Posted on 03/20/2007 12:56:20 AM PDT by truth_seeker
Excerpt first chapter:
http://www.rhsager.com/pdf/Chapter%201%20-%20Live%20from%20the%20Reagan%20Building.pdf
It should be required reading for anybody interested in winning elections, because it shows how the wings united before to do so.
The author's point of view favors the libertarian side, but gives fair voice to both in historic context. IOW how did the wings find common ground for unity and victory?
It is very readable, and informs the reader much more than talking back and forth, repeating ad infinitum the same daily rants.
Thanks.
I heard about the book, but haven't read it.
I am awfully suspicious of it. There are an awful lot of blurb quotes from admiring leftists saying how good this book is. When I see leftists saying how great a book on Conservatives is, I usually find the book to be utter junk, way off base, and full of crap.
But, the concept does sound good. In fact, I agree with the basic idea that the only way the right wins in this country is when they can find enough in a candidate to come together on. And when single issue voters can hold their nose long enough to let the ONE issue that they care about take a back seat to the greater good.
Single issue voters can't be chasing out of the GOP all who disagree with them, then threaten not to vote, threaten to leave the GOP, work more to defeat GOP candidates who disagree with them than to defeat the dims.
If men were angels, libertarians could win elections.
The "economic elitists"(business, industry, investors, etc) are the traditional wing of the GOP.
The "cultural populists"(social conservatives) are not the traditional wing. They were converted from dems to GOP by Nixon's Southern Strategy. They have never been loyal or dependable GOP voters. They are best described as "right wing bitchers".
I am posting several of the last paragraphs of the first chapter of this book. The whole chapter is very good.
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
Chapter 1: Live from the Reagan Building
The traditionalists,—typified by political philosophers such as Russell Kirk and Richard M. Weaver—placed the highest value (as their label might suggest) on tradition and social order. Repulsed by the rise of mass society and horrified by the depravity of the “total” war waged by and against Nazism and fascism, they radically rejected their own age. Seeking solace in the past, they exalted concepts such as a rigid class structure, elitism, and obedience to authority—especially the authority of God. As Kirk put it, this brand of conservative believed, first and foremost, that a divine intent rules society and that “political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.”13
The libertarians, on the other hand—typified by economists such as Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard—placed the highest value on human freedom. These men, too, were aghast at the age in which they lived, though for very different reasons than those of the traditionalists. They believed that, if anything, society had grown too authoritarian. In the march toward greater and greater state control of the economy, first during the Great Depression and then during World War II, the libertarians made out what the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek called, in a slim volume published in 1944, “The Road to Serfdom.” Control over the economy, Hayek argued, meant control over every aspect of man’s being—which could only lead to totalitarianism. The government, libertarians believed, must be kept as small as possible, and individuals must be restricted in their actions as little as possible....
The world was a lonely place for conservatives only a little more than fifty years ago. But Meyer showed them it didn’t have to be.
Tradition and liberty were complementary. Freedom and virtue were inextricably linked. And “Godless” communism was a moral affront and a mortal threat to traditionalists and libertarians alike.
A limited federal government pursuing a strong national defense would be the ideal scenario for all.
There are many in the Republican Party who believe that now is the time to enjoy the spoils of victory. In truth, however, this is just the beginning of a new war—a war for the heart and soul of conservatism.
On one side are those conservatives who think that the cause of small government is lost. And if they can’t beat big government, they might as well run it. They believe that the battles of the past have been a foolish diversion and that now is the time to adapt to the world as it is and to cease imagining the world as it could be. Some of these people have begun to simply seek power for its own sake.
Others have sold their souls in the hope of buying them back one day. Still others have glimpsed a golden opportunity to impose their idea of morality on their fellow citizens. The road to victory has been long and arduous, all of these people recall, and so in their minds there can be no turning back to the discarded ideas of the past.
Yet there are other conservatives. They are just now waking up to what their party has become: an echo, not a choice. They are realizing that big-government conservatism is no longer an illconceived theory, it is the creed of the Republican Party. And they are realizing that far from being “confident and optimistic and forward-leaning,” as Karl Rove would have it, this brand of conservatism is weak-kneed, defeatist, and retrogressive to a time before giants fused together the coalition that in four decades defeated communism abroad, halted the march toward socialism at home, lowered taxes, and reformed welfare—just to name a few of its accomplishments.
The Republican Party stands at a pivotal moment in its history, as was becoming clear to those on the convention floor at CPAC. It can learn to live with big government, determining that it’s not so bad, just as long as it’s Republicans intruding into the lives of Americans instead of Democrats. Or it can remember its roots and realize that a majority set against its own bedrock principles of limited government and individual liberty is not one worth having—and thus not one that can long be sustained.
The marriage between libertarians and social conservatives would certainly not be the first torn apart by power and fortune and success. But the consequences of such a divorce would be uniquely far-reaching. They would be of concern well beyond the expanses of the conservative family—most acutely, perhaps, to those moderates and liberals already profoundly uncomfortable living under Republican governance, who can only dread what this new, expansionist conservatism might become.
Most aggrieved, however, would be those conservatives who have remained faithful to their small-government vows—those who know the nobility of what conservatism can be when it holds to its ideal of a limited government that leaves Americans to work and prosper and love and pray, free from the daily diktats of the meddlesome minds in the nation’s capital.
"The differences between libertarians and social conservatives are not yet irreconcilable. There is a way open toward reconciliation— a way that revives the old fusion of
liberty and tradition,
freedom and responsibility,
small government and strong government."
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