Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

The next campaign starts now

Reading the Patriot Post this morning, I ran across this Michelle Malkin quote…

“There is no time to lick wounds, point fingers, and wallow in post-election mud. I'm getting a lot of moan-y, sad-face 'What do we do now, Michelle?' e-mails. What do we do now? We do what we've always done. We stand up for our principles, as we always have -- through Democrat administrations and Republican administrations, in bear markets or bull markets, in peacetime and wartime. We stay positive and focused. We keep the faith. We do not apologize for our beliefs. We do not re-brand them, re-form them, or relinquish them. We defend them. We pay respect to the office of the presidency. We count our blessings and recommit ourselves to our constitutional republic. We gird our loins, to borrow a phrase from our Vice President-elect. We lock and load our ideological ammunition. We fight.”
— Michelle Malkin

Michelle's got it almost right. We've got to do a lot more than simply defend our beliefs. If we're constantly on the defense we'll lose ground. We've got to aggressively educate people about our beliefs.

We've got to learn how to play offense too. Not how to give offense, not how to be offensive, but how to aggressively promote the ideas of individual liberty and responsibility.

And we've got to get ourselves more involved in our political landscape. This is where the rubber meets the road. As my friend David pointed out in a recent letter,

Problems? Genuine conservatives are not herd animals, by nature. Strong personalities with advanced diplomatic/interpersonal skills (or training in win-win negotiation, which is NOT the same as "go along to get along" cooperation or capitulation!) needed at the precinct level if involvement of many individualistic conservatives is to be effective. Time and effort, from people who, mostly, are already scheduled to the max with work and family and other community involvement. Face it, genuine conservatives are likely to be heavily committed to doing things, mostly the little things that duty to God, family and community demand, with little time left over for overt politics. We must persuade such people that local politics is emminently [sic] important, and work to make local conservative politics the lifeblood of the national conservative scene.

David laid out four steps that require more active volunteer participation at the precinct level as well (I've rephrased these a bit, but they're still his ideas)…

1. Voter registration of self described conservatives.
2. Get out the vote efforts come election time.
3. Effective change of Republican philosophy into genuine conservative republican philosophy at the grassroots level.
4. Promotion of more candidates we can believe in and vote for with enthusiasm.

The first two are examples where the left excels. While I think none of us admire their fraudulent tactics, ACORN was very effective in both registering an army of “liberal” voters, but the left also managed effective get out the vote campaigns in all of the key “battleground” states.

The third item is one that we hear a continual refrain and drumbeat from conservatives after every election we lose, and yet we continue to lose. That makes it no less true. We face opposition from within the Republican party and even some “conservatives.” We're told by moderate and liberal Republicans that we need a “big tent” party. It seems to me that what we get when we go that route is a “bit top” party — that's right, a circus.

The Democrats have a “big tent” party. Probably the one thing that unites them though is a disdain for the Republican party and an active dislike of conservative principles. This works less well for Republicans. For evidence, I refer you to the last campaign.

John McCain is a moderate. Some of his policies and voting patterns align with conservative ideals, but many do not. From the campaign for President in 2000, all the way up through early 2007 he was hailed by the press as a maverick. He was even considered, or at least lauded by the major media as a possible running mate for John Kerry in the 2004 campaign. The media and many on the left promoted his campaign all the way up until the point where he won the Republican nomination for President. Once his nomination was secured, an outcry was heard among conservatives, because we all knew — John McCain is not a true conservative.

Very soon we heard him claim the mantle of conservatism. We witnessed many attempts to redefine conservatism. When John McCain began to shift a small amount to the right we saw the left abandon him and begin to revile him as an extension of the Bush administration. This would have been laughable in light of his history of opposition to George Bush over the years and his “reaching out” to the left through his joining with the “gang of fourteen” and his “comprehensive” immigration reform approach, that is, it would have been if it weren't for his support of the Iraq war. It was inevitable that the left would abandon him once he became the nominee of the Republican party anyway. No matter how moderate he is, John McCain remains a Republican, and to the left no Republican is acceptable as an alternative to a Democrat.

The left's support of John McCain before he won the nomination should be instructive as well. Think of it in terms of Rush Limbaugh's Operation Chaos and you'll see what I mean.  Operation Chaos was designed to introduce chaos into the Democratic party's nomination process. By encouraging people to support Hillary Clinton (who would have been a polarizing figure had she been nominated) Operation Chaos weakened Barack Obama's support.  The left's support of John McCain served to give the Republican party a weak candidate, apparently acceptable to moderates and the left, a notion that appealed to “big tent” Republicans. John McCain's nomination drove conservatives nearly to despair though. Many were saying that they simply couldn't vote for him in good conscience, and I was one of them.

It didn't help that the plethora of candidates running for the Republican nomination was full of moderates, liberals, and loons. It didn't help that the conservatives that actually did choose to run either sat back and didn't get serious until it was too late to matter. It also didn't help that as the field narrowed the loons were more interested in the destruction of the few remaining actual conservatives in the field that, even though they had no chance they stayed in to draw votes away from those conservatives.

This all comes down to David's fourth step, getting more candidates that we can actually believe in and enthusiastically support. John McCain's marginal acceptability certainly didn't evoke much enthusiasm from the party base. Many conservatives nearly stayed out of things until he made the wise choice of selecting a conservative running mate. Sarah Palin's selection energized conservatives. It also proved John McCain's undoing among his base. I say this because John McCain's base was and is the moderates and the liberals in the Republican party. These people ended up rejecting John McCain, because of Sarah Palin, while to many conservatives she was the best part of the ticket. Some long time conservative pundits also rejected Sarah Palin out of the notion that we needed to appeal to the moderates and independents, and they attacked her experience and ability too.

A divided party isn't going to win. Thanks George Will. Thanks Kathleen Parker. Your help in dividing our party doesn't go unappreciated.

I suppose though that if we want candidates we can support enthusiastically that we've really got to groom them at the local level. Sarah Palin energized many conservatives, because she was popular at the local level, and because she embodied many of our ideals. She wasn't the perfect candidate by any means, but she was much better than her running mate. She didn't come from the national scene, she came from local politics in Alaska.

We need to raise up good conservative candidates at every local level. That's not going to happen without our active involvement though. It's also not going to happen without the first three steps toward a conservative victory. We need to actively recruit conservatives to register to vote. We need to actively recruit conservatives to actually go to the polls (or their mailboxes with the ever increasing trend to all mail elections) and we need to actively educate Republicans about the foundational principles that made our nation great and will one day make it even greater when we return to them. These things will tend to encourage those candidates that we can actually support.

Another thing that David suggested, but it's not on his four step list, is taking back the language. Conservatives are conservative in that we hold to traditional values and to ideas that have proven to work over the centuries. However, in terms of politics, conservatives are actually quite liberal. We believe in individual liberty and individual rights. We believe in freedom to pursue opportunity. We believe in the liberalization of markets. We believe in the liberation of all mankind and in freedom from tyranny and oppression. These are all liberal ideas, and they require responsibility and a moral people. The scheme of rights and responsibilities envisioned by our founders depends upon a moral people dedicated to obedience to God and committed to responsible exercise of their individual liberties.

Many of today's liberals believe in these ideas as well. Certainly many of today's moderates do too. The core of the left though believe less in individual liberty than in collectivism. The scheme of entitlements and government control envisioned by the left is the consequence of a people that do not trust in God and so need a temporal method of enforcing "charity" and collective responsibility. Their notion of social justice translates in the end to nothing less than socialism, and socialism is a word that still carries a stigma. They are working actively to stigmatize the use of the word by conservatives, while having co–opted the word liberal. When they first did that, it was quickly stigmatized. Over time their redefinition of the term has gained favor and now many are proud to bear the label — even though it has little to do with its original meaning.

We've got a long four years ahead of us with Barack Obama as our leader. With a solid Democratic majority in both the House and the Senate and a hold on the administration we can count on the implementation of many policies we're not going to like. We can also count on the erosion of our liberties and freedoms as Barack Obama nominates and the Democratic Senate confirms ambassadors that will act to dilute our strength oversees and judges that will actively seek to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution” as our President elect, who on January 20^th will take an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” has said.

We need to become more involved. As conservatives we need to seek each other out and improve our associations. We need to spread the word, and get involved, both personally and as groups. We need to educate one another as to our common history and strengthen each other in our principles. The more we do these things the better we'll be heard. If we enlist one another's support, if we encourage more conservatives to register to vote, if we encourage more active participation at the polls, if we take an active part in forming the agenda of the Republican party, and if we actively support real, conservative candidates that we can enthusiastically believe in we will win. We can do it. We can take back our party, and through concerted, continuing effort, we can take back our liberties.

Yes We Can!