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Political party futures

Author:		Webmaster
Posted:		7/17/08; 11:02:13 AM
Topic:		Political party futures
Msg #:		695 (top msg in thread)
Prev/Next:		686/698
Reads:		549

Powerline.com points us to a bleg from Minnesota Public Radio:

The Republican Party is at a crossroads. An unpopular president is on the way out, and the party's election-year hopes are pinned to a candidate who sometimes strays from the party line. With the convention coming up and the GOP seeking the public input on their platform outline, we want to know: Where would you steer the party?

My response to "What is your vision for the future of the Republican Party? Where would you like to see it head?"

Republicans need to recognize that they support liberty, which is a process that has worked, while Democrats prefer equality, which would impose results and has never worked in history.

Liberty is practical, while equality is a lazy fascination with symptoms. For Republicans, a person owns the fruits of one's own labor. Democrats believe they can take property whenever they feel like it and power gives them the right to impose splendid new social ideals that have never worked in practice.

Republicans try to put everyone to work because individuals are best equipped to make their own decisions, and Gross Domestic Product is highest and fairest when everyone contributes. Democrats, in their impatience, prefer to cover up poverty by stealing other people's property to make payoffs that put the problem out of sight and postpone actually doing something to solve the underlying problems. Creating opportunity for individual economic advancement, however imperfect, has lifted quality of life higher for more people than any other process ever tried.

Republicans need to inoculate voters that the Democratic Party elite posture about solving problems but seldom do solve them. They promise voters hope for change simply to get elected. Once in power, they help their friends, and if they can't deliver, they ask for more power.

My response to, "What else should we know about the future of the Republican Party?"

The Republican Party has a future, it is the Democratic Party that is at risk in the Internet age. Before the Internet, the mainstream media echoed American Liberal cant. The Internet holds a telling mirror to party shallowness. The Democratic Party has clichés, but no principles. It is American Liberal not Classical Liberal.

The Republican Party, despite a right wing that gets too much publicity in the liberal press, does have principles. It is really the party for Classical Liberals. It's problem is to discover the foundation that underlies those principles it now intuitively believes.