New GOP: Freedom Vs. “Biggies”

Conservatives and Republican loyalists bemoan failing to find sufficient traction among voters to retain three formerly safe seats in Congress. There’s a real split between their reasons. Conservatives say it’s a lack of conservatism among Republicans. Republican loyalists say it is a lack of conservative cooperation with the necessities of governing a split electorate.

Both are correct, and wrong.

The failure, on both their parts, is a lack of ideas – indeed of a basic principle -- that both unify and appeal outside of their tight circles. The principle, from which both have strayed, is freedom. Not just political rights, but basic individual freedom. Political rights emerge from and reflect individual freedom, not the other way around.

This was the strength of formerly understood practices, from the Constitution onward, that today are gainsaid both by those seeking statist approaches to governance as well as those seeking partial rollbacks of programs that are viewed by many as representing minimal government responsibilities to those in need.

With the majority of Americans paying little or no income tax, and the majority receiving payments and subsidies from government, one may easily see the constituency for continuing on the same course that both conservatives and Republicans fail to address. While Democrats’ “change” is just more of the same, its hollow promises aren’t seen to threaten individuals who benefit from government programs.

Conservatives and Republicans are amazed that someone as shallow and extreme as Barack Obama is on his way to the Democrat nomination for president. They shouldn’t be. The Republican nominee, and conservative default, John McCain, is in his own way as shallow – often taking public positions on major domestic issues that stem from emotion and crumble under facts and experience. His opponents will stress these during the election, and those in the Republican camp have little with which to defend his record. His sole strong credential – pro-American foreign and defense policies – is insufficient in itself, and is now also under attack by those who try to undermine it because it is based on a military upbringing or not being a foot soldier. These are absurd, but they offer a convenient excuse to those who want to ignore McCain’s purposefulness on foreign policy issues. Although the military is held in the highest esteem among all our institutions, that does not translate to widespread endorsement of specific policies in confronting foreign threats.

Those who look back to Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan as the golden age of conservatism often have a convenient memory. Their inconsistencies with what are viewed as conservative positions, and their compromises with liberals, are usually overlooked.

What Goldwater and Reagan, however, were consistent about – at least in speech, and often in signal stands – was individual freedom, whether at home or abroad. This principle cannot be either ignored or made secondary in its appeal to Americans as our unifying and basic principle.

Today the parties argue over how much programs cost or who is benefited more. But, with rare exception, there is no discussion of how programs deprive us of our freedoms, or which programs enhance our freedoms, or of how our freedoms are interconnected at home and with those abroad.

In part, we’ve come to take our freedoms for granted. Moreso, we’ve come to focus, in majority, and across parties, to view the primacy of self-benefit even at the cost of others.

Pork, although a minor portion of government budgets, is the canary, and both parties’ refusal to deal with it is telling. Taxation and immigration, and so on, are similarly debated, without resolution, because they are treated as who benefits issues between roughly divided constituencies, rather than argued on grounds of taking away our basic freedoms to be ourselves, uniquely American, in furtherance of a common culture of advancement on merit and work rather than redistribution of our productivity or our patrimony.

One of the most impacting breaks that conservatives and Republicans can make, if we are to be and be seen as representing “change” will be from corporate America, our largest multinationals. It has become a rent-seeker of the rankest order as any, its loyalty and contributions are to itself, and it is not well-serving freedom at home or abroad. Its international competitiveness is, further, undermined by protectionist policies of collusion with unions, to not rock the boat of well-compensated executives, and of collusion with legislators to block imports or new technologies. Whether tax-loopholes or subsidies, or trade with enemies of ourselves and their own peoples, corporate America is not serving individual freedoms. We all, across the political spectrum, know it.

At the same time, in keeping with a new crusade against the freedom corrupting “biggies,” conservatives and Republicans should closely link this with fundamental reform of union and non-profits’ funding and spending. Both are huge factors in spending to enlarge government, while grossly benefiting from tax-exemptions that are abused while spending relatively insignificant portions on their supposedly primary missions. Their leaders are as well-compensated as any corporate bigwig, and with as little economic correlation with performance.

In foreign policy, this same unifying principle, individual freedoms, requires strong measures to decouple our economy from foreign “biggies”: MidEast satraps, as well as others in Venezuela or Russia, whose dominance of oil beggars us and the rest of the world while weakening our principled stand with those they seek to control or eradicate. Alternative energy and use of all our resources are essential to individual freedoms here and abroad.

All these strands are there, for the taking, by conservatives, Republicans, John McCain. As long as they are just treated as disconnected strands, or we pick and choose among them based on personal profit, and fail to bring them together as one unifying principle that is emphasized, conservatives, Republicans, and Americans will fail.