Conservatives need more leaders who can represent their views to a confused public. My complaint is limited to the David Frum types who believe that we must “moderate” our positions to become more popular. The very title “Making Conservatism Credible Again” could be interpreted in this manner. And yes, I might just be jumping to an invalid conclusion.

Characterizing Statism and Socialism and what they do to the free-market economy ought to be a top priority for the conservative ticket come the next campain.

This was a dumb idea. No conference should revolve around the implied concept that conservatives don’t have their act together. There is nothing wrong with our core beliefs. The greatest challenge to American conservatives is not our ideas—but how best to overcome the never ending slime jobbing of the MSM and its leftist allies. Too many conservatives foolishly fall for the con job that its immature and whiney to constantly complain about media bias. But it’s the truth! And it is absurd to believe otherwise.

The free market does not “care” about who gets harmed in its mad dash of creative destruction. To make it palatable for those that will fail in the race, so to speak, there must be some small ameliorative
spring boards so that people can be given the proverbial “hand up, not the hand out.”

Also, obvious greed must be prosecuted ruthlessly so that people feel that there are consequences for unrestrained greed.

The problem today is that the free market has been viewed not as a tool for social betterment, but as a tool for overt self aggrandizement and the “losers” are so angry they are quite willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Conservatives need to start discussing how government can be made “responsible.” The goal cannot be to kill it, it must be to truly reform it. That was what many believed the promise of Obama to be, though the actuality is that he seems more interested in the moment at growing it.

There must be a balance.

Speaking of Aristotle, he, like many (though not all) great thinkers believed in a Golden Mean that is neither too much nor too little.

Reaganomics has a core that still is beneficial and can be harnessed for amazing good, but a dogmatic and unrelfective embracing of it doesn’t acknowlede there may need to be some tweaking to avoid it becoming a caricature of itself.

You, like me and a host of others, applauded and were moved by most (but not all) of McCain’s positions. They were just and justified. But even in cases where clarity would have been easy to achieve, his articulation was muddy and his points either ambiguous or grossly over-simplified.

The attractive and likeable Gov. Palin was even worse. The pair were addressing the party’s LCD, and only that. On the late-emerging economic issues, neither they not (since then)any strong conservative voice has uttered comprehensible alternatives to the Democrats’ juggernaut. All they’ve done is to cry “statism,” and “socialism.”

Those words mean very little to most voters these days. Most voters these days lack even the elementary historical and cultural knowledge required to understasnd those words. Most voters are products of the failed educational system of the past three decades. And no conservative has taught them the necessary lessons in history and political economy through the medium of speeches. The media won’t help. It has to be done viva voce!

Conservatism will have no renaissance here until it is once again a set of rational, articulate, informed, and eloquent positions on what we are and have been, and what we must do to survive that way and not as just another stumbling postmodern polity of the West. Who will say and do it? And where?