Rebranding in all its naked horror:
liberal = socialist.
progressive = socialist.
conservative = socialist.
libertarian = uh, just ignore those spoilers.
article.nationalreview.com
Quo Vadis, GOP?
How a conservative can love government.
By Alex Castellanos
The Republican party is a having an identity crisis, a full-blown public meltdown, complete with teenage existential angst. Erik Erikson, the psychologist who coined the term, described an “identity crisis” as the absence of a set of constant social, philosophical, or religious values to guide human action in a constantly changing environment. That pretty much describes today’s Republicans, who have no clue who they are, where they are going, or why — a serious impairment if you presume to lead a conga line, and much more so for the most powerful nation on earth.
Republicans can’t seem to express an organizing principle these days, and almost everyone with a computer to type on has noticed. David Brooks writes in the New York Times that the British have at last declared their independence from us: American conservatives, he notes, have lost the leadership of the conservative movement to them. Tom Davis, a former leader of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, writes, “the Republican brand is in the trash can.” The New Yorker headlines, “The Fall of Conservatism: Have the Republicans run out of ideas?” Most painful of all, the elegant Peggy Noonan, who is to conservative composition what Fred Astaire was to dance, says the Republican party, including its conservative leadership, has “squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years” because we are no longer serious about leadership, policy, or ideas.
Perhaps it’s time to lie on the couch, acknowledge our fears, and ask, “What do Republicans believe?” Every descendant of Goldwater knows that our crisis of character is real. Late in the evening, through the mists of our memories of the 1980s, we confess it: American conservative thought ran out of gas after Ronald Reagan. Perhaps we were exhausted, and allowably so, after routing the Soviet Union and rescuing Western civilization.
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Fellow conservatives, let’s learn to say it: We need more government, lots of it, but we need the kind that actually works: Bottom-up self-government by a mature people. And we need that government in our hands — because it is not natural, efficient, or beneficial to leave something so powerful in the hands of anyone else.
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