Victor David Hanson styles himself a conservative Democrat and this is how he'd reform the Dems. Difficult to disagree with him.
>>>"We update questions daily in response to questions asked by the readership. If you have a question for Victor Davis Hanson send it to author@victorhanson.com
February 2006
You have alluded in the past to your “conservative Democrat” identity. Please describe what a Conservative Democratic agenda would espouse economically, domestically, and in terms of defense and foreign policy.
Hanson: Good question. Let's imagine.
1. Economically: an end to subsidies to large corporate concerns. No more money for corporate agriculture, which compromises competition and goes to those hardly in need. Some sort of taxation that is either flat or nearly so, and eliminates evasion through phony write-offs. A balanced budget and an end to borrowing for programs we cannot afford, both subsidies for left-wing failed programs and right-wing conglomerates. Some sort of energy policy that weans us off imported petroleum by a balance between conservation, energy exploration, nuclear power, methanol and ethanol, and coal.
2. Domestically: protection of the border and an end to illegal immigration, both to promote the melting pot and to end the undermining of lower-end wages for Americans by the massive influx of illegal alien labor. Less advocacy for radical abortion, homosexual marriage, radical environmentalism and a host of cultural issues that special interests insist upon, but are not embraced by the majority of Americans. No more ethnic separatism but a return to the melting pot and an end to identity politics. More attention to the Midwest and less to Hollywood and the upper-West Side, since populism as advanced by boutique millionaires is a hard sell.
3. Defense and foreign policy: an end to Gorism, in which a Jimmy Carter or Al Gore travel the globe to apologize for American policies to their autocratic hosts. Something akin to Harry Truman or JFK is needed, in which Democratic foreign policy seeks to forge a bipartisan consensus with Republicans, jettisons the Vietnam War era trash-the-United-States mindset, and appreciates that millions come here for a reason. I wouldn't let a Moveon.org mouthpiece, Cindy Sheehan, George Soros, or Hollywood actor speak for any Democrat.
I confess I just don't feel a John Kerry (who thinks American soldiers are terrorizers), or Al Gore (who tells the dictatorial Saudis that the U.S. hurts Arabs), or a Howard Dean (who believes the war is unwinnable and George Bush may have had advance knowledge of 9/11) or Ted Kennedy (who charges that we were no different from Saddam at Abu Ghraib) or Dick Durban (who said we were Nazi-like at Guantanamo) in a post-9/11 world can be trusted with the nation's security.
Here two facts are cognizant: 1) the American people agree since they have not elected a Democratic President without a southern accent (an apparent symptom of conservatism) in nearly a half-century and only then under extraordinary circumstances (a preceding assassination, Watergate, or the presence of a third-party conservative like Ross Perot); and; 2) the foreign policies of both Jimmy Carter (the invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian hostage-taking, the Sandinista take-over, the Cambodian holocaust, the Soviet adventurism and Olympic boycott, the erosion in U.S. military preparedness, etc.) and Bill Clinton (global apologies, Pakistani nuclearization with similar programs hatched in Iran and North Korea, and, of course, the precursors of September 11, from the relatively unanswered first World Trade Center bombing, Khobar Towers, the East African embassies, the USS Cole, etc.) were mostly disasters. Note too how similar the Democratic left has become to the isolationist policies of the Buchanan Right; read The Nation and The American Conservative: they are almost identical now."
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