Claremont Independent

Last Updated: 12/8/08 Section: Editorial

In short, we must explain that our policies do exactly what the liberals want, but ours do it better. Providing a free college education and funneling heaps of money into school districts will not improve the quality of education in this country until the mechanism of competition is introduced into elementary and secondary public schools. Providing health care for everyone will be of little benefit to workers if employers can no long employ them; our goals are the same, but our solutions try to maximize both health and work benefits.

In other words, we just go about it in a different way. Though conservatives and liberals have some fundamental philosophical differences, we do in fact value much of the same goals, even if we have different approaches to public policy. Republicans should go out of their way to emphasize this in order to win back the voters inspired by Obama's rhetoric.

Second, we can also inspire in the way Reagan inspired, by looking to the past to inform our future. Young conservatives all agree that the principles of the founding period still apply today: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the idea that government power should be a small island in a sea of liberty. And that inspires us. Even Republicans, however, rarely invoke the founding period. John McCain barely mentioned it during the entire campaign season.

To liberals, the founding era has become synonymous with white slave-owners and hypocrites. But Republicans need to remind us that Thomas Jefferson trembled when he reflected that God is just. They need to remind us of this country's inexorable journey to meet its founding ideals. And they need to remind us of the age of absolutism and tyranny, an age which much of the world has yet to leave, and out of which Jefferson penned our famous inalienable rights.

The Republican Party must remind Americans of the brilliance of the Framer's design: that ambition would be made to counteract ambition, and no branch of government would have absolute authority; that states would retain freedom, so that repression in one state would not translate to repression in all; that there would be certain fundamental rights enshrined in the law of the land that not even the federal government could take away. Only then will we venerate the Constitution and its Republican principles. The founding era has inspired, and can continue to inspire, many young Americans, and it can inspire those college students who voted for Obama.

The Republican Party can inspire again. It can look to our past to inform our future, and it can remind us of why this country is great, as Reagan did. It can better articulate its goals in order to find common ground with liberals, while not sacrificing its principles. After all, even Reagan spoke fondly of FDR. If it can do these things on a national level, and if conservatives can do that on college campuses, then the Republican Party will be well on its way to inspiring the next generation of Americans and finding itself back in office.

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