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Contact Jim: jdipeso@rep.org (253) 740-2066 / 2009 Archive / 2008 Archive / 2007 Archive / 2006 Archive / 2005 Archive
Politics of Addition vs. Politics of Subtraction
November 12, 2008
The battle for the Republican Party’s future has begun.
While President-elect Obama ponders his Cabinet choices, the scraping sounds of blade stropping can be heard in the background as GOP factions prepare for a very loud and public affray.
On one side are Rush Limbaugh and the other talk radio jihadis who are the self-appointed arbiters of what is and is not conservatism. Their strategy is subtraction. All who do not subscribe to their dogmas to the nth degree must be purged, swept out, cast into the outer darkness.
For the ideologues who would purge all but the ultra-pure, the Republican Party is not a big tent. It’s not even a pup tent. It’s a sleeping bag perched on a very narrow ledge.
On the other side are traditional conservatives who prefer to follow a strategy of addition. They remember Ronald Reagan’s aphorism that one who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is your 80 percent friend, not your 20 percent enemy. A governing majority cannot be built on a foundation of exclusion.
Part of the strategy of addition is for the Republican Party to reclaim its heritage as the party of stewardship. Many young people, who voted in droves for Democrats, won’t give the GOP a second look unless the party shows it cares about the environment.
That’s more than good politics. It’s good for our country. Good stewards take good care of our inheritance, including the natural environment, which supplies essential services that enable our society, with all its freedom and abundance, to thrive.
That’s true conservatism, as conceived and thought through by Edmund Burke, the statesman who founded modern conservatism as an ethic of both temperament and ideas. That’s the pole star that must guide a shell-shocked Republican Party towards a new vision founded on old truths.
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