The Job. Facing Reality

Yuval Levin in Newsweek wrote the article “The Republican’s Road Back” linked below.

-----link-----
http://www.newsweek.com/id/188149/output/print
--------------
Hat tip to Richard Viguerie’s Conservative HQ.com. for a heads up on this Newsweek article dated March 16th 2009.

This is the type of thing I believe in and have been blogging about ever since David Cameron (the shadow Prime Minister of England’s resurging Conservative Party) helped clarify my ideas. He talked about Conservatives needing to use and work with the system in place in order to change that system.

The trick was not to be corrupted from it. ( With that said I cannot help but think of our last stint in power.) He thought that just continually crying about how bad the system was had gotten the British Conservative Party nowhere. He suggested coming up with Conservative based solutions to the problems they faced.

He would keep the basic Conservative principles, then work to implement programs based on those principles. Concrete Conservative ideas people could relate to. His idea of “facilitating” meant that the government should be more responsive to the actual needs of its citizens in a more economically efficient way. With more of an emphasis on the individual. Simply offering common sense solutions that worked.

Mr. Levin says.
-----quote-----
“But more than anything they point to the need to apply these general principles in a constructive and engaging way to the problems of the moment—understanding that the moment and its problems are always changing in this never-resting country. They suggest that standing up for principle and proposing incremental policy reforms are not mutually exclusive”
---------------

I agree. I understand the joy of blogging ad nasuem as I am prone to do about my intellectual aspirations for the party. I also on the other hand want to see America become a better place by offering practical solutions. To mix the two is the trick.
-----quote-----
Their work involved an intense intellectual engagement both with conservative ideas and traditions and with the problems of the moment
---------------

That quote talked about how hard the practical and theoretical had to work to come together to come up with workable social solutions to current problems of the time. It had to do with compromise on the solutions not the principles. Levin is saying that our Conservative success under Reagan and later Gingrich et all had to do with this type of necessary compromise.

I think Mr. Levin would agree with the idea that it is harder to do the work of melding the theory with the practice, and that to complain is less work than beating out a compromise that works and will win the hearts not just the minds of people.

I do not want the epitaph on my headstone to read here rests the perfect conservative. He always found a way to make sure his values weren’t compromised. He did nothing.

Regards, Live Dangerously Be A Conservative.