Conservatives despair. To win support, all liberals need to do is appeal to emotion. We, on the other hand, must explain principles. Weighty principles. Principles that have an intellectual foundation and decades if not centuries of evidence behind them proving that they should guide public policy today.
What works best when it comes to the size and scope of government? Health care policy? Tax policy? Foreign policy? Monetary policy? Energy policy? Education policy? Immigration policy. Marriage and the natural family. Okay, I’ll stop there — you get the picture. These are all things that we debate, albeit feebly from the political right, every day in the American public square.
The poltical left touches everyone’s feelings — our challenge is touch those same feelings only through their minds.
In my humble opinion, here at Dispatches you will find one of the best archives on the World Wide Web. Links to materials from commentators and think tanks are broken down by general topic area. What’s found here, I admit, only scratches the surface of what conservatives produce — but it’s a great place to start if you want to get caught up on some of what you may have missed.
What’s needed going forward is a lot more time spent distilling down the terrific messages combined with aggressive outreach to the uninformed and misinformed. Yes, we need to enter and fight — en masse — the information war.
Impossible? Nope. If General Electric can produce a two-minute video explaining how a jet engine works, then the bright conservative minds out there can do the same on any issue. Here’s that video:
