Once before, conservatism had to change: before we gained national support. When I entered conservative politics in 1963, conservatism opposed, for example, federal aid to education, the proposed Medicare program and the Voting Rights Act. Today, there are few, if any, elected conservatives who would vote to outright repeal Medicare, the Voting Rights Act or cut off all federally subsidized college loans.
Similarly, today the conservative GOP unconditionally opposes any limitations on free trade -- despite the rise of China and India, the lowering of our wage growth rates, the hollowing out of our industrial base and the reduction of U.S. economic dominance in the world. And it opposes any tax increase for any reason.
I am not prepared to abandon our vigorous free trade policies or support a tax increase. I have yet to see a convincing argument against low taxes and free markets. But neither am I prepared to consign to beyond the pale my fellow conservatives who no longer see unadulterated free trade in the national interest. Nor will I categorically write off those who sense that even conservative voters may, under some circumstances, be prepared to pay with taxes for wanted government programs (such as transportation at the state and local levels.)
As a Burkean conservative, I believe in the organic development of our institutions and methods. It has always been the left that, with the unjustified intellectual pride of the atheist, attempts to impose man-made party ideologies on his fellow man -- rather than let our civilization slowly unfold through the fuller play out of our character, institutions and values.
But Burke also wrote, "A state without the means of change is without the means of its conservation." So too, conservatism needs the means for change.
And yet today, it is many of my fellow conservatives -- both social and economic -- who insist on an ideological and programmatic purity, even as a baffling and fast-changing world has only just begun to humble the conceit of the overconfident and certain.
Tony Blankley
Tony Blankley, a conservative author and commentator who served as press secretary to Newt Gingrich during the 1990s, when Republicans took control of Congress, died Sunday January 8, 2012. He was 63.
Blankley, who had been suffering from stomach cancer, died Saturday night at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, his wife, Lynda Davis, said Sunday.
In his long career as a political operative and pundit, his most visible role was as a spokesman for and adviser to Gingrich from 1990 to 1997. Gingrich became House Speaker when Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives following the 1994 midterm elections.
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