It’s no secret conservatives have taken a beating in recent elections. With the recent defection of Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter from the Republican Party to the Democrats, some pundits wonder whether the GOP is on the road to oblivion. Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor of National Review and columnist for TIME, recently discussed the future of conservatism in a presentation for the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society. He also discussed that topic with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: This is a topic that anyone who leans right of center has been very interested in at least since 2008, if not since 2006. Should we be worried about the future of conservatism?
Ponnuru: Well, we wouldn’t be conservatives if we didn’t worry about the future of the country, and whether we are going to be able to contribute as much as we’d like to righting the ship. I do think that conservatism is not in a hopeless condition. It’s not that liberalism is inevitably going to triumph, even though liberals are in pretty unified control of Washington, D.C., right now. But I do think conservatives are going to need to do a lot of hard thinking about the problems of our time and how to solve them consistent with our principles.
Kokai: When you’ve heard this argument in recent months, there seem to be a couple of camps. One is that Republicans especially — but conservatives in general — need to get back to the basic principles. The other side of it is, we need to take the principles and adapt them to the problems of the day that are different than the ones that were around in Reagan’s era. Where do you fall on that?
Ponnuru: Well, I think it’s a dumber debate than you’re describing it as. I think it’s much more — you’re right, there are the folks saying we need to go back to basics and first principles and go back to the 1980s. And then there are the people who are saying we need to change everything and innovate. And what we don’t have really so far is that middle camp that says, we stick to those old principles and apply them to new circumstances. That’s, in fact, what Reagan did. He didn’t just run on Barry Goldwater’s campaign platform of 1964. He looked around, saw that there was a different world, different challenges, Americans wanted different things, and he didn’t really deviate from conservative principles, but he had practical solutions of that time.
Kokai: So we need to take the principles and say, it’s no longer 1980 or even ’88, what are we going to do in 2009?
Ponnuru: That’s right. And just two things that have changed since them — one is that taxes are a problem in a different way than they were back then. The income tax for most voters is less of a problem. For the economy, it’s less of a hindrance than they were in 1981 when you had a top tax rate of 70 percent, when you had people moving because of inflation into higher and higher tax brackets. Now the payroll tax is a bigger problem, and conservatives ought to be addressing that. For a lot of people, it’s a bigger problem, for a lot of young families especially trying to start out, it’s a crushing burden.
Health care is another issue. The cost of health care, the security of health care has become a much bigger problem than it was in 1981 for a lot of reasons. For one thing, health care can do a lot more than it could do back then, and it’s more expensive. But that’s something that conservatives have tended to say, “Well, that’s a Democratic issue. We’re not going to address it.” That’s something that has to change.
Kokai: Do you get the sense, Ramesh, that people are addressing the correct issues, or is there just too much infighting?
Ponnuru: Well, there’s bound to be some scattering and infighting under these circumstances. You have this huge, huge fall from power of conservatives over a fairly short span of time, and it’s not surprising people are sort of shell-shocked and wandering around. I do think some of this is happening, some of this necessary rethinking, but I’m impatient. I want it to happen a little quicker because I think the longer we dither the more of our economy’s going to be socialized between now and then.
Kokai: You’ve just started to hit the next point I was going to get to. If conservatives don’t try to play an effective role in this debate, what happens to society at large? What happens if conservatives continue to fight, or if they decided, oh, we lost, let’s just give up the ghost?
Ponnuru: At this moment people have turned to liberalism, liberal leaders, knowing that they themselves aren’t as liberal as their new elected leaders, but just thinking they’re offering solutions to problems and conservatives weren’t. There’s been too much truth in that perception, and we have, as conservatives, we have given liberals a lot of running room.
Kokai:Okay, for one day, someone gives you the pen, and you are writing the conservative agenda. What would be your agenda?
Ponnuru: The first thing I would do is say, we’ve got to solve this economic crisis, and there has been too little serious leadership from anybody on this front. I was just reading the papers over the weekend and President Obama seems more interested in building an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn than in solving the problem of toxic assets. I would say the first thing you have to do is change the mark-to-market rules and see how much you can use to get these bad assets off the books and revalue them without spending taxpayer money. After that, then we can talk about tax reform that works for middle-class families. We can talk about health care reform that makes health care more affordable, more market-based, and doesn’t impose rationing. That would be my top agenda for this year.
Kokai: One of the things that we’ve done in this interview is talk about conservatives. I don’t know if I have yet mentioned the “R” word of Republicans, but how important is it that the change that needs to take place in the conservative movement involve some sort of change with the Republican Party?
Ponnuru: Well, look, I think if you can generate an attractive conservative program that the public is interested in, then you ought to be able to get people in both political parties to support it, just because it’s popular, although the bulk of it is going to be from Republicans. The Democratic Party has become a fairly liberal party. The Republican Party is where most conservatives are going to hang out, and so to the extent you have to have a rethinking among conservatives, you have to have a rethinking among Republicans.
Kokai: Are you confident that this is going to happen, even if there is some infighting now? At some point, are Republicans, conservatives, folks in the opposition going to get together and say, “We’ve got to do something different”?
Ponnuru: Well, my concern is actually — this is probably symptomatic of my cast of thinking — my concern is, actually, there will be too quick of a Republican rebound, say in 2010, just because the economy’s not doing well, or because Obama is perceived not to be doing well enough, and that will make Republicans and conservatives think that they don’t need to go through this effort of rebuilding their party because they’re just counting on this sort of short-term bounce, sort of a dead-cat bounce really.
Kokai: In the long run, who should conservatives be focusing their attention on: middle-class families? Other groups?
Ponnuru: I would like to think that conservatives can gain popular appeal across the spectrum, but if I have to choose I would say that lower middle-class voters, folks who are making between $30,000 and $65,000 a year who have at least some vaguely socially conservative instincts. I think that is your target of opportunity. Notice I didn’t say white. I think you’ve got to appeal to Hispanic and black voters and even some Asian voters in that category, given the demographic trends in the country.