Suggestion: Republicans should behave more like modern Tories

by YankeeJim | March 25, 2010 at 03:37 am

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I read Ann Applebaum's Washington Post article this morning suggesting Republicans might learn from Great Britain’s Tory Party. (Trouble is Republicans are acting more like Neanderthals than Hominids.) Presumably, Tories learned to put substance behind their conservative ideals and are now rebounding from back to back losses to Liberals.

Here is an idea for conservative Republicans.

Instead of saying: “Big government is bad. Say: “Better government is efficient.”

Instead of saying: “The law is flawed and the strategy is wrong.” Say: “Here is the specific need and outcome, and here is specifically how we will achieve it, when, and the particulars.”

Governance and governing requires trade-offs and prioritization and messages today from both Democrats and Republicans are incomplete lacking transparency and accountability.

Entrenched in conservative ideology and rhetoric in the absence of substance fails to provide specific alternatives and choices that people may truly want.

“From Britain's Tories, lessons for the GOP

By Anne Applebaum

Thursday, March 25, 2010

And now, my fellow disappointed conservatives, former conservatives and disgusted conservatives, it is time for all good Republicans to come to the defense of David Frum, and to endorse his critique of radical right-wing talk-show rhetoric. If you've left the party in disgust, then call up your friends who are still members and get them to do it for you.

I am not writing this because David Frum is my friend, although he is. I am writing this because I was recently in London, where I got a close-up look at the state of the British Conservative Party, once the intellectual motor of free-market economics in Europe and the rest of the world. After almost two decades in power, the British conservatives lost, in 1997, to Tony Blair's slicker, smoother, Labor Party -- a party that had accepted the basic premises of Thatcherism and then moved on.

At the time, the Tories reckoned they would be in opposition for a couple of years at most: All they had to do was return to their basic principles and declare them with greater fervor and more self-righteous anger than ever before. They knew what the British people really wanted, they told one another, and ran two angry campaigns that reeked of xenophobia. The result: The Tories have been out of power since 1997. Thirteen years.

After the second, decisive election loss, the conservatives finally made some changes. They elected a new leader, younger and "modernizing." They changed their social policies to match the views of the majority. They supported the green movement -- hugely popular among their own, heavily rural electorate -- and accepted the basic premises of Blairism and moved on. Above all, they changed the way they spoke: No more shouting. No more anger. No more arrogance.”