Ms. Grabar writes,
“We need to get this message out. It’s all about values.
“This is where the Republicans have failed. They have focused too much on the short term and not enough on culture and education.”
True, the Republicans have been myopic pragmatists for decades – just like the Democrats – doing whatever the opinion polls conjure up. This is why our elections are so close – there is nothing of substance to differentiate – just bromides. McCain and Obama both vote for TARP. Palin and Obama both stress their relatively irrelevant church-going. The religious right wants to legislate their religious views on private, uncoerced individual choices, and everybody is advocating censorship under the woozily undefinable concept of “family values” or “fairness” which unfairly deprives property owners of their right to broadcast whatever non-libelous content they want.
The Republicans or a new party must drop the foggy mush of “conservatism” and instead commit to a single, crystal clear principle: inalienable individual rights.
Not the rights to *things* which other individuals have created like health care and education, but rather rights as moral principles – rights sanctioning freedom of action – to live, produce, voluntarily trade, acquire and dispose of property with *no* government interference.
That’s what the founders did. It’s labeled (classical) liberalism. It was and remains “revolutionary change” which young and old can support because it’s true and simple and morally right (by the standard of man’s nature, not arbitrary mystical edict) and leads only to freedom, prosperity and happiness – no wealth-destroying controls.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of young readers are now being exposed to the full intellectual nature of the battle – through the new morality invented by Ayn Rand – which provides the missing moral base to our Constitution: rational selfishness and the moral defense of the profit motive and capitalism.
Individual rights are absolute, and government’s function must be solely to protect those rights through courts, police and military – nothing else.
Islam is currently spreading rapidly because it’s far more consistent than conservatism or the new left’s egalitarianism, multi-culturalism, and collectivism. If Islam does not first plunge the world into another dark ages, individual rights *will* again become tomorrow’s mainstream politics.
