It doesn't work to drone on about lower taxes, reduced regulation, privatization, and limited government when most of the people we need to reach see that pitch as having nothing to do with them. They see Republicans as rich white guys grumbling about paying taxes while Democrats offer a government job with a fat pension. Republicans supposedly don't care about the environment, schools, or to give the less fortunate a fair shake. Unless conservatives can explain in simple terms how our policies do a better job, the majority of people won't ever listen.
Unfortunately, explaining how freedom works isn’t easy. The word doesn't mean much to an inner city single mom with gang bangers for kids, a farm-worker sleeping in a car, or a student at one of our institutes of higher brainwashing. These people have credible reason to believe that they need public help in order to survive, mainly because they can't see next month's rent check or a way to take care of their kids in abstract talk about limited government.
And that's just the problem: Coercion is an easy political sale because it is such a simple concept: If you want somebody to give you what you want, just vote for candidates who will force other people to give it to you. By comparison, it's awfully hard to make a case for freedom to someone who is barely getting by, convinced they are powerless.
The problem with coercion is that it doesn't work, because people are very creative in avoiding compliance, making enforcement hideously expensive. The economy loses the productivity of both the supposed skinflint and the enforcer. It loses competitiveness versus less restrictive governance. Coercion simply costs society too much for it to work, even if it were capable of acting impartially (which it isn’t).
Which brings us to the other problem: not only is coercion inefficient, it is sufficient power to be power for sale. It is regulatory power to put one's competitors out of business, or preclude market entry by innovative new technologies. Corruption is nearly always destructive to capital formation. Thus, not only is regulatory coercion a waste of productivity and destructive to global competitiveness, it costs jobs for those who fall for its false promises while favoring those with sufficient money to buy political favors: the extremely wealthy.
The power to buy favors is of course, the real reason why we have limousine liberals, most of whom didn't personally build the foundations of their vast wealth much less understand how wealth is really created. Controlling the market with political money keeps them from having to compete in a free marketplace of competitive ideas. Coercion, while destructive to total wealth, is reliably profitable (for them).
It is thus no accident why coercive government is the province of the Democratic Party and Republican moderates, because in a democracy possessing coercive powers, all one has to do to control the marketplace is to control public opinion. That is why those same wealthy statist interests just so happen to control the mass media.
By contrast, conservatism's strongest political assets are in their appeal to individuals: the unapologetic desire to profit in business, while expressing consistent moral values of honesty and decency in personal conduct. If conservatives go negative, they MUST do so from a position of credible moral authority. Else they will end up feeding the leftist pitch that conservatives are pompous, mean-spirited rich white guys with few solutions to offer for the less fortunate.
As is always the case with support from the "vast middle" of the political spectrum, their commitment to any candidate is at best ephemeral. So unless conservatives offer truly compelling ideas, those voters will always have divided loyalties. If it is truly the intent of the GOP to take the party to the left, and ignore the base that supplies it its supposed principles, then it will become the party of "We're not the Democrats," thus allowing Democrats to set the agenda to over all political choices.
So, in order for conservatives to win that public debate, it is critical to develop understandable alternatives to liberal governance and show how they work.
So, why don't we solve that little problem?
As I said, it isn't easy. I've been working for five years to introduce free enterprise environmental solutions, and started out speaking to rooms full of blank stares. Criticisms come easy; learning to explain new ideas and how they work in simple terms takes time.
Each solution must be sold on its own, else the pitch becomes overwhelming. It takes a well organized message delivered in small pieces. That takes coordination. Thus the most important thing is to teach a comprehensive set of sound-bites to candidates to deliver that message. Teaching such messages to candates, whether edcucation, transportation, or the environment, is precisely what I'm doing. Coordinating that set of voices into a chorus is what Reagan did particularly well.
Remember that repetition of a consistent message is the one way to both sharpen that message and get people to adopt it as their own. Once that positive image of what conservative ideas can do is set in the minds of the public, a patient, clear, and rational exposition of the disaster that the Slave Party has visited upon the middle class will work to seal their fate. It is high time conservatives operated from the moral high ground rather than believe that half-compromises with archaic liberal programs represent a superior form of governance.
Now if you could get them empowered though a non-corrupt funding source/mechanism to become affordably exposed to those with enough time and energy to act as missionaries.
I had Jehovah's Whitnesses trying to hand me tracts while on my morning constitutional walk this morning!!! I revolted instead of having my usual competitive conversation on my doorstep!!!
I like the mixture of religion and it's missionary zeal with solid conservative politics that retains an arms length between church and state!!! I know that's not what you are promoting, but it's just my personal preference.
It's also a useful conduit when you don't have your own resources and can remain somewhat uncorrupted for a time and dividing of times. Don't worry. These are just idle thoughts, to compliment your well thought out train of thought.
You wrote: "The problem with coercion is that it doesn't work, because people are very creative in avoiding compliance, making enforcement hideously expensive. The economy loses the productivity of both the supposed skinflint and the enforcer. It loses competitiveness versus less restrictive governance. Coercion simply costs society too much for it to work, even if it were capable of acting impartially (which it isn’t)."
The problem with this argument is obvious. You are asserting that what we already have, and have had since the New Deal, is "coercion".
And America since 1940 has worked splendidly.
We are dramatically more wealthy, and freer as a whole, than we ever were before the New Deal.
We live longer and are healthier.
So is Europe, which installed it's version of the New Deal after World War II.
So is Japan, which did the same thing.
The argument that the regulated free market economy with a strong social safety net "doesn't work" is belied by the fact that it HAS worked, everywhere, including here.
Reagan himself never even attempted to unravel the social safety net, and after talking a bit about Social Security reform swiftly came to the conclusion that the existing system needed to be protected.
That is the problem with the whole "conservative" line of thinking that wants to dismantle the regulatory state. The regulatory state has made us more stable, more prosperous, richer, more long loved, than the laisser-faire free market capitalism that preceded it. By a wide margin.
America is a lot more democratic and free today, too, than it was in the heyday of the unregulated free market.
Actually, ALL of the most advanced and prosperous economies GOT THAT WAY post-Depression and post-World War II with a strong regulatory state overlaid on a free market, and a strong social safety net. States without those things are not as prosperous. Even WITHIN the USA. You can't argue with success. That's the problem with the argument.