[GOP 256] Cute, but your're taking this sentence completely out of contect, which is precisely the opposite of you you suggest. Neo-Confederates , for example, define conservative as veneration for Confederate traitors.
Is this enough context to keep you happy?
Back to the Basics, pp. 226-228To keep us on the right path and reach journey's end, we Republicans must bear in midn the train-blazing careers of Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner. Stevens knew that for the emancipated slave, acquiring land of his own was a "sine qua non," meaning "without which, nothing." If Stevens had succeeded in implementing his proposal to provide each slave family with "40 acres and a mule," countless economic problems would never have arisen. If after the war Sumner's agendy for rigorous protection of constitutional rights had been enacted and enforced, the Democrats' political degradation of black Americans might have been prevented. Not taking these crucial first steps cost our nation a century of socialism and suffering.
The free market is voluntary cooperation, with self-interest the goal and societal advancement the result. Ronald Reagan was acutely aware that to preserve the free market society, the drift toward socialism has to be stopped. To seize and hold the policy initiative, we Republicans must charge right at the Democratic Party in a battle of ideas, our best weapon a clear vision of the free market society we are fighting for.
No distinction can be drawn between a free society and a free economy. Consider the numerous civilizations of the past which flowered when central government was unable to tighten its grip on the economy. For evidence of how socialism impedes progress, consider the cultural decline in Communist nations or the relative cultural stagnation of many European countries today.
And now consider the United States -- for Reagan a "shining city on a hill" -- at its most vibrant in areas least controlled by government. No one planned one of our country's greatest contributions to the world, the Internet, or anticipated that it would be responsible for the most magnificent outpouring of prosperity in history. By no accident did the Internet arise here, where government is strong enough to safeguard constitutional rights and foster economic infrastructure yet still weak enough to permit a free people to freely create such an enterprise so spontaneously. As Bill Gates once testified to Congress: "The incredible success of [the high-tech industry] in the United States owes a lot to the light hand of government in the technology area, the fact that people can take incredible risks and if thy're successful they can have incredible rewards... Overall, I'd say the light hand is working very well."
A century ago, economic transformation produced monopolies and other market failures for which the Progressive movement sought to compensate. Government action, particularly during the Theodore Roosevelt and Taft presidencies, was intended to promote the free market society, and o was progressive. But now, a century later, as the economy undergoes another transformation, decentralizing power and increasing the leverage of consumers at the expense of producers, regulation and other government intervention tend to impexde the free market. Now, for government to get out of the way of this progress is truly progressive. What is not progressive at all is the modern-day drive to extend the reach of government power over the individual. There is nothing democratic or progressive about socialism. Socialists chafe at restrictions imposed by the rule of law lest their planning be disrupted by predetermined rules which apply to everyone. Socialism is an attempt to fend off the future.
Innovation, by definition unforeseen, is a threat to the plans of the self-proclaimed enlightened, and so is the suppressed. Based on what Friedrich Hayek called "a naive and childlike...view of the world," central planning is "a fraud doomed to failure because no planner can possess all the knowledge needed to run a modern economy." Centralization of power in a bureaucracy led by those who profess to know more and care more than anyone else is in fact the old, lamentably commonplace way nations have been governed since civilization began. It is government for the sake of the individual which is new.
We Republicans place ourselves at another disadvantage in the battle of ideas by ripping from socialists a label which describes them so well. Opponents of progress are those who want to conserve the age-old rule of the few over the many and the cultural stagnation this entails. Socialists are the true conservatives. Republicans try without success to affix this conservative label properly to our Party, using as adhesive such adjectives as "dynamic" or "compassionate" or "progressive." Trouble is, though our Republican Party definitely is dynamic and compassionate and progressive, conservative it is not.
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