Beyond Rove, The Hard Thinking

Beyond the Rove Myth, there is reality, and Fred Barnes dishes it out.  Political advisers like Karl Rove can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. 

They can advise a candidate or a party how best to deal with a situation. But they can’t change the situation. And they can’t transform the circumstances at the time of an election.

Karl Rove can’t do magic, like make political realignments happen.  But Karl Rove certainly helped. Five elections out of six ain’t nothing.  If the Republican Party becomes the majority party again it will help to have a Karl Rove on hand.

But the real traction will come from political ideas and politicians who can speak to the American people, appeal to their better natures, and show them how to be the best they can be.

It is up to conservatives to start doing the thinking and the writing that will provide the firepower to a new generation of US politicians.

My own idea is this.  We conservatives need to bake a three-tier cake of political ideas.

• The philosophical tier, that must meet and beat the secular modernism of the academic middle class.  My candidate to lead this up political philosopher Roger Scruton who combines the conservatism of Burke and the modernism of Kant.
• The emotional tier, that must shame and blame the adolescent, diminished-responsibility culture of the academic middle class.  My candidate for this is George Gilder and his 1970s books on sexual suicide.  Yes, thirty years ago, before he got into high tech, Gilder forecast the child-dearth of the modern welfare state based on his analysis of its negation of men as husbands and providers.
• The mechanical tier, that must out-analyze and advocate at the policy analysis level.  This is actually already pretty well achieved.  Conservatives know what to do, and we have the programs pretty well outlines: privatize the welfare state with private pensions, private health care, and private education.

That’s all it takes, so let’s get going.