Rebuilding the Conservative Story Part I: Vision Statement

Before we get to the specifics and the personalities of the glorious conservative future—will it be Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal—let’s do the due diligence. Let’s start with a Vision Statement.

Yes, I know, all that off-site team-building stuff is awfully trite, but it has a point. It forces you to think about: Who we are, and what do we want, and why?

So let’s start with a Vision Statement. Here it is:

We believe in an America that lives and works together, with limited government, under God.

Alert readers will notice that we are covering the three sectors of Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Well of course we are. What did you expect? We are talking about the Greater Separation of Powers between the economic sector, the political sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

So when we talk about an America where we “live and work together” we are evoking the system of voluntary cooperation under law that we call capitalism. But we are trying to evoke a little more than that, because the notion of free enterprise is too guy-like. We must include the girl side of voluntary cooperation, and that means the community of women working together, sharing and caring. In the guy side, we are battling all the other guys for market share. Competition instead of cooperation. But for the girls we want to think of cooperation before competition. So we fudge it.

When we talk about an America with “limited government” we are talking about an America where the government doesn’t get its fingers into every pie as it does today. It would be an America where four of the five biggest government programs would not be: government pensions, government healthcare, government education, and government welfare. Instead the two biggest programs would be defense against enemies foreign, and defense against enemies domestic. Look at usgovernmentspending.com to get a feel for what that might look like.

When we talk about an America “under God” we are talking about an America where the dominant belief system is transcendent. We mean that the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not solvable by a secular religion of heaven on earth. Life is a mystery, and the meaning of life is not given to us. So we develop a faith in the value of life and the meaning of life, typically symbolized by the notion of God. “God” in this sense is a declaration of humility. We will not solve the meaning of life by reason, or experimentation. Of course that will not stop us from reasoning, or from experimenting to get a better understanding of life, the universe, and everything. But we understand that every time we advance human knowledge a step, the ultimate answer recedes a step. All we do is raise the stakes.

So there it is. Step One in rebuilding the conservative story.

We believe in an America that lives and works together, with limited government, under God.

Next up: A new conservative Mission Statement.