Rebuilding the Conservative Story Part II: Mission Statement

Yesterday we triumphantly designed a Vision Statement to guide conservatives during our rebuilding process. Today, as promised, we are releasing a Mission Statement to the world.

As everyone knows, in the subculture of off-site team-building meetings, the Vision Statement is a gauzy, uplifting, inspirational definition of the goal of an organization. The Mission Statement is more down to earth. It answers the question: What are we trying to do today?

How hard can this be? The conservative Mission Statement is short and concise:

We fight to reform a cruel and unjust welfare state.

Yes, I know that there is the War on Terror, and in the week after the brutal massacre of the innocents in Mumbai, who can forget it for a moment? But actually, I don’t think that the War on Terror is the front-and-center thing that conservatives must do.

I believe that we can count on our liberal friends to do the right thing by the War on Terror. They just have one little problem. They don’t want Republicans to get all the glory. They want to fight the war in their own sophisticated, nuanced way. Republicans just don’t know how to do nuanced, they know.

But conservatives are called to reform the dreadful, cruel, corrupt, and unjust welfare state, or we are called for nothing at all.

Let us repeat the words of David Cameron, leader of the British Conservative Party:

There is such a thing as society. It’s just not the same thing as the state.

In that statement, Cameraon (the lightweight?) encapsulates the whole thrust of conservative thinking. We all want to help the least amongst us. We want to comfort the afflicted. The question is: How? Shall we do it will rational, expert-driven bureaucratic programs from the cental government? Or shall we do it as individual people, joined into voluntary assocations, working together to help our fellow Americans?

Conservatives say that the rigid, compulsory, expert-led, bureaucratic way is not the way to help people. In fact, if you try to help people with government programs and bureaucracy, you get this:

Do you see the same thing that I am seeing? A little over one generation ago, about one in eight of the children of the uneducated were denied the basic human right to live with mother and father. But thirty years later four out of ten children of the uneducated were denied this right, and lived in a single-mother home.

Want to know how this happened? The welfare state did it. Liberals who drive the intellectual foundations of the welfare state and who manage the great bureaucracies of the welfare state did this.

And it is wrong.

That is why I say that the mission of the conservative movement is short and sweet:

We fight to reform a cruel and unjust welfare state.

Tomorrow: the Conservative Elev    ator Story.