It’s no accident that conservatives, who are searching for the way forward following the disasterous midterm elections, find themselves generally underwhelmed by the prospect of two years of presidential politics.
American conservatism, after all, is about vastly more than the presidency. From Howard Jarvis’s anti-tax revolt in 1978 — California’s Proposition 13 — to Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson and Indianapolis Mayor Steve Goldsmith’s pioneering work reforming schools, welfare and public bureaucracies in the 1990s, the history of the American conservative movement has been written in states, communities and citizen activism.
So what is the way forward for the right? It’s to take a clue from our past and look beyond Washington. To renew, revitalize and re-launch the movement of Goldwater, Reagan and the Contract with America, we must concentrate our energies on the 511,000 elected offices in America, not just the presidency. The Oval Office by itself is incapable of moving to a more conservative America. We need a movement far beyond Washington.
We need to return to being the movement that cares more about a better future for Americans than about power in Washington, D.C.
What will a future based on freedom look like? First of all, it will be shaped by unprecedented advances in science and technology. The best estimates are that there will be four to seven times as much scientific innovation in the next 25 years as there has been in the past 25 years.
The second step toward building a conservative future based on freedom is to take advantage of increases in American productivity in the private sector in order to replace our public bureaucracies.
Time and again, we see breakthroughs that give us more choices of higher quality at lower cost. But where do these breakthroughs come from? They’re in the private sector, they’re in the marketplace.
They’re where incentives lead entrepreneurs to invent a better future and then to check their invention against the market by seeing whether or not people are choosing that future.
And where do we not see this progress? Where bureaucracy, regulations and litigation are the dead hands of the past propping up failure.
If we had had the same innovation in learning that we’ve had in consuming, today every young American would be out-performing every Japanese, Indian and Chinese because we would have the best learning system in the world.
The final step toward a future based on freedom may seem counterintuitive: it’s to revive and renew the historic American culture that has made this the freest, most innovative, prosperous and generous nation in history.
The work ethic. Courage. Individual initiative. Responsibility. Teamwork. Energetic effort. Saving and investing. Recognizing and rewarding achievement. Having high expectations.
These virtues are under attack these days, but they are the virtues that have made America great. Combine them with an explosion in scientific innovation and a rejection of bureaucracy in favor of free market productivity, and there is no limit to the future America can have.
All of this is possible. A limitless future based on freedom awaits only the advocacy of citizen activists, mayors, school boards, state legislators and community leaders.
Politics as usual — focusing on what is wrong with the left rather than what we can do for the country — will not bring about change.
We have to take the proven principles of conservatism — what Ronald Reagan called the “banner of bold colors” — and translate them into bold solutions.
We need to build a movement outside Washington based on these bold solutions. Then and only then will we force conservative change on Washington.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is chairman of American Solutions for Winning the Future, www.americansolutions.com.
