Conservatives have a shrinking tent problem. Rather than growing their movement with addition, or even multiplication, they seem determined to shrink it by division and subtraction. If they want to be relevant, they will need to relearn important lessons from William F. Buckley in the 1960s and President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and figure out how to build a bigger tent.
The foundational premise for growing a tent is to recognize how many different kinds of conservatives might, if welcomed, choose to camp there. In fact, the number of adjectives that go with the noun “conservative” is almost mind-boggling. There are national security conservatives, fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, Christian conservatives, crunchy conservatives, neocons, paleocons, libertarians, traditionalists, and on we could go. If conservatism is about conserving something, these are all things that one conservative or another would like to protect.
