Reflections: What will we do the morning after?

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics.

Summer is over, another birthday has passed, and another of my daughters has struck-out on her own-in Austin. The Astros never really competed this summer-and said "good-bye" to some good veterans along the way-but they've ended the season showing signs of life for the future. My White Sox flirted with a pennant race long enough to make reading the morning box scores fun through Labor Day, and have since settled into their usual, second-place position. And the Cubs oh, well, there's always next year!

With fall upon us, politics is back.

I know for many of you it never left, but after the State Convention in June, I needed a break to re-charge my batteries after nearly 2 ½ years of campaigning: in September, 2007, I jumped head-long into what now seems like a continuous campaign that lasted more than 2 ½ years-first for a seat on a 10-county appellate bench; then to revitalize the local GOP; then to formally run for chairman of the Harris County Republican Party; and finally to help elect a new state chairman for the Republican Party of Texas. Even though I entered those campaigns with the support of my family and colleagues, and I believe my team, my supporters, and I made a positive long-term impact on our local party through these efforts, the shear length and depth of such a continuous commitment took a toll on my family and my work, because I hadn't structured and planned my life with an eye toward running for public office. As a result, I've needed to address this toll over the last few months with some long-needed vacation time and then a re-involvement in the practice of complex litigation. With the exception of giving a talk to a local club in August as a favor to fill-in for a speaker who had cancelled, and attending a few committee meetings, I've purposely stayed away from politics for a while to attend to family and work.

But, I haven't stopped thinking about politics completely. So, here are my reflections from a summer's rest...

First, we must finish the task at hand and win this election. There are only a little more than three weeks until the start of early voting, and six weeks until Election Day. While we still have a lot of work to do between now and November 2nd in order to win this election-locally and nationally-a momentum is behind the GOP and conservative candidates this year that I don't think there is time to derail. The biggest enemy now could be our own over-confidence (remember "President Dewey"?), so we need to complete the mission and get the vote out.

Then, when we wake-up on November 3rd, we must be prepared to lead, to govern, and to recruit strong candidates for the next election cycle. Let me give you my thoughts on each of these points:

We must be prepared to lead, with a vision that encompasses our cherished principles.

In my posts on this blog in May, June and July, I discussed an approach called "Renewing the American Community" with a focus on re-capturing a sense of Neighborhood and re-building our communities based on our conservative principles of limited and local government. I won't re-hash what I said in those posts, but I will recap this fundamental point: the original settlers from Europe established neighborhoods and congregations before they established governments. Successive waves of settlers governed their lives by being good and caring neighbors, and then later generations, culminating with the Founding Fathers, created governments to protect the society and culture the settlers had established. Were they perfect? No. Did they fail to apply their principles to all men and women? Yes. But, they built something unique in history, and the following generations fought amongst themselves to eventually apply those principles to all who lived here and came here. The story of the settler's creation, of the founder's vision, and of the following generations' struggles, is our heritage.

That heritage provides the vision we need to use to lead our communities, our state and our nation starting November 3rd. The men and women I've gotten to know over the last 2 ½ years in every corner of this region of the state, in every Tea Party group, and in every Republican organization, crave leaders who understand this heritage, who understand governments' proper role in preserving this heritage, and who are committed to work every day to preserve this heritage for our children and grandchildren. The men and women working hard to get conservatives elected this November need to hear of our party's commitment to this heritage, and of a plan for action consistent with our heritage. If we lead, these men and women will support us and work with us; if we don't, they will throw us out of office as soon as they can.

"The Pledge" that the Republican Congressional leadership presented last week is a good start, but doesn't go far enough. Republicans need a vision of action for not just the next two years, but for the next generation. To find it, we need to stop looking for new slogans, or trying to co-opt the slogans of the Tea Parties-we need to re-commitment to our heritage of Neighborhoods-of local action and limited government-and then fashion an agenda around that commitment. If we truly believe in the primacy of the individual and local government, that agenda must be built from the foundation of local government first. Continually focusing on the national agenda, though momentarily necessary because of the dire straits created by Obama's administration, is self-defeating to our cause in the long-run. Eventually, the national agenda must be drawn to complement and protect our local agendas.

We must turn from critics to problem-solvers and administrators, prepared to turn our principles into action and results.

In my last post on this blog on July 11th, I wrote about the "Tupelo Formula" for local action, which I broke down as follows:

•The community faced a problem that appeared intractable, and that had been confounded by multiple events-not unlike the confounding factors of under-education, under-employment, chronic crime and poverty, and the impulse to be "left alone", which exist in many of our neighborhoods today;

•One person, followed by a group of civic leaders, saw a strength within the community that created an opportunity that could be exploited to help the community address its problem;

•These citizens had the courage to take a risk with their own resources to take advantage of the opportunity and to share the gain with the community;

•These citizens involved businesses, private organizations, and local government in both the planning and the implementation of their plan; and

•The gains to the community were both short-term, and long-term, and were broadly shared-e.g., businesses were created and expanded, employment grew, per capita income grew, and schools improved.

I propose to our local conservative leaders on our school boards and city councils, and to our Republican officeholders at the county and state levels, that we sit-down after the election with other civic leaders, and begin to analyze and address our communities' needs through the prism of this formula. These needs should include at least the following:

•Our educational system, including the type of citizen we want to emerge from an elementary, secondary and college education in this state; the proper curriculum and delivery system needed to produce that citizen; and the most efficient and cost-effective mechanisms needed to pay for, account for, and administer that delivery system;

•Our transportation system and physical infrastructure, including a vision of where our citizens will live and work over the next 25 years; an understanding of how and where our goods and services will need to move; the maintenance cycle for all capital investments; an appreciation for the property rights of all Texans; and the most efficient and cost-effective mechanisms for paying for the needed infrastructure improvements; and

•Our criminal-justice and mental-health systems, including the effectiveness of such systems to protect victims, the public, and the person being held and/or treated within the systems; and alternatives that can reduce recidivism and improve the educational opportunities and long-term economic viability of the families and neighborhoods affected by the incarceration or mental-health treatment.

If we can address these issues, and create long-term strategies for addressing them at the most local level possible, we can begin to make government live by our principles while addressing urgent problems; and we can begin to address some of the most vexing structural pressures on our public budgets, which put upward pressure on our taxes and downward pressure on job growth.

Obviously, other problems, like the looming public-sector pension issue, will have to be addressed soon-but we need to start somewhere and show the public that our principles are relevant to modern life and modern problems.

To be the majority party, we must recruit and support strong conservatives to run for local, state and national offices over the next two years, who share our principles and are committed to use them to govern.

As I often said during my campaign for Chair of the HCRP, if we are the party that believes in local government, we must get involved in local government. This means fielding candidates now for the elections of 2011 and 2012. Remember, that in 2012 the local GOP will be the challenging party for countywide offices for the first time since 1996. Included among these offices will be between 30 and 40 local judgeships that will be open for Republican challengers, and we need to start finding competent, conservative members of the legal community to run for these offices.

But in 2011, many of the 416 local city council and school board seats will be up for election, including Houston's Mayor and Controller offices. Moreover, Utility and Emergency Services Districts hold elections each year. From just a rough review of the current holders of these offices, Republicans or Republican-voting independents hold already hold at least 40% of these offices. We need to talk with those officeholders, determine how we can help them keep their offices and how we can support them after they win. Most importantly, we need to determine who holds the other offices and recruit candidates who share our principles to run for those offices. Given the number of offices spread-out over 24 school districts, 34 cities, and many Utility and Emergency Services districts, this process must start now.

Finally, we need to continue the recruitment of new GOP precinct chairs-especially in communities where we need to re-introduce ourselves. For example, once this election cycle ends, those activists who have helped candidates like John Faulk, Fernando Herrera, Sarah Davis, Jim Murphy, and Steve Mueller, need to be actively recruited to stay involved by becoming precinct chairs.

If we can expand our presence in local offices and precincts before the 2012 election cycle starts in earnest, we will start that cycle with the army we will need to win that election and retake Harris County.

Although I have committed to my family that I will not run again for a public office myself, I am committed to the plan of attack I have outlined in this post, and will do all I can over the coming years to work with our party, our candidates and our elected officials to make the GOP the majority party in every part of this county and this state; and to not just cherish our conservative principles, but to use our conservative principles creatively to govern effectively. Will you help in this effort beginning November 3rd?

A July 4th Challenge: "What will you do?"

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics.

In response to my last post about re-establishing a sense of Neighborhood, one person’s comment included the following question:

My first thought was an overwhelming one of "where do we even start this?"

Although I will try to provide a more concrete answer to this question over the next few weeks, I want to give a more general answer to this question as we head into the July 4th weekend. You see, I believe the answer is to be found (as it always has in America) by each of us looking in the mirror and asking that person we see in the reflection: “what will you do?”

I firmly believe that one person, or one group of people, committed to positive ideas, can change the world for the better. Such positive change rarely comes through revolution, which destroys more than it changes. Instead, such positive change usually results from sustained effort to change one person, one family, and one neighborhood at a time. Soon momentum shifts, and the change spreads like a wildfire. Our civilization, at its best, is built on this notion.

Each of us is capable of being one of those people who ignites the wildfire--we have done that type of work all our lives with our family, our friends, our work, and our church or community activities. Remember that the founding generation of this nation, as remarkable a group as ever existed on the planet, came to the struggle of the late 18th Century with no more special background (except, maybe for Franklin) than any of us. They included farmers, surveyors, bankers, lawyers, doctors, ministers, silversmiths, printers, shopkeepers, and innkeepers, most of whom had never traveled beyond the hamlets of their birth, let alone seen the world. Their ranks were joined by ordinary men and women people who made extraordinary journeys across an ocean in wooden sailing ships to start a new life. Eventually, they each became committed to a cause greater than themselves, and that commitment created new opportunities and experiences for each of them individually, which they then used to their advantage to change the world together.

Indeed, it wasn’t that long ago that we still had leaders who understood the unique and exceptional challenge that lies at the heart of our civilization’s experience—and they led a victory over a world-wide tyranny. By way of example, I am going to quote at length from two speeches: Ronald Reagan’s speech at the end of the 1976 Republican Convention, given after a close and demoralizing loss of the Republican presidential nomination, and before he knew he would ever run for President again, in which he presented the challenge; and Pope John Paul II’s speech to the UN in 1995, reflecting on how the challenge had been met and victory had been achieved.

Reagan:

…I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now, on our Tricentenial….Then I tried to write—let your own minds turn to that task. You are going to write for people a hundred years from now, who know all about us. We know nothing of them. We don’t know what kind of a world they will be living in…And suddenly it dawned on me, those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles fired. They will know whether we met our challenge. Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here. Will they look back with appreciation and say, ‘Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept us now 100 years later free, who kept our world from nuclear destruction’[.] And, if we failed, they probably won’t get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom, and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read of it. This is our challenge; and this is why here in this hall tonight, better than we have ever done before, we have got to quit talking to each other about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we have ever been, but we carry a message they are waiting for….There is no substitute for victory, Mr. President.

Pope John Paul II:

The revolutions of 1989 were made possible by the commitment of brave men and women inspired by a different, and ultimately more profound and powerful vision: the vision of man as a creature of intelligence and free will, immersed in a mystery which transcends his own being and endowed with the ability to reflect and the ability to choose—and thus capable of wisdom and virtue. A decisive factor in the success of those non-violent revolutions was the experience of social solidarity: In the face of regimes backed by the power of propaganda and terror, that solidarity was the moral code of the—power of the powerless, a beacon of hope and an enduring reminder that it is possible for man’s historical journey to follow a path which is true to the finest aspirations of the human spirit.

We all are “immersed in a mystery which transcends” our lives, just as were Reagan and the revolutionaries of 1989--we all want to do more than just exist, we want to be a part of something larger than ourselves. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we need to stop always looking for that “something larger” somewhere else, and realize that we must start to make a better world by making better families, better neighborhoods, and better schools.

Over the past 18 months, I have been blessed to know many people who have responded to this challenge by forming Tea Party groups, forming organizations to spread conservatism in new neighborhoods and mobilize neighbors to stand and fight for our principles. Each of these people, every day, is showing us how to meet the challenge to re-establish the sense of Neighborhood we need to unravel Obamaism and preserve the nation we love and the inalienable rights we have been blessed with—whether or not they fully appreciate the consequences of what they have started.

This moment in history has given us both a challenge and an opportunity. We must remember that “we may be fewer in numbers than we have ever been, but we carry a message they are waiting for...” If we succeed, we will have met our generation’s obligation to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

"There is no substitute for victory".

Have a happy and safe July 4th.

It’s time to shift from the Circus to the Neighborhood

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics.

After the RPT’s State Convention in Dallas earlier this month, Dave asked me to give him my recap. Since that time, I’ve sat down on several occasions to try to write the recap—but no words seemed to come out.

In many ways, what happened in Dallas is a culmination of what many of us have worked for since late 2008, and it is hard to put into words the optimism I feel for the party at this point—even as I hear that the financial condition Steve Munisteri found when he took over the party was worse than anyone outside the organization had known. He has a big job ahead of him, and we all need to help.

I’ve decided to leave it to others to someday tell the story of how Steve engineered his victory. It is a story that needs to be told, and those closest to his effort deserve the credit and the opportunity to tell that story when they are ready. However, I can say this—driving home from work one night shortly after the convention, I heard a certain State Senator who hosts a radio show (and who gave a raucous, divisive speech just before the floor vote at the convention) spin how and why Steve was elected, and he was wrong about almost everything he said.

In fact, much of the challenge we face as a party, and will face as we move together into the future, is to stop taking the word of such self-anointed “ringmasters” as gospel, and to start thinking for ourselves. And these “ringmasters” need to be careful about over-use of circus analogies, because some in our party are tired of such clowns and midway acts anointing themselves to be the “ringmasters” of our party’s future.

Now, rather than get further side-tracked by circus metaphors and divisiveness, I want to follow the lead of Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, whose truly Reaganesque convention speech (which followed and eclipsed that State Senator’s speech) called on us to unite against the Democrats and to lead our country away from what the Democrats have done. Therefore, I want to continue to address a topic that I started to talk about in a post at the end of May—how will we lead if Republicans are again given control of government nationally, and are kept in office at the state and local levels? To answer this question, I want to return to that concept I discussed in that previous post: “Renewing the American Community”.

At the heart of this concept is a word that we don’t often use anymore: Neighborhood. We often talk of families, of churches, of organizations, of communities, of villages, of cities, etc.; but rarely do we talk about neighborhoods. If you’re like me, the word conjures up memories of friends and families that lived on the same block, who went to school with us, who played on the same teams with us, who served in the same scout troops with us, or who attended church with us. It brings back memories of our friend’s mothers and fathers, who looked out for us as we walked to school, or to the school bus; who kept an eye on us as we played in the street, or down at the park; who took us in when our parents had to go on a trip or out for an evening, or just gave us a safe “home away from home”; and who told our parents if anything went awry, but who could also give us a safe and confidential ear when we most needed it. More than a place, it was a shared experience, in which the members took responsibility for the other members—a civil congregation.

If we have lost anything over the last generation, we’ve lost this sense of neighborhood—this civil congregation that has been the heart of American Exceptionalism from its beginning. I believe the mission of American Conservatism and the GOP is not just to unravel Obamaism, but to re-establish this sense of neighborhood applicable to the 21st Century. To do that we must first remember how we got those neighborhoods in the first place.

It was the enterprise of spreading neighborhoods across a continent to which prior generations committed their hopes and dreams. When those dissident European Protestants first arrived and settled the Eastern seaboard, they started the process and created colonial and state governments to protect their settlements. Then, from the earliest actions of the first Congresses under the Articles of Confederation, the federal government promoted the creation and spread of neighborhoods. If you look at the Land Ordinance of 1785, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the founding generation was intent on devising a scheme for establishing the physical blueprint for future neighborhoods—surveys of townships to include schools and churches and post offices.

As new settlers migrated westward during the 19th Century, they often moved as whole communities or congregations; for example, settlers, and their offspring, who left Salem, Massachusetts together and started west eventually (over one or more generations) reached Salem, Oregon, and left Salems in many states along their journeys. As immigrants came to the cities, they created neighborhoods in city sections—“Little Italy”, “Chinatown”, “Brighton Beach”, “Hyde Park”, and many others. Neighborhoods were home to factory workers and bankers, to every social and economic strata of the community.

Neighborhoods furnished the primary support for those who needed help. In his ground-breaking book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, which helped lead to the welfare reform legislation in 1996, Marvin Olasky, a professor at the University of Texas, outlines the history of neighborhood-based efforts to provide help to those in need. The combination of local religious and private organizations, and of ad hoc volunteers, created a safety net of people who knew who needed help, who knew who they were helping, who knew the specific needs of those they were helping, and who could properly assess the type and amount of help needed. This familiarity with the person needing the help also provided an incentive for both people to succeed—to get the person to a state whereby they could help themselves; government help was reserved for those who truly could not help themselves. The volunteers were not professionals—they were neighbors. It was this volunteer spirit is one of the attributes that de Tocqueville found so exceptional in America.

Frederick Jackson Turner, the famous University of Wisconsin and Harvard University History Professor, gave a keynote speech at the Columbia Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, in which he noted that the frontier was gone. Almost thirty years later, Turner would note

Western democracy through the whole of its earlier period tended to the production of a society of which the most distinctive fact was the freedom of the individual to rise under conditions of social mobility, and whose ambition was the liberty and well-being of the masses. The conception has vitalized all American democracy, and has brought it into sharp contrasts with the democracies of history, and with those modern efforts of Europe to create an artificial democratic order by legislation. The problem of the United States is not to create democracy, but to conserve democratic institutions and ideals.

Between 1893 and 1920, when Turner wrote those words, the country began to cope with the problems created by the Industrial Revolution that Europe had been dealing with since the mid-19th Century. European movements had tried to change the social dynamic through laws designed to give the common man more direct say in their monarchical governments, while giving those governments more responsibility over the welfare of the common man. What Turner noted was that America already had created a system whereby citizens’ liberties were protected and they could participate in government—it didn’t need to legislate it into existence, but it did need to preserve it. Part of that American system was the neighborhood.

Throughout the 20th Century, we failed to heed Turner, and we followed Europe’s model for the “democratic welfare state”, and helped to slowly destroy our neighborhoods. First in the cities, and then in outlying suburbs and towns, the places remained but the sense of neighborhood disappeared. Some of the changes to the social dynamic were well-intentioned—even necessary, at least in the short-term. For instance,

* arguably, the Great Depression required some infusion of federal action to organize resources to get the country back to work, because the problem was national (even international) in its scale; and

* the extension of the recognition and protection of real liberty to minorities and women was long overdue.

However, each of these changes created consequences that destroyed neighborhoods:

* the change in the relationship of the individual with the national government; the national, programmatic approach to public welfare; and the professionalization of social work became a permanent fixture of American life, which the welfare reform legislation of 1996 did not fundamentally change;

* the extension of real liberty to minorities led to greater social mobility for middle-class minorities, which led to the separation of those persons from their traditional communities and led to a permanent underclass left to be cared for by the national and state governments; and

* the extension of real liberty to women took them out of their roles as the permanent sentinels of the neighborhoods—the mothers on watch for the care of the children, the volunteers to help those in need, the teachers and volunteers in the local schools—and placed them in the permanent workforce.

While each of these steps created positive benefits for individuals or groups, they left a fundamental void in our unique, American society.

We never have addressed the void that these actions left in our society—the loss of our neighborhoods—and the consequences of that void on our liberties. Today we live in gated “communities”, subdivisions with fancy names, fenced-in yards, large houses or high-rise flats with so many built-in conveniences that we never have to leave them except to go to work (that is--if you don’t work from home), and many of us now home-school our children. We have all these material benefits, but many people don’t know the people who live in the next house or apartment, or on the next street--let alone, know of their needs. Obamaism is a further extension of this model, that would limit our liberties and redistribute our wealth to bestow material benefits and safety directly to each of us, without calling on any of us to be good neighbors.

If we don’t begin to accept the responsibility that liberty expects of us, I fear we will ultimately become a “Place” where taxes are compelled from some to bestow benefits to others, rather than continue to be a “Nation” where we share an interdependence and a love of liberty.

How can the GOP begin to address these issues? The answers are at once simple and familiar—we need to promote those activities that build strong neighborhoods. Here are some examples:

* Promote policies that encourage small-business creation—small business creation is the easiest way to help people balance their need to make a living with our country’s need to rebuild neighborhoods. Businesses employ people, and employing people effects their lives. Every paycheck sets aside a retirement fund, pays for health care, provides for the sustenance of a family and (indirectly) for the support of the neighborhoods where employees live. Products or services generated by a business effects its customers, and those people touched by its customers. Wealth created by businesses increases the tax base and tax rolls, which in turn fund our schools—more wealth, creates better-funded schools. Programs that a business supports can enrich the lives of residents in the community where the business is located, as well as the lives of its employees. Each of us spends more time every day with our co-workers than with our family: the positive bonds you formed through this activity ripple out in every direction.

* Promote involvement in a traditional community-based service organization—between 1870 and 1920 many of the organizations that we remember as the backbones of our neighborhoods were created, and most still exist: Rotary, Kiwanis, the PTA, and many more. These organizations were designed to help serve the needs of their communities, and provide the social networks that build and maintain neighborhoods. Most of these organizations are crying for new members, but time and other commitments keep people from joining. The GOP at every level should be promoting policies that shorten commutes to work, offer tax breaks to companies who give employees paid time to work for schools and volunteer organizations, and offer tax breaks to individuals to donate time to charities (and faith-based organizations) as well as money or assets.

* Promote assimilation programs—To be a nation we must assimilate. Schools, churches, and childhood activities in the neighborhood were designed to assimilate children into our society as adults. Newcomers need the same help. Let’s not just argue about it, let’s act. Like the local GOP is now doing with its new Eastside Office, lets promote policies that give incentives to private organizations to create community centers and teach adults English and citizenship; that give children a safe place to meet, do their homework, and play; and that give families a safe place to interact and get to know and care for each other.

* Promote policies that keep families and neighborhoods intact and building wealth—Locally, our GOP Juvenile Court Judges worked to create a model program, funded with private dollars and partnered with neighborhood churches, that is keeping first-time, non-violent juvenile offenders in school and out of jail. These types of programs will fight the long-term problems of under-education, under-employment, and chronic poverty that fester in communities where too many young people drop out of school and get a criminal record. We need more of these innovative programs that help rebuild strong schools, strong families, and strong neighborhoods.

Some of you may think this agenda is too simple and too short—it is, but I must stop this post at some point. What I really want to do is to start you thinking about how we can build a positive agenda for running the government based on our ideals—based on that sense of Neighborhood that focused our liberty and built this country—and to re-build the nation we believe in. Give me your thoughts.

Some Thoughts about American Conservatism this Memorial Day

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics.

As I enter this Memorial Day weekend, I’ve been reflecting a lot on life and the last few years. As this Friday came and went, my emotions ran the gamut as:

• I remembered the tenth anniversary of the passing of my mother, whose principles and values formed the basis for how I would approach my life;

• I remembered my late father, who, though blind in one eye from birth, memorized the eye chart to pass his Army physical, and when caught at the end of basic training, had already proven himself to the point that, though he never went overseas, he spent the duration of his tour of duty during World War II training marksmen for the Army—and his quiet tenacity shaped how I would attack every challenge in my life;

• I received a letter from my oldest daughter, who moved to Los Angeles after graduating from college last year, telling me that she would be producing and starring in her first professional theatrical production this summer;

• I talked to my middle daughter about her plans to move to Austin by the end of the summer to strike-out on her own; and

• I saw my youngest daughter receive the highest academic awards from her school as she graduated from 5th Grade.

My reflections also turned to that small band of people, who starting in late 2008, I worked with as we began the struggle to re-awaken our local GOP to needs it has to address, and to how these friends have seized this last year and a half to make a difference with Tea Parties, with radio shows, with internet blogs, with national organizations in African-American and Latino communities, and with grass-roots efforts in our precincts. But, on Friday, I received a phone call from another of these friends who worked with me over this time, who told me of an extraordinary project he has now undertaken. Of all the many projects this group has undertaken, I think I may be the proudest of what he is now doing (and that is saying a lot). To explain my special pride in this effort, let me digress for a moment.

I’ve always believed that American Conservatism is more than a political movement. For it to work, American Conservatism must promote principles for individuals to live as neighbors in a community of free people, and our political principles and policies should flow from and compliment these “life” principles. I believe Goldwater was talking about this when he wrote in The Conscience of a Conservative:

Conservatism is not an economic theory, though it has economic implications. …It is Conservatism that puts material things in their proper place—that has a structured view of the human being and of human society, in which economics plays only a subsidiary role.

…Conservatives take account of the whole man, while the Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man’s nature. The Conservative believes that man is, in part, an economic, an animal creature; but that he is also a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires. What is more, these needs and desires reflect the superior side of man’s nature, and thus take precedence over his economic wants. Conservatism therefore looks upon the enhancement of man’s spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy. Liberals, on the other hand—in the name of a concern for “human beings”—regard the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission of society. They are, moreover, in a hurry. So that their characteristic approach is to harness the society’s political and economic forces into a collective effort to compel “progress.” In this approach, I believe they fight against Nature.

Surely the first obligation of a political thinker is to understand the nature of man.

An American Conservative knows that this land was settled, and this nation was founded, by people who tried their whole lives to understand the nature of man in this temporal world, to reconcile it with man’s relationship to his Creator, and to forge a real society based on that understanding. Because we appreciate this basis for our unique society, many people of faith naturally are drawn to American Conservatism, though, as a political movement its principles are broader and more encompassing than the tenets of any one religion or sect. Newt Gingrich, tried to discuss this unique “American Civilization” in a college course he taught in the mid-1990s, and he was ridiculed at the time by the left for his effort.

In fact, Reagan, in the famous 1964 speech that launched his political career, conveyed the political dilemma every American Conservative faces when they try to debate public policy:

…[A]ny time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. It seems impossible to legitimately debate their solutions with the assumption that all of us share the desire to help the less fortunate. They say we're always "against" things -- we're never "for" anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so.

When I started to seriously consider how to fix the problems that confronted our local GOP and drafted a plan, I wanted to do more than just talk about the nuts-and-bolts of party building and management. I wanted to discuss this bigger challenge to re-orient the discussion among conservatives to how we re-engage in the debate about achieving society’s humanitarian goals by using and implementing our principles in creative and dynamic ways—of addressing urban issues and education; of addressing the need to revitalize our understanding of the responsibilities of being a neighbor and maintaining a neighborhood; of what Steve Parkhurst, Jill Fury and I called “Renewing the American Community”.

In “Renewing the American Community” we wanted to remind conservatives that the American Conservative movement is not just about life and liberty, but—to be true to itself—it must address the third inalienable right: the pursuit of happiness. Not the purely material happiness that so many of our fellow citizens dwell upon, and that the creed of the Democratic Party focuses upon, but the happiness of the whole man (of the economic and spiritual sides of man)—what the ancients called “a whole life well spent,” and the challenge that St. Paul describes in his letter to the Galatians:

For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

Above all else, we wanted to remind our conservative friends that we will not succeed politically in the long-run if all we say is “no” to the Democrat’s schemes and plans—we must show and pursue an alternative course for addressing the needs of our society based on rebuilding our bonds as free people, as neighbors, and as fellow citizens, and on pursuing policies that use those bonds that De Tocqueville found so unique—rather than government—to address pressing needs. Our unique society can not work, and we can not limit the size and role of government in our lives, without these bonds. Neither liberty, nor “the pursuit of happiness” can long survive where free men and women isolate themselves from each other. In fact, de Tocqueville’s observation crystallizes this dilemma:

When no firm and lasting ties any longer unite men, it is impossible to obtain the cooperation of any great number of them unless you can persuade every man whose help is required that he serves his private interests by voluntarily uniting his efforts to those of all the others.

Without the bonds of relationships and interdependence—of family, of neighbor—action for the common good must be bribed or coerced, and the only entity with power to do that will be a government with the power to do great harm (as our parents learned throughout the last century).

Well, back to my friend’s new project. His plan is write a book and develop a seminar with a simple premise: to re-teach our neighbors that conservatism isn’t just a political movement, it is a way of life; and that if we re-adopt this way of life, we can lay the groundwork for taking back our government and society based on the political principles of American Conservatism. At his request, I look forward to mentoring him with this worthy project. If he succeeds, than so much of what we all set out to do in late 2008 will be set in motion.

Thanks to my family, and to everyone who I’ve had the pleasure of working with over these last 18 months, for making this a memorable holiday weekend.