It involves a rhetorical zeal and indiscipline in which virtually every reference to government is negative, disparaging, and denigrating. It is justified by an apocalyptic narrative of American life: We are fast approaching a point of no return at which we stand to lose our basic liberties and our national character. “We have a couple of years to turn this country around,” according to Texas senator Ted Cruz, “or we go off the cliff to oblivion.” Obamacare, added 2012 GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, is evidence of a “police state.” In the struggle to conserve our liberty, it is now or never.
.. This view is intensely felt — understandably, given the provocations of the last five years. It is, however, not only an incomplete understanding of the situation but a distortion of it, and an obstacle to achieving a properly conservative governing vision that will command the respect and win the support of a majority of the American people.
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Lincoln’s governing philosophy, however, ran even deeper than that, extending beyond that of the founders in a direction that prefigured some of the policy developments of 20th-century America. In what is known as his “Fragments on Government,” he wrote:
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves — in their separate, and individual capacities.
.. Many conservatives need to resist the temptation to “ideologize” the Constitution by imagining that their political theory is not just permitted under it, but dictated by it. It cannot be forgotten that the Constitution was instituted to replace the Articles of Confederation in order to allow for the exercise of broad powers in certain areas. How such powers are to be used is left to the winners of elections, who are entitled to promote their ideas of good government within the boundaries of the supreme law. If conservatives believe that some of these powers are being exercised in an undisciplined way, it is for a conservative party to make this case. The Constitution cannot do all the work that a party must do on its own. To think otherwise, and to hold that courts could enforce most conservative doctrines, amounts to legalistic thinking with a vengeance.
.. many conservatives fail to see the extent to which equal opportunity itself, a central principle of our national self-understanding, is becoming harder to achieve. It is a well-documented fact that, in recent years, economic mobility has stalled for many poorer Americans, resulting in persistent intergenerational inequality. This phenomenon is more complex than an income gap. It involves wide disparities in parental time and investment, in religious and community involvement, and in academic accomplishment. These are traceable to a number of factors, including the collapse of working-class families, the flight of blue-collar jobs, and the decay of neighborhoods that once offered stronger networks of mentorship outside the home.
.. A truly conservative response to the advance of a liberal or progressive ideology, however, would not involve the adoption of an opposite and equally narrow ideology. Just as the breakdown of family structures does not prove the illegitimacy of family life but instead points to the urgency of its revitalization, the alternative to government overreach is not the dogmatic disparagement of government but the restoration of government to its proper and honored place in American life.
.. Conservatives are more likely to be trusted to run the affairs of the nation if they show the public that they grasp the purposes of government, that they fully appreciate it is in desperate need of renovation, and that they know what needs to be done.