New Website Launched

In this first blog as the new site has been launched I want to address a question that I’ve been asked over and over again since last November: “Why are you doing this?” The short answer is: “Because I care deeply about the future of my party, the Republican Party.” My political principles were well-documented on my campaign website during last year’s campaign for the First Court of Appeals, and they form the basis for my proposed message of “Individual Empowerment” contained in the strategic plan. However, to explain why I care about the Republican Party, I want to share with you the basic beliefs and observations I hold, which led me to arrive at those basic political principles.

First, I believe that the story of America is exceptional. The people who voluntarily came and settled here during the 200-year period from the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s brought with them a commitment to the basic struggle to accept the gift of liberty, and to balance the exercise of that liberty with the admonition to love our neighbor. Because there was no state or elite class on this continent, these settlers were free to form self-governing neighborhoods as they pushed westward, in which they married and raised families, worked and produced wealth, and created churches, organizations, schools and local governments to protect and nourish these neighborhoods. When it came time to form colonial, state, and national governments, they limited the scope and responsibility of these governments in order to preserve the centrality of the family and the neighborhood to their lives. In other words, our founders committed themselves to live within a localized system of ordered liberty. This system of ordered liberty was the exceptional experiment to which Americans committed themselves.

Second, when, in the mid-1800s, the profound tragedy of slavery finally threatened to tear our country apart, those who were still committed to this experiment, and who believed that it must apply to all Americans, formed a new party, the Republican Party, to preserve and fight for the nation the settlers had created. Over the next century, the party would take the lead in every era to pass civil rights legislation and constitutional amendments to expand the experiment to include all men and women.

Third, when, starting in the 1930s, the Democratic Party became committed to imposing on America some form of social welfare state similar to those embraced in Europe, and our security was threatened by the rise of totalitarianism abroad, the Republican Party became the primary home for those who opposed the welfare state and the ideologies that fed totalitarianism, and who sought to preserve the experiment of ordered liberty to which our settlers committed themselves. A clear example of the differences we began to draw in the 1930s between the philosophy of the Democratic Party and the philosophy of the GOP, are two quotes from that period—the first from a prominent Democrat, and the second from a prominent Republican:

Democrat: Economic security was attained in the earlier days through the interdependence of members of families upon each other and of the families within a small community upon each other. The complexities of great communities and of organized industry make less real these simple means of security. Therefore, we are compelled to employ the active interest of the Nation as a whole through government in order to encourage a greater security for each individual who composes it.

Republican: It is all old, very, very old, the idea that the good of men arises from the direction of centralized executive power, whether it be exercised through bureaucracies, mild dictatorships or despotisms, monarchies or autocracies. For Liberty is the emancipation of men from power and servitude and the substitution of freedom for force of government. …Those who proclaim that in a Machine Age there is created an irreconcilable conflict in which liberty cannot survive should not forget the battles of liberty over the centuries,…. It is not because Liberty is unworkable, but because we have not worked it conscientiously or have forgotten its true meaning that we often get the notion of the irreconcilable conflict with the Machine Age.

As our opposition to the welfare state and totalitarianism continued over the decades, the base of the GOP eventually expanded to include social conservatives and libertarians who shared our opposition to these movements and our desire to preserve our experiment. Although our enlarged party made great strides over the last 30 years in this fight, we now find our experiment again threatened by the new national administration.

I am agitating the HCRP to adopt a new strategic plan because I believe that our history and our principles are important to the future of this county, and that the future of this county is important to the future of Texas and this nation. Harris County, and its surrounding metropolitan area, comprise the largest metropolitan area in this state and nation in which a majority of voters are still politically conservative. We must take this opportunity to show the residents of this county that the GOP’s principles are relevant to the issues that they face in their daily lives in this diverse community, so that they don’t turn for their security to the welfare state.

If we adopt this approach, Republicans will continue to elect our candidates in Harris County, while making the HCRP a model for the party nationally. If we don’t pursue this path, the voting and demographic trends that started in 2006 will consume us here and across this state. If the GOP is to regain the trust of the voters and revitalize the vision of our founders, we must not lose this county to our opponents.

This is why I care, and this is why I am agitating the HCRP to follow a new strategic path.

posted by Ed Hubbard 4-15-09