Promoting Conservatism

Since I announced that I would run for a seat on the First Court of Appeals in the fall of 2007, I have been asked a lot about my views on legal and political issues. I provided answers on my campaign website, in responses to questionnaires, in public forums, during private conversations, and in postings on this website. Though I will continue to answer these questions over the next few months, I want to focus this post less on my views than on our current predicament, on those beliefs that most Republicans share, and on how both issues relate to two of the goals outlined in the proposed strategic plan posted at www.FutureoftheHCRP.com.

The primary point of agreement among today’s Republicans is that ours is the major “Conservative” party in this country. The harder question to answer is what “Conservative” means—and that question creates many of the fault lines within our party. To understand the Republican Party, and how to unite it, I believe you first have to understand these fault lines and the factions they create.

Arguably there are four major factions that form the Republican alliance: Traditional “Republicanism”; Burkian Conservatism; libertarianism; and Social Conservatism. Reagan, Jack Kemp, Bill Brock, and many others, worked hard in the late 1970s to bring these factions together to form the modern GOP, which crystallized during the 1980s and early ‘90s. When we’ve worked together, the party has grown and we’ve won elections. When we’ve divided along our fault lines and fought with each other, when we’ve demanded purity of thought or commitment to one faction or another, or when we’ve failed to promote the principles we share, we’ve lost elections. We lost elections in Texas and nationally over the last two election cycles, in part, because all three vices took control of our party.

This problem is acute in Harris County. Since the early 1990s we have won elections in spite of our continued civil war between Traditional Republicans and Social Conservatives, and their mutual antipathy toward libertarians. We won because the Democrats were so discredited that they left the playing field. We had the luxury to ignore our need to unite and grow the party, and to focus instead on building careers and power centers around the battling factions.

In the meantime, Burkian Conservatives like me, whose conservatism is based primarily on our study of history and philosophy, and who came of age politically embracing the teachings and initiatives of Buckley, Kirk, Goldwater, Reagan, Kemp, and Sowell (among others) whose intellectual roots trace back to at least the writings of Edmund Burke, have been left to watch this war absorb the energy of the GOP without an effective ability to stop it, or to re-focus the party's energy. To put it bluntly, the party drifted away from the ideas that united it, and, in doing so, failed to live up to the promise those ideas contained—the promise of creating solutions for all our communities that would lead to a great realignment of voting blocks away from the Democratic Party and to the GOP. This failure came home to roost here in Harris County in 2008, when the Democratic Party finally placed a team on the playing field, while we were still engaged in an intramural scrimmage.

The shame of this battle is that we all agree on far more than we disagree—that’s why we are Republicans. We are all Traditional Republicans to the extent that we want to preserve the institutions that have protected our liberties and our free-market/free trade economic system, while allowing for societal innovation. We are all libertarians to the extent that we believe in a limited role for government, and the economic principles of Hayek and Freidman. We are all social conservatives to the extent that we believe that we must maintain a proper balance between the isolation and chaos caused by promoting unbridled liberty and the tyranny created by regimented conformity to one specific set of customs and traditions, and to the extent we believe that the inalienable right to life includes the lives of both the child and the mother.

At the core of our strategic plan is the goal to elect Republicans; but to continue to elect Republicans in Harris County, in Texas, and nationally, we must re-unite this party around the principles we share, and then have the courage of our convictions to spread these principles to new voters in every community. In other words, we must re-embrace the ideas that first united us 30 years ago, and then step back onto the political playing field to engage our real opponent for the hearts and minds of our neighbors.

I am one Republican who is through with the old paradigm of allowing our civil war to absorb the time and energy of this party. I am committed to ending it and re-focusing our party on electing Republicans.

posted by Ed Hubbard 5-8-09