Is the GOP Bereft of Ideas?
By
Prof. Emmanuel Konde
It has been noted that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The Republican Party (GOP), at onetime the American political party of ideas, no longer has any new ideas to offer. Its longevity in power—having ruled for 20 years during the last 28 years (1981-2009)—has rendered the GOP decrepit of ideas. Wallowing in abject confusion, the national Republican Party has since the ascension of Barack Obama to the presidency determined to launch negative criticism after negative criticism against nearly every program the president has proposed with the avowed aim of distorting, obstructing, and obfuscating.
All in all, the GOP seems bereft of novel ideas. Consequently, it has become the party of negativity, sinking to the level of distortionists, obstructionists, and obfuscationists. Beyond tax-cuts, the only thing it has to offer the country in this moment of crisis is negative criticism. If this is the political strategy of the Republican Party, it should be made abundantly clear that it will lead them to nowhere.
Indeed, the GOP should learn from English anthropologist A.R. Radcliff-Brown, who had postulated in Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1965) that “purely negative criticism does not advance a science. The only satisfactory way of getting rid of an unsatisfactory hypothesis is to find a better one.” This applies to the science of politics driven by ideas. Yes, America is anxiously waiting for some new ideas from the Republican Party, ideas that would counter those of the ruling Democratic Party.
Nearly three decades ago I was a student at a Midwestern college where the conservative ideas that catapulted Ronald Reagan to the presidency were crafted. That college is Hillsdale College, and the program responsible for the making of two successive Republican administrations was fashioned at the Center for Constructive Alternatives (CAA). Among the leading Conservative minds that frequently came to CAA was the venerable late William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008), founder of the conservative weekly National Review. Buckley was a veritable catalyst, a man of ideas and builder of the system of thought that contributed to the actualization of the presidencies of Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) and George H.W. Bush (1989-1994).
Unfortunately for the GOP, the mastermind of the driving ideas of late twentieth-century political conservatism, William F. Buckley, Jr., died on February 27, 2008. Buckley left a gaping hole in the Republican Party. Mentally weakened by their overly consumption of power, there seems to be none among the existing conservative minds capable of building a system of thought as powerful as Buckley’s to sustain the apparently flustered and flailing GOP.
As an eye-witness to, and student-participant of, the making of the glory days of the GOP, I am deeply disturbed by the current disorientation of the conservative movement. In politics as in real life, one cannot eat her cake and expect to still have it. Rather than expend ineffectual negative criticism against the Obama agenda for America, conservative thinkers should lick their wounds, go back to the drawing board and, like the late Buckley did, begin afresh the process of building a new system that would sustain political conservatism in the 21st century.
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"The problem of power is how to get men of power to live for the public rather than off the public." Robert F. Kennedy
