I consider myself conservative. But I don’t identify with the Republican party at all. This confuses people - how can I claim to be a conservative and not like George W. Bush?

I think Andrew Sullivan (with whom I don’t always agree) summed it up nicely:

Government needs to be kept in its place, taxes should be low and budgets balanced, individuals should be able to pursue their dreams as free of government control as possible, families do matter and need to be free from government interference, free markets and enterprise are the only guarantees of prosperity, moral choices - and their consequences - should be faced by the individual responsibly, and we have to be strong in our defense and prudent in foreign policy.

I agree with this. Today’s Republican party, however, does not.

Addendum: This is a fairly simplistic explanation, but it gets the point across. My motivating goal is to push power down, as close to individuals and as far from centralized authority as possible. This allows the greatest freedom, encourages the most innovation (and positive social good), and limits the impact of bad decisions (obviously bad decisions still have impacts - some worse than others, but they are limited to a smaller number of people).

The key words are “as possible,” of course. There are many policy decisions that need to made at a higher level - transportation planning and investment, for example - but we need to be especially careful about these decisions because their effects are widespread.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 6th, 2008 at 7:42 am and is filed under Blog, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can trackback from your own site.