My friend Shikha Dalmia has an excellent column in Forbes today regarding a way forward for the Republican party. In short, she argues that it can embrace liberty or it can continue its embrace of Bush-era conservatism. But it can’t do both; the latter is increasingly at odds with the former.
Shikha may be suffering from the Pundit’s Fallacy, defined as the belief that the way to political riches is for a politician or party to be “just like me.” I have no particular expertise at executing triple bank-shots on the electoral pool table, so I will not offer an opinion about whether her political road map is worthy or not. That said, I would much rather see the GOP go in this direction than continue down the road it’s on.
On a related note, my colleague Will Wilkinson has an insightful new essay up discussing the tension within conservative ranks between classic individualism and collectivist conservatism. Fellow Cornerites will probably find much to both agree with and disagree with in these two essays, but regardless, they are a cut above the usual fare.