At the Center for Individual Freedom, I blogged last week about the need for tempers on the right to cool and for the broader right-leaning coalition to find common cause again, perhaps even with a summit for conservative peace. Additionally, CFIF just published a column of mine laying out a strategy for the next budget-related fight — the upcoming one about the debt ceiling — that could be used not only to win a political and policy battle with the Left but also could unite the right in a strategy all could accept. In broad strokes:

The key goals are threefold. First, re-establish, after abandoning it in October, the principle that the debt ceiling should never be raised without at least some new, substantive limit on government. Second, re-establish in the public mind the idea that conservatives/Republicans are fighting not just for political advantage but instead for sensible, achievable, thoughtful savings for taxpayers. Third, create a situation where the Democrats/liberals, not those on the right, feel the political heat.
The key to achieving these three goals is to identify proposed savings that are easy to explain and understand, that are eminently reasonable without any hint of Scrooge-like tendencies, and that particularly highlight the idiocy of big government.

Finally, as I will argue here at NRO in an upcoming column, there are topics that Speaker John Boehner and others seem determined to raise next year that can only result in further, damaging, fissures on the right, and Boehner should reconsider (if indeed he is planning what he seems to be planning).

The key takeaway from all this is that 2014 could be a make-or-break year for the future of conservative governance, and that it behooves all strains within the broad-right coalition to find ways to work with each other, and against the Left, rather than fighting each other while letting the left off the hook. This isn’t “kumbaya” for the sake of kumbaya; it’s practical coalition politics for the sake of the country. It might be counterintuitive, but right now the best way to achieve big goals (in not just the long term but the, uh, medium term, not to mention the mid-term elections) is probably to set small goals in the short-term — goals with which everybody on the right can agree, goals which are politically achievable, and goals which actually do move the ball, even if only slowly, very much in the right (and correct) direction.