How The GOP Can Offer America A Vision To Vote For

I left my foxholes in the House and Senate almost 15 years ago. And, while continuing to work in D.C. supporting conservative members of Congress and an America-first conservative agenda, my perspective is now clearer as I look at policy debates inside the Capitol from across the street.

Sadly, looking from the outside in, it seems the competition inside the Capitol is increasingly between socialist Democrats and socialist Republicans. Any policy deemed bipartisan inevitably spends more money to create delusional government “solutions.” The Republicans who continue to fall for this insanity consider themselves to be enlightened moderates — much more constructive and compassionate than the uncivilized, rebellious conservatives. These “moderates” are regularly celebrated by the media.

This foxhole mentality eventually overtakes practically every Republican who stays in Congress too long. They lose sight of their original campaign promises and follow the media, the polls, and Republican leadership into box canyons where the only way out is left. Our so-called leadership become administrators who think their job is to make the trains run on time, forgetting their real job is to get the trains to run in the right direction. Rank-and-file Republicans are left with no leadership or vision of what they want America to become.

The current spectacle of political debates is reminiscent of my years as a strategic planning consultant for businesses, hospitals, universities, and school systems. It was difficult to get management and employees to refocus from short-term activities to long-term outcomes: the vision of what they wanted the organization to eventually look like.

I often used an exercise with puzzles in our planning meetings to help change their perspective. Participants were organized into groups of four sitting around small tables and given bags full of puzzle pieces, but no box tops with the pictures of finished puzzles. The groups would quickly begin to shuffle the pieces around on their tables and argue about where pieces should go, but few ever made much progress assembling their puzzles.

Everything changed when I handed out the box tops. There was immediate unity of purpose and division of labor. One participant would look for outside pieces to frame the picture while others collected pieces for the different sections of the puzzle. All the pieces found their places, and the puzzles were quickly finished.

The lesson is clear: Politicians need to have a picture of the finished puzzle so they will know where to put the pieces that make up coherent policies.

Republicans and Democrats have very different, mutually exclusive box tops for America — at least in theory when you listen to their campaign promises. The Democrats are mostly unified in their vision of an America where most services are provided or regulated by a national government. They will deny this description, but I challenge you to find any policies supported by Democrats that don’t fit this box top.

Republicans are less united but purport to want an America where the powers of our national government are extremely limited by a constitution that is a binding contract between the states, and this national government has very little involvement in the individual lives of people. This America provides for our national defense, justice for all, and the overall good of the country while protecting the powers of the states to regulate essential public services. All other rights are left to the people.

The Republican vision has been dimmed by years of compromise with the Democrat vision. Few Republicans even retain a dim view of an America guided by republican principles — principles derived from the concept of a decentralized constitutional republic rather than an all-powerful national government. Recently, when a group of centrist Republicans joined Democrats to extend Obamacare subsidies to insurance companies for another three years, I was reminded that few Republicans are even aware they are helping Democrats finish their puzzle for America. In this case, a government-run health care system.

There is still time for Republicans and the American people to recapture a unified vision where liberty, opportunity, prosperity, and civility thrive. This unified American vision will require a consensus among the people regarding the conceptual framework that consistently guides the development of policies to restore our constitutional foundation. A consensus among voters about the framework for good policy will create a political environment where good policies prevail. Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winner in Economics, put it this way:

I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.

This will be difficult but not impossible. I have developed a series of brief and, hopefully, simple articles to describe the sections of the puzzle that will match the real American box top and foster a public consensus to guide good policy. I’m grateful to The Federalist for agreeing to publish these articles.

Read the first article: “You Can’t Have A Free Country When The Government Makes Choices For You.”