From the Wall Street Journal:
The World Needs a Strong GOP
Republicans can show the way with careful fiscal conservatism at home and quiet idealism abroad.By DAVID DAVIS
It is always hazardous for outsiders to offer opinions on a foreign country’s political landscape, and as a lifetime admirer of America and its values I have always been cautious in doing so. Nevertheless, the world today is as volatile and dangerous as it has been for a long time, and it needs a strong and coherent Republican Party leading American opinion and policy. With the streets of the Arab world in flames, an ever more ascendant and ambitious China, and a global financial crisis that has not been well managed, let alone resolved, the rest of the world needs America to be a confident champion of Western values.
As a political movement, the various strands of Republican opinion have a force and vigor rarely witnessed elsewhere in the Western world. What is more, each strand brings its own wisdom and insight to the political debate.
Take, for example, the tea party movement. European liberals deride it as unsophisticated and simplistic. Yet we should remember that they said much the same of Ronald Reagan when he was alive, even as they now recognize him as the great, world-class statesman that he was. Discovering the right answer after the event is a luxury often exercised by the political left, but not one that we can afford now.
So the tea party brings vigor, but it also reflects a skepticism about big government that is a wisdom of our times. In the aftermath of a historically unprecedented bank rescue and economic stimulus, and in the absence of a serious intellectual answer to the banking crisis, who is to say that they are entirely wrong?
Similarly, it is fashionable to dismiss the neoconservatives for their aggressive foreign policy. I am uncomfortable with some of the incompetences of Western interventions, but the current explosion of unrest across the Arab world adds some validity to their claim that democracy is a universal human value wanted by everybody, irrespective of their culture, religion and history.
Even more unfashionable with the political left are the social conservatives in Republican ranks. It may be that the problems facing the U.S. economy will ensure that social issues take a back seat to candidates’ fiscal policies, but to America’s 60 million evangelical Christians social issues still matter. Those candidates seeking the Republican nomination in 2012 who choose to ignore social-issues voters will do so at their peril.
It would be naive to claim that the Republican Party, with its 47 senators, 241 representatives and millions of voters, can be neatly divided into a small number of distinct factions. It is potentially problematic for the Republicans, however, that there are groups within the GOP which hold widely different views not only about the party’s policy priorities, but also about what those policies should be.
For instance, there is a sharp divide within the GOP on federal spending. A recent Pew survey showed that Republicans identifying themselves as tea party supporters would broadly welcome cuts in spending on education, social-security and environmental programs, while non-tea party Republicans were more supportive of increased spending in these areas.
