// Reclaim Conservatism

John Hawkins examines a National Review piece by James Gimpel. Here is a bit of the flavor of Gimpel’s work:
A campaign doesn’t move toward them [centrist or moderate voters], but instead attempts to inspire them to come in the candidate’s direction. The incoherent center moves to the left or to the right, inspired by the [...]

A look back at the election:
All of the landslide majority did not vote against the conservative philosophy; they voted against a false image our Liberal opponents successfully mounted. Indeed it was a double false image. Not only did they portray us as advancing a kind of radical departure from the status quo, but they took [...]

I’ve started a discussion thread in the forum on this topic.
Just a simple question to open the discussion: What are the core conservative values?
Remember, we are talking about values here, not policies. For example - Fiscal Responsibility is a value, curbing earmarks is a policy. Let’s limit the discussion to the values.
Have at it.

Sphere: Related [...]

In order to reclaim conservatism it is important, I believe, that a certain hierarchy is observed: Principles, Policies, and then People.
One of the reasons that the Republican party (I hate the concept of “brand”) has fallen into such disarray is due to the mis-ordering of those three “Ps”. For this discussion let’s look at these [...]

I secured the domain and started this site in May of this year inspired by a post by Doug Ross. Examining the results of last night’s election leads me to believe that the idea behind Reclaim Conservatism is going to be needed more than ever.
Of course defining true conservatism can be as difficult as determining [...]

… You’ll fall for anything.  And so it goes in the political arena today with the liberal end of the spectrum pontificating with pie-in-the-sky ideals on poverty, abortion, transfers of wealth, taxing only the rich and other “inartful” dodges of truth!  The wife of the presumptive Democrat nominee Michelle Obama asks today’s college students to [...]

In 1962 and 63, my awareness of politics went overnight from “yawn” to “what the hell does congress think they are doing.  The overnight cause was a single reading in one fell swoop of Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, a fairly short book given to me by a High School buddy along with a [...]

Ed Morrissey wrote Time to return to the first principles of conservatism? several days ago. He makes a great point about the basics of conservatism.
What is the first principle of conservatism? Limited government. Our founders understood this, which is why they tightly constrained the jurisdiction of the federal government in the Constitution. Henry David Thoreau [...]

John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  Empty suits, empty heads.  Each has policies that are incompatable either with a free market or with a constitutional democracy, certainly this one. Yet, each has adherents that all but deify their choice for president, and many complain that Obama has indeed been deified into the “Obamessiah.”  
And [...]

This is about Democrats, and I’m not necessarily a Republican since the party left me and hundreds of thousands of other conservatives some time ago. In 1994 we conservatives elected, by dint of hard work, a new congress based on the principles explained in the Contract with America only to watch the elected Republicans gradually morph [...]