ALL THEY NEED IS LOVE
I was just reading The Right Nation, a book about the Republicans and the Right in America, and something occurred to me. Republicans have the upper hand in the war of ideas. This is masked by institutional inertia-- universities and a lot of Big Media outlets lean far to the left of the mainstream-- and by the supercilious myopia of much of the knowledge class, but is nevertheless reflected in the country's long-term drift to the right. A politician as intelligent as Bill Clinton, for example, has imbibed conservative ideas, not only about the market but about social responsibility and family (despite his personal life.) Free-market economics is theoretically and practically superior to communism. Religion refuses to see itself as refuted, and is now staging a comeback, partly because it can address and understand central questions relevant to the soul in a way that liberalism and secular humanism cannot. And in foreign policy, the main event of the last half of the 20th century was the fall of communism, a spectacular vindication of a worldview that haled from the right and was personified in Reagan.

Yet conservatism tends to be tainted by resentment. Liberals stereotype this as hatred: conservatives (according to them) hate blacks, hate gays, hate atheists, hate foreigners, hate Arabs, and of course hate liberals. Why should conservatism be identified with resentment? The free market should be innocent of resentment, except perhaps against regulatory red tape. And Christianity, more than any other creed in history, is centered around and founded on love, exhorting love without any limits-- "Love your enemies and pray for them that despitefully use you." Yet for no good reason this brew of resentment and paranoia continues to run in the veins of the Right (though not in Bush, as far as I can tell).

Thus, a message to conservatives: The war of ideas is mostly won. All you need is love. Love should be a habit, second nature, a litmus test for every policy: can this be justified in terms of universal love? That's what it takes to really be the good guys.