By Mark Rhoads -
Random people on the Left who always say they want to "help" the Republican Party stay "relevant" to more voters have come up with a new twist on their tiresome old theme of urging Republicans to reject conservative principles in order to win over new blocs of voters. We have seen the Left peddle this same snake oll many times before.
This time the twist goes like this. A vice president of Pew Research tells liberal Republican members of the Ripon Society that the GOP can never win "non-white" voters unless it "tones down" anti-government rhetoric because new voters embrace the socialism (my word) of the Democratic Party. The implicit premise of the Pew VP is that principles of individual liberty and limited constitutional government can have no appeal to "non-white" voters who will emerge as a majority of the country in the future. The idiotic racist premise of this conclusion is that "non-white" voters will always choose dependence on government over individual freedom if given the choice.
The lefties of course choose to ignore history and always make the claim that conservatives are on the "wrong side" i.e. the moral side of history. They ignore that fact that a moral movement to liberate non-white Americans from the yoke of slavery was the core of the abolitionist movement when the GOP started in 1854.
The new coalition of Whigs, abolitionists, and Democrats opposed to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was held together by the moral passion of the abolitionists who argued that no person has the right to spend another person's life and that is why slavery was morally wrong.
Lincoln argues that Jefferson hae promised no slavery west of he Mississippi River when he signed the Northwest Ordnance of 1787. Stephen A. Douglas was leader of the racist Democrats who argued for the repeal of the "Missouri Restriction" as southern slavers called it and Douglas claimed that new states should have "popular sovereignty" to call for votes in new territories and states on the question of expanding slavery to new areas.
Lincoln was mostly retired from Whig politics in 1854 after the death of his hero and mentor Henry Clay who was leader of the Whigs. But the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise in 1854 motivated Lincoln to come out of retirement to expose the evil that Douglas wanted to do to the country.
The abolitionist principle that no person has the right to spend another person's life was consistent with the principles of liberty of the founders even though slavery continued after 1776. Jefferson, Adams, Madison and other founders admired the writing of the English philosopher John Locke who wrote that every human had a basic God-given right to life, liberty, and property.
By "property," Locke did not mean land or buildings or real estate and he certainly did not mean slaves as the southern sophists tried to distort the term. Locke used "property" to mean anything that was the fruit of the labor of a human being and he argued that only the individual and not anyone else has the moral right to decidde how the fruits of their labor should be spent. Jefferson changed the well-known phrase from "life, liberty, and property" to the new phrase of inalienable rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" but there is no doubt he borrowed the idea from John Locke.
If the future purpose of the "Republican" party is merely to fill public offices with candidates who stand for no principles, then the advice of Pew is sensible because principles do not matter to people who only want to hold office for the mere sake of holding office. But people who love individual freedom and liberty and limited constitutional government have a continuing lifetime obligation to push those principles in the public life of the nation.
They should also reject the nonsense that such principles cannot appeal to young people and new non-white voters because freedom has universal appeal that transcends narrow interests.
