> Most conservatives see government as a ministerial device needed to perform a few functions that a free society must see to in order to maintain the order and security necessary for society to flourish. I have never thought “government has a responsibility to help those who can’t help themselves”; I have thought that I have a responsibility to help those who can’t help themselves.
Exactly.
Andrew McCarthy writing on National Review:
> Here is the blunt explanation: We have lost a third of the country and, as if that weren’t bad enough, Republicans act as if it were two-thirds.
> The lost third cannot be recovered overnight. For now, it is gone. You cannot cede the campus and the culture to the progressive, post-American Left for two generations and expect a different outcome. So even if Obama is the second coming of Jimmy Carter — and he has actually been much more effective, and therefore much worse — it is unreasonable to expect a Reagan-style landslide, and would be even if we had Reagan. The people coming of age in our country today have been reared very differently from those who were just beginning to take the wheel in the early 1980s. They have marinated in an unapologetically progressive system that prizes group discipline and narrative over free will and critical thought.
I want to say that Mr. McCarthy is just being pessimistic, but part of me thinks he is probably right. Hopefully, in a couple of months, it will turn out that he is wrong.