The job of conservatism, and to the extent that it is a conservative party then also the job of the Republican Party, is to lay out its vision before voters in an attractive and serious way, to show them how it builds on America’s strengths to address America’s weaknesses, how it enables human thriving, how it could be applied to the particular problems we face today in ways that would help solve those problems, and why it is good for each and all of us Americans. That means we need to speak to a coherent and appealing understanding of American life today, and that we need to translate our ideas into very concrete policy particulars that would advance them.
I would like to turn readers to an excellent piece Levin wrote in September as well:
But I think the argument we’re actually having—or rather the disagreement that actually underlies our politics just now—is really about the deeper question of the structure of American life. The Left’s description of its own worldview (that when we do things together, that’s called government) reveals an astonishingly thin notion of American society, which understands that society as consisting of only individuals and the government, and which neither discerns nor desires much of consequence in the space between the two. But most of life, and especially American life, is lived precisely in the space between those two—that space where the family, civil society, and the private economy thrive, and in turn allow us to thrive.