The Republican Party doesn’t need to steal Democrats’ language, let alone Democrats’ ideas. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, all the Republican leadership needs to do is click its collective heels together and start looking for answers much closer to home.
If Republican leaders really want to appeal to Hispanic voters, for example, they don’t need clever Spanish-language marketing or better slogans. Nor do they need to steal political positions from across the aisle. Instead, they could resurrect the only sensible comprehensive immigration reform bill not passed into law—a bill largely written by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. …
The conservative movement is a broad church, and its worshipers even include a few sympathetic foreigners. Republicans could certainly do worse than to consult their counterparts across the Atlantic. The British Conservative Party spent 12 years out of office after the 1997 elections that brought the Labour Party and Tony Blair to power. After two attempts to win by running well to the right of Blair, David Cameron led a group of Tory “modernizers” into power by, among other things, embracing “conservative” notions of conservation and budgetary austerity—and by deciding that the state should have no role in dictating private morality: Intolerance, one once told me, is “unconservative.” One Tory minister, Iain Duncan-Smith, spent his years in the political wilderness creating a think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, dedicated to the study of long-term poverty and welfare reform. He’s now in a position to put some of its proposals into practice.
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