As Republicans continue to think through their (and America’s) path toward renewal, they run a very great risk of focusing on what it is they oppose about the path toward national exhaustion laid out by the Democrats in recent years, and so neglecting to offer the public a clear picture of the Right’s own vision of America. Among the greatest risks is that Republicans, in responding to President Obama’s equation of common efforts with government efforts (an equation that is in fact an assertion of an extremely radical individualism, as it sees all citizens as unconnected to one another except through politics), will offer in contrast purely a defense of individual initiative rather than a vision of society, and so will answer an error with an error. The rhetoric of last year’s campaign season contained an awful lot of this (as I worried about here) with very few exceptions—like this fantastic speech by Paul Ryan toward the end of the campaign—and it has been common since as well.

That’s why this speech delivered Monday by Utah senator Mike Lee at the Heritage Foundation was so important, welcome, and refreshing. Without picking fights or being too aggressive about it, Lee corrected the excessive individualism of some of his colleagues, and offered a sense of how conservatives should show the public what they are for. And what he didn’t emphasize—not only the Right’s version of radical individualism but the frequently oversimplified theme of dependency—was as important as what he did.