Dan Henniger makes an important point in his Wonderland column in the WSJ: Republicans should purposefully cultivate the private sector that the Democrat left spurns or treats as a collective ATM. As Henniger points out, there’s ample language to appeal to the 75% of the economy that rightfully feels itself threatened.
Someone said, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” Why are the Republicans wasting it?
If the Democrats are willing to bet the entire U.S. economy on a 1931 theory known as the Keynesian multiplier, surely Republicans can excavate and relearn the core idea handed down to them by Ronald Reagan. That idea was known as economic growth.
Freed to choose between these two competing ideas, I’m guessing many voters would go for growth. All that’s needed is just one Republican who can explain this idea halfway as well as Ronald Reagan.
Arguably at no time in their lives have more Americans been this sharply focused on the economy. They think and talk about nothing else. The Republicans have been handed on a tarnished silver platter the chance to offer the American people an alternative vision of how their economy works — and grows.
They should take political ownership of the 75% of the U.S. economy that the Democrats have abandoned — the private economy.
Over the past four decades and the decline of private-sector industrial unions, professional Democrats — politicians, intellectuals like Robert & Robert, campaign professionals, unions and satellite groups — have severed their emotional and intellectual connection with private production.
Today, frontline Democrats see the private sector as doing two things: It produces tax revenue for $3.9 trillion federal budgets, and it shafts workers. The private sector in the Democratic worldview is necessary but nasty. Their leadership gives the impression of not having the simplest understanding of how an employer’s life unfolds day to day.
Democrats have indeed staked their future on John Maynard Keynes and a diminished economic vision – as in ‘small is beautiful’. But that’s hardly music to the average American’s ears. Deep down, most Americans believe in growth, in bigger and better production. We’re still a nation of mechanics, tinkerers, inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs. We like to make things, grow things, build things. Big things.
There’s nothing abstract about the way we talk with these folks – after all, we’re these folks. There’s emotion in the things we make, grow and build.
It’s primal. And it’s positive. Let’s use it.
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