By Michael Barone,Townhall.com
GOP should run against centralized government power
Move to the center. That’s the advice Republicans are getting from quarters friendly and otherwise. It seems to make a certain amount of sense. If opinion is arrayed along a single-dimension,left-to-right spectrum and clustered in the middle in a bell-curve pattern,then a party on the right needs only to move a few steps toward the center or just beyond to convert itself from minority to majority status.
But the world is a lot more complicated than that. Opinion is not arrayed on a single dimension,but flies all over the place in two or three or even four dimensions (which is to say it changes over time). New issues crop up,and old issues appear in a different light. Success in politics often comes not from readjusting one’s stand to conform with current opinion,but in redefining what is at stake and reframing issues so that you have majorities on your side.
So I think Republicans today should be less interested in moving toward the center and more interested in running against the center. Here I mean a different “center”—not a midpoint on an opinion spectrum,but rather the centralized government institutions being created and strengthened every day. This is a center that is taking over functions fulfilled in a decentralized way by private individuals,firms and markets.