The answer is not one thing, it is multi-faceted. Taken together, these seven trends over the past 78 years have produced the current predicament for conservatism:
- It sided with Big Business and the Big End of Town instead of with market competition to break-up cartels and favour small and family businesses
- It didn’t take enough interest in the well-being of workers and their families
- It overlooked the importance of civil society in creating sustainable, self-reliant families and communities, and became too comfortable with Big Government and Big Bureaucracy
- It swallowed the mantra of neo-liberalism that economics is the only thing that matters, and allowed the Left to take over the humanities and cultural institutions
- It aligned itself with career politicians and forgot that the core idea of democracy is citizen self-government
- It was too slow to embrace the multi-ethnicity, multi-faith character of our country
- It accepted high levels of government debt, transferred responsibility for debt repayment to the next generation, and abandoned the prudent conservative practice of living within our means
- It ceased being pro-active in ordering society, and became reactive and defensive
Nelle's journey 