When you visit the Republican Party website (https://www.gop.com/), try to find a listing of the party’s platform… Go ahead, try… Eventually, if you dig around deep enough, you can find on their site an About Our Party page, where you will see a short paragraph with general values listed once.

“Our platform is centered on stimulating economic growth for all Americans, protecting constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms, ensuring the integrity of our elections, and maintaining our national security.”

GOP Party – About Our Party

However, based on the last election, the platform seems to have a single plank, “Stop Liberals!”. How often did you hear a candidate say any of the above values in any of their speeches? In my opinion, the results of this last election show that “Stop Liberals!” is not working. How many conservatives would have won the seats they lost if they had embraced conservative values?

Instead of going directly at liberals with a “Stop Liberals!” platform, how much more could be done if we conservatives instead strive to change hearts and minds? In his book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People“, Stephen Covey famously wrote:

“Seek first to understand, then to be understood”

Liberals are generally patriots too. That is a hard pill for many conservatives to swallow. But I strongly feel that most of them love this country, and want to make life better for everyone. Seemingly, that should be common ground on which we can open reasonable conversations (instead of screaming matches). Why then do we have such deep divides that lead to us talking past each other? Why can’t we discuss good ideas without falling into name calling?

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