I think this reading should be made compulsory to all Right Wing Parties (especially the BJP)
I don't know Vajpayeeji ever read it but the ideas expressed resemble a lot to his tenure as of course it does to Reagan. Both my personal favourites!
As a matter of co-incidence, both Reagan's and Vajpayee's tenure changed the fortunes of the two nations. It is when the right wing parties start drifting too much from centre and start giving precedence to tradition over logic, they become unhealthy for democracy. Sadly post Reagan, the Republicans under Bush and now Palin have forgotten the basic principles of rationality, logic and debate. Needless to say, post Vajpayee BJP is finding itself in a similar (if not more 'extreme') state. Both these parties just need to see these two towering figures, and the rest would be history.
PS: I don't agree completely with the author and I would be slightly more conservative on social issues but all the assumptions of his political and philosophical theory look completely at the 'right' place.
A must read for for all of us, no matter which side of the centre we stand.
Just to quote few paragraphs
"I have been much concerned that so many people today with Conservative instincts feel compelled to apologize for them. Or if not to apologize directly, to qualify their commitment in a way that amounts to breast-beating. “Republican candidates,” Vice President Nixon has said, “should be economic conservatives, but conservatives with a heart.” President Eisenhower announced during his first term, “I am a conservative when it comes to economic problems but liberal when it comes to human problems.” Still other Republican leaders have insisted on calling themselves “progressive” Conservatives.1 These formulations are tantamount to an admission that Conservatism is a narrow, mechanistic economic theory that may work very well as a bookkeeper’s guide, but cannot be relied upon as a comprehensive political philosophy.
The same judgement, though in the form of an attack rather than an admission, is advanced by the radical camp. “We liberals,” they say, “are interested in people. Our concern is with human beings, while you Conservatives are preoccupied with the preservation of economic privilege and status.” Take them a step further and the Liberals will turn the accusations into a class argument: it is the little people that concern us, not the “malefactors of great wealth.”
Such statements, from friend and foe alike, do great injustice to the Conservative point of view. Conservatism is not an economic theory, though it has economic implications. The shoe is precisely on the other foot: it is Socialism that subordinates all other considerations to man’s material well-being. It is Conservatism that puts material things in their proper place—that has a structured view of the human being and of human society, in which economics plays only a subsidiary role."
"Surely the first obligation of a political thinker is to understand the nature of man. The Conservative does not claim special powers of perception on this point, but he does claim a familiarity with the accumulated wisdom and experience of history, and he is not too proud to learn from the great minds of the past.
The first thing he has learned about man is that each member of the species is a unique creature. Man’s most sacred possession is his individual soul—which has an immortal side, but also a mortal one. The mortal side establishes his absolute differentness from every other human being. Only a philosophy that takes into account the essential differences between men, and, accordingly, makes provision for developing the different potentialities of each man can claim to be in accord with Nature. We have heard much in our time about “the common man.” It is a concept that pays little attention to the history of a nation that grew great through the initiative and ambition of uncommon men. The Conservative knows that to regard man as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery."
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