Quotes

Quotes

"The Republicans’ abandonment of the city is good neither for their party nor for urban America. The GOP clearly needs a heftier percentage of the urban vote, but winning it by means of fiscal pandering or redistribution isn’t the way to go—partly because such a strategy would cost rural and suburban votes and partly because it would be wrong. A better approach is to offer the good ideas that cities desperately need. Republicans have plenty." — Edward L. Glaeser

“What I do with my garbage, my stereo, my dog, or my arsenal of weapons, has an immediate impact on the life, liberty, and happiness of my neighbors. Urban life demands a much more sophisticated understanding of personal liberty than modern Republicans at the national level seem willing to tolerate. Old world, traditional conservatism is extremely well-suited for urban life, but the southern-fried Jeffersonian model wreaks havoc on the city. Unfortunately, the style of conservatism that our cities so desperately need has no political sponsor in our current environment.Republicans have retreated into a parallel reality, an insular worldview one can only maintain with very light, carefully mediated contact with the outside world. That kind of limited horizon is almost impossible to sustain in downtown Seattle or Chicago or even Houston.." — Chris Ladd, founder of BuildingABetterGop

“American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair." — Jack Kemp

"Economic growth doesn't mean anything if it leaves people out." — Jack Kemp

"When people lack jobs, opportunity, and ownership of property they have little or no stake in their communities." —Jack Kemp

"After a week of election postmortems, one thing is clear: Mitt Romney’s failure to understand America’s changing demographics led to his undoing. But there was another killer: Geography. Deep blue cities and their inner suburbs came out for Barack Obama, pulling the president through in battleground states like Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, and Florida. And they put him so far ahead in places like Wisconsin, Nevada, and Pennsylvania that Romney never really had a chance (not to mention his home base of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which went 78 percent for the president).” —Lydia DePillis

"Conservatives will have to explain how and why they can do a better job of delivering high-quality public services more efficiently. They need to demonstrate that they can successfully tackle quality-of-life issues like traffic congestion that are in many regions vitally important economic issues as well. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s push to reform collective bargaining in his state is a good example of the kind of policy conservatives need to champion. Yet this effort has to be connected to a broader narrative about how to make America’s communities thrive. Until that happens, urban areas will continue to sink the GOP." —Reihan Salam

"Too easily do conservatives swallow the lie that sacrificing urban America means merely giving up a few hundred square miles of traffic, concrete, crime rates, and failed marriages. On the contrary, it means orphaning millions of human beings to the sway of whatever political philosophy has the upperhand in the public square.To reach the nation, conservatives must reach the city. Reaching the city begins with imagination and passion for restoring urban community rather than passive surrender to the failed policies currently governing it." — Caroline Forsythe

One-party rule is repressive in an American metropolis (but to a much much lesser degree) just as surely as it is repressive in dictatorial regimes. With that kind of entrenched power, there is no accountability. There could be accountability if the voters would occasionally vote Republican to purge some corrupt Democrats from the halls of power, but they’ve been indoctrinated to believe that the Republicans in their own city are more evil than the self-serving Democrats who’ve been helping themselves to the spoils of the city for scores of years. Somehow, they need the blinders removed."  —Daniel Jack Williamson 

"Given such consistent records of lackluster leadership, it becomes a wonder of modern marketing that the Democratic Party has managed to brand itself as a party of responsible stewardship for the Black community. It’s an even more amazing failure of modern marketing that the Republicans haven’t wiped the failed urban Democratic brand off the map by shining a massive spotlight on their history of dismal leadership, while offering up attractive, systematic alternatives with proven track records. The opportunities to compete and win back the African American community are very real. Dissatisfaction with the status quo is palpable. Our values—access to on the job training, expanding options for quality education, and eliminating incentive structures that reinforce intergenerational poverty—equip us with the intellectual framework we need to be able to institute effective long term change." —Andrew Simon, editor-in-chief of HipHopRepublican.com

Conservatives and Minority Outreach

 "Indeed, race matters; however, two things happen when some conservatives propagate the wrongheaded, politically correct idea that race is obsolete. First, they make the road clear for liberal sophists to persuade people that race matters in all the places where it does not, and second, conservatives lose the ability to effectively challenge liberals on the caustic effects of their policies on minority communities. The message conservatives need to be advancing is that race matters vis-à-vis specific issues. By championing the fallacy of colorblindness, the conservative's authority to discuss race in the public sphere is inadvertently ceded to liberals". ― Chidike Okeem

"Rather than engaging liberals in the kind of legitimate arguments that need to be made regarding race, conservatives decided to shut race down as a legitimate topic by championing the absurdity of colorblindness. Certainly, this didn't close the issue of race, but merely left race as an issue that only liberals had the authority to speak (read: lie) about.The same argument applies to the notion of multiculturalism. Rather than using multiculturalism in a constructive sense and harshly critiquing it where it is destructive, conservatives prefer to rip the issue apart merely because liberals have successfully advanced one particular brand of the concept and used it effectively to meet their malevolent goals." ― Chidike Okeem