For much of the 20th century, the entrepreneur has been a core Republican constituency. Arguments based on small business have been central to our messaging. And interest groups like the NFIB have been among our most loyal activists, while the Chamber of Commerce has kissed up to anyone in charge.
This special report will argue that the entrepreneurial idea has gone mainstream, supported by political leaders on the left as well as on the right, championed by powerful pressure groups, reinforced by a growing infrastructure of universities and venture capitalists and embodied by wildly popular business heroes such as Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson and India’s software kings. The report will also contend that entrepreneurialism needs to be rethought: in almost all instances it involves not creative destruction but creative creation.
It is absolutely true that in many important ways, the left embraces the rhetoric of entrepreneurialism. And many significant figures of modern business are on the left. I think that it is fair to say that the left has reacted in many ways to the fall of the Soviet Union by reorienting thier ideology.
In Europe, they speak of "unreconstructed parties of the right" like the French Socialist party and reconstructed ones, like the British Labour Party under Tony Blair. (and to a certain extent Gordon Brown, although his manifest failures and those of timing will never give us a clear glimpse into his thinking)
It seems to me that only recently has there been a counter-manuever on the right that responds politically, rhetorically, and strategically to the adjustment on the left. We see these in the quite serious Canadian Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, somewhat less serious British ToryDavid Cameron, and, somewhat differently, the Swedish Moderat (New Modertna, as their campaign literature called them) Fredrik Reinfeldt.
In many ways, we have not made that adjustment on the right in the United States. In our seemingly never-ending attempt to return to Reagan, we have forgotten that the left has done something, and it requires a response on our part. This is not necessarily a move to the right or to the center, but a reframing of the debate. The left has done this by making, at least rhetorically, entrepreneurialism compatible with certain kinds of redistribution.
What do we need to do on the right that both stops this movement on the builds our next coalition?