So - a couple days ago, I asked, “is the core principle of the right half of the blogosphere anti-Moonbattery? Is that enough?”

The question stems from a nagging worry that conservatism, from the pajama-clad bloggers to lawmakers to the thinkers and writers, is sliding into the lazy habit of spending much of our energy beating up the foolishness of the Kossacks, Deaniacs, and Moonbats. Yes, it’s fun, but it’s the mental equivalent of junk food. We know what we’re against; we’re having tougher internal debates about what we’re for.

I read Richard Brookheiser’s “What Would the Founders Do” last weekend. It’s a quick read, a fun look at history (including a list of the blogs the Founding Fathers would write if they were alive today!) and thought-provoking ideas.

But I wonder if you could really persuade a majority of voters to support a particular political agenda by citing that it is in line with the ideas of the Founding Fathers. I suspect there’s been enough historical revisionism and intellectual rot within the body politic to persuade too many voters that Thomas Jefferson’s signature accomplishment is sleeping with Sally Hemmings. I wish the argument that “This is what George Washington and Ben Franklin would support” were compelling to all, but it isn’t.

So I’m wondering whether you can base your political worldview on something more recent, and more intensely, emotionally compelling than the words of great men 200+ years ago. I’m thinking of Bill Whittle’s brilliant recent essay, “Rafts“:

People of good will on both sides value peace and freedom, yet we have diverging choices to make, and we have to make them now. We have to chart our course, a course for our country, and ultimately, a course for the entire world.

We need a map. Several are for sale. How do we choose?

Actually, it’s not so difficult. We can choose the map that best conforms to the coastline we see unveiling before us. We choose the map that best matches reality – the objective, external, indisputable reality of bays and promontories, capes and gulfs and rivers and shoals.

We can, indeed, lay out competing philosophies on the table, and see where each conforms to reality and where it does not. No maps are without distortions; none of these are likely to be, either. And one map may conform perfectly to the coastline in one area, and be dreadfully amiss in another. We can cut and paste them as we wish. This is too important for us to be arguing about who is right – all our energies must go to getting it right.

And before we start, we must agree to one thing: we will never be so full of arrogance and blinded by pride that we dare confront a place where our map does not match the coastline, and proclaim that the coastline must be wrong.

I have a mental map of the world. So do you. So did Lenin, and al-Zarqawi, and Winston Churchill, and Attila, and Ronald Reagan. Everyone has an internal map of how the world works.

Specifically, I’m wondering if you could shape a “map” - a coherent political platform and worldview entirely out of the painful lessons of 9/11. For example, what would happen if conservatives on Capitol Hill justified their arguments for a smaller government not by citing abstract principles or an intellectual ideal, but by contending that large, bloated, unfocused government will get us killed because it doesn’t focus on the most important issues?

I’m thinking of a few recent arguments, including Mark Steyn’s observation back on 11/19/01:

The bigger you make the government, the more you entrust to it, the more powers you give it to nose around in the citizenry’s bank accounts and phone calls and e-mails and favorite Internet porn sites, the more you’ll enfeeble it with the siren song of the soft target. The Mounties will no longer get their man, they’ll get you instead. Frankly, it’s a lot easier. And so the INS failed to get Mohammed Atta, but they did get [British citizen and 9/11 widow] Deena Gilbey. Congratulations, guys… We don’t need big government, we need lean government – government that’s stripped of its distractions and forced to concentrate on the essentials.

How many more voters will listen to you if you make the case based on the most important issue to them: Keeping them and their families safe?