Mitt Romney seems to dismiss the 47% of Americans who will never vote for him anyway. James P. Pinkerton, though, recounts another kind of conservatism–the tradition of Disraeli, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and others–that is oriented to the 100%.
This is the ideology of the popular conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who described his philosophy this way:
I’m a one-nation Tory. There is a duty on the part of the rich to the poor and to the needy, but you are not going to help people express that duty and satisfy it if you punish them fiscally so viciously that they leave this city and this country. I want London to be a competitive, dynamic place to come to work.
It is also the ideology of Calvin Coolidge, who said this:
The commonwealth is one. We are all members of one body. The welfare of the weakest and the welfare of the most powerful are inseparably bound together. Industry cannot flourish if labor languish. Transportation cannot prosper if manufactures decline. The general welfare cannot be provided for in any one act, but it is well to remember that the benefit of one is the benefit of all, and the neglect of one is the neglect of all. The suspension of one man’s dividends is the suspension of another man’s pay envelope.
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