Pajamas Media » Conservatives at CPAC Talking the Talk — But Can they Walk the Walk?
While there may be an agreement by conservatives regarding that critique, it presupposes that there were not other, more fundamental aspects of what conservatism has become that were roundly rejected by huge swaths of the American electorate. The movement is seen as intolerant of gays, immigrants, and other non-white, non-middle class citizens — a perception that the Republican Party does little to counter and makes attacking conservatism on these issues extremely easy. When one of the stars of the conservative movement (and a CPAC speaker on Saturday), Ann Coulter, can get up in front of conservatives at the CPAC conference in 2007 and refer to Arabs as “ragheads” to loud applause, there is more to reform than just the message.
Until conservatives can practice some painful introspection, looking with a self-critical eye at the reasons for the debacles of 2006 and 2008, most in the movement will continue to delude themselves that simply reaffirming conservative love of small government, low taxes, and less regulation will be enough to convince a majority of Americans that they recognize their shortcomings and have changed their tune. There must be a reckoning with those who violate the very nature of conservatism by obstinately adhering to exclusionary, anti-intellectual precepts that have thrown classical conservatism over in favor of ranting, ideological tantrums.
This is a continuing trope of Moran’s - that conservatism needs to play kiss-ass with “huge swaths of the American electorate… gays, immigrants, and other non-white, non-middle class citizens,” - because “simply reaffirming conservative love of small government, low taxes, and less regulation” isn’t enough.
Look. I disagree with socon attitudes toward gays, but I do understand why they feel as they do, and though it may be bigotry, it is honest bigotry based in large part upon religious beliefs. So Moran wants these conservatives to toss away their religious strictures about homosexuality and abortion so they can be “good conservatives” by his estimation? And he thinks conservatives have lost touch with reality?
Then he goes on to use the weasel word “immigration” when he’s really talking about illegal immigration. Conservatives have little problem with legal immigration, beyond that the regulatory bureaucracy could certainly be reformed so as to admit more legal immigrants with the sorts of skills and cultural assets that would be a net benefit to America. “Immigrants” in this context means illegal Mexican aliens who arrive in violation of the law and immediately become net users of services and taxpayer money. What does Moran think is a “good conservative stance” about these folks, one that will make “immigrants” think conservatives are more “tolerant” of them? Bush/McCain/Kennedy/Pelosi “amnesty?”
Moran seems to think that conservatism needs to be all things to all people in order to succeed, but he is wrong: any ideology that becomes so is, in the end, nothing to anybody. As the GOP demonstrated over the past eight years.
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
What the Republican party is right now is what one gets when one replaces principle with political handlers and assorted power mad hucksters.
And pragmatism. How can we win this seat, today? And hang the big picture.
Lest I be accused of rhetorical overreach (and that still stings, CalmRising; I cry into my pillow every night), this seat, today is the proper focus for the wards and the election committees. It’s the job of the national committees to consider long-term, broader goals. Speaking as someone who is neither Republican nor conservative (big or little C), it’s pretty clear the RNC has been focusing exclusively on the here-and-now. It’s a reasonable suspicion that the RNC’s leadership has been even more tightly focused, namely on their own personal good above all else.
Here’s the only stuff the Republicans need to do in order to bring health and happiness to our troubled Republic:
- low income tax rates (15, 20 and 25% — or preferably still, a universal flat tax of no more than 20%)
- 2% cap gains tax
- reduced government spending
- a strong military (stronger than they are now)
- massive clampdown on illegal immigration
- more, not less, government meddling in business, and speaking of business:
- 5% corporate tax rate, with fewer tax breaks if it makes the solons feel better.
All the rest — ALL of it — is irrelevant, and not the business of the federal government anyway.
If they can’t or won’t do that, the hell with them.
Eh? Glitch? If that was supposed to be the other way around, leave a note and I or another editor can fix it.
SteveF wrote:
I can recommend a good surgeon to have your tear ducts removed if that’s a persistent problem.
kim wrote:
In a way this is simple but in another way this is complicated.
Government overreach is a large threat to human freedom. However, corporate overreach is not an inconsiderable threat. In my view the best situation is the one where the multiple institutions in power hold each other down so that none of them can exert excessive force on the rest of us.
More specifically, I think government could have a role in preventing fraud and promoting transparency. But that doesn’t mean we need the kind of meddling where business activities are encouraged and suppressed for political whims.
So I think we need less of most kinds of meddling, but possibly more of a few kinds. Like not letting certain broker-dealers leverage 30:1.
I dunno about that. The problem is not their idiotic business gambles - the problem is stealing other people’s money to bail them out when they screw up, rather then permitting them to fail and vanish, leaving open space upon which to build, and salutory lessons in their wake.
Actually what has happened is that the people who lent the banks money even after they were levered 15, 20, 25 then 30:1 on the basis that the govt would bail them out if the bets went wrong, are being bailed out by the govt.
Slowly but surely the equity holders of banks are being wiped out and the taxpayer is being inserted underneath the debt level in the capital structure, hence taxpayers absorbing the first loss rather than the existing debt lenders. Sure, some of those lenders are the banks themselves, but there are many, many other lenders who are benefitting from the govt actions here. Follow the money.
Note this is not contrary to the original point that those that took ridiculous business risks should lose it all and should not be bailed out instead. The equity holders should fail because they were overleveraged and placed wrong bets on the asset sides. However, the taxpayer subsidies are not just going to the equity holders. To a large extent the bailout is going to the debt holders, as currently structured.