Conservative Votes, Right-Wing Victims . . .
In the midst of a debate with Conor Friedersdorf, John Hawkins of Right Wing News produces this gem of thought:
. . . the reason so many conservatives are hacked off at moderates is because they are the ones who supported many of the dumb positions that decimated the GOP over the last eight years. It wasn’t the conservatives arguing for deficit spending, amnesty, and a prescription drug benefit — it was the moderates. When they won the day, the Republican Party, conservatives, and America lost.
Then, moderates got their dream candidate in 2008: John McCain.
Of course, there never was a simple vote to have “deficit spending.” Instead, there were two tax cuts and a couple of expensive wars that right-wingers strongly supported. Concerning Medicare Part D, John McCain voted against it while such “moderates” as James Inofe, Richard Shelby and Rick Santorum voted in favor.
Perhaps John Hawkins opposed cutting taxes in the face of two expensive war and led “tea party” demonstrations outside of the office of Rick Santorum, but I doubt it.
One lesson from the last few years is that movement conservatives are never responsible—they are always victims circumstance, the Liberal Media, or of nefarious “moderates” and “RINOs” that nobody previously noticed being in charge in the GOP.
“One lesson from the last few years is that movement conservatives are never responsible—they are always victims circumstance, the Liberal Media, or of nefarious “moderates” and “RINOs” that nobody previously noticed being in charge in the GOP.”
Quoted for M-F’ing truth!
Prepare to raise shields, Mr Stooksbury. they’re coming in from all sides and they are – not – to blame.
Good post. Personal responsibility used to be the first narrative of the conservative movement but today movement conservatives seem eager to toss it all over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. We all need to remember that liberty, free enterprise, balanced budgets, federalism and even traditional values begin there.
I don’t see how conservatives can expect to convince anyone of any part of their argument until they can finish a paragraph without complaining about unfairness and betrayal. Many of us outside the movement might reach the same conclusions, but we do so in spite of “conservative leadership” and we won’t be looking for movement leaders as we act.
I feel the reason behind most of our troubles and the need for TEA Parties is the government’s ability to print up whatever money it wants to manipulate us.
Maybe this will help make the danger of fiat money clear.
Imagine you and me are setting across from each other. We create enough money to represent all of the world’s wealth. Each one of us has one SUPER Dollar in front of him.
You own half of everything and so do I.
I’m the government though. I get bribed into creating a Central Bank.
You’re not doing what I want you to be doing so I print up myself eight more SUPER Dollars to manipulate you with.
All of a sudden your SUPER Dollar only represents one tenth of the wealth of the world!
That isn’t the only thing though. You need to get busy and get to work because YOU’VE BEEN STIFFED with the bill for the money I PRINTED UP to get YOU TO DO what I WANTED.
That to me represents what has been happening to the economy, and us, and why so many of our occupations just can’t keep up with the fake money presses.
They have been beating us with our own stick!!!!1
Conservative translation:
Moderate = someone the libs can control/influence, and they want us to vote for him/her because they are pretty sure they can beat that person.
GOP Decimated = libs have gotten the LameStreamMedia to convice some that it is not true that 50-something percent of Americans describe themselves as having conservative values.
Deficit Spending = something Republicans dabbled in, but usually explodes when the pendulum recoils from Republican politicians’ stupidity and dishonesty, and the libs get control.
Responsibility = a lib, without honesty, integrity, or morals, will smile at the camera and claim to have it, without having ever understood it.
This is the kind of unclear criticism of movement conservatism that gets AmCon lumped in with moderates. Conservatives most certainly should support tax cuts. They should just be accompanied by spending cuts. (Fat chance in reality but I’m speaking theoretically here.) Spending and tax cuts when the government is out of control is clearly more desirable than not cutting taxes in the name of fiscal responsibility.
And to be fair, movement conservatism was pretty much unanimous in its opposition to prescription drug coverage. It failed in its ability to keep people like Shelby and Inofe in line against tremendous pressure from a White House movement conservatives were clearly much too deferential to.
Where Hawkins gets it wrong is by not realizing that Republican foreign policy was a drag on the party, especially in 2006, and that foreign policy interventionism makes frugal, limited, responsible government impossible.
But what Stooksbury and others don’t seem to realize (or care) is that it make it harder to make a credible rightist non-interventionist case against interventionism if you also come off sounding like a Concord Coalition moderate on taxes. Then the John Hawkins of the world can write you off as a moderate and not take the foreign policy objections seriously.
Dan:
Sure cons opposed Part D, but where were the consequences? I never even sensed that they were anything less than thrilled with Bush, Cheney, Delay, etc. in 2004.
You are right, I don’t care. Non-interventionism–a position more associated with Ron Paul than Pete Peterson– has gained no traction within the movement, which should indicate the right-wing’s level of detachment from reality.
And I don’t care if it sounds “moderate,” but the fact is that Bush and the Republicans frittered away a budget surplus with, tax cuts that are going to expire next year, while prattling that deficits don’t matter.
“Sure cons opposed Part D, but where were the consequences? I never even sensed that they were anything less than thrilled with Bush, Cheney, Delay, etc. in 2004.”
I agree. Movement cons were too fixated on the “War on Terror” and lost their collective head.
But it is not true that non-intervetionism isn’t gaining traction. Non-intervetionism is already the default position of the “far right.” Just ask Alan Keyes who ran into a non-interventionist firestorm when he tried to get the Constitution Party nomination. And it is gaining adherents among movement cons. While the conservative movement is not going to embrace Paul style non-interventionism any time soon, foreign policy is decreasing in importance. The reflexive hawks obsessed with foreign policy are a shrinking group of bitter-enders. How much is foreign policy an issue at the Tea Parties, for example? It has fallen off the radar screen with many of those folks.
I am not sure I understand the Pete Peterson reference. My point was that rightward non-interventionist criticism of interventionist foreign policy should carry more weight with Hawkins types if it is accompanied by tax and budget cutting hawkishness. At least Hawkins types couldn’t just write it off as liberal or moderate carping against movement cons, lumping it in with Noonan for example. I wasn’t suggesting that foreign policy non-interventionism is of the middle. It demonstrably is not.
For the record, Hawkins is not a likely convert. He is a committed interventionist hawk and a nationalist who has been openly hostile to Ron Paul and decentralists. But some of the people who read Hawkins may be potential converts and it makes no sense to give Hawkins ammunition because of carelessness with language and a failure to make distinctions.
Also, people like Hawkins, although they may not admit it, know non-interventionism is gaining traction which is why they react so hysterically against it. If it was really an idea with minimal following and with no threat of pealing away converts they would pay it no mind. The hostility of the reaction to non-interventionism and Paul is an admission that they fear it and know it is growing.
” the reason so many conservatives are hacked off at moderates is because they are the ones who supported many of the dumb positions that decimated the GOP over the last eight years. It wasn’t the conservatives arguing for deficit spending, amnesty, and a prescription drug benefit — it was the moderates. When they won the day, the Republican Party, conservatives, and America lost.
Then, moderates got their dream candidate in 2008: John McCain.”
Here’s a perfect example of the problem. Hawkins goes after “moderates”. They’re the ones to blame. And yet actual “moderates” within the GOP caucus in Congress has decline to the point of irrelevency for the past two decades. All the big increases in spending took place under a GOP Congress with so-called “conservatives” voting for prescription drug benefits, No Child Left Behind, farm subsidies, earmarks, you name it. To blame it all on “moderates” is typical of people who want to hide behind trees and want you to pretend they don’t exist. To suggest there have been a bunch of Jacob Javitses running around in the Congress for the past 20 years is the height of dishonesty, lunacy and hypocrisy.
Sean, in modern movement conservative terminology, I think moderate means something close to what you identify as Establishment. So moderate doesn’t mean Jacob Javits, it means Kirk and Crist. Of course Hawkins is delusional or ignorant or both. The ideologically pure conservative hard core that is supposedly battling the Establishment is yesterday’s left-winger. And the elected officials who supposedly come from the purist movement shill for the Powers That Be with the best of the Establishment boys, but just pay better lip service to the base. But this is the kind of thing that needs to be pointed out to Hawkins. What he thinks is conservative would have been wacko liberalism in 1920.
Historically, I don’t think that the conservatives prevailed against the moderates so much as the places that used to elect moderate Republicans (urban, North East) now elect Democrats. In much the same way that places that used to elect conservative Democrats (the South) now elect Republicans.
“Personal responsibility” and other rightist shibboleths…
Sarah Palin’s book has a lot of political score-settling, which is not surprising, and a fair amount of grievance-peddling against those she believes wronged her. Frankly, I wouldn’t blame her for wanting to waterboard Andrew Sullivan over the disgra…
Sean, nice Jacob Javitz reference; those days have long since passed. The GOP has become so skewed right that by today’s standards, Bob Dole would probably be viewed as a left-of-center, weak-kneed RINO, despite a 96 ACU lifetime rating. Crazy.
Must confess that I’m completely putoff by Palin’s score-settling. She seems to be in a state of constant grievance. Must be a condition precedent to populism. For me, it simply abrogates her personal responsibility.