The Republican Opposition's Gnostic Rebellion: Or, why McCarthy's opponents should stop acting like a bunch of liberals

Makis E. Warlamis

The failure of Kevin McCarthy to secure the speakership of the U.S. House certainly doesn't reflect well on McCarthy. It is his first test as a leader: can he secure the support he needs in his own party? If he can't win his fellow Republicans, how can we expect him to command leadership in a chamber in which the opposition party has almost as many seats as his own?

Still, the main problem is not the opposing party, but the opponents within his own party who, without any alternative, are preventing McCarthy's installation as House Speaker. The only alternative McCarthy's Republican opponents are offering is some ghostly political democratic ideal, some non-McCarthy Shangri-La which will allow them to legislate in peace and eternal bliss.

It's enough to make smoke-filled rooms look positively attractive in comparison--and themselves like a circular firing squad. They're going to shoot themselves in the hope that some of the gore gets spattered on McCarthy.

Why should McCarthy's opponents be expected to sully themselves with the course political realities necessary in a parliamentary body? Every time you hear a politician rail against backroom deals and behind-the-scenes coalitions and cross-party alliances, make a mental note that this person is either being completely dishonest, or simply doesn't understand how politics works. In the first case he cannot be trusted and will end up engaging in the very behavior he condemns as soon as he's out of earshot; in the second case, he is a complete innocent who will never be effective and should be sent immediately to a monastery.

The legislative process has been aptly compared to a sausage factory for a reason.

McCarthy is not perfect. No one disputes this. Both sides know it. The difference is that his Republican opponents offer, as an alternative to McCarthy, some kind of ideal the details of which seem to elude McCarthy's most ardent detractors--some sort of Trumpian Shangri-La, some unrealistic Arcadian vision of ideal politics. It is the spectacle of a bunch of self-professed conservatives championing what Thomas Sowell has derisively called the "Vision of the Anointed."

The chief characteristic of this alternative is that it is not McCarthy. Beyond that lies the unknown.

Note that McCarthy's opponents are offering no actual alternative to McCarthy other than people who actually support him. There is no alternative except some dreamy political ideal that is so perfect it cannot even be described.

Is there a Swamp in Washington? Sure there is. Can it every be completely drained? Of course not. Such political swamps have existed time immemorial. And to think they can be completely drained is to cease to be conservative because it is to cease to be in touch with reality.

The problem with this kind of conservative ideal is that it is not conservative. Conservatives are practical and realistic. They are not dreamy and delusional. They acknowledge reality and try to find the best ways to ameliorate it. In economics they adhere to a few bedrock realities, like supply and demand and reject the idea that you can spend unlimited amounts of taxpayer money and not ever have to pay it back. In social policy they accept the simple reality that there are two sexes and reject the belief that there are some 75 different genders, the exact number depending on the time of day.

They accept the idea of Original Sin and that life and politics will never be perfect. Delusional perfection is the province of the Left: it is the Left's job to deny Original Sin and to constantly be casting some unrealistic vision of perfection that everyone knows really does not and cannot exist.

If the Republicans really want to succeed as conservatives, they should focus on the amelioration of the imperfect not the installation of the ideal. The Gnostic Republicans now making a bold stand against reality should stand down and deal with things as they are not as they wish they could be. 

Republicans pleading nolo contedere on social issues

The Achilles heel of the modern Republican Party is its unending attempts to avoid addressing all but the most pressing social issues in favor of a focus on abstract economic issues. The party still invokes the name of Ronald Reagan, but it has knocked off the third leg of the Reagan stool, which is one of the reasons it keeps tipping over.

Reagan emphasized three things: Smaller government, a strong national defense, and traditional values. Since the Reagan administration, Republicans haven't particularly distinguished themselves in any of these, but they at least give lip service to the first two. The third has been largely eliminated from their agenda.

The most egregious example of this tendency was in the 2012 election when Mitt Romney, the poster child for this type of Republican, would try to change the subject every time a social issue was mentioned. Abortion? Change the subject to economics. Marriage? Change the subject to economics.

If you want a good example of this, you can look at how the party is now responding to the same-sex marriage issue that has reasserted itself since the Dobbs decision. Republican senators are either voting in favor the so-called "Respect for Marriage Act," or remaining mum about it altogether. The "Respect for Marriage Act" (I call attention to the quotation marks) would basically enshrine same-sex marriage in federal law.

What can you say about a supposedly conservative party that cannot trouble itself to defend basic conservative institutions like marriage? In fact, some have pointed out that, if you can't defend the traditional view of marriage, there is little traditional you can be expected to defend.

The party notoriously bailed on the marriage issue when it really would have mattered in the two years leading up to the 2014 Obergefell decision. And now their reprising their cowardly performance of eight years ago.

When asked what their positions are on the "Respect for Marriage Act," they respond, in frightened tones, "I haven't read the bill." Haven't read the bill? Since when did that ever stop a lawmaker from voting for or against anything? I doubt if any lawmaker reads any bill he votes for, including the ones he has supposedly written.

This is why Republicans lose--because they deny what Democrats know all too well: that social issues provide the gut-level motivation for their voters to go to the polls. Economic issues only work when there is an economic crisis that the reigning party can't fix. We have one of those now of course, so Republicans will pick up seats in the midterms even as they avoid issues of the heart. But when the economy improves, they will need social issues to motivate their voters, and they will choose, once again to avoid them.

World without end, amen.

It's the End of the Conservative World as We Know It

Paul Gottfried

There is one conservative blog (other than, of course, Vital Remnants) that will put the current election in excellent perspective. It is a conservative oasis in the sea of nonsense. It is the Imaginative Conservative. Today's article is a great example of why this online magazine is a light in the conservative darkness. Paul Gottfried, one of the great modern conservative writers reflects on the state of modern conservatism, so-called:

[E]very time I hear the term used to describe a GOP position on just about anything, I have to wonder what makes that position “conservative.” Why for example is nation-building abroad, which involves imposing the latest model of American democracy on populations that are culturally quite different from the present American ruling class, a “conservative” position? And why is letting American working communities languish while our jobs are outsourced a “conservative” policy? The obvious answer is such stands are talking points deployed by the Republican Party as it works to hold on to certain constituents. These stands also happen to be those of the GOP donor base.

... I am convinced that the designation “conservative” is losing any substantive meaning, except for attachment to Republican operatives and donors and the label that particular media personalities choose to give themselves. 

In going back and reading Russell Kirk, as I have had the occasion recently of doing, I am reminded once again of how far gone modern so-called conservatism is. Real conservatives are trapped between a presidential candidate and his followers who hold many positions consistent with conservatism but who, when asked to defend them blindly repeat that the want to "Make America Great Again," and establishment Republicans who hold many positions at complete odds with conservatism.

And, worse, both factions have abandoned the long tradition of social conservatism. On Trump's end you get an immigration plan that would only let in people who support the agenda of radical gay rights groups (maybe that's the reason he opposes letting so many Syrian Christians into the country):

Recently he discussed how he would make Muslims entering the United States undergo “extreme vetting,” which would include making sure they had favorable attitudes toward gays and affirmed full gender equality. I’ve no idea why this test is something associated with the Right. It looks like something that came from editorial board of the New York Times or from some other publication that is now attacking Mr. Trump as a fascist.

On the other side you have the New Conservative Establishment, who were waving the white flag on marriage even before the ink on Obergefell had dried:

Popular “conservative” journalists Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz are high on gay marriage, which they argue promotes family values. National Review‘s rising star Jillian Kay Melchior wishes to see the United States become more fully engaged in Ukraine against Vladimir Putin, lest transgendered Ukrainians come under reactionary Russian sway. Other conservative journalists have berated the Russian president for not allowing gay pride parades in Russian cities.

As Kirk pointed out, conservatives in any time are almost necessarily relegated to the status of a Remnant, and we probably need to embrace that role, which means keeping our powder dry in elections like this one.

Eunuchs in the Palace of Liberalism: Modern conservatism and what Ailes it

Sean Hannity, conservative ideologist.

I still, unaccountably, hear people who consider themselves conservatives talk about how much progress conservatism has made over the last ten to twenty years and how much that is attributable to media institutions like Fox News.

The first thing to say about this attitude is that it is utterly preposterous. Yes, there is a conservative media that didn't exist before the mid-90s, but what needs to be explained is why the rise of the supposedly conservative media has been accompanied by an almost complete loss of the culture.

Clearly conservatism is NOT winning. In fact, the influence of conservatism on our culture has ebbed to such an extent that if it were an animal, it would have to be put on the Endangered Species List.

So why do some conservatives like these think that conservatism is somehow thriving?

The reason is that for them (and this is perhaps the central problem with modern conservatism), conservatism is an ideology. In order to tell whether it is winning or not, one need only tally up the political offices inhabited by Republicans, compare that number to the offices held by Democrats. If the former number is bigger than the latter (or if it is growing in relation to the latter), then conservatism is in good shape.

This is malady that infects conservatism as it is represented by Fox News: The idea that the way conservatism wins is to gain political power. The more control conservatives wield over the engines of government, the better off everybody is—particularly conservatives.

This is Sean Hannity Conservatism. Roger Ailes Conservatism. It is the conservatism of the neoconservatives who have, for all practical purposes, dominated the Republican Party since the departure of Ronald Reagan from the political scene. 

Reagan himself was not of this sort. Reagan was the product of the National Review conservatism that produced him. National Review, which until the 90s was the flagship conservative voice in America, particularly when it had in its stable of writers people like Russell Kirk and Joseph Sobran, and to a certain extent its editor William F. Buckley, could be said to have had a soul, a soul that left the body some time, oh about the time that Reagan's vice president George Bush, Sr. took office.

What Reagan and the old National Review conservatism recognized was that politics was the effect in relation to which the culture was the cause.  

Go back and look at a copy of the old National Review (I have boxes of them in my attic). Note the prevalence of social commentary, film criticism, and book reviews—reviews of books of every kind, including poetry, fiction, literary criticism—in addition to books on policy. Then compare it to today's conservative publications (including National Review), which, if they don't actually harbor writers who suffer from it, at least appeal to readers who are poorly read and largely unfamiliar with the Western culture that magazines like NR were founded to defend.

It was the culture, stupid—the culture which has served as the battlefield on which conservatives have been completely routed—on marriage, on education, on bioethics, on sexual ethics—in addition to the size and scope of government.

Conservatism now shares the liberal impulse to achieve some sort of earthly utopia, the only difference being that for liberals this utopia consists in a thoroughly administered life through the agencies of government while for conservatives it is realized in a free market economy.

If you listen to someone like Sean Hannity, you'll hear the eschaton being immanentized (something the conservative political theorist Eric Voegelin and his cheerleader Buckley spurned) on a daily basis. The purpose of political theories, in this reading, is to write and implement the program by which heaven can be brought to earth. It is the substance of ideology, which is, as Russell Kirk, whose book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot single-handedly founded the conservative movement, pointed out is political religion.

How many times have you heard a conservative spokesperson use the expression "conservative ideology" as an expression of approval? If you were to say this in the presence of the old conservatives, they would lift their aged heads and fell you to the earth.

Not only is the expression "conservative ideology" an oxymoron, it is blasphemy to the ears of a real conservative. It is the unwitting declaration that conservatism is merely another political religion designed to give us secular salvation—through "the market," or the Republican Party. It implies that, as liberalism has always maintained, if we can just get society structured properly, we can all live in peace and contentment, free of external evil (the only kind of evil liberals believe in).

It is the denial of Original Sin, the doctrine which Chesterton maintained was the only Christian belief that could be empirically proven, and the denial of which underlies the fatal conceit of political utopianism.

Conservatives have ceded the culture to liberals, and think the way to fight it is to get their hands on the levers of power. They are sorely mistaken.

What Fox News has done is to redefine conservatism so as to hide the defeat. For example, the network did little to stand up to the judicial fiat by which the legal doctrine of traditional marriage was swept away—a judicial fiat it would have been called by its proper name in the days when Robert Bork was still alive. It holds tenuously to the prolife position only because it has to appease its more culturally conservative audience. And not only is homosexuality fully accepted on every program its runs, but it now regularly refers to the "transgender community," an expression pregnant (if one can use that word in such a context) with ideological assumptions no conservative could ever accept.

Modern conservatives are Eunuchs in the Palace of Liberalism, having been culturally emasculated and reduced to doing the bidding of their liberal overlords, and are receiving the appreciation they deserve.

You think Trump shot himself in the foot? Check out what the Establishment is doing

Just when the air was going out of the Trump campaign for newer ever more blithering stupidity, along comes the Republican Establishment to rescue him by openly repudiating him and in the process reminding people once again how utterly worthless they are and underscoring the opposition Trump offers to them which makes people hold off on abandoning him for just a little bit longer.

Thank you, Establishment. Just keep it coming.

Even McMullin

First they launch an alternative supposedly "conservative" candidate. Now think about this. You have the Republican nominee who got where he is on the wave of disaffection among normal Americans toward Establishment conservatism, which is led by "Republican operatives" and which is associated with economic entities like Goldman Sachs, and you put up someone supported by "Republican operatives" and who worked for Goldman Sachs? 

Seriously? Will someone please issue an orange alert for political blindness? Please?

Add in the fact that Evan McMullin worked for the CIA and you have a candidate who makes Jeb Bush seem Bohemian by comparison. Ugh.

Then you have fifty national security experts come out in public opposition to Trump. Why wait for Trump's birthday to give him presents. 

Fifty national security experts? Who think Trump is a threat to national security? Are these the same people who supported the Iraq War--which, by the way, if we haven't mentioned it already (which we have) is the precise reason we have a Middle East crisis right now?

Real conservatives are not completely surrounded by imbecility. I, personally, am going to stock up on provisions and tidy up the bunker.

The lyin' guy whose father helped assassinate JFK and whose wife is a bimbo didn't endorse #Trump. Go figure.

That the Trumpites who are all up in arms about Ted Cruz not explicitly endorsing Trump last night did not expect Cruz say exactly what he said (and didn't say) is a measure of just how fatuous is Trump's support.

The Morning Jolt captured it perfectly:

But why is everyone so surprised? Trump nicknames him “Lyin’ Ted,” argues he’s a Canadian ineligible for the presidency, retweets an image mocking his wife’s appearance and suggests his dad had a role in killing JFK, and never apologizes for any of it… and the Trump team is surprised Cruz didn’t endorse him?

Why were they and the RNC so surprised by a text they saw beforehand? Trump’s chief strategist, Jason Johnson, contends they weren’t.  “Since it’s obvious the shock is contrived, let me ask: What the H**l did they expect from the son of the man who killed JFK? Lighten up.”

Either the people booing were naive (a tendency common among many of Trump's supporters) or it was disingenuous.

And the only thing worse than the common run of naive or insincere Trump supporters is those current Trump supporters who were formerly Cruz supporters who now profess to be ashamed of him.

After all, if I have give up my principles so that my party can "win," why doesn't Cruz do it?

Wednesday night is going to be one of those nights that political junkies talk about for a long time. Ted Cruz’s decision was bold, reckless, politically stupid, brave, principled, divisive, gutsy and vindictive, all the same time. If you’ve spent the last couple years complaining that all politicians are spineless hacks who only follow the weather-vane and refuse to stand on principles, you’ve got no reason to complain this morning.

I agree with all of that except the part about political junkies talking about this for a long time. Political junkies don't talk about anything for a long time. They have very short attention spans. They're a bunch of Dories who can hardly remember what happened last week, let alone a year ago.

This will be virtually forgotten after next Sunday. Two weeks tops.

The Anti-Establishment Establishment

One of the mantras of the anti-Establishment forces in the Republican Party has always been principle over politics. And the biggest criticism by it of the Establishment was that the Establishment was too willing to sell out their principles to win politically.

But ever since Trump became the Presumptive Nominee (let us capitalize this expression to underscore its official status--or at least its presumptive official status), the anti-Establishment has begun to do the very thing that they have always criticized the Establishment for doing.

Now we are told that we get over our principled objections to Trump because otherwise we will lose. 

Yo, Anti-Establishment, are you listening to yourself? Do realize you are championing precisely the position you have always criticized the Establishment for? Sean Hannity? Mr. Anti-Establishment? You there?

These people preached to us about how important it was not to sacrifice principle for politics and yet now you are  that it is imperative that we do just this.

Interesting how, when the pigs take over the barnyard, they begin acting just like the humans who they replaced.

Trump and the Establishment: A plague on both their houses

The chief problem in the discussion over Trump is that he is disliked for all the wrong reasons. This is what makes the discussion about Trump's hostile takeover of the Republican Party so utterly frustrating.

The question has become whether Trump is going to change the Republican Party into something other than a conservative party. But the trouble is that the national Republican Party has had a tenuous relationship with conservatism ever since Ronald Reagan left the scene.

People forget that, before Reagan came along, the Republican Party establishment was largely made up of what were then called "country club Republicans." These were people who, generally speaking, wanted a strong national defense, a balanced budget, and a highball by the pool in the afternoon. They were in favor of the military-industrial complex to fix the world, monetary policy to fix the economy, and good security guards in their gated communities to fix their neighborhoods.

Then came the social conservatives.

In the early 80s, an army of Pat Robertson supporters invaded local Republican Party organizations. Because they were uncouth, religious but unPresbyterian or unEpiscopalian, and actually believed in something, the country clubbers fought them—and lost. Reagan, who, although he was really too principled for the country-clubbers, they were willing to accept because of his celebrity background and success as a governor. But, to their shock and dismay, he ended up embracing the social conservatives. Later, he scandalized them even worse by abandoning the stilted foreign policy doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction in favor of Star Wars, and the stilted economics of monetary policy in favor of supply-side economics.

 

Hence was born post-Reagan Republican conservatism, characterized by the triple doctrines of strong (but not expansionist) national defense, the pragmatic spending policies of smaller government and lower taxes, and advocacy of traditional values.

Since then, although outwardly championing Reaganism, the Party establishment has been moving away from all three of these.

In foreign policy, the Party was captured by neoconservatives who wanted to spread American influence the military adventurism and the religion of democracy. While Reagan bombed Tripoli and quickly left, George W. Bush invaded Iraq and ended up trying to run the place. The first achieved its goal (a less dangerous Quaddafi), the second did not (Iraq is now a satellite state of an even more dangerous Iran).

In economic policy, the Republican brand was ruined by the establishment advocacy of international free trade agreements and the Medicare Part D drug prescription benefit that amounted to a new and costly social entitlement. And while Reagan's advocacy of the free market was a position based upon the pragmatic benefits of policies whose goal it was to get government off people's backs, the increasing influence of libertarians in the Party has resulted in what amounts to a religion of the free market that has, through ostensibly free market trade deals, caused jobs loss at home.

 

And where once the Republicans were the party of traditional values, their replacement of them by "market values," a phrase that exalts freedom at the expense the common good, has resulted in the abandonment of the commitment to integrity of marriage as the central social institution in particular, and jettisoning of defense of the moral order of the Judeo-Christian ethos in general. And then there is the increasing acceptance among the Party elite of more virulent forms of gender ideology that threaten to displace the common sense categories which are the only basis for even believing in marriage. Ronald Reagan was not a libertarian, he was a conservative, and he knew the difference.

In short, the Republican Party had already experienced a hostile takeover before Trump ever started running for president.

But since everyone seems to have forgotten this, they talk about Trump's policies as if they were somehow opposed to conservatism, when, in fact, many of them are perfectly conservative.

His opposition to foreign military adventurism is perfectly in line with Reaganite restraint. And those people who keep characterizing Trump's foreign policy and economic views (as he has stated them) to the "American First" movement need to go back and listen to Alexander Haig's remarks as he articulated Reagan's foreign policy as his Secretary of State. He talked about "American national interest" and criticized the Soviet Union for its expansionist foreign policy. And they need to go back and take note that it was only with the George W. Bush administration that the United States began signing wide-ranging trade deals that ignored the consequences on jobs at home.

Far from being at odds with conservatism, Trump's views on foreign policy and economics are actually closer to conservatism than the views of the Republican establishment which appears to have forgotten what conservatism actually consists of, at least in its Reaganite form.

 

The worst criticism that could be leveled against Trump is on social issues, an area of Trump's stated agenda on which the paint has barely dried. It is on social policy that authentic conservatives have the most cause to be worried. 

And it is on all these views that conservatives need to ask themselves whether Trump really believes the positions he has taken or whether they are the product of pure political expediency. 

It is not Trump's stated positions that are the problem. The problem is whether he has any principles underlying these positions which we can have any confidence will cause him to keep them. Already he is abandoning his positions on his tax plan and the minimum wage are devolving into something different from what he ran on. How do we know his other position won't undergo the same devolution?

Trump is a creature of opportunity, and such creatures don't stay in one political position for long. But let's be clear on the fact that the establishment of the Party left conservatism before Trump ever came along.

The Republican choice this year was between someone who doesn't seem to have any principles and a Party establishment that has the wrong ones.

The rock bottom criterion for a presidential candidate that Trump doesn't meet

There is one rock bottom criterion that should be applied to all presidential candidates. If you want to be president, you can be a Republican or Democrat, man or woman, Black or White, short or tall, old or young, rich or poor. But if you do not know what form of government we have, then you have no business running for the nation's highest office. 

Donald Trump (and apparently the rest of his family) do not seem to have a clue that we live, not in a pure democracy, but in a Constitutional republic. They are apparently under the impression that no procedure for electing a president is legitimate unless the process for doing it is directly democratic in nature.

Hence Trump's criticism of the delegate process in the Republican (and Democratic) Party. Trump doesn't like the delegate apportionment process because when he wins a state, he doesn't get as many delegates as he thinks he should get. This is the guy who, for example, only got 45.7 percent of the popular vote but got 100 percent of the delegates?

When he got all these delegates, were the other candidates calling the system rigged? If he thinks the system is rigged because delegates aren't assigned in proportion to the popular vote, is he going to give those delegates to the other candidates in proportion to the percentage of votes they received?

Don't count on it.

Do these people not realize that when it comes to the general election, they will not be involved in such a process? Do they not realize that they will be elected, not directly by the people, but by delegates to the Electoral College? And that that's the way the founders set it up? And that the founders were justifiably suspicious of a pure democracy and that all the checks and balances that they put into our republican form of government were to avert the dangers that were implicit in the direct kind of democracy that Trump and Co. seem so enamored of?

And why in the world are supposed conservatives like Tucker Carlson and Pat Buchanan backing Trump up on this?

I'm sorry, but if I'm given the choice between Jefferson and Trump, I'm picking Jefferson every time.

The problem (from Trump's perspective) is that he doesn't like the rules each state party has set up for selecting a president. And he's calling on the national Party to change the process.

Now let's get this clear: He's wanting to nationalize the presidential election process in the Republican Party. Is that a very conservative thing to do? Can we look for more of this approach when he becomes president? If he doesn't like things that states do, is he going to have the federal government force them to change it?

Heck, if he's going to do that, then why NOT elect Hillary?

Why Everyone Doesn't Like Donald Trump Although Some People Still Do

Everyone is talking about Donald Trump—which, of course, is exactly what Donald Trump wants. And almost everyone who is talking about him (publicly, anyway) is talking about why they don't like him.

Why doesn't anyone like the guy who says that everyone likes him and why do some people still like him despite the fact that no one does?

The Authorized Version of Why Donald Trump Is Still Popular Despite The Fact That He Shouldn't Be is that he is really not a politician running for the presidency, but an entertainment impresario putting on a show: He's a reality TV star beating the media at its own game.

There is some truth to this. We now have a significant portion of the citizenry that has a hard time distinguishing between reality and Hollywood-induced fantasy. Which is one reason why the criticism by the mainstream media rings so hollow: They are themselves the very ones who created the conditions under which Donald Trump thrives.

In fact, the mainstream media is part of the very circus they purport to criticize. Americans turn on their television sets expecting a show, and Donald Trump is giving them one—with the unwitting cooperation of all the people who keep saying he should just go away.

The show is about a rich businessman turned reality TV star running for president who claims that everyone likes him but who really makes everyone mad. It stars Donald Trump and is written by Donald Trump. Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, and Jake Tapper play supporting roles, as does every Fox News anchor. But their lines were written by Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is playing the evil puppet master Stromboli and his media critics are all Pinocchios who dream of being real journalists some day.

This is why people can both love and hate Trump at the same time: Just like they loved and hated J. R. Ewing, The Master, and Simon Cowell.

Now that I think about it, it is kind of fun to watch.

But the more fundamental reason Trump remains popular with Republican primary voters is that the part he has written for himself is a guy who is willing to say what he thinks without caring how many people don't like him for it.

And a lot of people like him for it.

Conservatives have spent the past five years or so watching their leaders turn tail and run on some of their core principles—particularly values issues like same-sex marriage.

If Donald Trump has the courage to face down the media on indefensible positions, why can't other candidates muster up the courage to stand up more firmly on issues—like traditional marriage—that are perfectly defensible?

It's a commentary on how starved Republican voters are for a candidate that has the courage of his convictions that they will settle for one who will at least play the part, however unreal he is.

The Great Republican Surrender: CPAC and the GOP's abandonment of social issues

Imagine you are a Republican living in the year 2027. CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Committee, is having its national convention and straw poll for 2028 Republican presidential hopefuls. But markedly absent from speeches and discussion is any mention of free market principles. Few mentions of the problem of big government. Little or no rhetoric about over-burdensome taxation.

The Party is almost almost silent on economic issues.

If you think that sounds preposterous, then ask yourself whether, twelve years ago, you would have thought the Republicans would have almost entirely given up on values issues, which, along with free market economics and a strong national defense, was one of the three fundamental pillars of post-Reagan Republican policy.

If you bothered to watch the coverage of the 2015 CPAC convention you would have noticed a loud silence on what used to be one the Republican Party's major themes. Other than a few fleeting mentions of marriage and abortion, there was mention of nothing other other than economics and foreign policy.

Even when candidates were asked about where they stood on same-sex marriage, they punted—or sounded like they were. When Sean Hannity interviewed all the candidates who showed up for the event, only a few had even a well-thought out answer on the issue, but the eventual winner of the straw poll, Kentucky's Rand Paul, sounded as if he had heard the question for the first time, saying little about the federal courts declaring martial law on the issue and talking instead about the virtues of civil unions.

"I'm old-fashioned," he told Hannity, "I think marriage is between a man and a woman, but I'm also open in a sense that legally I don't think we should discriminate against people and that if people want to have a contract with another adult, there's no reason why the law should discriminate and prevent them from having benefits, or custody, or seeing people in the hospital, all that stuff can be arranged through contracts [between] adults."

This is the comment of someone who clearly is uncomfortable talking about the issue and all and really doesn't want to talk about it. Just imagine if someone ask him about free market economics. Would he say, "Well, you know, I'm a believer in free market economics, but I'm also open in the sense that there are circumstances in which the government needs to get involved in markets and I don't think we should be against that."

Not on your life.

In the same interview in which Paul declared himself a "constitutional conservative," he seemed to express little concern about the wholesale federal court takeover of state marriage policy in violation Supreme Court precedent.

The worst thing that could happen to the Republican Party is happening: Long charged by its Democratic detractors with not having a heart, Republicans are now doing their best to prove their point.

Say "Hello" to the Materialist Right: Republican politicians who have nothing to say about the most deeply-held convictions of Americans, who can no longer connect with their voters on issues of the heart, who cannot spare time in their analysis of the ills of big government to address the ills of the family.

The Republican Party's social policy agenda used to be marriage, the traditional family, and traditional values. In states like Kentucky this still survives, albeit in etiolated form. But the national party has dropped all three, and they have nothing to replace them with.

Am I saying Democrats are winning on social issues? I sure am. But the reason isn't because they have a better argument than the other side; the reason is that they bother to make an argument and the other side doesn't. It's easy to win a battle when the other side doesn't bother to show up.

The banner under which the Republicans are marching on social issues is a white flag.

It is a shallow cliché among the less politically astute that people vote their pocket books. The decisive refutations of this view are too long to catalog, but the would include at least the last two presidential elections. The dirty little secret in politics is that people don't really vote their pocket books: They vote their hearts, and the candidate who knows that and exploits it wins.

Barack Obama. Bill Clinton. Check it out.

The libertarians now controlling the Republican Party think they can win elections by doing a political heart bypass operation. Economic issues and criticisms of Democratic foreign policy are what they think will win them national elections. But it won't work. Ask Mitt Romney how this worked out for him.

If the choice is between a candidate who only appeals to the intellect of voters on the one hand, and one who appeals to their sentiments on the other, they will pick the second one every time.

The Republican Party has a huge constituency of cultural conservatives who are simply being ignored by Republican rhetoric. The current crop of candidates knows this and their strategy isn't hard to discern: They are willing to say the absolute minimum they can to keep these voters in the fold. And where else are they going to go anyway?

But the fact is they do have another place to go: Nowhere. That is, they can just sit out the election. This is what more than a few people did the last time around and it resulted in a second term for Obama, whose foreign policy missteps would, in any other world than the one Republicans have constructed for themselves, have been enough for him to be defeated.

There has not been a major party realignment in some time, but if you read history, you know that it does in fact happen periodically. If you look at polling data it is very clear that there is a huge plurality of voters that don't go along with the Elen Degenereses of the world. So substantial is it, in fact, that under any other circumstances it would be considered a situation to exploit. To Republicans, however, it has become an advantage to squander.

I have never been an advocate of a third party, but it is becoming increasingly clear that if Republicans don't recapture their cultural soul, they will unwittingly undermine their position as a viable party and produce, however unintentionally, a third party--one that probably couldn't win many elections, but could certainly decide them.

Republicans abandoning their position on free market economics

In light of the sea change in the view of Americans away from free market economics as evidenced by the loss of Mitt Romney in the last presidential election and the passage of Obamacare, many Republicans are abandoning their position in defense of the free market. Others are bowing to the reality of the demise of market system on the federal level and trying to preserve it on a state-by-state basis.

Many national Republican Party leaders argue that the Party has to update its positions on economic issues in order to remain competitive in national elections and that taking hard line positions on issues like economic freedom is a political liability. "We are going to have to reach out to socialists and welfare advocates, particularly among minority voters," says one party official. "The Republican Party cannot be pigeon-holed as the party opposed to big government. We've got to ..."

... Uh, hold on. Let me check something. Wait, it’s not free market economics that Republicans are abandoning; it’s their position on traditional marriage they are caving on because of the recent Supreme Court decision and polls showing same-sex marriage to be more popular than it was just ten years ago.

Turns out they still hold staunchly to free market economics and always will no matter how unpopular it may become because they've got a backbone of steel when it comes to their long held political principles. They will never, ever give in on that. Ever.

Promise.

The Neville Chamberlain School of Republican Strategy

First Things' R. R. Reno, in response to former chairperson of the Republican National Committee Ken Mehlman, on whether the Republican Party should surrender on same-sex marriage:

Same-sex marriage will encourage fidelity and commitment, and foster family values? We can’t predict the future of culture, and I suppose Mehlman is entitled to his dreams. But a sober-minded observer sees that same-sex marriage puts an exclamation mark on the transformation of marriage and parenting from the basic norm for adult life into one life-style choice among many, one that we can enter and exit as our choices change. There’s nothing about same-sex marriage other than the now redefined word “marriage” that remotely suggests “family values.”

Even more ridiculous is the notion that redefining marriage makes government less intrusive. The notion of civil rights that fuels the push for “marriage equality” requires pumping up the power of the state to bulldoze older traditions and attitudes that stand in the way of the full acceptance and affirmation of homosexuality. It’s going to lead to litigation, regulation, mandated school programs and “inclusivity” seminars, and lots of other legislation. For good and for ill, the civil rights revolution of the 1960s created entire government bureaucracies, which in turn led to corporate diversity consultants and many other positions, all keyed to compliance.

Read the rest here.

The Commitment Gap: Mitt Romney and the Republican Party's crisis of values

Republicans trying to figure out what went wrong in Tuesday's election should put down their charts and graphs and visit the graveyard of the idea that they are more politically competitive if they nominate a moderate for president. They will find there a row of gravestones, each bearing the name of a candidate who was thought more likely to win because he was a pragmatist rather than a man of ideas.

The Litany of the Moderate Republican Political Dead includes Gerald Ford (lost to Carter), George Herbert Walker Bush (lost re-election to Clinton), Bob Dole (lost to Clinton), and John McCain (lost to Obama). In each case the party took the advice of those inside and outside who said they had a much better chance of winning without an "ideologue" (read: someone who is serious about ideas) on the ticket. Romney joins this list as only the most recent casualty of the crisis of values in the Republican Party.

Mid-campaign shifts of position, as we saw in Romney's general election campaign, are just symptoms of a deeper problem. The reason Republicans nominate moderates is that they don't have enough confidence in their own most deeply held beliefs—and this is not a technical problem; it is a moral problem.

Romney lost because he did two things that all technocratic pragmatists do: 1) He triangulated on fundamental moral issues and focused exclusively on what we might call "secular" issues: issues on which there is no fundamental disagreement among voters; and 2) He cast himself as a more capable administrator than his opponent.

To a moderate, an election is not about issues, it is about competence. An election is not about what the candidate thinks; it's about what he can do. Moderate pragmatists only want to talk about means, but they do not want to talk about ends. Democrats have the moral confidence to talk about both.

Republicans try to convince Americans that Republicans do agree with Americans; Democrats try to convince Americans that Americans should agree with Democrats.

This is why many Republicans emphasize economics and are squeamish about moral issues: Everyone wants a job, a higher salary, and lower inflation. These are ends about which there is no debate: The only thing at issue is the means by which these things can be brought about. But when you start arguing about whether a fetus is a human being deserving of legal protection, or whether marriage necessarily excludes a man marrying a man or a woman a woman, then all of a sudden you have crossed a line: the line between means and ends.

There is no technocratic calculus by which a moral issue can be resolved, and so it must be minimized, if not ignored altogether.

There is one issue in which these contrasting emphases can both be seen at play. Both parties have been willing to fight openly over the health care issue. But what to the Democrats is a moral issue—an issue about social justice involving fundamental human rights—is to Republicans an economic issue—one about facts and figures and technical feasibility.

The problem with pragmatism is that it isn't very useful—at least not in the political world. With the one exception of Clinton (who stands in a separate Machiavellian category altogether), Democrats don't run pragmatists; they run ideologues—people with an explicit moral agenda. Just look at this year's party conventions: The Republicans talked about who Romney was and what he could do; the Democrats talked about abortion and same sex marriage. The Republican's hid their views on controversial moral issues and lost; the Democrats put them front and center and won.

The irony is that, if you look at polls on these issues, they still slightly favor traditional marriage and the pro-life position. There is no reason for Republicans to run from them and every reason for Democrats to fear invoking them. And yet they do it anyway.

In this year's presidential race the abortion issue raised its head again and again thanks to Republican politicians who, ill-equipped to address it when asked, tripped all over themselves and lost their elections. Two seats in the United States Senate fell into Democratic hands yesterday for one reason and one reason only: the candidates were simply incapable of articulating moral issues.

The difference between the two parties is that there is a depth of moral commitment among Democratic leaders that is lacking among their Republican colleagues. The average Democratic activist will fight and die for nationalized health care, the "right" to abortion, and most of them now will spill blood over the "right" of gays to marry. Although Republicans will argue the economic feasibility of the nationalized health care, when asked about the right to life or traditional marriage you get qualifications a mile long.

Democrats go into battle with the intention to come back with their shield or on it. Republicans too often go into battle with their tails between their legs.

This was evidenced repeatedly throughout the campaign. While spokesmen for the Obama campaign championed the "pro-choice" position unapologetically, whenever a Romney spokesman was asked about the careless remarks of Todd Akin or Richard Mourdock—or on Romney's position on Roe v. Wade, they went into prevent defense. They dissimulated on the issue itself and gave all the reasons why Romney's stated position on abortion wouldn't make any practical difference. The "practical" result of this, of course, is that people begin to doubt your sincerity and question the depth of your convictions.

The obvious response on the abortion issue would have been to shoot right back and attack Obama's history of supporting partial birth abortion, a procedure in which a full-term baby is partially delivered and then, through an incision in the back of the head, has its brains sucked out. This is an easy and effective response for a person even moderately competent in basic moral discourse, but for the soulless Republican political operatives now deployed to defend their candidates, it is a form of articulation foreign to them.

Republicans have lost their moral voice. They have tried to occupy what they perceive to be the high ground of abstract economic competency, only to cede the much higher moral ground to their liberal adversaries. They have abandoned what Richard Weaver once called the "Office of Assertion," and have settled into the Seat of Sophistry.

Republicans either need to stand for what they claim to believe in or admit they don't believe in what they claim to stand for—things like the sanctity of life, the integrity of marriage, and larger moral well-being of Americans.

If they take the first course, they will remain a viable political party. If they take the second course, they will not only become politically irrelevant; they will have lost their political soul.

Are the roots of the Republican Party strictly economic?

Rudy Giuliani is telling Republicans who have criticized New York for legalizing same-sex "marriage" to stay away from the marriage issue and stick to economics, like good Republicans always have.

 “Stay out of it,” Giuliani said. “And I think we'd be a much more successful political party if we stuck to our economic, conservative roots and our idea of a strong, assertive America that is not embarrassed to be the leader of the world.”

The Republican Party? You mean the party founded in Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854 in order to oppose the expansion of slavery, the greatest social issue of the time? That Republican party? Staying away from social issues because it has always stuck to economic issues?

Rudy needs to review his own party's history--and then think about not saying stupid things like this from now on.

Why the political impetus is always to the left

I have not had much to say on the current election, mostly because, much as I love politics as a spectator sport, other things have interested me more. But I had a thought today about the current election situation that exemplifies the different way liberals and conservatives operate.

The accepted wisdom is that Democrats are more clannish and practice more party loyalty and that Republicans are more issues-oriented, sometimes resulting in long-running ideological feuds that damage the party. To a certain extent this is true. But there's an interesting wrinkle to this general thesis.

George F. Will has talked about the liberal "ratchet effect"--the idea that our culture moves left by increments, but never right, the long-term result being a significant leftward movement over time.

Why is this? I think I know.

The success of Democrats over the long term is illustrated by the current election. Democrats are getting hammered over the health care issue. Now you have to ask the question: did they know they were in for it when they voted for it? I think the congressmen who voted for it had to know that they were going to pay a price for their votes. But they voted for it anyway. And their leadership knew, as they bribed and cajoled their way to victory in the vote that the chances of their party being put out power was increased by doing so. They may not have known that it would be as bad as it has turned out (the continued economic crisis being the aggravating factor), but they had to know it was going to hurt.

But they also knew that, even if they were defeated at the polls, the legislation would never be fully reversed. A good part of it would be here to stay.

This is the difference between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans: liberal Democrats are willing to stick their necks out for their ideological agenda, knowing it will hurt them in the short run. Republicans are simply not willing to do this. Heck, their not even willing to do much on issues like same-sex marriage or abortion, where the public is on their side!

I can think of several times when liberal Democrats have forced through big, sweeping pieces of legislation they knew would hurt them in the next election cycle. In Kentucky, this happened in 1990 with education reform--a big, sweeping, unpopular measure with a huge tax increase that cost them lots of seats in the next election. They did it anyway.

When was the last time conservative Republicans stuck out their necks for a big, bold piece of legislation that pushed things in a conservative direction in the teeth of public opinion and for which they would have to take hits? I can't think of a single one. Even when conservative Republicans have opinion polls on their side, they have a bunker mentality. Liberal Democrats never have a bunker mentality, even when their agenda is unpopular.

A lot of Democrats will lose seats this election, but the health care legislation will never be repealed. It may be curtailed, but never repealed. Some of it will stay, and ratchet will move leftward just a little bit more. But there is never any ratcheting to the right because there is so little willingness to sacrifice for conservative ideas.

This is why the left will win in the end. It's all a matter of dedication and willingness to sacrifice for your ideas. Some have it, and some don't.

Abortion coverage was included in national Republican health plan

This is the kind of thing that doesn't instill much confidence in the national Republican Party.

Jindal in 2016

D. R. Tucker at Human Events laments that Bobby Jindal has taken himself out of the running for the Republican nomination in 2012, remarking that it is "difficult to imagine Jindal losing."

Look, I think Jindal is the best thing going for the GOP. He's young, smart, attractive, and a person of color. But Tucker is just plain naive on several counts:

1. To take yourself out of the running four years before an election means practically nothing. If circumstances change, Jindal could easily change his mind. In four years, people are going to have completely forgotten what Jindal said in 2008.
2. For Jindal to take himself out of the running now is a politically smart thing to do. There is virtually no downside to it for him. If Obama is popular in four years, Jindal keeps his powder dry and goes for the open seat in 2016 (I can't believe I'm talking about what could happen in 2016!). If Obama is unpopular, Jindal is still there, all that much more attractive as a candidate because he is apparently unavailable. In politics, being unavailable makes you all that more attractive.
3. My prediction (I feel the prophetic spirit coming upon me once again) is that Obama is very popular in 2012. One way or another, the Iraq situation is likely to be resolved, and the economy is bound to be better than it is now--and Obama will claim credit for it. That's the advantage of coming into office during an unpopular war and a bad economy: the baseline is so low, how can you fail?

Why the Republicans will lose in November

Nobody has come right out and said it, but the Republicans are going to lose in November for one very simple reason: they are divided among themselves on the most important issue in the election, the economy.

The bailout debate simply splintered the Republican Party. In my state of Kentucky, the six most prominent Republicans in the state are right down the middle: three-three, with the two senators, Jim Bunning and Mitch McConnell, finding themselves on opposite sides. This is going on around the country.

The split is not only the effect of confusion, it is the cause of confusion among the electorate, who are sensing that the Republican Party doesn't know what it is about. You simply can't win an election without a coherent message, and you can't have a coherent message without a coherent philosophy--and the Republican Party no longer has one. The Republican Party uses the image of Ronald Reagan the way Kentucky Fried Chicken uses the image of Colonel Sanders: not because they cook food the way he did (they don't), but because his image give the general impression that they do.

In the case of the bailout plan, a Republican president proposed the plan; on the other hand, a Democratic Congressional leadership helped promote it. On the one hand, the majority of rank and file House Republicans opposed it; on the other hand, the Republican nominee for president supported it. And both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates took the same position on the issue.

The only recipe here is for total electoral confusion, a confusion the Democrats benefit from because at least their consistent--consistently wrong, but consistent.

The Republicans had nothing politically to gain from supporting the bailout. Support for the plan just means that they are indistinguishable from the Democrats. They can talk all they want to about how the Democrats were responsible, but confused voters will still wonder why they both have the same solution.

Here's the chief problem for the Republicans: their chief domestic policy themes for decades have been fiscal restraint and free market economics. These were the positions that marked them off from their Democratic opponents and that brought them success with Ronald Reagan. But George W. Bush scuttled the first issue by massive increases in federal spending during his two terms in office, and McCain, although feigning support for fiscal restraint, has scuttled the second issue by supporting the bailout.

Republicans are left confused about what exactly they are supposed to stand for economically, and why they should vote for Republicans over Democrats. The Democrats on the other hand, with a few exceptions, they are united on the bailout bill. And why shouldn't they be? It is a pure big government solution--completely consistent with everything they have stood for for years.

How can the Republicans win when the chief economic crisis of our times (which crested, ironically, right in mid-presidential campaign) was resolved on liberal Democratic economic principles, and half of the party that supposedly stands on conservative principles joined arms with them?

The bad news for Fletcher is good

At the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna, I'm going to say the same thing about Sen. Jim Bunning's endorsement of gubernatorial candidate Rep. Anne Northup as I said about Northup's candidacy per se: namely, it's not bad, it's good for the Fletcher campaign--if it is handled right by Fletcher.

How often does a sitting governor get to run against the establishment?

Gov. Fletcher now has the opportunity to run against his own party's establishment (Northup, Bunning, McConnell) at a time when there is an anti-establishment sentiment among the electorate.

Should someone in the Fletcher campaign try to get Hal Rogers and the rest of Kentucky's congressional delegation to endorse Northup?

It's a thought.

If Northup's line-up includes only Washington big shots and Fletcher continues lining up state legislators and county judge-executives, Fletcher can portray his race as grass roots Kentucky vs. the Washington big shots (and the former Washington big shots, a.k.a. Northup)

Finally, Ernie Fletcher is getting good breaks. Ironically, they're coming in the form of bad news.