Perri Nelson's Website 

Have conservatives learned nothing?

As conservative outrage against the illegal-alien-amnesty-act of 2007 continues unabated I'm noticing a disturbing trend. I'm seeing more and more calls to cut funding from the GOP. I have to ask, did we learn nothing at all in 2006?

Consider for a moment a few facts. In national elections the chances of someone outside the two major political parties winning is pretty slim. Sure Joe Lieberman did it in his Senate race, but he had the big advantage of being the incumbent and having name recognition. Consider him to be the exception that proves the rule.

Of the two major political parties, the most conservative by far is the Republican party. Finding a truly conservative member of the Democratic party is harder than finding a needle in a haystack. When a Democrat speaks of the mainstream, they almost invariably are talking left of center. When a Democrat talks of bipartisanship they invariably mean that conservative Republicans must abandon their principles and "move toward the center", a move that can only be to the left.

The Democratic party never "moves to the center". The Democratic party seldom, if ever, works in a bipartisan way with Republicans by adopting conservative principles.

I'm well aware of the fact that the Republican party has a large number of liberal and "so-called" moderate members. I'm well aware of the fact that many incumbent Republican legislators seem more interested in pleasing the press, and by extension the left than in standing up for conservative values. Even so, I see no Democratic legislators that you could call "mavericks". They're all liberal, and none would stand up for conservative values.

Not even Joe Lieberman. Sure, he's a hawk when it comes to the war on terror. Not all Democrats are so poisoned by "Bush Derangement Syndrome" that they'll compromise national security just to get back at a Republican administration. But they're all liberals when it comes to domestic policy.

In November of 2006, conservative voters demonstrated their pique with the Republican party's intransigence. The Republican controlled Congress turned out one of the worst possible big-government sessions. Big government entitlement programs expanded at a rate never seen under Republican control.

The Democratic party machine saw an opportunity and they took it. They ran young candidates on a "conservative" platform and took away seats from more "liberal" Republicans.  The result was the loss of both houses of Congress by the Republicans.

I said then that while conservative voters seemed to think it was a good idea to teach the Republican party a lesson that we were all going to get schooled. It didn't take to long to prove me right. From the moment the Democrats took power they stepped up their campaign to lose the war on terror. All of the new "conservative" Democrats soon were taught to toe the party line.

For conservatives, nothing good has come of our fit of pique last November. Cutting off funding for the GOP in the middle of a national campaign in another fit of pique won't do us much good either. It's a sad state of affairs that we must choose the lesser of two evils when we go to the polls, but conservative politics has been facing that choice for over 150 years.

Every time we try to teach politicians a lesson it has resulted in a bigger leftward slide. Don't you think it's time we started fielding true conservative candidates? Maybe we should start paying more attention in the primaries. Maybe we should vote our incumbent Republican legislators out at primary time, rather than waiting for the general election to do it.

Instead of cutting off funding to the party, maybe we should donate to conservative Republican candidates. If we can find any.

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David responded with:

"Finding a truly conservative member of the Democratic party is harder than finding a needle in a haystack.... "

And nearly as hard is finding a conservative in the Republican't ranks. Frankly, the "center" of politics is so far to the "left" (N.B.--Pournelle's Political Axes would be more informative than "left-right/liberal-conservative" but that's another day's comment... :-)) that the "far right" is now no longer truly conservative but simply "something else" that's still Big Brother oriented.... *sigh*

Sure, there are conservatives left in Republican ranks, but perhaps only two at the national level--and neither one has a chance in a presidential race, let alone affecting Congress substantively.

So, are politics to be solely the realm of pragmatism? If so, we are doomed, given pragmatism's dismal record of endless unintended (being generous here) consequences.

Perri Nelson responded with:

If we must slide ever leftward, which seems to be our only choice in these times, then lets do it as slowly as possible.

We really do need a conservative revolution again. Conservatives seem to thrive on inertia rather than activism. Without a change there we are doomed.

That's why I closed the post with a call to find conservative candidates wherever possible. If we can slowly drag the Republican party back to the right we have a chance.

It's either that or form a third party. The history of that particular path though is pretty discouraging.