It has been almost 60 years since the birth of the modern American conservative movement.
Conservatives have won some electoral victories over those years: two Reagan landslides, the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994, and the Tea Party victories last election.
Yet, in terms of lasting policy changes, what have conservatives accomplished? What do we have to show for so many years of effort?
The answer is, unfortunately, not much.
The primary objective of conservatism has been to limit the size and scope of the government. By this standard, the movement is a near complete failure.
[…]
After more than a half-century, conservatives must re-evaluate everything, from short-term and long-term policy goals to electoral strategies and tactics. We cannot waste another 60 years without significant and permanent policy achievements. The country cannot afford it.
That bolding is mine.
I’m not going to disagree with Barrett: though conservatism / classical liberalism is the foundational ideology of the United States, the left’s march has been thorough and relentless — and conservatives, who threw their lot in with the GOP rather than separating off to bring in “Reagan Democrat”-types and form a classically liberal coalition party, have found little success in beating back this tide, mostly because as I’ve been arguing for a number of years now, the GOP establishment is, by nature, itself quite statist, though it believes in a slower rate of government growth than do leftist Democrats.
That is, they believe the ruling class shouldn’t rub it in when they work always and forever to expand their power at the expense of the liberty of the individual.
But be that as it may. The reason I highlighted Barrett’s breadth of “re-evaluation” suggestions is that he’s got that part entirely wrong: the policy goals of conservatives need not change, and in fact, changing policy goals reached by way of adherence to principles is something of a surrender. Too, worrying about “electoral strategies and tactics” is useless unless the strategies and tactics involve, first and foremost, a re-assertion of the principles that need always kind us.
Clever pragmatism and triangulation — straining for “moderates” and “independents” by playing the left’s games by their rules under their descriptions within their paradigms — has been a complete failure, and had Bush the elder followed the Reagan trajectory, the US may indeed have turned itself back around by now.
So once again, let me scream into the abyss: the way to turn the tides is to take back language. Through language, epistemology is adopted and instituted. Through language, what comes to be regarded as truth is determined. Through language, individual autonomy is either asserted or surrendered — and we’ve been surrendering that autonomy for at least 60 years.
Is it really just a coincidence that the rapid advances of the left have taken place at the very time our failure to guard the language has allowed for its institutional control by the forces of collectivism and, inevitably, tyranny?
From identity politics to political correctness to “diversity” to the hermeneutics of “textualism,” we’ve allowed the left to institutionalize a way of thinking that will always and inexorably move us leftward. This blog has been dedicated to pointing out how and why that’s been done — as well as how often many on the right not only adopt and legitimate the left’s linguistic calculus, but they’ve been conditioned to defend it, as well.
I can’t say it enough. I’m willing to explain and teach and convince and argue — even to my own personal and professional detriment (there are reasons beside my being an asshole that attempts have been made to so thoroughly marginalize me on the right, even after I proved myself as one of the better combatants against the online left); but the message just won’t seem to gain traction, and time is running out.
Throwing our lot in with the GOP establishment has been a mistake. Conservatives are soon going to either have to break with them, or die alongside them. That’s just the way it is.
(h/t JHo)
It’s no accident Melville made Billy Budd a tongue-tied stutterer.
The loss of the language to the left is an obvious tragedy, but having to re-frame every discussion correctly before engaging is distracting to the majority of the semi-literate population churned out by the public schools. I fear we are past the point where such a correction can be made (or at least made and won).
Imagine no oligarchiEEEEEEE… It’s easy if you try.
Imagine no corruptocracy. Really. Imagine an America unfettered by a dime’s worth of federal social anything. Imagine an utterly free market. Image a sound currency.
Imagine American pride and honor and self-sufficiency and scads and scads of private solutions to the problem of life.
What do you soon realize? That hundreds of trillions of dollars in debts, obligations, derivatives, and frauds to, by, and for the ruling class are circulating instead in your pockets and the pockets of your countrymen.
Which points out the fool in any Team R candidate arguing back against American One Party Marxism. See the real perspective? Its not how to keep another 5% of your wage on the good ship USSA because of how you voted POTUS.
It’s a fundamentally different way to perceive existence. And we’re not doing it. Ever. Team R is just playing a mild game of defense and there is a reason they are doing so.
We don’t have to play the re-frame game, Hrothgar. We need to do what they did and re-teach the basics of how language actually functions — while pointing out the dangers of using it the way iit’s currently being used. And I mean that we need to re-teach the right, so that they are in a position to think outside the left’s frames.
There’s a third option. Break the establishment.
But that means telling the people telling us that we have to support Romney because the country can’t survive four more years of Obama that a country stupid enough to reelect Obama doesn’t deserve to survive.
And if Romney can’t win without our support, why isn’t he courting us on our terms?
Personally, I think the best way to fight back is to go back to the basics: being better than the people keeping their head down because “It’ll stay this way forever.” Keep better care of yourself, your friends and family, and your house. And above all not pretending that liberals are “cooler” or “have a point.”
I myself gave up on a liberal friend last year who was “going to be a librarian.” These people are so lost that they’re just time wasters at this point.
And above all not pretending that liberals are “cooler” or “have a point.”
Word.
The only point they have is, “We ought to be in charge of everything,” and all their rhetoric is designed to obtain that end. Once you figure that out, you can stop with “Don’t they understand X?” and “That just doesn’t make sense!”
If these morons are in charge of the Conservative movement, then, yes, it’s a massive failure.
Two headlines currently up on Drudge tip the next line of assault:
“GALLUP: Americans’ Concerns About Obesity Soar, Surpass Smoking…”
and then this particularly concerning headline:
“Orszag: Summer Is Making Kids Dumber and Fatter…”
Better that these kids be performing national service where they can learn the New Way than doing fun stuff that makes them dumber and fatter.
How can we force you to understand? It’s for your own good. And for the children.
I Will Not Submit.
‘Pragmatic’ Republicans. They are as much to blame as the left. They don’t care about language, or the Republic; the country, probably. Keeping their fat arses on the comfy seats? Abserferkinlutely.
Exactly, Di. Every progressive point no longer has anything to do with actual fairness, logic, or even ideology. They don’t know how much money is sunk into teacher’s unions while allowing them to sit in rooms if they are found molesting kids, how much booze you can by on SNAP, that recycling is a ridiculously hard program to justify (especially if you factor in the water spent “washing” products before they’re tossed in the bin), or the F’ing fact that Brian Terry went up against drug lords we armed with his government approved slingshot. Honest Liberals would have taken to the streets once they realized that Obamacare just means hiring IRS agents to check if you have insurance.
It is now so bad that it’s not worth talking to liberals because they honestly don’t believe it could possibly be this crazy or corrupt “since they watch NBC every night.” Better to buy an extra shotgun.
Eh, rant over.
Better to buy
an extraanother shotgun.FTFY. No such thing as “extra.”
Or year round school, OCBill. Summer has become too much of a time for parents to deprogram kids from the ideological indoctrination of the school year. And that’s just not good. For the children.
It’s not just summer school, Jeff. There’s a reason the government wants “children” to attend grad school, run up a hundred grand in non-dischargeable debt, work 24 hours a week making cappuccino, live in the basement, and keep their parents’ insurance ’til they’re 26.
Of course, if they hadn’t given the indoctrinators the most powerful union in the world, they might still be able to get the programming done by age 17. It’s hard to find good help these days.
Which in my book makes them more culpable, morally speaking, than the left.
Ugh. That makes way too much since, Squid. At least less parents are going along with this “One glorious path to glorious future.”
Which in my book makes them more culpable, morally speaking, than the left.
I’ll second that.
Folks who forget to close their html tags should be dragged out into the parking lot and beaten by folks who don’t take kindly to folks who forget to close their html tags.
I have broken the blog myself, so who am I to point fingers?
I saw Rich Lowry on teevee last night and wanted to drag him out in the parking lot so my friends could beat him.
Somebody needs to smack Lowry on the nose with a rolled up nose paper until he learns not to shit where he eats, lest he end up like the two Davids.
Is nose paper the ad hoc cocaine delivery system?
I’d blame auto complete, but I managed to fuck that up all by my lonesome.
At least you didn’t break the html.
Hey, if you think you broke the html, take solace in the fact that you didn’t truly do it all on your own. Government was there to help you break that html!
Take heart George Zimmerman! You didn’t kill Trayvon Martin by yourself! The WHOLE NATION helped you pull that trigger including Angela Corey. So did Trayvon! It is what it is! Shut your brain down because you won’t need it anymore! From here on out it’s all Zen and doublethink!
Indeed! If Algore hadn’t invented the internet there’d be no HTML to break.
One important thing. We’ve kept the 2nd Amendment alive.
Granted, that’s mostly due the heavy lifting the NRA has performed over the years. But most of us who are NRA are also Conservative – Classical Liberal – Democrat ex-pats, since the far-Left has all but expunged the blue-dogs from the Democratic Party.
We, the NRA, also kept Al Gore out of office in 2000 (Tennessee’s 11 electoral votes were denied to Gore, because we beat him about the head and shoulders with proof of his broken-down fences). We’ve slowed this Republic’s decline considerably.
I’d say that if Alexis de Tocqueville could check us out now, he’d be writing that this little Republic has lasted much longer than he expected it would. We of the opposition to far-Left have tried our damndest to brake this thing.
The Second Amendment is hanging by a slender thread. It was only a 5-4 decision that kept the individual right to bear arms alive, and that was before Chief Justice Roberts found his voice as the New York Times’ representative on the Supreme Court.
That’s why, OCBill, that the NRA needs every new member it can wrangle.
Here, allow me. If everyone who owns a gun would join, keep pressure applied on bastards of both parties, then we might have a chance to keep that one slender hope alive.
Already a member.
Rich Lowry
Hear, hear.
I’m always up for a good beating.
It just got a shiny new lifetime member.
this should be fun
Obama switches off his teleprompter
I’ve been an NRA Life Member since the ’80s. Paid for it on the installment plan.
Not the one where you pay annual dues every year for the rest of your life — an actual installment plan they were offering back when a life membership was only $500.
Obama switches off his teleprompter
This may be true, but reporters will still be forced to report what was in the script, and to ignore Teh Won’s Bidenesque ad-libbed non sequiturs.
Well, not forced to. They’ll do it because they love Him, and want Him to look good and be happy, and because they are so well trained.
I thought they didn’t have any choice now that the higher ups need to get the okay from the campaign about what they are going to publish.
I don’t think I’d like to work for TASS.
I got my life membership a few years ago when they offered a discount on it.
I think I’d be insulted if somebody discounted a life membership for me. Worried, at the very least. I mean — what do they know that I don’t know?