Sunday, May 27, 2012
Sunday Question for Conservatives
What's your reaction to the string of defectors from the GOP? If you disagree with them: why does this seem to keep happening, if they're wrong? If you agree with them (that is, in their shared claim that they are still in fact conservative but that there's something wrong with the Republican Party right now), do you think they should be admired, or should they have acted differently?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
"If you disagree with them: why does this seem to keep happening, if they're wrong?"
ReplyDeleteReps don't care if they "lose" a few pundits if (against all demographic expectations) they stay competitive in national politics.
Sullivan posted about Palin's womb and genetic swabs for about a year, blogs endlessly about the circumcision conspiracy (Jewwwwsss!) and was wrong and obnoxious on Iraq. Good riddance.
Frum is the quintessential neo-con. Progressive, wealthy, and distracted. He paired with Reps for a few wars to export democracy to the part of the world that interests him most. His bloggingheads with Mark Schmitt wherein he screeched about Mark's disgust for Giuliani's 9-11 anniversary monkey show was him at his most Frum. Now he's devolving into a Progressive. Good riddance.
Replaced by people like Breitbart, Stacy McCain, and a bunch of pjmedia types: capitalists who recognize that American liberals are (at best) Fabian Socialists who think Andre Carson is peachy.
Just an observation on foundry's perceptive post (by a non-conservative): I am not sure that adding Breitbarts and Stacys and PJMs is winning the trade. They are preaching to the converted. It's not a group with ideas.
ReplyDeletePeople aren't usually converted by ideas or arguments. Mostly, they aren't even willing to talk about things they really disagree about, like the way liberals refuse to talk about how Asians and Jews are wealthier than gentile whites and what that implies about "inequality," how odd the federal definition and treatment of Hispanics is, and whether it makes sense to not censure crazy racists like Andre Carson. There can be no conversion because there will never be a conversation about difficult things.
DeleteYou bring a raw gemstone to perfection by cutting away the superfluous bits that mar its appeal.
ReplyDeleteIANAC, but I think the more interesting question (no doubt conservatives miss David Frum about as much as I miss Mickey Kaus) is, do they think the party is stronger or weaker by possibly sacrificing numbers in favor of greater agreement and commitment?
ReplyDeleteI think they should be admired when they oppose positions taken by GOP politicians like Buchanan on Iraq and Bartlett on the budget. I do not admire them when it is about a question of style from non elected people and organizations. I agree that the Heartland ad was stupid but most people have never even heard of the outfit. Is the left any better when it includes a leader who claimed preferential treatment for being 1/32 Indian and people who were eager to condemn Zimmerman before a trial?
ReplyDeleteWith the current media there are nuts and cranks across the spectrum. Anyone who wants to be in a movement with only high minded types will be in a small group.
I don't think much of Breibert but I don't think people like him were responsible for the disasters of the Bush years. The failures of Bush were due to bad policies like Iraq and supply side economics. These policies were not created by Rush Limbaugh. The publications Fumento wrote for like the WSJ, TWS and NR played a bigger role in pushing for the Iraq war. When Fumento writes about the old right versus the new right he is not making much sense since the political positions of the two groups are the same.
I want to add to the pushback. It seems that liberals always think that the Republicans of yesteryear were much more civil and admirable than the Republicans of today.
ReplyDeleteThe party is just a coalition of different voting groups, and the coalition sometimes changes, sometimes grows and sometimes shrinks. Perhaps the Republican party is in the middle of some kind of realignment. Does anyone remember Zell Miller?
JB said: "which is one of the reasons why I’m not sure Sullivan should be in the group; his flip was over Iraq, not over the conservative movement as such".
ReplyDeleteSullivan's flip wasn't over Iraq, it was over gay marriage. He was still an Iraq hawk up to the day that Bush came out for a federal marriage amendment.
These are pretty minor defections from relatively unimportant people who never really believed in low taxes and a stingy welfare state, which is at the heart of today's Republican Party ideology. The most important policy intellectuals in the Republican Party are the free market economists, and if the Cowen's and Mankiw's were turning against the Republican Party, I would be worried. However, that is not happening. The Republican Party just had the greatest House gain in 2010 that either party has had since 1948, took control of the majority of state legislatures, and nominated a Presidential candidate in 2012 who is running nearly even in the polls with President Obama. So the Republican Party looks pretty healthy to me.
ReplyDeleteNot a conservative, but:
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure. Yes, it seems like more conservative "intellectuals" are departing the ranks of the GOP, but it's not an exodus. The Dems experienced an exodus in the 1970s-1990s of the conservative wing, and that was a much larger exodus.
Plus, let's not forget that neocons are in no small part made up of former liberals who defected both ideologically AND in partisanship.
So, all that adds up to a lot of smoke, from many potential sources. So, unless we're in that Beltway circle, I really don't think many of us, liberal or conservative, can speak to it that well.
And the vast majority of conservative commentators dedicated to offering more intellectual justifications and elaborations of positions have not rejected the GOP. They, many of them younger, seem to simply be biding their time, cultivating lower profile venues of discussion, and sometimes registering intra-party dissatisfaction but not in any serious concerted way aimed at shocking or overhauling the party. Has there been a string of defections suggesting a growing trend? Or has there actually been a pervasive strategy of "let's sit tight" with some occasional exceptions, usually by figures who always had notably composite ideological profiles, such as Frum and Sullivan?
Delete