Monday, October 23, 2006
Bush not conservative enough? Ha!
Michael Domino, a law professor at Prawfsblawg, suggests that Republicans may lose because they are insufficiently conservative. My response follows:
"Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who. without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President." Walter Lippmann, 1932 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,743040,00.html
Democrats do have a program, but when the opposition is collapsing at the seams, you don't focus on your platform too much. So it was for FDR with Hoover, and so it is with the Democrats and the Rubber Stamp Republicans.
It also seems to me that your post is a soft version of a prevalent spin that has been emerging: that Bush and the Republican Congress do not represent a real conservativism. Of course nothing could be farther from the truth. The hallmarks of Bush's administration and his Congressional enablers have been contempt for the responsibilities of governance, blind faith in the powers of the market, efforts at erosion of the wall between church and state, muscular militarism, what if you're unkind you'd call bigotry, if you're a bit more gentle, a socially conservative outlook, nativism, and pillorying of ideological opponents as unpatriotic.
The "far Left" are not the ones who have come to loathe this administration's utterly failed policies. It's a supermajority of 63-67% who have turned on its incompetence and foolishness. Read the polls. There are not enough people in this country who subscribe to the conservativism that the Bush Administration allegedly should be upholding.
The failures of this Administration have not come from its betrayal of some hidden, inscrutable reservoir of conservative virtue. They have sprung from that very poisoned font. Conservatism is the ideology that failed. Go back to the drawing board, readapt, as conservatives did when they renounced their racist heritage, and perhaps after another time in the wilderness, conservatives will once again be viable.
"Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who. without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President." Walter Lippmann, 1932 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,743040,00.html
Democrats do have a program, but when the opposition is collapsing at the seams, you don't focus on your platform too much. So it was for FDR with Hoover, and so it is with the Democrats and the Rubber Stamp Republicans.
It also seems to me that your post is a soft version of a prevalent spin that has been emerging: that Bush and the Republican Congress do not represent a real conservativism. Of course nothing could be farther from the truth. The hallmarks of Bush's administration and his Congressional enablers have been contempt for the responsibilities of governance, blind faith in the powers of the market, efforts at erosion of the wall between church and state, muscular militarism, what if you're unkind you'd call bigotry, if you're a bit more gentle, a socially conservative outlook, nativism, and pillorying of ideological opponents as unpatriotic.
The "far Left" are not the ones who have come to loathe this administration's utterly failed policies. It's a supermajority of 63-67% who have turned on its incompetence and foolishness. Read the polls. There are not enough people in this country who subscribe to the conservativism that the Bush Administration allegedly should be upholding.
The failures of this Administration have not come from its betrayal of some hidden, inscrutable reservoir of conservative virtue. They have sprung from that very poisoned font. Conservatism is the ideology that failed. Go back to the drawing board, readapt, as conservatives did when they renounced their racist heritage, and perhaps after another time in the wilderness, conservatives will once again be viable.
