It has been a rough patch for conservatives of late, hasn’t it? The media, more or less in Obama’s pocket, has been smashing at conservatives and touting “crisis” after “crisis” – and lauding Obama for his handling of each “crisis”. The left-leaning bloggers have cheerfully parroted whatever the White House orders them to. Obama and the Democrats are still running against George W. Bush – despite the fact that he was not running in the last election at all.
We conservatives are being lectured (by the Obama-favoring) media that we have to be more moderate or we are doomed. We are routinely told our movement is over, we are relics, we are outmoded. We are trying to climb mountains.
I had missed this column by Mark Steyn, published last week. He points out that we conservatives have always been climbing mountains.
In fact, the GOP’s tent has many poles: It has social conservatives, libertarians, fiscal conservatives, national-security hawks. These groups do not always agree: The so-cons resent the libertarians’ insouciance on gay marriage and abortion. The libertarians don’t get the warhawks’ obsession with thankless nation-building in Islamist hellholes. A lot of the hawks can’t see why the fiscal cons are so hung up on footling matters like bloated government spending at a time of war. It requires a lot of effort to align these various poles sufficiently to hold up the big tent. And by the 2006 electoral cycle, between the money-no-object Congress at home and a war that seemed to have dwindled down to an endless half-hearted semicolonial policing operation, the GOP poles were tilting badly. The Republican coalition is like a permanent loveless marriage: There are bad times and worse times. And, while social conservatism and libertarianism can be principled to a fault, the vagaries of electoral politics mean they often wind up being represented in office by either unprincipled opportunists like Arlen Specter or unprincipled squishes like Lincoln Chafee.
Meanwhile, over in the other tent, they celebrate diversity with ruthless singlemindedness: in the Democrat parade, whatever your bugbear government is the answer. Government is the means, government is the end, government is the whole magilla. That gives them a unity of purpose the GOP can never match.
And yet and yet… Last November, even with the GOP’s fiscal profligacy, even with the financial sector’s “October surprise,” even with a cranky old coot of a nominee unable to articulate any rationale for his candidacy or even string together a coherent thought on the economy, even with a running mate subjected to brutal character assassination in nothing flat, even running against a charming, charismatic media darling of historic significance, even facing the natural cycle of a two-party system the washed-up loser no-hoper side managed to get 46 percent of the vote.
OK, it’s not 51 percent. But still: Obama’s 53 percent isn’t a big transformative landslide just because he behaves as if it is.
We Conservatives are always climbing mountains. We do not always agree with one another on details or issues. But we do hold certain core principles. On the details, we can and should be able to agree to disagree.
I see signs that are hopeful. But we have to not cave in and take the easy path.
Chin up. There’s a mountain to climb.
(Do go over and read the entire piece by Steyn. Well worth the trip.)
