Ripping the Republican Big Tent Apart

Fifty years ago the US conservative movement began in a fusion between Burkean conservatives and libertarian conservatives. In the late Sixties they were joined by the “mugged by reality” neoconservatives.

Then in the 1970s the Supreme Court created the Christian Right with Roe v. Wade and added social conservatives to the movement.

These different factions in the conservative movement have not always got along, but they have learned to live with each other and to respect each other’s agenda. The poster boy for this is Rush Limbaugh. Divorced several times, he is a success-oriented conservative; yet he is respectful towards social conservatives and he is pro-life.

Having learned to live with each over the years many of us were shocked when John McCain ran for president against the social conservatives in 2000. Why would anyone want to do that, we wondered? It’s become clear, in the years since, that McCain is a national security conservative only, and just doesn’t understand, and doesn’t want to understand the other factions of the movement.

The initial first tier candidates for 2008—Giuliani, Romney, Thompson—are all fusion candidates. They may target their appeal to one faction or another, but they do not try to split the conservative movement.

But insurgents like Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee are splitters. Ron Paul is trying to create a divide between libertarians and the rest of the conservative movement and Mike Huckabee is trying to create a divide between evangelical conservatives and the rest of the conservative movement. And then there is John McCain, who still wants to split off national security conservatives from the rest of the movement.

I’m rooting for one of the uniters to win. And I hope that all of the dividers fail. Our conservative movement needs to grow. It needs to be ready and welcoming when the next troop of Americans is cast out into the political wilderness by the liberal establishment.

The various wings of the movement have broadly similar goals and the particular concerns of each faction informs and inspires the others.

We don’t want no stinkin’ dividers.

Huckabee Sucks Up to Liberals

They say that presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, despite his aw-shucks manner is a true product of Arkansas politics—like Bill Clinton.

So it’s not surprising that in his upcoming article for Foreign Affairs magazine he says just what the liberal Council on Foreign Relations would want to hear.

The Bush administration’s arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad.

You could say that.  Or you could say that the Bush administration’s steadfastness and willingness to adapt when its policy had failed is the reason that we now see light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq.  In the last year the Sunni rejectionists seem to be abandoning revolutionary politics for politics-as-usual.  They have abandoned their alliance with Al Qaeda in Iraq and are working with the US and the Iraqi government.

Frankly, I have no time at all for second-guessers.  Any attempt to do something in this world—as opposed to sitting on the fence—is necessarily a catalog of mistakes.  Every business plan is invalidated the moment it is finished.  Every political campaign is a roller-coaster of “gaffes” and mistakes.  Every war is a parade of folly.

The question for every leader always is: shall we continue on the path we have begun, or is it time to change course?

If you were right to continue on course then the fence-sitters like Mike Huckabee say you are tenacious and courageous.  If you are wrong, then you have an “arrogant bunker mentality.”

But, in fact, the Bush administration has learned from its mistakes, and has changed course when it became clear that its policy wasn’t working.

So what do you call that?

Hewitt Peels a Brokaw

Radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt is a master of the interview. His particular skill is painting a picture of a subject’s political views when the subject refuses to be categorized.

No, they say, in answer to the question about voting for Reagan or Bush. I don’t tell who I voted for. So Hewitt spends the next 30 minutes—or 60 minutes—painting an exact picture of the subject’s world view. Just so his listeners will know.

Last week Hugh Hewitt interviewed Tom Brokaw on his book Boom! Voices of the Sixties. For Hewitt, the book was predominantly about the Left Sixties, and it left out the story of the Un-sixties Sixties. But Tom Brokaw wan’t about to admit that.

No, the fact that the subjects in the book were 55-12 left of center to right of center didn’t mean anything. Anyway, Hewitt was stereotyping people.

Eventually, Hewitt asked about Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago.

HH: Right. One of the best portraits in here, because I think it’s so jarring given who he is and what he believes, is Richard Daley, current mayor of Chicago. He’s a Boomer, his son’s in the military, his dad was at ’68, and he’s frustrated with environmentalists, because they won’t let him update his airport.



TB: Right.



HH: It’s a fascinating portrait…



TB: And does he come down on the left of center?



HH: He’s left of center. Sure he is. He’s a Democrat activist…



TB: He’s a centrist. He’s a centrist. The way he runs Chicago is as a centrist.



HH: Well, of course the way he runs Chicago. But the way he’ll get Hillary the votes that she needs to win Illinois is nothing got to do with the center, is it?

You can’t do it any better than that. Sure, Dick Daley in Chicago governs as far to the right as he can. Why wouldn’t he? He wants Chicago to prosper. But when it comes to practical politics he’s a Democrat and that means electing whatever the Democrats nominate.

When you carry water for the left that means you belong on the left. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just nice to get it out in the open and not pretend.

What is the Meaning of Change?

When the Democrats talk about "Change," what do they mean? Mark Steyn wondered about that for the benefit of his readers. It’s puzzling, because, as he writes:

The Democrats are the party of stasis: on affirmative action, there can be no change; on abortion absolutism, there can be no change; even on a less cobwebbed shibboleth such as the Iraq war, there can be no change

The other day Barack Obama broke with the program and proposed on Social Security

just the teensy-weensiest little tweakette of a change to keep the wheels from coming off the entitlement bus, and immediately he got clobbered by Paul Krugman and Democrat activists as a pathetic stooge for the heartless right’s plans to get rid of the whole racket.

After all, if you are talking about Real Change, you must be talking about making a real course correction in the nation’s politics. At least that’s what I would think it would mean.

Obama’s current slogan is “Change You Can Believe In.” What exactly does that mean? Or what is it intended to mean to Democratic primary voters?

Obviously, it can mean only one thing to the Democratic rank-and-file. To them, “Change” means another government program. It means the whole progressive ball of wax, finally delivering on affordable everything. Or, as Steyn says, better than I:

more entitlements, more regulation, more incremental government annexation of health care

Not to mention more “choice” and wonders of healing from embryonic stem cells.

There’s just one problem with all this, according to Star Parker. “Life is not a defined benefit.”

Michael Novak for Romney

Readers of RMC will know that Michael Novak is one of our RMC Chappies.  That’s because of his book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and its notion of the Greater Separation of Powers.

So when Michael Novak comes out for Mitt Romney, we listen. He says he’s been privately for Romney for some time but the egregious bigotry of Mike Huckabee forced him to go public.  And he argues from the old biblical injunction “By their fruits you shall know them.”

[E]very one of the Mormons I have ever worked with, beginning with a great graduate assistant for one of my classes at Stanford in about 1967, have been the most well-mannered, inquisitive, competent, kind and thoughtful people I know.

Me too.  And nothing has revolted me more in this campaign season than the anti-Mormon bigotry of Mike Huckabee.

Michael Novak’s notion of the Greater Separation of Powers proposes that we think of democratic capitalism as a society of three sectors: the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

In his view these sectors should be free and differentiated like the three branches of government.  They should each have power and each use their power to jealously limit the powers of the other sectors.  It’s a powerful concept, taking the separation of powers concept from government to the wider society.

That brings us to the signature sound bite of British Conservative Party leader David Cameron: There is such a thing as Society; it’s just not the same as the State.

Because the State means the political sector takes over and totally dominates the other sectors.  But conservatives believe in a distribution of power among the various sectors of society.

Can Obama Really Solve Everything?

Many conservatives have been annoyed by the intrasigence of Democrats during the Bush years. There’s no doubt it’s been effective and deflected Republicans from overdue reforms of the welfare state.

But the Dems have come to believe in a dangerous illusion that as Jonah Goldberg puts it:

If only Democrats ran things, there’d be no war, our allies would love us, global warming would be brought to heel, and we would have universal health care, happily married gay neighbors and embryonic stem cells for everybody.

If only. Up to now Dems thought they would see Happy Days are Here Again with Hillary Clinton. Now it’s beginning to look more and more like Sen. Obama.

But the idea that returning Democrats to power is going to change things is starting to die an agonizing death.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said it best himself in Monday’s Roll Call: “Have we stopped the war in Iraq? No. Have we gotten health care? No. Have we improved education? No. But we have been able to do what we’ve done. We’ve done a lot of things.”

Yes, and a lot of the things done were pretty shabby.

The truth is, as Rush Limbaugh says, that Democrats are calling plays out of a 30 year-old playbook. Their ideas, for withdrawal from Iraq, for an intensification of government intervention in health care, don’t really move the country forwards.

And once they return to the White House, people will start to notice.

If that is what it takes to prepare the American people for genuine reform, then so be it.

We Interrupt This Message

The shocking thing about the actions of New Life Church member Jeanne Assam’s takedown of assassin Matthew Murray is the break with the narrative.

There we were, worrying about “hate speech” and the NIE assessment, whether Hillary Clinton is slipping in the race for the presidency, and listening respectfully to all the important talking heads when suddenly the story changed.

Instead of the usual liberal narrative about “hate” we had a true hater knocking off Christians in Colorado. And all of a sudden a woman takes him down—with a gun.

There was another security guard at the church with a gun, but he was dithering. Assam was a trained police officer. So she just kicked in her police training. She ran towards the gunman, shooting as she went.

Then she appeared at a press conference and talked about God’s Will.

It’s a slice of life without your usual liberal suspects, and we are not used to that.

The shocking thing about the whole incident is listening to the different world view. Said Assam at her press conference:

"God was with me. I didn’t think for a minute to run away. God guided me and protected me.


"It seemed like it was me, the gunman, and God."

Yes, we usually try to keep that sort of thing out of the newspapers. But we are used to the rhetoric of the gunman, Matthew Murray:

"You Christians brought this on yourselves," Murray wrote, [on a website]. "All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you ... as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world."

Talking about God on TV. That’s controversial in today’s America. Blaming Christians for all the world’s problems. Why that’s what they teach in school.