[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
Opinions/Editorials Title: Rebuilding a Conservative Movement I The trouble with the donor class, by and large, is that it is resistant to change because it doesn't want to change. The Democratic and Republican donor classes donate for their business interests, but the Democratic donor class has a radical edge. Groups like the Democracy Alliance want a fundamental transformation of the country. And they understand how they can make money off that. There are too many Republican single issue donors who are fairly liberal on everything outside that issue. And there are too many big business interests and financial folks who live in major cities and only differ from liberals in their economic policy. The trouble with fiscally conservative and socially liberal is that the left is not a buffet. You don't get to pick a combo identity. Fiscally liberal follows socially liberal as day follows night. All those single people, their babies need assorted government benefits. No amount of lectures on "liberty" will change that. Austrian economics is never going to displace food stamps for the socially insecure. A lot of the Republican donor class would like to have its cake and eat it too. It wants the fun of a liberal society without having to pay the bill. It wants cheap Third World labor without wanting to cover their health care, the school taxes and all the other social welfare goodies. But it doesn't work that way. There's no free ride. Yes, they can move to a township where the property taxes are killer, and dump their pool guy and tree trimmer and maid in some city to live in housing projects at the expense of that city's shrinking middle class and working class. And it can work for a while, until all those cheap laborers get community organized and the organizers take over the city. And then the state. And then there are housing projects in the township, everyone is plugged into the same statewide school tax scheme and the left runs everything and taxes everything. The wealthier members of the donor class can outrun this process longer. Or just live with it while funding groups that promote "Liberty", the way the Koch Brothers do, but the bill always comes due. You can't outrun the political implications of poverty in a democracy. And you can't stop those political trends without addressing the social failures that cause them. A socially liberal society will become politically and economically liberal. Importing Third World labor also imports Third World politics, which veer between Marxism and Fascism all the way to the Islamic Jihad. Everything is connected. You can't choose one without the other. We're not going to have some libertarian utopia in which everyone gets high and lives in communes, but doesn't bother with regulations and taxes. The closest thing you can find to that is Africa. Nor are we going to be able to import tens of millions of people from countries where working class politics is Marxist without mainstreaming Marxism as a political solution in major cities across America. People are not divisible that way. Human society is not a machine you can break down. The left has fundamentally changed America. Much of the donor class hesitates to recognize this or prefers to believe that it can isolate the bad changes from the good changes. It doesn't work that way. Getting the kind of fiscal conservatism that a lot of the donor class wants requires making fundamental changes to the country. You can't just tinker with economic regulations in a country where schoolchildren are taught to demand taxes on plastic bags to save the planet or where a sizable portion of the population is dependent on the government. Those tactics can rack up ALEC victories while losing the war. Fiscal conservatism requires a self-reliant population that believes in the value of honesty and hard work. Those are not compatible with social liberalism or casual Marxism. Individually, yes. It's possible to make money while being a leftist. But spread across a large population with different classes and races, those individual quirks will not be replicated. And you can't create that population with slogans. You have to be able to shape national values, not just economic policy. That's the hard truth. There are no single issue solutions. At best there are single issue stopgaps. But the left is not a single issue organization. It has narrowed down most of its disagreements and combined its deck of agendas. Its coalition supports a large range of programs from across the deck. It's still possible to be a pro-abortion Republican, but the political representation of pro-life Democrats is disappearing. You can be a Republican who supports the Muslim Brotherhood, but a Democrat who says anything too critical about Islam has a limited future in his party at any national level. The same is true across the spectrum. Kim Davis is a Democrat. How much of a future do Democrats opposed to gay marriage have? Meanwhile it's possible to be a pro-gay marriage Republican. The Republican "big tent" is more a symptom of ideological disarray, as we've seen in this primary season, by a party that doesn't really know what it believes, than of tolerance. But the left has taken over the Democratic Party and made its agendas into the only acceptable ones. There are still some national Democrats hedging weakly on gun control and environmentalism, but they're going to be purged. Their party will abandon them and Republicans will squeeze them out. A lot of the donor class is really seeking an accommodation with the left. The election was warped when the Koch brothers decided to find common ground with the ACLU on freeing drug dealers. They dragged some good candidates in with them and down with them destroying their credibility on key issues. You can't have an accommodation with the left. The left isn't seeking a compromise. It wants it all. The left has to be fought all the way or surrendered to all the way. There's no middle ground here regardless of what philosophical objections are introduced, because that is what the left is doing. It's easily observable just in Obama's two terms. The left has defined the terms of battle. And its terms are total control over everything. You can't be pro-life and pro-Obama. You can't be pro-business and pro-Obama. You can't be pro-Israel and pro-Obama. You can't be fiscally conservative and pro-Obama. You can't be socially conservative and pro-Obama. You can't be anything less than full leftist and pro-Obama. The left has to be fought totally or not at all. Single issues can be important and it's good for people to pick one or two things to focus on, but that has to come with the understanding that there can be no accommodation with it in any other area. An organization fighting gun control is doing important work, but its backers should never fall under the illusion that the 2nd amendment can be maintained if the left wins on all the other fronts. As Benjamin Franklin said, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately". The quote is true today in all its implications as it was then. We must have a conservative movement that is united in a common front or we will be dragged down one by one. There will be no conservative issue islands left to stand on if the red tide comes in. The final point is that it is not enough to resist. That's just delaying the inevitable. Even the strongest resistance can be worn away with time. If the left can't win directly, it focuses on the next generation. If cultural barriers are in the way, it goes for population resettlement, as it's doing in parts of this country and Europe. There is no such thing as an impregnable issue island. Winning means pushing forward. Winning means advocating for change, not just fighting to keep what we have. Winning means thinking about the sort of free society that we want. Winning means having a vision to build, not just resist. Winning means advancing forward. To do that, we have to accept that fundamental change is necessary. Right now we're fighting a losing battle. We're trying to keep the tide out, when we must become the tide. Poster Comment: Money quote: You can't be pro-life and pro-Obama. You can't be pro-business and pro-Obama. You can't be pro-Israel and pro-Obama. You can't be fiscally conservative and pro-Obama. You can't be socially conservative and pro-Obama. You can't be anything less than full leftist and pro-Obama. The left has to be fought totally or not at all. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top Page Up Full Thread Page Down Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 8.
#1. To: Rufus T Firefly (#0)
The left has to be fought totally or not at all. Well, if that's the agenda, then you cannot win as the right. Pro-life is a moral necessity. Right now there is no pro-life party either. Life begins at conception. Anything that says otherwise is a lie. That means that there cannot be a RAPE EXCEPTION. To abort the baby born of rape is to commit premeditated murder. That's just a fact, and there can be no compromise on it. Now, if you take that correct and true stance, you have to abandon fiscal conservatism, and here is why: 2 million babies, 75-80% of them poor, are aborted in America every year. Rape accounts for practically none of them. Good old red-blooded recreational sex is the cause. And you cannot legislate against THAT or make it stop. People are gonna do it, sin or not, and contraception is gonna fail. Right now, it fails (or is ignored) about 2 million times every year, and about 1.6 million of those times, the baby that is conceived is conceived in the womb of a woman who will most certainly need social welfare to raise that child. So, if we do the right thing on abortion, we will increase the social welfare state by 1.6 million souls per year, year after years. The school systems will have to get bigger, the housing projects will have to get bigger. You have a choice: be pro-life, and accept a LARGER social welfare state, or be pro-choice (which is to say, a murderer) and keep costs down. The choice that does not exist is the make-believe of the right: no abortion AND smaller social expenditures. That is ABSURD. it's ridiculous. It's physically IMPOSSIBLE. And it will never happen. Pro-business is fine, BUT AGAIN if you are pro-life, that MEANS a LARGER social welfare state, so UNLESS you CUT SOMETHING ELSE (namely, the military) you are going to have to increase taxes. And that's not business friendly. A large military and military intervention plus pro-life plus lower expenditures is fantasy land stuff. It is impossible. Which brings is to the "pro-Israel" part. 50% of our foreign aid budget goes to Israel. Why, exactly, is it in the US national interest to pour such money into a white colony in the Middle East? How is that in any way in AMERICAN national interest? It certainly isn't CHRISTIAN. Jesus doomed ancient Israel and God destroyed it for good. This thing that calls itself "Israel" is a white European ethnic enclave carved out of Arab land because of white guilt over what happened to the Jews in World War II. It would have made a great deal more sense to give the Jews Bavaria and deport all of the Germans from that province, expropriating everything as punishment, and then requiring every European state that shipped Jews to the camps to provide financial aid for a generation. That would have been justice. Creating a European colony in the Middle East that has to be propped up forever by American taxpayers and American armies is ridiculous, and it is ridiculous that Americans permit it. If you're going to be pro-life and stop abortion, you cannot pay for the large expansion of social welfare that will be required and ALSO maintain a world military empire with half of the foreign aid budget going to Israel. if you're going to be pro-life, you are going to have to cut off Israel. The article concludes that the Left has to be fought totally, or not at all. The problem is that if you're going to be pro-life, you cannot simultaneously be fiscally conservative. Pro-life is by its nature socially conservative. And if you are going to take the proper stance on life, that means that you have to start formally teaching sexual morality. So, you have to be socially conservative or you will break the bank. But that will not be enough, because you cannot impose harsh punishment for sexual liberty - the nation will never allow it. Which means that pro-life inevitably leads to a permanent expansion of the social welfare state. To be socially conservative, if pro-life is to be included in that, you have to be fiscally liberal when it comes to the social welfare state - because all of those babies have to eat - and even then the military empire cannot be sustained with a full-on pro-life agenda. For American babies to live, the American empire, and huge American aid to Israel, has to die. Socially conservative, fiscally liberal, and pacificistic is the only thing that will actually WORK, if pro- life is part of the socially conservative aspect. And if pro-life is not part of social conservatism, then that form of social conservatism is an evil sham that should lose anyway. These are hard truths. American conservatives have to face them.
I agree. That train left the station a couple of decades ago. Here's a refresher: THE RISE AND FALL OF GREAT CIVILIZATIONS From Apathy to Dependence to Slavery 1. From bondage to spiritual faith, There's room to quibble, but I'd say we're at "7", entering into "8".
ping to 7
There are no replies to Comment # 8. End Trace Mode for Comment # 8.
Top Page Up Full Thread Page Down Bottom/Latest |
[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
|