Why Conservatives Have Finally Lost Their Sense Of Solidarity And Purpose
The ol' Rooster has come home to roost. I saw this coming in 1992 when I finally left the Republican Party for good. The hypocrisy was just overwhelming.
Washington Post Writers Group
"Whose Side Are You On, Comrade"
by E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Why conservatives have finally lost their sense of solidarity and purpose.
Post Date October 24, 2008
WASHINGTON--Conservatives are at each other's throats, and here's what's revealing about how divided they are: The critics of John McCain and the critics of Sarah Palin represent entirely different camps.
Skeptical social conservatives are precisely the people McCain was trying to mollify by picking Palin as his running mate. These include the faithful of the religious right who remember McCain as their enemy in 2000, and parts of the gun crowd who always saw McCain as soft on their issues.
That McCain felt a need to make such an outlandishly risky choice speaks to how insecure his hold was on the core Republican vote. A candidate is supposed to rally the base during the primaries and reach out to the middle at election time. McCain got it backward, and it's hurting him.
A Pew Research Center survey this week found that among political independents, Palin's unfavorable rating has almost doubled since mid-September, from 27 percent to 50 percent. Whatever enthusiasm Palin inspired among conservative ideologues is more than offset by middle-of-the road defections..................................
Yet the pro-Palin right is still impatient with McCain for not being tough enough--as if he has not run one of the most negative campaigns in recent history. This camp believes that if McCain only shouted the names "Bill Ayers" and "Jeremiah Wright" at the top of his lungs, the whole election would turn around............................................ ............
For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against "liberal elitists" and "leftist intellectuals." Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.
The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity--and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.
And then there is George W. Bush. Conservatives once hailed him for creating an enduring majority on behalf of their cause. Now, they cast him as the goat in their story of decline.
The conservative critique of Bush is a familiar rant against his advocacy of big government and huge deficits--now supplemented by a horror over his embrace of actual socialism with the partial nationalization of big banks. And, yes, a fair number of conservatives were never wild about the adventure in Iraq.
Things are so bad that the internecine warriors on the right have begun copying the rhetoric of the old left. In a Washington Times column this week upbraiding dissidents such as Brooks and Noonan, Tony Blankley, the conservative writer and activist, fell back on an old left slogan, asking them: "Whose side are you on, comrade?"
This is a revelatory question. It arises when a movement has lost its sense of solidarity and purpose, when the "sides" are no longer clear. There is no unified "right" or "center-right," which is why we are no longer a conservative country, if we ever were...............................
Conservatives came to believe that if they repeated phrases such as "Joe the Plumber" often enough, they could persuade working-class voters that policies tilted heavily in favor of the very privileged were actually designed with Joe in mind.
It isn't working anymore. No wonder conservatives are turning on each other so ferociously.
More: http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.ht...1-c3978ba94600
Interesting article with some astounding observations!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Originally Posted by theHawk
