Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey,
soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds
are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in dif-
fers so materially from the world at large, that they have but little
opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed
to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of
any throughout the dominions.
Thomas Paine
Common Sense
I have a friend at work who is a rarity these days – a conscientious conservative unafraid to speak up. I honestly like him because when we argue, we argue based on principles we both agree upon. We differ in our prioritization of these principles, we differ on how best to realize them, but at heart his values are focused on the welfare of his family and his community, not on grand theories that mask unlimited arrogance and greed.
More below the fold
This is the kind of conservative that at one time formed an important element of the Republican Party. No longer. Along with that other vanishing species, the “moderate Republican”, they have been banished from the party of Eisenhower and Lincoln by the rise of the Neocons and the Greedocons.
What is the cure for a party gone so wrong, who have become in Thomas Paine’s rhetoric “the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions” ? The only thing that will break their grip on the party machineries and funding is a sound and thorough electoral defeat.
It is in the power of sane Republicans to act boldly to resurrect their party as a true , patriotic opposition force in American politics. The first step in this process is for them to vote straight Democratic.
Hear me out, I want to make this case from the mouths of your fellow Republicans, not self-interested Democrats.
We could start with David Stocktons’ expose of the realities of the Reagan presidency, but that would probably be to much for you to accept. RR is to Republican true believers what FDR is to Democrats. I would argue that the comparison is really a false one – FDR governed, RR simply was the CEO of a most dysfunctional group of ideologues, but I will leave that debate for another day.
Let’s start instead with Bruce Bartlett:
In the Magazine: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush
“”Just in the past few months,” Bartlett said, ”I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.” Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush’s governance, went on to say: ”This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he’s just like them. . . .
”This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,” Bartlett went on to say. ”He truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.” Bartlett paused, then said, ”But you can’t run the world on faith.” “
The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush’s top deputies — from cabinet members like Paul O’Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq — have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president’s decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his ”gut” or his ”instinct” to guide the ship of state, and then he ”prayed over it.”
“The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision — often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position — he expects complete faith in its rightness.
O.K., maybe he is just a single outlier, off his meds. How about John Dean for the prosecution?
John Dean on Bush: The second coming of George III
Dean argues that traditional conservative thinkers would have been appalled by the extraordinary loading of powers into the presidency. This time it’s through Article II of the Constitution – the commander-in-chief clause – which he says the founders saw mainly as a label. Again, Dean argues, this finds the Bush administration using the absolutism of George III as a model and dressing him in a cloak of constitutionality. He explained: “He can go to war any time he wants to; he can ignore the Parliament or the Legislature. So to me, these are facades of legitimacy that they use to make their case over policy objections.”
Maybe there are two “traitors” out there, surely that is not enough:
Ex-Aide Says He’s Lost Faith in Bush – New York Times
In speaking out, Mr. Dowd became the first member of Mr. Bush’s inner circle to break so publicly with him.
He said his decision to step forward had not come easily. But, he said, his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s presidency is so great that he feels a sense of duty to go public given his role in helping Mr. Bush gain and keep power.
Mr. Dowd, a crucial part of a team that cast Senator John Kerry as a flip-flopper who could not be trusted with national security during wartime, said he had even written but never submitted an op-ed article titled “Kerry Was Right,” arguing that Mr. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and 2004 presidential candidate, was correct in calling last year for a withdrawal from Iraq.
“I’m a big believer that in part what we’re called to do — to me, by God; other people call it karma — is to restore balance when things didn’t turn out the way they should have,” Mr. Dowd said. “Just being quiet is not an option when I was so publicly advocating an election.”
Paul Craig Roberts sums up the case:
The Greatest Threat America Has Ever Faced: the GOP? By Paul Craig Roberts
We must get the Republicans totally out of power, or we will have no country left for the Democrats to mess up.I say this as a person who has done as much for the Republican Party as anyone. I helped to devise and to get implemented an economic policy that cured stagflation and that brought Republicans back into political competition after Watergate. If I could have looked into a crystal ball and seen that under a free trade banner, Republicans would enable corporate executives to pay themselves millions of dollars in “performance pay” for deserting their American work forces and hiring foreigners in their place, thus destroying the aspirations and careers of millions of Americans, I never would have helped the Republicans. If a crystal ball had revealed that a neoconned Republican Party would launch wars of naked aggression against countries that posed no threat to the United States, I would have shouted my warnings even earlier.
The neoconned Republican Party is the greatest threat America has ever faced.
So what is the cure for a party gone so wrong, a party whose entrenched leadership is so out of touch, so clueless, so dangerous? There is only one cure: they must be punished at the polls with a massive defeat. Only then can others pick up the pieces and remake the party.
That means that even moderates, even down ballot good guy Republicans must go. They had their chances, they lost the intraparty battles. Now they must pay the price.
In particular, the down ballot races for offices like school board, justice of the peace, judges matter greatly! They are the faces of government we see daily, they can make our lives miserable, they can inflict daily pain on the weakest of us. Only by straight ticket voting can we purge the ideologues that have ridden the coat tails of the Perry’s and the Kay Bailey’s into office from the body politique.
So, Republicans – do your duty as Americans, purge your party, return it to its historically useful place as the party of conscientious conservatism, of Goldwater, not Strauss, of Burke, not Rove. Where do your loyalties lie, in America or in the sad wreck that is the contemporary GOP?
