On "Go-Along-To-Get-Along" Conservatism.

Dwight Eisenhower was a great and good man, who was ashamed of very little of what he did in his life. One of the things that he was ashamed of was standing by and saying nothing as a drunken paranoid, like Senator Joseph McCarthy denounced General George Marshall a communist dupe.

Eisenhower, who like almost all Americans, revered Marshall, didn't want to rock the boat during the 1952 presidential campaign. He went along to get along. It worked, too. Eisehower became the 34th president of the United States in a landslide. But he had a very hard time reconciling himself with the fact that he had abandoned his friend and mentor to the slander of a cur like McCarthy.

However, Eisenhower never did that again. As president, he resisted the unanimous advice of his cabinet to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. He spent far, far less on the military than most in his party wanted because he knew that, beyond a certain point, military spending was self-defeating. He openly disdained the John Birch Society and refused to do anything to prevent the Senate censure of McCarthy.

Let's look at where conservatism is today. People like Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck are openly trying to revise McCarthy's place in history and the Birchers are co-sponsoring CPAC. Tea Party and Republican candidates and office-holders are advocating policies that are nothing short of insane, and otherwise reasonable people are remaining silent out of cheap expedience.

The Conservative Party of Canada might actually be worse, having become a transparent copy of the Liberals and even more shameless about their use of the public purse to buy votes.

And then there's the debt. North American conservatives have racked up truly jaw-dropping levels of debt over the last 30 years. When Jean Chretien and Bill Clinton are more fiscally conservative that Stephen Harper and George W. Bush, traditional conservatism is essentially dead.

Binky over at Steynian seems like an awfully nice guy, and he's been a very good friend to this blog. In a roundabout way, I'm actually kind of glad that he wrote this.

I REALLY LIKE Terry Glavin’s stuff, and Skippy Stalin has received lotsa links from this website over the years. However, I’m a little worried that they’ve got bash conservativitis on the brain.

OK, the conservatives can sometimes be as addled, inbred and misinformed as anybody else. Conservativeness isn’t infallibility. However, we’re comparing apples and hand-grenades.

Consider: the Western LibSupremacy in media, politics, academia and the whole utopian world-gov thing means that conservatives are coming from behind in terms of market-share, commonly accepted wisdom, and real-world power. Free Mark Steyn is not a multibillion dollar media-conglomerate with a staff of thousands… nor is Mark Steyn himself. Whatever her imperfections, Anne Coulter won’t soon have the power to turn of the internet at her say-so, unlike Obama.

Yes, we need to fact-check, and beware partisan group-think, and the easy echo-chamber repetition. No, all American conservative talk-radio folks are not infallible pundits. FOX TV can be embarrassing. So?

The alternative is not some magic world of ideologically pure superhero conservative saints, but more Liberal domination, group-think, and silencing of any and all opposition– so they are free to do what they want to their victims.

Anti-con sniping as a way of avoiding the real issues– utopian progs taking over the planet by hook and crook, rewriting history, criminalizing freedom and dissent– turns out to be slavish naiveté at worst, if well-intended cautionary commentary at best. Pot-shots at conservatives who err– or who are perhaps a bit off– doesn’t redeem the cause.

Anti-cons should look around them and ask if they really want to be on the same side as Francois Houle & Allan Rock and The Screaming NDP Girl (in the Coulter thing), or on the side of neo-marxist academics when it comes to apologia for the Soviet Union and Communist China. Really? REALLY?

Facts are facts and truth is truth– let’s not be embarrassed by the fight-back against progressive utopianism unless we have a reasonable alternative way of going about it. Not so much? Then get on board, or get on the other side if that’s where the argument leads you– sitting on the fence with both ears to the ground is an uncomfortable place to sit.

In fairness, liberals are deservedly famous for doing liberal things. I don't concentrate on them because I don't feel that I have to. The Democrats have been promising a national health care program since Franklin Roosevelt was president. The only thing that's remotely surprising about the Obama plan is that it was lifted so completely from the GOP's 1993 alternative plan. Anyone who is shocked by the Democrats' policies under Obama just hasn't been paying attention to politics since the Great Depression, and there isn't a whole lot I can do about that.

I'm far more interested in what the alternative to liberalism is today, and as far as I can tell, there really isn't one. To be sure, there is religiously based statism that is consumed with ridiculous arguments about gay marriage and abortion. But it is fundamentally incapable of respecting well-established laws governing torture and wiretapping. If conservatives want to drown people, fine. Just change the law. But for God's sake, stop pretending that the law means anything other than what it says.

Republicans spent eight years defending a president who issued 1,100 signing statements, more than all of his predecessors combined. And unlike any of his predecessors, President Bush explicitly said in those statements that he reserved for himself the right to violate the laws he was signing. Republicans and other alleged "conservatives" were entirely and uncomfortably silent about that.

How about balancing a budget? The last Republican to pull that off was Dwight Eisenhower, and virtually no one in the movement calls them on it. I know that everyone likes to pretend that Obama invented debt, but he inherited a $1.3 trillion dollar deficit. And that was just the annual deficit. Bush and his Republican congresses managed to double the total federal debt.

As Orrin Hatch, a pretty conservative guy, said recently; "It was standard practice not to pay for things" when the Republicans were in power.

Stephen Harper and his Conservative minority government are well on their way in emulating Bush and creating structural debt through ill-conceived tax cuts and program spending increases. Like with the Republicans, the Tories have created more entitlements than did their Liberal predecessors.

"The Western LibSupremacy in media, politics, academia and the whole utopian world-gov thing" didn't mean a goddamned thing when the GOP was winning seven out of ten presidential elections, when Brian Mulroney won the biggest majority government in Canadian history, and it doesn't mean anything now. It's little more than an exercise in victimhood, self-justification and lazy thinking. I honestly can't believe that Sarah Palin gets away with decrying "the lamestream media" from her perch at America's highest rated cable news network.

Certain elements of the movement are constantly cautioning against "red on red" attacks ... as they purge the movement of elements that they disagree with. And god forbid that you be considered something resembling an intellectual. Of course, it's almost impossible to argue with people like Jim DeMintt and the Tea Parties, who honestly believe that the best way to grow a movement is by shrinking it.

The fact is that the only significant differences between modern Republicans, Tories and liberals are only a matter of degree. And unless serious people start pointing that out, nothing is going to change. Fighting to preserve the power of these people is hardly worth the bother because it doesn't further a cause greater than preserving their power.

I like a healthy competition of ideas. The only problem is that there isn't one.