Tucker Carlson once wrote that it’s the duty of the political
majority to torment the minority.
He’s right, of course, and since the 2012 election, watching
Democrats torture Republicans is reminiscent of Le Chiffre finally
getting his hands on Bond, or one of the more sanguinary scenes
from 24. Turn on MSNBC these days and you’ll see a
non-stop metronome of post-Romney Republican flogging. You want
this to stop?! Then pander to Hispanics! Give up on
entitlements! It’s enough to send you thumbing through the
Geneva Conventions.
Conservatives ought to be weathering the pain and dismissing it
as a short-term problem. Instead many are succumbing to Stockholm
Syndrome, taking the flagellations personally and wondering if
their captors have a point. Certain conservative quarters are
starting to sound like political strategy shops, fretting over
which principles to jettison so they can win an election and make
the abuse stop.
Forget the Resurrection or American Founding or French
Revolution. For these commentators, the formative historical moment
for conservatives is now the 2012 election. Republicans (narrowly)
lost; therefore the right must charter a new course and make its
ship sleeker. So cast overboard the constitutionalist cargo and
roll back the culture war cannons. The intellectual tradition of
Burke and Kirk, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, John Adams and
Adam Smith, Taft and Coolidge and Goldwater and Reagan, must come
to a bracing halt. Because Republicans lost an election.
This is such spectacularly bad logic that it’s tough to know
where to begin. Let’s start with the fact that the right’s Democrat
tormentors don’t want a legitimate opposition party. They want a
single Democratic Party, in agreement so it can pass its agenda.
The left is insisting the right “modernize” on certain issues.
Which ones? Entitlements. Spending. Taxes. The debt. Regulatory
policy. Healthcare. Abortion. Gun control.
Everything.
Those last two – abortion and gun control – speak volumes about
what’s really happening here. Polls show Americans are more
pro-life than ever before, and the NRA has a 54% approval rating in
spite of the post-Newtown firestorm. And yet these are issues on
which the right must yield? This isn’t serious political advice;
it’s the left using the election loss to blindly bludgeon
Republicans.
Many of the GOP’s self-styled moderates and gravitas-radiating
establishmentarians have happily joined in. They’ve established a
narrative that goes something like this: Mitt Romney was a fine
candidate with a real shot at winning. But then Todd Akin emerged
and said something stupid. This led tens of millions of curious
Americans to turn on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, which filled them
with revulsion. Then Romney was caught on tape referring to the
47%, which was the last straw and sent the great middle stampeding
towards Obama. Also, Karl Rove lied to donors. It was those damn
conservatives, you see.
This is patent nonsense, as any check of a mid-2012 presidential
tracking poll will show. But it’s a view taking hold among many
Republicans. Witness this from the National Review summit over the
weekend, as
summarized by the New Republic:
It was Commentary’s John Pohoretz [sic] who broke the news that
when a party spends several decades declaring all government
regulation off limits, it makes it sort of hard for elected
representatives to pass regulations and laws to their liking.
It’s one thing to decry Dodd-Frank or the Affordable Care
Act, but if you aren’t able to propose rules and regs to replace
them, you’re not going to be taken seriously. “The problem
with three decades of movement thinking is that it ends up creating
dead ends,” he said. (Emphasis added.)
But many conservatives don’t believe the government has any
business passing new health care “rules and regs.” Those same
conservatives also blame excessive government regulation for
driving up health care costs in the first place. Podhoretz and
other commentators can disagree with that view. But it’s not a
“dead end” and pointing at the election doesn’t refute it.
Conservatives balance and apply their principles differently.
They should debate and disagree. But they shouldn’t become a
flimsy, reactionary force that follows the wind of public opinion.
“Mitt Romney lost” isn’t an intellectual argument, and it’s not
much of a political one either.
Also notice that the target of much of this moderation talk
seems to be the small-government wing and the Tea Party. To avoid a
2012 repeat, we’re told, stop talking about entitlement reform and
cutting federal agencies.
It’s an astonishing message. At a time of record debt and
government overreach, we’re supposed to have two economically
liberal parties?
Enough of this hand-wringing. Even if the GOP had run Rand Paul
for president, even if he’d lost by 25 points, even if Democrats in
gray suits were now overflowing out the Capitol building windows,
that doesn’t mean the right should call it quits. We lost an
election. Politics are ephemeral; principles and traditions are
firm.
And politics change. When George W. Bush was elected in 2000, no
one anticipated that 9/11 would happen and he’d flourish as a war
president. Equally unpredictable was that Bush would win
re-election thanks to social issues. Or that the public would tire
of the war by 2006. Or that an economic crash would help Barack
Obama into office in 2008. Or that Obama would overreach with
health care and the Tea Party would rise in 2010.
Casting aside decades of conservative thought to rebuild on the
soft ground of an election loss is the height of foolishness.
Republicans have a dedicated activist base, a talented bench,
and a strong beachhead in the House of Representatives. They’re
facing record national debt, crumbling entitlement programs, and
torpid small business growth. They should be planning for the year
ahead, not nodding in unison with leftists wearing executioner
masks.
Snap out of it, gents. There’s a fight to be had.
