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Pundits Right and Wrong

By Robert Stacy McCain on 2.23.09 @ 10:24AM

Rick Moran at The Next Right worries about Republicans being too "divisive" and populist. In replying, I offered this thought:

A basic problem with conservative punditry is that too often it admits the premises of liberal arguments and yet expects to reach different conclusions. This is a fatal rhetorical trap. If one accepts the premise that the objects of government are to achieve liberal goals -- "world peace," "social justice," "economic equality," etc. -- then trying to find "conservative" answers to those problems is a snipe hunt. So it is with the will-o'-th'-wisp pursuit of "bipartisan civility," a euphemism employed by Democrats to mean, "Republicans lose and shut up."

You can read the whole thing, including my offer to write the book, Everything the Republicans Did Wrong 2005-2008 -- which would be a very long book.

View all comments (3) | Leave a comment

Red Phillips| 2.23.09 @ 1:58PM

"A basic problem with conservative punditry is that too often it admits the premises of liberal arguments and yet expects to reach different conclusions. This is a fatal rhetorical trap. If one accepts the premise that the objects of government are to achieve liberal goals -- "world peace," "social justice," "economic equality," etc. -- then trying to find "conservative" answers to those problems is a snipe hunt."

Amen to that! And you even managed to work in a snipe hunting reference. :-)

chemman| 2.23.09 @ 2:52PM

You are entirely correct. When the "conservatives" cede the ideas area to the progressives then the Hegelian synthesis will always favor the progressives. Hence, we have consistently moved towards the left since I was old enough to register and vote (1972). Conservatives/Libertarians have to begin winning the war of ideas and quit joining the battle on the progressives ground.

BJC| 2.23.09 @ 4:36PM

Bravo, bravo bravo! Excellent, RSM -- and the Craig Henry response is also most excellent! How can Rick Moran be taken seriously ever again, after he's asserted that the nonentity "Rovian wedge tactics" split voters? To heave up this canard is to allow the Leftists to evade debate on the terms where Leftism is weakest.

For the record, Karl Rove never counseled GWB to make any long-term commitment to leading political opposition to the anti-moral positions of the Leftists on abortion and redefining marriage. Quite the contrary, in fact. Example: Candidate GWB in 2000 refused to take a position in favor of California's Prop. 22, which was the statute law enshrining man-woman marriage but which was overturned by California's Supremes who were intent on forcing everyone to bow down and celebrate homosexuality. (John McCain way back then endorsed Prop. 22.) In fact, the "wedgiest" GWB ever got, in my view, was in hosting families with "snowflake baby" children -- those youngsters who'd formerly been abandoned frozen embryos but were adopted, then gestated and birthed, instead of being treated as fodder for embryonic stem cell research. That was such a soft, cultural approach to defending embryonic humans against government paying to kill them, that it really doesn't qualify as "wedgy" at all.

Rove, in my assessment, over-applied his experiences from Texas politics -- thinking that D.C. Democrats would be as willingly bipartisan as Austin Democrats had been and that his objective of co-opting big government for purportedly conservative aims would be relatively easy. How'd that work out for him? He earned for GWB a raft of swollen, ineffective government programs, deficits and debt, and the blame for what transpired. Debatably, if a "wedgy" set of tactics had actually been tried during Team Bush, the nation would be in steadier hands today.