The American Spectator

S.L. Toddard| 10.14.09 @ 8:01PM

There's already a perfectly good term that describes such people: "real conservatives".

Unfortunately, you won't find them called that or "maverick". "Maverick" has the air of a compliment, and implies a virtuous straight-shooter who defies expectation by holding to his principles in the face of opposition from his own party, and the sort of people Mr. Antle describes here are more likely to be reviled than complimented by either the left or right. David Frum classified that sort as "Unpatriotic Conservatives", and the chorus on the right that accompanied his jeering was near unanimous. The left is more likely than not to portray them as kooks, and then point to the disdain of the Lindsay Grahams and David Frums as evidence that they are so outside of the mainstream as to be beneath consideration.

As for those "who occasionally side against power" - they have few friends on the right as well - ostensibly their own side. Rather than siding against power, today's Right is far more likely to exhibit a servile, near religious reverence for Authority and muscle-flexing displays of power - they fetishize "rough men", empty bravado, macho posturing and military confrontation, and swoon, weak-kneed and giddy, over armed agents of the state.

The Right needs to re-learn to fear their government as the Founders did - even when it is in Republican hands. They need to listen to and follow those who speak truth to power from the right, those true mavericks who fight to wrangle the federal beast back into its constitutional cage, and who endeavor to return to the people and the states the powers that the federal government has usurped and the wealth that it has confiscated.

And lastly they must ask themselves whether they truly advocate small government, or whether they would rather retain the sort of gargantuan leviathan state necessary to the task of policing the world and building whole nations out of thin air, rubble and dust.

We cannot have both.