The Conservatives’ Big Tent

Mallory Factor recently presented parts of his newest book, Big Tent: The Story of the Conservative Revolution – As Told by the Thinkers and Doers Who Made It Happen, to an audience at the Heritage Foundation.

Factor is the John C. West Professor of International Politics and American Government at The Citadel, a military academy in South Carolina. He is also a Fox News contributor and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He brought the constitutional challenge, Free Enterprise Fund vs. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, to the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation on business accounting before the Supreme Court.

In his talk, he compared the emergence of the conservative movement to the arrival of a P.T. Barnum circus in a small town. Factor reasoned that is why “every day, the mainstream media portrays the conservative movement as a sideshow.”

The media presents “a parade of horribles: candidates who are portrayed as uncaring about the needs of women and minority groups, politicians who are said to promote xenophobia and fear of immigrants, or rich old white men who are seemingly focused on lowering their tax rates and preserving their wealth instead of paying their fair share.” Factor added that, “Day after day, the media tells stories like these in lurid detail” and “through these reports, the conservative movement is depicted as an array of human oddities.”

In response to the media’s treatment of the movement, Factor acknowledged that “many conservatives fear that the media-reported freak shows may turn the next generation away from conservatism.” However, he did not feel that this would be a major problem because Factor believes that “America is a conservative nation.”

He pointed out, “Conservatives outnumbered liberals in 47 states” and that the majority of conservatives do not self-identify as Republicans.

There are no conservatives in America. The political divide in America is between the liberals and the “liberals.” We liberals believe in liberty, and in progress concomitant to individual freedom to innovate; the “liberals” (who misappropriated the term in the 1920s) promote every reason they can conjure up to reduce liberty and trammel the natural tendency of free people to increase prosperity. Liberals are tolerant of the small mistakes of free individuals, and intolerant of the tendency of governments to make much larger and much more dangerous mistakes. Whereas “liberals” are cynical about individual success, and arbitrarily attribute large income to theft.
The difference between the liberal and the “liberal” is the difference between
"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena - From Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 speech at the Sorbonne:
and
”You didn’t do that.”
The latter statement being made presumptively and arbitrarily by “liberals” as a blanket condemnation of the idea of individual responsibility and individual authority. That is nothing more or less than cynicism.
It should be obvious that “the critic” of Theodore Roosevelt’s formulation fits the journalist. who ventures nothing but sneers at the (inevitable) shortcomings of those who do take personal risks in an effort to gain personal rewards. And that “You didn’t do that” is not the statement of an entrepreneur but of “the critic.” Equally, it is obvious that journalists and other “critics” were the ones who had the motive and the opportunity to invert the meaning of the politically-freighted word “liberal.”

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.