Typically, The Washington Post seeks to drive a wedge into the Republican Party and define one remnant to be extreme. Sometimes they seek to drive a wedge between social and fiscal conservatives, sometimes they seek to do it on race, sometimes between ill-defined "moderates" and conservatives. This time the wedge is to be driven between The Tea Party and the Republican Party itself.
This might be a unique occasion in which the Washington Post is reporting a reality rather than trying to create one. I've been posting for quite some time now that the party is liable to break asunder if the establishment continues to campaign and govern against The Tea Party. This is especially evident in the issue of immigration amnesty.
It is important to understand the predicate for The Washington Post's approach: the conservative philosophy is somehow illegitimate and should not be tolerated by decent people. So long as conservatives permit this predicate to shape the debate we will lose the debate.
Some time ago, actually before the 2008 election, I wrote a vanity anticipating the stinging defeat we were about to receive at the polls and I attempted to anticipate how conservatism might come back. At that time it was not possible to anticipate Obamacare and the birth of The Tea Party but I think the principle of declaring conservatism legitimate was recognized. Essentially, the Ronald Reagan formula which is the successful formula for conservatism is not to ape Democrats and not to demonstrate fitness for decent people by excluding conservatives but to clearly define conservatism and draw people into the "tent" rather than attempting to spread the tent by diluting the message.
The stunning victory of 2010 engineered by The Tea Party I believe vindicates the vanity which appears below.
Here is a portion of the vanity which I published before the election in response to a Politico article calling for Republicans and conservatives to move left to fill the big tent:
As we conservatives drag the remnants of our movement into the wilderness with no idea how we will emerge or whether we will ever emerge as an electoral force in America which is recognizable by my generation, we must inevitably engage ourselves in the most soul- searing inquiry of what went wrong. This will be an agony but equally it will be effective only to the degree that it hurts. It will not succeed without bloodshed. There must be finger-pointing and bloodletting. We must carve to the bone. The process must be Darwinian. Those whose ideas are false must be bayoneted on the trail.
The object is to find our soul - nothing less. In a come to Jesus sense we must get absolutely clear what it means to be a conservative. Only at this point do we look to the tent flaps and open them. Those who cannot subscribe to the hard-won consensus, to a confession of faith as to what is a conservative, should walk out through that flap. Those who are attracted from the outside to the core message of conservatism should be encouraged to walk through the flap and enlarge the tent. What the left wants us to do is to expand the census in the tent prematurely and thus turn a movement into a menagerie. The Soul-searching must be conducted by conservatives without the earnest ministrations from liberals like those of Politico. This article, of course, has nothing whatever to do with explaining why Republicans lost 2008 election across the board, it has everything to do with first efforts by the left to sabotage the rebuilding process on the right which must be done exclusively by the right.
We have not lost the 2008 election because we were excessively partisan while Obama was enlightened and transcendental. We actually lost the election because George Bush and Karl Rove betrayed the soul of conservatism. A party without its soul is like an army which does not believe in itself, it cannot win the next contest. A party which had abandoned its principles and so lost the last two elections and frittered away both its power as the ruling coalition and its status as the majority philosophy of the nation, cannot expect to swell its ranks by recruiting to a lost cause. The party must first know what the cause is and only then can it recruit. To again borrow the military analogy, a party like an army disintegrates without a mission. Armies are assigned missions but a political party finds its mission only through soul-searching.
As this process occurs we will be told by the left that only a big tent party can win and that to become a big tent one must move to co-opt the center. That is not how it works. That is the reverse of the way it works. The center is not peopled by voters with fixed notions about the exercise of power who wait for one of the great political parties to surrender their values and embrace the tempered and resolute opinions of the middle. That happens with splinter parties but not with the mushy middle. When an unaffiliated voter bestirs himself to enter the polling booth he is confronted with one of two options: right or left. He does not consider who has moved the farthest geographically from right to the left or left to right any more than he commits because of his own long held political beliefs. He votes for the fella who best tickles his fancy at the moment. Put more charitably, he votes for the candidate who persuades that he is the best, and has the best to offer.
If we as conservatives do not believe that we have the best to offer we should get out of the business. A candidate, like a party, who is centered on his philosophy has integrity and is persuasive. And that philosophy must first have a vertical spiritual component which finds expression and out working in a horizontal governing philosophy.
Because of his race, Obama was asked only to demonstrate that he could walk and talk like a president. Obama has won the middle, not because he pandered to them, which he did, but because he had the wind at his back.
As John McCain reverts from titular head of the Republican Party to United States Senator, it falls to the rest of us to contrive a governing philosophy which he, unfortunately, did not own and therefore could not bequeath to us. We had such a legacy from Ronald Reagan but we squandered it. We must construct our own. We must do it in the wilderness. We must do it unaided by intermeddling liberals. Their's is the serpent's way, the easy way, a pander to the superficially popular, the accommodation to the middle. The bed of birth has always been a bed of pain. The pain must be embraced if we are to receive a new life.
