Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson lifts veil on Establishment GOP's Stockholm Syndrome

In what was clearly intended to be a snarky, hip rebuke of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Tea Party supporters, and other limited government advocates, the Washington Post's domesticated, in-house “conservative” Michael Gerson inadvertently exposed his true colors. By so doing, he articulated the gaping divide in the Republican ranks.

After a string of juvenile insults of various leaders of the limited government movement, Gerson bottom lined it, approvingly quoting from a recent National Affairs piece by Phillip Wallach and Justus Myers:

Tea Partiers and other limited government advocates "seek to break with the past in a very different manner – repudiating 80 years of institutional development and reinventing American as a nation that rejects the substantive role for regulation or a social safety net.”

And there you have it. Honesty from a liberal masquerading as a “conservative.” Yes, Mr. Gerson, millions of us do seek a break from the collectivist past built by your Bull Moose cronies.

The Regulatory State is killing our nation, destroying the very concept of private property and consigning us into a Kafkaesque world ruled by an army of Lois Lerner clones.

By defining the battle lines as those who oppose the leftist slide of government and those, like you, who want to make it more efficient and effective you have shown beyond all doubt that the Establishment GOP is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. In the Eisenhower era, this was called "Modern Republicanism."

Like Patty Hearst, you have been a captive of the intellectual thugs of the Left — your own personal Symbionese Liberation Army — so long that you now see their cause as your own.

They define the agenda, they decide what is relevant and what isn’t, they determine what speech and topics are allowed and which are “impolitic.”

Good article, on target.

Reminds me of Hayek's "The Constitution of Liberty"

The picture generally given of the relative position of the three parties (ed: socialism, conservatism, classical liberalism) does more to obscure than to elucidate their true relations. They are usually represented as different positions on a line, with the socialists on the left, the conservatives on the right, and the liberals somewhere in the middle. Nothing could be more misleading. If we want a diagram, it would be more appropriate to arrange them in a triangle with the conservatives occupying one corner, with the socialists pulling toward the second and the liberals toward the third. But, as the socialists have for a long time been able to pull harder, the conservatives have tended to follow the socialist rather than the liberal direction and have adopted at appropriate intervals of time those ideas made respectable by radical propaganda. It has been regularly the conservatives who have compromised with socialism and stolen its thunder.
[Conservatism] by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments.

Hayek's article is food for thought. We need a party of liberty.

It is slowly dawning on Republicans that Democrats have not been the problem, but rather liberal Republicans who masquerade as conservatives.

It is truly inspiring to see a formerly blind Republican see the light.

Shills like coulter, mccain, glenbeck, oreilly, medved and countless others have rendered a great service to us by exposing themselves. Nothing opens peoples eyes faster than realizing the betrayal coming from the mouths of their former heroes.

The Republican Party is tearing apart. But it is doing so over important things.

An excellent point, that is so often lost on the "can't we all just get along" contingent.

Defending the repugnant tactics and actions of Sen. Thad Cochran's re-election campaign -- whether ultimately found to be legal or not -- demonstrates for all to see that the only thing the establishment will fight for is holding on to power. There are no principles, no moral character, no integrity -- just a thirst for power that is unquenchable.

And that is why the GOPe is such an enemy (in many ways, the enemy) of conservatism. Conservatism is about the reduction of centralized power. It is anathema to those who seek power for power's sake. McConnell is the same, at heart, as Harry Reid (largely symbolic "conservative" votes aside). Because he is from Kentucky, not Nevada, he courts Kentuckian Republican votes, as opposed to Nevada's Democrat union supporters, but the differences between the two are minor. He (and most of the Republican senators) have gamed the system, and gamed the party, for his benefit, and his benefit alone, with no concern for the citizens of his state, principles, the nation, or the future.

An excellent article, and one which indirectly shows the role that Republican voters played in creating what is rapidly becoming the exact opposite of what this country was created to be.

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