Posted on 03/16/2007 9:21:11 PM PDT by Sunsong
Robert Bidinotto cannot say the Republican Party lost so badly on Election Day because it had lost its soul. Mr. Bidinotto, a New Castle native and editor-in-chief of The New Individualist, is unsure if this party had a soul. But he is sure it doesn't have a core philosophy. He believes the GOP can recover -- if it's the advocate of the individual.
"Conservatives never dared to fully embrace individualism," says Bidinotto, who studied economics at Grove City College in Mercer. "Conservatism has no central defining principle. Conservatives cannot make up their minds if they are champions of the individual and his rights, or of society and its traditions." Such as, how many conservatives believe an adult has the right to read, view or hear anything society labels as obscene?
The New Individualist is published by The Atlas Society, a Washington think tank. The magazine champions reason, individualism and freedom inspired by author and philosopher Ayn Rand. It co-sponsored the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, offering libertarian principle to the intellectually bankrupt.
If the GOP has a soul, it is a blackened and divided one, he says. "It's a soul divided against itself with too many competing ideas and values to have any notion of identity."…
(Excerpt) Read more at pittsburghlive.com ...
All that's left is to fight the war and kill as many ragheads as we can.
FYI
LOL - so a war only party is what we need(s)?
Its not all that's left but all that's right.
Sounds as though Dimitri Vassilaros is an Objectivist.
Could be
The author may have trouble figuring out what Conservatives are about. I'm having no such trouble.
I am the ultimate champion of individual freedom, rights, and self-government.
And no, I'm not a libertarian, because the libertarians are afraid to have a conscience and morals.
Why are libertarians so obsessed with defining absolute rights legalistically? An adult will do what an adult will do, especially in their own home. Do you think the conservative "thought police" care if you've got a Playboy under the couch?
You've got the concept of liberty turned around sideways. Conservatives here in the West are generally on the side of the people, the culture. The people want to and need to make laws protecting community standards, enforce marriage duties, commonsensical stuff.
The civil liberties absolutists conflate the simple and desirable closing down of a porno shop with repressed church ladies peering into people's bedrooms. When you follow that kind of thinking to its logical conclusion, you end up having judges that have more power than the people. Everything under the sun is cast as taking away someone's rights and therefore the business of liberationist judges.
Conservatives aren't near as worried about what people do in the privacy of their homes.....as we are concerned about them bringing it out on our sidewalks and making a friggin sideshow out of it so that none of the rest of us can escape it.
...Or that pubic funds are used to help them do it.
I don't believe there's only one meaning of conservatism. Like any other 'big words', conservatism has multiple meanings. And each side tries to claim that their definition is the 'true meaning of conservatism'.
Because libertarians are scared to death of slippery slopes. Their need for reality to conform to a set of simple axioms with 100% consistency forces them into extreme positions. As soon as you concede that it's reasonable that the community shouldn't have to put up with a porn shop on the corner, then the pure individualist argument is undermined. Suddenly a perfect philosophical system has a little chink in it. This is unbearable to libertarians, because they know that that chink is exactly where the "statists" are going to stick their wedges and their crow bars. So, rather than have that, they maintain -- I would almost say retreat -- to their extreme positions as required to maintain the seamlessness of their philosophy. What they gain by this is a position that is nearly unassailable in pure a pure logical sense, but that paradoxically has the fatal quality of being unreasonable.
It's the weirdest thing. You can use pure libertarian arguments to win debates with people and yet leave them utterly unconvinced of your position. In fact, back when I was tinkering with libertarianism, I found that I was arguing not just to convince the other person but also very much to convince myself. However, I never was able to fully convince myself, which is why I more or less abandoned libertarianism for conservatism. Conservatism honors that gut feeling of rightness and reasonableness in a way that libertarianism simply cannot.
The problem with conservatism, why it doesn't seem to have a cohesive message, why it doesn't connect with a lot of moderates, is that it's for limited government, individual rights, and then is for big government, nanny state social issues.
Doesn't seem to have a cohesive message
1. The most cohesive political messages are either Utopian or mainly rhetorical. Conservatives don't lie about complexities that can't be reduced or conflicts that cannot be resolved.
2. The need to nurture the key institutions of this fantastic civilization is not obvious and not only isn't striking to most minds, it is invisible to them.
Doesn't connect with a lot of moderates
1. Moderates are not Utopian, but generally pragmatic. Conservatives are not Utopian but they do take impassioned stands on seemingly non-critical issues. In short they are frankly ideological. That's off-putting to moderates.
2. Moderates can connect to a movement or candidate or message that appeals to common sense or sympathy and cleverly masks its underlying ideology.
The writer is confusing libertarianism and conservativism. Yes, there are different forms of conservative thought, social conservativism, economic conservativism, neo conservativism, but they are all supposed to support small government that doesn't intrude on private rights such as freedom of religion. The problem arises when the left brings what should be private issues into the public forum, making a federal case out of private issues.
I think the past 25 years of massive increases in immigration, offshoring of our economy, and multinational takeover of our corporations are ample evidence that we need a new definition of both conservatism and libertarianism.
Patriotism and nationalism need to take priority. Family values should mean American family values, for Americans, by Americans. And they should be expressed in English.
It might be too late already, but we can at least hope.
The problem with your statement is it's false.
I'm assuming by "social issues" you're referring to issues like abortion and gay marriage so you're going to have to explain how protecting the rights of the unborn or traditional marriage equates to either "big government" or a "nanny state".
Abortion was illegal in every state for 150 years and up until quite recently a concept like gay marriage would have resulted in you being laughed out of any political party. Was this country operating as a "nanny state" in, say, 1920? When did these issues become synonymous with "big government"?
The first thing that we need to do is remove social issues from the federal stage and stop redefining terms, like marriage. Nothing should depend on what the definition of "is", is. State governments are much better suited to determine social issues, except where they effect federal law. Our problems are much broader than off-shoring and immigration. Our problem is that the left wants to destroy our society as we know it. Then, they want to rebuild it in their socialist, feminist image. Moral relativity, political correctness and victimhood are all tools to be used toward that end.
I am afraid that off-shoring is a fact of life, immigration problems should not be. Off-shoring will eventually balance out. Dell has been having big problems since they started off-shoring everything. They had to bring their office help desk back because companies just wouldn't put up with it. I wouldn't be surprised if Cingular's problems were caused by their excessive off-shoring.
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