Interestingly, my remarks presaged the author's insights about "eye rolling" etc.
Since the Obama administration has veared left as far as some of us have predicted, I think our enemy will be our best conciliator between social and fiscal conservatives. In other words, the threat to the republic posed by a continuation of Obama rule is so grave that I believe that social and fiscal conservatives, hardliners and rinos, will bury the hatchet long enough and deep enough to effect decent party unity if only through the election.
If Sarah Palin makes a run, the fundamental cleft of the party will be harder to bridge and the Rinos will have to come to terms with her nomination or leave. If Mitt Romney makes a successful bid, his candidacy will be swallowed easier by the right than Sarah Palin's will be by the left. In either case, these candidates must make their cultural obeisance is to the other side. Sarah Palin must do what we have been telling her to do since before the election, she absolutely must get serious about her persona and acquire gravitas and television presence. Romney absolutely must not pussyfoot on any key conservative issue. He has a special problem with his healthcare history in Massachusetts. But if John McCain could get the endorsement of his party, Romney certainly can. Remember, this is being said in the context of an electorate on the right desperate to save the Republic from Barack Obama.
Here is a portion of the vanity to which I alluded in which emphasis has been subsequently supplied:
I believe that the big battle in the party will not be between conservatives and moderates but between social conservatives and fiscal conservatives who are primarily libertarian. Both flavors of conservatives find common ground in strong defense. Fiscal conservatives are generally not as enthusiastic about Second Amendment rights, but the issue is not a dealbreaker. Social conservatives are almost universally fiscal conservatives but not all fiscal conservatives share social conservatives concerns about abortion and the ancillary issue of the morning after pill, education, religion in the public square, homosexual union, stem cell research, and pornography, marital fidelity as a prerequisite to public service, and evolution.
I consider myself to be a social conservative with a pesky libertarian reflex. In other words I am ferociously opposed to abortion but I am less exercised about what homosexuals are doing to each other in private. I am very concerned about the war being waged against Christians by our own governments but I'm not very exercised about adult pornography. I recite all of this because I think the way I resolved my apparent dilemma is the way everybody should do it: look for the victim and protect him. The classic arguments in support of legalizing alcohol, drugs, prostitution and gambling all point to the "absence" of a victim so the traditional conservative bias towards individual liberty weighs very heavily. But I sure see a victim in partial-birth abortion so I don't give a damn about the mother's convenience. Indeed, I see no reason to grant exceptions to prohibitions against abortion for incest or rape because those circumstances do not justify victimizing innocents, that is, to kill babies. Life of the mother exception, to the contrary, makes sense to me because one can identify the mother now as a victim. So if all conservatives would only just do as I do, (you know, be as reasonable as Henry Higgins and I) which is to weigh the balance in behalf of an identifiable victim but otherwise to respect individual liberty, we would find much overlapping common ground upon which to build long-lasting compromise.
If social conservatives would accept formulations of public morality the organizing principle of which is the protection of an identifiable victim rather than the vindication of a moral precept, fiscal conservatives and libertarians would be much more comfortable in the party. Fiscal conservatives, for their part, must go to bat for Christians when they are embattled by the secularists who would rob them of their faith through the arm of government. Fiscal conservatives owe Christian conservatives one more consideration, they must stop their smug condescension and their eye rolling whenever Christians express their faith in public. Consider for example the execrable figure of the son of William F. Buckley Jr. abandoning the McCain/Palin ticket for ill disguised abhorrence of Palin's faith. This is probably the last kind of bigotry that is socially acceptable in America but it must no longer be acceptable among conservatives. Buckley claims that he is a "small government conservative" but I claim that no matter how small his government, he is no conservative at all but something quite alien to us.
If the conservative movement is to be salvaged, this dichotomy will have to be resolved either along lines that I suggest or some other way. The alternative is a further splintering of the party and that would be very, very unfortunate.
