John McCain is unwittingly providing conservatism an indispensable service by opening a battle he cannot win but which provides conservatism the very contest it must have. Here is the reply:
Prior to the election, indeed prior to the first debate, I sat down my thoughts about the period of agonizing reappraisal conservative movement must now experience as we are cast into outer darkness. If we are to find our way back into the light we must be rigorous in the basics which build winning armies, winning football teams and winning political parties.
To me, that means that we must be ruthless in our search for virtue. This is not a time to paper over differences. This is the time when we have nothing to lose so we should come to a clear understanding of what it means to be a conservative.
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 and left behind.
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.
We conservatives as early as immediately after the debate and certainly no later than after election eve will unavoidably come to grips with the desperate straits of the movement. The Republican Party at the end of this election cycle will be reduced to the citadel of the old Confederacy and a few Rocky Mountain states.
We will be virtually leaderless, President Bush has already been discredited in the public mind and John McCain will have been cast aside as an eccentric loser who is past his prime.
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Events have borne out this prediction, John McCain has indeed been discredited and he cannot be rehabilitated by his own efforts or by the efforts of the media who have always been ready to side with him against the Republican Party. Let him bring on his crusade to move the Republican Party left. He will fail and the conservative movement will triumph.
