Posted on 09/16/2010 12:40:58 AM PDT by nathanbedford
Once in while we write something on Free Republic upon which we can look back with some satisfaction. Just after the November election of 2008 when everything was as bleak for conservatism as it could be, and the Libs were condescending to instruct us about how to conduct ourselves, I wrote a piece which I think has been borne out in the last election.
The Murkowskis and the Castles along with so many other Republicans have been bayoneted along the trail as the party and, more to the point, conservatism has found its soul. The bloodletting was not only necessary but indispensable to the reconstruction of conservatism in America.
Here is a portion of a post which I published just after the election of 2008 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.
Someone on another thread here on FR mentioned that Alinsky’s book never gave instructions on how to handle an uprising of patriots!
Obama and the Democrats don’t know what to do. But I bet you anything Soros does, and it involves panic, death, pain and lots of bodies.
The next forty days or so are going to be nailbiters.
The “moderates” have always prevailed upon our good graces demanding that we support them even when they didn’t support us, for the greater good as they defined it.
The spectacle of seeing the “moderates” refuse to lose graciously has actually been liberating. They are not us. We no longer have to pretend that they are.
They need to step aside. They can sit quietly in the pews toward the back or they can leave. They were never worth the trouble anyway.
Its been going on since the mid-90's when John Warner refused to support Ollie North. It's been worth the wait though, watching 'em scurry away like Rats ...
You mean Mike Castle still hasn’t come out in support of Christine O’Donnell? Oh, my. And the RINO establishment promised he would be such a team player and be instrumental in blocking the Obama agenda. Apparently Castle is as big of a useless RINO a$$hole as we all knew he was.
Thanks for sharing.
To those hand-wringers trashing O’Donnell, who in the words of Rove, jeopardizes Republicans’ chances of a 49 seat minority with a 48 seat minority, I say, “I would sooner lose an election than lose my soul.”
Now it is time they stop their sniping and rally behind O’Donnell, if they really do care about that all important 49th seat.
We aren't sports fans who get all excited just becuase our team won, in spite of the fact we don't actually benefit materially thereby. Get this, GOP: Where's the beef? We want ALL of progressivism rolled back as though it had never existed! All the way back to 1789! But you haven't even been able to roll back The Great Society, let alone the New Deal, the Income Tax, the Federal Reserve, Wickard vs. Filburn or any of the rest of it. Why should we vote for you?
Mike Castle was already preparing to switch parties once he won the senate seat. The Democrat opposition was sacrificial. O’Donnell is not the weak candidate in the Delaware race, the “bearded Marxist” Coons is. His job was to lose easily.
There must be a party that guards the rights of The People. Republicans have done nothing for the last decade except legislate our rights away at a slower pace that the statist Democrats.
Well, good riddance to Mike Castle. Our consolation is that, due to his age, he’ll be among the first to be denied life-saving treatment under ObamaCare — but hopefully only after Andy Griffith goes down first.
You just know socialized medicine is bad when one begins to take pleasure in the demise of the pricks who forced it upon you.
NB, thanks for the reminder...I read this when you published it in 2008 and thought that you nailed it then. Thank you and FR for all you have done and will do. God bless America!
Excellent post and comments. Bump. We need to communicate the conservative message to women. They still are polling Democrat in most political races. I’m not sure why the message of fairness and security isn’t reaching them as successfully as men. Left politics is who you know and who you pay off; the small businessman gets destroyed by the big businessman who has lawmakers in his pocket. Children go without because their families can’t afford the good things that children should have, whether it’s a decent education or a learning game or a trip with the family. The left creates an unstable system because of economic ups and downs that are magnified by selfish and simply wrong actions by a giant government. Security is non-existant for anyone in a system that ignores the law in favor of power and connections. I think women are more reachable through their “social networks” their group of friends and their facebook pages and community groups. We have to enter those, conservative women have to enter those and persuade.
Having tea party candidates win elections proves nothing.
The very essence is what will they do when in power? That has always been the problem.
Spot on. I’ve see way too many Freepers wringing hands over a “lost majority”, etc. O’Donnel came from behind from as many points in the primary as she will have to do in the general. She not only galvanized the vote, she electrified the turn out. Delaware is the only, or one of the only states where one could actually campaign against an admitted Marxist! Coons is toast, and I base that on my having predicted every upset so far.
I’ve been working in campaigns for and supporting conservative candidates since I was 14 years old (1962) and this year I am finally going to see everyone believing as I do! I don’t drink a whole lot anymore, but I’m going to have a bottle of Balvenie ready for election night and knock it totally off, and Karl Rove be damned.
With the destruction of the traditional family structure, many women are depending on the government, and the socialists are manipulating the dependency masterfully. Find an independent thinking, conservative woman and you’d better marry her. Ann Coulters, Michelle Malkins, and Sarah Palins aren’t that plentiful!
She should hammer him in ads with that exact statement. If he admitted to it, it’s fair game.
The answer is very easy. Men typically operate on a basis of logic and “Git ‘er done”. Women typically operate on a bsis of emotion.
Being one who was very lucky to have married a woman with both atributes with the balance leaning to the logic side. She sees the problem easily.
That’s why Palin has to be careful not to go too far with it and make the appeal itself sexist, but her ‘Mama Grizzly’ outreach is potentially a very powerful move—that gets her still more flak from the left.
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