The right's tendency to eat its own is no different than that of the left. As on the left, there is a spectrum: from rigid conservatives resisting anything smacking of change to Reagan democracts to "former" radicals such as Horowitz who entertain the right with leftist circuses in their honor in his old haunt Academia.Unfortunately, upon the advice former radicals such as Horowitz … hawking his "Progressive Vision for the Party" … the right has made two grievous mistakes.
First, they've refused to use any of the Left's winning tactics.
There are no litmus test issues on which the "I'm personally opposed, BUT … " party can unify.
Instead, they repeatedly compromise -- and thereby render meaningless -- their personal convictions as they invoke the spell of "pragmatism" to explain why they traded the family cow for a couple of magic beans or used our money to purchase already-been-killed "Excess Human Lives" for their "hopeful humanitarian research".
Second, the right has ensured its own destruction from within by adopting wholesale the textbook Bolshevik tactics that are:
In other words, as we have compromised and even abandoned wholesale the enduring, self-evident truths on which this nation was founded, we have lost the touchstone of our true unity despite our rich and lively diversity of opinion.
- The art of the personal smear and the invoking of Slogans instead of sound, reasoned, factual rebuttal,
- The Cult of Personality by which they place their faith in politicians instead of holding their statesmen and leaders accountable in action and word; and in an effort to homogenize their own ranks and ostracize the independent-minded among them rather than go the Rainbow-Coalition-as-Scythe route …
- They pigeonhole individuals as groups or factions to be judged, attacked, blamed, wooed, appeased or silenced en masse rather than recognizing and preserving always the individual as a person … weighing his arguments; not his appearance, his friends, his sex, race or his reading material as do academia's deconstructionists.
We are following the left into a "democratized" world of utter subjectivity where truth is determined by majority rule.