"Why am I a conservative? So that you can be a liberal!"

"Why am I a conservative? So that YOU can be a liberal."

😉👌 pic.twitter.com/g4TSkLm0zN

— PragerU (@prageru) September 16, 2020

"But at least I'm not a "journalist" from Vanity Fair"

Andrew: "I'm a conservative because I'm a liberal!" Liberalism, as Andrew defines it, is "You doing you and me doing me...and you paying for you and me paying for me." Freedom, responsibility. It is only the Left that wants to shut people down. It is only the Left and the altRight crazies that want to maintain the illusion that race matters in matters of politics. Leftism is the enemy of liberalism!

Beto is Obama in white face, which may not work out that well for him. He is charming and optimistic and bouyant and the Left looks at him and thinks, electable! He told 60 Minutes and several other outlets that he was not going to run for president in 2020, but he is! I will say that I love the way his wife looks at him. What a beautiful smile she has. The Vanity Fair piece on him is here.

Maria Espinoza is Andrew's guest. She is the national director of the Remembrance Project which remembers people who have been killed by illegal immigrants. Because of Sanctuary Cities, it seems that illegal immigrants are untouchable in America. Is there an emergency? "Absolutely!" It is political theater, games. No one has done anything because no one (among politicians) wants to! She has just returned to Texas after being in the D.C. swamp for two years.

Andrew asks her about her experiences in the swamp. One example she gave was a time when she took grieving "Angel moms" to meet with Speaker Paul Ryan at his home in Wisconsin. He was wisked away without even saying hello to Maria's group.

Andrew's final reflection was on comedy today. Jay Leno wishes for a return to civility on late night comedy. Leftists know they can turn on late-night t.v. to get their ideas reinforced. Johnny Carson warned about that self-important feeling one gets when dealing with serious issues every night, and he was opposed to doing that. Andrew says that conservatism is the liberal philosophy. When conservatism no longer allows its opposition to speak, if there comes a time when conservatism starts to sort people according to race or gender categories it will lose people like Andrew. But right now the party of hate and exclusion and illiberalism is the Left.

Comments on Google testimony

Zombie comments at Ace of Spades,

"Conservative" is now a meaningless label, applied equally to traitors and limousine socialists -- but never to actual conservatives.

Mikey NTH comments,

I mean, we all understand how Google has to make certain that conservatives are deplatformed, shadowbanned, have search results not show their work and so on. Because this is the free market in action, and if we write things that glorify our new paymaster those bad things will not befall us. So we join with Sauron - Google.

Really, it is the only choice

joe, living dangerously, commented,

Big business is "naturally conservative" the same way that Hispanic immigrants are.

It's a convenient fiction that gets told often enough that people believe it, but it hasn't been true for a long time. The top valued companies now are Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Samsung. One of those isn't even based in the US, and the other 4 are undeniably pro-leftist agendas.

Ace commented,

Let's say I agree that Google will become so thuggish in its censorship and INTERFERENCE WITH US ELECTIONS (just like RUSSIA!) that a competitor will eventually rise and become its equal.

What is the time scale we're talking about? 10 years? 20 years? NEVER?! (Some monopolies are too powerful and remain in place forever.)

Should we just wait for the magic of the self-correcting market for 20 or 30 years while we're censored, surveilled, and manipulated politically? After 30 years of Google stacking the deck for Democrats, what exactly would be left of America to conserve?

Read more here.

Will colleges collapse under the weight of their own Leftism?

What facts made you a conservative? Bookworm takes the time to answer that question. Here some of the facts she cited that I liked best.

39. The US would be a better place if our colleges and universities collapsed under the weight of their own Leftism. They are a virus that infects all the institutions to which they send their graduates: the media, K-12 education, more colleges and universities, the entertainment world, and corporate America.

37. No Leftist is a true patriot because, as Obama said, all Leftists want to “fundamentally transform” America. And if you want fundamental transformation, you really hate the thing the way it is.

25. Common sense agrees with studies showing that the surest way to leave poverty behind in America is to get educated, get a job, get married, have children, and stay married — in that order.

Read all 39 here.

Maybe we're not so deplorable after all?

At American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson asks,

what exactly would be the formal agenda of the proverbial deplorables and irredeemables? And how would it differ all that much from conservative Republicanism of generations past?

After all, despite a much-hyped conservative civil war, a bitter primary, and a NeverTrump movement that won’t quiet, 90 percent of the Republicans in 2016 still voted for Trump. These voters assumed, like deplorable and irredeemable Democrats and Independents, that Trump would push conservative agendas. And they were largely proved correct.

After 10 months of governance, Trump’s deregulations, a foreign policy of principled realism, energy agendas, judicial appointments, efforts at tax reform and health care recalibration, cabinet appointments, and reformulation at the Departments of Education, the EPA, and Interior seem so far conservative to the core.

In the few areas where Trump conceivably differed from his 16 primary Republican rivals—immigration, trade, and foreign policy—the 20th-century Republican/conservative orthodoxy was actually closer to Trump’s positions than to those of recent Republican nominees, John McCain or Mitt Romney.

Vast majorities of conservatives always favored enforcement of federal immigration law rather than tolerance of sanctuary cities. They wanted to preserve legal, meritocratic, diverse, and measured immigration, not sanction open borders. And they championed the melting pot over the identity politics of the salad bowl.

Vast majorities of conservatives always favored enforcement of federal immigration law rather than tolerance of sanctuary cities. They wanted to preserve legal, meritocratic, diverse, and measured immigration, not sanction open borders. And they championed the melting pot over the identity politics of the salad bowl.

All Trump did was return prior orthodoxy on border enforcement to the fore, albeit often with blunter rhetoric. He called out a loud but minority corporate interest on the Right that wanted cheap labor. And he questioned the wisdom of Republican officials who apparently saw appeasement of illegal immigration as a way to compete for the eventual votes of inevitable and huge annual influxes of illegal aliens.

But again, the rise of the deplorables was not evidence of some new strain of xenophobia and nativism. Rather their views marked a return not just to Republican values, but also the majority position held by most Americans.

...So what drives deplorablism?

It is not so much an ideological or even political movement as it is a spiritual and psychological frame of mind that is fed up with hypocrisies of the proverbial establishment, bicoastal cultural elites, and the deep administrative state.

Deplorables grew furious as amnesty Democrats and especially corporate Republicans preached about the values of open borders and unchecked illegal immigration—but never quite experienced first-hand the effects their policies had on distant others. Influential advocates of lax border security tended to put their kids in private schools, lived in mostly apartheid communities, saw illegal aliens largely as cheap labor and personal servants, did not have any personal desire to live among, befriend, tutor or mentor those they championed—and assuaged their guilt by blasting their own fellow conservative with charges of xenophobia and nativism.

...In sum, “deplorablism” is mostly a style. The Trump agenda so far is mostly mainstream 20th-century Republicanism. To the degree it is not seen as such on trade, immigration, and foreign policy, it may be that it is far more traditionally conservative than what had become the de facto position of the 21st-century Republican Party.

The departure from conservatism is not what the once liberal Democrat Trump has done since January, but what those who oppose him might likely do in his place.

Read more here.

"We prefer a free society based on personal liberty and mutual respect. But if you leftists veto that option, that leaves us either a society where you rule and oppress us, or one where we hold the power."

Kurt Schlichter writes today at Town Hall,

...I took it seriously when Conservative, Inc., promised to fight the leftist blitzkrieg against normal Americans. It was all a scam, a lie, a pose for us rubes. The Tru Cons didn’t actually mean it.

There’s a lot of that not meaning it going on in the GOP right now. Exhibit A is John McCain, who ran ads touting how he was leading the way in opposing Obamacare only to give it aid and comfort when someone in the White House would actual sign its repeal. He’s the guy the establishment designated to lose to Barack Obama in 2008, and he was sure up to the task. But in retrospect, thank goodness, because McCain’s inevitable presidential betrayal of conservatives by breaking his word then and treating GOP voters like he treated his first wife would have done exponentially more damage to conservatism than Trump being prevented from keeping his word today ever could.

It’s so good to know that, despite his wonderful, close, awesome friend humiliating him while lying to Arizona’s voters, Lindsey Graham is still the blue falcon’s buddy. No hard feelings!

...Conservativism forgot about the real world conservatives we expected to line up behind us. While we were talking about free trade, we were ignoring that GOP voter who fought in Fallujah, came home, got a job building air conditioners, raised a family, and then one day watched the video of the oh-so-sorry CEO – who looked remarkably like Mitt Romney, because all these guys look remarkably like Mitt Romney – sadly informing his beloved employees that their jobs were getting shipped to Oaxaca. And our response to the 58-year old Republican voter who asked us how he was going to keep paying for his mortgage and his kid in college? Pretty much, “Well, that’s how free enterprise works. Read some Milton Freidman and go learn coding.”

...How about the guy who wanted to be a roofer in Fontana but he couldn’t because the contractors were only hiring illegals? What was our answer to him? “Oh well, the big corporate donors need their serfs, and if some pack of tatted-up MS-13 dreamers gang-rapes your daughter that’s just a price we’re willing to pay!”

They try to crush our religion and Conservative, Inc., cowers because Apple’s CEO might say mean things. “Just bake the cake,” they say – it’s not worth the fight! They demand our tax money to kill babies and Conservative, Inc., passes the spending bills – “Gosh, we can’t risk the WaPo saying we’re mean!” They diss our National Anthem, we react, and Conservative, Inc., wags its soft, spindly fingers – “So, so very unpresidential! My word!”

Conservatism has become a racket, and everything happening now is a result of its members hoping to wait out Trump and the demand for change he represents. Maybe if they do nothing, but say all the right things, we normals will get tired and go back to our jobs and keep providing those votes and renting those cruise cabins. But that’s not happening. We aren’t going away; business as usual is over. We aren’t just giving up, tossing away our country, and submitting to the ruling caste. We were nice with the Tea Party. Trump’s not as nice. What’s coming after is going to be much, much less nice.

Who are the normals? The Americans who built this country, and defended it. When you eat, it’s because a normal grew the food and another normal trucked it to you. When you aren’t murdered in the street or don’t speak German, it’s because a normal with a gun made those things not happen. We normals don’t want to rule over others. We don’t obsess about how you live your life, but also we don’t want to be compelled to signal our approval or pick up the tab. We are every color and creed – though when someone who is incidentally a member of some other group aligns with normals, he/she/xe loses that identity. The left drums normals who are black out of its definition of “black,” just as normal women get drummed out of womanhood and normal gays get drummed out gayhood. In a way, the left is making E pluribus unum a reality again – to choose to be normal is to choose to reject silly identity group identification and unite. Instead of saying “normal Americans,” you can just say “Americans.”

...Who are the normals? The Americans who built this country, and defended it. When you eat, it’s because a normal grew the food and another normal trucked it to you. When you aren’t murdered in the street or don’t speak German, it’s because a normal with a gun made those things not happen. We normals don’t want to rule over others. We don’t obsess about how you live your life, but also we don’t want to be compelled to signal our approval or pick up the tab. We are every color and creed – though when someone who is incidentally a member of some other group aligns with normals, he/she/xe loses that identity. The left drums normals who are black out of its definition of “black,” just as normal women get drummed out of womanhood and normal gays get drummed out gayhood. In a way, the left is making E pluribus unum a reality again – to choose to be normal is to choose to reject silly identity group identification and unite. Instead of saying “normal Americans,” you can just say “Americans.”

...But we’re not giving up, and we’re not going to sit back and just take it. Militant normalcy is the result of normal people roused to anger and refusing to be pushed around anymore. We prefer a free society based on personal liberty and mutual respect. But if you leftists veto that option, that leaves us either a society where you rule and oppress us, or one where we hold the power. So let me break this down, both for the left and for their fussy Fredocon enablers: You don’t get to win.

Conservatism is the new counter-culture!

hat tip Bookworm Room

"The smug condescension from useless know-it-alls"

Z Man takes a look at different kinds of conservatism. He notes the decline in readership of the National Review, and that NR seems to think that all they need is a redesigned website. He quotes at length from Matthew Continetti, who is trying to understand how Trump thinks.

Guys like Continetti would not last five minutes in the world of real estate or the world of fast food, for that matter. If he were to get a job with Trump’s organization, it would be as a doorman or desk clerk. Maybe in a decade or so he could be in a position to make a decision, like selecting a cleaning contractor or a building maintenance vendor. The reason the Conventional Right is in crisis is that normal, conservative people, have grown weary of the smug condescension from useless know-it-alls like Continetti.

Read more here.

"That’s populism: Doing what you know is wrong, heedless of harmful consequences — some unintended, others easily foreseeable — because the masses will perceive it as empathy."

Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review,

...conservatives are quite good at perceiving problems — especially problems demagogically manufactured into crises for the purpose of rationalizing populist solutions of the statist variety. In reality, the chief political weakness of conservatism is that modern Americans are conditioned to expect that government can — or must at least try to — solve all our problems. It is the lot of conservatives to resist ill-conceived solutions. Populism cannot change the fact that government is incapable of solving problems upstream of government — problems of culture and complexity that government amelioration efforts, however well-intentioned, often make worse.

...Stephen Moore, by contrast, is telling conservatives to abandon their principles entirely: Surrender to the zeitgeist, deep-six the GOP’s image as the (highly imperfect) vehicle of Reagan conservatism, and become “Trump’s populist working-class party.”

He reportedly told some fairly aghast congressional Republicans that it means helping Trump deliver on his campaign promises . . . even if lawmakers think some of them are dumb ideas — just as Moore does. Trump, for example, wants an Obama-like stimulus of a trillion dollars for roads, bridges, etc. Moore’s response? “I don’t want to spend all that money on infrastructure. I think it’s mostly a waste of money. But if voters want it, they should get it.”

That’s populism: Doing what you know is wrong, heedless of harmful consequences — some unintended, others easily foreseeable — because the masses will perceive it as empathy.

In the United States, it is the states, not the public at large, that elect the president. Absent that arrangement, the Constitution would not have been adopted, and the nation would not have been founded. Our republic has become more democratic, but honoring the original understanding ensures that elections remain national in the sense that candidates must court all the states and be responsive to their varying concerns.

Read more here.

Facts favor conservativism, which is why the mainstream media works so hard to hide them.

Bookworm writes,

My blog’s motto is “Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.” The only thing wrong with the motto is that the word “liberal” is a poor substitute for a whole category of Leftists and totalitarians of all political and religious stripes. Otherwise, it’s entirely accurate — as is beautifully shown by the story of Kasim Hafeez, who was raised on a steady diet of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic conclusions. These conclusions led him to being a rabid anti-Israel activist — something that changed dramatically when he read Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel. Confronted with actual facts, Hafeez did a volte face on his previous prejudice and now tours campuses as a pro-Israel activist.

Facts favor conservativism, which is why the mainstream media works so hard to hide them.

How hard does this media work to hide facts? This hard: Larry Correia minces no words when he describes how appalling the American media is when it comes to reporting the news. He sees them as engaged in a four step dance of information death:

Read more here.

Will conservatism wear out its welcome, after attacking both Republican elites and Republican voters?

Tom Krannawitter asks,

WHAT OF CONSERVATISM IN THE UNITED STATES?
We may very well be witnessing the demise of the Republican Party, the modern history of which might be summed up thus: from fecklessness to meaninglessness to internal division to dissolution to obscurity in the dust bins of history.

But what of the modern conservative movement?

The intelligentsia of the conservative movement -- the kinds who flock around National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Heritage Foundation, AEI, and similar institutions subsidized by conservative philanthropists -- the kinds who know and care who Russell Kirk was, as well Irving Kristol, Milton Friedman, Frank Meyer, and Willmoore Kendall -- have been challenging and sometimes attacking the Republican Party for decades.
It's from hardcore conservatives, after all, that one hears hears the frequent lament that many elected Republicans are mere "RINOs."

These are the kinds of conservatives who sometimes can be found denouncing Wal Mart while carrying a copy of Wendell Berry in their briefcase. Or preaching free market economics and the virtues of business and competition from the pulpit of their favorite tax-exempt, subsidized 501(c)3. (Confusing, I know.)

Yet the rise of Donald Trump has directed the ire of the conservative intelligentsia away from Republican Party elites, at least for the moment, toward ordinary Republican voters. The conservative intelligentsia, in large measure, seem to have no more patience for Republican voters who support Trump than they do for the squishy Republican cronies in DC.

I mean, good grief, National Review published an entire issue of their magazine devoted to denouncing and dismissing Donald Trump! And the contributing writers spanned virtually the entire spectrum of conservative thought.
So if the conservative intelligentsia are opposed to elites within the Republican Party AND to large swaths of ordinary Republican Voters -- AND if the conservative intelligentsia have no allies or friends in the Democratic Party, and very few in the progressive worlds of academics, journalism, Hollywood, and professional sports -- is there a future for the modern conservative movement in the United States?

If the Republican Party ends, is that too the end of the conservative movement? If the Republican Party survives to see yet another election cycle, will conservatism be welcome within it? Or will conservatism have worn out its welcome after attacking both Republican elites and Republican voters?

Submit, or Resist? I'll take the latter!

Ace of Spades writes,

...But the fact that a clear social liberal, who practically no one believes is "pro-life" or even pro-gun, is the runaway favorite for the GOP nomination is a fact with major implications for the party going forward. If Trump's liberalism can be accepted, why can't the liberalism of Giuliani (or a Giuliani type to be named later) be accepted?

I had thought a whole bunch of things were non-negotiable demand points from an important part of the coalition.

Now it seems they either are plenty negotiable, or that part of the coalition isn't as important as I thought.

Ace links to this article by John Frum in the Atlantic:

...not perhaps since George McGovern in 1972 has a presumptive nominee so signally failed to carry the most committed members of his party with him.

...Donald Trump spoke to genuinely underrepresented people. Concerned that the GOP was captured by theocratic Southerners? Where Republicans are most secular and supposedly most moderate—the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic—Trump has done best. By all indications, he’ll do crushingly well in California, too. It’s where Republicans are least moderate that he was most resisted: Texas, Utah, and wherever party activists gather in caucuses and conventions. That’s where an Independent candidacy would be most effectively aimed.

To what end? Those conservatives who like Trump least presumably dislike Hillary Clinton most. Now that he’s the presumptive nominee, why won’t they line up behind him? The larger part of their most trusted sources of information, talk radio and Fox News, are already cheerleading for him. Those who still balk will likely follow eventually: After all, the real enemy is “the Left” ... and Hillary Clinton leads “the Left,” as everyone knows.

Resistance now means something more—and more dangerous—than tapping out #NeverTrump on Twitter. It means working to defeat Trump even knowing that the almost certain beneficiary will be Hillary Clinton.

Oh, a certain kind of pundit may speculate that an Independent candidacy will electrify the country, winning enough of the vote to throw the election into the House of Representatives. There, the Republican majority could—in some apocalyptic remake of Bush v. Gore—defy the popular vote and bestow the presidency this time on the third-place finisher. But this is fantasy, not politics. Theodore Roosevelt was the most successful vote-getter between the Civil War and World War I. Even he could not cast the 1912 election into the House, and if he cannot, some retired Marine general non-uniformed Americans have never heard of will surely not be able to. And if, against all odds, the scenario did unfold, the so-called winner would have no legitimacy.

What can more credibly be imagined, however, is an Independent candidacy that peels away 7-8 percent of the vote from a Trump-led GOP ticket, as John Anderson peeled votes away from Jimmy Carter in 1980, aiding Ronald Reagan.

2016 was the year that the great American center actually did rise up against the extremism of the corrupt two-party duopoly and actually did disrupt outdated ideologies.
Independent candidacies like Anderson’s allow political partisans to accept an outcome they cannot endorse. It’s the same thought process President Lincoln described in a favorite joke. A temperance preacher doing his rounds of the hot and dusty roads of Illinois stopped at the house of a more broadminded friend. The preacher asked for a glass of lemonade. The friend offered to put a shot of something stronger into the drink. The preacher refused on principle, but added: “If you could manage to put a drop in unbeknownst to me, I guess it wouldn’t hurt too much.” Lincoln told that joke to Generals Grant and Sherman in March 1865. When they asked whether they should try to catch Jefferson Davis when he fled Richmond. Lincoln added: “I’m bound to oppose the escape of Jeff Davis, but if you could let him slip away unbeknownst to me, I guess it wouldn’t hurt too much.” Some anti-Trump conservatives will feel bound to oppose the election of Hillary Clinton—but they guess it wouldn’t hurt too much compared to the Trump alternative.

So: If an Independent candidacy, what kind?

To date, talk of third-party candidates has been the sport of TV green rooms and conferences in pleasant locations. The old-line parties are too extreme, the complaint goes, and what’s needed is an Independent candidate to bust the corrupt duopoly, disrupt outdated ideologies, and at last represent the great American center. The people who advance this notion imagine the great American as looking very much like themselves: socially liberal, at ease with globalization, committed to sensible moderate problem-solving ideas like reducing entitlements, liberalizing immigration, keeping guns out of the wrong hands, and campaign-finance reforms. These are the people who talk about a Michael Bloomberg candidacy, as before that they talked about a Colin Powell candidacy.

The trouble is: 2016 was the year that the great American center actually did rise up against the extremism of the corrupt two-party duopoly and actually did disrupt outdated ideologies. A secular businessman who backed both parties, who denounced big money in politics, who promised to do deals and bring back jobs—isn’t that what you had in mind? No? And if, like J. Alfred Prufrock, you murmur, “That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all” then it’s time to reckon with the fact that the great American center wasn’t what you imagined it was at all either.

The people who like Michael Bloomberg are the least underrepresented people in American life. They don’t always get their way—who does?—but it’s not for lack of candidates eager to take their money and voice their views. Hillary Clinton is almost as perfect a candidate as the Davos consensus could wish, and to the extent she deviates from that consensus—favoring somewhat higher taxes, expressing rather more skepticism about the benignity of large financial institutions—it can be pardoned as a necessary concession to political reality.

Donald Trump spoke to genuinely underrepresented people. Concerned that the GOP was captured by theocratic Southerners? Where Republicans are most secular and supposedly most moderate—the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic—Trump has done best. By all indications, he’ll do crushingly well in California, too. It’s where Republicans are least moderate that he was most resisted: Texas, Utah, and wherever party activists gather in caucuses and conventions. That’s where an Independent candidacy would be most effectively aimed.

To what end? Those conservatives who like Trump least presumably dislike Hillary Clinton most. Now that he’s the presumptive nominee, why won’t they line up behind him? The larger part of their most trusted sources of information, talk radio and Fox News, are already cheerleading for him. Those who still balk will likely follow eventually: After all, the real enemy is “the Left” ... and Hillary Clinton leads “the Left,” as everyone knows.

Yet here’s something that traditional ideological conservatives will want to consider: Trump rose by shoving them aside. Trump’s rise exposed the weakness of social conservatives in particular. For a third of a century, social conservatives imposed a pro-life litmus test on Republican nominees for both presidency and vice presidency. They pulled the party into confrontations over sexuality and religion that many Republican elected leaders would have preferred to avoid. And then, abruptly, poof: The social conservative veto has vanished. New York values have prevailed, with a mighty assist from Jerry Falwell Jr. and other evangelical leaders. It seems unlikely the religious right will return in anything like its awesome previous form. A visibly conscientious objector to the culture wars easily defeated candidates who elevated the defunding of Planned Parenthood to the top of their agenda. That lesson, once demonstrated, won’t soon be forgotten.

Trump’s almost certain failure in November will likewise drag after him other conservative causes, notably immigration restriction. Republican elites will be quick to blame a Trump loss on his immigration message. The way would then be cleared for a President Clinton and Speaker Ryan to do the immigration deal that congressional leaders wanted to do with President Obama in 2013. And if, by some freak chance, Donald Trump were to win the presidency, immigration restrictionists would discover—as so many have discovered before them—how little a Donald Trump commitment is worth.

The big internal conservative struggle of 2017 will be the fight to write the narrative of how Trump emerged and why he lost. Anti-Trump conservatives will want to say that Trump lost because he wasn’t a “true conservative.” But 2016 to date is proposing that “true conservatives” constitute only a pitiful minority of the Republican Party, never mind the country as a whole. Why should any practical politician care about them ever again? To regain respect after their humiliation by Trump and the pro-Trump talkers on radio and TV, those who regard themselves as “true conservatives” will have to mount a show of force. “Maybe we can’t win on our own … but you can’t win without us.” And that means contributing—and being seen to contribute—to a Trump defeat.

...If the former Republican leadership had been more responsive to the needs of its voters and less swayed by the demands of its donors, the party might have changed from within. Now it’s the target of a hostile takeover that will stamp the TRUMP brand as indelibly upon it as it was once stamped upon the cityscape of Atlantic City. That branding ended in ruin for Atlantic City, and the GOP is unlikely to fare better.

Read more here.

Was the argument always just about which fat, soft comfortable elites would be in control?

Ace of Spades writes,

...There seems to be a lot of avoidance of the discussion of actual ideas by the party which once upon the time styled itself -- no, really, it did -- as the "Party of Ideas."

Now ideas are passe and kind of dangerous. Now the idea is to hide ideas from the public, and just talk about pablum and loving American and loving grandpa, and having a handsome-but-not-threateningly-so guy deliver this pablum, and thereby manage the voters into giving up a vote without ever actually giving any consent.

You can't avoid the ideas you plan to implement and run on a variety of trivial distractions and then claim some kind of mandate to implement them later.

This isn't the consent of the governed. And this isn't treating the voters as peers worthy of respect.

This is the management of thugs, morons, scoundrels and various sorts of social inferiors who you plainly do not trust to do the right thing (or to believe the right things) by manipulating them by all means except honest persuasion and argument.

Conservatism used to have this sort of everyday egalitarian populism to it -- we trust the people to do the right thing when provided all the information. It's the dreaded liberals who wish to hide their agenda and thereby avoid any actual engagement with the electorate.

Where did that conservatism go?

Or was that always, like so much else, just a stupid faithless lie?

Was the argument always just about which fat, soft comfortable elites would be in control?

Proposed Debate: Let's actually have a debate on open borders, huh?

My nominees for the border security/restrictionist side are David Frum (yes, he's on this side), Mickey Kaus, Mark Krikorian, and Tucker Carlson.

The other side can nominate whatever Open Borders hucksters they like -- probably mostly from the WSJ editorial board and Jorge Ramos. Whoever.

And let's actually see what the public really thinks.

Read more here.

Who is looking out for us?

Mark Steyn writes,

On Wednesday's show Rush Limbaugh discussed the Trump phenomenon through the lens of a 20-year-old Sam Francis article:

"Imagine giving this advice to a Republican presidential candidate: What if you stopped calling yourself a conservative and instead just promised to make America great again?" What do you think might happen in the current climate, where the middle class in the country feels totally left out of everything going on?

They feel like they've been targeted by every liberal Democrat policy that has not been stopped by the Republican Party. What if you dropped [talking] about the free market," stop all of that, "and promised to fight the elites who were selling out American jobs? What if you just stopped talking about reforming Medicare and Social Security and instead said that the elites were failing to deliver better health care at a reasonable price? What if, instead of vainly talking about restoring the place of religion in society ... you simply promised to restore the Middle American core," and everything it stands for?

Rush's view is that "nationalism and populism have overtaken conservatism in terms of appeal" - ie, that there are insufficient takers for conservatism. It comes to something when the nation's Number One conservative talk-show host is putting it that way, but you can see what he's getting at.

In contrast to the ebb and flow of eternally shifting multiparty systems, America has a rigid, inflexible two-party choice:

One party is supposed to be the party of big government, the other the party of small government. When the Big Government Party is in power, the government gets bigger, and, when the Small Government Party is in power, the government gets bigger.

One party is supposed to be the party of social liberalism, the other the party of social conservatism. When the Socially Liberal Party is in power, the country gets more liberal, and, when the Socially Conservative Party is in power, the country gets more liberal.

One party is supposed to be the party of foreign-policy doves, the other the party of foreign-policy hawks. When the doves are in power, America loses wars, and, when the hawks are in power, America loses wars.

So much for American conservatism's three-legged stool. "Mainstream" Republican candidates are essentially reduced to the argument: This time it'll be different, I promise.

Democrats' principal appeal isn't to philosophical coherence: They tell their coalition that they'll take care of their own - the gays, the blacks, the feminists, the transitioning, the environmentalists, the Hispanics, the educators... This time round, a big chunk of the Republican base has figured it'd like someone who's looking out for them, too.

If the present polls hold up through Iowa and New Hampshire, it'd be the reconfiguration of Mr and Mrs Main Street America as just another interest group. So a philosophical commitment to free trade means less to them than the degeneration of mill and factory towns into wastelands of fast-food service jobs and heroin addiction. An abstract respect for religious pluralism means less to them than reducing the number of crazies running around whose last words before opening fire are "Allahu akbar!" A theoretical belief in private-sector health care means less to them than not getting stiffed by crappy five-figure health "insurance" that can be yanked out from under you at any moment under Byzantine rules and regulations that change 30 times a day. And bipartisan myth-making about "a nation of immigrants" means a whole lot less than another decade of Press One For English, flatlined wages, sanctuary cities and remorseless cultural transformation...

Twin totalitarianisms

Mark Steyn points out that most of us just go with the flow:

...Most of us are not cut out to swim against the tide. For one thing, it's exhausting. Tides ebb and flow, and it's easier just to go with it. In Germany, maybe if your very best pal was Jewish, you'd say something. But, if it's just the greengrocer or the elderly couple in the second-floor flat that you nod to on the stairs, do you really want to make a fuss and have arguments with your family and friends all the time? Isn't it easier just to say nothing?

... I find the idea that tens of millions of American "traditionalist" conservatives are going to lead their own lives immune to the broader culture somewhat unlikely. Were the same-sex marriage decision, for example, merely a judicial ruling, Barack Obama would not have lit up the White House in LGBT rainbow colors. It is after all "the people's house" and half the people aren't entirely on board with this. But he chose to see this not as a mere judge's ruling but as an ideological victory - and to celebrate it as such. And he's thereby telling you that this shift is an official one, backed by the state, and state power, and it won't stop here.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, in an actual bit of jurisprudential footnoting in the midst of his Hallmark greeting card on the raptures of gay love, said that organizations would still be free to teach and promote the old form of restrictive straights-only marriage. That's awfully sporting of him, but the Boy Scouts of America provide a clue as to how it's likely to work out. In the late Nineties, the BSA said no to gay scoutmasters. I was on the floor of the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles in 2000 when they had some Eagle scouts as an honor guard - and in my section of the crowd everyone booed. And I remember thinking, "Man, these Dems are nuts. Booing boy scouts?"

But the booers won. Over the next decade, gay-friendly churches (Episcopalian, Congregational, and the other post-Christian ones) booted the scouts from church halls where they'd met for decades; Disney cut them off the list of approved charities to which their employees were permitted to donate their "Ears To You" fundraising proceeds; other corporate benefactors from the US soccer league to Lockheed Martin severed their ties ...and the number of new recruits to scouting dwindled remorselessly, and so did their finances. And in the end the boy scouts' leader caved - but too late. In the blink of an eye, the boy scouts had been, as my friend Ezra Levant likes to say, "de-normalized", and banished to the fringe, and nice soccer mommies don't want l'il Jimmy playing on the extremist fringe.

That's quite an accomplishment. After all, until Democrats figured it was safe to boo them, boy scouts were so mainstream that their very name is a synonym for someone kindly and pure and good-hearted. Take litigious lunatic and Nobel Prize appropriator Michael E Mann, who says here that the argument between the global warming crowd and us deniers has been "likened at times to a fight between a boy scout and a terrorist - and you know, we are the boy scouts". Which would make me the terrorist. When Mann calls himself a "boy scout", he doesn't mean he's a homophobic hater - although I'm certainly happy to advance that line in court if it helps. Mann is using "boy scouts" as a synonym for "the good guys".

That's how effective Big Gay is: They took "the good guys", and made 'em the bad guys, in nothing flat.

...I don't want to wind up with a choice between the twin totalitarianisms of soulless state-regulated hyper-sexualized semi-tyranny and sharia - because, if that's what it comes down to, I know who'll win. But conservatives have spent the supposed "end of history" winning a zillion elections, and losing everything that matters. To most of the so-called millennials, conservatism is entirely invisible except as a Jon Stewart punchline - and that invisibility was largely our choice. Instead of launching another radio show or news aggregator or think-tank, never mind obsessing over whether Jeb or Jindal or Christie will play better in Iowa, we need to make like the Islamic mullahs and the sex mullahs and start competing for the space where people actually live.

Read more here.

The power of a story

Bill Whittle has an idea.

Can immigration reform be depoliticized?

PJ Media's Henry Gomez linked to an article in Reason by Ed Krayewski, who advocates for immigration reform because

From a rights and limited government perspective, normalizing the situation of illegal immigrants ought to take top priority. Lack of legal status prevents illegal immigrants from participating in economic and civic life. As I’ve argued before, it’s not access to welfare that drives illegal immigrants' desire for legal status, but rather access to property and other rights that are, in our modern society, unfortunately tied to government documents and recognition. Focusing on a “pathway to citizenship” recognizes the need for illegal immigrants to have government recognition in order to buy and sell property, enter into contracts, use the court system for dispute resolution, and so on. It provides a way to depoliticize the issue and broaden its appeal.

For a libertarian solution, the "path to legalization" isn't about delivering new voters for the Democrats or increasing the welfare rolls, but about creating a legal environment wherein millions of people already living in the U.S. can become full and active participants in the economy. It would involve providing a federally recognized legal status for illegal immigrants that would fall short of citizenship or permanent residency but allow them to participate in economic and social life—to open bank accounts, drive, acquire occupational licenses, board planes, and do the many other things that require an ID in America today.

Concurrently, a libertarian solution would repeal the laws that penalize employers for hiring the wrong person. Employers have as much of a right to associate freely as immigrants have to travel freely. Government edicts should not come in the way of someone who wants to work and someone who wants to pay for work.

Of course, the libertarian approach also seeks to legalize drugs, which is a huge component of our massive governmental approach to border security. Gomez points out, though, that

Republicans of both the conservative and libertarian variety need to coexist in order for the party to have a viable future. In fact, on many issues the libertarian wing is taking the lead. Insofar as the Tea Party is about smaller government, lower taxes, less debt, and more personal freedom, it’s operating in deeply libertarian territory. But somehow Rubio’s intent is a sin so unforgivable that many had written him off as just another RINO in the mold of John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

Gomez wonders who made immigration reform the litmus test of conservatism?

Abridging liberty

CPAC is having its annual conference this week in Maryland. One of the controversies this year is whether or not an atheist group should be allowed to have a booth. Brent Bozell wrote,

The invitation extended by the ACU, Al Cardenas and CPAC to American Atheists to have a booth is more than an attack on conservative principles. It is an attack on God Himself. American Atheists is an organization devoted to the hatred of God. How on earth could CPAC, or the ACU and its board of directors, and Al Cardenas condone such an atrocity?

On the other hand, Charles C.W. Cooke argues here that atheism and conservatism are compatible.

You needn’t believe in God to believe in the American constitutional order.

One of my favorite blogs to read is The Atheist Conservative. That blog is proof of the truth of Cooke's comment above.

More from Cooke:

Indeed, given the troubled waters into which American religious liberty has of late been pushed, it strikes me that conservatives ought to be courting atheists — not shunning them. I will happily take to the barricades for religious conscience rights, not least because my own security as a heretic is bound up with that of those who differ from me, and because a truly free country seeks to leave alone as many people as possible — however eccentric I might find their views or they might find mine. In my experience at least, it is Progressivism and not conservatism that is eternally hostile to variation and to individual belief, and, while we are constantly told that the opposite is the case, it is those [leftists] who pride themselves on being secular who seem more likely and more keen to abridge my liberties than those who pride themselves on being religious.

Judging itself by its best intentions

Are good people prepared to ignore evil in the name of ideology? David Horowitz learned the hard way that they were.

“I had believed in the left because of the good it had promised. Now I learned to judge it by the evil it had done.”

Barbara Kay reviews David Horowitz’s “The Black Book of the American Left, Volume I: My Life And Times,”

Conservativism is “rooted in an attitude about the past rather than in expectations of the future.” Ideology is about the future. And herein lies the unbridgeable chasm between the two. “Since ideologues of the left are committed to an imagined future, one that re-establishes the Eden of our mythic beginnings, to question them is to provoke a moral rather than an empirical response: Are you for or against the equality of human beings? To dissent from the progressive viewpoint is not a failure to assess relevant facts but to an unwillingness to embrace a liberated future. It is, therefore, to will the imperfections and injustices of the present order.”

“A key to understanding the mentality of the left is that it judges itself by its best intentions, while judging its opponents – America chief among them – by their worst deeds.”

Conservatism is not a religion, though most religious Americans are conservative. But since leftism is so fixated on a future utopia, it is a kind of religion, whose god is “social justice,” in pursuit of which all is permitted.

Horowitz’s writings reveal that today many of America’s political and academic elites, including the president of the United States, are similarly blind to the moral treachery of those close to them, associates who in the past have committed terrible crimes or who dream of committing them in the future, yet they choose to honor and protect them.

Has Obama awakened conservatives?

How best to aid the conservative cause?

George Will writes that conservatives have believed that the way to persuade unbelievers in the conservative message would be to have them read some well written text written by a conservative. However, Will writes that what conservatives have learned is that the best way to persuade people is for progressives to be elected, and then people can see the bankruptcy of the progressives' policies.

Will writes,

Counterfactual history can illuminate the present, so: Suppose in 2012, Barack Obama had told the truth about the ability of people to keep their health plans. Would he have been reelected? Unlikely. Suppose in 2012, Chief Justice John Roberts, instead of rewriting the health-care law to save it, had been the fifth vote for overturning it. Would Obama be better off today? Probably.

Will wonders if history will repeat itself and progressives and statists will be rebuked by voters for many years into the future. Let's hope so.