The ‘feeble conservatives’

“When radicals scream that victory is indubitably theirs, sensible conservatives knock them on the nose. It is only very feeble conservatives who take such words as true and run round crying for the last sacraments.” — British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, as quoted by David Frum

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I found myself agreeing with much of what David Frum has to say in this column about the future of the Republican Party. It is true; the modern Republican Party is filled with “feeble conservatives” who are masters at bitching, playing the blame game and identifying all that’s wrong with America while providing few substantive solutions. While I don’t necessarily have a dog in the hunt, I would prefer as a voting American that the GOP step away from the fringe cliff because as they drag their party further to the right, they legitimize all the nutcases who want to raze entire departments within the federal government and would go so far as to actually sign petitions in support of state secession.

For those folks, and for everyone else within the Republican Party, Frum has some reasonable advice, and it starts with calling out people who purposefully misconstrue the facts and those, like Bill O’Reilly, who clearly have a dim view of millions of their fellow Americans. Here is Frum’s response to the nonsense in the above video:

You’ll hear O’Reilly’s view echoed wherever conservatives express themselves.

Happily, the view is wrong, and in every respect.

America is not a society divided between “makers” and “takers.” Instead, almost all of us proceed through a life cycle where we sometimes make and sometimes take as we pass from schooling to employment to retirement.

The line between “making” and “taking” is not a racial line. The biggest government program we have, Medicare, benefits a population that is 85% white.

President Barack Obama was not re-elected by people who want to “take.” The president was re-elected by people who want to work –– and who were convinced, rightly or wrongly, that the president’s policies were more likely to create work than were the policies advocated by my party.

The United States did not vote for socialism. It could not do so, because neither party offers socialism. Both parties champion a free enterprise economy cushioned by a certain amount of social insurance. The Democrats (mostly) want more social insurance, the Republicans want less. National politics is a contest to move the line of scrimmage, in a game where there’s no such thing as a forward pass, only a straight charge ahead at the defensive line. To gain three yards is a big play.

Whatever you think of the Obama record, it’s worth keeping in mind that by any measure, free enterprise has been winning the game for a long, long time to this point.

Frum rightly says that the next step for the GOP was to “reassemble a new coalition for limited government and private enterprise,” one that will not just consist of a “white establishment” but one that must necessarily include multiple ethnicities. Criticizing O’Reilly again, Frum then added:

To assume from the start that only certain ethnicities will contribute, and that others aspire only to grab, is not only ugly prejudice; it is also self-destructive delusion.

He ends by saying that the GOP needs “more sensible conservatives” who are able to contribute something meaningful to the political discourse:

As for the feeble conservatives, they should take a couple of aspirin and then stay quietly indoors until the temper has subsided and they are ready to say and do something useful again.

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