The theory/hope of renewed conservative resistance tentatively vindicated
That’s not my title, but Alex K.’s, who writes:
You’ve been hoping, as have I, that an Obama victory would force the water-carriers of Bushism-McCainism to start resisting the left again. Well, the recriminations amongst the mainstream Right seem to be leading to just that.
Apparently Arnold Schwarzenegger said of the Republican Party—this is as quoted by Fox’s Brian Kilmeade—“They should move away from some of their core principles, those conservative principles, and start spending on programs Americans want.” So that’s Arnold, who, of course, is not any kind of conservative.
So this is what Rush Limbaugh, who is exactly the kind of blind, water-carrying conservative we hope will shape up, said today:
I got an email yesterday from Brian Kilmeade of Fox News. He does the Fox & Friends show in the morning, and he was in Los Angeles. He was going to go interview Governor Schwarzenegger, and he said that he said one of the things that Schwarzenegger said was that the Republican Party is going to have to get rid of its conservatism if it is to ever have a chance to win again.
It is it is clear that Schwarzenegger’s reading David Brooks and some of the other conservative pseudo-intelligentsia on our side. [Drop] conservative principles and start spending on programs Americans want. Governor Schwarzenegger, would you look at how much spending went up during the Bush years? We got a new entitlement, we were spending money left and right and we were doing it trying to get votes of people! I told Kilmeade, “You tell Schwarzenegger we just ran the campaign he thinks we ought to be running. And then you ask him what the hell happened. We just ran a campaign with no conservative principles. We just ran a campaign where we ditched our core beliefs. We just ran a campaign where our candidate promised to buy up every failing mortgage. If that’s not spending money on what people want, I don’t know what it is. And we didn’t get any advantage to this. You tell Schwarzenegger that we already tried his campaign.” Lordy. This is worse than I thought.
I thought it was bad last week. The battle we have, I mean screw Obama, we know what that’s going to get us. The big question we have is what the hell are we going to do to ourselves on our side with this kind of stupid, idiotic, ignorant thinking? Advocate the very thing that failed big time right in front of our eyes as the way we win down the road.
[end of quote]
So with no Republican president to rally behind, and having been smacked into focus by defeat, Limbaugh is gearing to take on not just Obama but the leftward drift of the corrupted conservative movement. He even disses the Bush era of pandering for votes in leftist ways. (He does it without, as you’ve often observed of mainstream cons, admitting any reversal on his part.) While I have no doubt he will continue to focus mainly on the perfidy of the Democrats, his way of doing it is shaping up to be exactly as you’d hoped: by fighting the leftist creep on the Right, because he sees it as the wrong way to resist the Democrats. He will argue that when the conservative restoration comes it must be different from Bush-McCainism. He was incapable of drawing this line while Bush was in power. He had to be forced to turn against Bushism in a Republican power vacuum. Hopefully others like him will follow.
LA replies:
Arnold Schwarzenegger said:
“They should move away from some of their core principles, those conservative principles, and start spending on programs Americans want.”
Has anyone ever said it as baldly as that? Just give people what they want? If they want a life-time subsidy from the government—give them what they want?
Now keep Arnold’s comment in mind while we recall what Sarah Palin said in her interview on Univision:
To clarify, so you support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants?
I do because I understand why people would want to be in America. To seek the safety and prosperity, the opportunities, the health that is here. [Italics added.]
About which I commented:
So, people who have illegally entered and illegally remained in this country should be legalized and made citizens. Why? Because we sympathize with their desire to get the nice things they want to get here.
So, Arnold says the policy of Republicans should be to spend on programs that Americans want. And Sarah says, let illegals aliens stay in America because it’s what they want.
How many times have I said, liberalism is about satisfying people’s desires. Since in the liberal vision there is nothing higher than the human self,—no God (at least no God that practically counts), no social order, and no moral order—the only guide is people’s desires. And the only moral action is satisfying those desires. The philosophy of the Whig Party, out of which the Republican Party was born, was: self-advancement in life, in conformity with moral self-restraint. The philosophy of today’s Republican Party is: Give people what they want! Give them cake!
Schwarzenegger-Palin ‘12!
Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 21, 2008 12:24 AM | Send