How the “right” keeps moving to the left without realizing it

Below, from August 2005, I have re-posted a VFR entry that concisely sums up the internal operations of the American “right” in its ongoing surrender to liberalism. Among other issues, I mention the “right’s”—including Rush Limbaugh’s—support for John Roberts. Now of course Limbaugh has been saying of late that Robert’s decision in the Obamacare case is a disaster for the country, and that the conservatives who claim it’s really a conservative victory are delusional. He gets credit for saying that. But has he acknowledged that in 2005 (even as I was writing article after article showing that Roberts was a liberal) he backed the nomination of the man who has now brought about this disaster ? Has he?

Limbaugh has his twenty million daily listeners, and is the best known conservative in America. VFR has its at most ten thousand daily readers, and is almost completely unknown among mainstream conservatives. But the truth was—and is—at VFR, not with Rush Limbaugh.

Here is the 2005 entry in its entirety:

Critique of conservative dhimmitude

I said the other day that for today’s “conservatives,” what is right is defined solely by whatever is the opposite of what the left is doing or seeking, or, more precisely, by whatever will beat the left in the field of partisan politics, not by what the conservatives themselves believe or ought to believe.

This situation gives the left ultimate power over the conservatives. If the conservatives are concerned primarily with fending off leftist attacks and defeating the left politically, then, instead of advancing their own, conservative, principles, they will try to beat the left at its own game. As a result of this way of thinking, President Bush, in a series of moves intended to neutralize or out-flank the left, has made considerable concessions to the left—in endorsing race-conscious preferences, in supporting same-sex civil unions, in proposing a guest worker program that is tantamount to open borders, and in nominating to the Supreme Court a man who is not a conservative in any serious sense. Now of course the left, being leftist and therefore not limited in its demands (a fact that today’s conservatives fail to understand, just as they fail to understand that Muslims are not limited in their demands), has not been out-flanked or mollified or silenced by any of those moves. They want Bush to go much further. They want it all. For example, John Kerry didn’t think Bush’s quasi-amnesty proposal went far enough; he wanted all illegals in America to be given amnesty and citizenship now, no questions asked.

So Bush, in order to disarm the left, moves left himself, yet the left still attacks him as a right-winger. What are Bush’s conservative supporters to do? They’ve got to defend their man, right? So the conservatives defend Bush’s left-leaning policies and adopt them as their own. We thus end up with the “conservative” Rush Limbaugh calling on conservatives to support John Roberts for his pro-homosexual rights record. El Slowbo evidently thinks of this as a smart conservative move.

Between the left that has ultimate goals over which it will not compromise, and a dhimmi-like “right” that implicitly accepts the left’s dominance and thinks that the only way to beat the left is to move in a leftward direction itself, the left will, obviously, always win—even as the “right” keeps imagining itself in the throes of triumph, and the left keeps whining that America is turning into a fascist country.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 14, 2005 02:17 PM

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 06, 2012 10:08 AM | Send