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The far-out right-wing in the U.S. is having a terrible time swallowing Obama’s second win
Anything and everything anytime
Viewpoint: Republicans at a crossroads
By Rod Dreher Senior editor, The American Conservative
Surveying the smoking rubble of the Republican Party’s election hopes, the right-wing talk radio giant Rush Limbaugh made a declaration.
“Conservatism, in my humble opinion, did not lose last night. It’s just very difficult to beat Santa Claus.”
Read those two sentences carefully, for they tell you a lot about the massive psychological problem the Republicans face – and why it will be extraordinarily difficult and painful for them to deal with reality.
On his popular radio show, the highly influential Limbaugh explained in detail how the election results prove that the American people have become weak-minded, jelly-spined degenerates.
Why, they even allowed themselves to be bought off by a welfare-state liberal Democrat who promised them the moon!
Compounding the problem is the Limbavian dogma, widely shared on the ideological right – Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed.
It is interesting to contemplate how conservatism, or Limbaugh’s version of it, can ever fail?
If conservative candidates or conservative policies are rejected by voters, or conservative government shipwrecks itself with bad policy or plain incompetence, (case in point: the disastrous Bush administration) – well, isn’t that a pretty clear sign of failure?
It is far easier to dismiss voters as fools and unsuccessful GOP candidates as wretched sinners unworthy of conservatism.
Roman Catholicism holds a doctrine declaring the Church to be the “spotless bride of Christ”. To be sure, Catholics recognise that this is a theological claim, not an empirical one.
Limbaugh and millions of grassroots conservative militants approach politics as if it were a dogmatic religion. For them, conservatism is the Spotless Bride of Ronald Reagan and nothing about it can be falsified.
If voters reject the religion of conservatism, it’s because they are too sinful to see and embrace the truth.
That, or particular conservative politicians and strategists lack faith. Activist American conservatism has a name for such slackers and heretics: RINO, which means “Republican In Name Only”.
The point is simply that imputing politics with moral grandiosity and quasi-religious fervour makes deviation from ideology an extremely risky proposition.
Several more moderate Republicans lost their political lives to hard-right Tea Party primary challengers, who later proved too radical to win in Tuesday’s general election.
“I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country,” said Limbaugh, on the day after. “I don’t know how else you look at this.”
So a plain-vanilla Republican like Mitt Romney losing a close election to Barack Obama amounts to the Conservative Apocalypse? Good grief. Where does this pants-wetting hysteria end?
The true-believing conservative grassroots and leaders like Limbaugh have constructed a perfect system of epistemic closure.
Under their framework, there is no need to rethink what conservatism means or how conservatives behave in light of new facts or changing circumstances.
The Republican Party is becoming a perversely rigid sect, more concerned with being militantly correct than being pragmatic and successful. With each passing election cycle, their purity will become the purity of the desert.
There are many American liberals who counsel conservatives that all would come right for us again if only we would jettison our principles and become liberals.
No, thanks. Conservatives must be conservative, but we must also recognize that conservatism is not an ideology, but a way of approaching the world, the chief virtue of which is prudence.
As the great modern conservative Edmund Burke taught, the act of governing – indeed, “every human benefit and enjoyment” – requires compromise.
The talk-radio Jacobins and the suburban sans culottes may not like that kind of treacherous talk, but it is the essence of the conservative political temperament.
Burke once observed that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”
He might have said the same thing about the Republican Party. Then again, the old boy was probably a RINO.
2012-11-08 22:20:32
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