Please Tell Me Some More About How the NeverTrumpers Are The Most Conservative Republicans In the Universe

It would be one thing if Flake were merely liked by our most marginal, liberal-leaning semi-voters. Every party has a more liberal wing and a more conservative wing.

There's nothing wrong with that. It's unavoidable. It's just something that has to be worked out by compromise and bartering.

But of course the "Super Conservative" Thought Influencer class -- which, in theory, should be trying to make the voting population as a whole more conservative, not more liberal -- is pretty keen on Jeff Flake, too:

Why is it that our institutions are not merely overpopulated with but dominated by liberal Republicans? Shouldn't liberal Republicans merely be a 15-20% segment of our magazines and think tanks, with the most of the rest being genuine three-legs-of-the-stool conservatives?

Jonah Goldberg has been loudly bragging that he supports gay marriage since before Obama admitted he supported gay marriage.

He also recently declared that he's basically or "essentially" pro-life, which is code for what I am: pro-choice, but not really upset by the sort of minor restrictions that conservatives are likely to actually get through the courts.

He's a social liberal.

There's nothing scandalous about that -- any party should have, and will be strengthened by, a diversity of opinions on various matters.

But the pro-gay-marriage position is not a minority opinion in the class that rules the Republican Party. It is the dominant position, and long has been.

Do you really think Bill Kristol favors gun rights?

Have you ever seen him holding a gun? Writing about guns?

Do you really believe the conservative writers who are not chiefly on the pro-life beat are really very pro-life?

Because I don't. If they really were pro-life, they wouldn't always be shouting down pro-lifers agitating for a cause important to them, saying "Shhh! You're injecting divisive issues into the political debate!"

Yes. Injecting divisive issues into the political debate is the only way of changing the status quo.

Those who prefer to keep the status quo will shout down those "trouble-makers" and "Hobbits' trying to upset it. They will claim their reasons are tactical -- "We just don't want to inject this issue into the election" -- but their real reason is substantive:

They are not strongly opposed to the pro-choice regime, though they wouldn't mind a few restrictions around the edges. (Like me, but I've never claimed to be anything other than pro-choice with some restrictions.)

Similarly, the liberals crying "Don't talk about immigration!" are pretending their objection is merely a tactical one, one of timing and method, but their real objection is substantive: they want to keep the status quo of lax to no border enforcement, no wall, very limited deportation and only for the hardest of hardened criminals, etc.

They won't tell you the truth about this -- they'll just snipe at any effort to change the status quo -- because, like the actual progressive Democrats who are their kissing cousins, they have learned to hide their real positions from the Deplorables and Riff-Raff they rule over, concealing their actual position (keep the no-enforcement status quo, grant DACA in exchange for... nothing) while pretending they're only objecting to timing and messaging.

Or, with Trump: "decorum" and "civility."

They invent false reasons for opposing you because if they told you the truth -- that they disagree with you on substance, and not just on minor things but on foundational elements of conservative thinking -- you would correctly categorize them as "liberal" and no longer heed their counsel or buy their (failing) magazines.

Conservatives are consistently marginalized and dominated by liberals even in their own fucking political party.

Why is the alleged conservative party's political class and media class absolutely dominated by liberal Republicans?

Shouldn't a conservative party be top-heavy with conservative thinkers and leaders instead of top-heavy with liberal Republicans, with only an occasional dissenting conservative allowed?

Is that allowed? Or would that be too racist a thing for the liberals to permit?

Again, I don't mind the idea that there should be contrarian/dissenting voices in the GOP's leadership/influencer ranks.

But these are not contrarian or dissenting positions in the current ranks! The current dominant -- dominant! Not just a minority objection, but the dominant position among our "leaders" -- is that we must have Obama's Open Borders regime.

We just don't want to call it Open Borders. We want to pretend we're doing something while actually doing nothing. Like Obama did.

And then adding DACA.

That's the dominant position among this class, and they'll blackball you from the Club if you make too much noise objecting to it.

A conservative party should not be structured so that liberals are empowered to marginalize and deplatform actual conservatives from positions of influence within the party.

Again, I don't mind Jonah Goldberg's social liberalism in the party's leadership structure.

What I do mind is that Jonah Goldberg's social liberalism is the party's leadership structure.

More: Being socially moderate (eh, moderate to conservative, depending on the issue) myself, I wouldn't want to be purged from the party. I would say of myself, "Hey, there are people like me who vote Republican sometimes, and you can't just purge us all if you want to win elections."

So I wouldn't say "Purge Jonah Goldberg."

I do find it preposterous, however, that in a party in which most party regulars demand more border enforcement and support a wall -- and that about 35-40% of the general population supports these positions -- this majority position in the GOP is treated by the leadership class as if it's fringe if not outright racist.

Either way, our Leaders, if you can call them that, are not representing us on this issue, and not because of tactical considerations or because Trump doesn't "talk about it the right way." If that last objection were a real objection, then there should be no trouble amassing a lot of conservative media writers who do talk about immigration "in the right way" so that Trump can shut his yapper and just quote them.

But they don't.

Because they support Obama's immigration policy, in the main.

And they will keep on lying to you about this until you confront them about it, the same as you'd confront the hostile progressive media about their lies.

An Eye-Opening Moment: Remember when Todd Akin made his "legitimate rape" comments?

Dana Loesch fought for him to remain in the race, because Dana Loesch is pro-life and feels, as many pro-lifers do, that a baby created by rape or some other terrible circumstance is still a baby and still a life, and so what Akin said, while inartful, was a perfectly respectable political position to hold.

And she was screamed at for it.

Now, as I've said, I share Jonah Goldberg's (real) position on abortion: I'm mostly pro-life with tepid support of stuff like a 20 week cutoff and such.

For someone like me, who is pro-choice, Akin's position was indeed somewhat "extreme" and unforgiving.

But what I couldn't understand is all of these alleged "pro-life" Republicans joining in the screaming at Dana Loesch for his alleged extremism.

Then it dawned on me: Oh, the writer/professional caste of this party is only somewhat pro-life (some about as pro-life as I am, which is: not that pro-life) so of course they'll scream at Dana Loesch for pushing an absolutist (yet philosophically consistent) position on abortion.

I'm not saying that a real pro-lifer has to agree with Dana Loesch's position. I'm just saying that it shouldn't come as a shock that must be shouted down with great vehemence and social-shaming.

It should be more like a debatable point where you go, "No, I can't go that far; you're wrong, Dana."

And I started to wonder: Why don't the more socially-liberal or moderate Republicans forthrightly state that they're social liberals on this or that policy, so that people like Dana Loesch are not deceived into believing they represent a majority position?

I mean, from Dana Loesch's point of view: All of these conservatives swear on a stack of Bibles that they're intensely pro-life; why wouldn't she, or shouldn't she, take them at their word and assume that Akin's position, though maybe at the edges of what they'd prefer, was still a legitimate position?

Similarly, we have a lot of de facto Open Borders advocates who are cowards and will not admit they are essentially Open Borders advocates. They lie to other conservatives and claim to support some conveniently nebulous, unspecified plan for enforcement, and yet object to every tangible enforcement step offered.

Don't the Open Borders people realize they are deceiving the rest of the party into thinking the border enforcement/sovereignty position is much more widely held than it really is by consistently lying to people about their actual position?

Eh. Maybe they're lying to themselves, too. Maybe they think they really are in favor of border security, in some hazy, not-very-thought-through way, and then perpetually find them outraged and disgusted by actual, tangible border control efforts.

Precisely because they never bothered to think about the issue except in a Checklist Conservative way -- Oh sure, I support border enforcement and oh sure, I'm super-pro-life too -- and so every time they're forced to examine the actual issue, they're surprised by what they see.

You mean to say -- if we enforce the border, we're going to have to tell hardworking migrants they can't come into the country?

Well! That doesn't sound nice at all! I had no idea that excluding foreigners from our country entailed some exclusion!

Exclusion is so exclusionary, you know?

Or:

You mean if someone with a child is arrested for an illegal border crossing, we're going to have to separate the child from its parent while the parent is in jail? Egads! Why I never considered That!!!!

I basically think the Conservatism, Inc. scam is full of bullshit, and bullshitters, and outright grifters, and will not tell its customers/marks what it really thinks, and also is pretty stupid and thoughtless, and partly doesn't tell its customers/marks what it really thinks because it hasn't even bothered to figure out what it really thinks.

Until a liberal says "LOOK AT THIS OUTRAGE" on Twitter and then they think about it for literally the first time and have their opinions set by their liberal pals by 9am.

A "thinker" caste which won't tell you what it actually thinks, or which hasn't even bothered to figure out what it really thinks before being asked to make a snap-decision on Twitter about something they never thought about before.

But Trump's the problem here, right?

Is it too much to ask of our supposed Thinking Class to have thought more about major long-proposed policies than not at all?

posted by Ace of Spades at 05:53 PM

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