Conservatism under glass

“We didn’t govern as conservatives!” we hear reliably from National Review, The Weekly Standard and the old-line conservative blogs. “The problem isn’t with the ideology, it’s with the fact that Republicans sell out on major issues.” While that kind of talk is a great way for the authors to offload responsibility for failure on Election Day, it does nothing to advance either the conservative movement or the party.

 

The only viable political vehicle for conservatism in 2008 America is the GOP. If it fails, conservatism fails. Deal with it.

 

Keeping conservatism under glass and separate from the Republican Party insures that these thinkers and writers never ask themselves the hard questions.  Questions like how the public wants its government to behave and how well conservative policies that have actually been implemented work in practice. As a result, we learn nothing when we lose elections.

 

Think about it: the “conservatism has never really been tried” argument sounds suspiciously like a campus communist after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Soviet communism wasn’t a “real” implementation of Marx’s theories, he claims, to an increasingly small audience. In real life, Marxism turns into oppression, stagnation and war. In real life, conservatives (generally) run as Republicans and have to compromise on judges, immigration and everything else while still trying to win elections with a consistent message.  This is the world we live in.

 

So what’s the takeaway message? Treat conservatism not as an orthodoxy based around the pronouncements of Hayek, Friedman and Limbaugh that punishes apostates and shirks responsibility for real-world results, but as a tool to best run America. 

 

Winners govern. Inquisitors, bloviators and true believers who are unwilling to get their hands dirty lose.

 

Some folks would prefer to be part of an ideologically pure niche that will never be held responsible for anything. I’d like to win.