The one question I invariably encounter in a conservative movement that tends toward the gray side is how to engage the youth. And the answer is usually nothing that the questioners want to hear.
Now the Republican Party has laid the corpse of the last election on the slab and come up with the expected answers. Some of them are correct, albeit belated. Many others are the sorts of things that the squishy side of the party has been recommending for a while.
The Republican Party has gone from denying that there is a culture war to conceding defeat in the culture war while denying that it ever existed. Its program now is to push aside the socially conservative material and stop frightening off minorities. And that misses the whole point about everything.
The right has its racist elements like the left, but its weakness with minority groups has nothing to do with what the Republican Party is, but with what the Democratic Party says it is. The GOP is taking on responsibility for the things that it never did. That is a bad idea on the best of occasions, but a terrible idea since it only reinforces the exact same image that has attached to it.
The Republican Party doesn't poll poorly with minorities because its party members wear hoods and jump out of cars in minority neighborhoods while shouting "Boo". It polls poorly with minorities because the Democratic Party has built up an extensive infrastructure in minority communities, backed by a national and local media presence.
George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney were not racists, but if you listen to the media and have no opinion of your own, you might get that impression. And if you're a member of a group that experiences racism and your community leaders and role models tell you that they are racist, then you have excellent odds of believing it.
Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain or Ben Carson are not going to fundamentally change that because the problem is not really in the Republican Party. The problem is that the other side has an extensive investment in depicting Republicans as racist and it controls much of the media and academia. Its figureheads also happen to be highly influential in those communities being targeted.
The only way to counter that is to build up an actual working presence in these communities, focused on their middle class and their small businesses, finding common cause where it's possible, and doing something to build up rival community leaders.
And this isn't only true of minorities. Plenty of white communities are in the same boat. They can occasionally be won over, but they have been structurally indoctrinated and organized into seeing the Republican Party as the enemy. That isn't going to change because the Republican Party goes out of its way to announce that it is now friendly.
A non-retarded Republican Party would have spent the Bush Administration seeing that all that money from Washington D.C. is going to friendly organizations, rather than unfriendly ones. The Democratic Party has spent decades doing just that. But that is very doubtfully the GOP plan.
Instead perhaps there will be a series of LDS-style ads featuring minorities who announce proudly, "I am Black and a Republican." And someone will make a lot of RNC money proposing that idea.
That naturally brings us to the youth. A sizable number of them do believe in gay marriage, abortion and a cradle to the grave nanny state complete with free contraception and abortion for all. But for various reasons the Grand Old Party has decided to bend on gay marriage in the hopes of winning over the kids.
Romney didn't actually lose the white youth vote and going for gay marriage will likely alienate young religious voters while failing to attract nearly enough socially liberal/fiscally conservative voters to make up the difference. Not unless Rand Paul is on the ticket and probably not even then. But the GOP still isn't thinking with its head. And like Rob Portman, it's driven as much by personal concerns as by political ones.
The answer that I give when asked about the youth, that no one really wants to hear, is that in many cases they aren't 'gettable'. That doesn't mean that they are permanently off-limits, but that with delayed employment opportunities and delayed maturity, it will take time until they actually share conservative economic and social concerns. That's not true across the board, but it is true of the very voters that the Grand Old Party wants to get its hands on.
Shifting on gay marriage will not make a difference. It will only reinforce the image of the GOP as a dated party that lags behind the Democratic Party's initiatives. And gay marriage does not exist as an individual cause. It is part of a constellation of social causes representing progressive social mores. The idea that gay marriage is a stopping point is laughable. There is no stopping point. That is the whole point.
The left is not interested in gay marriage because it believes in marriage, but because it believes in destroying all existing social institutions. A Republican Party that fails to grasp that has no clue where it is or what it's fighting. It might as well be sent blindfolded into the ring with Muhammad Ali. And that is indeed what has been largely going on. The Republican Party has capitalized on populist backlashes to the left's culture war without really understanding them or believing in them.
The Republican Party can go fiscally conservative and socially liberal and the joke will be on it, because a socially liberal society of broken families and absent values is naturally dependent on the Nanny State. Trying to be fiscal conservatives in a socially liberal society makes as much sense as trying to sell burnt Korans to Mecca.
A socially conservative society can be naturally fiscally conservative, but a socially liberal society is going to reserve its patches of fiscal conservatism for the upper classes. A socially liberal and fiscally conservative party will revisit the old broken Eastern Establishment GOP with a veneer of radicalism that will quickly rub off once the Democratic Party takes its proposals and runs with them.
That brings us back to the youth. If we are to believe the brilliant rebranders of the GOP, then the youth have naturally socially "advanced" on gay marriage. That is of course utter nonsense. The advance has been carefully engineered by the left for its own reasons using popular entertainment and the education system, among other methods. The same process that branded the Republican Party racist led to this amazing social revolution in believing what you see on television to be true.
Gay marriage exists as part of a set of progressive social values. To accept it, you have to accept everything that comes with it... or a year from now you'll be right where you were before you accepted it. And the people moving the agenda forward are not your friends. The places that they are moving the agenda are meant to stagger you and bewilder you. To make you feel like you are losing your own country.
The natural advance theory is a myth. And trying to keep pace with these 'advances' is hopeless because they are managed culture war strikes, not some external process naturally progressing at its own pace.
The same problem exists with the youth vote as with the minority vote. We are not up against a cultural or social misunderstanding, but a deliberate program that has been developing for over a century and that is backed by heavy investment in role models, in entertainment and in ideas. We have not alienated them. They have been alienated from us. The distinction is an important one because it means that we are not in control of the process.
Trying to win by evolving is a lost cause. Trying to repackage conservatism as socially liberal ignores the most basic elements of human psychology and the entire process of youthful rebellion that feeds radicalism. All that's left is to get rid of conservatism, rename the Republican Party the Freedom Party that now stands for everything the Democratic Party stands for except higher taxes and big government and wait for the laughter.
The Republican Party isn't competing with issues. It's competing with schools and comedians. It's competing with the entire messaging apparatus of the left which is extensive, elaborate and pervasive. Imagining that the conservative position will get equal time with their professors and Family Guy because of a shift on gay marriage is the most deluded idea ever. The problem isn't gay marriage, it's the apparatus that's the problem.
Imagine a Republican candidate trying to adopt his liberal opponent's positions in a debate with a one-hour delay. That is how ridiculous the GOP is being. And its leaders should not doubt that even a crowd of voters which gets sizable chunks of its politics from its entertainment will only sneer at them for their hopelessly uncool efforts at trying to fit in.
The GOP leadership wants a quick fix solution. How to Get Minority Voters and Young Voters in 4 Easy Steps. There is no such solution.
The left did not get to where it is with quick fix solutions. It thought in the long term and it acted in the long term. And while we may lack the time and the committed manpower to replicate its tactics, it's absurdly silly to think that its cultural advantages, which include, among other things, control of the education system and your television set, can be negated by turning on a few positions.
This is a war of values. Whatever your beliefs about marriage or any other subject may be, every political struggle is about what we believe about society at large. It is about what we believe other people should believe. The man who believes in the least amount of government imaginable still needs a society that agrees with him and is willing to implement that kind of system or it all comes to nothing.
We are in the middle of a culture war. That doesn't mean our leaders should go around shouting that to the skies, but they should understand what it means. This is not really a struggle over ObamaCare or gay marriage or whether money should be pumped into green energy, agricultural subsidies or foreign aid to Pakistan. It's a battle over what kind of society we should have and what its people should believe and not believe.
You don't win a culture war by opting out. You don't win it by surrendering on most of the points. And you don't win it by pretending it isn't there. If you fail to make an argument, then you lose by default. And then when the polls catch up with you, you chalk up that failure to changing mores and count yourself clever for catching up to the bandwagon of your enemies and then fighting a last stand on the next issue of the day for as long as the polls say that you should.
This is not simply about government. This is about the kind of society that we want to have and the kind of people that we want to be. This isn't about enforcing morality, but it is about recognizing that if we don't have a system of values that we put forward, then we will automatically lose to those who do. And their system of values will have very little room for freedom of speech or any other kind of freedom.
Some people vote for parties, swapping them out like yesterday's laundry. These are the independent voters. Others vote their values and that is as true in Portland as it is in Salt Lake City. Most vote their culture. That tribal sense of where they belong. It is why Jewish support for the Democratic Party is so hard to shake. It is why social conservatives keep voting Republican even when they see little out of it.
If the Republican Party ever starts understanding where its voters are coming from and where the people who aren't its voters are coming, and the entire process that has been tearing apart the country for generations then it might have a shot. But that's not a quick fix. It's not an easy answer. It can't be solved with an online ad campaign full of videos meant to go viral, but not in the way that the people making them think that they will.
The GOP used to understand the culture war, now it doesn't. It would like a unilateral detente. It would like to opt out and just focus on economic reform. And that plan has as good a chance of succeeding as interrupting an exchange of shelling in WW1 to ask if this whole thing can't be settled with a spirited debate. It doesn't work that way.
The real problem is not just that the Republican Party is still shell-shocked from its defeat, but that it has learned very little from that defeat. Despite being beaten by a coalition, it has no real plan for assembling its own coalition. It doesn't really understand its base or the other side's base and it is thinking in urban liberal terms about the future of a conservative party.
The Republican Party has gone from denying that there is a culture war to conceding defeat in the culture war while denying that it ever existed. Its program now is to push aside the socially conservative material and stop frightening off minorities. And that misses the whole point about everything.
The right has its racist elements like the left, but its weakness with minority groups has nothing to do with what the Republican Party is, but with what the Democratic Party says it is. The GOP is taking on responsibility for the things that it never did. That is a bad idea on the best of occasions, but a terrible idea since it only reinforces the exact same image that has attached to it.
The Republican Party doesn't poll poorly with minorities because its party members wear hoods and jump out of cars in minority neighborhoods while shouting "Boo". It polls poorly with minorities because the Democratic Party has built up an extensive infrastructure in minority communities, backed by a national and local media presence.
George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney were not racists, but if you listen to the media and have no opinion of your own, you might get that impression. And if you're a member of a group that experiences racism and your community leaders and role models tell you that they are racist, then you have excellent odds of believing it.
Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain or Ben Carson are not going to fundamentally change that because the problem is not really in the Republican Party. The problem is that the other side has an extensive investment in depicting Republicans as racist and it controls much of the media and academia. Its figureheads also happen to be highly influential in those communities being targeted.
The only way to counter that is to build up an actual working presence in these communities, focused on their middle class and their small businesses, finding common cause where it's possible, and doing something to build up rival community leaders.
And this isn't only true of minorities. Plenty of white communities are in the same boat. They can occasionally be won over, but they have been structurally indoctrinated and organized into seeing the Republican Party as the enemy. That isn't going to change because the Republican Party goes out of its way to announce that it is now friendly.
A non-retarded Republican Party would have spent the Bush Administration seeing that all that money from Washington D.C. is going to friendly organizations, rather than unfriendly ones. The Democratic Party has spent decades doing just that. But that is very doubtfully the GOP plan.
Instead perhaps there will be a series of LDS-style ads featuring minorities who announce proudly, "I am Black and a Republican." And someone will make a lot of RNC money proposing that idea.
That naturally brings us to the youth. A sizable number of them do believe in gay marriage, abortion and a cradle to the grave nanny state complete with free contraception and abortion for all. But for various reasons the Grand Old Party has decided to bend on gay marriage in the hopes of winning over the kids.
Romney didn't actually lose the white youth vote and going for gay marriage will likely alienate young religious voters while failing to attract nearly enough socially liberal/fiscally conservative voters to make up the difference. Not unless Rand Paul is on the ticket and probably not even then. But the GOP still isn't thinking with its head. And like Rob Portman, it's driven as much by personal concerns as by political ones.
The answer that I give when asked about the youth, that no one really wants to hear, is that in many cases they aren't 'gettable'. That doesn't mean that they are permanently off-limits, but that with delayed employment opportunities and delayed maturity, it will take time until they actually share conservative economic and social concerns. That's not true across the board, but it is true of the very voters that the Grand Old Party wants to get its hands on.
Shifting on gay marriage will not make a difference. It will only reinforce the image of the GOP as a dated party that lags behind the Democratic Party's initiatives. And gay marriage does not exist as an individual cause. It is part of a constellation of social causes representing progressive social mores. The idea that gay marriage is a stopping point is laughable. There is no stopping point. That is the whole point.
The Republican Party can go fiscally conservative and socially liberal and the joke will be on it, because a socially liberal society of broken families and absent values is naturally dependent on the Nanny State. Trying to be fiscal conservatives in a socially liberal society makes as much sense as trying to sell burnt Korans to Mecca.
A socially conservative society can be naturally fiscally conservative, but a socially liberal society is going to reserve its patches of fiscal conservatism for the upper classes. A socially liberal and fiscally conservative party will revisit the old broken Eastern Establishment GOP with a veneer of radicalism that will quickly rub off once the Democratic Party takes its proposals and runs with them.
That brings us back to the youth. If we are to believe the brilliant rebranders of the GOP, then the youth have naturally socially "advanced" on gay marriage. That is of course utter nonsense. The advance has been carefully engineered by the left for its own reasons using popular entertainment and the education system, among other methods. The same process that branded the Republican Party racist led to this amazing social revolution in believing what you see on television to be true.
Gay marriage exists as part of a set of progressive social values. To accept it, you have to accept everything that comes with it... or a year from now you'll be right where you were before you accepted it. And the people moving the agenda forward are not your friends. The places that they are moving the agenda are meant to stagger you and bewilder you. To make you feel like you are losing your own country.
The natural advance theory is a myth. And trying to keep pace with these 'advances' is hopeless because they are managed culture war strikes, not some external process naturally progressing at its own pace.
The same problem exists with the youth vote as with the minority vote. We are not up against a cultural or social misunderstanding, but a deliberate program that has been developing for over a century and that is backed by heavy investment in role models, in entertainment and in ideas. We have not alienated them. They have been alienated from us. The distinction is an important one because it means that we are not in control of the process.
Trying to win by evolving is a lost cause. Trying to repackage conservatism as socially liberal ignores the most basic elements of human psychology and the entire process of youthful rebellion that feeds radicalism. All that's left is to get rid of conservatism, rename the Republican Party the Freedom Party that now stands for everything the Democratic Party stands for except higher taxes and big government and wait for the laughter.
The Republican Party isn't competing with issues. It's competing with schools and comedians. It's competing with the entire messaging apparatus of the left which is extensive, elaborate and pervasive. Imagining that the conservative position will get equal time with their professors and Family Guy because of a shift on gay marriage is the most deluded idea ever. The problem isn't gay marriage, it's the apparatus that's the problem.
Imagine a Republican candidate trying to adopt his liberal opponent's positions in a debate with a one-hour delay. That is how ridiculous the GOP is being. And its leaders should not doubt that even a crowd of voters which gets sizable chunks of its politics from its entertainment will only sneer at them for their hopelessly uncool efforts at trying to fit in.
The GOP leadership wants a quick fix solution. How to Get Minority Voters and Young Voters in 4 Easy Steps. There is no such solution.
The left did not get to where it is with quick fix solutions. It thought in the long term and it acted in the long term. And while we may lack the time and the committed manpower to replicate its tactics, it's absurdly silly to think that its cultural advantages, which include, among other things, control of the education system and your television set, can be negated by turning on a few positions.
This is a war of values. Whatever your beliefs about marriage or any other subject may be, every political struggle is about what we believe about society at large. It is about what we believe other people should believe. The man who believes in the least amount of government imaginable still needs a society that agrees with him and is willing to implement that kind of system or it all comes to nothing.
We are in the middle of a culture war. That doesn't mean our leaders should go around shouting that to the skies, but they should understand what it means. This is not really a struggle over ObamaCare or gay marriage or whether money should be pumped into green energy, agricultural subsidies or foreign aid to Pakistan. It's a battle over what kind of society we should have and what its people should believe and not believe.
You don't win a culture war by opting out. You don't win it by surrendering on most of the points. And you don't win it by pretending it isn't there. If you fail to make an argument, then you lose by default. And then when the polls catch up with you, you chalk up that failure to changing mores and count yourself clever for catching up to the bandwagon of your enemies and then fighting a last stand on the next issue of the day for as long as the polls say that you should.
This is not simply about government. This is about the kind of society that we want to have and the kind of people that we want to be. This isn't about enforcing morality, but it is about recognizing that if we don't have a system of values that we put forward, then we will automatically lose to those who do. And their system of values will have very little room for freedom of speech or any other kind of freedom.
Some people vote for parties, swapping them out like yesterday's laundry. These are the independent voters. Others vote their values and that is as true in Portland as it is in Salt Lake City. Most vote their culture. That tribal sense of where they belong. It is why Jewish support for the Democratic Party is so hard to shake. It is why social conservatives keep voting Republican even when they see little out of it.
The GOP used to understand the culture war, now it doesn't. It would like a unilateral detente. It would like to opt out and just focus on economic reform. And that plan has as good a chance of succeeding as interrupting an exchange of shelling in WW1 to ask if this whole thing can't be settled with a spirited debate. It doesn't work that way.
The real problem is not just that the Republican Party is still shell-shocked from its defeat, but that it has learned very little from that defeat. Despite being beaten by a coalition, it has no real plan for assembling its own coalition. It doesn't really understand its base or the other side's base and it is thinking in urban liberal terms about the future of a conservative party.
Comments
The real problem of the Republican Party is that it seems to be controlled by people who hate controversy as well as people who profit from the status quo, and many of these are in both categories. You can't win by being like the other guy who is a radical, but only less radical. Trying to appeal to the middle-of-the road voters based on being "mild" doesn't vote for a host of reasons. First of all, you can't generate "passion" and passion is what gets voters to the polls. Romney lost because the base didn't turn out, and the biggest reason was not his Mormon faith but the lack of passion for what he stood for. Second, you lose all the extremists on YOUR side not only because of the lack of passion but because to them you looks like the other side. Many have said that they see no reason to vote for the GOP instead of the Dems, because what's the point of trying to go over the cliff at a slower speed? You are still going over the cliff. Thirdly, if you are "mild" you can't really educate anyone so they see no logical reason to vote for you. So you really appeal to no-one but the confused low information voters who like your non-controversial demeanor and to those so scared of the other side that they'll vote for anyone but. That's not enough in most cases. It's especially not enough when the other side controls the dominant media and the education system.
ReplyDeleteThe idiot GOP now has come out with a plan to turn their minority outreach into a full-blown Amnesty. They remind me of either lemmings or some horror-movie character irresistibly drawn towards self-destruction. Every logical person who has analyzed the situation has now picked up on the reality of the numbers involved: if you legalized 20 million illegals, you will get 15 million new Democrats. Not only that, this will not get you more than 2-3% of the current Hispanic voter base. So they are insane, or the maniacal "business leaders" who feel they desperately need the illegals are dictating the terms, or the globalists are controlling them, or SOMETHING but the party is acting suicidally.
Lastly, gay marriage. The way for the Republicans to deal with gay marriage is to declare it a state issue because the Federal Government has no constitutional responsibility there. It does need to deal with the practical reality of the tax code as well as benefits for the partners of federal employees but that can be handled as a contractual issue. Regardless of how the issue is resolved on the state level, it needs to be separated into two components there: viewing traditional marriage as the proper environment to raise kids and a traditional cultural institution on the one hand, and as a contractual arrangement between two consenting adults on the other. Just doing whatever the majority prefers is appropriate for the Democrats because of their control of the media, but not for the Republicans.
Very comprehensively summed up, but the GOP, like most organizations is only capable of thinking in terms of easy short term solutions that cause worse problems and solve nothing.
ReplyDeleteAmnesty is the solution that they're paid to come up with. And it sounds plausible and sellable. It's a quick fix that wrecks everything. Which makes it perfect.
The only culture anyone should vote for is American culture.
ReplyDeleteAnything else is ugly and questionable.
Many are independent because they vote for the best candidate despite party lines. There used to be that option.
Today the Republican party is left and the Democrat party is father left and there is no choice really.
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I'm still surprised so many people look at the Grand Old Party and think it is worth saving. And for me this has very little to do with gay marriage, illegal’s or any of the other socially liberal canards. We have watched as the establishment Republicans have fought viciously against people like us, and perhaps even colluded with the Democrats in the process to get their people ahead of real Conservatives.
ReplyDeleteThis all started with George H.W. Bush. This guy was practically a Democrat himself, except for about two minutes of his campaign when he demanded we read his lying lips. We watched the establishment push good Conservatives like Jack Kemp out of the way for the guy whose "turn it was". In turn, Kemp never even stood a chance, all money and attention was funneled to the Bush campaign.
Then we saw Bob Dole, a guy we all knew had a snowball's chance in hell of beating Clinton get predictably trounced.
In the 2000 primary there was a boat load of actual Conservatives Keyes and Forbes who also didn't receive any help from the so called party of Conservatives, and instead it came down to Dubya and McCain. I specifically remember the never ending bombardment of coverage of these two, and I believe we saw back then which direction this party wanted to go.
We have seen the Party chairmen bashing Talk Radio and even Rush Limbaugh for being essentially too Conservative. Talk Radio like it or not is a huge outlet for Conservatism, especially before the Internet became as big and important as it is today, yet the party has consistently for decades now pushed back against actual Conservatives, and the results were clear 1992, 1996, 2008 and again 2012 when millions of actual Conservatives stayed home and watched Clinton and Obama come to or stay in power.
Yet here we are once again just like after they railroaded Goldwater, trying to find a way to fix a party that doesn't even want us. It is becoming a vicious cycle. I believe the best long term strategy Republicans and Conservatives can employ would be the same one we are seeing Naftali Bennet use in Israel. He started an alternative Conservative movement, and then eventually became so powerful, that the establishment Right had no choice but to merge with them, and they have now become so vital to Netanyahu and Likkud that if Bennet pulled the plug tomorrow and separated, the Right would lose everything. And in a few years you will see more of a Right Wing Party in Israel that is actually Conservative, and the fundamentals will be impossible to ignore making them popular because of results, not marketing schemes.
@AG
ReplyDeleteKemp was establishement, he was the 1996 running mate and an amnesty supporter.
Mr. Bennett's approach will not work here because our system is winner take all, not proportional representation.
The best idea is to formalize the conservative faction and have "internal primaries" before the actual primary.
Ideally it would be selected by paid membership, but we get the joys of "democracy"
I believe that a major cause of Romney's defeat was fear on the part of white voters of black riots if Obama lost.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that it is a fact that the RP can only win if the white working/middle classes support it and turn out to vote. Just about every other demographic are overwhelmingly DP supporters. It is the failure of the RP to put forward policies that benefit whites that lead to the lack of enthusiasm of that group.
For starters:
Affirmative action directly affects white people by restricting opportunities for whites and favoring minorities.
Unrestricted immigration, legal or otherwise, disparately impacts working/middle class people by reducing wages and employment choices.
Anti discrimination laws are a direct attack on freedom of the individual. Freedom has to mean choice, if I cannot discriminate then in what sense am I free?
The RP has completely swallowed the nonsense of a "progressive" taxation system and thus has conceded that the private earnings of individuals may be confiscated by whim of Govt. This is profoundly unjust, we need to scrap income, corporation, inheritance and capital gains taxes and replace them with a straight 20% VAT. Everybody pays the same rate but the more you spend, the more you pay. This could eliminate the whole tyrannical nonsense of the tax code.
The RP needs to put up a plan to resuscitate the private sector, certainly the elimination of corporate tax would help but more is needed particularly the mandate for employers to provide health coverage is crippling to US business, we need to set up a single payer HC system just to get this load off of the back of business.
As for the youth vote; appeal to their self interest, there is enough dissatisfaction for a savvy politician to exploit, but whoever it is will need the guts to say and argue positions that are contrary to the collectivist norms that have been installed.
regards
roger in florida
AG, I couldn't agree with you more about the Bush's and the party hating people who have principles and demanding we fight for them. You can add Sarah Palin and Herman Cain to the list of heads the GOP elites have skewered. This is the reason for the Tea Party Caucus. It already exists we just need to direct the money to it. That message was clear at CPAC.
ReplyDeleteDavid Horowitz has the right ideas and he knows the Left better than anyone. He just needs the money to bring the fight to the Left.
Finally, Daniel this is a question to you. The only guy I hear making the case against same sex marriage is Dennis Prager and his case his simple, they wish to blur and then erase sexual distinction all together. I think its a good case, but it removes an important element from the equation and that's the past.
The Greeks, The Spartans, Romans, etc. were all societies where homosexuality was ubiquitous. The common thread is women were treated as second class citizens. It was the Torah which commanded men to cling to woman and set the world on the path to separate but equal. It has the added benefit of destroying the myth that the sexes are so fixed. Why isn't this a good line of attack?
As long as the thinking, but only at the utmost post-adolescence and thus feeling rather than thought operating young people of the day, live strictly in an Ianything world, brainwashed by college, detached from religion and values, kept enslaved in study debt and the rest of the electorate is enslaved in government entitlement or an unstable hence looking for the best liars promising them a future, illegal but pardoned allian status, where is any conservative movement going to find enough voting followers to restore the political system back to some form of intelligent individualistic stability?
ReplyDeleteBeth, it's a good line of argument for traditionally minded people. Not so much for much of the left which rejects the family.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to compare the before/after data on HIV, etc. and other social, medical, economic data in a state like Massachusetts where SSM has been operational for a while...Actually since Mitt Romney railroaded it Obama-style past the MA Constitution and Legislature.(Portman was not the first GOP to come out for SSM)
ReplyDeleteSibyl Smith
Israel has tolerant laws re: homosexuality and advanced medical care. Despite (or because of) this, HIV has increased 55% in Israel since 2005.
ReplyDeleteWhat are Israel's laws re: Same-sex marriage and adoption?
Isa, I imagine African migration also had a good deal to do with those numbers.
ReplyDeleteAbortion has nothing to do with social conservatism. This revolves around a philosophical question of when human life begins and to what extent. If anti-abortionists are right, abortion is murder or is so under certain circumstances. However, murder is rightly a state matter, not federal.
ReplyDeleteConcerning marriage licenses, gov't has no business defining marriage. That is a matter for dictionaries. Gov't has a role enforcing contracts generally, but has not role defining what type of contract is allowed (provided the contract does not call for the initiation of force or fraud).
A license is gov't permission to do something which otherwise would be illegal. For most of western history, there were no gov't-issued marriage licenses, just private contracts. Later licenses were required for marriage involving underage or mixed races.
You're trying to ignore the elephant in the room. Many young people smoke pot or have friends who do, and realize the insanity of prohibition.
Another problem the GOP has: often conservative or GOP functions open with a Christian prayer. This tends to alienate non-Christians, and many Asians are not Christian.
Concerning immigration, the solution is simple. Since we can't stop economic immigration, best to legalize it. People should be allowed to work here, but citizenship and voting do not need to go along with working. The problem with Hispanics in America is not tha they work here, but that they tend to vote the wrong way (due to ethnic solidarity and gov't benefits and anti-immigration coming from conservatives).
If the US doesn't allow economic immigration, then manufacturing will shift to low-cost countries. Which is what is happening.
Kevin,
ReplyDeleteMost social conservatives would disagree with your assertion that abortion has nothing to do with social conservatives.
Murder may be a state issue, but the legalization of murder is another matter.
Government doesn't define marriage, it recognizes marriage. Just as it recognizes children or clouds or rain.
Quite a few young people have also shoplifted or have friends who shoplifted. Should we legalize shoplifting? It's not much of an argument.
Most Asians, as in Chinese, etc are Christians. Many Muslims, e.g. Pakistanis, however are not.
We can control economic immigration and keeping people on migrant worker status while denying them citizenship has proven nearly impossible in most Western countries. Even Rand Paul's amnesty plan includes a path to citizenship.
The US has allowed a great deal of economic migration and manufacturing has still shifted to low-cost countries.
Labor isn't why manufacturing has gone over seas. My corportation did a study on this about 10 years ago as we are huge world wide manufacturer. The result of the study was that after shipping the goods to the US from wherever (Mexico excluded) the cost of shipping negated the savings in labor. But, the overhead not usually seen in labor, i.e. regulations, made manufacturing here in the US unrealistic. So now my company manufactures over seas, ships the products to the US, and only our service branches remain in the US for obvious reasons.
ReplyDelete@Kaiser Roll - Every one always dismisses third parties, even though a good effort has never acctually been made to try it. With that attitude we will never fix anything.
ReplyDeleteI do sometimes tend to lean to the side of "You can't effect change from the outside looking in" but we also need to know when we are not wanted.
@Beth - I joined the TEA Party back whe they first started. At first we wanted nothing to do with either party. Then a bunch of Republican establishment types created the "TEA Party Express"and cleved onto the movement. I rejected this and eventually quit. Many thought it brought legitimacy to the movement, I knew it would bring hatred from the Leftists, and we can clearly see who was right. If the TEA Party wants to be relevant again, they need to dump the caucus and divorce the GOP.
If you have ever seen the TV show Bar Rescue, often when tryng to turn around a failing business that has a bad reputation, they have to change its name The GOP brand is so damaged by the RINO's that there is no rebranding it with the same people and name.
"The left is not interested in gay marriage because it believes in marriage, but because it believes in destroying all existing social institutions."
ReplyDeleteYes!! I've said this for years...that they don't care what they get as long as whatever they're attacking is different when they're done.
A person's sexual preference is decided from birth.
ReplyDeleteOnly religious extremists believe that it is a choice or a sin.
I'm with you, AG although I never joined a Tea Party. Yhe Independent Tea Parties are disconnected from the big 'Pubby money (like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks). If I were to join such an org, it would be an Indy.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, the Tea Parties tend not to be "law and order" orgs. FreedomWorks money controls most of the big Republican Tea Parties. Libertarian money controls the Libertarian ones. Only recently has Tea Party Nation's Judson Phillips come out sounding like a real Conservative, pushing back against Amnesty (which was a pleasant surprise). Forget about TPE. Once they railroaded Mark Williams out, they "went Establishment".
If the TPs begin coming out strong against Amnesty, they'll garner more members and support. However, I'm of the position that one doesn't have to belong to a TP or other org in order to have an impact on the culture, hence the advent of so many true Conservative online talk shows throughout the nation. Cheering for "our team" the way Bay Buchanan's and Tom Tancredo's longtime assistant used to do in emails to me (like, "Go Team!") was more fitting for a college gridiron than a politically conservative org. It really turned me off.
Being someone who doesn't need an org to speak for me, I suppose I have a different view of this than others who need groups to express themselves and waste their time supporting do. Glad to see you "got out" when you did, AG!
Ever since I was a NR subscriber back in the '70s and saw the wide range of opinions there, I've come to realize that the 'conservative' movement is a very mixed bag for the very reason that it consists of the people who actually think rather than just parrot the "current truth" (ala People's Cube.) Still, there have to be some real 'social' principles behind it, or it will just deteriorate into self-serving power-seeking, as this article illustrates
ReplyDeleteMr. Greenfield has hit the nail on the head. People who understand him will also appreciate and understand this Conservative Party Editorial.
ReplyDeletehttp://home.conservativepartyusa.org/white-people-blame-americas-decline/
The gnostic dream conception is koranic. It cannot be questioned, challenged or opposed. The activist component, the Left, will not be resisted by the teleological or axiomatic Right. To do so would mean blowing up right wing gnosticism.
ReplyDeleteLook no further than the "gay" rights conflict. All debate has been supressed, yet the fundamental biological reality of sexual designation to one of two mutually exclusive roles in living organisms is stood on its head by their non recognition of reality. This is no mere mood, but a immanent principle at war with the structure of reality. Their intellectual hostility at the world as it exists is without restraint. They will not rest until every vestige of traditional public order is destroyed, or it destroys them.
Historic truth and its representation, the symbols manifest from the articulation of human action have no place in the dream conception. The gnostics have made it jahiliyyah (time of ignorance). Like Mohammed, truth only exists in the form of immanent revelation, displacing everything else from the corpus politico.
Daniel is quite correct, the gnostics are merely using these out groups as tropes in their quest for heaven on earth. With a hint of irony, they're literally running out of victims to victimize.
I was always proud to be a Republican, even though I come from the state who foisted the Socialist George McGovern and Tommie Dashcle on the citizens of this once great country.
ReplyDeleteI worked very hard to get both of these socialists voted out of office. That was a good couple of times in my life.
Now, I am not only disillusioned, but down right angry that the Republican Party has not stuck to the philosophy of,
"A HAND UP, NOT A HAND OUT"
Every single day I hear someone talking about, getting some kind of government subsidy, everything from medical care, food stamps IE: EBT cards, housing, cell phones, utility subsidies, and the list goes on and on.
I was grew up in a very poor family, 8 kids, no running water, one small gas space heater, yet, I was never hungry, never without clean clothes, never missed church, and had parents who stuck it out despite all the economic struggles as a self employed business. We knew the meaning of "Feast to Famine" quite well. So we always prepared for the Famine Part of Life.
Every single sibling in my family went out on their own, struggled with starting businesses, raising families, and passed those traits of hard work, earns you respect, and accomplishment, and pays the bills.
What The Hell Has Happened To My Country? I am 62, still working 7 days a week, because I like to work. I am trying to enjoy life, making a little money, but paying more and more of it to a criminal bunch of (Pork Barrel Politicians who think they have my best interest in their plans.)
Message to the politicians: Leave us alone, make people work, make them learn the discipline of getting up everyday and finding the American Dream.
The Homosexual Agenda is that, and agenda, to destroy our sanctity of marriage, and to indoctrinate our children, and grand children, that it's OK to let another man have sex with a young man, or woman on girl, and we are supposed to accept there's nothing wrong with that behavior.
Having been nearly molested by an older man,at the age of 8, and then an older woman at the age of 11, I knew intuitively it WAS WRONG, AND I SPOKE UP, VERY LOUDLY. Much to the embarrassment of the molesters. This was before the laws about molestation were prevalent. But my parents handled it very well. The threat of death to these people kept them away from us, and they told everyone about what nearly happened to me.
My parents told me "NEVER LET ANYONE TOUCH YOU, NO MATTER WHAT LIES THEY TELL YOU."
Now our children are so confused about What Is Right? What Is Wrong? I Need To Be Accepted! So now we have allowed these young people to be demeaned an humiliated by a deviant sick bunch of homosexuals and lesbians, who were probably molested and indoctrinated in their young lives and NEVER FOUGHT BACK, NEVER STOOD UP FOR THEMSELVES LIKE I DID.
My belief is: " IT'S ADAM AND EVE, NOT ADAM AND STEVE"
And for all you people who think it's OK to have this deviant type of sex, I have already heard your arguments.
"How do you know you wouldn't like it until you try it?"
My answer: "Well, I have never killed anyone, so should I try that and see if I like it?"
I am a staunch Christian Conservative Who Is Praying For Our Country, While Watching It's Complete Destruction, In The Name of Acceptance of all this expanding government, and the take over of every aspect of business and life, and promoting deviant actions by liberals from both parties.
Oh yea, I am no longer a Republican Party member. I quit paying my dues to their coffers when obummer got elected the 1st time.
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