I wrote the following before the 2012 election. What I feared largely came to pass. When trying to save our country via election, the first goal must be not defeating ourselves. Some of the below is a bit dated, but most is not. I would be grateful if you read this if you're considering not voting for your moderate Republican. Thank you, and let's save America this Tuesday!
Just when I thought the Right was
getting its act together, I received a link from Libertarian Tony
linking to a ludicrous article claiming that it would in the long run
be unfortunate if Mitt Romney wins on Tuesday. It called Mitt
Romney "an empty suit", and it called to mind what I can't
stand about some on the right. Some on the Right seem to be
perfectly ignorant of the role of political parties, and are
arrogantly prepared to let the country go to hell rather than
"compromise their principles". They claim that they
are being "true to their principles", and that they and
they alone get to define words like "Republican" and
"conservative. I had hoped that this sort of pretentious
foolishness had at least decided to take this election off, since
throwing B.O. and his socialist commissars out of power is THE issue
of the day. I guess it's like Count Dracula, though -- nothing
seems to kill it permanently. For people who claim to know
history, it's amazing how ignorant they are of the history and
purpose of party politics in America. They also seem to be
unable to discern differences in degree when actions superficially
seem similar. It's as if someone is asserting that since murder
and parents spanking their children are both acts of violence, and
murders are executed, child-spanking parents should be executed,
too. Wearily, like a retired knight, I buckle on the armor of
historic knowledge and drawing the sword of logic, I re-enter the
fray of conservative/libertarian debate. Let's try this
again...
Political Parties are Formed to Enable People with
Similar Interests to Obtain Their Common
Goals
The fact is that we are all members of minorities in
our political beliefs. I believe and identify myself as a
Reaganite conservative, my sisters identify themselves as moderates
in that they have some views that are conservative and some which are
liberal, my friend Libertarian Tony calls himself a libertarian
conservative. Since none of these sets of principles represent
the views of even 20% of the electorate, what are we to do. If
we refuse the possibility of co-operating with those who do not agree
with us on everything, we will obtain nothing!
For lessons in this, we can consider the history of the
Republican Party.
The Republican Party was born when the
Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the Kansas-Nebraska
Act forced slavery and the expansion thereof into the territories
became the most prominent issue before the American people. It
split the parties of the time. The most immediate victims of
this party-splitting were the Whigs, who essentially split into the
two wings they had managed to hold more or less together before 1852,
the anti-slavery ("Conscience Whigs") and the pro-slavery
("Cotton Whigs"). When Kansas-Nebraska and "Bleeding
Kansas" forced Americans to choose between competing visions --
a future of slavery expansion South, West, and perhaps even North
(the Dred Scott decision would add that dimension to the dilemma in
early 1857), or a future of free soil and free men, the Whigs
discovered that they did not have any common principles strong enough
to hold their party together under the strains of the time.
The
new Republican Party formed itself with surprising speed from the
fragments of the Whig Party, but it had a rival. The American
Party, founded on prejudice against foreigners and Catholics,
sprouted like the weeds among the wheat in the Biblical parable.
This party had a brief period of frightening success, winning
elections in several states and running Millard Fillmore as their
Presidential candidate in 1856. Viewed from the perspective of
today, one sees similarities with the Nazi movement in Germany in the
1920s and 1930s. However, like Dolly the Sheep, the American
Party (derisively dubbed the "Know-Nothing Party" by Horace
Greeley because its members were instructed to reply "I know
nothing" to any inquiries regarding its operations or
membership) was born with genetic defects that prevented it from
enduring. It survives in memory today as an oddity, along with
such short-lived "anti-" parties as the Anti-Masonic Party
and the "Dixiecrats".
There were those who believed
that the Republican Party had no better chance of survival than the
Know-Nothings. The anti-slavery Whigs had had among them
supporters of low-tariffs and high-tariffs (known at the time as
protectionists), adherents of many faiths, including mainline
Protestants, Catholics (largely Irish), pacifist Quakers, puritanical
New Englanders, and anti-slavery, anti-clergy European immigrants
(largely refugees of the failed European revolutions of the late
1840s). Even the anti-slavery opinions had some splits between
the immediate uncompensated abolitionists, the compensated
abolitionists (who preferred payments to those deprived of their
"property"), the gradual abolition through territorial
restrictionists, the colonizers (who wanted to free the slaves and
establish them in their own country in Africa -- Liberia), and so
on. As the late scholar William Lee Miller described it, the
Republican Party at its birth "was one of the great sausages of
American politics".
However, the Republicans had
two great advantages over their K-N rivals. One was that they
had a positive program -- free men, free labor, free soil. The
other was that they had canny political leaders in their ranks -- men
like Thurlow Weed of New York (forgotten today, he was one of the
great political organizers of the 19th century), Andrew Curtain of
Pennsylvania, John A. Andrew and Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts,
John Sherman of Ohio, and a lanky, recently-returned-to-politics
lawyer from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. (Of all of the
unforeseen consequences of Stephen Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act,
perhaps the most important was that it pulled Lincoln back into
politics.) These men realized that if their fledgling party was
to survive, they would have to pull together as a team to battle the
established Democrats, who in fact were beginning to show some
fissures in their own facade. They understood what political
parties are formed to do. Many of our right-wing fellows do
not.
The leaders who chose to concentrate on what united them
and to set aside what might divide them paid off handsomely in just
their second Presidential election, as Abraham Lincoln (himself a
compromise choice as nominee) was elected the 16th President of
the United States. He only received 38% of the popular vote
(somewhat misleading, as Lincoln ballots were not even offered in
several southern states), but the other 62% were split between three
candidates. The Democrats had suffered a fatal split at their
conventions (they convened two of them in 1860) between the
traditional Democrats headed by Stephen Douglas of Illinois (who
proclaimed that it did not matter to him whether slavery was voted up
or down), and the radical pro-slavery Democrats led by men like
Jefferson Davis and William L. Yancey (for whom nothing but slavery
endorsement and extension would serve). The former group
nominated their obvious leader, Stephen Douglas, while the latter
nominated Kentuckian Vice President John Breckenridge. The
fourth party called themselves the Constitutional Union Party, and
they nominated dignified elders John Bell and Edward Everett.
They were running in an election marked more by passion than dignity,
however, and they finished third in the Electoral College and fourth
in the popular vote. With the opposition fragmented, Lincoln
won an easy majority in the EC, with 180 votes against 123 for his
three rivals.
Put simply, the Republican Party stayed united
and won. The Democrats fragmented and lost.
Fast-forward
to 1912. This time it was the Republicans who split suicidally
between the regular Republican nominee and incumbent President
William Howard Taft and the mercurial, charismatic former President,
Progressive Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt. The factional
split allowed Democrat nominee Woodrow Wilson to win the election
with just 41.8% of the vote. Many students of history (including
this one) trace the growth of leviathan big government (and the
consequent shrinking of personal liberty) to the election of Wilson.
Republican failure to unite behind one candidate made this disaster
possible. United we stand...
Now we can look at another in which
lack of unity cost the Republican Party dearly, the election of 1964.
The conservatives took advantage of the failure of the liberal wing
of the party to unite behind one candidate to nominate their chosen
favorite, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. In a display of
suicidal poor sportsmanship, the liberal conventioneers tried to
deprive Goldwater of the nomination by uniting (belatedly) behind
Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania. Failing in this, they
actually booed Goldwater when he came to the stage to accept the
nomination. It's not really credible to argue that this disharmony
cost Goldwater the presidency. As Richard Nixon realized, after the
trauma of the Kennedy assassination, the American people were not
going to reject the man they saw as Kennedy's legatee, Lyndon
Johnson. However, it almost certainly cost them seats in the Senate
and the House of Representatives. Given that they were already in
the minority in both houses, this was a setback they could ill
afford. Interestingly, the aftermath of the 1964 Republican debacle
proved the political party-building skills of former Vice President
Richard Nixon, who worked tirelessly to repair the rift between the
wings of the party and was largely responsible for the Republican
recovery in the mid-term elections of 1966. Nixon, who emerged
blameless for the 1964 split (having worked tirelessly for
Goldwater's candidacy that year), criss-crossed the country
throughout the 1966 campaign season working for Republican candidates
regardless of faction. The Republicans made a remarkable recovery in
1966, picking up 47 House seats in the House and 3 seats in the
Senate. It also gave Nixon the title of chief uniter of the
Republican ranks, and put him on the inside track to the 1968
nomination (and eventually the Presidency).
(I pause here to mention that if you
want to annoy a Democrat (and who doesn't?), remind them that Richard
Nixon received more popular votes in his five nationwide elections
than Franklin Roosevelt did in his. Few people remember that
Franklin Roosevelt was the Democratic nominee for Vice President in
1920, when Democrat James Cox was summarily flattened by perhaps the
most unjustly maligned President in American history, Warren G.
Harding.)
Forward to 1976 and the beginning of
the Reagan Republican Revolution. After Reagan, former successful
two-term Governor of California (remind Democrats of that, too), lost
by a whisker at the 1976 Republican Convention, he accepted nominee
Gerald Ford's characteristically gracious offer to address the
convention. After making a speech urging Republicans to unify behind
their nominees, he then went to work campaigning for Ford and Robert
Dole. Just two years after Watergate, the Republicans came close to
holding onto the White House. Reagan's efforts at party unification
would be rewarded in1980, when he would attain the nomination, the
Presidency , and then greatness, in that order. After Ronald Reagan
won the nomination, let us remember, he immediately started the work
of uniting the party behind his candidacy by choosing moderate
Republican George Bush as his running mate. The moderate Republicans
and the soon-to-be-called Reagan Republicans pulled together, and the
party ticket won going away, to the great benefit of the country.
United we stand...
Now let us look at 2008, when John
McCain, moderate Senator from Arizona (full circle!) took advantage
of fragmented conservative opposition to win the Republican
nomination, despite conservative 11th hour efforts to
unite behind former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. (Had you
forgotten that little fact about the 2008 primary campaign?) Despite
McCain's Reaganesque gesture of choosing conservative darling Sarah
Palin, conservative Governor of Alaska, many conservative/libertarian
Republicans sulked Achilles-like in their tents, allowing an
undistinguished junior Senator from (eventually) Illinois named
Barack Hussein Obama to cruise to an easy, largely media-driven
victory. Admittedly the McCain campaign was at times amazingly
incompetent, but a united party might have won another couple of
Senate races, and maybe even more seats won in the House. I believe
that the conservative/libertarian sit-down strike of 2008 gave us
Obamacare less than two years later.
“...divided we fall.”
Now we have lockstep supporters of an incredibly unpopular and power-abusing President trying desperately to run away from their voting records and incredibly, some conservatives and
libertarian Republicans once again want to form a circular firing
squad. This is literally insane. For any would-be Republican
Achilles who wants to sit out this election, I propose a challenge.
It has two parts:
Go to the positions page of whatever
moderate Republican wants your vote this time around. See how much
you disagree with. I'll bet it's less than you think.
Now check out the issues page of your Democrat candidate. See how much
of that you agree with. Compare the scores.
There is only one way to save our
country on Tuesday. That is to elect as many Republicans as
humanly possible to every office we can vote on. The more
Republicans we elect, the more conservatives we will have, since the
conservative office-holding Democrat has been extinct for years now.
I think the last moderate Democratic Senator was John Breaux of
Louisiana, and he retired. A year or two ago, I received a scorecard
from the eminently respectable Heritage Foundation, the premier
conservative think tank in the country. It rated every Senator and
Representative by the percentage of conservative votes they cast in
roll call votes. I discovered that the median Republican rating was
74% conservative. The median Democrat rating was 14%. No difference
between the parties? (This has changed a point or two since 2012. The Republicans graded slightly more conservative, the Democrats more liberal.)
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln and
Ronald Reagan, and the Bible (alternately), in your hands, my
dissatisfied fellow conservatives, and not in ours, is the momentous
issue of socialist defeat or ascendency. Freedom is always just one
generation away from extinction. Will freedom be betrayed because of
a stiff-necked generation of its friends? We will indeed nobly save,
or meanly lose, the last, best hope of Earth.
As the great RR advised us years ago,
this is indeed “a time for choosing”.
