The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘In One of the Wiser Posts I Have Seen’

Posted on | January 1, 2011 | 19 Comments

Eric at Classical Values knows what words to put beside my name in a post about the alleged conflict between social conservatives and economic conservatives.

When (alleged) libertarian Ryan Sager was pushing this “House Divided” angle from one side, I denounced it. And now that some people are pushing it from the other side, I denounce it again.

This allegedly irrepressible conflict between liberty and morality is fictitious, and is never aggravated by people who have the best interest of the conservative movement foremost in their purposes. Go back to my October 2008 American Spectator column, “The Bible vs. the Bailout”:

Some years ago, I was asked to speak to a Christian homeschooling conference — my wife and I have homeschooled our six children — and during the question-and-answer session after the speech, I faced a question for which I was unprepared.
“How has your Christian faith influenced your political beliefs?”
This stunned me into silence for a second. Then I answered: “Well, I guess it comes down to that part about ‘Thou shalt not steal.’”
From there I proceeded to discuss the basic immorality of the welfare state, how it is wrong for government to take money that one man has worked for and give it to someone who hasn’t earned it.
Whereas transactions in a market economy are voluntary and peaceful, the actions of government are essentially coercive, backed with the threat of violence to those who disobey. What government does, it does “at the point of the bayonet,” so to speak. Therefore, the fearsome power of government ought to be constrained to limited and specific purposes — defending the life, liberty and property of citizens.
When government begins to meddle in the economy, picking winners and losers, using appropriations and fiscal policy to transfer money from one group of citizens to another, it divides society into two classes, taxpayers and tax consumers, punishing the former in order to reward the latter.
Such a policy is not merely misguided, it is immoral — indeed, it is sinful, as I told the Christian homeschoolers — and by displaying the spectacle of government engaging daily in legalized theft, the welfare state tends to corrupt the morals of its citizens. . . .

Read the whole thing. My point is that I am an all-around, general-purpose, hidebound reactionary. If I had to pick a “Golden Age” of America, it would be no later than the administration of Grover Cleveland, and quite possibly a good deal earlier.

Nobody can play the “More Conservative Than Thou” card on me. When the passage of Prop 8 in California resulted in outrageous attacks on supporters of the gay-marriage ban, I made pointed reference to Judge Roy Moore’s ruling in Ex Parte H.H. — which is about as hard-core as it gets. And when picking a fight with Conor Friedersdorf over same-sex marriage, I deployed this quote:

“The fantastical project of yesterday, which was mentioned only to be ridiculed, is today the audacious reform, and will be tomorrow the accomplished fact.”

If anyone cares to research the source of that aphorism, be my guest. Like I said, hard-core.

Pundette recently recognized me for one of her “Thirty Favorite Quotes of 2010″ for my Mother’s Day critique of the Contraceptive Culture.

Yeah, I’m against the Pill, too. Like I said, hard-core.

Nevertheless, until we can muster a Supreme Court majority to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut — “penumbras, formed by emanations,” my butt! — we must fight the fight we’re in, on a battlefield not entirely of our choosing, under conditions that put us at a disadvantage.

Thanks to the GOP’s biggest congressional landslide in 60 years, the House is clearly under conservative control. Yet Democrats hold a Senate majority and President Obama is still in the White House. The economy is in the crapper and until that’s fixed, American voters don’t give a rat’s rectum about anything else that goes on in Washington.

Why, then, start a squabble about the inclusion of one group, GOProud, in this year’s CPAC?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

If those idiots don’t get their priorities right, we’re never gonna get back to the good old days of Grover Cleveland.


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Category: Conservatism 101, CPAC

Comments

  • The Wondering Jew

    LOL– this is one of your best. An Encomium to Grover Cleveland and Roy Moore spiced with an R.L. Dabney reference– all in defense of including a group of homosexual conservatives at CPAC.

    Very well done. . .

  • Anonymous

    A Big Tent of Mutually Tolerant Reactionaries. Something like that. I was tempted to quote John C. Calhoun, but thought, “Nah. Too much.”

  • largebill

    It could be claimed that Grover Cleveland was the last honest Democrat. He is certainly that last fiscally responsible one.

  • The Wondering Jew

    “A Big Tent of Mutually Tolerant Reactionaries”– I love that phrase and concept– I wish I could have deployed it in explaining my rather heterodox views in a 2000 word email I just sent to a friend of mine currently wasting some of his prodigious intellectual talents writing for the New York Times. (I did let him know my great disdain for his employer)

    I was trying to explain to him how as I conservative, I could appreciate both the Radical Libertarianism of Muarray Rothbard and the Carlist fervently Pro-life Monarchism of Brent Bozell without necessarily subscribing wholly to either.

    As long as someone has a sufficiently reactionary general mindset, I am willing to tolerate a large degree of friendly disagreement on issue specifics.

  • pjMom

    You are on fire tonight, sir. Will tweet and post in part once I’m off this Lilliputian keyboard.

  • Anonymous

    The Bourbon Democrats. They must have drunk themselves out of existence.

  • John Doe of Smash Mouth

    Seems to me that GOProud started the squabble. If as you say keeping our priorities straight is so important, why don’t you condemn the homos who insist on driving a wedge into the fiscally conservative coalition? The light in the loafers GOProud crowd could have shut up, shown up, and been as fiscally conservative as they liked. But NO, the little AIDS carrying crowd just could not do that. Nope. They just had to be divisive little queers.

    Some things are more important than party unity. Supporting immorality is wrong, whether your excuse is a greater cause (defeating socialists), or just because one is too gutless to speak out. Sure, standing up to immorality isn’t cool these days, but somebody has to do it.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/EU5DQWQTTHTPO4A4ZYSL3AAV2U Adjoran

    I’m in!

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/EU5DQWQTTHTPO4A4ZYSL3AAV2U Adjoran

    Great post – my only quibble is the inclusion of the buzz-killing name of Conor Friedersdorf, whose invocation reduces the gravitas of any essay by half by default.

    Unless the topic was, “Most Likely to be Transgendered in 2011″ or something.

  • CountVikula

    Grover Cleveland. Nice!!!

  • Quartermaster

    GOProud is not a conservative organization, Mr. McCain. pretending they aren’t the camel’s nose in the tent won’t change the fact they are subversive. The Christian groups were right to pull out, and they are not marginalizing themselves, CPAC is.

  • The Wondering Jew

    @Quartermaster

    Care to justify that with an argument ?

    If they are generally interested in electing solid conservative candidates, and I think GOProud is, I am all for a big tent. I wouldn’t call a group that invited Ann Coulter to keynote their convention to be leading candidates for RINOhood.

    It was a lot of the social conservatives who in fact marginalized the entire conservative coalition by supporting “Compassionate Conservatism” and other Bursh-Era nonsense. Many will make the same mistake with big-government “Conservative” Huckabee. I have no beef at all with social conservatives per se– on many issues, we are in complete agreement. But if their response to Bush era failures is to even refuse to associate with a major conservative conference because it allows participation from a group they don’t like, then good riddance.

    I’ll take Stacy McCain/Jim DeMint social AND fiscal conservatives any days of the week. You can keep Bush and Huckabee . . .

  • dr kill

    Eric ans M. write the most thoughtful column in the blogosphere. Of course, that simply means I agree with them. I believe our philosophy of life may be stated as

    Morality cannot be legislated

  • Tennwriter

    In the Fiscon/Socon Conflict, we need to keep a few facts in mind:

    1. Socons are Fiscons.
    2. Fiscon only tend to be squishes.
    3. Fiscon only have very small numbers.
    4. Considering in Ca. where Prop 8 did better than the R’s, we have to consider the Fiscon attitudes as a weight on the vote.
    5. The fight between these two sides is almost always started by Fiscons who use threats to get Socons to sit in the back of the bus although socons do most of the work.
    6. Socons don’t NEED pure Fiscons.
    7. Arguably, we’d do better if we dumped them from the Coalition.
    8. Fiscons always keep coming back with a new variation of the same arguement ‘you shut up, an dsupport teh values that unify us.’
    9. Go back to #3 for why #8 is stupid. Why should a hundred million Socons listen to ten thousand pure Fiscons?
    10. The Conservative route to victory is to A)Enthuse the Base B)Have the Base enthuse the Independents. C)Have the Base provide gunfire cover and a giant Greek chorus when the Chosen Hero goes forth with the Sword of Truth to contend with MSM-Tiamat the Many-Headed Dragon Goddess of Evil. And finally D)
    LANDSLIDE!!
    11. Thus anything that dispirits the Base has to be regarded with extreme skepticism.
    12. The Tea Party has shown the way for knocking over corrupt establishements. Now the Socons want to play even more boldly than they have.
    13. The Tea Party is but the latest in a longish line of growing political movments. We had Town Halls before this. Now, its time to Get Bigger and Badder! The Tea Party is but a waystop, not an endpoint.
    14. So far, its clear the Tea Party does not have enough muscle to do the job completely. We need Whole Milk Conservatism.
    15. The Libertarians have always counsellled caution to us, afraid that if we discovered our true strength we wouldn’t be so respectful of them. They were right to do so, but wrong also. Because they traded a current respect for a great deal of Liberty we would have brought.
    16. Indeed, no difference between Liberty and Morality, no matter what the fiscons say.

    It is not time for Fiscons and True Conservative Happy Warriors to come together. It is time for Fiscons to join us under the banner of a United Conservative Party.

  • Quartermaster

    You can keep yourself. The man is not an evangelical.

    Past that? Oh puhleeeze! GOProud is not conservative. Just because it is 80% “conservative” does not make the it true. The queer agenda is utterly subversive. Socialists aren’t communist, but try to convince anyone that is politically aware they aren’t subversive. The two things of the queer agenda that GOPround supports are the strongholds of that agenda. The rest will drop into their laps like over ripe fruit. This is not a slippery slope argument. It’s the bottom of the slope. If you can’t see that, then you are most ignorant.

    The Evangelicals that are staying away are doing so for very good reasons. CPAC between the queer nonsense and ACU’s corruption is marginalizing itself. Normally being 80% conservative is not being 20% enemy. In this case it’s 100% enemy. The rest of what they say they stand for is nothing but a cover for the rest.

  • Quartermaster

    Morality is ALL that is legislated. The statement that it can’t be is a statement of utter delusion. Some one’s morality is what goes into bills that go in the hopper and get passed and signed. In fact, in our post-christian, secular humanist society, law defines morality.

  • Quartermaster

    And if the Fiscon can’t join the real fight, then show them the door.

  • Tennwriter

    Absolutely.

  • John Doe of Smash Mouth

    I HATE mindless morons who bring up the “you can’t legislate morality” B.S. We do it all the time. We legislate against cruelty to aclonimals. We set the arbitrary age below which an adult cannot legally have sex with a minor. There is nothing magical about a certain age. If there were, various states would not have different ages of consent. We legislate against polygamy and beastiality and close family members.

    YOU CAN’T LEGISLATE MORALITY is not an argument, it is an idiot and baseless conclusion.

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