OK, so that’s both oversimplified and overstated, but I think that captures the essence of the problem R. S. McCain’s talking about in his latest post.
Friday, I had lunch with Tim Mooney of Save Our Secret Ballot and, in the course of discussing everyone’s favorite CPAC ’09 topic—what’s wrong with the GOP?—discussed the problem of the polluted information stream.Among the ill effects of liberal bias in the media is that much political “news” amounts to thinly disguised DNC talking-points. The conservative must learn to think critically about news and politics, to filter out that which is misleading, or else he will internalize the funhouse-mirror distortions of reality that define the liberal weltanschauung.This, I said to Mr. Mooney, is one of the major problems of the Republican Party, that so many of its supporters have unwittingly accepted liberal beliefs as political truths. Therefore, when those who present themselves as conservatives parrot the liberal line, the damage they do is far worse than if the same statements were made by Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi. Why? Because this “conservative” echo tends to act as a hardening catalyst for the conventional wisdom.I have never forgiven David Brooks for “National Greatness.” Brooks’s argument, that “anti-government” conservatism is both wrong as policy and doomed as politics, had a demoralizing effect on the Republican Party. The elegance of Brooks’s writing—whatever your opinion of the man, the elegance of his prose style is beyond dispute—was the spoonful of sugar to make that poisonous medicine go down. That was 12 years ago, and if the GOP now appears disastrously ill, Brooks and his erstwhile publishers at the Weekly Standard are heavily implicated in this perhaps fatal disease.
This is, I believe, both a major reason why the David Brooks segment of the GOP is opposed to Gov. Palin and the major reason why the party needs Gov. Palin to play a major role, not just in Alaska but nationally. She’s a Reagan conservative (and hands-down the most Reaganesque conservative we have, to boot) and an outsider to the “chattering class,” and both these things are essential characteristics for the next leader of the GOP, if the party is to have any hope of recovering from its political exile any time soon. She won’t make the party elites happy—but then, neither did Reagan, at least until he was safely out of office and one of their own (George H. W. Bush) was safely in control. (Of course, the elder Bush promptly lost the next election, the one he had to run on his own merits, but the GOP establishment didn’t get the point . . .) What she can do, and I believe will do, is lead the party back to the point where it actually stands for something besides merely gaining and using political power—and that’s what matters most.Update: Here’s a fine example of what I’m talking about, courtesy of the ever-diminishing David Frum, who looks increasingly like a RINO in sheep’s clothing. Allahpundit linked to it as “the quote of the day,” which makes me think he was hoping to use it against Gov. Palin, but it looks like the commenters on his post have been too smart for that; one of them, DFCtomm, summed it up particularly nicely:
Frum is willing to say or do anything to win. I imagine there is no principle too big to be abandoned, and he justifies this by saying that once we’re in total power then we can steer the country to the right. It just doesn’t seem like a workable strategy to me.