If the way of things is for you to take advice from any old political stampeder, here’s your chance to do a big belly flop into the shallow end of the pool where most of your political allies are splashing around.
Much is being written now about the demise of the Republican Party as constituted over the past 30 years. In our recent history Republicans rose to electoral majority and congressional power using tactics of anger, divisiveness and the most serious degradation of polical civility in the past 100 years.
John Dean wrote in Conservatives Without Conscience how the co-founder of the National Review, James Burnham, in a 1959 attempt to blend real-world politics with intellectual conservatism, distilled a 13-statement list of point-by-point comparatives to liberal positions that differentiate between the two.
Here’s the list as quoted in Dean’s book.
(1) There is a transcendent factor vital to successful government.
(2) Human nature is corrupt, and therefore conservatives reject all utopian solutions to social problems.
(3) Tradition must be respected, and when change is unavoidable it must be undertaken cautiously
(4) Governmental power must be diffused and limited by adhering to the “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” of the Constitution.
(5) Direct democracy must be rejected because people are not well informed and are easily misled
(6) [Conservatives believe] in States Rights
(7) Each branch of government must be autonomous and must resist encroachment or usurpation by any other
(8) Public support of limited government must be encourage in order to keep government in check
(9) The Constitution’s principles have permanent value
(10) Government must be decentralized and localized so that power is diffused
(11) Private enterprise should be encouraged.
(12) Morality begins with the individual
(13) Congress should be more powerful than the executive branch.
Of his list, Burnham declared,
“Whether the cause of this linkage – which is not absolute, of course – is metaphysical, social or psychological, we do not need to decide in order to observe that it exists.” (Dean, page 9)
Metaphysical, social or psychological?
How about 50 years later we use the words supernatural, sociopathic, psychopathic or just plain Left Behind?
Having successfully and specifically exploited number (5) for several years, the current Republican talking point implies that the “transcendent factor vital to successful government” is FEAR.
The corruption of human nature is considerably less dim than the corruption of the corporate nature. The abuse of corporate “personhood” identity has deteriorated to volumes of legislated non-Constitutional inequality: specific partisan legislation on behalf of non-mortal corporate “persons” at the tragic expense of human citizen persons.
Our contemporary Republican self-styled “conservatives” of this generation have no notion of change undertaken cautiously and gradually. What has become unavoidable is change based upon greed.
Invoking the fear-based metaphysics of (1) against those described in (5) above, we see a Republican suppression of separation of powers, checks and balances and all that lie in the venue.
Limited Government?
Well, the Conservative Republican version was probably still alive in the 70’s, when Goldwater and Dirkson told Nixon to get his ass out.
By the 1990’s limited government merely an on-going talking point until the Gingrich-Delay Republican unwise governance.
Until of course the “fake news” election of the fake news candidate so short of wit, wisdom and maturity that he will be without peer the most incompetent Republican ever to sit in that office.
Permanency of Constitutional Values?
Enter the pulpit-pounding hypocrisy of today’s social conservatives who dominate a party that has included mostly nonsense talking points, for example, Gay Marriage as the overriding issue facing this country.
Yeah, and so much for decentralized localized government and diffused power.
“Private enterprise” – in terms of small-business entrepreneurs is the talking point joke behind which big business sucks at all the biggest troughs. Under the current Republican Conservatism, the Depart of Labor should be renamed the Department of Corporate Welfare.
Morality begins and ends with the individual. It doesn’t spill and splash from a pulpit nor self-promote itself as an artificial and manufactured construct entitled “Morale Values.”
Congress more powerful than the Executive Branch?
I think that means that legislation and policy are the purview of represented electorate. Execution of the law – putting into effect the will of the people – every four years that’s what we hire (or rehire) the President to do.
If we “conservatively” applied this last notion, future candidate posturing during presidential elections would be mere taking point politics and implied influence sans a lot of the “when I’m President I will – ” nonsense.
This is what Indicted Trump and his party have come to and what they are asking voter permission to continue.
The Saga of Crooked Donald 