We intruded into Tiny's sexual and reproductive freedom way back when she was a kitten, born in our attic closet to her feral mother, Sweet Pea. Always fascinating to compare what we permit ourselves to do in managing others' lives vs permitting others to manage ours.
"Social conservatism has an ideologically inconvenient collectivist streak embedded in it, particularly an intrusion of the government into questions of sexual and reproductive freedom," writes The Daily Beast's Jon Avlon in "Top 5 Misconceptions About the Tea Party Movement,"
Past icons, like libertarian Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, couldn't have passed the party purity measures pushed by some conservatives.
Go ahead and read the whole thing for the self-described "radical centrist's" take on what animates us Tea Partiers, but we're interested here in that perverse nanny-statist "collectivist streak" the author identifies and what role that may or may not play in the red-in-tooth-and-claw battle between beltway leaders and Tea Party-affiliated outsiders for the soul of the Republican party. First a little background and then a few thoughts on what The Hill is calling Sarah Palin's and Mitch McConnell's "proxy battle in Kentucky Senate race" (h/t Dan Riehl).
On the merits, social conservatism's "ideologically inconvenient collectivist streak" has always stuck in our craw. We expect our busybody friends on the left side of the aisle — who do, after all, know better than we what is good for us — to try to insinuate meddling government tendrils into every corner of our lives, but as Andrew Klavan tells Bill Whittle in a new PJTV interview, "The Tea Party movement is what the Republican Party used to be":
Beyond personal distaste, social conservatism's collectivist streak can be counterproductive to getting small-government, strong-national-defense fiscal conservatives elected. Think 2006 midterms. As Sarah Chamberlain Resnick wrote that autumn in "A Key to Victory for Republicans this Fall: We can't forget about Centrists and Independents":
For months, the far right in our party told us we needed to do more to excite the social conservative base. We had meaningless votes on gay marriage, video gambling, and abortion, and we had the President’s veto of potentially life-saving stem cell research. All of this was intended to “excite” the base. Unfortunately, the result of months of “exciting the base” is a looming electoral disaster for the Republican Party.
That was then. As we wrote the other day, wedge issues seem so yesterday in the clarifying light of The Brown Revolution. The Boston Globe [!] explains:
Because he calls himself a supporter of abortion rights [a simplification, but sufficient for the current argument], Brown might not be an obvious choice as a surrogate or guest of honor for GOP candidates across the country.
But his vaunted status as the Republican who won the late Edward M. Kennedy’s Senate seat [The People's Seat, puleeze!], establishing himself as a crucial vote against Obama’s health care plan, trumps such policy differences, said Rob Gray, a Boston-based national GOP strategist.
“They’re looking for somebody who’s going to draw crowds at an event or a fund-raiser, and Scott Brown is a huge draw at this point,’’ he said. “You also have a lot of candidates, especially incumbents, who might not be considered as populist as they used to be. Scott can kind of give them and their campaign an injection of populism, because he’s come to represent it.’’
"You can't legislate good behavior. It happens through character," says one of the panelists (can't remember which one) at the controversial first-ever National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, broadcast live today on C-Span even as we blog and covered in fascinating color and depth by PJTV. Bill Whittle and Zo and Glenn and Dr. Helen and Andrew Breitbart and the whole gang rock! It's all about local people vetting and selecting local people. It's the subsidiarity, stupid. Or, as Jeff S. said in the comments to our post "All local politics is national?" the other day, "All politics is still local, but now local is as big as the internet." Disintermediate at will! Army of Davids foot soldier Norsu twittered it all:
"Does Doug Hoffman's run in NY23 signal the start of a Revolution? Looking back - YES!!!!!"
Avalon in the Daily Beast Article quoted above asserts that "current Tea Party icons like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh enforce the social and fiscal conservative straightjacket," but is that true? Hope is not a strategery, but we hope not. Sarah set our girls-just-wanna-have-fun juices — not to mention our Shining-City-Upon-Upon-a-Hill juices — flowing that day back in August of 2008 when she sprung full blown from John McCain's brow. Now she's locked in a life-and-death struggle with the powers that WERE on Capitol Hill to determine whither goest the Republican Party. The NYT in a fascinatingly fact-filled piece headlined "Palin, Visible and Vocal, Is Positioned for Variety of Roles" asserts that "As she jumps more into the national political swamp, Ms. Palin is proving as divisive in Republican circles as she was within the fractious McCain campaign." The Hill's piece on Palin's support of rogue candidate Rand Paul vs. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell's backing of Trey Grayson has this to say:
The growing activism of conservatives around the country, including many longtime members of the Republican grassroots, has helped energize the Republican Party, such as in Massachusetts. But the indifference or opposition of Tea Party activists to candidates favored by Republican leaders threatens to upset the GOP’s carefully crafted political strategy.
The jury's still out. Here's Fox's Campaign Carl Cameron, on the scene in Nashville:
They're having fun here, and whether or not they agree on everything, they do want to see some change in business as usual in Washington.
Our sis always tells us we have a heart too soon made glad, so we'll give the last word for now to self-acknowledged "damned cynical" political observer and blog buddy Dan Riehl:
Factually, the more many on the Right are getting to see of Sarah Palin, the less enthusiastic they are about her as a potential candidate for something right now. But that doesn't mean they dismiss her as someone incapable of helping to bring about positive change in some other role. What some hope is that she doesn't end up doing more damage than anything else. If she puts Rand Paul over the top in the primary, but he loses the general as many believe he will, what will she have accomplished in the end? Not much good, I'm afraid.
And her die-hard fans are only kidding themselves if they assume I am alone in re-thinking her. Every day more and more genuine conservative activists seem to be scratching their heads, looking at Palin play out and thinking, WTF is she doing, now?
Update: "Sissy Willis doesn’t seem to have a bit of confusion regarding what the Tea Party Movement is about (and works in an allusion to “My Last Duchess”), writes POWIP with a link. Way COOL!
"...Palin and Rush Limbaugh enforce the social and fiscal conservative straightjacket..."
What, exactly, is the mechanism for this enforcement? A bunch of cigar-smoking Limbaugh brownshirts breaking my windows at night? Lol...it's always about coercion with them, isn't it? I guess that's the first thing that comes to their minds, as either solution or explanation.
Regarding Palin: I'm pretty much in sync with Dan Riehl. Palin achieved her staggering initial burst of popularity because she was an articulate, attractive public speaker who, for whatever reason, was the first Republican in years who actually had the guts to hew to those simple ideas that propelled Reagan to the presidency. That was manna from heaven for a bunch of us. But while it looks as though she's a pretty astute analyst (see the "Death Panels" comment), I wonder if she has the ability to take her analyses and then synthesize new policy from it. I'm not at all saying she can't, just that she hasn't proven it yet. But I certainly do enjoy the debilitating hysteria she induces in leftists.
Posted by: Jeff S. | February 06, 2010 at 08:42 PM