Conservatives Do it in Public

No conservative in American history ever attempted the takeover of one sixth of the national economy by way of stealth or by bullying. No legislation has been crafted by conservatives behind closed doors on Christmas Eve without so much as a nod to the opposition party. Health insurance by conscription is anathema to conservative principles. The convoluted and unconstitutional mélange of devices brewed by liberals would not only commandeer a huge chunk of the US economy, it would change forever the valued relationship between patient and physician; replacing the doctor’s judgment with that of listless bureaucrats.

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Worse still, the health crimes legislation would establish a permanent left wing majority in a country that is by nature, center right. Small comfort that the November elections are a presumable rout for the Democrats who supported this lubricity. The mutations to our way of life wrought by the liberals’ scheme will endure far beyond a single midterm or even presidential election. The unparagoned Mark Steyn deciphers why so many Democrats are willing to commit self- immolation in service of a ruinous contrivance:

“I've been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally "conservative" parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let's not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a ‘conservative’).”

In other words, the Soros backed demolition of the finest health care system the world has ever known will change not only the way we get-or mostly don’t get-our medical care. Indeed, health care reform, as proposed by the Democrats, will ultimately redefine the opposition to liberalism.

“Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily ‘compassionate’statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect ‘conservatives,’ as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha'penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.”

Doubtless, the Democrats will take some losses in November; perhaps even lose the White House in 2012. But the long term damage they can do to the country is well worth it to them. As we celebrate the Obama- driven ascendancy of conservatism, we would do well not to let the Left continue to explain it for us. With their own party in utter bedlam, the democrats are doing what they always do: marginalizing the opposition with school yard name calling and ad hominem clubbings. Lucky for them, conservatives are doing a good measure of the work for them. Too many Republicans seem compelled to enable the left to control our narrative. When you find yourself aligned with some bovine school alum at MSNBC, perhaps it’s time to rethink your positions. Unlike liberals, conservatives don’t have to resort to lying and subterfuge to communicate their ideas. It’s liberals who now have to go on TV and say outlandish things like how they are going to use a “simple majority” to pass health care legislation. The truth is that budget reconciliation has never been and was never meant to be used to force legislation through that will create an unprecedented expansion of the federal government, just as the American public makes it manifestly clear that the Democrats are doing it entirely against the will of the people. No liberal could ever sell any of their policies if they told the truth about them. Labor unions are a great example of liberal perfidy. They laud the unions as being the champions of the little guy, just as those altruistic union leaders are raiding pension fund to bankroll Democrat candidates; ruling through force and fear, while ravaging the industries in which those cherished little guys have to earn their livings. Only by way of unmitigated deception could labor unions, who represent an increasingly smaller percentage of workers, have unfettered access to the current White House and far more sway over policy than the entire voting population. The liberal mind cannot grasp the nature of true conservatism; they aren’t wired that way. Employing the primitive psychological defense mechanism of projection, liberals presume that conservatives must be every bit as mendacious as they are. Democrats understand that much of their funding comes stealthily from unrepentant Nazi collaborator, George Soros. They are perpetually baffled as to who is funding conservatives. Having no comprehension of how free markets work, liberals spend an inordinate amount of time trying to link Rush Limbaugh to everything from big oil to Timothy McVeigh. Who, they wonder, is funding Rush Limbaugh? We must know so we can destroy that evil genius forthwith. Any ten year old with common sense understands that Limbaugh’s sponsors fund Limbaugh. It’s an entirely open--in fact Limbaugh’s sponsors want it as open as possible-- relationship. Limbaugh promotes a product and the vendors of the product give him money. He must be pretty good at it because they give him lots of money. So bewildered is the Left about the Tea Parties, they have turned to such oily operatives as James Carville to try to figure out what amoral narcissist is funding them. True conservatism is not only firmly rooted in the truth; it is also elegant in its simplicity. No silly slogans or platitudinous orations are necessary to explain it. Conservatism is entirely consistent with human nature, which is why no treacherous mind games are required to explain it. The primary task of early childhood is separation and individuation. The young infant has no sense of himself as a separate entity from his mother. Maturation requires the gradual development of a sense of the self as a distinct and free human being. The ubiquitous terrible twos are an outward manifestation of the struggle between the innate human longing to be free versus the pleasure of the security and comfort of the adult. The terrible twos reappear in adolescence to facilitate the final push toward independence. Teenagers talk constantly about wanting their “freedom”. Yet, they are caught in the same paradox of seeking freedom or security. The constant rebelling and arguing is the adolescent’s unconscious way of making that final separation less painful. Individual liberty is the foundation of true conservatism, and really should not be a difficult sell. All humans naturally long to be free to raise their family and pursue their goals without constant outside interference. The rest of the conservative platform: respect for life, strong national defense, fiscal responsibility and limited government are entirely natural. People like the idea of keeping what they earn and making their own decisions about how to spend it. Reasonable Americans would give greater Constitutional protections to our own Navy SEALS than to a terrorist. We like the idea of being able to freely enter contracts for the purchase of goods or services without government intrusion. We understand the need for a rule of law, as long as it is practiced evenhandedly and our elected officials take direction from us. We resent activist judges who force their liberal ideology on us. Conservatism, in its purest form is effortless. Nobody ever has to force conservatism on a population. Liberalism, like its cousins, socialism and communism, is entirely antagonist to basic human nature. It’s pure folly to believe that humans will toil as hard for an amorphous “common good” as they will to provide for themselves and their families. As further evidence of the persistent failure of liberal ideology in the form of statism, there is the stubborn fact that liberalism always fails. The various definitions of socialism are necessarily vague; it’s a theory that has never worked. It fails because it runs contrary to basic human nature. For all of the lofty-sounding ivory-tower rhetoric about working together for the common good, humans are not wired that way. What people begrudge is being forced to give up their hard-earned income to support those who choose not to participate in what we refer to as work. Socialism mandates surrendering enormous control over our lives to a powerful centralized government in the absurd belief that they will act in our best interests. When has that ever happened? History is rife with examples of the failures of socialism. Hitler’s Nazi Party was socialist; remember his was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. We know how that turned out. Or ask the happy and well fed citizens of Cuba how that socialism thing is working out for them. Cubans risk their lives on rafts and boats trying to escape this grand social experiment. The ideology has failed in the USSR, China, and Eastern Europe. Western Europe has experimented with “democratic socialism,” and it has been a disaster. So calamitous has European socialism been that European Union leaders have warned Obama against following the same toxic policies. Socialism creates “pervasive demoralization” by removing incentives. Why bother to get an education or work hard if your income will be confiscated by the state and redistributed to whomever the government sees fit. Liberals have been trying to sell us on socialism for decades; they have created and elevated an imaginary victim class: the poor, single moms, the disenfranchised⎯whatever label they think we will buy. Expanding a centralized government and redistributing your income, according to the Left, is the only way these lost souls can experience fairness. Never mind the fact that a free market system has allowed even the lowest earners in the nation to enjoy a lifestyle that is the envy of millions of real poor people throughout the world. Our poor have color TVs, air conditioning, and enough food. Conservatism, on the other hand, always works. So does capitalism, which we haven’t had in years. Decades of allowing the expansion of the federal government has given us a system of corporate statism, rather than true capitalism. You will note that Obama, like all liberals, makes a lot of racket about “the poor” and the “workers.” We are supposed to believe that allowing the government to grab maximum power is going to help the working class. They always say that. But in actual practice, socialism is cherished only by intellectuals and benefits only the elites, not the workers. If we are going to return to conservatism, we must start by no longer allowing the Left to define it. As long as politicians are preoccupied with the next election, we won ‘t get back to our God- given Constitutional government. The politicians we need to look for now are those extraordinary few who will willingly relinquish their own power. In Washington, that means politicians who support states’ rights and term limits. On a local level, the Constitutional conservative will be the politician willing to take the unpopular stand against government overreaching. Obama’s presidency has plunged the country into a grave crisis, which is what is propelling so many Americans toward conservatism. Instinctively, people know that the conservative ideology, best expressed in our divinely inspired Constitution, is in harmony with human nature and designed to bring out the very best in us.