Keepers of The Flame
by digby
Garance at TAPPED writes today about the Patriots to Restore Civil Liberties and cautions the Democrats not to get too excited about guys like Grover Norquist or Paul Weyrich leaving the Republican coalition over Bush’s disregard for civil liberties.
I have no idea if she was referring to my post among those she admonishes, but I think it’s worth clarifying anyway. My point was not that Grover and company were going to leave the Republican Party, but that they were laying the groundwork for purging others from the coalition. They will not do this while Bush is in office, for obvious reasons, but they are beginning to make the case that Bush was not a “real conservative” and therefore anything he did while in office cannot be defined as “conservatism.” They do this whenever a politican becomes unpopular.
I linked to Rick Perlstein’s post on HuffPo from a while back in which he tells of his speech to the conservative cabal that was meeting at Princeton late last year:
This past year, I interviewed Richard Viguerie about conservatives and the presidential campaign. I showed him an infamous flier the Republican National Committee had willingly taken credit for, featuring a crossed-out Bible and the legend, “This will be Arkansas if you don’t vote.” “To do this,” Viguerie told me, “it reminds me of Bush the 41st, and not just him, but other non-conservative Republicans.”
Republicans are different from conservatives: that was one of the first lessons I learned when I started interviewing YAFers. I learned it making small talk with conservative publisher Jameson Campaigne, in Ottawa, Illinois, when I asked him if he golfed. He said something like: “Are you kidding? I’m a conservative, not a Republican.”
But back to Viguerie’s expression of same. With a couple of hours’ research I was able to find a mailer from an organization that was then one of his direct-mail clients that said “babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood.”
Why not cut corners like this, if you believe you are defending the unchanging ground of our changing experience?
[…]
This part of my talk, I imagine, is long after the point a constitutive operation of conservative intellectual work has clicked on in your minds: the part where you argue that malefactor A or B or C, or transgression X or Y or Z, is not “really” conservative. In conservative intellectual discourse there is no such thing as a bad conservative. Conservatism never fails. It is only failed. One guy will get up, at a conference like this, and say conservatism, in its proper conception, is 33 1/3 percent this, 33 1/3 percent that, 33 1/3 percent the other thing. Another rises to declaim that the proper admixture is 50-25-25.
It is, among other things, a strategy of psychological innocence. If the first guy turns out to be someone you would not care to be associated with, you have an easy, Platonic, out: with his crazy 33-33-33 formula–well, maybe he’s a Republican. Or a neocon, or a paleo. He’s certainly not a conservative. The structure holds whether it’s William Kristol calling out Pat Buchanan, or Pat Buchanan calling out William Kristol.
Norquist, Weyrich and Keene (not Barr, who I think might be a principled libertarian) are all keepers of the flame. Their job is to maintain “Conservatism” the brand, the movement, the value. The Republican party is their beloved vessel, not their cause.
I doubt that anyone is suggesting that Grover Norquist is thinking of leaving the Republican coalition over this. He’s thinking ahead to the moment when it is clear that Bushism and DeLayism are so tainted that they will make “conservatism” look bad. That is when they will be revealed to have not been true blue in the first place. In fact they will have been traitors to the movement. Only “real conservatives” like Norquist and Weyrich and Keene can be counted upon to be pure keepers of the flame. Or so they say.
Garance points out that these “Patriots for Checks and Balances” aren’t actually doing anything, just sending out press releases. This is par for the course. They aren’t going to actually work to undercut the Republican Party. The party is one of their assets. What they are most concerned with is maintaining the value of their brand and that requires constant vigilance. Grover and his conservative “leave us alone coalition” aren’t worth much if they sign on blindly to illegal wiretapping, are they?
None of this means that Democrats could still not deftly exploit this for our own purposes. But that’s another story.
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