How are RINOs like women? It's
hard to tell what they want:
This is the dichotomy established by many moderate Republicans: shrill, rigid, movement conservatives on one side and open-minded RINOs on the other.
. . .
The RINO movement consists of . . . well, people who say they’re RINOs. They’re pro-library-voices and anti-tri-cornered hats and pro-middle-class. Beyond that it’s hard to tell. But the left seems to approve.
At any rate, let me offer some overtures to the RINOs. I’ll agree to doff my tri-cornered hat and stop firing musket blanks at my co-workers, several of whom have taken up my epistemic closure with the HR office. But I’m going to keep demanding smaller government and less spending, and I may occasionally even use an exclamation point.
We’re staring down tens of trillions in debt. If the RINOs have a better solution, I’m all ears.
19 comments:
I’ll agree to...stop firing musket blanks....
Blanks!? Somebody said to load wadding only?
Eric Hines
Last time I checked, the RINO 'movement', such as it is, consists of anyone the base wants to demonize or run out of the party (and I've heard that one many times directly from the horse's mouth) this week.
People like my Dad, who is 83 years old and has voted conservative all his life. A guy who supported Reagan when the base was trying to stage some sort of coup. Or me.
No one has an easy solution to the debt problem because the other side gets a vote too. That's inconvenient given that we appear to be outnumbered at present, but it's a feature and not a bug.
I can't help noticing that people resort to banal (his word, not mine) tropes like "Women! Does ANYONE know what *they* want? [wink wink, nudge nudge]" when they don't really care to find out. Often this is followed up with impressive, out of the box thinking like, "Let's repeal the 19th amendment!". After that, maybe we can start in on the groups (blacks, Jews, etc) who vote far more overwhelmingly progressive than women ever have or likely will.
Hey, it's a "solution".
Women are not some monolithic group that can be described by a simple set of rules. But then neither are conservatives, who spend an awful lot of their time arguing with each other. Or men.
Sorry for the rant, but I'm really losing patience with my own side of late. Suggesting that moderates want to shut up principled or passionate debate is really beyond the pale.
Again, sorry for the asperity in my tone.
I am really getting discouraged about our prospects in the next election. If we can't manage to rise above differences with people who largely agree with us, I honestly don't think we have a snowball's chance in hell of having a voice in this country's future.
At some point, rather than reacting to Kathleen Parker's snark, some of these folks are going to have to decide whether RINOs are a disconnected group who don't think or agree on anything, or whether we react monolithically (and in direct contrast to their characterizations), a la "Conservatives can’t even support sequestration without drawing condemnation from the center-right."
This isn't a principle critique - it's hurt feelings. My husband is one of those taking a pay cut and you don't see me condemning anyone for supporting the sequester. If this guy has a problem with Kathleen Parker, why not take it up with her instead of oxymoronically claiming that RINOs don't stand for much of anything in particular (we're the Episcopalians of the Right!), yet oddly we react in lockstep? :p
Did he actually say "like women," or did you just write that to get Cassandra's goat? :)
I for one doubt there are any moderate solutions simply because the scale of the problem is so very large. However, as Cass often points out, the way our democracy is structured you can only do moderate things because you need coalitions. (Even the sequestration is cutting a few tenths of a percentage point from spending, for example.) It is highly unlikely that there will be a political solution to our problems.
I added the "like women" part, but not to get C's goat, more as a joke at my own expense. She's right, of course, that anyone who's consistently clueless about what the opposition wants is probably not paying close enough attention.
I suppose I'm considered a bit of a RINO myself, for not toeing the line on a number of social-conservative issues. But it's pretty easy to tell what I want.
Usually. Although I do think that sometimes we simply can't communicate -- I get the sense on occasion that no amount of explanation will convey the meaning I intend, because we simply live in different worlds.
I take that problem seriously, actually. It may sometimes (often?) be simple bad faith, but a lot of the time we -- you and me, me and Cass -- don't understand each other in spite of an abundance of good faith. I think sometimes we really can't understand each other, perhaps because our experiences of the world are so very different.
My wife and I talk about this sometimes, and it's amazing how different are the worlds we live in. Things that are utterly obvious to her -- a white flower has sprung up, not a quarter-inch across, where yesterday there wasn't one -- I would never see if she weren't there to point them out. Even seeing them, I'm sure they don't look the same to me as they do to her. I can see the joy and the excitement in her face at the new spring life, and I can almost sense what it must be like -- I can almost share it. But not quite, not really. I know it's not the same.
Bad faith aside, then, I think there's a real issue. What we do with it -- how we achieve friendship, or at least alliance, in spite of living in very different worlds -- is the hard question. It seems to work for me and my wife, but it's hard when you don't have that bond of intimacy, and that regular daily interaction that lets you come to know the value of what the other one sees, and the world they live in that you could otherwise never know.
That's not your political issue, though. I don't have an answer for that, but I do have the increasing sense that it doesn't matter. There are no political solutions. The problems are too big for the kind of solutions our political model can build.
Well, if there is no solution, then the thing crashes, so to speak. But really, look at the numbers.
If this is at all correct:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_federal_budget
You have basically 4 giant outlays:
The Military
Social Security
Medicaid and Medicare
Everything Else
Income was 2.469 trillion
Outlays were 3.795 trillion
Outlays are approximately 1.53 times income.
As Glenn Reynolds says: "Something that can't go on, won't."
It is just a matter of time.
My point.
It's time to think about what comes next, and how we get from here to there.
I added the "like women" part, but not to get C's goat, more as a joke at my own expense
After my first bout of Online Tourette's, I went back and re-read and got the joke :p
I am in the middle of Delivery Hell this month, and will consequently be working even longer hours than usual. I'm sorry I momentarily lost my sense of humor - every now and then the RINO thing just gets to me. I hear my Dad's voice every time I see that word - he's somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun, but like me he also thinks we have to live in the real world which, as Grim noted above, means we can't just force our will on the rest of the country. Which means compromise, as little as we may like it, and a whole lot of patience about things we can/can't change.
I often ask myself what I'd do if I were dictator for life and it's not an easy question even then. Sure, I could wave my hand and force everyone to live within their means but then I've taken away free will. Now I know how God feels, if only through the proverbial glass, dimly... :p
Eric, I agree with you that it can't go on. The thing is, we've been here before - at some point even they won't be able to keep kicking the can down the road. We'll either go the route of countries like Canada and scale back entitlements and the military or there will be some sort of default (which, unless it leads to a total overthrow of the government, and you can put me in the camp of doubters on that score), will lead to the same thing (cuts and tax increases).
Or there will be another world war, something I'm guessing is another fairly high probability.
I understand all the reasons the right opposes tax increases and because we're now essentially a DINK household, any such increases will fall most heavily on us. But you don't pay debt down simply by slowing spending. So I want what Obama keeps (dishonestly) promising - balanced reform that includes revenue hikes AND deep, phased cuts.
I don't think there's any painless way to get both those things, so I don't think we'll do what's needed until there are no other options left.
I suppose the author was about as tired of being castigated as a wingnut as RINOs are of being called RINOs, and I identified with him somewhat.
I don't object to the idea of compromising in recognition of the real world we live in. I might compromise on different things: I'd give in on every single gay-rights proposal, for instance, if it let us shrink government and cut spending. But that's not the RINO behavior that we ideologically rigid wingnuts normally object to. We feel the compromises aren't getting anything valuable in return. They're just a reflection of the fact that the changes that are important to us don't matter at all to Democrats and matter far too little to the voters in the middle. And we have a sense that we're running out of time while still heading in the wrong direction.
Ah, well, that's the problem with being extremists.
I'm not defending Parker's op-ed. I read it quickly when it came out and was annoyed by the tone, though I have to say that after 5 years of reading people in my party call us traitors (as well as calling politicians they just LOVED last week traitors because of a single vote they disagree with), and talk about how much better (in what sense is losing votes better???) the party will be when we've all been purged from that big tent Reagan created (and that's some of the *mild* stuff :p), I sympathize with her points about tone.
Moderates can argue that a tactic isn't helpful without using words like wingnut (a term I have almost never used). But the point loses some credibility when the author turns right around and does what he just objected to. Republicans who don't agree with the Tea Party are NOT Republicans "in name only". The term isn't meant kindly in any sense of the word. It's what Heinlein used to call an "insult direct".
My problem with the piece is that he didn't take Parker on - he extended his ire to a lot of people who haven't endorsed her tone or even (necessarily, as the point about the sequester makes clear) her positions.
There really is a brewing civil war within conservatism and I'm convinced that a goodly part of it has to do with the needless insults. Personally, I'm sick and tired of having my values attacked. They are time-tested conservative values taught to me by my parents and once pretty close to universally respected by conservatives. No one has to agree with them, but I'm watching my sons and my daughter in law become disgusted and disillusioned with conservatism and it's largely due to the nastiness. It makes even reasonable positions sound unreasonable.
This is a real problem for us, and it's distressing that apparently we can't even discuss tactics without bizarre references to "library voices". Refraining from name calling isn't asking people to tiptoe around or whisper - it's something we used to accept as simple decency.
Once more, I really am sorry about my tone earlier. If I offended you, please accept my sincere apology. I am just as angry and frustrated as everyone else, and sometimes it slips out.
Oh, please don't apologize. I knew my post was provocative. I'm sorry it had the effect on you that it had.
I thought the crack about "library voices" was kind of funny. It expressed just the frustration I feel with being painted as strident. There's a lot of disagreement out about what "true conservative values" are. I'm in a mood to shout about it, and I feel a much stronger affinity for the guys wearing the tri-cornered hats than I do for most of the voices of reason.
But there was no need for me to insult comrades and fellow travelers, and I certainly was sorry to have insulted you with a careless quotation of a post that I found amusing if not 100% defensible. I hope you know how great a regard I have for you.
Hey, I'm just glad it wasn't me, this time. :) I feel the same way, of course. (Although sometimes I do yank her chain on purpose. :)
Most so-called 'conservatives' really aren't.
Frankly, I think the real conservatives died out with WWII.
What came after, not conservative. Not really.
Maybe Goldwater was the last one, but even he was more of a libertarian, not really a conservative.
It's like the term 'liberal'. I'm not even sure what that means anymore.
Orwell had a comment in his essay "Politics and the English Language" where he says that fascism doesn't really mean anything anymore other than something that is not wanted.
Depending on one's point of view, if you don't like it, label it conservative. Or, if you don't like it, label it liberal.
A lot of internet pundits, who in an earlier time, would never have been heard from, now some how are casting themselves as arbiters of what's conservative and also what's liberal. Why?
There's a lot of dreck out there. That needs to be remembered.
I no longer have any idea what to call myself. I favor minimal government, mostly aimed at law and order of the most basic type, which (to me) means protection of property rights and prevention and punishment of outright violence and fraud. I don't want the state to take any position on most matters of social choice, and by the same token I don't want the state to intervene between any citizen and the disastrous consequences of his own social choices, especially if intervention requires the commandeering of significant fractions of the resources of others. I'm a social conservative about many of those choices, but that bears only on my conduct of my own life.
So I often find the Republican Party to be weak tea on economic issues where I'd be a hard-liner (quit borrowing! quit redistributing! quit price-fixing!), and an officious intermeddler on social issues that I consider strictly none of the state's business, even if they are of the greatest public and individual moral and social import. Does that make me a radical or a moderate? I'm willing to cut deals with people on the other side of most of these issues, if the deal looks good on the whole.
Don't call yourself anything. Just advocate for what you think is right.
As a general rule of thumb, if someone tells you they are a conservative, you should ask what they want to conserve. If they say they are a progressive, you should ask what they take to be progress. If you find that you want to sometimes do one and sometimes the other, you're not really either one. That's OK.
I used to say that I was a classical liberal, and at the time I was; but over the years I came to appreciate the role of institutions such as the church or the Marine Corps in shaping character and encouraging virtue. So I described myself as a conservative, because I believed in the importance of those things. And for a long time I was working to conserve the institutions I thought encouraged the right values.
Lately I have come to believe that our institutions will have to be renewed and reforged, as we have discussed at length. That makes me, I suppose, no longer a conservative but a radical.
It's like the term 'liberal'. I'm not even sure what that means anymore.
It means monarchist--18th century conservative. They're both enamored of government Knows Best and is the solution to all problems. Even the preferred government structure isn't all that different between George and Barack and his Progressives.
I no longer have any idea what to call myself. I favor minimal government, mostly aimed at law and order of the most basic type....
Well, I'm more hubristic than you: wanting that sort of thing, also, I unhesitatingly call myself a modern conservative--an 18th century liberal.
Eric Hines
But there was no need for me to insult comrades and fellow travelers, and I certainly was sorry to have insulted you with a careless quotation of a post that I found amusing if not 100% defensible. I hope you know how great a regard I have for you.
That regard is returned several times over, Tex. FWIW, it was only a momentary reaction on my part. I've been working very long hours and my back and head were killing me, so I imagine that had something to do with it. Still, I should not have reacted the way I did. Usually when I'm not feeling well, I don't write and don't comment.
I should have obeyed my own rule :p
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