“I know that Romney’s bad. But first we get Obama out. Then we’ll hold Romney’s feet to the fire.” That’s one of the most common things I hear from self-blinkered GOP partisans hacking for the artificially engineered Romney nomination. They angrily pretend that rank and file conservatives have no choice but to obey the “eyes wide shut” command emanating from the GOP’s elitist faction Party bosses.
There’s a suspiciously peremptory tone to their pretense these days. As an old Star Trek fan I hear the chilly, disembodied voice of the Borg collective. “You will be given no other choice. We will add your no longer electorally distinctive ballot to our total. Resistance is futile.” Truth to tell, however, if you are authentically conservative, supporting Romney is also futile; futile and self-destructive.
A leftist pretender like Romney wins office by successfully gulling a conservative constituency that would otherwise oppose the things he really means to achieve. He uses their support to build up the lie that he’s one of them. Once in office he works with the leftists (in his own party and the opposition) to come up with predominantly leftist plans and proposals that implement his true goals. The false perception that he’s “conservative” allows his supporters in the “conservative” party to hold any critics in its ranks in check . “We have to trust him,” they say. “We have to give him the benefit of the doubt,” they plead. “He’ll implement this with respect for our views,” they promise. And on and on.
Thanks to this strategy for governing, the duped conservatives can’t hold his feet to the fire because he has no need to bed down in their camp once elected. He can set to work building a coalition that combines the left-wing tail of his own party with the left-wing body of the opposing party so as to pave the way to re-election, with or without the conservative dupes who obligingly handed him the opportunity to make them obsolete.
Thus leftist results, wearing a conservative gloss, move the government toward greater consolidation of socialist politics. In the process the term “conservative” gets progressively (pun intended) redefined to encompass more and more of the features of socialism. What is more important, those who articulate and insist upon approaches that actually correspond to conservative principles and institutional goals (like respecting unalienable rights, preserving the natural family, encouraging morally responsible individual entrepreneurship and competitive free enterprise) are put in the false position of being unrealistic “purists” and rigid opponents of “the possible.”
The GOP’s nomination of Mitt Romney actually marks the culmination of more than twenty years of this stupidly self-destructive brand of “conservative” pragmatism. Whatever patter Romney uses to deceive, the actual results of his career stand well to the left of what Republicans claimed they adamantly opposed in Bill Clinton. In terms of politics, Romney represents the successful “transvaluation of values” (as the Nazi’s must Friedrich Nietzsche called it. That’s the political equivalent of a sex-change operation.)
The result is, and will be, to condemn real conservatives (those loyal to America’s founding principles and institutions, such as the US Constitution) to a Hobson’s choice-accept the new and ever leftward redefinitions of conservatism, or else accept banishment to the outer limits of political irrelevance. The first requires the sacrifice of conscience, common sense and intellectual integrity. The second means life in a wilderness of lies, living on the remembrance of self-evident truth that is the “locusts and honey” of America’s true believers.
Faced with this choice, many GOP “conservatives” of my acquaintance have in one way or another jumped on the bandwagon of self-extinction. Thank God, I am now no slave to their partisan machine. I don’t feel their compulsion to suspend disbelief in order to pretend that a deed proven socialist and implementer of the leftist deconstruction of America’s moral identity can ever, in any sense, be “my candidate” for President.
No more do I feel any kind of racial compulsion to support a deeply rooted communist like Obama just because his skin is a lighter shade of brown.
I find that the inevitable wrestles of youth, and the ongoing tussles of adulthood, have confirmed the moral sense that flowed through the earliest roots of my moral identity. That moral sense affirms that my goodwill is not bound to correspond to any material attribute or passion, but only to the insistent inclination that draws the mind and heart toward truth, the way a compass needle seeks the northern pole.
On both sides of the sham election currently being staged, truth is the uninvited guest. The racial partisans say I should not tell the truth about Obama’s allegiance to the cult of death: his advocacy of child murder; his suppression of the family’s call to procreation; his abandonment of God’s precious gift of freedom in order to enslave humankind to the outcomes of “history”, however inconsiderate, vile and inhumane.
The GOP partisans say that I should not tell the truth about Mitt Romney’s worship of ambition and financial gain, which led him, too, to sacrifice conscience and unalienable right in order to feed the depraved appetites of those he thought necessary to his advancement. I should not tell the truth about his deed conflicted stands; his careless health care packages tainted with the blood of murdered innocence; his socialist “bipartisan” schemes tainted by the sacrifice of conscientious liberty.
But ringing true in my ears is the word that drowns out all they say. “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his own soul?” (Matthew 16:25) And before my eyes is the example of the one who said “For this was I born; and for this purpose I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth…” (John 18:37). In my youth I was inspired by the painful history of my forbears to read and give much study to the effort to understand what it takes to found and safeguard human liberty. And here, in what may be its gathering twilight, Christ’s word and his example epitomize the best fruit of that effort.
If tomorrow all the self-professed conservatives I have known and worked with in my life could break free from the mesmerizing light of false pragmatism and walk only by the light of that word and example, they would see their own strength. Awakening from their redeemer bereft nightmare world of “lesser evils”, they would shun the tawdry compromise that now steals their strength away. “But that would take a miracle,” you say. So be it.
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