Posted by
T. Thomas on Tuesday, March 04, 2008 9:46:12 AM
As hoary and overused as the image has become, visualizing an American political party as a big tent serves a purpose. A tent is something made of rope, canvas and stakes. Inside it the circus performs, remaining in one place only as long as there are people willing to come inside and enjoy the show. When there are no customers left, the roustabouts pull up the stakes and the tent is taken to where the people are. “Ism’s” are more like buildings – systematic, fixed architectural constructs, rigid and resistant to change. Conservatism is one such.
The rock ribbed conservatives, those who guard its purity like temple priests with attitude, have lost perspective. They have come to think that the Republican Party is conservatism, and so they rage ceaslessly against those Republicans who are not with them 100%. Now they threaten menacingly to see to it that GOP is “punished” for the sin of John McCain. They promise to vote third party or even cast their votes for the other side, an act of madness by those who have seemingly forgotten that political gain in a democracy is not about absolutes, but about compromise, fortitude, the illusion of congeniality, and above all patience. Alas, the ultra conservatives have become so overcome with anger that they may return from washing their hands of today’s GOP to find the wind whistling forlornly in the trees and a huge empty space where a vibrant and welcoming tent once stood.
Though nobody elected anybody to be the Keeper of Republican Purity, internet blogs are rife with anonymous posters who puff up their chests and hold forth, sometimes viciously, on what a “true” Republican is. Once they have described such a creature, they hurl damning insult at those who fall short and polish the whole thing off by throwing what they perceive is their most wounding barb “RINO!” (A Republican in Name Only) at the targets of their disgust.
But here is the great irony: everyone is a RINO! Being Republican is a self-defined identity. The GOP is a vast and unwieldy collection of tens of millions of individuals whose vaguely similar political instincts cause them to come together from time to time to try and elect people to office. That is its sole purpose. Republicanism is a rubric under which many different beliefs collect. For every problem there are a hundred “Republican” ways to solve it.
The GOP is best and most easily defined by what it opposes, and as its nemesis mutates, so does the party. It is a target sensitive ideology, not a fixed philosophy. I challenge anybody to find cogent similarity between the bellicose and militaristic Republicanism of Abraham Lincoln and the passive laissez-faire brand practiced by Calvin Coolidge. There is none.
The chest thumping Republicans who have bestowed upon themselves the red robes of the Inquisition are, at this moment in time, its arch conservatives. The most right leaning of them, owing primarily to the illusion of genuine access they have felt under perfidious George W. Bush, have come to believe themselves the heart and soul of the party, the curial overlords of its Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. They have subsequently become intemperate and sanctimonious in their attempts to purge “their” party of its perceived heretics.
The road to ideological purity is an inward journey through ever narrowing concentric circles. One arrives at absolute purity in the company ultimately only of oneself and a very few fellows. In their single-minded drive to rid the party of its moderates and compromisers, the arch conservatives have mistaken that final circle of ideological purity for the same center ring where the ponies leap and the elephants dance. Long before they have driven the so-called RINO’s from their midst, they may find the whole Republican tent has up and moved to a more congenial place where it can set up again with its flags happily snapping in the breeze, welcoming all those who seek to win American elections by defeating Democrats.