Rush Limbaugh represents mainstream, popular conservatism today. I actually have a sentimental attachment to his radio program because it helped solidify my conservative instincts way back during George H.W. Bush’s campaign in ’88. To Rush’s credit, he has joined Ann Coulter, Laura Ingrahm, and a handful of other prominent conservatives to oppose McCain’s candidacy, pledging to oppose him, even if he is up against Hillary Clinton.
He explains this controversial position well:
Limbaugh said in an interview over the weekend, he would rather see the Democrats win the White House.
“If I believe the country will suffer with either Hillary, Obama or McCain, I would just as soon the Democrats take the hit . . . rather than a Republican causing the debacle,” he said. “And I would prefer not to have conservative Republicans in the Congress paralyzed by having to support, out of party loyalty, a Republican president who is not conservative.”
I feel the same way. I will not vote for McCain. I’ve tried that before–Dole (’96) and Bush (’04)–and it’s time to stop compromising because of alleged trump issues like the courts or taxes or whatever thin reed has replaced conservatism in the Republican Party.
There is one issue for conservatives that eclipses all others: we simpy won’t have our country anymore if amnesty comes to pass, and we fail to institute serious immigration restrictions. As a tactical matter, conservatives could unify against a President Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama if one of them proposes something destructive like mass amnesty and a guest worker program. But McCain can likely push it through using a combination of Democrats and moderate Republicans. If he does this–and he is fanatical on this issue just like W.–it will literally amount to the destruction of our country and its replacement with a new one, with a new people, who will have entirely different values. Only the geography will be the same, and even it will change as overcrowding destroys more and more farmland, forests, and open spaces.
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Good post, Chris. I would just add that McCain 2008 is very different and much more dangerous than Dole 1996. Sometimes, the guy you like just doesn’t win, and someone a bit too liberal becomes the Republican nominee. That was the case with Dole, and I think most conservatives were right to swallow their dissatisfaction and vote for him.
But this year and McCain are different for several reasons. First, McCain is clearly an emotional wreck of a man whose combination of rage, vanity, and self-righteousness should disqualify him from the presidency. This cannot be emphasized enough, and it’s a decisive issue that comes into play before we even get to questions of ideology, direction of the Republican party, etc.
Second, McCain is not just wrong, but he is an ideological fanatic on the most important issue facing Republicans and the country, as you point out above. With a McCain administration, we will get amnesty, and with amnesty, we are doomed demographically. End of story. With a Democrat in the White House, we will fight against amnesty, and although it will be an uphill fight, it’s one we can win. With McCain, there won’t even be a fight, except on the Tancredo fringes.
Third, McCain’s personal narrative represents one of the most profound risks we face in our politics today. Personal narrative is important — much more so than fleeting positions on the flat tax and the like. McCain’s narrative is the superficial, modern, flag-waving narrative of the aggrieved war hero whose decadent country won’t show him the proper respect. The narrative that encourages him to respond to any criticism or debate with statements like, “How dare you say that to a war hero?” A McCain ascendancy represents the sort of pseudo-militarist populism (“pseudo” because no one actually wants actually to sacrifice for all the wars they support) that I believe is a real threat on the modern American Right.
Fourth, McCain represents the final defeat of conservatism in the Republican party. Unlike Dole, a center-right liberal on policy but I guy with a fairly reflexive, conservative outlook on life and issues, McCain is a fanatic. You could never picture Bob Dole ramming through an amnesty bill with no debate and ranting and raving about how everyone who disagrees with him is a bigot. McCain also takes obvious pleasure in fighting with, insulting, and doing harm to his fellow Republicans, especially conservatives. At the end of the day, Dole was a liberal but a Republican partisan, and as such he was due some deference from the right as its party’s nominee. McCain is much more liberal, much more ideological, and decidedly anti-partisan. I have never seen him attack Democrats with the same relish and venom with which he attacks his fellow Republicans, except on the sole issue of Iraq. And even on that issue, his nastiness toward Rumsfeld, which I agreed with in substance but which was unacceptably awful in tone for a public figure, outshone anything he has ever directed at the Left on any issue.
Let’s face it, McCain is a not-very-bright, liberal, anti-Republican, open-borders ideologue who openly relishes putting conservatives and other Republicans in what he believes to be their places. He is a vain, self-righteous, and fundamentally dishonest man, made worse by his total lack of self-knowledge as to these traits. He is a temperamentally-unsound, unstable personality. As a Democrat he would represent an affront to what we believe in as conservatives and to what we respect about leaders. As a Republican, he represents all that AND the likelihood that we as conservatives will be blamed for and permanently tarnished by his preposterously-numerous flaws.
Dole was a Republican party hack who happened to be kind of liberal. McCain is so much more, and thus so much more a potential historical menace to our party and to our political beliefs system.
Rush Limbaugh and these other blowhards are slamming the barn door after the horse has bolted. They were the guys who made war-mongering a litmus test for Republicans and now they have gotten their comeuppance – the biggest warmonger of them all (with apologies to Hillary) is now the Republican frontrunner!!
That’s certainly true, although for their part, I don’t think it’s the war-mongering that’s the issue. What’s ridiculous is how Limbaugh and other influential conservatives waited around for one or two months while McCain came back from the dead, all the while refusing to coalesce behind the one guy who (1) pledged himself to conservative causes and (2) could beat McCain. And now they wonder why they can’t halt his momentum in the span of one or two weeks?
Theodore, there’s a long road from Ron Paul’s wishful thinking about the world and McCain’s war-mongering. There is something like a reasonable view for strategic independence with a strong threshold for war that is also willing to use force when appropriate and that has little regard for things like the UN or Afghanistan’s sovereignty.
Agreed McCain sucks. Agreed he will damage our country and the Republican party. Agreed immigration is a crucial issue, perhaps the most important one. But that issue now appears mostly lost for this campaign. Maybe Conservatives might be able to extract some pledges from McCain, but don’t expect any from the Democratic nominee, who well may be Obama, the most Leftist Senator in Congress.
And after Obama loses both Iraq and Afghanistan, and we spend the next 30 years hearing about the foreign policy lessons we learned from our immoral attacks on Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, we’ll regret his presidency. We’ll regret his presidency when we listen to the terrorist messages describing their recent attack as an another victory over the weak-willed Americans who were defeated in Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
McCain will be a disaster. But nations don’t recover from the pyschological blow of repeated losses in war. As a nation, we won’t find the will to fight more effectively in the future, we’ll be taught that we waterboarded too much, or lied to support our aggression. The lessons my generation was force fed in schools and movies about our transgressions in Vietnam will be amplified and set in stone.
This is a simple issue for me. We are going to have a disastrous presidency for the next four years. The question is whether the Republican party survives as a conservative party, or if it instead becomes a coalition of McCain liberals and Huckabee populists. I want a Republican party that can produce a semi-conservative or conservative president in 2012 and beyond. Iraq and Afghanistan are not enough to convince me to give up conservatism forever.
Moreover, I would rather take the worst in Iraq and Afghanistan and a defeat of the pro-immigration bills, than surefire amnesty. We can defeat amnesty under any condition except a McCain presidency.
Finally, MCCAIN CANNOT WIN IN NOVEMBER. Seriously. He can’t. Basically no shot. So given that, I think it is important that he be defeated soundly, so that his kind of Republicanism is seen as a loser, not as an almost-winner in a bad year for Republicans. Dave, if I am right in my prediction that he can’t win, don’t you agree that a solid defeat is better than a close one?
Dave, you make a mistake saying immigration is lost. It is not lost, because we can defeat it in Congress as we did last year. UNLESS a Republican president supports it and is able to pull over enough Republican votes out of partisan loyalty. We got lucky that we overcame a Democratic majority and Bush, but Bush was already unpopular by then, and there wasn’t much cost to Republicans revolting against a universally-despised second-term president.
That won’t be the case with a McCain administration.
Alas, Ron Paul has played a character from Dickens in this campaign: “The Ghost of the Republican Party Past.” He has been no more welcome to the Republican Scrooges of today than The Ghost of Christmas Past was to the original Scrooge.
I appreciated his libertarian candidacy, and he has actually had a pretty good showing for an adherent of a philosophy that basically no one believes in. But perhaps part of the reason he “has been no more welcome” is that he is a kook on foreign policy and seems at least to have entertained the notion that the Bush administration was complicit in the fall of the Twin Towers.
Call me crazy, but that doesn’t strike me as the ready-for-primetime vibe you want in a presidential candidate.
I didn’t mean the immigration was lost for the next four years, only that the prospect of getting a presidential nominee who wants to curtail immigration is now lost.
Here’s my analogy for our current political predicament. You’re more worried about freezing to death. I’m more worried about burning to death. What’s probably going to happen is that we are going to be force fed hot coals and then stuffed in a freezer.
Ron Paul is not in the current libertarian mainstream (he might be called a right-wing libertarian). It was the libertarian part of his ideology that I found most problematic; however, the Republicans don’t believe in the conservative part anymore either.
Dave —
I think there’s a small chance we can survive with some bad third-degree burns, but in the process find a weapon that destroys all the freezers so that the worry about freezing to death recedes.
Plus global warming should keep us from freezing anyhow.