One of the things that has attracted me to David Brooks over the years is his willingness to not get so heated in his writing.  In a time when it seems that what sells is trying to show everyone how outraged you are, Brooks quiet conservations about issues has always been a breath of fresh air.  Brooks has been critical of folks across the political spectrum, but it was never done in a withering attack style.  That’s just not David Brooks.

At least it wasn’t until yesterday.

Brooks incredible tounge lashing of the GOP for it’s dance with default should be a sign to Republicans that they are in danger of losing any and all credibility.  When you get the man who has made a living on calls for civility angry, you’ve pretty much lost the independents and moderates that are needed to win.

The modern GOP is in a bit of a bind. My guess is that even within the halls of Congress there are a number of GOP members of Congress who agree with Brooks.  They want to make a deal with Democrats to avert any kind of fiscal disaster.  But I also think the GOP is trapped by its own ideology; faced with a base that doesn’t want any compromise and will punish any lawmaker that goes against their wishes. As Jonathan Bernstein notes, citing a recent New York Times piece, GOP lawmakers are kept in line using fear:

What matters here, however, isn’t what actually happens in these primaries (after all, virtually all incumbents will survive them), but what’s in the heads of Republican Members of Congress. And for that, it’s possible that the ambiguities and unclear interpretations in Steinhauer’s story reflect accurately a focus on primaries and Tea Party short leashes that dominate the thinking of those Republicans.

All of which means that, at this point, it doesn’t really matter how many establishment figures defect or how harshly they complain: as long as Republican politicians are convinced that their main vulnerability is primary challenges from the right, they’re going to get crazier and crazier.

The thing is, it’s really not that crazy to worry about challenges from the right. Several Republican incumbents went down to defeat in primaries last year because they were not “pure” enough. It happened enough in 2010 to strike fear in the the hearts of GOP lawmakers. And as Bernstein notes as long as those politicos think this is their fate if they even make a deal, they will ride that crazy train no matter what a columnist says about them.

I really don’t know what the solution is.  Of course, GOP lawmakers should make deals, but the reality is they won’t because of what could be the repercussions of compromising.  Brooks slap across the face should be a wake-up call, but I doubt it will.  So far, there hasn’t been any consequences for going crazy.  There have been consequences for making deals.  Only when a price is paid for ideological rigidity will the GOP be able to change its course.  The question then will be if it’s too late.

Originally posted at Big Tent Revue.

It was a pretty normal, run-of-the-mill event — as weddings are.  It was held in a small, picturesque Episcopal Church outside of Minneapolis.  The sanctuary was decorated with flowers.  The families of both parties were there, beaming with excitement.  The only thing that might not make this event a typical wedding was that I was getting married to another man: my partner, Daniel.

At that wedding, we pledged to be faithful to each other. Our relationship was blessed by the Episcopal priest and those gathered, including both of our parents.  Our wedding (and Daniel was insistent we call it that) was soley religious, since Minnesota doesn’t allow for same-sex marriage.  At some level, it didn’t matter that our marriage was not recognized by the state.  It was important that we made a committment to one another in front of the gathered community and in front of God.

But a year later, it did matter.

One October morning, Daniel woke me, saying he had some kind of chest pains.  So, we got in my car and headed to the closest hospital.  After a few tests, it was determined that Daniel was having a gallbladder attack.  Surgery was scheduled the next day.

At Daniel’s request, I called his brother and sister who live in North Dakota.  His sister and family decided to make the five hour trip from Grand Forks to Minneapolis to join me.  I can remember as clear as day, Daniel asking me to bring the legal documents we had drawn up that would allow me to see him should anyone get snippy with me.

You see, because Daniel and I were not legally married in Minnesota, I didn’t automatically have hospital visitation rights. His sister automatically has those priviledges because they were immediate kin, but I had to have papers on hand should someone decide that my word wasn’t good enough.

Now, living as we do in Minneapolis where there is a large gay community, there was a good chance I would be let in to see Daniel.  But I couldn’t say that with certainty and if I were in another part of the state,  I might very have had to produce those documents.

John Vecchione’s post against same sex marriage is the standard argument found in many Republican circles: he is angry that in New York same-sex marriage is called a marriage, he talks about how he and others like him who disagree with the idea will be hounded by elites and he talks about how the recent decision by four GOP Senators to vote for the same sex marriage bill in New York will doom the state party.

So, let’s take them one by one.  Vecchione is opposed to calling a same-sex marriage a marriage.  Fine.  I’m okay with using the term “civil unions” — and several states have gone that route.  I’m willing to get half a loaf instead of none.  But if that alone were the issue, you’d think Vecchione would talk about the importance of the state at least giving some legal status to people like Daniel and I. And while he doesn’t support same-sex marriage, he would support civil unions. (Sociologist Peter Berger did so in good essay earlier this year.) But Vecchione doesn’t do that. He talks about why he doesn’t like same-sex marriage that seems to include any type of relationship of two same-sex persons.  So I can only conclude that he is not just upset about gay people using the name “marriage”, but he’s upset that the state is daring to even recognize any form of same-sex relationship.

The other interesting point to be made is Vecchione’s assertion that this vote will doom the state GOP.  “We could have been the ‘27 Yankees. We are shaping up to be the ‘62 Mets.” he said.

I don’t know how he makes this connection.  One only has to look at the dwindling number of Republicans representing the Empire State in Washington.  Even into the late 1990s, there were a substantial number of New York Republicans in Congress — and Senators like Alfonse D’Amato were also common.  Today, Republicans hold six of the 29 congressional seats — an increase of the all-time low of two representatives in the 111th Congress.  The GOP lost one earlier this year where Medicare, not gay marriage, was the factor.  In 2009, partisan infighting led to the GOP losing the 23rd congressional district, which had been Republican since the Civil War. What could have been an easy win became a pick-up for the Dems because some conservatives couldn’t support a gay friendly GOP candidate. Ironically, the recent increase in GOP representatives included two gay-friendly Republicans: Nan Hayworth and Richard Hanna.

In my own work through Log Cabin Republicans, I have noticed how many young Republicans just don’t understand why people are so afraid of same sex marriage.  It could be that they see more and more gay people in their lives and they count many of them as their friends.  Why in the world would they want to block their friends from having the same rights that they themselves have?

Vecchione might think that defending traditional marriage is key to GOP victory, but as evidenced by David Frum’s conversion, even conservatives can see the handwriting on the wall.  Those of us who are gay and want to have the same marriage rights don’t want to destroy marriage or the American society.  What we do want is to be able to do what hetrosexual married persons do — including really mundane things, like visit each other in the hospital.

Same-sex marriage is not the end of the world.  It’s just allowing that world to get a little bit bigger.

Originally posted at Big Tent Revue.

Anyone who insists the Tea Party is not animated by a distinctively white unrest should read that whole thing three times slowly. I’ve had several conversations lately with people who insist, as Glenn Beck and other Tea Party leaders have done, that the movement is not about racism or xenophobia. I believe them. I doubt that anyone outside a small fraction of the activists who have marched in Washington openly despise black people or have personal antipathy toward the Hispanic immigrants in their hometowns. (In mine, they work for virtually every local business, and Mexican flags fly uncontroversially alongside the U.S. and Texas flags at many auto dealerships.) But one cannot listen to the exchange above and miss the clear sentiment behind the expressed concern: distinctive American culture, which happens to be the way white middle-class people who speak English live, is “under assault from within.”

I think Sessions is correct that “white panic” is a major part of the Tea Party movement and he is also correct that this panic is not the same as pure racism.  I don’t think white Tea Partiers somehow hate blacks and other folks who aren’t white.

But while Sessions doesn’t say that such folk are racists, he does at the same time seem to imply that these folks are not the norm:

People who dismiss the “white fear” interpretation of the Tea Party will no doubt accuse me of presenting anecdotal evidence, or say that Rush Limbaugh is not a Tea Party leader. That’s fair enough, and focusing on this undercurrent in no way suggests it is the only thing the Tea Party is about. But the ubiquity of the type of conversations like this “Fútbol Americano” exchange among the Tea Partiers I know, the reflexive undercurrent of hostility toward anything—Spanish, mosques, bike lanes—that is not distinctively American, gives something away. They are not just under assault from a Democratic president, but a host of vaguely-defined foreign invaders, just like Richard Hofstadter described in “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt.” It just so happens that most of the defenders are white Christians and most of the invaders are something else. And the fact that these Americans can make wild connections between 20-second Spanish advertisements during NFL games and the “degradation” of American culture shows us something about what’s going on inside their heads.

A lot of African Americans as well as conservatives and liberals well versed in diversity will no doubt say that the Tea Party is racist or like Sessions say that its driving force is racial resentment and leave it at that.  When such statements are made, we who have issues with the Tea Party movement can either look at them with fear or with contempt.  But what we don’t do is figure out what is fueling that racial resentment.  Is it simple racism or is it something more complex?

There is no doubt that folks like Rush Limbaugh and Angelo Codevilla are adept in stirring the racial and ethnic pot.  But I believe there is more going on than the tired old story of conservatives being racist.

I think this racial resentment and fear is more a symptom than it is the disease itself.  A changing America, with the first African-American president as its symbol, is a threat to those who feel left behind by this changing nation.  While working class African-Americans have been hammered over the last 30 years, so have working class whites.  Their story is less well known, but they tend to live lives of quiet desperation, seeing their way of life disappear.

Back in July, Virginia Democratic Senator James Webb stirred things up in an op-ed where he talked about the economic concerns of working class whites.  He makes a case that race-based affirmative action programs have done harm to poor whites and need to cease.  He wrote:

In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt created a national commission to study what he termed “the long and ironic history of the despoiling of this truly American section.” At that time, most industries in the South were owned by companies outside the region. Of the South’s 1.8 million sharecroppers, 1.2 million were white (a reflection of the population, which was 71% white). The illiteracy rate was five times that of the North-Central states and more than twice that of New England and the Middle Atlantic (despite the waves of European immigrants then flowing to those regions). The total endowments of all the colleges and universities in the South were less than the endowments of Harvard and Yale alone. The average schoolchild in the South had $25 a year spent on his or her education, compared to $141 for children in New York.

Generations of such deficiencies do not disappear overnight, and they affect the momentum of a culture. In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks’ average of 10.6 years, and well below that of most other white groups. A recent NORC Social Survey of white adults born after World War II showed that in the years 1980-2000, only 18.4% of white Baptists and 21.8% of Irish Protestants—the principal ethnic group that settled the South—had obtained college degrees, compared to a national average of 30.1%, a Jewish average of 73.3%, and an average among those of Chinese and Indian descent of 61.9%.

Policy makers ignored such disparities within America’s white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on these policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.

I don’t know if we should abandon affirmative action, but we should consider long and hard how are we to help poor whites get a leg up in this swiftly changing environment.

Why should a black guy like me care?  Because I grew up in a working class town where poor whites as well as poor blacks came to town to work in the auto plants.  When those jobs went away, it hit both just as hard.  They scrambled for work while they saw their way of life disappear.  If you want to know why Michigan has so many white folks in the militia movement, you might want to look at the loss of auto jobs.  Back in the 1980s, a group of white men killed an Asian man they thought was Japanese.  Was it racist?  Yes, but it was also fear of  losing a decent way of life because Detroit and the rest the auto industry was in the crapper.

In a recent column, Ross Douthat noted that being left behind in a changing America tends to fuel paranoia. He was talking about white Christians being underrepresented in elite colleges, but he could have been referring to the economy as well:

Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.

This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially tinged conspiracy theories that Beck and others have exploited — that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third- world immigrants, and so forth.

But Douthat also concludes that because white liberals have little contact with poor whites, they also have a jaundiced view of them:

Among the highly educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland.

In the Bush years, liberals fretted about a looming evangelical theocracy. In the age of the Tea Parties, they see crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs everywhere they look.

So, how do we solve this?  Well, one way is listening to Tom Joad again.  Using the lead character from the Grapes of Wrath, David Brooks says its time for a progressive, nonideological center to arise and work to spread middle class wealth again.  He notes that affluent liberals and anti-tax conservatives have crowded out any concern for the standards of the middle class, even as jobs disappear.  I would add that unless there is a center that listens to the white working class as well as others, we will continue to have movements fueled by white panic.

It’s time that we give a damn about Tom Joad, instead of looking down at him.

Originally posted at Big Tent Revue.

“Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.”
-Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York

Christian tradition tells us that one day Jesus went into the region of Samaria with his disciples and stopped at a well. His disciples went into a nearby town to get something to eat, but Jesus stayed at the well. Now, Samaria was a region that most Jews liked to avoid. They didn’t much care for Samaritans because of their mixed heritage and because they worshipped God a bit differently. But Jesus didn’t seem to mind, and so here he was at this well.

After a while, around noontime, a woman comes up to the well to draw some water. It was a bit odd for this woman to come to get water in the heat of the day, but here she was. Then, Jesus did something strange: he asked the woman a question. He asked her if she had any water.

The woman was shocked because this man was talking to her. And Jesus kept talking to her and because of this her life was forever changed.

This story, sometimes called the Woman at the Well is one of my favorite stories in all of Scripture. It’s a wonderful example of Jesus reaching across the many boundaries of that time to treat this woman with respect. It was nothing short of a miracle for a Jewish man to be talking to a Samaritan woman. Two people, from two different faiths were able to cross what had become a great divide.

The recent controversy surrounding the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” has me wondering if my fellow conservatives are able to reach across a modern religious divide. So far, the results are not encouraging. Leading conservatives such as Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani have come out against building this place of worship because it is two blocks from Ground Zero, where thousands died on September 11, 2001.

Yes, we know that it was Muslim extremists who somehow thought God would be pleased if they rammed planes into buildings. That said 19 people who had a warped sense of their faith should not be considered the standard bearers for a faith of a billion adherents.

This issue has confirmed something that I have suspected for a long time: that there is a growing problem with religious bigotry within conservatism. I hear many conservatives talk about dealing with “radical Islam” and I tend to think that when those words are uttered it means that all of Islam is radical, not just a small portion.

As conservatives, we love to talk about how we tend to adhere to the Constitution and yet this issue has shown our love for that document to be a lie. If we can’t respect the very first amendment which guarantees freedom of religion, then I doubt we will respect the rest.

There has been a lot of talk about sacred ground recently. Ground Zero is definitely such a place. The mosque inside of the Cordoba Initiative is also a sacred space for people to commune with their God. As Christians, we see our churches as sacred spaces as well. But sacred ground can occur whenever we learn to see our sisters and brothers of differing faiths as…well, sisters and brothers. It happens when we learn to live with each other and try to respect our differences.

September 11 happened because there were some that didn’t want to live with others different from themselves. I think to not allow this mosque to be built would have basically supported their beliefs to divide people, to disrespect others and treat them as less than humans.

It’s time for conservatives to not take the bait. We must be willing to say no to those who want to spread death and division. We must be willing to say yes to creating sacred ground in our communities, to welcome those who might not even worship the same god or worship no god at all.

It’s time for us to go into our own Samarias, come to the well and meet whoever is there. We might realize we are standing on sacred ground.

Originally published at NeoMugwump.

This is what Tim Lee says:

Conservatives care about “protecting individual liberty” for some people, but the conservative movement includes many people who are indifferent, if not hostile, to the liberty of foreigners, immigrants, drug users, gays and lesbians, women who want abortions, broadcasters, sex workers, criminal defendants, Muslims, publishers of pornography, atheists, and so forth. It’s true, of course, that you can compile a similar list (gun owners, business owners, etc) on the progressive side. But I see no reason to think the progressive list is longer, or that the people on that list are somehow more important, than the people on the conservative list.

This belief is shared not just by some libertarians, but conservatives and Republicans as well. More than once I’ve seen people come to the fore with the sunny hopes of presenting a more inclusive vision of conservatism and the GOP, only to give up months later when they encounter some of the darker sides of the American right.

This all leads me to wonder: can American conservatism ever be reformed?

There really isn’t a strong movement in the United States that is committed to a more moderate version of conservatism. There are a few groups, but there is no strong reformist presence within what makes up the American right in the same way that there is in the United Kingdom. Across the pond, the Tory Reform Group has been around for 35 years representing a more moderate brand of conservatism and they can be credited for helping get the Conservative Party back in power.

But the impulse here in the States among those on the right who are dissatisfied with the state of things, is to simply walk away. Whether its Brink Lindsey now touting a “libertarian centrism” or Tim Lee flirting with the left, the usual result of frustrated folks on the right is not to change things, but to leave and look for greener pastures.

Why is that? Why is there no impulse to change the right?

I think I have a few reasons.

The first is the word “conservative.” When someone uses that word it is almost always about the more negative aspects of human nature. If a community or person has issues with same-sex marriage we tend to say that they are “conservative.” Conversely, the word “liberal” tends to have more positive connotations. All the philosophical meanings of conservatism that came from people like Edmund Burke or Russell Kirk are never thought of in common parlance. If being a conservative means being anti-gay or suspicious of immigrants, well, who would want to be a part of that, let alone try to reform it?

Related to that, is how we see conservatism. If conservatism is made up of bigots, whom we believe can’t change, then why bother trying to reform anything?

Finally, I think there has been so little impulse for a renewed conservatism, because there has not been a keen vision of what a renewed conservatism would look like. While there has been some attempt to start this project, for the most part there really has not been any strong desire to frame a new conservatism for the 21st century. There’s a lot of talk about what conservatism was like in the 1980s under Reagan, or about the moderate Republicanism of the 1950s through the 70s, but very few have said this is what conservatism should look like today.

If you are someone under say, 40 years old who believes in limited government, but sees a conservatism that is filled with bigots and with no one really crafting a more positive vision, then you would probably want to ignore the conservatives and leave them to their fate.

For me, the question is not whether American conservatism can reform, but should it reform.  I believe wholeheartedly that it should. The reason I believe it has to reform has to do with the fact that unless something radical happens, we live in a two-party system. While many folks have left the conservative movement, there are still a fair number that remain and they are more radical than ever. They are less thoughtful and deeply suspicious of anyone that doesn’t think or see things in the way they do. It is a movement that is built more on resentment than on the sunny conservatism that Ronald Reagan once espoused. On paper, a party like this should be on the margins, but because of our two-party system, they are the alternative to Obama and the liberals. As the alternative, it means they have a greater shot at winning. As Jeffrey Goldberg has noted in his blog posts on Sarah Palin and the New York mosque controversy, a simple-minded conservatism is dangerous to the health of our democracy.

Cross-posted at NeoMugwump.

Yes.  Let me explain why.

Libertarians tend to be very wary of having the government get involved in telling private businesses what they can and can’t do. I can understand that. But I also think that there are times when it might make sense for the government to tell a private entity that they can’t do something that impinges on the liberty of another person. For example, people have to eat, or get a job or live in a home. If someone says to a person of another race that they can’t eat at this restaurant, or have this job or live in this neighborhood, then that person is being denied their freedom to live as they see fit. The whole problem with racism is that it limited the liberty of a whole people simply because of the color of their skin. The problem with Mr. Paul’s answer is that at some level, it isn’t very libertarian. Libertarianism is about, well, liberty, and if someone is totally free to live here and there and have this job or that one while someone else is not, that isn’t liberty to me.

Mr. Paul may have done himself harm. He will be perceived, wrongly in my view, to be a racist. I don’t think he is, but he is rather clueless when it comes to the issue of race. Sometimes, the government does have to step in ensure liberty and justice for all.

Originally published at NeoMugwump.

Born and raised in Puerto Rico, my mother learned English in school, but the accent stayed with her, even when she moved off the island to Michigan in 1963.

It remains with her to this day. What’s so funny about it is that as her son, I never realized my mother ever had an accent until I was well into my 20s. Other people would remark about her accent, but I never noticed it- it was normal to me.

I grew up in a household where English and Spanish was spoken. Several of my mother’s relatives moved to Michigan after she did, including 2 uncles and mi abuela, my grandmother. I learned Spanish by hearing my relatives speak to one another.

I’m very proud of my Puerto Rican heritage in addition to my African American heritage. I also consider myself lucky to have been raised in a bilingual household, where I heard two languages being freely spoken.

When I think about the current mess concerning the new immigration law in Arizona, I have to wonder how comfortable my Spanish-speaking relatives would feel down there. Something tells me they would not feel welcome.

In the aftermath of this law, many conservatives have defended it saying that something had to be done. While I agree that something does need to be done to deal with immigration and border security, the law in Arizona was the wrong way to do it. The law is discriminatory towards Latinos and regardless of whether that was intentional or not, it will have the affect of driving Latinos away from the Republican Party.

Why you say? Well, because the law as is written, could allow the police to stop anyone who might look like an illegal immigrant. Since most illegal immigrants in Arizona tend to be Mexican and speak Spanish, I have the feeling that there will be a lot of stops made because someone was “DWH” or “Driving While Hispanic.”

Some say the answer to this law is that legal residents should just carry their papers. So, someone who might be born here and raised here, has to keep proof of citizenship on their person at all times because their name happens to be something like “Sanchez” while the guy named “Johnson” can just move along with no I.D. at all? How in the world is that fair?

What has bothered me is how many Republicans have not bothered to even think how this would affect Hispanic Americans and their views of the GOP. It doesn’t matter if the intent was to curb illegal immigration, it looks like conservatives have it out for anyone who has a “funny” last name or talks with an accent.

The passage of this bill has damaged the perception of the GOP in the minds of millions of Hispanic Americans. This law has basically told the fastest growing minority in America that they are not to be trusted. They will respond by not voting Republican.

As someone who is part Hispanic, this law offends me. I am ashamed today to call myself a conservative.

Not surprisingly, this is causing a bit of a stir among civil rights groups.  David Frum, who has the proclamation in full, thinks the document is “anodyne” and not endorsing slavery.

Looking at the document, it does seem rather bland, and I doubt that McDonnell is trying to start some kind of culture war or as Frum said a lust for Confederate nostalgia.

But while it may be “inoffensive” on one level, it is still pretty bad and will hurt the GOP in the long run.  As James Joyner notes, this will open up old racial wounds:

I agree with McDonnell and SCV spokesman Brandon Dorsey that the legacy of the Civil War is complicated and I understand the desire to honor the sacrifices of one’s ancestors and to remind people that the war was about more than slavery and that, in any case, the men who fought it — on both sides — were motivated by other issues. Even in the north, the war was about Union, not abolition.

But proclaiming Confederate History Month, much less after it had ceased being customary, reopens old wounds while doing next to nothing to heal them.  The classic Simpsons answer, “Slavery it is, sir!” is what people will remember about the war.  And flying the Confederate flag and otherwise glorifying the war is simply offensive to most black Americans and quite a few others.   And, as Hardy Jackson, as ardent a lover of the South as any man alive, taught me, it’s simply bad manners to go around hurting people’s feelings for no good reason.

While this statement might be “meaningless” it does make it look like, yet again, Republicans don’t care about African-Americans.  I don’t think McDonnell did this to hurt the feelings of African-American Virginians, but it does that just the same.  While there might have been other causes that helped start the Civil War, we all know the main cause was slavery.  Issuing a proclamation for people who for the most part supported keeping my ancestors in chains is a tad bit offensive and is hurtful.  The proclamation allows blacks to believe that the GOP does not care about them.

The best thing that McDonnell could have done is just not issue a proclamation.  Leave the history of the Civil War to the historians.

But then, my questions of despair gave way to another question: a question that comes from defiance more than despair.  So, what do we do?

Over the years, I’ve read tons of blogposts by people who are disgusted at the current state of the GOP and conservatism in general.  All of those voices, from both moderates and conservatives, are voices that need to be heard.  They are mourning the passing of something that was very important to them.

While some like Currey, write in a mournful tone, others are angry.  Conservatives like Andrew Sullivan and Bruce Bartlett write with justified anger at the state of conservatism in America.  Again, it makes sense to be angry.  When you have devoted yourself to a cause that ends up going off the rails, one can feel betrayed.

But after we cry for what has been lost, after we rage against what has changed, what do we do then?  Do we allow the GOP and conservatism to sink into the mire?  Or do we seek a new vision for Republicans?

What has not been heard from GOP dissidents (myself included) is a way forward.  If this is the end of the Republican Party and conservatism in America, then there need be no new ideas.  We can just continue with our sad ceremony.  But if we think there might be a future for the GOP and if we believe — to borrow a hackneyed phrase from a certain presidential candidate – that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for, then we as the disaffected misfits, must dream a new vision of the GOP and then get to work at making that dream come true.

I would love to hear stories from folks who have dreams on how to make the GOP a party that is interested in governing again, and not politics.  I want to see people with plans to make the GOP more inclusive of gays and minorities.  I want to see conservatives have some hope again.

So, what is the vision?  Who is willing to dream new dreams?  Who is willing to build a new GOP that is better than the one we have now?

I’m waiting…

I will agree that this bill is a mess and I do worry about the fiscal problems in the future (though I wonder if any of those who are so angry about the healthcare bill were as mad about the Medicare expansion passed by a Republican congress and signed by a Republican president in 2003 that also blew a hole in the budget). But I also think the GOP should have been willing to work with Democrats instead of opposing them. This isn’t about giving up our beliefs, it’s about accepting reality.

Let’s face it: there was an election in 2008 and the Democrats won. This means that they can come up with a healthcare bill if they want to because they won. My fellow Republicans have refused to accept this reality, The fact is, they are in the majority, they get to call the shots. I don’t like it, you don’t like it, but there you have it.

That said, just because the Democrats won Congress and the White House doesn’t mean that they can do anything they want. Republicans were also elected to Congress as well. We could come up with decent proposals as Paul Ryan did. We can also come to the negotiating table and make sure that some of our own priorities get into a bill. We could have bargained for better cost controls. We could have asked for better ways to fund the plan that would save money in the long run and not break the bank.

But Republicans refused to play along and so the Democrats drafted a bill that won’t even come close to balancing the books. And for what? Some hope that people would still be mad come November?

I don’t know what has come over Republicans that they think that compromise is equal to surrender. It isn’t. But compromise is a reality that the other side exists and has to be dealt with.

It wasn’t that long ago that Democrats and Republicans could work together for the good of our nation. What has happened to us?

At the end of the day, the Democrats are not evil. Most of them are well-meaning people. They are our fellow Americans. We might disagree on the issues, but we share the common bonds of citizenship.

I know this post will be interpreted as defeatist, but what I am calling for is honest to goodness pragmatism. I am not calling for the abandonment of conservative principles, but I am calling for common sense.

It’s up to Republicans now to make the changes needed to right the fiscal ship. Will we have the courage to do this and give up trying to hurt the Democrats just because we can?