Guilt By Association

posted at 12:32 am on September 16, 2009 by Doctor Zero
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This morning, Ed posted some excerpts from a book called Speechless: Tales of a White House Survivor, by former Bush staffer Matt Latimer. The book includes comments from Bush which, to put it mildly, make it clear he doesn’t consider himself part of any “conservative movement.” Most conservatives would agree. Bush’s comments highlight one of the problems facing everyone crammed into the clown cars of our two-party system: we’re all considered guilty by association of things we disagree with, and people we don’t fully support.

As a registered Republican, I’m a member of the same party as Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Olympia Snowe, and John McCain. If the reader is a Democrat, you belong to the same party as Andrew Jackson, John F. Kennedy, Charles Rangel, and Michael Dukakis. There’s a lot of ground separating the beliefs of those people. Even if you stick to purely contemporary figures, there are vast differences between them, and distinctly hostile factions within each party.

Thanks to the immense size and complexity of the modern State, it’s difficult to imagine any single candidate that could embrace all of the positions held by all the voters in his or her party. Every election is a necessary compromise of values, as voters must size up a candidate’s platform and decide which heresies they can live with. This is especially true of presidential candidates, who find themselves campaigning through primaries thundering with passion for a variety of issues, then facing a general electorate divided on some binary conflicts that cannot be finessed. Of course, they always try to finesse them anyway… and suddenly we’re all looking for coded messages of what really lurks in their hearts, a game that grew tedious before we broke up with our first high-school sweethearts.

Naturally, each side of the political struggle likes to associate all of its opponents with their most objectionable representatives. When it comes to politicians, this is not entirely unreasonable. If you were profoundly disturbed by the misadventures of Mark Foley in 2006, or Charles Rangel today, the best way to punish them is to vote against their party. In fact, voting their party out of power is virtually a pre-requisite for any sort of meaningful justice. You can’t expect any intense probes of a party that holds both houses of Congress.

The two-party system probably isn’t going anywhere, although one of the parties could radically change in character, or give birth to a truly viable third party, which eventually devours it. There is too much power to be gained from unity of purpose, and for all the factional squabbling and single-issue jousting matches, the division between the parties has become increasingly clear… at least to everyone except the more clueless Republican politicians. The past nine months have fast-forwarded us to a point we would otherwise have reached in ten or twenty years, when the old game of saddling free-market taxpayers with the bill for socialist programs could no longer be played. Before we can move any further to the Left, the essential character of our nation must be forever changed. In a process that began with TARP bailouts and auto-company takeovers, and is meant to continue through the destruction of the health insurance industry, those markets will no longer be “free” in even a rhetorical sense. To grow any larger, the government requires serfs, not sugar daddies.

The choice now is between liberty and tyranny. It always was, but like a used car, tyranny can be made to sound like an attractive purchase: loaded with good intentions, and financed with no money down and low, low payments. That deal is no longer on the table, and never will be again. The restlessness of the Blue Dog Democrats is the queasiness of people who aren’t sure they stand on the right side of the battle lines, when the morning fog melts away and lances are lowered.

There certainly are some rascals, crooks, and wimps associated with the Republican Party… but when I look at the other side, I see Michael Moore sitting beside Jimmy Carter at the 2004 Democrat convention. I see Ted Kennedy receiving an obscenely improper hero’s funereal. I see Barney Frank slobbering over all the money he can’t wait to suck out of the private sector. I see a party insisting that anything less than blind obedience to Barack Obama is racism. I see a Truther in the White House, and an Attorney General who wants to cripple U.S. Intelligence with show trials. The morning breeze flutters across their lines, and raises the banners of ACORN and the SEIU. Instead of a fife and drum, I hear someone declaring 9/11 to be a national day of community service. I hear none of these things renounced, so I hold their party guilty for all of them, and know my place is on the other side.

I hope the Republicans can dazzle me in 2010 and 2012. I don’t expect candidates who agree with all my beliefs, but I would like to vote with enthusiasm for a change… instead of settling for agreement by association, with people who aren’t even on the ballot.

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