Well, it always helps to be ignorant and paranoid to advance a conspiracy theory, but in my experience the “true conservatives” never show up for precinct meetings, can’t win elections to district committees or to state conventions, and show up en masse demanding to “have a seat” because they’re so damned wonderful and important with their ten percent of the electorate – on a good day.
I watched “true conservatives” give a liberal Democrat the governorship of my state for two terms because a decent, fiscally conservative but socially moderate businessman – in a fundamentally libertarian state – didn’t meet their exalted expectations, so they ran a hopeless Third Party and elected the liberal Democrat. I’ve watched the Sarah Palin contingent try repeatedly to actually win an election to Republican Party office and fail over and over. She won the governorship by running AGAINST Republicans and with Democrat and NP support; Republicans voted for John Binckley or Frank Murkowski in the Primary and only held their nose and voted for the Black Widow in the General. I watched Sarah Palin over and over say she wouldn’t oppose Senator Murkowski and then put up her proxy, Joe Miller, and arrange his “Tea Party” financing. When your campaign hallmark is pictures of tubby bearded guys walking in parades with AK-47s slung over their shoulders and a Glock in a thigh holster on their fat thighs, you ain’t gonna’ make it with anyone anyhow. And don’t give me any 2nd Amendment crap; I know you have the right to do it, but you also have the right to have some sense. I’ve seen my State Senate go from solidly Republican to a Democrat controlled coalition because the “true conservatives” couldn’t get their way and destroyed perfectly reliable caucus Republicans.
Many, many years ago I was your basic Southern Democrat. Like most Southerners, I thought FDR and the New Deal were a pretty good thing, and like most Southerners of the ’50s and ’60s with a little education, I thought that segregation was a relic to be discarded and the violent redneck image was something to put behind us, so I stayed a Democrat into adulthood and even after I went “North to the Future.” And then, when I was the head of the Committee on Political Education of the Anchorage Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO, those are pretty good Democrat bona fides, I found myself surrounded by leftover SDS’ers and other brands of ’60s communists taking over the Party and forcing all us “old conservatives” out. Of course, they then lost every statewide office in the State and at the National level lost election after election and even lost the Congress that they’d held for almost fifty years all in pursuit of ideological purity.
Now we on the Republican side are doing the same thing to ourselves. Sorry, you self-styled “true conservatives” can’t win an election outside the rural areas of the Country. You can’t get enough votes to put yourselves in charge of any state Republican Party, so you can’t just storm the door and demand a seat. Maybe you do need your own party so you can fight it out about who’s the “true conservative,” but you’re going to have to ally with the Republicans to have any power because you sure as Hell ain’t going to be able to ally with the Democrats on much. Nobody since Reagan has been able to define “conservative” or come up with any unifying principle other than “not Democrat.” We need to settle that argument and find a definition for the Party, but more than that, we need to defeat the communists who’ve taken over our Country, and this may be the last election in which it can be done.
