Fitting explanation for GWB personal stands. However, he at least permitted his political machine punished conservatives who demonstrated loyalty to principle before principal. And his behavior fits the RINO profile. Showing no spine against the Dems but really putting their backs into internecine warfare.
The real problem may just be the sea-change in people’s beliefs. That surely contributes. What large numbers been herded away from and what they’ve been indoctrinated to corresponds with what they’ve been taught to ridicule and what they’ve been told they must tolerate. That our institutions had degraded so much into MisInfo and MinInfo now is far more widely accepted (though these mocking names haven’t yet taken hold as quickly as some others). Where there are democratic elections it is preferable that desired policies at least appear to have percolated up. How did they come to believe these things? Well, who regulates the policy of what schools teach? Who influences what editorial bent manages the media? We’ve witnessed the incubation of the Ministry of Truth.
In the public arena…. There is where real conservatism has been tarnished and will continue to be so until we find a way of getting the majority to recognize in how many ways they too are conservative and that conservatism represents them better than any label the power hungerers claim belongs to them.
BTW. Your use of the term “the public arena” and your later phrase “speeded up and is rushing us” suggests to me that it is time to update the oldest entry in my glossary, the Ideological Corral. It was suggested to me back to the mid seventies. Your phrase here echoes one I used there “moving a great deal faster all the time.” So I bet since its operation is clearer now than ever before, functionality has changed.
A corral is inclusive. An arena is exclusionary. Those who insist on standing by the old standards, the right-most anchors of the corral before those running the show decided to pull up stakes, now find themselves outside without voices inside to champion their causes.
In the arena postmodernism is preferred to modernism; science has been supplanted by post-normal science; Progressives employ Luddites; liberals are preoccupied with what can be tolerated. You want entry? Better bone up on shibboleths.
