Free For All - The Free Liberal Blog: The Transitory Nature of Partisan Hacks

August 2008

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Thanks much to Norm Singleton for his post, "Who's Not Who on the Right" Too often, people want to be identified with who's hot at the moment regardless if those people are articulating coherent ideas, or lasting principles. No matter if they teach or deceive, as long as they sell, they seem to attract fauning admirers.

I thought this line of the New York Times article was especially telling:

"Newt came and went rather fast but didn't leave hard fingerprints," Mr. Buckley said. "The quote, unquote conservative politicians have a pretty short lifetime in encyclopedia usage.

The fact is, that many of our "leaders" are merely cheerleaders with whom everyone wants to sleep. You don't necessarily become popular by having the right idea or the correct solution.

The propensity to confuse the ideology of conservatism with support for whatever the Republican party does is a problem for members of the conservative movement, as well as America as a whole. Simply because there is overlap in some areas, does not mean that one must define the other. In fact, conservatism and Republicanism (in its partisan sense) are both amorphous entities and are composed of competing sections. To think that even one alone could define itself without contradiction is absurd, and even more so that one could define the other.

As individualist thinkers, we must not confuse the whole for its parts, nor the parts for the whole. And we should not delude ourselves that simply because there is similarity there is symmetry. Ideas must stand on their own merits. It is one thing to agree to be a part of team, compromising some values to further others, as a part of an overall strategy of achieving correct ends, and it is another to conflate the ends with the means. To say that Republicanism is the goal of conservativism is to undermine the latter for the former.

And I write all of this, not as a member of the conservative movement, but as a member of the libertarian movement -- a movement I believe desperately needs to move towards building a bigger tent with people who are not ideologically in line with all of the libertarian program. I hope that libertarians might be as sucessful as conservatives, but without losing the intellectual muster which libertarians have attained.

The libertarian problem today, is exactly the opposite of the conservatives. We are all ideology and no politics. I believe transpartisan thinking may hold some of the answers. The transpartisan vision is to meld ideology with utility, utopia with reality. We need to be able to see the values inherent in our opponent's position without abandoning our own rationality and our own principles.

-- Kevin D. Rollins