P.J. O’Rourke On The “Conservatives”

We first became acquainted with author P.J. O’Rourke fifteen years ago when one of his columns (on Haiti, we think) happened to blip across the cover of a Rolling Stone issue featuring our favorite glam grunge band of the 1990s, the Smashing Pumpkins.

Look it up … we might be right.

Anyway, the Weekly Standard contributor has always had a way of nailing that common sense sweet spot with uncommon accuracy … sort of like his dead-on post mortem of the conservative cause that appears in the current edition of that esteemed publication that all Republicans subscribe to, but few actually follow.

Of all the “GOP RIP” tombstones popping up across the Internet landscape these days, however, O’Rourke’s latest masterpiece is by far the greatest, and should be required reading for anybody who thinks they know why Republicans “went down like lead” in both the 2006 and 2008 elections.

Appropriately-entitled “We Blew It,” O’Rourke’s piece is one of those rare, meandering delights that covers so much ground it’s difficult to know where to start. And while we encourage you to read the whole thing, we thought this passage on taxes and spending was particularly insightful … and challenging.

From the master:

Yes, we got a few tax breaks during the regimes of Reagan and W. But the government is still taking a third of our salary. Is the government doing a third of our job? Is the government doing a third of our dishes? Our laundry? Our vacuuming? When we go to Hooters is the government tending bar making sure that one out of three margaritas is on the house? If our spouse is feeling romantic and we’re tired, does the government come over to our house and take care of foreplay? (Actually, during the Clinton administration??.??.??.??)

Anyway, a low tax rate is not–never mind the rhetoric of every conservative politician–a bedrock principle of conservatism. The principle is fiscal responsibility.

Conservatives should never say to voters, “We can lower your taxes.” Conservatives should say to voters, “You can raise spending. You, the electorate, can, if you choose, have an infinite number of elaborate and expensive government programs. But we, the government, will have to pay for those programs. We have three ways to pay.

“We can inflate the currency, destroying your ability to plan for the future, wrecking the nation’s culture of thrift and common sense, and giving free rein to scallywags to borrow money for worthless scams and pay it back 10 cents on the dollar.

“We can raise taxes. If the taxes are levied across the board, money will be taken from everyone’s pocket, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and least advantaged will be harmed the most. If the taxes are levied only on the wealthy, money will be taken from wealthy people’s pockets, hampering their capacity to make loans and investments, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and the least advantaged will be harmed the most.

“And we can borrow, building up a massive national debt. This will cause all of the above things to happen plus it will fund Red Chinese nuclear submarines that will be popping up in San Francisco Bay to get some decent Szechwan take-out.”

Yes, this would make for longer and less pithy stump speeches. But we’d be showing ourselves to be men and women of principle. It might cost us, short-term. We might get knocked down for not whoring after bioenergy votes in the Iowa caucuses. But at least we wouldn’t land on our scruples. And we could get up again with dignity intact, dust ourselves off, and take another punch at the liberal bully-boys who want to snatch the citizenry’s freedom and tuck that freedom, like a trophy feather, into the hatbands of their greasy political bowlers.

How good is that?

O’Rourke’s piece is similarly dead-on when it comes to breaking down all the social conservative issues that have frankly helped bury the GOP right along with its chronic fiscal irresponsibility.

As has been observed on this – and countless other websites – the vast majority of Americans are fiscal conservatives and social libertarians.

That means they want to keep more of their money and more of their freedom, something Barack Obama understood intuitively when he promised a majority of them that he was going to cut their taxes on the backs of the white collar millionaires.

On that juggernaut – which not even the incisive “Joe the Plumber” could stop – the Democrats rolled to another big November “W.”

But Obama and his friends only told half the story – because there’s really no fifteen-second way to explain how depriving a $40 million business owner of an extra couple of million a year will make all those middle class tax cuts irrelevant once the pink slips start showing up.

Which they will.

But Republicans couldn’t figure it out, and now like Axl Rose at the riveting conclusion of “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” they’re screaming at the top of their lungs asking “Where do we go now?”

That’s a great question – not for the GOP politicians who led their party off of the cliff, but for the people still dumb enough to follow them.

Obviously the “Reform” party didn’t work (see 1992). And it’s becoming pretty obvious that reforming the Republican party (see 1994, 2000) didn’t work, either.

The Contract With America?

Broken before the snows thawed on the first winter of the “Republican Revolution.”

Compassionate conservatism?

Succumbed to the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” perhaps, but dead and buried all the same.

So where do we go now?

While Republican hacks like Katon Dawson gather at swanky resorts in Myrtle Beach, S.C. to spout the same platitudes we’ve heard from Republican “reformers” for decades, we’ll be looking at the so-called “nuclear option” (a third party) in a lot more detail in the days, weeks and months ahead.

Anybody wanna come along for the ride?

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