The Future

The future is looking pretty blurry to me. Or maybe it's just my monitor.

But my future looks positively rosy compared to the future Craig Shirley paints for the GOP and the Conservative movement in his latest article. He accurately describes a party and a movement that has made any number of Faustian bargains with itself. Isolationism has been thrown overboard in favor of Neo-Conservativism and Laissez-Faire Economic policy in favor of corporate welfare. Not to mention the Social Conservatives.

Cynical politicians have manipulated the social right, through the meddling in the Terry Schiavo case, to the banning of gambling on the internet and a constitutional amendment defining marriage has helped transform the conservative movement, which was once about the expansion of freedom, into "Big Christian Brother" which is now concerned with the expansion of virtue. It is the height of intellectual dishonesty for a political party to say out of one side of its mouth, overturn Roe because we believe behavioral issues belong at the state level, while out of the other side of its mouth say we need to federalize the private act of marriage. Republicanism has become incoherent for most Americans.

It is pretty bizarre to line up their rationales for a federal ban on gay marriage with their rationales for overturning Roe v. Wade.

At any rate, he does hold out hope that his version of conservativism will prevail once everybody comes to their senses. I suspect most conservatives feel the same way, which makes it hard for me to fathom any real compromise coming soon.