Big daddy, establishment republicans are fighting
back against Tea Party criticisms.
Washington D.C. cannot stand having plebeians holding a mirror to their
faces and reminding them of their wart ridden failures. To insiders, like Michael Gerson, the lords
of Washington D.C. are the beautiful people, while we are the great unwashed.
In order to maintain power within the Kingdom of the
Potomac, the ruling class must marginalize its critics. This tactic is as old as the republic. Federalist and their Tory sympathizers did
the same to the so-called Anti-Federalist.
They called these dissenters anarchist, mobs, and haters of
government. Anti-Federalist
became a pejorative. This wouldn’t have
been possible without a biased media.
Yes, even back then, there was media bias.
Newspapers, like the Charlotte Observer, feature faux-conservatives like Michael Gerson in their Sunday editions. This is perfectly natural when you have a republican
writing like a democrat. But what Mr.
Gerson and his ilk had better understand is that papers, like the Charlotte
Observer, will distort their message as well.
The following paragraphs of Mr. Establishment Republican’s op-ed were
left out of the Disturber’s edition:
These habits
of mind — desperation, utopianism, purifying zeal and ideological simplicity —
have their uses throughout history. But they can’t be called conservative. This
is one theme of a careful, instructive essay by Philip Wallach and Justus Myers
in National Affairs that ought to be required beach reading for conservatives.
The authors describe the attributes of the conservative temperament — humility,
an appreciation for what is worthy in our society, a preference for incremental
reform, a distrust of abstraction — and contrast them to the “misguided
radicals of the left and right.”
Progressives, in their view, have created complex and
ungovernable public systems by “doubling down on centralization and
technocracy.” But “some on the right seek to break with the past in a very
different manner — repudiating 80 years of institutional development and
reinventing America as a nation that rejects the substantive role for
regulation or a social safety net. Though they are often labeled as
‘conservatives,’ their ambitions, and especially their rhetoric, emphasize the
need for a sharp break with many features of our current governing
institutions.” The alternative is a more empirically grounded and practical
conservatism, which displays a “deep interest and knowledge of our starting
place and the plausible means of making improvements.”
I had to get
the “unedited” version from the St. Louis Post Dispatch. The Charlotte Observer didn’t have the
decency to advise its readers that Mr. Gerson’s article was an abridged edition. Go figure.
You would think establishment republicans would’ve learned by now. But they’re too busy playing whack-a-mole
with tea partiers.
