Mark Steyn notes:
Two months ago, the Labour government was exhausted and discredited, under an unpopular leader presiding over the ruins of an economic policy he was largely responsible for and which had finally caught up with him. “Dave” Cameron, on the other hand, had signed up to every shallow, pandering fancy the slickers had recommended (I seem to recall more than a few Republican “reformers” recommending the Cameronization of the GOP).
And what was that worth in the end? There was a swing of over six per cent against Labour, and barely three-fifths of that went to the Conservatives. I can’t say I’ve ever cared for Cameron, but, whenever I raised the point with Tory heavyweights, I was told that they didn’t personally care for him either but “he smelt like a winner”. As I wrote over four years ago:
This is dangerously close to the rationale of Democratic primary voters in 2004, when they told pollsters that what they liked most about John Kerry was his “electability”. Sadly, electability isn’t enough to get you elected.
It looks as though Cameron will be able to get in to Number 10, but at the price of Liberal-Democrat support…and this means he won’t be able to do even the slightest Tory thing. Any attempt to move even slightly right will cause the coalition to collapse – and given that Cameron did run as a centrist, get-the-job-done kind of politician, we can expect him to toe the Liberal-Democrat line in order to retain office.
This is the likely death of the Tory Party – they’ll get all the blame for everything which is about to go wrong and when a vote is held (probably only in a year or two as Britain does not have rigidly scheduled elections as we do) they’ll be wiped out. The only way to avoid this is for Cameron to eschew power – and he doesn’t seem to have the backbone to do this.
Why does this matter to us? Because what happened to the Tories is precisely what the liberals and RINOs want to happen to the Republican Party. They want us to mute our conservatism; move away from Evangelicals; drop the life issue; surrender on gay marriage; not be serious about border security. In liberal and RINO prescription, the only way for the GOP to save itself is to surrender core principle. Well, the Tories did that, and look what they got.
The key to victory is to stand firm – but even if it were the demonstrable recipe for defeat, it would still be the way to go. Liberalism is a dying creed. Its economic prescriptions have proven false and no matter how hard they try to juggle the books, the ultimate collapse of this fiat money economy is certain. They are also dying in the sense that they are the party of despair, dissolution and death. They are trying to import voters because they won’t got out and make them on their own. They are finished.
But they still dispose great resources of power – and thus they might be able to keep things going for a while and might even beat us at the polls. It makes no matter – their end is certain. And when that end comes, we want our side to be the blazing light of truth. We want it to be super abundantly clear that we had separated ourselves from liberalism and had nothing to do with it. We do that, and when the crash comes, our victory will be complete.
Or, we can RINO ourselves in to oblivion and allow liberalism to retain power by default. Not for me – I refuse to be a conservative who winds up conserving liberalism. I refuse the office of efficient manager of the welfare state. I stand firm, and await the final death of liberalism.
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