Conservatives: The quest for ideological purity

last updated 8 January 2015

Republicans have developed a purity problem, said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. Every candidate in the current presidential field has been “thumped by conservatives” for any position they’ve ever taken that conflicts with the Right’s current orthodoxy. The same “whack-a-mole primary process” that hammered Rick Perry for his decision to educate immigrants’ children and Herman Cain for supporting the TARP bailout will now turn on Gingrich, for acknowledging in 2008 that climate change was real and supporting an individual health-insurance mandate in the 1990s. With the conservative media now egging it on, the GOP has adopted “a form of fundamentalism: the belief that a return to power can be achieved only by a return to purity.” That’s a tragic “misreading of history,” said Ramesh Ponnuru in Bloomberg.com. Republicans didn’t lose the elections of 2006 and 2008 because they weren’t conservative enough. “It was among independent voters that Republicans got slaughtered.” If the candidate we run in 2012 is too far to the right, we’ll get slaughtered again.

Conservatives want to win elections, said William Kristol in The Weekly Standard. But we want to win with a candidate who will actually stand up for core conservative principles. That’s why we keep resisting media darling Mitt Romney, who has compulsively flip-flopped on ethanol subsidies, union bargaining, and abortion. Conservatives had to swallow the centrist John McCain in 2008, said Richard Viguerie in RealClearPolitics.com, and before that, it was both Bushes, Bob Dole, and Jerry Ford. This time, we want a real conservative “who will draw a clear contrast with Obama and the big spending, big government liberalism he represents”—someone like Ronald Reagan.

As a lifelong Republican, I fear that the search for such purity will destroy my party, says David Frum in New York. Today’s GOP insists that more tax cuts for the rich will cure everything, that poor people are “lucky duckies” because they pay little in taxes, and that any attempt to reform a broken health-care system is “socialism.” If you disagree with the party’s “flight from reality,” you’re attacked as a RINO—Republican in Name Only. By today’s standards, even Reagan would be branded a RINO, said Peter Wehner in CommentaryMagazine.com. Don’t forget, he was condemned by hard-core conservatives for making deals with “liberals, Democrats, and the Soviets.” If even Reagan is too moderate for today’s GOP, conservatism will shrink to a “rump movement” doomed to lose every national election.