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2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumHeresy Hunters Rule CPAC, and GOProud, Chris Christie Need Not Apply
Mar 13, 2013 4:45 AM EDT
Ideological purity! Patriots only! The heresy hunters of this weeks Conservative Political Action Conference sniffed out and rejected those who arent suitably right wing, like Chris Christie and GOProud. Itll ensure the same losing result, writes Michael Moynihan.
Every year the doyens of the Conservative Political Action Conference issue a series of indirect proclamations on who qualifies as an echt conservative. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie? Not one of us; too chummy with the president during Hurricane Sandy and too squishy on gun control. The gay conservative group GOProud? Were open to sinnersNewt Gingrich is a scheduled speaker, after allbut not ones who have contempt for the institution of marriage. Donald Trump? A sinner too, on wife No. 3 and pro-abortion rights to boot, he believes that President Obama might have been born in Kenya. Nevertheless, Trump is an American patriot popular with conservatives, said one conference organizer.
Its hardly surprising that CPAC is interested in ideological purity, considering the right-wing confab is organized by the American Conservative Union, a group that provides legislative rankings to those in Congress who insist on differentiating between those who protect liberty as conservatives and those who are truly liberal. As its website explains, ACU defines conservatism (emphasis in original). And that definition seems rather narrow these days.
This big-game hunting of RINOs (Republicans in Name Only), the replacing of unreliably conservative candidates with the undereducated and unelectable ones, lost the party a number of safe seats in recent years. And as anyone who has attended a recent CPAC has witnessed, the grassroots activists of the righta rather different species from the average Republican voterseem increasingly incapable of calmly arguing that America is being forced off the road to prosperity and onto the road to serfdom. Concerns about overweening government, which one could manage with sensible anecdotes about debt, drones, and taxes, are punctuated with an invocation of Marx or Mao. (At the 2011 CPAC, I spent 10 bizarre minutes chatting with the president of the John Birch Society, a co-sponsor of that years event.)
Between the babble about ascendant American Leninism and the infiltration of the ACU by operatives of the Muslim Brotherhood (seriously), one cant help but be reminded of an ideology CPAC attendees profess to loathe. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell noted that his comrades on the left frequently obsessed over ideological purity: Sometimes, when I listen to these people talking ... I get the impression that, to them, the whole socialist movement is no more than a kind of exciting heresy-hunta leaping to and fro of frenzied witch-doctors to the beat of tom-toms and the tune of 'Fee fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of a right-wing deviationist!
-snip-
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/13/heresy-hunters-rule-cpac-and-goproud-chris-christie-need-not-apply.html
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