An absolutist prescription for a perennially messy world

The largest frustration conservatives experience is the incompleteness of of any victories they achieve.  Nothing is ever tidily dispensed with.   Immutable principle never attains permanence as policy.  It's always a case of tallying the present score and plotting future moves.

State legislatures codify the millennia-old, normal-people definition of marriage, only to have federal judges torture the Fourteenth Amendment's equal-protection law to strike down what they've done.

The House, to which the matter of DHS funding had returned after the Senate caved on the issue of killing executive-order amnesty for illegal aliens, wound up behaving likewise, due to the spinelessness of 25 Pubs, including Speaker Boehner.

Acquiescence to not-only-pointless-but-downright-harmful initiatives such as diversity councils, the minimum wage and recycling permeate levels of government from the municipal to the federal.

An unserious society gasps at the inappropriateness of mentioning what really must be done to defeat both of the West's Islamic enemies - the Sunni variety and the Shiite variety - and then resumes its celebrity worship and ephemeral distractions.

Such a messy world makes it challenging indeed to be a figure like Ted Cruz.

Consider the juxtaposition between him and the other probable 2016 Pub prez contenders at last weekend's Iowa Ag Summit.  There is, of course, nowhere on earth where ethanol subsidies approach the status of something sacred than Iowa.  The temptation is great for any politician to convey respect for that sentiment when addressing Iowans.

Every one of the potential candidates - save one - succumbed to that temptation:

Let’s start with the bad news. First up… Rick Perry.

[T]he former governor of a petroleum-rich state [Governor Perry] suggested he didn’t think it would be fair to end the RFS while oil companies continued to benefit from tax breaks. “I don’t think you pull the RFS out and discriminate against the RFS and leave all these other subsidies,” he said.

Jeb Bush acted like the RFS is a bad toy, but had no plans to put it back in the cupboard.

“The markets are ultimately going to have to decide this,” said Mr. Bush, who declined to set a firm deadline for ending the fuel standard imposed a decade ago by his brother, former President George W. Bush. “Whether that’s 2022 or sometime in the future I don’t know,” he said.

Chris Christie left no room for doubt.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was clearer about his position, saying he “absolutely” supported the fuel standard.

Mike Huckabee is at least consistent.

Mike Huckabee argued that support for ethanol is good national security policy, helping to reduce U.S. dependence on oil imports. He then quipped his support for the corn-based fuel wasn’t about pandering to Iowans because of their important role in the presidential nominating process.

 Rick Santorum also stuck to his unsatisfactory 2012 answer.

Former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who won the 2012 Iowa Republican caucuses, said ethanol “creates jobs in small-town and rural America, which is where people are hurting.”

Perhaps most disappointing, Scott Walker:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker backed the RFS, saying that while he tends to oppose government intervention, a marketplace issue exists for ethanol. He said consumers do not have the same access to corn-based fuel as gasoline, and because of that there’s a need for the standard.

“Right now we don’t have a free and open marketplace, and so that’s why I’m going to take that position,” he said.

The lone voice of unwavering principle, the guy who stood for acting according to the notion of free markets right now, was Ted Cruz:

When asked if he would support the Renewable Fuel Standard he just said no. And then he put out some hard truths which seemed to earn him the respect a difficult answer deserved.

“I recognize that this is a gathering of a lot of folks where the answer you’d like me to give is ‘I’m for the RFS, darnit;’ that’d be the easy thing to do,” he said. “But I’ll tell you, people are pretty fed up, I think, with politicians who run around and tell one group one thing, tell another group another thing, and then they go to Washington and they don’t do anything that they said they would do. And I think that’s a big part of the reason we have the problems we have in Washington, is there have been career politicians in both parties that aren’t listening to the American people and aren’t doing what they said they would do.” 

And the crowd applauded, giving Cruz the warmest welcome so far.

And then that messiness that characterizes the human condition arises once again.  Not only does the hopelessly wacko left strive to Palin-ize him, he gets eye rolls from fellow Pubs.

So discouragement is never far from stepping in to be our prime motivator.

Kurt Schichter, in his column today, offers some solid reasons why we ought to hold that counterproductive attitude at bay:

 1. We conservatives have made huge, undeniable strides since 2010. There are more conservatives at every level of government except the presidency than there have been in a century. That’s tangible progress we can’t just fritter away.

2. At this moment, the GOP controls Congress, not conservatives. But the GOP is more conservative than it was, and every election it gets more so. We have fired many RINOs. We will fired more. No, they aren’t all gone yet, and because they are the Old Guard they, by definition, hold positions of seniority. But the next stop for people with seniority is the pasture – they are going away, slowly but surely. In a decade, McCain, Hatch and a bunch of other pseudo-cons will be just a vaguely troubling memory – and the generation coming up behind them is decidedly unsquishy.

3. There isn’t going to be a third party. The GOP has an infrastructure that is powerful, that is effective, and that we need to take over to use to promote conservatism. We can’t build a third party from scratch without giving the liberals the country for a couple decades, at the end of which our third party is likely to be outlawed anyway.

4. We are outworking, outthinking and outbreeding our withered, hateful, failed opponents. They are defending the status quo, and who is happy with that? The trends go our way. Look at the loser they are wheeling out in 2016 – an elderly, hypocritical cryptolibfascist email-shredder reeking of corruption and decay, whose satyr of a husband will undermine her by nailing every tramp he can get his gnarled paws on from now until election day. Bring her on. Oh yeah, we’re ready for Hillary.

5. In 2016, we are likely to nominate a conservative. Establishment darling Jeb Bush’s innovative strategy of alienating the people who actually vote in the GOP primaries is failing. He’s a loser. The only people excited about his candidacy are squishes who can write million dollar checks, Democrats and their mainstream media catamites, and Jeb Bush himself.

More basically, we need to remember that our worldview as conservatives is predicated on this messiness.  It's often referred to as a tragic take on the human condition, given its assumption of our species' fallen nature.  The inevitable flaws in a human being's choice-making activity are the basis for keeping government diffuse, with three coequal branches and a bicameral legislature.  It's also the reason for the conservative prioritization of nongovernmental realms of human life, namely, the family, the church, and freely formed associations based on common interests.

So conservatism is the only sane response to a human condition that does not advance morally even as it does so technologically.  We neither expect perfectibility nor resign ourselves to messiness without relief.  We see that there is a relatively happy way forward based on what we are really all about as creatures of both foible and virtue, if we can muster the courage and steadfastness to act accordingly.  And rely on He who is indeed perfect to keep us aware of the eternal implications of our moment-to-moment decisions.