I don’t remember who it was – David Frum, perhaps? David Brooks? – but someone not long ago said that American conservatives should be more like the British Tories.
Really? You mean like David Cameron, British PM? As far as I’m concerned, he has already been weighed and found wanting with his idiotic pronouncements on Gaza (apparently the world’s first prison camp with a shopping mall).
The Tory brand seems to have suffered a considerable decline since the Thatcher years. There may be an object lesson in here somewhere for the Republican Party: if you’re nothing but Non-Democrats – or worse, a cheap Democrat substitute – then you’ll never be anything but a kind of rebound date for voters who occasionally have a spat with the majority party, but nonetheless consider it as their main squeeze, always one step away from hugs, tears and reconciliation. Get on board with your idea guys – people like Paul Ryan – and let’s start winning some hearts and minds, let’s get the peaceful revolution underway (‘cause there’s gonna be a revolution, peaceful or otherwise).
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Good point Paco. Curiously, the Liberal Party in Britain went down in just that way. Before WWI the Liberal Party (in office from 1906-1922) introduced the rudiments of the Welfare State into Britain. Leading exponents of this strategy to preempt the Labour vote were David Lloyd-George and his friend Winston Churchill. But the Labour Party was the real exponent of this type of government, and the Libs only half-hearted (since many of them still, at that time, believed in freedom). The voters who liked the idea of the welfare state went over to the party that really believed in a welfare state, and support for the Liberal Party collapsed. They are now the Lib-Dems in coalition with the Tories, and they have even stupider ideas today than they did when Edward VII was King.
ReplyDeleteVoters who believe in a system of policies will always move to the party that really believes it and abandon the party that doesn't. That killed the Liberals. It will kill the Packs if they try to compete in offering stupid policies from expediency and opportunism, against the Jackass Party, whose members really belive the stupidities they spout.
Exactly. That's why Republicans need to offer clear choices.
ReplyDeleteCameron is not conservative. This is why he LOST the election. He lost 1 million votes to to right parties, whatever you may think of them, and consequently lost 30-40 seats to Labor.
ReplyDeleteHe lost because he is not conservative; he is one of the effete eletes.