An unusual Republican

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
An unusual Republican				May 27, 2009

There may be hope for the Republicans after all, at least locally.

In their latest firehouse primary to choose an opponent for incumbent delegate Bill Barlow (D-64^th), they threw caution to the wind and actually opted for a moderate over the neoconic hideboundedness of Mike Holle.

Isle of Wight supervisor Stan Clark, who was accused along the way of secretly slipping shekels to the abominable Democrats, found most of his support on the far side of the river.

Williamsburg and the hapless Republicans in James City who are beyond the grasp of the unsinkable Brenda Pogge (R-96^th) evidently had not gotten the latest memo from the Pew Research Center. According to Pew’s recent poll, true conservatives are jumping off a leaky Republican ship in hordes because of the slavish adherence of people like Holle and Pogge to the intolerably outdated positions of the politically manque. Only 22% of Americans now admit to being Republicans.

Pogge, again flexing her penchant for butting into the business of a district other than her own, exquisitely played her now concretized role of amanuensis for the far right and penned a newsletter to her followers in which she tussie-mussied the qualifications of her clone, Holle.

Cranking out all the old saws that have apparently induced somnolence in a now ideologue-weary public, Pogge noted that Holle believes in the sanctity of life and will champion the rights of the unborn. He’s a 10-year member of the NRA. He’s opposed to raising taxes and will support traditional marriage (gays need not apply). And finally, “he will defend our culture from vulgarity.”

Vulgarity seems to be a new addition to the usual neocon laundry list of things they oppose. I’m sure there’s a subtext in there somewhere, though I would have no idea where to begin to probe for it.

What Pogge still fails to realize is that her brand of conservatism is what’s driving people, including most intellectual conservatives, away from the Republican Party in numbers that the party cannot dismiss or refute.

In a recent essay entitled “The Intellectual Decline of Conservatism,” Richard Posner, a Reagan-appointed judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, notes that he was quite satisfied with the state of conservatism at the end of the Clinton presidency.

“I saw no reason,” he says, “for personal income taxes further reduced, the government shrunk, the rights of gun owners enlarged, our military posture strengthened, the rise of homosexual rights resisted, or the role of religion in the political sphere expanded.” Yet all of these causes were embraced by what he calls the “New Conservatism” that crested with the election of George W. Bush in 2004.

Posner further maintains that the policies of new conservatives are “powered largely by emotion and religion and have, for the most part, weak intellectual grounding. That these policies that are weak in conception are political flops is unsurprising.”

As the major blows to conservatism Posner lists the failure of the military to achieve foreign policy objectives, the inanity of substituting will for intellect (as in the case of global warming), the use of religious criteria to select public officials and the continued preoccupation with abortion and massive budget deficits. One might also add gay marriage to the list of distractions.

By the time the campaign of 2008 rolled around and the conservative movement was captured by the likes of Sarah Palin and Joe the plumber, conservative intellectuals, says Posner, “had no party.”

The conservative movement that was brilliantly envisioned by Barry Goldwater and, to a lesser extent, defined by Ronald Reagan has, for subtle-minded and reason-driven people like Posner, been so politically bastardized by those who would eschew its principles for the sake of some emotional and religious notion of rectitude that it is virtually unrecognizable.

To what degree all this solidified the choice of Clark and the rejection of the Holle-Pogge version of conservatism is hard to say. What is clear, however, is that the days when Republicans can whisk themselves into office on the basis of fear-mongering, abortion, gay marriage, military exploitation and tax cuts are over. Family values circumscribed by narrow-minded exclusivity are values embraced only by hypocrites.

It is shameful indeed that Pogge will return unchallenged to the House of Delegates. Even sadder is the fact that she firmly believes that her concept of conservatism is the yarn from which the Republican tapestry of the future will be woven.

As Colin Powell recently remarked, “I may be out of their (Limbaugh/Cheney) version of the Republcan Party, but there’s another version of the Republican Party waiting to emerge once again.”

Perhaps the victory of Clark over Holle is one small indication that such an emergence is commencing.