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On The Failure Of The Conservative Model
August 25, 2010 | j.argese

Posted on 07/25/2010 7:45:01 AM PDT by j.argese

While you were working to provide for your family, your children were indoctrinated by government schools.

While you were quietly awaited your chance to cast your vote, others were registering questionable applicants and taking seats on electoral boards.

While you reassured yourself "Conservatives don't do that", others were busy organizing, mobilizing and protesting to amplify their small numbers.

While you engaged in your normal, day to day business, others infiltrated and appropriated the media, academia, government, foundations.

While we accept one television station, supporting our point of view 50% of the time, the majority of the outlets disseminate the minority view continuously.

We can continue our minority majority status and applaud our micro-victories or we can change our strategy. My apologies for the wake up call but the choice is only ours.


TOPICS: Government; Miscellaneous; Politics; Society
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To: j.argese

Limbaugh, Steyn, Sowell, ad infinitum all have answers. They don’t just moan and complain about the problems.


21 posted on 07/25/2010 8:31:45 AM PDT by Anitius Severinus Boethius
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To: Anitius Severinus Boethius; All
Please understand my intention wasn't to be demoralizing or confrontational but more an attempt to brainstorm, for lack of a better term. Conservatives have achieved much in the past year or so by breaking free of previous behaviors.

We listened to the Class of '94, which lost steam by 2000. We heard Rush ask if Liberalism was dead in America. Obviously not. We stopped playing to win and started thinking we could run out the clock.

I keep thinking about Ellsworth Toohey, when he was speaking to Gail Wynand. Wynand was making profits but losing the paper. We are in the same position. An example? In earlier days people went to work for the government and sacrificed higher income for security and benefits. Well, how did that work out? Now they have the benefits, the security and the pay, all the while taxing you into poverty and creating regulations by which you must abide.

22 posted on 07/25/2010 8:44:45 AM PDT by j.argese (Liberal thought process = oxymoron)
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To: j.argese

While you were working and paying taxes, half the US population was made exempt from paying income taxes (And if they did not earn enough, they were given free money by the IRS, under the Earned Income Credit).


23 posted on 07/25/2010 8:55:22 AM PDT by Rapscallion (Obama - The anti-American dictator disguised as a President. Repeal Obamaism.)
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To: j.argese
August 25, 2010 | j.argese

You wrote this a month in the future?

Way cool!

Before you come back to this time, can you look up and freep mail me me the winning Powerball lottery ticket numbers for the July 27th, 2010 drawing?

24 posted on 07/25/2010 9:40:23 AM PDT by MNJohnnie (The problem with Socialism is eventually you run our of other peoples money. Lady Thatcher)
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To: j.argese
We can continue our minority majority status and applaud our micro-victories or we can change our strategy.

So...what is your strategy?

I mean, besides accusing and pigeonholing everyone on here while making many assumptions without any validation.

25 posted on 07/25/2010 9:45:06 AM PDT by Allegra (I am not humblegunner...and Pablo is very wily.)
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To: MNJohnnie

picked up on that, didya?


26 posted on 07/25/2010 9:53:41 AM PDT by j.argese (Liberal thought process = oxymoron)
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To: Allegra
Imagine, if you will, a group of Conservatives with the same level of energy and defiance as that possessed by the Patriots who stopped the vote counting in Miami-Dade in 2000.

It's obvious the current Congress doesn't fear us. They voted on the Obama agenda without batting an eyelash. But then again, I mentioned my intentions in a previous post.

Thanks,

j

p.s.

Hope all is well with you. Your reports from Baghdad were quite informative.

27 posted on 07/25/2010 9:59:33 AM PDT by j.argese (Liberal thought process = oxymoron)
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To: PhatHead

No, actually, I’m making the case that ordinary people failed to take any measures to protect their own best interests against the surreptitious incursions of the liberals, in large part because education has been systematically undervalued, and most people were content to let liberals conduct their “silliness” over in the schools, content, like sheeple, in the false belief that liberals couldn’t do much harm there. Now we see just how wrong we all were.


28 posted on 07/25/2010 10:18:24 AM PDT by Oceander (The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance -- Thos. Jefferson)
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To: j.argese

I agree wholeheartedly with the above sentences. We’ve had the “creeping socialism” for YEARS, courtesy of Both “political party Rulers” (notice, even the RINO’s that continue at the helm). It’s taken Obama and the radicals to wake up more than Freepers. I think the TeaParties are testament to that.


29 posted on 07/25/2010 1:03:17 PM PDT by radioone ("The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.")
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To: Oceander

Yes, “ordinary people” engage in what I termed “normal human behavior.” I still don’t see how that is the “conservative model” which has failed. You laid out a premise that suggested there is somehow a conservative political model we’ve all be following and it hasn’t been successful, now all you seem to be saying is that liberals are always pushing their agenda, and normal people don’t push back until it’s already gone too far. With that, I agree, but it really isn’t a new argument. You might almost say that people “are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”


30 posted on 07/25/2010 3:56:53 PM PDT by PhatHead
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To: PhatHead

If you want to fob off responsibility on someone else and play the role of the victim, that’s your choice.

The simple fact of the matter remains - it wasn’t the liberals who sat by passively, in the face of clear evidence that their interests weren’t being served, in fact were being affirmatively disserved, now was it? That leaves only one conclusion - conservatives were sitting passively by, in the face of clear evidence that they were in danger, and they did nothing.


31 posted on 07/25/2010 8:22:49 PM PDT by Oceander (The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance -- Thos. Jefferson)
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To: Oceander
If you want to fob off responsibility on someone else and play the role of the victim, that’s your choice.

You cannot possibly be responding to anything I said. No conservatives sat by passively. Normal, regular, non-political people did. And they always will - that isn't the failure of some grand conservative plan.

Don't confuse your arguments like the guy who started this thread has. It just sounds silly.

But then, I remember high school. If you are just now figuring out that liberals are drawn to government and bureaucratic jobs that they imagine give them power over the minds of the people, then you are either very young, or you only recently started paying attention. Either way, welcome.

But if your reaction is to be disheartened, because the "conservative plan failed," then you are part of the problem. The grand liberal triumph in the schools has yielded a populace that that self-identifies 2:1 conservative over liberal.

Don't be a defeatist. Conservatives don't - and shouldn't - have a grand plan to be masters of the people. That's why we ultimately win, however painful some of the stops along the way may be.

32 posted on 07/25/2010 9:26:03 PM PDT by PhatHead
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To: Oceander

Sorry - WRT my reference to “the guy who started this thread,” I realize I’m still talking to that person.


33 posted on 07/25/2010 9:28:30 PM PDT by PhatHead
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To: PhatHead

No conservatives sat passively by? Really? So where are all those conservatives who got into academia in order to at least balance, if not expunge, the liberal cadres that had installed themselves in academia for the express purpose of brainwashing our children, a la Bill Ayers? Oh yeah, they didn’t. That’s passivity in the face of a threat, no matter how you want to dress it up.


34 posted on 07/26/2010 4:43:31 AM PDT by Oceander (The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance -- Thos. Jefferson)
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To: PhatHead; Anitius Severinus Boethius; mnehring; HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity; bmwcyle; Bob; ...
I'd like to start off by thanking you for your comments and criticisms. All were valuable in helping to establish a starting point for future projects.

I didn't list my solutions because I wanted to see responses to my observations, not to ideas put forward. Maybe I'm missing something or my decoder ring is out of date but I couldn't define the current Conservative model any other way but passive. If anyone could provide an example or two, I'd be receptive.

I keep hearing about the need to educate about Conservatism. Well, someone again pointed out the 2 to 1 identification ratio so our work should be done, let's go fishin'. Well, actually we can't do that because electoral results don't bear that statistic out, does it? We might start by discovering how people define Conservative vs conservative.

more to follow

35 posted on 07/26/2010 5:52:28 AM PDT by j.argese (Liberal thought process = oxymoron)
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To: j.argese; Oceander

I guess I must be missing your point. Maybe you are advocating conservative speech codes, or conservative brainwashing? No thanks. My kids have been through school without being brainwashed. So have most people.

The fact that most people aren’t political is not a failure of any “model.” As one who has worked very hard for decades against the things that are bothering you, along with many other conservatives, I just wonder what planet you are living on where “conservatives sat passively by.”

When you claim “the conservative model” has failed, I guess I just have no idea what “model” you are talking about. Your comments just remind me of the sort of thoughts that ran through my teenaged mind when I first read Ayn Rand, and thought I was the first to realize that there really were Ellsworth Tooheys out there. But I wasn’t.

Rand was exposing the grand liberal conspiracy decades before Bill Ayers and Oliver Stone became part of it, and still more decades before you, just now, seem to have noticed it. But somehow you and I were able to figure it out, weren’t we? Unlike liberals, I don’t think that makes us part of some intellectual elite. I think you and I figured it out because it isn’t really much of a secret, and because their brainwashing didn’t work on us. And because there were always conservatives calling it out.

The liberal college professor, real as he may be, is also a laughingstock and a stereotype; he is not an effective proselytizer. When Americans self-identify as conservative rather than liberal by a 2:1 margin, I think that the alarm bells over the centuries-old liberal grand plan are a little overblown.

Keep calling them out - that’s what we do. But conservatives don’t believe that there are “unwashed masses” who need to be, and ought to be, schooled by their betters in the intellectual elite. We believe in the individual, and we believe that when those individuals live their own lives, and take care of themselves and their families, they are - by nature, not by design - already part of a greater cause: the cause of freedom.

I don’t like it when people just throw up their hands and say “we’ve failed” or “we’ve lost” simply because the other side hasn’t given up. They will never give up. You would do well to keep in mind TS Eliot’s admonition that “there is no such thing as a lost cause, because there is no such thing as a gained cause.”

Our elected so-called conservatives are the ones who have fallen short. Those stupid, brainwashed “sheeple” gave them control of Congress for twelve years, and what did they get in return? Was it really so irrational to give up on them?

Conservatives in politics will always play the role of rolling back “change.” We start from a base of freedom, not “programs.” And people, or “sheeple,” as faux-conservative elites like to call them, will always be “more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable” than to become activists, so sometimes the rollback will be painful.

But don’t be a quitter, and don’t blame the victim.


36 posted on 07/26/2010 6:01:04 AM PDT by PhatHead
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To: PhatHead
Heaven's no, not a conservative speech code! Actually, more like a fast response media team + action.

I was on my way out, when I saw your post so I wanted to nip that right in the bud.

37 posted on 07/26/2010 6:26:09 AM PDT by j.argese (Liberal thought process = oxymoron)
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To: j.argese
Whew! ;-)

BTW, I love this line on your profile page:

The truth shouldn’t just hurt, it should leave a bruise for a week to 10 days.

38 posted on 07/26/2010 7:15:22 AM PDT by PhatHead
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To: PhatHead; Anitius Severinus Boethius; mnehring; HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity; bmwcyle; Bob; ...
To continue on my previous ...

A solution I touched on was the creation of a rapid response team or special ops to quickly counter lies and soft facts release by various organizations. This would also be used to spread information within the Conservative community.

An example of each: How quickly did Shirley Sherrod go from racist to victim? Half a news cycle? How was that turned around so quickly? That may not be the perception among Conservatives but among receivers of the water torture media? That is how minds are influenced!

An example of dissemination of news within our group: Conservatives bloggers met in Las Vegas, what happened? I couldn't tell you if you were going to pay off my mortgage. Not FR, not Drudge, nothing. I can tell you about Franken, Reid and Jones though. Why?

39 posted on 07/26/2010 8:28:25 AM PDT by j.argese (Liberal thought process = oxymoron)
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To: PhatHead

Wow! Such a long response, and so utterly beside the point.


40 posted on 07/26/2010 5:02:58 PM PDT by Oceander (The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance -- Thos. Jefferson)
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