Notes From D.R. | Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene

In a truly stupid move, a supposedly pro-life activist group is demanding that Ann Coulter apologize for endorsing Mitt Romney in the 2008 election. These are the same geniuses that falsely accused Romney of implementing same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. I’m not a fan of Ann Coulter, but my God, I’ll defend her against these nutballs.

Tara Wall on the prospects for a GOP comeback.

Thomas Sowell and David Brooks on President Obama.

Virginia Walden Ford on the importance of vouchers.

Monsters vs. Aliens tops the charts.

David Frum asks: what happened to the right?

Fred Barnes and Matthew Continetti on President Obama.

The Wall Street Journal and New York Times on the 30th anniversary of Three Mile Island.

UPDATE: More from Jeff Jacoby and Time.

Legendary Boston talk-radio star Larry Glick passes away at 87.

Sometimes, it just makes more sense to be pessimistic.

It would make me happy to be happy—to believe that the country’s move to the left is only temporary, and that somehow, by magic, Americans will wake up and become conservative once again. It would really be nice to believe that.

However, believing that would require an abundance of blind optimism—and I’m sorry, but my supply is low.

Years ago, I believed that the left’s victories were only temporary—just flukes, accidents of fate. Bill Clinton winning the Presidency was just happenstance, a hiccup, an error of existence. It didn’t represent a trend.

Yet it did represent a trend, a trend of the country moving away from conservatism and embracing a left-libertarian social model. The country changed—demographically, culturally, philosophically. These changes benefited the Democrats, and will continue to benefit that party. How can a thinking person deny this?

America is not the “traditionalist” country it once was, and it’s disgusting to see the American right bury its head in the sand rather than confront this reality and develop ways to advance conservatism despite cultural defeats. Why do conservatives assume the people will eventually rise up against President Obama’s agenda? If the economy recovers, the people won’t care about Obama’s efforts to alter the country.

It’s hard to be happy when everywhere you look, you see the conservative movement still holding on to the “silent majority” nonsense. You can’t turn on a major conservative talk radio show or log on to one of the right’s big-time blogs without reading some balderdash about how it’s still a “center-right” nation and how the “Obamunist” agenda will collapse upon itself. No new ideas, no new strategies—just sitting back in an easy chair and waiting for Obama to fail.

Here’s a scary thought for these folks: what if Obama doesn’t fail? What if the economy recuperates and Obama gets all the credit? What if the people turn a blind eye to the more unsavory elements of Obama’s agenda, just as they turned a blind eye to Clinton’s shenanigans a decade ago?

The conservative movement is attempting to throw a party in the middle of an earthquake. The American right is so close to self-destruction, and it doesn’t even seem to realize it.

I couldn’t care less about the polls allegedly showing a slight decline in Obama’s popularity. It’s not as though the people have forgiven the Republicans yet. Besides movement conservatives, do you hear anybody pining for George W. Bush to come back?

It’s hard to be happy when there’s so little to justify happiness. It’s hard to be happy when people I thought were smart are now acting stupid.

I thought the conservative movement was going to clean up its act after the defeats of 2006 and 2008. I thought the American right was finally going to figure out a way to bring Reagan’s principles into the 21st century.

I must have expected more from conservatives than I should have, because right now I just read Teleprompter jokes, not discussions about how to fix the problems that ail the right. I just see ridicule of Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, not serious efforts to replace all three with committed conservatives. I just hear cheerleading for Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, not a drive to get us out of the problems that we’re in.

How am I supposed to be happy, when the conservative movement has hit its nadir? How am I supposed to be happy when the right is more interested in infighting than innovation? Only a fool would be happy under these circumstances.

There was a time when the conservative movement had its stuff together. Conservatives understood that they were competitors in a dangerous game, and that they had to fight harder and with more skill than their progressive adversaries in order to win. Now, it seems that conservatives have lost the eye of the tiger—or, more precisely, they have allowed that eye to be plucked out.

It’s impossible to be happy when a cause one believes in has collapsed. Obsessed with ideological purges and apparently uninterested in fixing the movement’s flaws, the American right is now a toxic asset, almost wholly bereft of value or significance. Give the American left its due: domestic progressives were committed to changing the United States so that it would be more like the European countries that had, in their view, a fairer social and economic system. Unfortunately, by allowing itself to fall into disrepair, the American right ended up aiding the left in the achievement of this goal.

Ken Blackwell attempts to downplay the division between fiscal and social conservatives within the Republican Party. Blackwell’s a smart guy, but he and other conservatives will not be able to reduce the bigotry (there is no other rational way to describe it) between fiscal and social conservatives unless they first acknowledge that this bigotry is real–and far more intense than he implies in his column.

Jeff Jacoby on the sixth anniversary of the Iraq War.

Charles Homans on the demise of the conservative website Culture11.com. A must-read.

Rich Lowry on Afghanistan.

Is Newt Gingrich’s latest effort doomed to fail?

Last week, USNEWS.com reported that the former House Speaker has created a new organization, Renewing American Leadership, intended to strengthen the weakening relationship between fiscal and social conservatives. Gingrich claims that America is now “…in a crisis in which the secular state, if allowed, will fundamentally and radically change America against the wishes of most Americans…You’ve had such rising hostility to religious belief that I wanted to reach broadly into the country and dramatically raise public awareness of threats to religious liberty.”

Gingrich also believes President Obama poses a threat to religious liberty. In an interview with US News and World Report’s Dan Gilgoff, Gingrich noted that “…The gap between [Obama’s] rhetoric and symbolism and his actual policies is so radically different. The stimulus package had a lot of money in it for sex education and included a prohibition against any money being used in buildings used for religious purposes. Every evidence is that they’re going to move on a Freedom of Choice Act, which would remove every limit on abortion at the state level. He has appointed people with very close ties to abortionists who offer late-term abortions. The evidence we have so far is that he’s going to move methodically to limit the use of freedom of conscience and impose abortion on institutions. So I’m not sure his actions are not fundamentally different than his words.”

Although Gingrich has not been closely aligned with social conservatives in the past, there’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of his commitment to this cause. As the New York Times recently noted, Gingrich, who authored Rediscovering God in America a few years back, is in the process of converting to Catholicism; he’s also putting the finishing touches on a documentary about Pope John Paul II’s efforts to conquer Communism. Gingrich is correct in his view that social and fiscal conservatives, when united, can become a near-unstoppable political force.

The problem is that right now, social and fiscal conservatives are not united—and they may never be united again.

According to Gingrich aide Rick Tyler, John McCain captured the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination because social conservatives embraced Mike Huckabee in the primaries, while fiscal conservatives embraced Mitt Romney. Why couldn’t social and fiscal conservatives agree on a consensus choice?

The reality is that fiscal and social conservatives have fundamentally different values. While there are social conservatives who lean right fiscally and fiscal conservatives who dislike secularism, the folks who supported Huckabee in 2008 were primarily focused on limiting abortion for birth-control purposes and reversing efforts to expand same-sex marriage rights, while the folks who supported Romney were primarily focused on the country’s fiscal strength.

Huckabee’s core supporters weren’t particularly bothered by questions about his fiscal record as governor of Arkansas; he was their man on the issues that mattered. Romney’s core supporters blew off controversies surrounding his views on abortion and gay marriage; after all, he was Mr. Fiscal Responsibility.

Decades ago, fiscal and social conservatives were unified by their common opposition to Soviet Communism. Because Communism was the antithesis of capitalism, those who loved money were against it; because Communism was godless, those who loved God hated it. Fiscal and social conservatives became friends only because they had the same enemy.

The bond between fiscal and social conservatives weakened around the same time that the Berlin Wall fell. Nothing, not even the War on Terror, has made that bond strong once again. Social conservatives and fiscal conservatives are, unfortunately, not natural partners. They watch different shows. They listen to different musicians. They read different books. They live different lives in different regions.

While most social conservatives and fiscal conservatives will never admit it, both sides are deeply prejudiced against each other. The average social conservative regards the average fiscal conservative as someone who would happily toss morality out of the window in order to make more money; the average fiscal conservative regards the average social conservative as a Bible-thumping, snake-handling moron.

Because social and fiscal conservatives no longer have a common enemy, they have returned to their natural loathing for each other. It’s a depressing fact, one that will inevitably lead to the full political triumph of Obama liberalism, but it’s a fact nonetheless. Gingrich wants to reunite social and fiscal conservatives, but such a reunification can only occur in two places: in theory, and in Gingrich’s own mind.