Posted under Conservatism & Election 2012 & Health Care & NeoCons
Conservatives have the same problem as DC’s garrison in Afghanistan, and that’s enemies claiming they’re on your side. When you least expect it – Wham! – you’ve been back-sided.
Previously, we’ve talked about Neocons posing as conservatives while pushing their neo-imperial agenda of open borders and endless war. One of the worst is Andrew Sullivan, who also advocates same-sex “marriage” as part of what he calls a “conservative” platform – see here and here, for example.
So it should surprise no one that the big-government Neocons are now pushing for socialized medicine. In a New York Times op-ed entitled, Why Obamacare is a Conservative’s Dream, J.D. Kleinke of the American Enterprise Institute – the Death Star of Neoconservatism – argues conservatives should embrace Obamacare. After all, says Kleinke, government economists who call themselves “conservative” approve of Mr. Obama’s ambitious plan:
The core drivers of the health care act are market principles formulated by conservative economists, designed to correct structural flaws in our health insurance system – principles originally embraced by Republicans as a market alternative to the Clinton plan in the early 1990s.
The real problem with the health care plan – for Mr. Romney and the Republicans in general – is that political credit for it goes to Mr. Obama. Now, Mr. Romney is in a terrible fix trying to spin his way out of this paradox and tear down something he knows is right – something for which he ought to be taking great political credit of his own.
It’s bad enough we have to fight the overt leftists without having to watch our backs from infiltrators claiming to be on our side. Of course, the best defense against being fooled by these ideological hucksters is to know what we believe in and why.
Feltan on 01 Oct 2012 at 6:56 pm #
Based on that article, Mr. Kleinke is no conservative. If I had read that without HB2′s introduction, I would have thought him one of the Obama insiders.
Regards,
Feltan
HarrisonBergeron2 on 01 Oct 2012 at 7:55 pm #
Feltan,
That’s the thing about Neocons – if they didn’t call themselves conservatives, no one would think of them as conservative.
aware on 01 Oct 2012 at 8:48 pm #
Not being a conservative but an anachro-capitalist take this for what it’s worth. The problem is too many issues. It allows those who may be with you on 2 things to claim they are you. Then confusion ensues as they then go for the 10 other things you don’t want.
Before you know it even conservatives aren’t sure what it even means to be conservative. I suggest boil down to just 1 issue. The State. I will not support anyone who has grown, expanded, increased, empowered, or in any way for any reason, including alleged “security”, enhanced the State can never be trusted. No matter what they claim to be.
Every other issue important to actual conservatives would be resolved happily with a government about 1/10th of what we now have. Maybe even 1/20th.
JDP on 02 Oct 2012 at 6:24 am #
as one of those nefarious social conservatives in certain ways, what drew my interest was the guy’s condescending (and stereotypically leftist) remark that besides generic anti-Obama animus, other conservative opposition to Obamacare was driven by “a desire to control women’s bodies.”
AKA: if you reject the current unrestricted abortion regime imposed on this country by the Supreme Court, if you reject the feminist argument that women must be able to abort at any time for any reason or they will be “inferior” to men, and if you reject the liberal idea that all that is needed to combat teen pregnancy/single motherhood is passing out birth control (don’t talk morality at all, remember that makes you “anti-sex”) then you’re an eeeevil patriarchal oppressor.
JDP on 02 Oct 2012 at 6:40 am #
also the thing about “The Conservative Case for such and such” is that it’s very easy to isolate certain ideas respected conservative intellectuals espoused — Burke’s openness to gradual change (though tellingly the change argued for today is always liberal,) Kirk’s “negation of ideology” — and use them to treat conservatism as an amorphous blob that means nothing.
i can do it myself, very easily. “The Conservative Case for Abortion” — prevents single motherhood. conservative case for homosexual marriage, it’s just extending a stabilizing institution to homosexuals (although i’d love to see Sullivan make “the conservative case for nonmonogamy” given how important he thinks that is for homosexual couples.) conservative case for a massive tax increase, well spending cuts would throw our society into flux wouldn’t they, and we have to be fiscally prudent. i can see David Brooks making an argument like this, if he hasn’t already.
of course the problem with these is that there’s always liberal assumptions baked into the cake (i.e. the alleged irrelevance of gender in marriage, the assumption that everything the federal government is currently doing is necessary, and the treatment of the unborn as non-human/disregard of any effects easy abortion access has on promiscuity) that sort of derails the whole “conservative” thing. there’s also the fact that Kirk’s conservatism as the negation of ideology approach doesn’t really work so well if it’s simply taken as go-along-get-along with an ideologically liberal society. otherwise, we might as well call Fidel and Raul Castro conservatives, in which case it’s a meaningless, relative term.