You’re Not William F. Buckley!

Truer words have never been said:

While it is certainly true that Buckley ousted the John Birch society from the conservative movement, it is also important to note that you’re not William F. Buckley. My point is that there is no single conservative leader today who has earned the respect and credibility required to take such bold action. This is especially true of young conservatives who are the future leaders. Still, it’s important to realize that of all the great conservative leaders and voices of his generation, only Buckley — and possibly Reagan — had the gravitas to have made such a pronouncement — and have it generally honored.

This kind of reflects on something I mentioned last night after watching Jon Henke on MSNBC.  Matt Lewis goes on to say:

Lastly, I would argue that conservatives are, by nature, resistant to taking orders and following others blindly. Conservatives — especially those with libertarian instincts — are skeptical, rugged individualists who question authority. And bloggers — regardless of ideology — are notoriously difficult to manage (if they wanted to take orders and behave themselves, they would have become operatives or politicians). Bloggers are ornery and argumentative by nature, so it’s probably to be expected that many conservative bloggers would not fall in line easily. It’s essentially like herding cats.

That’s an understatement if I ever heard one, but that’s why we’re stuck using persuasion. I think even more than suffering from a lack of intellect, as Henke notes, the Republica Party also suffers from a lack of talented coalition builders, who can take all the various Republican interests and get them all moving in a similar enough direction that everyone is relatively happy.

Matt Lewis goes on to offer ways that this kind of problem can be mitigated so people can work together to accomplish things.  It’s worth a read.

5 thoughts on “You’re Not William F. Buckley!”

  1. It would seem to me that a Republican coalition builder would indeed have to be very talented, since most of the social conservative agenda is totally at odds with a libertarian agenda, and yet both supposedly coexist in the same party. The only coalition I could envision would be one that focused solely on economic issues and stayed strictly away from social issues — and I can’t imagine either social conservatives or libertarians tolerating that for very long.

    Gun rights could arguably be a common ground issue, but there you find many libertarians suspecting social conservatives only give lip-service to the RKBA, while valuing their other agendas more highly, and only using the RKBA as an election year talking point from their traditional laundry list of issues.

  2. The biggest problem you’ve got is that small group of greedy media whores who are so incredibly popular. The Becks and the Limbaughs make you all look like nuts. The left has their own kings of sarcasm like Olbermann and Stewart, but nothing compares to the vile of those conservative would-be spokesmen.

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