The Myth of the Moderate Republican

Posted by Larry Miller on February 10, 2009 under How | Be the First to Comment

Have you ever noticed that you never hear the term Liberal Republican? Many believe there is no such animal… that the term is oxymoronic. Actually the term is just moronic. To the press, and many others, Republicans are assumed to be conservative, by which they mean extreme. Those that don’t qualify as Reaganesque are called moderates, as if there is some sort of virtue to living in the mushy middle.

I’m reminded of the line from Barry Goldwater’s 1964 acceptance speech that chased the “moderates” in the New York delegation from the hall. And what awful thing did he say?
“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” Apparently the “moderates” did not believe that liberty and justice should be pursued with everything we’ve got.

Unfortunately the actions of more and more Republicans shows that they too would run away from this statement. The most notable are the three who broke from a party just discovering the value of unity. While not from New York, it should be recognized that they are also from the northeast. What can be said of those who supported the current spending orgy coming out of the land inside the beltway?

Can they really be thought of as moderate in any way, shape or form? Can the rest of us join in their excitement at having trimmed a hundred billion dollars from an eight hundred billion dollar spending package? If you had three children, could you be happy if you convinced a kidnapper to only take one rather than all three? Would we have felt any better if only 2,000 hundred people died on 9/11 rather than 3,000?

Politics is said to be the art of compromise. However when we are faced with a choice of right or wrong, only the morally ambiguous can feel satisfied with a compromise. Suppose FDR had been able to negotiate a treaty with Adolf Hitler, whereby only 3 million Jews would have been slaughtered. Would the former paper hanger have been less of a monster?

No, there are times when, win or loose, we need to take a stand against something that is patently wrong. To compromise and give our assent to something that is plainly wrong lessens our stature among those around us and in our own eyes. When these people abandoned their core principles, or at least what they said were there core principles, they showed themselves to be untrustworthy and unreliable. They showed themselves to be something many thought did not exist. By siding with liberals, they became indistinguishable from them. They showed themselves to be Liberal Republicans.

Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins are not alone. Each just unmasked themselves one more time. Knowing there are such beasts among us should help us to be prepared to deal with them and not be afraid to root them out as soon as possible. If we don’t we will be lulled into a false sense of security by simply looking at numbers. Beware – you may run into Democrats in Republican clothing. I certainly have.