Re: the O’Rourke piece I fisked this morning, another blogger weighs in:
So “conservatives” are blamed for a supposedly unworkable policy that has never even been attempted. And the idiocy of the Bush proposal to turn illegals into citizens is that people who don’t obey immigration laws are not likely to obey naturalization laws.
Behold the incoherence of conservative discourse, with O’Rourke bashing a cartoon stereotype of Buchananite policy proposals (policies that, to repeat, have never actually been attempted nor even proposed by any Republican administration) in a magazine that would never publish anything by Pat Buchanan himself.
(…)
The problem with conservative intellectuals (and O’Rourke would qualify as such) is that they presume a far more informed electorate than actually exists. They therefore look at elections and imagine that voters are rejecting specific policy positions with which voters are, in fact, entirely unfamiliar.
(…)
Conservatives don’t need a global-warming plan, or a poverty plan, or a health-care plan. We ought to be arguing instead that the problems liberals now “plan” to solve are either non-existent (e.g., global warming) or else are largely the result of the last generation’s liberal “plan.”
But the inferiority complex of conservative intellectuals requires that they offer up plans of their own to address these problems — problems that have nothing to do with the just powers of a constitutionally limited government, the true meaning of the Constitution being the main thing we conservatives ought to be trying to conserve!
Instead of arguing over what a massive, expensive, insolvent government with unlimited powers should be doing, why don’t we instead argue that the government is too big, too expensive and too powerful? That was what I signed up for. What about you?
