“The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally – not a 20 percent traitor,” according to an unsourced quote from Ronald Reagan. And it’s time that the Right remembers that principle.
The ideological purity test used to be a casual means of gauging a candidate’s general political position in order to sate personal curiosity and determine rational voting. Now, it’s been sullied and turned into an arbitrary cut-off line, separating conservatives and RINOS everywhere. Meanwhile the Left laughs its way to the banks and the voting booths.
To some extent, this is a problem that plagues any party that does not occupy the presidency. It’s easy to make the established regime look incompetent, out-of-touch and corrupt, but it’s more difficult to demonstrate to non-base voters that our party has retuned its political and moral center around the values of the average middle class American voter, as well as rebranding the greater message as such.
Naturally, broad ideological reexamination creates some conflict among lobbying groups and voting blocs who want their core issues prioritized, but it has come to a point where individual conservatives everywhere go into a mad scramble for identity, oftentimes because their ideological integrity is called into question by other conservatives. We are quick to cast the slightest note of dissonance with the label “RINO” or “Democrat-Lite.”
It’s time we all cool it.
The first problem is that we miss the point of what conservatism as an ideology actually is. Conservatism is an organic movement, constantly trying to re-assess the merits of a political and economic system. It seeks to shape society around evolving humanist principles, ensuring that the law and overall arm of government keeps a careful balance between stably maintaining social order, governing effectively, minimizing bureaucracy and maximizing personal liberty. The broader goal is to ensure the endurance of civilization and to prevent social and moral entropy. That can mean anything, and indeed the definition of “conservative” in Reagan’s time in the context of contemporary policymaking was not the same as it is today.
Today, to be conservative is to have more aggressive approaches to spending cuts and deregulation, as well as to scaling back our interference and defense initiatives abroad. It does not mean, “Vote this way on Bill X or forever renounce your phony conservative stripes.” That was definitely the case with the Affordable Care Act, but most votes aren’t so grand in proportion and consequence. Politicians everywhere need to be held accountable, but changing the standard for their adherence to principle every time a big issue comes up doesn’t do that.
Sadly, purity test obsessives forget that, which leads to the second problem. We rob ourselves of our ability to make waves in our own movement, as well as our ability to draw others to it. An effective ground campaign requires we set our differences aside for the greater purpose of winning an election, and that we embrace our friends and allies instead of questioning their motives upon first contact.
We weren’t able to come together in 2012, and we should be wary of failing to do so again in 2014 in what could be a pivotal year in terms of reshaping the landscape for the presidential race. We must, at the end of the day, remember that we are the lesser of two evils and that we, as conservatives, have the capacity to be better than that.
TIME magazine, BuzzFeed, iSideWith and many other sites have given us a myriad of different political alignment surveys, but these type of ‘tests’ are just fun exercises, not rigid determinations of devotion to principle. To overthink these, or any more serious ideological tests, in that way is to view the broader conservative movement not as a team with which to make meaningful cultural and political changes on the country, but a cult where the non-believers must be purged. It is to reject the value of political pragmatism entirely, to advocate a one-size-fits-all definition of conservatism and to enable an easier win for the Left. As patriots, we have an obligation not to let that happen.
