Cowboy Constitutionalism

Jacob Weisberg wrote a thoughtful piece on the various factions on the Right. It was published in the dying Newsweek blog:

The GOP Looks West

Here’s my favorite paragraph:

The GOP’s new Western tone harks back to Goldwater’s disastrous but transformational presidential campaign of 1964. Goldwater didn’t care about religion—he was a Jewish Episcopalian who once said that Jerry Falwell deserved a kick in the nuts. He wasn’t focused on racial politics; there weren’t many black people in Arizona then. What mattered to him was limiting government and preserving liberty. To Goldwater, political freedom was inseparable from economic freedom, a view distilled in his most famous phrase: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

It was great analysis until the end… when Weisberg predictably proclaimed that what America needs is “a conservatism that hasn’t been in evidence lately—a version that’s not Western, Southern, or Eastern, but instead tolerant, moderate, and mainstream.”

In other words, a “conservatism” that is anything but conservative… sort of Country Club Republicanism that most Americans don’t want and which consistently loses.