The always-thoughtful Joshua Trevino, in a post that needs to be read in full, issues a call for conservatives to reassert control of their party, particularly online.
Here’s a small excerpt:
Serving a structure for its own sake is the time-honored career of apparatchiks through history, and the Republican Party assuredly has its own class. Fortunately, they are easy enough to pick out: they are the ones who pirouette and leap to defend whatever line is promulgated by the ruling elements of the party at any particular moment, independent of its veracity or sense. They do the hard work of shaping the narrative at the ground level, and they hew it so that it is impervious to principled critique — almost always with the protest that such critique merely weakens our own. The irony is that no critique weakens our own so much as their most profound absurdities, be it that Tom DeLay is worth fighting for to the bitter end, that Harriet Miers is competent to serve on the Supreme Court, that Alberto Gonzales is a fine Attorney General, or that the White House is doing a great job in Iraq. The cumulative effect of these things, and the concurrent abandonment of conservative principle in governance large and small, is why we now have a Congressional minority and a President with a 33% approval rating. The men of the party took the 1994 and 2000 victories won by the men of the movement, and squandered it all on — well, the party. Common sense tells us that it’s time to reverse the priorities and put conservatism ahead of Republicanism if we want to begin the climb back.
Read it all.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.