{"id":1268,"date":"2007-09-06T04:15:37","date_gmt":"2007-09-06T09:15:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1268"},"modified":"2007-09-03T15:44:11","modified_gmt":"2007-09-03T20:44:11","slug":"of-party-and-principle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1268","title":{"rendered":"Of Party and Principle"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day, commenter J. Ewing – who is a frequent dissident from this forum’s dominant paradigm – left a comment<\/a>\u00a0in my thread about the launch of True North<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n

But what I just don\u2019t get is how, without taking a \u201cprincipled stand\u201d that candidates of one party (say, for example, the GOP) will do a better job of advancing your principles than those of another party. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The answer is, of course, that True North<\/em> is not <\/em>“non-partisan”.\u00a0 We are overtly partisan; our “party” is First-Principles-based Conservatism.\u00a0 Not the GOP.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A simple look at the roster of bloggers writing for True North <\/em>should tell the tale; True North <\/em>includes a list of people who are conservative activists and Republican sympathizers, and even functionaries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the blog is not, and emphatically will never be, <\/em>an organ of the GOP. The GOP needs its feet held in the fire when it comes to the First Principles<\/a>\u00a0that drive us,\u00a0no different than the DFL (only the DFL is much farther-gone).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Looking at the roster of contributors, it\u2019s pretty obvious that most of us are Republicans of one form or another, and all of us are conservatives. Most of us are<\/em> Republicans because we believe in those first principles, and that the GOP (at its best, anyway – and don’t all of us join political parties because of the best <\/em>they represent?) best supports them.<\/p>\n

So we’re explicitly partisan.\u00a0 We are just not part of the Republican party.<\/p>\n

There are two reasons to declare yourself or your organization “non-partisan”:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. To exercise, with integrity, an intent to disavow\u00a0 politcal postures of any sort.\u00a0 This is the philosophy of the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers<\/a>, which actively eschews politics (even though most of its members are conservatives) in order to remain open to bloggers of all types.<\/li>\n
  2. To disingenuously claim non-partisanship to make an expressly partisan agenda seem benign, like “Growth for Justice<\/a>” and its contributors<\/a>.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    To do so – for a group of active, gleefully unrepentant conservatives – would be as disingenuous as Joel Kramer’s claims of centricity.<\/p>\n

    Mr. Ewing continues:<\/p>\n

    Yes, you can do a heck of a good job being \u201cnonpartisan and purely educational,\u201d as the Taxpayers League is, but at some point you need to start putting the education into an actual practicum\u2013 \u201cfield work\u201d\u2013 to get anything done, right? What\u2019s wrong with partisanship, if it gets you where you want to go?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    And that’s what True North <\/em>is really all about; making the turn from opinion to action.<\/p>\n

    But that comes a little later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The other day, commenter J. Ewing – who is a frequent dissident from this forum’s dominant paradigm – left a comment\u00a0in my thread about the launch of True North: But what I just don\u2019t get is how, without taking a \u201cprincipled stand\u201d that candidates of one party (say, for example, the GOP) will do a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-true-north"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}