{"id":56068,"date":"2015-11-12T12:00:51","date_gmt":"2015-11-12T18:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=56068"},"modified":"2015-11-12T13:14:53","modified_gmt":"2015-11-12T19:14:53","slug":"the-why-we-war-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=56068","title":{"rendered":"The Why We War"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s the time of the election season when conservatives of all stripes engage in that greatest of relatively recent right-of-center traditions – one that might seem counterintuitive for people calling themselves “conservatives”: \u00a0the collective purity test.<\/p>\n

My favorite example: \u00a0Marco Rubio – who, four years ago, was a Tea Party insurgent – is now “establishment”, because of his position on immigration. \u00a0But examples attach to every single candidate in the field; \u00a0any given conservative wants to toss Jeb Bush because he’s soft on Common Core, Rand Paul because he’s soft-ish on defense, Christie because he’s weak on the Second Amendment and hugged Obama, Fiorina because her Senate campaign in dingy-blue California catered toward dingy-blue voters, Carson because he’s very weak on the Second Amendment, Trump because for most of his life he never really talked like a conservative, and Cruz because he’s\u00a0that all-purpose political diagnosis when you can’t find anything better, “Crazy”.<\/p>\n

After watching Mitt Romney lose an election he could have won had 400,000 conservatives in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Colorado gotten over their various quibbles with his history on abortion, gun control and healthcare, I’ve despaired at times that anyone could be perfect enough to satisfy everyone enough to actually get them to the polls.<\/p>\n

Jay Nordlinger \u00a0wrote about this on National Review the other day. <\/a>You should read the whole thing if the subject has ever affected you as well.<\/p>\n

He concluded it with a quote from a podcast he did with British conservative thinker\u00a0Roger Scruton:<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that, in the end, there is something that unites all conservatives, which is that they are pursuing something they love.<\/p>\n

My view is that the Left is united by hatred, but we are united by love: love of our country, love of institutions, love of the law, love of family, and so on. And what makes us conservatives is the desire to protect those things, and we\u2019re up against people who want to destroy them, and it\u2019s very simple.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And if conservatives can’t unite around\u00a0that<\/em>, then I despair for the nation’s, and the world’s, futures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s the time of the election season when conservatives of all stripes engage in that greatest of relatively recent right-of-center traditions – one that might seem counterintuitive for people calling themselves “conservatives”: \u00a0the collective purity test. My favorite example: \u00a0Marco Rubio – who, four years ago, was a Tea Party insurgent – is now “establishment”, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56068","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=56068"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56073,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56068\/revisions\/56073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}