The Right-Wing “Rift” and the Wormtongues Who Want It

Dana Loesch has an excellent post at Big Journalism today about the war the left really wants to see between Christian conservatives and libertarians (via Instapundit)

Coalitions between different groups who have various beliefs in common are instrumental to success. We can’t disrespect, by way of discounting or misunderstanding our different sticking points, the beliefs of the various groups comprising the tea party movement, but we all have more in common with each other than we do with factions on the left: the communists, the socialists, the say-they’re-anarchists-but-are-actually-socialists. We know that the only way to securing increased civil liberties comes by way of our alliance and we must continue to hold the line and work together.

The groups on the right have accomplished so much by working together and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what all else we can accomplish, Newsweek be damned.

I have no doubt that the left and their accomplices in the media want to spread the perception that there really is a serious rift in the coalition that routed them on Election Day. I don’t blame them. The coalition that exists is not a particularly strong one. Right now, it’s forged by the common cause of staving off fiscal armageddon, but it’s so fragile that a chance phrase thrown off in the middle of an interview amplified by a few opportunistic ideologues can strain it badly. The truth of the matter is that most political coalitions aren’t particularly strong when they are first forged and that the most efficient way to attack them is not with an open, honest debate with facts and reason and all those things we say we like in politics. If you want to break an alliance, be it a marriage or a pact between nations in wartime, the most effective weapon is distrust. J.R.R. Tolkien knew it, which is why he put Grima Wormtongue in The Lord of the Rings. Theoden would never have bowed to a naked show of force, but those sly words of mistrust that poisoned him against Gondor, that weakened his fighting spirit and caused him to neglect Rohan, very nearly worked. Now, we don’t have a Gandalf to throw Wormtongue’s influence out of our heads all at once. We’ll have to handle that ourselves.

We start by facing facts. Libertarians don’t trust, or particularly like, social conservatives and vice-versa. There are plenty of good reasons that’s so, but none of them have anything to do with the pressing fiscal issues of the day. Each sides’ pet social issues can wait a year or so until we get a real and lasting handle on Washington’s spending and get some people in office who we won’t have to watch like a toddler in a toy store. To do that, we’re all going to have to extend some trust on credit and make darned sure we don’t betray that trust. If not, we’ll end up with more progressive hopenchange and, like the man freed of the “unclear spirit” in Matthew 12:43-45, we’ll find ourselves in a much worse condition than when we started. Trust is easy to lose and difficult to gain, especially with the Wormtongue media whispering words of betrayal in our ears and the Democratic Party driving divisive social issues into the public square. Let’s just keep our eyes on the prize and stop listening to the folks who want us to fail.

Tags: Conservatism, Libertarians, Media Bias, Republicans