I came across not one, not two, but three prominent conservative commentators discussing the Terri Schiavo and how it could be an early sign of, as Glenn Reynolds puts it, the coming "conservative crackup":
| In their book, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, authors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge predict steady growth for the conservative movement in America, unless something goes wrong to derail its trajectory. But things can always go wrong. How could the Republican coalition fail? By being "too Southern, too greedy, and too contradictory."
Right now it's aiming at two out of three. ..snip.. A while back, I wrote about the problem of "fair-weather federalism," but judging by the past week things look to be getting much worse. So will the Republican coalition fracture under these pressures? Quite possibly. National security is the glue that has held Bush's coalition together. The war isn't over, and we haven't won yet, but it's going well -- Austin Bay notes that it's a war that we are winning -- and this is allowing the divisions to show. All of the people I've quoted are on the right, and they're all unhappy. One may argue that libertarians and small-government conservatives aren't a big part of Bush's coalition, but his victory wasn't so huge that the Republicans can surrender very many votes and still expect to win. So this is a real threat. |
From there I pretty quickly stumbled across a piece by conservative Andrew Sullivan in The Sunday Times. Here's a bit of his take on the matter:
| The Republicans have plans to intervene directly in many people’s lives — spending billions on sexual abstinence education, marriage counselling, anti-drug propaganda, a war on steroids, mentoring programmes for former prisoners, and on and on. Got a problem? Bush’s big government is here to help.
Where Republicans once believed that states should have priority over the federal government, Bush has pushed in the opposite direction. Last week the religious right wanted a federal ruling to prevent a Florida woman in a persistent vegetative state from having her life-support cut off. This is a job for the federal government? They have overruled state laws on medical cannabis and tried to prevent states from making their own policies on gay civil marriage. In the 1980s Republicans wanted to abolish the federal Department of Education, believing local control was best. Bush has all but ended local control, introduced national standards and added a huge increase in federal spending. No wonder Ted Kennedy, the arch liberal Democratic senator, voted for the bill. How these contradictions can be resolved is hard to see. Is conservatism now paternalist, spending huge amounts of federal money to guide people into more moral lives? Or is it about restraining government so people can make up their own minds how to live? Do deficits matter? Is the point of foreign policy the pursuit of national interest or the spread of human freedom? Or are they inextricable? Are tax cuts defensible if accompanied by big spending rises? Is American libertarianism dead? Bush’s four years have put all these questions on the table. ..snip.. The race to succeed Bush will become, in part, a battle for the future of American conservatism. I have no idea how it will turn out. But I do have one clear prediction: the Republican internal battle in the next four years is going to be bloody. After the mid-term elections in 2006 it will be brutal. |
And then, finally, the grandaddy of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley Jr. And from him I need only quote one word.
| Enough. |
Please. Let her go to god in peace. Let her go.
UPDATE: Full disclosure. The Buckley piece actually does not predict a conservative crack-up. But the fact that Buckley has chosen to speak up on this issue, to do so now, and that I came across it as I came across the other two is what led me to make the connection. However, I admit my initial phrasing might have made the connection sound more significant than I had intended, and thus, this correction.
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