Republicans have their guns blazing, shooting themselves in the foot.  One way that conservatives regularly harm themselves is that they start an argument by conceding defeat.  They take the false premises of the enemy as the starting point of their own argument.  If step one of your defense is to agree with your opponent, you are helping them more than you are helping yourself.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal gave us an example of this technic on Monday.  He called on Republicans to “stop being the stupid party” .  He said,  “We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys.”

Does he believe that conservative principles of limited government are only good for wealthy people?  This is exactly what his opponents believe and they express it in almost the same way he does.  Jindal accepted and repeated their premise.   If he understood conservative principles, he would argue that liberty and limited government are the keys to prosperity for all.  The stupid party is the party that thinks otherwise, against all evidence of history.

Bill Kristol showed that he accepts the premise of the Democrats when he said a few days ago, “It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires  … I don’t really understand why Republicans don’t take Obama’s offer.”  Why, he wondered, should we “defend a bunch of millionaires”.

Does Kristol not understand what Kennedy and Reagan understood when they argued that tax increases in a recession will slow growth and decrease government revenues.  The argument is not about millionaires.  It’s about rational tax policy.  Why not make that argument rather than concede the argument with the language of the left.

And beyond the tax question, the real problem is wildly out of control spending.  Taxing the 1% even more will not remotely fix our budget problem.  Taxing high earners at 100% would only be a drop in the big, big bucket.  The debt would still be enormous and growing.  That’s the story that needs to be told.

After the election, much of the discussion among Republicans about the Hispanic vote started with the premise that conservative positions are anti-Hispanic.  That is our opponents position exactly.  But is there something racist about wanting secure borders?  Are Mexicans racist for protecting their southern border?  Is it racist to be against a socialist welfare state?  These are not racist or anti-Hispanic positions and we will never out-Democrat the Democrats in pandering on these issues.  Never.  If we say the liberals are right and we favor open borders and expanding welfare, then we have lost the battle at that point.

When you hear a Republican like George Bush say he is a new kind of Republican - a “compassionate conservative”,  you should realize that he is saying that regular conservatism is not compassionate.  That is wrong and is a good example of accepting the premise of your opponents.  Watch for it.  Republicans do it all the time.

One other possiblility to consider is this.  When establishment Republicans say, essentially, “We agree with you Democrats and want to be more like you”, they may mean exactly that.  They are striving to be Democrats-lite.

Andrew McCarthy tries to explain why Republican voter turnout was so low for this election.  Apathy among Republicans explains a big part of the loss.  But how do we explain apathy in this election?  Here is an excerpt:

Somehow, Romney managed to pull nearly 2 million fewer votes than John McCain, one of the weakest Republican nominees ever, and one who ran in a cycle when the party had sunk to historic depths of unpopularity. How to explain that?

The brute fact is: There are many people in the country who believe it makes no difference which party wins these elections. Obama Democrats are the hard Left, but Washington’s Republican establishment is progressive, not conservative. This has solidified statism as the bipartisan mainstream. Republicans may want to run Leviathan — many are actually perfectly happy in the minority — but they have no real interest in dismantling Leviathan. They are simply not about transferring power out of Washington, not in a material way.

As the 2012 campaign elucidated, the GOP wants to be seen as the party of preserving the unsustainable welfare state. When it comes to defense spending, they are just as irresponsible as Democrats in eschewing adult choices. Yes, Democrats are reckless in refusing to acknowledge the suicidal costs of their cradle-to-grave nanny state, but the Republican campaign called for enlarging a military our current spending on which dwarfs the combined defense budgets of the next several highest-spending nations. When was the last time you heard a Republican explain what departments and entitlements he’d slash to pay for that? In fact, when did the GOP last explain how a country that is in a $16 trillion debt hole could afford to enlarge anything besides its loan payments?

It’s worth reading in its entirety.

I have pasted some interesting election commentary below.  Let’s start with Rush Limbaugh, who explained the election in just 8 words:

“In a Nation of children, Santa Claus wins.”

“Do you realize that Barack Obama’s message is that the people who are making it possible for him to be Santa Claus in this country aren’t working hard enough so he’s going to tax them more?”

“Say what you want, folks: Mitt Romney did offer a vision of greatness, a vision of traditional America, a vision of an American recovery and return to prominence.”  But it was rejected.

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Michael Walsh at NRO:

First, the Republicans should never again agree to any debate moderated by any member of the MSM, most especially including former Democratic apparatchiks like Stephanopoulos. What used to be the American journalistic establishment — and I spent 25 years in it — is now out and proud and fully committed to the Obama Way. For them, this was the moment they’d been waiting for since the 1960s, their chance to (as they see it) change the course of American history, to be participants instead of just observers and stenographers, and if they had to first compromise, and then abandon, their stated principles of objectivity and neutrality, so what? The game was worth the candle. They will go to their graves feeling good about themselves.

…[Republicans] can’t win without a media operation that can neutralize the 15 to 20 points that MSM advocacy regularly contributes to the Democrats. The only way to beat the media is to replace the media — and if you don’t think the media won this election for Obama, you’re delusional.

Finally, as for Romney, whose political career is now over, I have mixed feelings. Like John McCain, he never really took the fight to Obama and, more important, Obamaism; he spectacularly refused to engage the Democrats on an ideological level, to explain why conservative principles are better than the chimera of “progressivism,” ….And with the intelligence community leaking damaging details about Benghazi on a near-daily basis, he inexplicably took the entire issue off the table. He’s a good man, but a bad candidate, albeit the “most electable” of an unelectable lot.

In the end, though, Mitt lost because he and his team were incapable of grasping one simple, terrible fact: Far too many Americans today don’t want a job, they want — again, to use Obama’s term — revenge.

They just got it.

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Veronique de Rugy at NRO:

Andrew McCarthy on “Immigration and Delusion”:

Could you find a more sharp disagreement between genuinely smart folk than in the competing description of Hispanic immigrants offered by Heather Mac Donald and the editors of the Wall Street Journal? Here is the Journal this morning:

Immigrants should be a natural GOP constituency. Newcomers to the U.S.—legal or illegal—tend to be aspiring people who believe in the dignity of work and self-sufficiency, and they are cultural conservatives. They are not the 47%.

Here is Heather yesterday:

If Republicans want to change their stance on immigration, they should do so on the merits, not out of a belief that only immigration policy stands between them and a Republican Hispanic majority. It is not immigration policy that creates the strong bond between Hispanics and the Democratic party, but the core Democratic principles of a more generous safety net, strong government intervention in the economy, and progressive taxation. Hispanics will prove to be even more decisive in the victory of Governor Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30, which raised upper-income taxes and the sales tax, than in the Obama election.

Heather is clearly right. Anyone who has followed her work on this topic for years knows her sobering insights are based on extensive, on-the-ground research and careful analysis. The Journal, which often reflects the views of the Republican establishment, bases its immigration views on wishful thinking. And not just its immigration views. Today’s bromides about “aspiring people who believe in the dignity of work and self-sufficiency” are of a piece with the Journal’s similar soft-spot for the “Arab Spring” and Muslim outreach. These GOP fantasies are similarly based on the wishful thinking that Islamists are also “cultural conservatives” sure to forge freedom-embracing democracies when empowered in the Middle East and become model Americans when courted here — sure to assimilate seamlessly into our society rather than seek to change it fundamentally.

Falling in love with your own high-minded rhetoric is no substitute for clear-eyed examination that takes the world as it is, not as we would have it. In point of fact, Islamists, like many Hispanic political activists (think: La Raza), are statists. As I’ve detailed in The Grand Jihad and, more recently, Spring Fever, their thoroughgoing alliance with the American Left is ideologically based — it is not a product of insensitive messaging or “Islamophobia.” Islamists revile finance capitalism, favor redistributionist economic policies, and endorse nanny state regulatory suffocation as well as an ever-expanding welfare state. This is not because Leftists made inroads while conservatives idled. It is because — though this often seems unimaginable to the Journal — Islamists, like many Hispanic activists, are the vanguard of a different culture that they passionately believe is superior to the culture of individual liberty.

There is no single-issue quick-fix to the challenge of ushering them into the Republican coalition. Rather, there is a choice to be made: either convince them that they are wrong, meaning make the unapologetic case for liberty and limited government; or fundamentally change who you are, meaning accommodate their statism.

The fact that this choice is easy to identify does not mean the right alternative is easy to implement. Convincing skeptics of the long-neglected case for freedom is going to take a long time — you can’t cede your leading institutions to statists for decades and expect to turn things around over night. But the second alternative, the one that is so easy — and obviously for some, so tempting — is surrender and steep decline. Accommodation only works in a normal political order where both sides have the same core values but differ on how to validate them. It does not work when one side is looking to vanquish the other.