Parker: GOP Suicide Pact

Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker notes the self-destructive nature of the drive within the GOP for ideological purity in The Houston Chronicle.

Thus, some conservative members of the party have come up with a list of principles they want future candidates to agree to or forfeit backing by the Republican National Committee. The so-called purity test is a 10-point checklist — a suicide pact, really — of alleged Republican positions. Anyone hoping to play on Team GOP would have to sign off on eight of the 10 — through their voting records, public statements or a questionnaire. James Bopp Jr., chief sponsor of the resolution and a committee member from Indiana, has said that “the problem is that many conservatives have lost trust in the conservative credentials of the Republican Party.” Actually, the problem is that many conservatives have lost faith in the ability of Republican leaders to think.

The resolutions aren't so much statements of principle as dogmatic responses to complex issues that may, occasionally, require more than a Sharpie check in a little square... Most of us know that decisiveness isn't always a virtue, yet those pushing the purity test seem to view nuance as an enemy of conservatism. The old elite corps of the conservative movement, men such as William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk, undoubtedly would find this attitude both dangerous and bizarre. When did thinking go out of style? In fact, the 10-point checklist proffered by Bopp and others is the antithesis of conservatism. As Kirk wrote in his own Ten Conservative Principles, conservatism “possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata … conservatism is the negation of ideology: It is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.”

--Ballard Burgher