Health Care BS

It is difficult, when reading people like Larison (via Sullivan), to escape the conclusion that conservatism is a type of masochism. Larison seems wistful for the usual conservative humilation:

The GOP seems to be making what ought to be an easy win into a national Phyrrhic victory in which the relative strength of conservative activists inside the party becomes vastly exaggerated.

Apparently, Larison failed to notice that the GOP was dragged kicking and screaming to the Hoffman camp. The party establishment, you will recall, supported the perfidious Dede.

And isn’t it a good thing for actual conservatives to increase their influence within a party that has at least some chance of influencing national policy? Not if you enjoy defeat.

Larison would rather focus on the Virginia and New Jersey elections because those races seem to confirm that the influence of conservatism is still marginal.

If things go as I expect them to with a Republican pick-up in Virginia and a Democratic hold in New Jersey … It will mean that Virginia will have chosen a Northern Virginia moderate who successfully ran away from his earlier social conservatism while New Jersey re-elected an incumbent who was thought to be highly vulnerable and discredited by corruption.

At present, actual conservatives don’t have enormous influence in the GOP. If Hoffman wins, that will change. A rational conservative would regard that as a positive.

While most conservatives have been frustrated by the movement’s repeated whippings, people like Larison have been hissing through clinched teeth, ”beat me harder baby.”