Repeating the tired canard that Democrats only criticize and have no ideas, the ethically (and grammatically) challenged
Sen. Conrad Burns says, "It is us that's got the vision, the hope," the "us" presumably being conservative Republicans rather than Abramoff payees. Well, here's a snippet from last week's
George Will: "Conservatives are happier than liberals because they are more pessimistic." Ah, the vision, the hope.
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Will says their pessimism about government makes conservatives happier in three ways. First, they're happier because they get to feel right most of the time since things usually do get fucked up. Second, on the rare occasions when they're wrong and things don't get fucked up, well, they're happy about that. And finally, since they have no faith in government, they accept that "happiness is a function of fending for oneself," and this acceptance apparently contributes to their happiness.
Sen. Burns's claim to the contrary, Will's smug bleatings here and in general demonstrate what should be obvious to most people by now: Conservatism is fundamentally and quite literally vacuous. It is devoid of any idea beyond letting things be because, sigh, anything government tries to do for the commonweal will only make things worse.
The conservative corollary is that the only good collective action is self-interested collective action, i.e., corporate. The hidden hand will take care of the macro effects, and if it picks your pocket, well, you'll just have to learn to be more careful, won't you? For the powerful, this is a clearly self-serving idea to promote. For the weak, it's an argument for complacency, which may console people who are overwhelmed by the demands of simple survival, or for rapine on the part of the more ambitious amongst us.
It's a good thing that the people who founded this country weren't conservatives, or they would have been sitting around with the rest of the Loyalists saying, "Settle down, good neighbors! We're well enough off. We should just continue fending for ourselves and not try to change the government. We'd only make things worse, you know. Long live the king!"
To our detriment, influential conservatives after Shrub's dad lost to the hated Clinton were determined to get "the vision thing" and became "neoconservatives," i.e., visionary pessimists. Having no faith in "princes," though they had become the princes, they understood that their way to happiness was to fend for themselves, and they did.
So they got to be happy in two of Will's three ways. First, they got to be right: "the unintended consequences of bold government undertakings [have been] larger than, and contrary to, the intended ones" (Will). They've sure been right about that (although we should not casually accept the equivalence of "unintended" with "foreseen and understood to be likely but ignored." These folks haven't even been playing the odds; they've been playing the lottery.) Unfortunately for all of us, they've missed out on that second, smaller, portion of happiness that comes when things happen to go right. But finally and most importantly, they have been in a dandy position to fend for themselves, humbly accepting that the best they could hope for was to use their government positions for personal gain, clearly a position preferable to depending on government to do something right.
So yes, Senator Burns, Republicans do have "the vision, the hope," but the vision is apocalyptic, and the hope is for better pickin's in the "fend for yourself" derby. It's not good enough that you have vision and hope. What is your vision of? What are you hoping for?