Actions Have Consequences: or, How to Advance Your Beliefs By Helping a Candidate

Ideas only have consequences if someone acts to advance them.

“I am but one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
— Edward Everett Hale

by Rod D. Martin
March 27, 2001

Conservatives forever complain about their political leaders. But they don’t do a lot about it.

Liberals (or more precisely, Leftists) are quite different. Coming as they do mostly from distinct interest groups possessing activist political cultures and a sense of victimization (be they unionized workers, civil rights activists, feminists or whomever), leftists grow up on a steady diet not only of ideas, but of the strategies and tactics necessary to win. From cradle to grave, they look to the state as a sort of political savior, and they learn early how to get from it what they want.

By contrast, conservatives do not and never have thought in these terms. Generally, conservatives just want to be left alone, and see government as a necessary evil, nothing more. Their lives …