Difference between Conservative Politicians and Political Conservatives

Why Some Conservative Politicians Talk a Good Game, But Don’t Really Mean It

By Daniel Greenfield
Saturday, April 17, 2010

We see it every election. The conservative candidate gets up and spells out everything wrong with the liberal position. And then he gets elected, and tosses it all to the wind. The same problems continue and actually get worse. The behavior seems irrational, because even the candidate is a hypocrite, it seems as if would be safer in a cost-benefit analysis to follow through on his promises, than to abandon them.

There is however an unfortunate split between conservative politicians who view liberal policies as an existential threat and those who view them as a political threat. Conservative politicians who take the existential view believe that those policies are actually dangerous to the long term survival of the country. By contrast Political Conservatives, who view those policies as a political threat, see the situation in terms of political survival only.

A democratic system requires that politicians cultivate voter bases. And the easiest way to cultivate such a base is by pledging to fight an ongoing problem that a great many people care about. But eliminating that problem would also risk eliminating the base that they’re depending on. Which means that the key to political success is to keep the problem, while pledging to fight it. This way both sides can come back to their base on election day and demand their help. And then rinse and repeat every other election day after that.

Such deliberate political stalemates are often cynically cultivated in order to “farmâ€