Richard Viguerie's Big Con

This one goes out to my fellow journalists, progressive or otherwise.

Please please please please please stop reporting it as news when Richard Viguerie says if the Republican Party doesn't do what he wants it to do, it is no longer "conservative," and that he, as Pope of the nation's "conservatives," will withdraw "conservative" support from the Republican Party, thereby destroying it, unless it does what he says.

Getting these meaningless threats of his quoted is his way of making the Republican Party an offer it can't refuse.

He's been working this hustle for over 30 years. "Conservative" means: all those millions of people you Washington folk can't possibly understand, but I do. He sells his supposed mystic access to these masses for cash on the barrelhead, in the form of mailing lists. If the media stopped quoting him as the arbiter of what is "conservative," he'd lose all his cachet, and have to beg for quarters off a highway exit.

Special coda for progressives: taking him seriously is deeply, deeply, deeply counterproductive to the project of weakening the hold of conservatism in the long term. Every time a conservative—say, Bush—is revealed as a miserable failure, the Vigueries of the world can say he was never "conservative" in the first place, and that "conservatism"—like Trotskyists used to say of "Communism"—has never been "tried." So give us one more chance. We swear it will work this time.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future