Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk reportedly said that Republicans would do much better if they’d be more compassionate toward immigrants and stay away from ‘bedroom’ issues. Is the billionaire innovator right?
Alfonzo Rachel and Bill Whittle create two new episodes of The Virtue Signal each week. Access the full archive.
18 replies on “‘Compassionate’ Conservatism: Is Elon Musk Right About How to Revive the Republican Party?”
Perhaps discussing VIRTUE is a no win situation when talking about our country’s politicians of the left and the right.
All of our would-be archetype/heroes have feet of clay. Some have grown such enormous feet that that is all they seem to be—completely and utterly huge clay feet with no other discernable body parts! Feet that stay planted for years and refuse to move from their comfy slippers of power and graft.Those clay feet have begun to have an awful stink coming from them. A usurper’s feet have the worst mal-odor of all.
Bill, what about Peter Thiel?
Well it’s not quite so simple, Elon.
I agree we should stay away from “bedroom issues”, but when the “bedroom issues” move beyond the bedroom and are imposed on others to not only tolerate but embrace, or else … it’s no longer a bedroom issue. Murder is also not a “bedroom issue”.
But yes, there are gay people out there, folks, and it’s become increasingly clear that these feelings are not their “fault”. You can agree or disagree that actions and feelings are two different things and tolerate one but not accept the other. And we should probably reflect that in our outward attitude – as there are a significant number of gay conservatives, even if it probably is a small percentage.
We also need to find simpler ways to convey that our policy preferences ARE, in the end, more compassionate to more people than the “progressive” alternatives.
My younger brother has a saying. “If it has a politician’s name on it, it’s pork.”
I don’t typically consider myself to be socially conservative, but …
… I will always take issue with the abhorrent behavior of people when their bedrooms and corresponding bedroom activities spill onto the public square.
… I will always protest when illegal aliens steal resources and liberty from my children and grandchildren and my friends’ children and grandchildren.
Unfortunately, Zo is preachin’ to the choir. Those who promote such reprehensible behaviors are not listening, because they are either ignorant or motivated to promote destruction and chaos.
Compassion requires neither my compliance nor my complicity in evil acts.
Amen! “The fear of men will prove to be a snare.” Being slandered by a sewer rat Leftist swine is a BADGE OF HONOR, and DECENT people need to start taking pride in being slandered by sewer rat Leftists. If they’re not slandering you, you’re not doing enough.
Zo, Jesus didn’t have to “balance” common sense with compassion. The absence of common sense is the absence of compassion. This is just like truth & love. They are two sides of the same coin and cannot be separated or pitted against each other. The absence of truth is the absence of love.
I agree but the problem I have with Leftist slander isn’t because it bothers me. It doesn’t. Very little that anyone says bothers me even a tiny bit and that’s why I’m so outspoken.
The problem I have with Leftist slander is that it works on other people who don’t know any better. It’s pretty hard to get people on our side if we let the Left slander us as racists, bigots, and fascisti.
Therefore we should not just let them slander us and call it a badge of honor. It is a badge of honor but that doesn’t take it far enough in my view. We need to call them out for the Liars they are. It’s not slander when it’s true and you can prove it.
As for what you said about truth and love being inseparable, I agree completely. It applies to combating slander too, the truth is on our side and we need to make certain we stay on the side of truth or we lose that advantage.
If I’m called racist, bigots or fascist, I either ignore it and mentally label them a jerk, or if in the mood … If called racist or bigoted or sexist I ask why there say that. Normally they say because I’m white, male conservative, etc. I then point out since they don’t know me that, theyare racist, etc. If called fascist, I ask to define the term. And then point out they have no evidence of that for me or conservatives. They hate that.
Yeah, don’t let them just get away with it even if all that means is not letting them get under your skin or into your head. Even if I don’t challenge them due to circumstances I don’t take the position they’ve honored me with their lies. I think they’re idiots and have no honor to bestow on anyone no matter what they do. You can’t suck blood from a turnip and you cannot derive honor from the dishonorable.
When it comes to idiots, they’re just idiots. Giving them anything more is more than they deserve.
We have no quarrel here. I revel in rubbing Leftists’ noses in my contempt for them and their despicable antics. Part of that process is to promulgate that contempt to any onlookers who might have been contaminated by the Leftist vermin’s slander. (I’m sure you can dig up several other parts of that process which I failed to include here. I didn’t list ALL of them because I have other things to do in my life besides type every tedious little detail out to the Nth degree every time I type something.)
I think there may be a misunderstanding about libertarianism here. “liberals who hate taxes” might describe the libertarian party, but the libertarian party hasn’t really represented libertarianism as a philosophy very well.
Libertarianism as a philosophy centers around what they call the “non-aggression principle”, which basically means “don’t start fights”, or “don’t hurt other people”. This generally means the policy of leaving people alone if they aren’t hurting you or other innocents. It does not exclude fighting back in self defense, and despite what some “libertarians” may claim, it does not endorse abortion because ending the life of an innocent person a violation of the non-aggression principle by definition.
Granted, they do sound a bit utopian to me at times, and they often tend towards anarchism, which is why I’m not entirely in their camp.
In fairness though, I don’t tend to find myself in the republican camp either because while they preach the gospel of limited government, they have their own agendas that they have no problem with employing coercion against other people to achieve. Neoconservatives within the republican party have started an awful lot of wars in the past few decades for example.
I guess my point is the freedom minded (not neocons) conservatives and the NAP following libertarians would find enough in common with each other to be allies in fighting back against the aggressive expansion of the left if they would stop turning their noses up at each other.
Um, no, that’s not Libertarianism, that’s English Common Law which is based on the Golden Rule and says you should not be allowed to do anything to someone else you wouldn’t want them doing to you. The Bible espoused that principle long before anyone came up with the word “Libertarian”.
Libertarian philosophy of “You do you and I’ll do me as long as we’re not hurting anyone” isn’t the same thing.
Because all that’s needed to circumvent it is to claim that whatever you’re doing isn’t hurting anyone else. We saw this with gay militancy and “We just want to love who we want to and be left alone”. Which might have been OK, we were mostly doing that as a society anyway. But in changing the definition of “we’re not hurting anyone” they successfully and intentionally opened the door to a whole slug of bad things and we’re reaping that today. With CRT, transing little kids, teachers who are deviants bragging about indoctrinating the children in their classrooms, etc.
We were told that gay people wouldn’t come for our kids, they just wanted to be gay in peace and be left alone in their ‘love’ preferences. We were told that their orientation is legitimate as anyone else’s and there would be no detrimental social repercussions if we would just accept that as a fact. As soon as we said “OK” the slippery slope was placed in full effect and unless we stop letting them do things like this, unless we stand up for a moral and just society even if that makes some people less than comfortable, it’s going to get worse not better.
In fact, it’s getting so bad that even some gay people don’t want to be associated with the lunacy that walked in when we opened that door.
Another example of how Libertarianism gets it wrong is their naive approach to drug abuse issues. They preach that there should be no legal restrictions on any drugs at all. What you put in your body is your own business. Etc.
Problem is, it doesn’t end there. Someone gets hooked on drugs, loses interest or capacity to work and provide for themselves then must resort to theft or worse to support and undurable, undeniable urge. Letting people do that to themselves hurts other people they have no right to hurt. Even if someone doesn’t go all the way down the road to being a gutter crawling criminal they still hurt their family and those close to them much more than if they didn’t use drugs at all.
If Libertarians were honest about this sort of thing they’d say “You can use drugs if you want but … If you don’t work and if you hurt anyone else in any way you will be put to death after a speedy trial and sentencing. Because you’re allowed to hurt yourself but you’re not allowed to hurt anyone else so if you do, you die.”
Pretty sure if they did that it wouldn’t be long before drugs were not a problem in this nation any more. The people who could handle it would be OK and the genes that contribute to chemical dependency would be skimmed off the gene pool.
(BTW, I feel the same way about any substance abuse no matter what substance is abused. I drink fine whiskey and the occasional cocktail and I despise drunks as much as I despise any other kind of addict. )
But they’re not going to take that position, are they?
You might say that all this isn’t “true Libertarianism” and you might have a point if you do. But it would be the same point as anyone who advocates Communism and says that the atrocities and excesses of every Communist regime in history are because they didn’t get it right and failed to practice “True Communism”. Then claim that they will be the ones to finally get it right and usher in a secular, temporal human paradise.
Ideology isn’t just ideology. It must have practical real world applications that take into account things like human nature. If it does not, it’s not going to work and adopting a failed or potentially failing ideology over a proven self-correcting system that works is always a bad idea. Anything else is something we should understand and stand against. It does no good to say something is a bad idea if you can’t say why.
In this sense, various forms of Libertarianism are as hazardous to our Republic as Social Marxism. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work no matter how spiffy it sounds. Obviously Communism sounds great to some people or the Communists would never be able to sell it. If they had to tell the truth, that power would be concentrated in the hands of a ruling elite who would live like kings and everyone else is going to end up miserable and hungry … No one would ever buy that. Either.
All of that said, there are more conservative Libertarians and less conservative ones. We are a natural ally of the more conservative ones and the natural enemy of the less conservative anarchists.
In reality, those more conservative Libertarians are really just squishy conservatives deep down so we’d have to keep an eye on them no matter what. The real hope here would be to convince them to stop being so squishy because it leads to a place they don’t really want to go.
It’s better to just help the conservative screaming inside of them to get out, to come out here where it can thrive. A more conservative Libertarian will do just fine in a conservative society where the reverse is not necessarily true. A conservative is not going to be happy with Libertarian politics because the ideology is a bust if it is taken to its natural conclusion. A dominant political entity that calls itself Libertarian is absolutely going to do that. They have no reason not to, they’re not conservatives. There’s nothing to hold them back from trying ever and ever ‘better’ ideas until they create a disaster.
I think about the only way the “legalize all drugs” can work is if they also ask for no government medical insurance, options for private insurance to kick off substance abusers, and espouse a willingness to let addicts die in the streets (or opium dens). If you want to say doing drugs doesn’t hurt anyone else, then you have to mean doesn’t cost anyone else either. Pain in the pocketbook still hurts.
All very true. Arguing that anyone should have full access to any psychotropic chemical they want whenever they want is a disastrous idea.
Nathan Larson responded to me and engages in sophistry by saying —
“Being against the government drug war is not the same thing as being pro addiction.”
… So I’m not going to respond to him.
Because that’s not the position of any “true” Libertarian. The position of Libertarians is that you can do anything you want as long as you don’t do any sort of harm to anyone else and so you should be able to put anything in your body you want to. It’s your body.
I’ve heard this countless times from Libertarians. It fits the Libertarian ideology. Rewording it to sound like it doesn’t is simply sophistry and a matter of semantics. It is not substantial.
As I pointed out and you amplified upon, there are nasty ramifications to a policy like that. We are addressing just a single example with drugs, there are many more. Libertarianism opens yet another can of worms and puts us on yet another path to destruction.
A path to destruction is a path to destruction. The whole point of Conservatism is to apply what we know works for the greatest good. Not experiment with society and invite collapse if the experiment goes south.
Nathan goes to pains to point out that a theory that doesn’t work is a ‘bad theory’ but the problem with theories is by the time you conclude they’re not going to work it’s too late and the damage is done. At that point it’s just a matter of degree regarding when this conclusion is reached and what if anything can be done to overcome the social inertia of behavior based on the theory that sounded great, was put into practice and turned out ‘bad’.
Like Marxism, it is a social hamster wheel that only stops when the hamster drops dead from exhaustion.
As I said to him above — A Libertarian can live, prosper and thrive in a Conservative Society but the reverse is not true.
If Conservatives and Libertarians have an enemy in common with Social Marxism it’s an uneasy, reluctant, shaky alliance at best.
Libertarianism is a childlike worldview. It’s the old game we played when we were kids. The “If I were king of the world I could make everything wonderful” approach. So the kid then declares free pizza and ice cream for everyone. That’s the basis of it but it’s shrouded in more complicated sounding ‘theory’. Marxist theory is the reverse side of that same coin.
Conservatism is not like that. Conservatives try to learn lessons from what has worked historically and then improve on that. That’s how we got as far as we are today and we have come a long, long way. It’s idiotic to give all that up for a new theory. It is dangerous and potentially disastrous to think there’s some “better way” than the best way ever devised by human minds in millennia of human experience and efforts.
If you want to know about communist philosophy, you’d read Karl Marx right? The parallel would be if you want to know about Libertarian philosophy, you’d read Murray Rothbard.
To quote Rothbard: “The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person of property of anyone else”
Also Rothbard: “If a theory is correct, then it does work in practice; if it does not work in practice, then it is a bad theory. The common separation between theory and practice is an artificial and fallacious one. But this is true in ethics as well as anything else. If an ethical ideal is inherently “impractical,” that is, if it cannot work in practice, then it is a poor ideal and should be discarded forthwith. To put it more precisely, if an ethical goal violates the nature of man and/or the universe and, therefore, cannot work in practice, then it is a bad ideal and should be dismissed as a goal. If the goal itself violates the nature of man, then it is also a poor idea to work in the direction of that goal.” Read more here if you’re interested: https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/were-not-equal/
Now use your own judgement and decide if your list of democrat crimes that you attribute to libertarians adheres to the libertarian creed.
Also note that being against the coercive government solution is not an endorsement of the problem. Being against the government drug war is not the same thing as being pro addiction. The most ethical and effective solutions to addiction are private charities who help people who want to be helped. Which would you say has been more effective in helping alcoholics, prohibition, or A.A?
Is libertarianism perfect? No. Is conservatism perfect? No. Do both groups have a common enemy in the militant left? That seems like an obvious yes to me
Wow, a lot to address in this one … And no, Elon isn’t right about this.
Bill tries to make the case that we should not call ourselves “compassionate Conservatives” because Conservatism IS compassionate by nature.
When the Founding Fathers were arguing over the ratification of our U.S. Constitution one faction insisted on adding the first ten Amendments which we know as the ‘Bill of Rights’. That faction wanted to define specific rights that under no circumstances were to be infringed. They had a good point.
The other argument was that a Bill of Rights should not be included as a condition of ratification. Because the way the Constitution was conceived and written already covered those rights and every other right automatically. This faction felt that spelling out specific rights would encourage an interpretation of the Constitution wherein all the rights not specified were not rights at all. They had a good point too.
There was an impasse. Neither side wanted to budge from their position. Eventually the side opposed to a Bill of Rights compromised and allowed those first ten Amendments in order to get the rest of the Constitution passed into law. If they had not done that and had prevailed in their position there would be no Bill of Rights today.
In hindsight does anyone doubt that if it were not for the 2nd Amendment the Left would have gone the way of the rest of the industrialized West and forbidden or severely restricted firearms ownership in the United States?
Do any of you really believe that if the rights in the first ten Amendments were not specifically spelled out that our political enemies and opponents of personal liberty would not have finagled, re-interpreted and manipulated us out of those rights as they have done so effectively with all the other non-specified rights?
In hindsight the wisdom of insisting on the Bill of Rights was the one thing that has preserved any semblance of individual liberty in our nation and even then it’s been and continues to be a very iffy thing with even those clearly delineated rights under constant attack. If they were not clearly spelled out long ago this would be a different nation today.
So obviously being specific about something is not always a negative. It’s a mistake to think that Conservative also automatically means compassionate. All that’s required to remove any compassion from Conservatism is to redefine what Conservatism means and our adversaries are masters at redefinition. They’re doing that as I sit here writing this and they’re damned good at it too.
So very much depends on how a concept is defined. Elon Musk apparently defines “compassionate Conservatism” as being soft on law breaking illegal immigrants and a libertine, libertarian view of private conduct.
I don’t agree with Elon Musk on that subject at all. I define “compassionate Conservatism” to mean showing mercy and providing aid to the deserving poor who find themselves in trouble through no fault of their own. This is the correct interpretation of compassion as it pertains to Conservatism and for instance applies to veterans who have fought for this country. Especially those who have sustained an injury or type of damage that limits or eliminates their ability to earn a living the same as anyone who is as healthy as they were the day they swore their Oath of Service. Those people lost that ability trying to preserve our Republic, they deserve compassion, all the compassion we can spare.
The same goes for their widows and the families they left behind. We are a wealthy nation, we can afford to do these things and we should do them.
So I call myself a ‘compassionate Conservative’ and that’s how I define it. I define my compassionate Conservatism so as to deny others (like Elon Musk) the opportunity to define it for me and to differentiate myself from Conservatives who have no compassion.
There are absolutely Conservatives who have no compassion and hide behind Conservatism as an excuse for their hard hearts. I know several of them. They would say to those dead and wounded veterans and their families “Thanks for your service. Now you’re on your own. You can sink or swim from here and good luck to you.”
This is why I always cringe a little inside when someone says “Thanks for your service” to me. I don’t want your words. I appreciate your sentiment and gratitude but sentiment and gratitude plus about five bucks will buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks. It is deeds not words that count.
I know people like that. Who think that saying they’re grateful for something is every bit as good as demonstrating real gratitude. It’s not. Empty rhetoric is empty rhetoric no matter how sincerely it’s intended. Which means it’s useless and more than useless. It’s harmful because it is not an excuse not to act though many believe it to be.
I know a man who calls himself Conservative and votes Republican. He makes all kinds of promises that he sincerely means when he makes them but never follows through on and almost never actually does what he says. He considers himself a “good person” thereby. If you’re like that I wish you’d just go join the other side because my side doesn’t need people like you.
So I don’t see anything wrong with the phrase ‘compassionate Conservatism’ because of these reasons.
One of the causes of the Left going apeshit regarding the overturning of Roe v. Wade is that they are masters of the slippery slope. Our political enemies know how to put us on a slippery slope and use that faculty as a political tactic to major effect. They think we’re like them, just on a different side of how to obtain ultimate power so they believe that striking down Roe v. Wade was our version of putting the nation on a slippery slope. You’ve all seen them crowing about how “Now the Republicans will ban interracial marriages” and all kinds of other such nonsense. They make a point of this because when given a political advantage like striking down Roe v. Wade is to us that is exactly what they would do.
A while back Bill said, paraphrasing “Saying we don’t want to stoop to their level is egotism.”.
This slippery slope tactic that the other side uses is a level I’m not willing to stoop to. Call me egotistical all you like, I’m not going there. If we become like them then we are them. In this above video Bill and Zo both lament the existence of “RINOs” because they are indistinguishable from our political foes. RINOs are Republicans who have become defacto Democrats by learning from and using the tactics of Democrats. They have stooped to the same level as Democrats and I despise them for doing that. So … It’s lamentable to become like them but stooping to their level is not a bad thing. That’s a cognitive disconnect.
There are certainly things like the Culture War that we can learn lessons on how to fight from our opponents. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is someone who we all respect saying something that doesn’t smell right. I’m not going to stoop to the level of lying, manipulating, cheating, ends-justifies-the-means craven sliminess of our opposition. That doesn’t mean that I won’t condone and apply some of the things they’ve done being used to advance our cause, it means I won’t stoop to their level just to win. I will use some of their own weapons against them as long as using those weapons does not make me like them.
Because if we do that we don’t win, we just trade one set of immoral, unprincipled masters for another. The end result is indistinguishable either way. If we stoop to their level we must give up the things that make us Conservatives because they have certainly given up the things that make them Americans so the lesson is clear. If you want to destroy the Republic, stoop to the level of the Democrats in all things and that’s what you will achieve. That’s what the Democrat Party is attempting to achieve.
Compassion can be spanking a child when he’s doing something wrong or grabbing a hand and yelling at a child reaching for the hot stove.
Compassion can be sitting a friend down and hitting him with the hard truth that what he is doing will lead to something bad. It can be saying “No I won’t give you a $20 that you’re just going to spend on a bottle” (but I will go buy you some food).
I think some on the Left and Right, and I know some on the Left, think doing something and meaning well is compassionate, when it is really evil that leads to the suffering of others. Welfare is fine as a hand up but too often is just a hand out that keeps someone poor. Calling math racist might feel empowering to someone with a Studies degree and a well paid job, but telling the black boy he cannot be a rocket scientist because math is a tool of the white patriarchy (or black girl, with that movie about the women in space science in the 60s) does not help him.
Plus, if the rumors about Elon’s views of marriage (that vows are somewhat more like “guidelines”) are true, then we can accept the comments he makes that are true, and agree with him on those, but not see him quite as on our side.
Yeah, I agree with every bit of that. There seems to be an egocentrism today that’s even worse than the historical normal. People, if they do anything to ‘help’ someone else, do that thing because it makes them feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Not because it actually does any real help. They give that drunk you mentioned enough money to buy a bottle and feel like they’ve helped someone when the opposite is true.
I’m having a hard time following Bill’s logic on a few things lately. He looks tired, and he looks angry. Maybe he is suffering some COVID aftermath issues or some other personal problem, I don’t know. I know he’s not at the top of his game in the logical reasoning department lately. Maybe he needs to take a vacation or just get away from being in front of cameras until he gets whatever this is worked out.
Here’s what I’m noticing …
He said recently that people who say “I won’t stoop to their level” when referring to our political foes — Is an egotistical act.
It’s not at all egotistical to refuse to become a figurative intestinal parasite by emulating our opponents. I won’t stoop to using the foul, slimy tactics our opposition favors, I won’t stoop to scoop up the gutter sludge they love to roll around in. That’s not me being too proud to fight or refusing to fight in any way, it’s me choosing the ground I’m going to fight on. That’s not egotistical, it’s sound tactical and strategic positioning. Choosing high ground to fight from is always the better option, but you have to actually fight either way. It’s better to force the enemy to climb up to get at you and insisting on this is not egotistical one bit. That’s what the Left is trying to do to us and should be denied to them both tactically and strategically. It’s using their own tactics against them. There are other tactics that they use which are useful to us and can be used against them.
This is a good example:
Using the words “compassionate” and “conservative” in the same sentence right next to each other is a positive not a negative. “Compassionate Conservatism” is we Conservatives defining ourselves and denying the enemy that privilege. It is us counterpunching to their slanders of racism, bigotry, homophobia, fascism and all the rest of the things they try to unjustly hang on us.
Using the phrase “Compassionate Conservatism” IS using their own tactics against them without getting down in the manure with them. It’s not stooping to their level because it is a true and accurate descriptive adjective of real Conservative values. It is an effective counter tactic to their libelous assaults on the very substance of real Conservatism.
Yet Bill argues against the phrase because he insists Conservatism is compassionate and that ought to be obvious and so go unsaid. While at the same time he holds the position that we need to use the tactics of the Left against them and declaring that anyone saying “we won’t stoop to their level” is egotistical.
That’s a cognitive disconnect. It is holding two diametrically opposed ideas and arguing both of them are correct. I’m not nitpicking here, this sort of inconsistency and muddled thought is not typical of Bill Whittle. I’m a bit concerned for him.
Here’s the thing about this as I see it. It’s all fine and dandy to know and cover all the theoretical, philosophical and ideological aspects of our Conservative values. You can’t explain why you fight for something or why other people should join you in your fight — If you don’t know what that something is.
That’s only the theoretical half of the battle though and it is the losing half if you don’t go from there to the practical application of how to engage and overcome the enemy.
It’s not enough to know why you should fight, you need to know HOW you should fight too. This might be an attitude carried over from my military training but it’s sound as can be also. It’s not enough to tell a Marine why he should fight someone, hand him a rifle and drop him into the combat zone. You have to train him in the strategies and tactics that will overcome that enemy, you have to teach him how to use the rifle you gave him to maximum effect. You have to not only provide him with the theory you have to teach him the practice or he will fail no matter how enthusiastic he is.
Tactical application is something we on our side are dreadfully short on. How to take the high ground and make your foe climb to get at you. How to counterpunch slander with a truthful description applied broadly. How to overcome is as important as why to overcome. How to do that without becoming the thing you’re fighting by not stooping to the vile tactics of your foe is paramount.
In a combat situation, it is unwise to stoop to the level of your enemy. If you do that, you will lose and there’s nothing at all egotistical in that. If you start shooting women, children and other non-combatants you will generate a wall of resistance that cannot be climbed because you are no longer forcing your enemy to rise to your level, you have sunk to his. You want to keep him down there while you stay above him and pick him off whether that’s fighting on a physical hill in a gun battle or on an ideological hill fighting a Culture War.
You have to learn and teach others how to recognize and counter the tactics of your enemy. That means observing what the enemy has done which worked for him and then devising means to turn that around on him, without becoming him. That doesn’t mean you just dust off your hands, shrug your shoulders, declare “I’m not stooping to their level” and walk away either. That’s just a cop out and an excuse not to engage your foe. You have to learn, to teach yourself, to fight smart not hard.