Helen Weir
November 11, 2004
How and why Dr. Keyes won in Illinois
By Helen Weir

"It's great about Bush getting re-elected," my conservative friends have been saying to me these days, "but, hey! You must be bummed about Keyes' big loss in Illinois."

"What 'loss'?" runs my somewhat testy reply.

"The one where he got, like, a quarter of the vote."

"That," I inform them, "was a loss for Illinois, and for the Republican Party, and for the country as a whole, not for Dr. Keyes." And though this may sound — coming from an avowed Keyester — like sour grapes, it is not. In fact, the course and outcome of the senatorial election in Illinois reveals a self-inflicted wound on the cause of conservatism in America, which deserves careful reflection before we will be able to recover, as well as evidence of a growing Declarationist movement in the Land of Lincoln and elsewhere, from which we can draw great hope.

Dr. Keyes' campaign, as unlikely and late-breaking as it was, should have been trumpeted from the rooftops by every conservative commentator in this nation. Finally, we Americans could have witnessed a real contest, one in which the race card had been providentially taken off the table, and the true threat posed to American liberty by the stealth-mode socialists of Obama's ilk could be made manifest. But, no. What did we get instead?

We got Tony Snow saying he preferred Obama's background to Keyes' — Obama, a measly state senator, with more "experience" than a Reagan-era ambassador to the United Nations? Snow tipped his hand as to the origin of this blatantly absurd assessment by denouncing Dr. Keyes as a man who had "declared war on the Republican Party." So now it's an attack, to call our Party back to its Lincolnian roots?

We got Laura Ingraham giving Dr. Keyes the "cuckoo" sound effect for chanting a Psalm during a national interview. The candidate did this so well, by the way, that it stung tears to my eyes. But evidently, even some conservatives consider any public expression of Christian belief to be embarrassing at best.

We got to wait in vain for Dr. Keyes to be invited to give the keynote address at the Republican National Convention, counterbalancing Obama's role on the Democratic side. Wouldn't we want to show the world that we, too, are a diverse party, graced to have within our midst an orator capable of moving hearts in our platform's direction? We got to see Dr. Keyes snubbed by Illinois GOP leaders as well, confirming the impression that the Republican Party in general would rather see a Senator Obama make it to Washington, D.C., than to allow a pro-life "star" to "rise" in its own ranks.

And aside from the occasional interview by good old Sean Hannity, we got precious little else — just general agreement, conservative as well as liberal, that overlooking a candidate as "unelectable" as Keyes is merely good sense. If Alan Keyes were truly "unelectable," America would be no more. But Alan Keyes isn't "unelectable," just unelected for the time being, as divine providence would have it. And that is something to be hopeful and not humiliated about.

Somebody, somewhere, has got to start standing up for the Declaration of Independence in this country, which outlines the parameters within which liberty paradoxically functions. When those very parameters are pulled into the political process, as theoretical libertarianism would have it, liberty collapses into anarchy, which in turn ushers in tyranny. Keyes is being rejected by conservatives who have lapsed into libertarianism in their understanding of America, if not (yet) in their practical conclusions. Are there not also "conservatives" who are, as Dr. Keyes put it in his prophetic concession speech of last week, whispering "in our ears that only our passions matter, that only our desires matter, that only our choices rule," and who are "leading a people down the road of its own destruction" as surely as the liberals are?

Listen to Tony Snow some time, talking about how we conservatives happen to be "winning in the marketplace of ideas" at the moment — as though truth itself were a commodity to be traded along with soybeans and hogs. Perhaps we should assign it a point value, and upgrade its status daily on the NASDAQ. Consider the viewpoint of Mark Davis, a talk show host on WBAP-AM in Dallas, who holds that Roe v. Wade is wrong, but only because it goes against the country's "consensus." Evidently, on his read, if a country agreed to — say — wipe out its Jews, this action would be valid as long as it was mainstream. Think about Bill O'Reilly's facile "objectivity," which denounces both the "extreme left" and the "extreme right." If political conclusions could be rightly reached in that way, then the best position for the "good Germans" of the Third Reich to take would have been to insist that only some Jews be done away with.

Behind the "Keyes is unelectable" mantra lurks a libertarianism — conflated with "conservatism" or not — that has lost its footing in bedrock Jeffersonian, Judeo-Christian truth. Only the marginalized voices in the Republican wilderness — like Keyes nationally, McClintock (who refused to step down against the RINO Schwarzenegger) in California, and Suder here in Wisconsin — are standing for that which is non-negotiable in American political life, but their followers are growing in number and conviction all the time. Victory will come, but it will not come in the "horserace" terms of libertarianism, nor through the ascendancy of a Republican Party compromised and denatured. Truly, as Keyes insisted in that same concession speech, "we will not preserve our freedom until we have restored respect for innocent life in the womb," and we will not restore this respect even by convincing a majority to "vote pro-life." Victory will come when Americans are again convinced, as they were at their founding, as they have been throughout the course of our two centuries of existence, that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not things that can be voted on in the first place. Because Dr. Keyes, during his short window of opportunity as a candidate for senator from Illinois, energized over a million people in that lamentably "blue" state with new or renewed Declarationist realization, I count his efforts there a victory indeed.


"It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those that cling to false hope."

Gandalf at the Council of Elrond, The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 282.


© Helen Weir

 

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Helen Weir

Helen is a freelance writer based in western Wisconsin. (Her works have also appeared under her former name of Helen Valois.) She is a member of the Militia Immaculatae movement of Marian consecration founded by St. Maximilian Kolbe.

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