Every so often I jump over to see what Daniel Larison has to say on his Eunomia blog. Larison says Eunomia is Greek for "The Principle of Good Order" but it is also the name of a Greek goddess, said to be daughter of Hermes and Aphrodite, sister to Hermaphroditus, who personified bisexuality, Peitho, who personified seduction, and in some traditions sister also to Tyche, mistress of fortune, and to Priapus, who personified erectile dysfunction. 

Another tradition has Eunomia being one of the second generation of Horae, the three goddesses controlling orderly life. I'm sure that's the one Larison would choose, because all the mythological broughaha above sounds suspiciously like a HuffPo report on the last Republican National Convention.

Anyway, staunch Catholic Larison has chosen to name his blog after Eunomia. He calls himself a "traditional" conservative, as opposed to what he describes as the "movement" conservatives in the Republican Party. I took some flak for suggesting there might have been some real conservativism behind the initial Tea Party movement, but Larison seems to feel some wisps of kinship with them, too. Still, he doesn't see them having a lasting impression on the Republican Party.

Republican Victory, Conservative Loss

... I wanted to post a couple of my responses from the thread to explain why anti-Bush, traditional conservatives shouldn’t be very pleased with the prospect of a Republican House majority.
...

On the whole, I don’t regard Tea Party activists as enemies at all, even if some or many of them might see me as one. In many respects, they are on the right track. It’s true that I don’t have much respect for movement conservatives who aligned themselves with Bush until things went awry, then pretended that they never treated Bush as one of their own, and have now once again identified themselves completely with Republican electoral fortunes. It’s certainly true that I am annoyed by some conservatives. These are the conservatives cheering on the current electoral wave driven by economic discontent and anxiety, but whose economic and trade policies would tend to exacerbate that discontent and anxiety in some of the very states that are about to deliver Republicans so many House seats. Do voters in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania really want to empower the party that is foursquare in favor of outsourcing and free trade? That’s what they seem poised to do, but I don’t think they’re going to be happy with the results. Do people who are furious over the bailout of Wall Street really want to make John Boehner, the pro-bailout friend of financial interests, into the Speaker of the House? If things work out as most people think they will, this is what will happen. I hope I’m not the only conservative who finds that a perverse and rather sickening outcome. I don’t consider that to be “making the same arguments the other side makes.” I consider that to be a critique rooted in conservative skepticism of state capitalism and decentralist distrust of concentrated wealth and power. Maybe I haven’t explained myself or made my arguments as well as I could have, but that’s what I keep trying to do.

I find it hard to get enthusiastic about Republican gains this year because they are wholly undeserved, and because they seem more than likely to result in the re-empowerment of all the same people who supported and enabled Bush’s agenda as if nothing had happened. Is it really beneficial for movement conservatives for their most visible elected political leadership to be John Boehner and Eric Cantor? I have been arguing that Boehner should be replaced for years, so I’m hardly going to become giddy at the thought of him as Speaker of the House. Has all of this clouded my judgment and made me hope that this rather appalling scenario (i.e., Boehner as Speaker) doesn’t come to pass? Maybe, but I don’t think so.

I assume that the activists who really are on the right track are going to be sidelined or marginalized at the first opportunity by a party leadership that is perfectly content to exploit their energy and then cast them aside. The “Pledge to America” has already told us that this is what will happen. On the policy front, I am concerned that some things, such as the arms control treaty, will be scrapped in the wake of the election, and that wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the broad, near-universal hysteria about Obama’s foreign policy coming from movement conservative think tanks, pundits, and activists. Far from correcting for the foreign policy errors that helped drive them from power, the most influential movement conservatives have become even more misguided.

...

Ultimately, I see concentrations of wealth and power as the real enemies of conservatism as I understand it, and I see a lot of conservatives and Republicans aligning themselves with both in the service of getting themselves back into power, so I can’t say that I see that as conservative success. I am under the impression that the “centrists” dedicated to protecting centralized power and concentrated wealth are the real enemies of the bulk of both “Blue” and “Red” America, and I suspect that competitors within the political class want to keep pitting us against one another as a way of winning our support against their political class rivals while neglecting the interests of the rest of us.

I can't argue with much of that, but I wonder if Boehner has a blog called Priapus.

I decided early on that candidate Obama, despite his soaring rhetoric, was very much a centrist, and since Kucinich could barely get into the debates, I haven't been as surprised as some that Obama hasn't pursued a strong leftist agenda. I've been disappointed in some cases, but not really surprised. But he has surprised me in his pursuit of consensus even to the point of surrendering his mandate. Larison, however, cites a columnist that saw that coming.

The Sanctification of the Status Quo

... I was one of those people who pored over [Obama's] speeches and parsed his interviews, and that was how I came to my assessment of him as a rather dull, conventional center-left Democrat. In [an] article that has since vanished into the ether, I wrote this:

    "An apt description of what the next President will actually represent was penned, in a different context, by columnist Robert Samuelson, who once described Obama as the “sanctification of the status quo.” Though his lifelong search for stability and rootedness are frequently lost in the polemics and panegyrics about his life, close study of his biography reveals a desire for consensus and accommodation to structures already in place. Assimilation to the norms of the American cultural and political elite makes Obama seem alien mainly to those who feel great alienation from most national cultural and political institutions where Obama has thrived (i.e., conservatives), but the very elitism that they (correctly) perceive is also evidence of Obama’s aversion to challenging established norms and introducing radical change."

    "This will reassure most of his enemies as much as it disheartens many of his friends. If you have a high opinion of the Washington establishment and bipartisan consensus politics, Obama’s election should come as a relief. If you believe, as I do, that most of our policy failures stretching back beyond the last eight years are the product of a failed establishment and a bankrupt consensus, an Obama administration represents the perpetuation of a system that is fundamentally broken."

Two years ago, Republican partisans engaged in election-year misrepresentation were bound to get this wrong, but almost two years into Obama’s first term there is really no excuse for [such] misunderstanding. If one insists on mischaracterizing the legislation Obama has signed as being to the left of what he campaigned on, one will continually make the error that Obama governed from the left of his party and conclude that the “loudmouths” were right about him. In fact, almost every bill he signed was less to the liking of progressives than his original campaign positions. He hasn’t really been “more conservative” than his campaign rhetoric suggested. He has instead being more or less exactly what one should have expected given his campaign rhetoric and his political career.

I find myself wishing that more people were really the conservatives and liberals they claim to be.