I think it is interesting to observe that people who consider themselves to be a part of a political movement can only see the world in terms of the movement's ideological framework. Cause-conservatives seem to think it is still 2010, when they had a bold victory in an off year election. But, the world has turned and the energies in place are quite different.
Cause-conservatives lost their bid to declare gay marriage illegal. Their anti-gay bigotry has been rightly ruled to be discrimination and unconstitutional - a bitter pill for the religious right wing who seem to think that God is in the business of punishing countries for the "terrible sin" of loving people of the same gender. I think any problems that America encounters in the future will be man made, not punishment from God.
In Texas, a state senator, Democrat Wendy Davis, staged a 13 hour filibuster and killed an extreme anti-abortion bill which would have stopped abortions after 20 weeks. She had some remarkable support from the gallery to shout down the Republican tricks to end the filibuster. (Although, it looks like Governor Perry is calling a special session to jam the bill through after all, but I think he does so at the peril of hurting the Republican Party in the eyes of the nation as a whole.)
And, oh yes, affirmative action was reduced some but survived.
Cause-conservatives have very clearly branded themselves as opposed to gay love, opposed to women's right to choose and control their reproductive lives, supporting anything they can think of to reduce the turnout at the polls of non-white voters. And, oh yes, they want to drag the country into another civil war in the Middle East. I don't think those are winning political positions in any place other than the right wing ideological bubble.
As long as cause-conservatives limit their sources of information to right wing talk radio, Fox News, and other right wing sources, they will continue to think they are leading a charge into a more pure right wing world, featuring evangelical moralities, libertarian sensibilities, and hawkish eagerness for Middle Eastern wars. But they only seem to be leading themselves off the cliff into the land of marginal political outrage and ineffectiveness, or so it seems to me.
They could try tuning into moderate center left sources like NPR, Thedailybeast.com, the New York Times, or the Washington Post and start seeing the world as it exists outside of the right wing bubble. Who knows, they might start to come up with some helpful ideas of governance based in reality rather than continue to feed themselves the dogma within their ideological bubble and continue to march along the path of self destruction.
