The Coming Conservative Crack-Up
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., with comments by Tom Bethell, Richard Brookhiser, Victor Gold, Daniel Henninger, Lewis E. Lehrman, Joseph Sobran, and Ernest van den Haag THE COMING CONSERVATIVE...
...Conservatives celebrate this latest manifestation of the liberal crack-up, but the ugly American truth is that despite four Republican victories in the last five presidential elections, the heralded conservative "revolution" has been a one-dimensional thing—a political current running against a cultural tide that continues to move the country leftward...
...Though momentarily dispirited, the conservative movement is solid and it's here to stay...
...They remain preponderantly liberal, purveying a cultural Zeitgeist that brings even a conservative President to pay obeisance to liberal sacred cows and shibboleths...
...Certain supply-siders can't be invited to the same party...
...Sharp debate and discussion are important...
...The Democrats won in 1976 (and hold control of Congress) by managing to mute the philosophical contrast between the parties...
...They have been on the outside so long that they have become habitually cliquish and sectarian...
...This is important because, however much the political or social climate turns against them, liberals are able to retreat to this stratum for incubation, thence to reemerge, when the weather patterns change again, like seventeen-year locusts...
...The young democracies will become stronger if they are not forced to hobble about on American crutches...
...All covert operations should cease forthwith...
...The conservatives have not adapted to an era that is moving beyond the problems of the early 1980s...
...For liberty was made for life...
...Had they arrived in the White House any earlier, bellicose minorities still holding to Liberalism's old beliefs and bugaboos would have mired them in controversy, but by the late 1970s New Age Liberals were in disarray...
...Conservatives are now on speaking terms with one another...
...News & World Report, and another to the New York Daily News...
...The British media have the diversity of a robust left and right...
...conservatives are timid about reaching out to Kemp and there is a curious guardedness about him...
...Stop kidding yourselves, conservatives...
...The Republicans may lose if their candidate is devoid of conservative ideas...
...The world has changed...
...Economic Growth...
...I have seen it retard fuddy-duddies like Russell Kirk and the libertarians, who can become violent at the first departure from orthodoxy...
...For no lasting American party of principle can today be established upon the ground of narrow self-interest, no matter how economically plausible...
...The narrowness of America's conservatives is a mystery...
...This was a daunting task—liberals are anything but tidy—which left little time to address the architectural problems of our society...
...A standard rule of American politics is that elections are for the incumbent to lose, not for the challenger to win...
...There is truth to their charge, but despite their wizardry at raising funds there is little evidence that the businessmen among them have ever attempted to purchase publications or broadcast media...
...The Soviets were taking SALT I cum grano salis and sending forth a vast array of missiles to unbalance the nuclear equation, particularly in Europe...
...Don't you think...
...Richard Brookhiser is managing editor of National Review...
...he cast a spell...
...Conservatives, alas, are narrow...
...We should remind the Japanese that World War II now really is over and that how much they spend on defense is their decision to make and should not be influenced by constitutional provisions imposed by U.S...
...magazine set his agenda...
...Many Liberals, unappeased by this progress, took up radical causes and dreamed of a New Age...
...He is only sporadically political...
...At dinner parties, conservatives agree on the conservative President's failings, but once past the failing President agreement ends...
...T he real explanation for the 1 political reign that began to falter so badly last November reposes in the fact that by 1980 the Liberals had played out their hand...
...In ignoring the reality of a conservative political ascendancy they have also left the conservatives unexamined, their weaknesses unreported...
...VICTOR GOLD Behold America's liberals...
...They hardly form a conservative community...
...Incrementally it will be a better place because of -the conservative presidency, and surely this is one purpose of politics...
...then, when he seemed about to score a knockout, he ran out of gas and spent the better part of a year trying to rope-a-dope his way through the Iran-contra mess...
...Conservative factions tend to insist on the rightness and primacy of their opinions...
...America has a one-party media, and conservatives have done little to change it...
...Politically, it may seem so...
...From the fantasy of Hair to the fantasy of Platoon, New Age Liberalism has served up its sentimental pifflings and all Americans either savor them or take their leave...
...ERNEST VAN DEN HAAG Since the 1930s the main task that fell to conservative administrations was cleaning up after exorbitant liberal parties...
...Will life sour still more for conservatives...
...There is no alternative...
...As he waved to the crowds and cameras, the real regime seemed to carry on—and change hands—independently of him...
...Wills's displeasure, but there is no such thing as magic...
...Then came failure, not the failure of his magic but the failure of Ronald Reagan's conservatives...
...He adopted its foreign policy and many of its domestic bugaboos...
...He is political, outgoing, and, by my lights, a public nuisance...
...They are principled...
...Anyway, many conservatives don't like to address structural problems...
...But conservatives are unhappy, mostly with each other...
...Not having the White House isn't fun...
...Now they must do the same in foreign policy...
...In the United States, we manage to divide the world and all its problems into two major problems...
...Yet within the Republican party the conservatives have become so impotent that it is likely the Republican candidate will get through his convention uncontaminated by their good ideas...
...Ronald Reagan's rise is explained by Liberalism's crack-up...
...For a hint into R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Conservatives don't have to penetrate the culture...
...From early in his first term it became clear that the Administration was being stage-managed by those notorious "people around the President...
...Underlings arranged secret initiatives—secret not only from Congress but from the President himself—so as to provide him with "plausible deniability...
...From Democrats and Republicans, any argument to the contrary must itself betray the fundamental American proposition as set forth in the Declaration of Independence—the animating spirit of our laws...
...Wills discoursed on the political phenomenon of Ronald Reagan for two full pages, mentioning the Nuremberg rallies three times...
...which is to say, one attuned to the cultural Spirit of the Times...
...They had no plausible policies left to perpetrate on the American people...
...Reaganism, however blurred, dominates the Republican party...
...should remove its troops from Western Europe and from South Korea (now easily able to defend itself against Kim II Sung's slaves...
...Gerrymandered opinion polls may say otherwise, but an 011ie North brings out its true colors...
...They become conservative through experience and observation, not teaching...
...So did Reagan, once upon a time...
...T hus after the political victory of Ronald Reagan has come the conservative failure...
...For all the years of the Reagan presidency, the Liberals and those who repair to them for wisdom have been giving false testimony as to the failings of the left and the right...
...There was no Reagan revolution, just a Reagan bedazzlement...
...Reagan gave conservatism a beachhead in Washington, but he didn't follow through...
...At the level that counts, they own it...
...It denies conservatives a place not only in the national debate on issues but also in shaping culture and in creating a political community...
...Liberal businessmen buy and support publications all the time...
...Since I brought The American Spectator to Washington two years ago, the most oft-repeated witticisms directed at me by conservative friends have been variations on the theme that in Washington I shall be "corrupted...
...Worse, the political agenda has slipped away from us...
...What we ultimately want for that kid when he graduates is not a one-way ticket to Powertown—but the opportunity, and the encouragement, to go to Washington, or New York, or Los Angeles, or the academy—wherever ideas are minted and marketed...
...Those who speak of the Reagan magic ignore all this...
...Not so conservatives...
...Anti-Communism...
...All it needs is a little leadership...
...They could not overcome their parochialism and coalesce into a political community...
...However much they value continuity, conservatives cannot shirk the task of reversing major political trends...
...The conservatives of Great Britain have institutions that have been around for decades...
...Often he is hardly social...
...The Liberals' failure was in their weakness for the wild thrills of radicalism...
...Wills from your mind and recall the Carter revels...
...The Democrats may lose the 1988 election if their New Age Liberals force the Democratic candidate to carry all the weird ideological baggage that they have acquired in recent years...
...Italy has eleven political parties, though of course there aren't eleven significantly different theories of how to run Italy or anywhere else...
...After dominating the political agenda for many years, one of the two American parties became so prideful and self-righteous that it began demanding full internal loyalty and public support for each of its discrete parts...
...Whoever runs this Administration has feared to take its case to the public that twice elected Reagan by enormous margins...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987 and the higher journalism—than they were ten years ago, or twenty...
...The nation is latently conservative...
...Too often conservatives have insisted that only their favorite dish leads to good health...
...Trying to blockade it with warships is like trying to ward off a virus with a suit 'of armor...
...Well, I do not want to incur Dr...
...Not to forget the Post and the three major television networks...
...In a hair-raising essay on Ronald Reagan, Professor Garry Wills heaved off what was the Liberals' stock perception of the Reagan Administration four months into its present trials...
...LEWIS E. LEHRMAN There can be no Conservative New Age in the absence of a Conservative Party of Principle...
...The ordinary conservative looks within himself and purrs...
...A piece of advice for conservatives as they prepare for the possible election of a second conservative President: If you wish to live in a country where people really stand on principle, move to Italy...
...The conservatives' intellectuals have the most innovative suggestions for public policy, but for six years they have failed to engage Liberals or even hold a significant place in public forums...
...not life for liberty...
...In the end, all else will be unavailing for the mercantile Republican party...
...We will regain the initiative the same way we gained it in the first place—by telling Americans that we have what they need...
...Unemployment was at 7.1 percent...
...Most would rather retire from the fray and whine about Bias In The Media...
...Eight years removed from the White House and they still can't get their act together for the 1988 presidential race...
...News & World Report went on the block it was bought by a Liberal...
...Yet his candidacy flounders...
...They acted on the quite reasonable assumption that liberals would not help in this enterprise...
...Proof that the conservatives have failed to establish a political community, which is to say a hierarchy of influential organizations and leaders, came in 1985, when in pursuit of public support of the White House's Central American policy Lt...
...Consequently, Jimmy Carter, who is admittedly a very bright fellow, will probably go down as the worst President of this century...
...Cnservatives have spent a lot of sweat ; c nstructing forums for their own ideas and breeding grounds for their own talent...
...The image of Ronald Reagan in the White House driveway, clasping hands in a mindlessly liberal publicity exercise, stays with me...
...Along these lines, the best news I've heard recently was that one of my acquaintances has gone to US...
...I have been among them for years...
...We are now more than six years into the Reagan Revolution...
...The American voters washed their hands of all of them...
...But doldrums aren't Gotterdammerung...
...We've been around a while...
...Conservatives are no better integrated into what might be called the cultural second echelon—the lower arts Owing to their parochialism conservatives have never quite succeeded in creating a political community comparable to the Liberals' community, and they have no idea of a cultural community...
...Accordingly the U.S...
...The Senate has finally slipped away from the Republican party...
...Today their political leader should, based on the issues and long service, be Congressman Jack Kemp...
...As Abraham Lincoln rebuilt the shattered remnants of commercial Whiggery upon the unshakeable ground of first American principles`free men, free labor, free soil"—so, too, must the modern Republican party be restored upon the very first American principle which the party has all but forgotten-1`that all men are created equal"—at home and abroad...
...Ernest van den Haag is John M. Olin Professor of Jurisprudence and Public Policy at Fordham University...
...The libs have sold the Administration on the myth which Reagan's victories should have demolished: that Republicans thrive by adopting "moderation...
...What we ultimately want on campuses is not a hundred-and-first alternative newspaper, but a situation in which a conservatively inclined kid heels the Harvard Crimson—with the attitude that, if he is good and he works hard, he may become editor in chief...
...The ideas with which Ronald Reagan separated his party from its dispiriting past policies emerged from years of political argument...
...It is too early to give up hope, and not too late to work for the institutionalization of conservative ideas...
...We follow the election returns, see the liberal agenda rejected —at least, on the presidential level—and conclude the tide has turned...
...His present problems are explained by conservatism's subtle weakness...
...The ordinary New Age Liberal lets out a roar, organizes ad hoc committees, fires off letters to the editor...
...Instead of engaging the nation in a debate on the security of Central America, or of our nuclear defenses, conservatives find themselves sniping at the Boland Amendments and the impending INF pact...
...In fact, it is democracy that confers immunity on a country exposed to this virus...
...If they do not do so soon I can see a book on the subject...
...The lesson of the Reagan years is that Congress will support such payments, but only if the President has the courage to take his case to the American people (via the news media) and lobby for it...
...Call it The Conservative Crack-Up...
...Daniel Henninger is chief editorial writer of the Wall Street Journal...
...Consequently the political future, which will be decided on election day 1988, is murkier than need be...
...A shorter version of this essay appeared earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal...
...Just as the American Whigs of the 1840s foundered on the narrow commercialism of tariffs, central banking, and internal improvements, so, too, do the Republicans of the 1980s founder after the success of tax rate reductions...
...that future we must understand the recent past...
...With a few exceptions such as the Heritage Foundation, the conservatives in their parochialism keep to themselves...
...and so they rarely have acknowledged leaders in politics, journalism, the academy, or even business—and they are supposed to be the ideology of business...
...We got Baker I, Regan, Baker II...
...So far it has not, as RET points out...
...The young are being taught by leftists...
...They have been years of achievement, but only in terms of a few salutary policies...
...Conservatives think that because Communism is a menace, the appropriate response is to block it with military armor, troops stationed abroad, bases dotted about the globe, and anachronistic talk of sea lanes, choke points, strategic minerals, and warm water ports...
...Always, however, he returns to his belief that the Fortieth President beguiled us with magic...
...With adequate staff work, a keen sense of timing, artful compromises, and an ability to focus onmost of the urgent problems of the hour, President Reagan implemented most of his prized policies by 1986...
...The U.S...
...Victor Gold is The American Spectator's new National Correspondent...
...Liberals gobble them up...
...TOM BETHELL There is a serious problem with foreign policy...
...The Commemorative Banquet...
...And boy, was it plausible...
...Reagan didn't get around to doing this until 1986...
...Political Action...
...There also is a small but important group of intellectuals disenchanted with leftism...
...What "Hands Across America" doesn't tell us, Howard Baker as Ronald Reagan's major domo in the White House does: that conservatives may win political battles but liberals are still winning the cultural war, in the end dictating the true national agenda...
...But they may have lost sight of the goal—which should be, not to maintain a permanent set of parallel institutions, but to march through the institutions which exist...
...It ought to be doable...
...Perhaps after Iran-contra they will finally learn this...
...They respond to Liberal sallies, they never leave their name on a desirable issue...
...After this infantile prelude, Dr...
...It all belongs to Ted Koppel...
...In Michael Oakeshott's words they "prefer the familiar to the unknown . . . the actual to the possible . .'L-which is prudent, but not helpful when the familiar is a liberal welfare state with monstrous government regulation and spending...
...political decision...
...Thrust Dr...
...Since 1980, the governments of the United States, Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, India, Australia, and New Zealand have incorporated degrees and aspects of Reaganomics into their public policies...
...The conservatives, too, had a weakness that they did not overcome...
...It is infantile, and I have no yearning for a second childhood...
...Carl "Spitz" Channell, a man who rose without a trace...
...Some, like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., were fleeing from Jimmy...
...By 1980 inflation had raced to 12.4 percent, the prime rate was at 15.2 percent, productivity was rising not at all and in some instances falling...
...Each has one or two solutions to the Republic's problems: Supply-side Economics...
...As a result, conservatives have been permitted to saddle the country with a kind of policy board game called "Sea Lane" ("choke points" trump "strategic minerals," and so on...
...The Eternal Verities...
...When US...
...and that all are "endowed by their Creator with" the inalienable right to life, the inalienable right to liberty, the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness—at home, and abroad...
...There are enough of us, and there is a vacuum: The ideas which keep liberal culture going, suffering and sex—who got screwed, and who gets laid—have gotten a little tedious...
...Nations that are self-governing don't need to be U.S.-led...
...Their views are sound enough but eachis only one recipe on life's menu...
...Black conservatives badmouth each other in private...
...RICHARD BROOKHISER Are we, too, headed for a crack-up...
...But it also overcomes conservatism's new recruits, the neoconservatives who gave up on Liberalism when its utopianism became intolerable...
...Jimmy Carter's presidency revealed the futility of New Age Liberalism...
...Still, I am not quite as pessimistic as RET...
...The weaknesses of both New Age Liberals and conservatives are notable, for both groups have enormous influence on presidential politics...
...The President has muffed the job...
...But the leading social indicators—education, the arts, the media—argue otherwise...
...But conservatives should remain aware of the danger inherent in their politics...
...They ignore that in 1980 Americans rejected New Age Liberalism...
...They have made modest inroads into the media...
...Position Papers...
...Many conservatives in Washington take pride in existing apart much as black activists pride themselves in remaining out of the mainstream...
...Economic Education...
...In this alternative view, Communism is regarded more as a promise than a threat...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987 51...
...leadership" is also outmoded...
...Bob Dole isn't a conservative and Jack Kemp's position on Social Security and the welfare state is troubling...
...JOSEPH SOBRAN Give Garry Wills his due...
...AIDS testing has replaced abortion as the ultimate conservative single-issue litmus test...
...Remember our war cry: "Let Reagan be Reagan...
...America was ready for military rebuilding, tax cuts, deregulation, a slow-down in the government's growth-rate, and the projection beyond our borders of power rather than mere pious bulls...
...Howard Phillips has the highest standards since Cato the Younger...
...Owing to their parochialism they have never quite succeeded in creating a political community comparable to the Liberals' community, and they have no idea of a cultural community...
...The conservative rarely reaches out...
...Magic was not needed...
...This is not meant as an appeal to "pragmatism," a code word for selling out the best part of one's position...
...Historian Kenneth Lynn has pointed out that the Liberal political model that in the early 1960s was expected to bring peace abroad, tranquillity and justice at home, and pandemic compliments to its progressive statesmen came to ruin in an endless Southeast Asian war, proliferating grievances from students and minorities at home, and a sick economy...
...The Liberal model had taken America as far as it could...
...He's only saying what Tom Bethell has said in these very pages...
...The evidence of success is abundant...
...Unfortunately in academe, where most of them dwell, they are chiefs without injuns: the academic rank and file (as distinguished from the neoconservative elite) is passionately leftist, even in the hard sciences...
...Besides, it's not as if we're up against Franklin Roosevelt...
...Ronald Reagan realized as much and succeeded in making some structural changes...
...But Reagan will be an ignis fatuus unless a widespread and united conservative constituency coalesces...
...and as the world becomes'' increasingly democratic the U.S: must respond by withdrawing its hardware and, its destructive dollars from around the globe...
...Genuine Reaganites, both within and without the Administration, have been continually frustrated by White House staffers whose instinct (continued on page 51) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987 19 CRACK-UP/SOBRAN (continued from page 19) has been to cajole, evade, manipulate, and appease the lib establishment, especially the media...
...The first American principle must now become the practice of party leadership: and such leadership must begin by elevating, to primacy in the party platform, the first of the enumerated inalienable rights set- forth in the Declaration and in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution—the inalienable right-to-life...
...No wonder conservatism got little real traction...
...They do not even take an interest in each other's work...
...Nicaragua and Iran had fallen to anti-American regimes...
...For a few rounds he was dazzling...
...Conservatives simply do not take much interest in the world around them...
...Anon, they radicalized themselves beyond the wildest dreams of Franklin Roosevelt or John E Kennedy...
...improvisations, instead of principled policy...
...A Bushite presidency is "unacceptable...
...Neoconservativesdon't trust the New Right, and the New Right launches surgical strikes against the neocons...
...Prior to 1980, political truth was thought to be the direct opposite of these propositions...
...Generally speaking, all have come to believe that the private economy creates national wealth,– that deregulation and denationalization enlarge the private economy, and that tax policy and growth are related...
...He deregulated, decreased taxes, rearmed, reformed the tax system, and slowed government growth...
...Throughout Reagan's Administration its opponents have steadfastly refused to acknowledge the forces that thrust them out into the cold...
...Aid to anti-Communist groups, such as the contras, is a U.S...
...Republicans must learn to believe that their policies can be popular if advocated publicly, but look terrible if implemented covertly...
...Coq au vin is delicious and good for you, but man cannot live by squiffed chicken alone...
...As the liberals sometimes say, Communism really is an "indigenous" phenomenon...
...Nor can I forget that when this conservative President became vulnerable during the last years of his Administration, he opted to pacify the liberal gods by naming as his chief of staff a "moderate" Republican...
...Oliver North could bypass all conservative leaders and turn to charlatans such as Mr...
...Wills...
...The News Letter...
...is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Not least the liberals too are disunited and, unlike the conservatives, have no idea where to go (except back...
...A myth commonly shared by self-congratulating conservatives and self-denigrating liberals is that we live in the age of Reaganism, a rightward reactionto the New Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society...
...This is not weakness nor isolationism but necessary adjustment to a changing world...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., with comments by Tom Bethell, Richard Brookhiser, Victor Gold, Daniel Henninger, Lewis E. Lehrman, Joseph Sobran, and Ernest van den Haag THE COMING CONSERVATIVE CRACK-UP As the Administration loses steam, we ask: Was it foreordained...
...The Liberal coalition in the late 1970s had cracked up into a riot of enthusiasts thumping for feminism, income redistribution, neoisolationism, small-is-beautiful economics, minority preoccupations and other manias, all existing in very uneasy alliance...
...Lewis E. Lehrman is founder of the Lehrman Institute, a public policy forum...
...In America New Age Liberalism is our culture...
...They have not even thought of maintaining enduring institutions comparable to those of the Liberals...
...T he conservatives' weakness is not 1 radicalism or extremism but parochialism...
...Ronald Reagan's America...
...Wills, the Reagan Administration did build a structure...
...Otherwise the conservatives have lost their heft...
...Moreover, they can see only one or two ways to get THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987 17 these solutions across to their fellow Americans: Seminars...
...Some reorientation may be in order...
...is editor-in-chief of The American Spectator, a syndicated columnist, and author, most recently, of The Liberal Crack-Up...
...There is something decidedly shaky and ephemeral about all their think tanks, their magazines, their activist groups...
...Traditional Family Values...
...And Nancy: she wanted him to go down as a "peace" President, so we got sporadic jerks toward arms control...
...Conservatives have largely succeeded in imposing this policy on the nation because the visible alternative to it comes from the left, now in control of the Democratic party...
...Contrary to Dr...
...Conservatives are forever complaining about how they are barred from media and the universities...
...The consequence of this piece of narrowness is far reaching...
...The foreign policy of George McGovern and the domestic aspirations of Ralph Nader and Ms...
...Nonetheless, now the conservatives' hour was at hand...
...In this they are as bizarre as vegetarians and as unwholesome...
...The electorate rejected a Liberal Administration in 1980, accepting Ronald Reagan's conservatives warily...
...Fund Raising...
...It remains to be seen, however, whether conservatives are ready to offer themselves to 79 million voters as a coherent movement or as principally a lot of opinionated people...
...The divisiveness of conservatives does so no less...
...Finally, the Soviets, loyally assisted by Fidel Castro, were rapidly endangering American security interests in the Third World and even along our coast...
...victors in 1945...
...All this militates against a conservative future...
...So we got shortsighted P.R...
...More proof came in 1987 when a beleaguered President had to turn to Howard Baker, an admirable fellow but no self-conscious conservative...
...The notion of U.S...
...Conservatives are a motley group of small businessmen (some big ones too —but most biggies prefer the familiar to the possible), farmers, church people (as distinguished from the often leftist clergy), professionals, and, mostly, people impatient with taxes, waste, crime, permissiveness, and appeasement...
...Its underlying rules really date from the eighteenth century when buccaneers ran up the Jolly Roger and seized ships on the high seas...
...Beyond their one or two wonder cures they lose interest...
...Nonetheless, I am not surprised by his resort to superstition...
...In six years of presidential power the conservatives never significantly affected the climate of American ideas...
...The magic is going off almost as mysteriously as the spell was woven in the first place...
...Yes, it has come to this: the Liberals attribute their arch enemy's political triumph to savorings of the marvelous...
...According to him, "Ronald Reagan did not build a structure...
...The average American had been appreciably impoverished by rising taxes and eroding purchasing power...
...should also start talking about closing its bases in the Philippines...
...DANIEL HENNINGER One hallmark of the two-term presidency of a popular conservative has been the persistent unhappiness of conservatives in the midst of success...
...That the perception was widely accepted cannot be doubted: Time magazine had commissioned Dr...
...Jimmy Carter presided over a foreign policy that, notwithstanding all the poetry about superior American values, was actually returning America to isolationism...
...The neoconservatives too adopt one way to save the world: The Quarterly Journal...
...The best news of all will be when such career moves aren't newsworthy...
...Others were dreaming up still wilder pipe dreams...
...Throughout the Reagan years the conservatives have been off pursuing their one way to save the Republic: The Seminar...
...The result is a conservatism composed of conservatives who do not integrate their narrow values into the broad range of human experience...
...Joseph Sobran is a senior editor of National Review and a nationally syndicated columnist...
...In came the conservatives with an agile political leader and a handful of timely ideas...
...But New Age Liberalism is not immoral...
...So are school teachers, as the NEA demonstrates, and the visual and print media...
...The conservatives were not resourceful enough to insulate their President against dissolving into sentimental appeasement toward his Iranian foes...
...Conservatives have been the biggest believers in the Reagan magic...
...Conservatives painfully learned to purge themselves of elitist domestic-policy views...
...Ask a Democrat...
...Let someone else be Reagan...
...A conservative connected these dotty people into a group portrait called the San Francisco Democrats, and the party's presidential hopes collapsed...
...The truth is that the Republicans win precisely when elections are ideologically polarized...
...When the Democrats come forward a year from now with a dwarf at the top of the ticket, and a man at the bottom whose only qualifications are that he is (a) black and (b) not Jesse Jackson, things will look up...
...Culturally, the situation is more serious...
Vol. 20 • September 1987 • No. 9
