IDEAS STILL HAVE CONSEQUENCES

...Today, the conservative movement has evolved from three to four branches—one heart and four heads, it has been said—the traditionalists, sometimes called paleocons, the libertarians, the neoconservatives, and the religious right...

...After Nixon was elected on a conservative platform, he proceeded to appoint liberal Republicans to his cabinet (he would have had trouble finding more than a handful of conservatives, and certainly not enough even to begin to populate his administration), and to push through many new, big government programs...

...In a typical Buckley retort to a reporter who asked what he would do about a threatened water shortage, Buckley quipped, “Let them drink wine...

...Conservatism is much more than a political alternative to liberalism, and much more than a set of policies advocated by a political party or an administration...

...As conservatives began to be elected, winning control of the Congress as well as many state and local offices by 1994, they basked in the perks and the power...

...As a result they will dominate the courts for many years to come...

...BY THE LATE 1960S, the foundation for the new American conservative movement had largely been laid, and the three-part structure that would become one of the most interesting and robust of the American experience was being built...

...Although the foundation for a movement had been laid, there was much to be done before conservatism could become a cohesive political philosophy capable of having much influence on the way the country worked...

...The election was particularly important because it gave Buckley a national bully pulpit from which to talk about conservative principles without worrying about whom he might offend—an echo of Goldwater’s campaign a year earlier, except that Buckley knew he could not win, so it didn’t matter whom he irritated...

...The other DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 2 3 A L F R E D S . R E G N E R Y Today nearly half of all federal judges are conservatives appointed by Reagan and both Bushes...

...We virtually dominate thinking on economics, government spending and taxation, legal theory, education and social policy, foreign policy, and politics itself...

...Today, after a successful Reagan administration and subsequent conservative takeover of the House of Representatives, a candidate’s acceptability is measured not by how liberal he is, or how moderate, but how conservative...

...In terms of politics, there were a few conservatives, but they were largely conservative Republicans or Southern Democrats counting on their respective parties for support...

...Outside right-of-center political forces, such as activist and lobbying organizations, think tanks, grassroots groups, and political action committees, were scarce...

...Next are the courts and the law...

...According to Robert Bork, originalism is the only approach that can make judicial review democratically legitimate, and simply means that the judge must discern from the relevant materials—debates at the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers, newspaper accounts of the time, debates in the state ratifying conventions, and the like—the principles the ratifiers understood themselves to be enacting...

...Announcing the 2008 Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellowship Program $75,000, $50,000, $25,000 Fellowships For applications and more information,visit our website or write: Mr...

...Today, although there is no end to accusations and charges of left-wing media bias—mostly justified—conservatives in fact have a huge media presence...

...It was ideas—the philosophy of conservatism—that the students at Indiana University set out to introduce as they decided to start publishing their little journal 40 years ago...

...Sooner or later, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil...

...So it is with politics...

...Before long Republicans, which most conservatives were, began to look indistinct from the Democrats they had replaced...

...And all too often, many did not understand the principles for which the movement stood...

...it brought the conservative intellectual and political forces together for the first time...

...The winners will be announced at an awards dinner in Washington in the spring...

...But Buckley did, pointing out that government-run social programs usually made things worse, citing studies by the few liberals who recognized their shortcomings —policy intellectuals like Irving Kristol, Pat Moynihan, and Daniel Bell, among others...

...First, there were Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and the rest of the economic libertarians, who were largely concerned with individualism and freedom, believing that government should not meddle in business and the economy, but should allow free markets to thrive on their own...

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...Finally, the traditionalists— men like Richard Weaver and Russell Kirk, who were more interested in preserving what was left of Western civilization and culture—believed that political problems were, at root, religious and moral problems...

...Said the New York Timesmany years later: “Buckley’s bid for office was an I D E A S S T I L L H A V E C O N S E Q U E N C E S 2 2 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 Before 1967 only three elections involving real conservatives ever received national attention, and only one of those was won by a conservative...

...If conservative books were published, they mostly came from a small and struggling house owned and operated by my father in Chicago...

...First, in the ideas department, we conservatives have made enormous strides...

...Conservatives, on the other hand, have developed a thorough body of scholarship on the issue, can count any number of economists, including no fewer than nine Nobel laureates in economics, and best of all have the satisfaction of having applied their economic and tax policy and proved that it works...

...New York publishers would have virtually nothing to do with them...

...its purpose, indeed, is to change the nation’s intellectual and political climate...

...The campaign gave tens of thousands of conservatives a taste of national politics, and while Republicans may have been left depressed by their candidate’s awful showing, conservatives found a silver lining in the clouds of defeat...

...Nobody ever quite knew what a compassionate conservative was, although as Bush worked his way through his first term and into his second, it became evident that there was more compassion than conservatism in the phrase...

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...Reagan’s election taught conservatives that it was possible to win, and his two successful terms as governor would teach them that conservatives could govern...

...The fellowship program seeks journalists who share the Foundation’s mission to advance constitutional principles, a democratic society and a vibrant free enterprise system...

...A first-rate sports team may have the best players, the best coach, the best equipment, and the best training, but it still loses games...

...George W. Bush, who had few conservative instincts, announced during the 2000 primary season that if elected he would govern as a “compassionate conservative...

...The Phillips Foundation is dedicated to advancing the cause of objective journalism...

...They form a sometimes unified, sometimes fractious coalition, agree on some things and disagree on more, but are unanimous in their distaste for liberalism...

...Its ideas are complex and they often conflict with each other, but they nevertheless provide conservatives with a surprisingly consistent worldview...

...Before they do so, however, I think it might be worthwhile to take a look at the state of affairs 40 years ago, when The American Spectatorwas founded, and to remind ourselves of just how far we have come since, of where we are, and what resources we have...

...When he started National Review in 1955, Bill Buckley made no bones about what he wanted to accomplish...

...Twenty Seven Million Americans Cannot Be Wrong” became their watchword, as the newly minted young conservatives and recharged, middle-age volunteers looked around for the next enterprise...

...The remainder of the task is to apply those principles to unforeseen circumstances, a task that law performs all the time...

...Over the next four decades, conservative ideas caught on, the journals grew, books were published, think tanks and activist groups were organized, candidates were elected to office, and the movement became perhaps the most significant force in American politics...

...According to conservative historian George Nash, the movement “has proved remarkably resilient, united in part by overlapping aspirations and by a recurrent sense of mortal challenge from enemies at home and abroad...

...there are dozens of columnists and editorial writers...

...He told friends that it was important for him to enunciate conservative principles and pull the Republican Party in a conservative direction...

...With his charm and wit, Buckley was able to make the case for conservative ideals and principles in a way that Barry Goldwater could not...

...Politics reflects the culture and the way people think, and political success can endure only when it is preceded by a strong and sound political philosophy...

...This magazine,” he wrote in his prospectus, “will forthrightly oppose the prevailing trend of public opinion...

...conservatives virtually own talk radio and control a large segment of websites and blogs...

...It may seem so in Washington, but the world does not revolve around politics...

...By contrast, when two Supreme Court vacancies opened up in 2005, conservatives delivered a list of acceptable judges to the White House, put together a coalition of some 80 conservative organizations to pressure the Senate to confirm them, and raised sufficient funds to run a very substantial lobbying campaign, with the result that two of the most conservative Supreme Court picks in history were nominated—and not men the President would have named had he had his way— and confirmed by a Senate that could have otherwise easily defeated them...

...It has often been said that conservatism is a movement of ideas...

...Indeed, the world is ruled by little else...

...important chapter in one of the crucial events in modern political history, the transformation of the consensus politics of the peak cold-war years of the 1950s and early ’60s, its agenda set by liberals, into the more polarized politics of our era, ruled by conservatives...

...John Maynard Keynes, who should know, said that “ideas are more powerful than is commonly understood...

...in 1965 for mayor of New York—comical not because of the issues, but because of Buckley’s attitude toward the press and toward stupid questions...

...The Goldwater campaign had several other benefits as well: It introduced conservatives to their next political hero, Ronald Reagan...

...The city’s worst problems were largely due to the black and Puerto Rican underclass—issues no politician would dare confront...

...609 Email: jfarley@thephillipsfoundation.org www.thephillipsfoundation.org Deadline March 1, 2008 three—Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun, and Lewis Powell—continued doing what Earl Warren and William Brennan (both appointed by Dwight Eisenhower) had started years earlier...

...Liberals have no theory of taxation or government spending other than redistributing the wealth and using tax policy to buy votes...

...In fact, his ideas about economics did rule much of the world, at least until the revival of free market economics replaced them, relegating Keynesianism to the ash heap of history...

...Out of four Nixon Supreme Court appointments, only one, William Rehnquist, was a conservative, and that was by the luck of the draw...

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...A L F R E D S . R E G N E R Y...

...Applications must be postmarked by March 1, 2008...

...First was the 1964 presidential election starring Barry Goldwater as the Republican candidate, and the first authentic conservative ever nominated on a major party ticket...

...Third, conservatives were heartened in November 1966 when their favorite Hollywood actor was elected governor of California, beating incumbent liberal Democrat Pat Brown by one million votes, the same margin by which Goldwater had lost California two years earlier...

...When the Spectatorwas founded, in the fall of 1967, conservative voices in the media were almost inaudible...

...The word “conservative” became a label, and it applied to virtually everybody who wasn’t a liberal...

...Running against liberal Republican Congressman John Lindsay and liberal Democrat Abraham Beame, Buckley vowed not to suck up to any special interests, but to use the best conservative arguments he could muster...

...Applicants must be U.S...

...In addition, there are separate fellowships on the environment, free enterprise in society, and law enforcement...

...Applications are now being accepted for 2008...

...Second, anti-Communism, which would form the backbone of much of the movement, had been articulated by the likes of Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, and Frank Meyer, and a wide-ranging network of scholars and activists were making their voices heard from one end of the country to the other...

...The Goldwater campaign had been like nothing they had ever experienced, and it was exhilarating...

...Which is exactly what National Review, The American Spectator, and the rest of the intellectual conservative movement have been doing for the past 40 years...

...Ronald Reagan would of course prove to be the quintessential conservative politician: one grounded in conservative ideas, one with a sunny personality and a friendly smile, and one who could appeal to voters in numbers never imagined...

...Most New York publishing houses have a conservative imprint...

...gained stature and popularity, more people joined, often not because they believed in its principles but because it was good politics, or just because it was the thing to do...

...Keynes may have been wrong about economics, but he was right about the power of ideas...

...As with any political or philosophical movement, some things began to come undone as conservatism matured...

...The economic principles explained by Hayek, von Mises, Friedman, and the rest drive public policy, and much of the world has adopted them over the past couple of decades...

...It would take many more pages than the Spectator has available to fully answer that question (in fact I just wrote a whole book about it, and it too only touches on the subject), but let me focus on a few key areas...

...The second was the sometimes comical third-party campaign launched by William F. Buckley Jr...

...free market economics now has more influence on the way the world works than any political party anywhere...

...John Farley • The Phillips Foundation One Massachusetts Avenue NW, Suite 620 • Washington, DC 20001 Telephone 202-250-3887 ext...

...National Review, Human Events, and a couple of other small journals were published and had modest circulations, but the mainstream media, as it came to be called, dominated everything else...

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...After he was sworn in as governor in January 1967 he immediately assumed a national status, and by 1968 he was the most charismatic Republican speaker and the party’s best fundraiser, attracting enthusiastic crowds wherever he went...

...At first it was made up of true believers—was there any other reason to join a movement with no clout at all...

...There are shifts in short-term political trends and candidates who do not live up to their billing, as well as wars and other matters that override normal considerations, each of which may turn an election one way or another...

...Although Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide, taking a good part of the Republican congressional delegation, such as it was, down with him, conservatism’s first presidential campaign changed the political scene forever...

...and although Fox News is “fair and balanced,” at least it is not dominated by the left...

...Pat Buchanan, himself a former Goldwater volunteer, wrote, “Like a first love, the Goldwater campaign was, for thousands of men and women now well into middle age, an experience that will never recede from memory, one on which we look back with pride and fond remembrance...

...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 BY ALFRED S. REGNERY One of them has been the conservative movement’s political, intellectual, and economic progress against the stale dogmas of liberalism over the past 40 years...

...The fellowships will begin on September 1, 2008...

...Although he wound up getting just 13 percent of the vote, the fact that 340,000 New Yorkers voted for Bill Buckley invigorated conservatives from coast to coast...

...Theirs was one of many similar journals, some started by students, some by professional journalists, and others by just true believers, that emerged in the late 1960s, and which, in the aggregate, have helped to define the issues and to develop the ideas that formed the bedrock of the early conservative movement...

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...The conservative movement suffers from middle age, and in a sense has become a victim of its own success...

...BUTBYNOMEANShave conservatives won the war...

...Alfred S. Regneryis publisher of The American Spectatorand the author of the new book, Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism, to be published in January by Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster...

...As one wag put it, they got elected by calling Washington a cesspool, but after a couple of years on the job, they realized it was really a hot tub...

...Liberalism, on the other hand, was DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 2 1 thriving as never before...

...They convinced themselves that the most important thing they could do was to get re-elected, and the best way to do so was to satisfy the voters by spending the taxpayers’ money...

...Conservatives often think they might as well find another cause or, worse, prepare to move abroad...

...Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was going full tilt—creating new agencies, departments, social programs—and spending money with the zest of another New Deal...

...When Nixon ran for president in 1968, he announced that he would only appoint “strict constructionist” judges who would decide cases according to the written law, not legislate from the bench...

...Within a year or so, conservatives were so disenchanted with Nixon and his entourage that they would have gladly thrown him over had they had anybody else to run against him or the clout to do anything about it...

...Until that time, the federal courts, bulging with liberal judges, were moving the political landscape sharply to the left in decisions on civil rights, crime, reapportionment, prayer in schools, forced busing, obscenity, and federalism...

...IN THE POLITICAL REALM, conservatives, who in 1968 had virtually no political clout, now control one of the two major political parties (although many conservatives don’t realize that) and many (but not enough...

...If you are a print or online journalist with less than five years of professional experience, a unique opportunity awaits: The Phillips Foundation’s $75,000, $50,000 and $25,000 full- and part-time journalism fellowships...

...In terms of legal thought, the concept of originalism —the way judges should think about and apply the Constitution—has earned an accepted place in legal theory and is the benchmark against which a Republican president appoints, or should appoint, judges...

...SOWHEREHAVEWECOMEin those 40 years...

...Any philosophy that does not confine judges to the original understanding inevitably makes the Constitution the plaything of willful judges...

...Those who are not conservative, of whom there are understandably many, fall over backward to try to convince the voters that they are, in fact, candidates of the right...

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...Even then, in a culture such as ours, neither side has a lock on electoral politics...

...Conservative issues and principles are present everywhere, in every election, and may very well be the most accepted political force in the country, regardless of recent election returns...

...Other politicians, who knew they needed to call themselves conservatives, wanted to fudge the idea by qualifying their conservatism...

...Democrats enjoyed their largest margins, in both Congress and the state houses, in almost three decades...

...citizens...

...S CONSERVATIVES AND PUNDITS survey the prospects facing the right in the 2008 presidential election, they invariably conclude that conservatism is over, or at best still twitching just a little...

...But as its strength grew, as it 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 I D E A S S T I L L H A V E C O N S E Q U E N C E S When the Spectatorwas founded, in the fall of 1967, conservative voices in the media were almost inaudible...

...Today nearly half of all federal judges are conservatives, appointed by Reagan and both Bushes, under a system of careful analysis to determine what sort of judges they would be...

...The fact that no current presidential candidate is a true-blue conservative is probably the fault of the movement itself in not cultivating its own candidates willing and able to run...

...Before 1967 only three elections involving real conservatives ever received national attention, and only one of those was won by a conservative...

...Its future will probably always be laden with difficulty, but a future, it is certain, there will be...

...seats in Congress, and have many competent people ready and able to serve a conservative administration...

...and it started the purge of the hated Rockefeller faction from the Republican Party...

...Winners undertake a one-year project of their choosing focusing on journalism supportive of American culture and a free society...

...The true conservatives, those who had elected them in the first place, assuming they would actually act like conservatives, did not like it at all...

...But Nixon had no yardstick by which to determine who would be a strict constructionist judge or not, so he did what presidents had always done—he appointed well-connected lawyers and friends from the lower courts...

...Elections Ideas Still Have Ideas Still Have Consequences A are won and lost for all sorts of reasons other than the strength of the philosophy behind the candidates or the general political attitude of the country...

...The problem, in a nutshell, was with the politicians...