THE NATION'S PULSE: Reaganism Revised

...Conservatives can claim considerable credit for all of these accomplishments...

...We’re at a point in time when we’re about to start redefining—as a number of people started talking about, starting to redefine—the nature of the Republican Party, in response to what the country needs...

...It was widely believed that the Soviet Union was here to stay...

...Since the 2006 drubbing at the hands of angry Democrats, it has become a conservative cottage industry to produce manifestos urging the GOP to get with the times and revive its electoral fortunes...

...The conservative policy agenda of the next century cannot be perfected in an election cycle, so the outpouring of books and magazine articles debating these issues are welcome...

...Supply-side economics was not yet a fully developed theory...

...conservatives have been doing what liberals always accuse us of doing: trying to recapture an imagined past...

...the welfare system that sapped taxpayers’ incomes and subsidized destructive personal behavior has been reformed...

...We are at the end of the Reagan era,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich somewhat controversially declared on ABC’s This Week in January...

...your humble servant pointed out on this magazine’s website, “Frum had a point back in the 1990s when he argued that conservatism’s prospects appear grim once you accept a growing federal government as a given...

...These votes, contrarian conservatives say, can’t be won back simply by humming golden oldies from the Contract with America or the 1980 GOP platform...

...As Nancy Pelosi’s grandchildren descended on Capitol Hill to see her sworn in as Speaker, most conservatives were singing a refrain reminiscent of “Let Reagan be Reagan...

...slides not because of how well he conformed to Tin the country...

...These same voters might prefer peace dividends to new investments in our military or entitlements aimed at the middle class rather than the non- working poor...

...The new conventional wisdom, coming from young writers like the Atlantic Monthly’s Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam as well as more established voices like former Bush speechwriter David Frum, is that this initial analysis was a bit too selfserving...

...Some polls even show the GOP lagging on national security...

...Frum’s Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again is one of the first book-length treatments of this argument, though it won’t be the last...

...If today’s conservative intellectuals concentrate on winning elections in the current political climate—which is the task of politicians and party strategists, not writers and thinkers—rather than making arguments to help change that climate, it is unlikely that the right will be as successful even if we keep electing Republican presidents...

...In addition to demoralizing conservatives, Republicans alienated independents, who swung Democratic by a 57 percent to 39 percent margin and haven’t looked back since...

...They claimed Republicans lost control of Congress because they weren’t behaving like Republicans, much less conservatives...

...n shouldn’t be attuned to what is going on that make so many conservatives pine for the Reaga e l p c i r p e h t t e g r o f t o n s u t e l , t a p w e n a ng i g r f hat doesn’t mean that conservatives q o uestions even wh h en their answers are flawed n . B i ut in s conservative litmus tests, but because people perceived his answers to stagflation, high energy costs, and America’s national defense posture to be more compelling than those offered by his Democratic opponents...

...As If today’s conservative intellectuals concentrate on winning elections in the current political climate rather than making arguments to help change that climate, it is unlikely that the right will be as successful even if we keep electing Republican presidents...

...Douthat and Salam, previewing the arguments of their forthcoming book Grand New Party in the pages of the Weekly Standard, claimed, “[L]ike aging hippies who never quite got over Woodstock, many of Like aging hippies who never quite got over Woodstock, many of those young Reaganites, now W ticket to political power...

...So is the Communist menace of the Soviet Union...

...Nevertheless, his book Real Change: From the World That Fails to the World That Works emphasizes the contrast between problem-solving by markets versus bureaucracies...

...by W. James antle iii HeadinG into this year’s presidential elections, the Republican Party may face many problems but a shortage of advice is not among them...

...After enumerating the missteps of the past eight years, Frum also acknowledges that conservatives are a victim of their own success...

...Forty years ago, it was by no means obvious that conservatives would win the debates over welfare or crime...

...and controlling immigration—are com g n i d e p , q a n o n i r t n i a u B hen sh th d e m real is an a d t i o ma — Gined Ir failu s res n of the - , establishment, view across-theboard tax cuts as a permanent bined with the issues taken off the table by conservative successes, the political landscape looks bleak...

...Not because it wasn’t partially true—both President Bush and the last Republican Congress did much to damage the GOP’s reputation for managerial competence and fiscal rectitude—but because it only went so far...

...Marginal income tax rates no longer stretch all the way up to 70 percent, even after the tax increases of 1990 and 1993...

...Surveys show majorities of Americans preferring the Democrats to the Repub licans on a whole host of issues ranging from health care to the economy...

...Four out of five Americans now pay more in payroll taxes than income tax...

...Despite current economic anxieties, the stagflation of the 3 6 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a R c H 2 0 0 8 W . j a M e s a n T l e I I I 1970s is but a distant memory...

...Those who pay little income tax aren’t going to be lured to the polls by promises of across-the-board income tax rate cuts, but they might be open to some help from Uncle Sam with their heating and medical bills...

...Indeed, Christine Todd Whitman proposed to slash New Jersey’s income tax rates by 30 percent, and Dan Quayle promised to do the same at the federal level during his brief 2000 presidential bid, not due to the prevailing economic conditions but because it was a cut identical to Kemp-Roth...

...Ronald Reagan won land- era in the first place...

...This is more promising terrain for Republican office-seekers as well, especially compared to entering into a nanny-state bidding war with the Democrats they cannot win...

...Yet the Douthat-Salam contention that Reaganites have turned on, tuned in, and dropped out of American politics highlights an inherent risk in the right- reform project: By even implicitly denigrating Reaganism, re-inventors of the conservative wheel might discard useful principles and precedents...

...Rnatives to Hillarycare during the campaig r t l a s a s n l p h l e e s a t e r a m o t o r t epubli u C t an po k liti - C b ians d C h an a n t o lon a ger afford e t n o - only to dispense with them afterward...

...After achieving parity in party identification, by 2007 self-described Dem ocrats outnumbered Repub li cans by a 3-to-2 margin (though there are some indications that the presidential campaign has eroded slightly the Dem ocrats’ gains...

...Con servatives were brought to power in the 1970s and 1980s by liberal failure,” he writes...

...They had become corrupt, enamored of Washington’s big-spending ways, and averse to reform...

...Frum isn’t the only conservative reading these figures and recommending a GOP course correction...

...It is also about alleviating the payroll-tax burden on the same middle-class families that income-tax rate reductions no longer reach...

...T H e n a T I o n ’ s P u l s e Reaganism Revised Charting the right’s course in a new era of big government...

...Some of the policy recommendations Frum makes in Comeback proved controversial even among those who agree with his thesis that Republicans need to adapt to changing political circumstances...

...Ponnuru, reviewing Comeback in National Review, argued that in suggesting that Republicans should mount a public campaign against obesity Frum “leaves behind not only the conservative consensus of the day, as he intends, but conservative habits of mind...

...But that doesn’t mean conservatives would not profit from pointing out the extent to which our flawed health-care system, high energy prices, and numerous other problems are fed by overregulation and bad government policies...

...Now conservative failure threatens to inaugurate a new era of liberalism...

...If they don’t promote new conservative policies aimed at alleviating middle-class economic anxieties, as many of the reform-minded authors suggest, Democrats will continue to fill the gap with big- government solutions...

...Some conservasafely ensconced in the GOP M a R c H 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 3 7 T H e n a T I o n ’ s P u l s e tives, like Michael Gerson in Heroic Conservatism, succumb instead to the temptation to ape liberalism...

...Many of Gingrich’s examples—like the unflattering comparison between the feds and FedEx—have long been staples of his speeches...

...But it also means that they can no longer run for office offering solutions to the problems of yesterday...

...Similarly, conservatives can emphasize that entitlement reform is not just about protecting programs or balancing the books...

...Principles became policies, abstractions, or slogans...

...The prescriptions diverge depending on the source, but a rough consensus seems to have emerged: Getting back to basics won’t cut it...

...Their authors ask the right W. james antle III is associate editor of The 3 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a R c H 2 0 0 8 American Spectator...

...The status quo was challenged both by liberal failure and decades of patient arguments by intellectuals on the right...

...The post1960s crime epidemic that horrified the country has mostly been contained...

...Instead of finding their footing in the country’s new political terrain,” Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru wrote in a cover story for National Review, “too many those young Reaganites, now safely ensconced in the GOP establishment, view across-the-board tax cuts as a permanent ticket to political power...