NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER: Conservatism Is Dead-Long Live Conservatism!
Regnery, Alfred S.
Conservatism Is Dead— Long Live Conservatism! n o t e F R o M t H e P u b l I s H e R To paraphrase mark twa by Alfred S. Regnery in, the rumors of the death of conservatism have been...
...The remedy, Coburn reminds us, is a return to first principles—adherence to free markets and fiscal responsibility that will require Republicans to rejoin Americans in the real world of budget choices and priorities...
...Most recently, and after many other such stories, comes the New Yorker in one of those interminable pieces entitled “The Fall of Conservatism,” which breathlessly concludes that the ascent of John McCain “shows how little life is left in the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces...
...Conservatives may indeed have some problems...
...A fractured and divided Democratic Party may be capable of winning some elections, but is hardly the vehicle that will help a new president govern, as Jimmy Carter discovered to his chagrin...
...Are there great new ideas brewing from liberalism’s brain trust...
...They are two different entities, with two different missions, joined in something like an unhappy but non-voidable marriage...
...The critics are never able to differentiate between the conservative movement and the Republican Party, but always mix them into one bowl of dough...
...But things aren’t always what they seem...
...Conservatism Is Dead— Long Live Conservatism...
...It is, to be sure, a tough year to be a conservative, and tougher yet to be a Republican...
...Sen...
...Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, one of the few remaining conservatives in the Senate, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the Republican Party is ailing because of the triumph of biggovernment Republicanism, and the triumph of compassionate conservatism...
...This month Steve Moore worries that might be more than we can hope for (p...
...But if liberals and Democrats think they have the answers, well, I have a bridge to sell on eBay...
...And it will hardly come as a surprise to Spectator readers that we doubt that more big-government programs will do much for the problems they are sup posed to fix, nor will the economy and the American people prosper from them...
...n o t e F R o M t H e P u b l I s H e R To paraphrase mark twa by Alfred S. Regnery in, the rumors of the death of conservatism have been greatly exaggerated...
...I like to think of conservatism as the soul of the Republican Party—at least until the party leaders sell out for the latest bunch of earmarks...
...A Democratic year, with Democratic gains in Congress a virtual certainty, and the prospect of a Democrat—a leftwing Democrat—in the White House does not do much to cheer up this old right-winger...
...A Democratic year it may be, but if I were a liberal, I just don’t think I’d be all that smug...
...Every six months or so, you can count on coming across another story about the end of conservatism, usually written by a liberal wishing that it were true, and usually quoting a journalist or think-tank operative who is still on the fringes of the movement, uncomfortable about being there, but with nowhere else to go and dependent on some poor sucker who signs his paycheck...
...It is not the conservative movement that is sick, it is the Republican Party...
...Barry Goldwater,” declared James Reston on the front page of the New York Times the day after the 1964 election, “not only lost the presidential election, but the conservative cause as well...
...alfred s. Regnery is publisher of The American 6 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Spectator and author of the new book Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism (Threshold/ Simon & Schuster...
...Do calls for “change” and “hope” provide the kind of solutions that Democrats are demanding...
Vol. 41 • July 2008 • No. 6
