Editor's Page
Cohen, Mitchell
BOTCHED PRESIDENCIES open the way to change, sometimes for better (let's hope now), sometimes for worse. Think of Jimmy Carter's tenure, which left us in "malaise," Ronald Reagan in Washington,...
...Carter's agenda for federalism and the economy tilted the country away from social liberalism...
...More: the "conservative movement" was now in power without checks, because it dominated all branches of government...
...It must hold...
...They should not get away with innocence by dissociation...
...Six years later, survival of the paleo-fittest brought neomalaise and, finally, fortunately, Democratic victories that open opportunities...
...The left can best enhance it by speaking in a persuasive—not a purging—voice about how Americans should think straight politically and why conservatives haven't shot straight...
...Meanwhile, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski trumpeted jihadism in the Mideast for the sake of anticommunism, oblivious to long-term implications...
...Think of Jimmy Carter's tenure, which left us in "malaise," Ronald Reagan in Washington, and Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran...
...The neoconservatives embraced Reagan for foreign policy reasons...
...Religious sanctimony gained new purchase in public life, much to Jerry Falwell's political advantage...
...n It was hard to imagine anyone making more of a hash of things—until recently...
...But the folks who brought us Reagan also brought Bush...
...By the 1990s, they declared that they were "neo" no more, just conservatives...
...The paleoconservatives rid themselves of constraints within the GOP by making "liberal" Republicanism extinct...
...Dan T. Carter considers the politics of the South...
...In this issue Robin Blackburn examines the nexus among taxes, power, and privilege...
...Theodore Marmor addresses the health insurance debate...
...But those victories come of a center-liberal configuration due largely to the war...
...Charles Taylor scrutinizes Dinesh D'Souza's paleo-neo saw, extremism in defense of extremism is no extremism...
...n Bush's victory (sic) in 2000 was no turn from this "evolution," but its crest...
...Here's Murphy's new law: everything the Bush administration can do wrong, it will do wrong, from "Iraqi Freedom" to Gonzales "Justice...
...n Reagan, like his intellectual and political forebears—William F. Buckley, Jr., and Barry Goldwater—struggled against fetters that ranged from New Deal legacies to Democratic Congresses...
...Some of them now hope to save the image of the "Reagan Revolution"— that golden age when ketchup was a school lunch vegetable and Iran-contra was globalization—from tailspinning Bush...
...Once there was the Brontosaurus and also a Nelson Rockefeller...
...M.C...
...Conservatives grasped the opportunity provided by Carter's tailspin presidency, branded it "liberal" (it was "conservative Democratic"), and put Republicans in the Oval Office for a dozen years...
...The real problem, however, is not (copious) incompetence, but a worldview—swaggering, parochial, socially cruel—promoted for decades by militant conservatives...
Vol. 54 • July 2007 • No. 3
