Conservatism in Traction
TIME's cover story this week displays a weeping Ronald Reagan on its cover and ponders "How the Right Went Wrong":
"A generation ago, fresh off the second biggest electoral landslide in American history, Ronald Reagan surveyed the wreckage that had been the opposition and declared victory. Standing before 1,700 true believers at the 1985 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he proclaimed, "The tide of history is moving irresistibly in our direction. Why? Because the other side is virtually bankrupt of ideas. It has nothing more to say, nothing to add to the debate. It has spent its intellectual capital."
The failure of the Bush presidency has overshadowed the successes of the conservative movement-- the break up of the Soviet Union, a tax rate half that of Carter's presidency, and welfare and education reform. And so it is the conservatives who are devoid of ideas and who are on the wrong side of the tide of history. Even from conservative blogs and forums, I find it notable how shallow, tiresome, dissicated, demoralized, and unpersuasive conservative apologists have become. And it isn't by accident that the face of modern day conservatism isn't a university or think tank intellectual but Fox news propaganderist Ann Coulter. Conservatives claim that ideas have consequences, but it appears that the only ideas now coming from modern-day conservatists are middle-school taunts. Fighting words such as treason. slander, and godless is now the sum of what passes for deep conservative thought. It's especially rich that a woman with such ambiguous gender-- she with the pronounced Adam's apple-- would call Edwards a faggot to the apprecative laughter of the CPAC audience.
Policies-- and more importantly wars-- are won or lost in the realm of the mind-- ideas and debate. By any measure, conservatives have lost the intellectual argument in the wake of the failure of conservative governance. It can only be a matter of time before they lose in social and political impact.
"A generation ago, fresh off the second biggest electoral landslide in American history, Ronald Reagan surveyed the wreckage that had been the opposition and declared victory. Standing before 1,700 true believers at the 1985 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he proclaimed, "The tide of history is moving irresistibly in our direction. Why? Because the other side is virtually bankrupt of ideas. It has nothing more to say, nothing to add to the debate. It has spent its intellectual capital."
The failure of the Bush presidency has overshadowed the successes of the conservative movement-- the break up of the Soviet Union, a tax rate half that of Carter's presidency, and welfare and education reform. And so it is the conservatives who are devoid of ideas and who are on the wrong side of the tide of history. Even from conservative blogs and forums, I find it notable how shallow, tiresome, dissicated, demoralized, and unpersuasive conservative apologists have become. And it isn't by accident that the face of modern day conservatism isn't a university or think tank intellectual but Fox news propaganderist Ann Coulter. Conservatives claim that ideas have consequences, but it appears that the only ideas now coming from modern-day conservatists are middle-school taunts. Fighting words such as treason. slander, and godless is now the sum of what passes for deep conservative thought. It's especially rich that a woman with such ambiguous gender-- she with the pronounced Adam's apple-- would call Edwards a faggot to the apprecative laughter of the CPAC audience.
Policies-- and more importantly wars-- are won or lost in the realm of the mind-- ideas and debate. By any measure, conservatives have lost the intellectual argument in the wake of the failure of conservative governance. It can only be a matter of time before they lose in social and political impact.
posted by My Mall and News at
6:06 PM
1 Comments:
U give Miss Coulter too much credit. She has never been for the movement-- just for herself. And controversy only oxiginates her book sales.
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