Posted on 11/01/2010 11:16:02 AM PDT by mojito
So whatever happened to the death of conservatism? Wasn’t it supposed to be long gone by now, crumbling within its sarcophagus, a dim memory of a discredited past? Didn’t we start hearing authoritative rumblings about its impending doom around the time of the last set of midterm elections, in 2006, when disillusioned ex-conservatives like Francis Fukuyama and soi-disant types like Andrew Sullivan began tuning their cellos of lamentation and discontent? Wasn’t that also approximately when disaffected conservative writers were proclaiming, in the pages of the Washington Monthly, that “It’s Time for Us to Go”? The talk was so deafening that I was moved to argue with it back in January 2007 in these pages in an article entitled “Is Conservatism Finished?” I concluded with some gingerness that it was not, but my conclusion came nearly two years before the most liberal candidate to run for the presidency in nearly half a century won a resounding victory.
In the wake of that election, the liberal conviction about the demise of the left’s intellectual opposition mutated into an inarguable presumption. The neoconservative branch of the conservative movement found itself in especially dire straits. One would have thought its principal figures would henceforth be banished to pass the rest of their days in dark and lonely places, condemned to while away the balance of time poring fruitlessly over the collected works of Leo Strauss in the original Aramaic.
Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times wrote a long article in the New Republic that was turned into a tome rather too thin to serve as a headstone, notwithstanding its blunt title: The Death of Conservatism. George Packer made the grand announcement in the pages of the New Yorker of “the complete collapse of the four-decade project that brought conservatism to power in America.”
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
But Conservatism abides.
Dear left: thanks for electrifying us! :D
Jan. 13, 2008, Newt Gingrich on Georgie Stephanopolis’s show: “The era of Reagan is over.”
Nice job, Newtie. That’s all we need to know about how smart you are.
True conservatism (ordered liberty) will never die.
“the collected works of Leo Strauss in the original Aramaic.”
Strauss in Aramaic?
“the collected works of Leo Strauss in the original Aramaic.”
Strauss in Aramaic?
Who knew? I thought he was German.
What he didn't say, didn't guess, or didn't know is, the Age of Palin is about to begin!!!!
All things old become new again.
CA....
Yeah, he was also Jewish but I never thought he would write in Aramaic.
>>>over the collected works of Leo Strauss in the original Aramaic<<<
Sounds like a joke to me.
It was not then the case, nor is it yet true today, that it doesn’t matter what the Times says, or what Time, Newsweek, and the major TV networks do. The full-court press of advocacy for Obama in the 2008 election reminded us of the power of mass-media orthodoxy. But the increasing prominence and energy of the alternative media, and the steady decline of the credibility and economic viability of the older media, help explain why Obama’s stratospheric popularity proved to be so short-lived.
Another highly significant episode in the 2004 presidential campaign was precipitated when CBS News’s Dan Rather presented the country with documents purporting to cast doubt upon President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard less than two months before the public was to go to the polls. In a pre-Internet era, it would have been very difficult to contest Rather’s claims, and the presidential election might well have been thrown to Kerry.
Conservatism is alive and well in the hearts of TEA Party members, Oath Keepers and Patriots.
“In a pre-Internet era, it would have been very difficult to contest Rather’s claims, and the presidential election might well have been thrown to Kerry. What ensued, however, was a lesson in the information-aggregation power of the Internet. Ordinary bloggers all over the country immediately got to work on the problem. They were not experts, and did not know one another. Unlike the staff of CBS News, they were not part of any certified community of the competent. But they brought to the task a set of idiosyncratic skills and experiences that, when united and focused on a single problem, yielded astonishingly swift and conclusive results. By means of blogs, they were quickly able, in an entirely spontaneous and undirected way, to assemble and test conclusive evidence that the documents were forgeries.”
Buckhead post#47...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1210662/posts#47
Very good article. Thank for the ping;post.
Life, liberty and the pursuit and destruction of totalitarians.
Lots of work remains to be done.
Thank you for the quote & pic!
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