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Lastly, the sudden embrace of Trump by GOP establishment members in an attempt to knock out their real nemesis, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), has got to force Trump voters to take pause. The GOP gambit is to knock off Cruz in Iowa because his voters go disproportionately to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Trump's voters, on the other hand, tend to go to Cruz. So, beating Cruz would boost the establishment's favored alternative, and in classic "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" fashion, they are pumping up Trump.

Last week, the conservative magazine National Review published a long and scathing attack on Donald J. Trump. Notable names included Glenn Beck, Erick Erickson, Michael Medved, and Thomas Sowell. Absent was the radio champion of conservatism, Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh said National Review’s attack came “too late now,” and would not convince Trump’s supporters. This may be true, but it could also be Limbaugh’s way of explaining why he won’t attack Trump himself. Could Limbaugh be “cheating on conservatism” with The Donald? Does he identify with Trump, or does Limbaugh’s hatred of the “establishment” run so deep that he is willing...

The other day a commentator asked a GOP candidate this simple question. "What is the Federal Government doing that it should not be doing?" The candidate did not have a ready answer, and did the soft shoe talking point response that had little to do with this question. But, isn't the answer to this question the crux of conservatism? Should not each candidate running for office under the guise of conservatism not have, at the constant ready, a litany of unnecessary federal government programs and activities? Admittedly, the easier response is to take the question in the negative and respond...

If there's one thing that Donald Trump has done for the leaders of the conservative movement, the Christian Right and the Republican party it's that he's teaching them a necessary lesson in reality: It turns out that a large number of their supporters don't really care about ideology, morality or even their supposedly mutual loathing of the hippie Democrats on the other side. Their concerns run to something much more primitive.

Ever since Donald Trump's rise to 2016-contender prominence, the rap on him, and perhaps part of his broad appeal, has been that he's not a conservative. And he's not -- he's a nationalistic populist. Yet there's another way to understand The Donald's professed politics: as that of the first prominent "European-conservative" American presidential candidate. He's not so much America's next Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater, but her first Marine Le Pen. A prerequisite for grasping this is first understanding the true natures of liberalism and conservatism. While many have their own definitions of the latter -- and will stubbornly insist...

While Cruz is running for president in 2016 as the consummate outsider, he launched his political career as a Bush administration insider, and his relationship with the GOP establishment is far deeper and more complex than he lets on. On the trail today, Cruz bashes the "Washington cartel," jokes of being so hated in the U.S. Capitol that he needs a "food-taster," and says at nearly every stop, "If you see a candidate Washington embraces, run and hide." But 16 years ago, as a young domestic policy adviser for Bush's 2000 campaign, Cruz himself had sought Washington's embrace. He uprooted...

Monday, January 25, 2016 Conservatism Isn't Dead Posted by Daniel Greenfield No, conservatism isn't dead. It just isn't nearly as influential as some conservatives thought it was. This shouldn't have come as a surprise after two Obama victories, the failures of the Tea Party and the warping of conservative institutions and politicians to serve entirely different agendas. Ideas only have power when they're vested in organizations that have power. Conservative organizations have very little institutional power. Those that do are not particularly conservative, but serve the agendas of an establishment that has self-interested goals. Conservative organizations lean heavily on messaging,...

Today we learn from Jim Robinson of a movement afoot to proselytize among the so-called conservatives here to abandon Free Republic. This is but another effort by the supporters of Ted Cruz to squirm out of the Trump's closing in on the Republican nomination, and, perhaps the presidency. If the close is forestalled, and they SCREAM loudly enough in block capital letter that TRUMPIZOIDS ARE INSANE they will see Trump for what he is and the nomination will go to Cruz. They even project idiocies such as Trump's supporters would overlook it if he killed 500 puppies on TV with...

Growing up in an unhappy and unsupportive home, I took pride, at least, in our family history. My great-great grandfather, a Southern boy, defied community and family pressures and supported Lincoln. He went to Illinois and joined the Union Army. We were Republican ever since and it was the one inspiration I took from my heritage. Over time though I was no longer proud to be Republican as the party began to stand for almost nothing. I found solace, however, in describing myself as Conservative. "Conservative" embraced my values and political positions exquisitely. I unashamedly proclaimed myself to be Conservative....

So how does Donald Trump do it? Do what, you ask?Entirely detached from identifiable conservative principles, and almost equally detached from a recognizable conservative record, he nonetheless is filling up venues with enthusiastic people who are responding to what they think is some kind of conservative vibe. What is it that enabled someone like Sarah Palin to go dithyrambic? It isn't anything conservative, of course, but it is not just smoke. There is a reason people are thinking what they do, and as a showman and entertainer, Trump knows how to exploit it. And as it happens, the two things...

The Republican National Committee announced late Thursday that the venerable conservative magazine National Review had been dropped as a debate sponsor after it published an issue devoted to why voters should reject Donald Trump's presidential campaign. RNC spokesman Sean Spicer confirmed to Buzzfeed News that the magazine had been dropped as a sponsor of the Feb. 25 debate in Houston, saying "a debate moderator can't have a predisposition." "We expected this was coming," National Review publisher Jack Fowler wrote in a blog post early Friday, calling the RNC move a "small price to pay for speaking the truth about The...

... Influential leaders with direct ties to the founding of modern conservatism are rallying behind Ted Cruz...

It’s pretty clear Donald Trump isn’t a conservative. The problem is many voters in the Republican Party think he is. These voters are real, they care about the constitutional principles that make America exceptional, and Trump needs them. He can’t afford to have the base of the Republican Party leave him for Ted Cruz.This is why he needed Sarah Palin’s endorsement. This is why he went to Liberty University and talked about “2 Corinthians.” This is why Cruz’s comment about New York values was problematic for him. Many pundits made the mistake after the last debate of thinking the comment...

So! YOU. STILL. DON'T. GET. IT! It is an irony of politics that we often get that which we most despise yet doggedly work to bring into fruition - mediocrity ... Purists want nothing less than complete lock step with whatever definition each one of them individually defines to be their ideology. But life, in a land that upholds as sacrosanct the historically novel idea of individual freedom, must by its very nature admit as many diverse opinions as their exists individuals. The nexus of the problem is that the purist can never bend in the wind - and so...

Movement conservatives and self-styled Republican populists have long been joined in conflict with the party establishment, but the GOP presidential race has set them on a collision course. Friction between these two GOP factions is being fueled by the increasingly bitter battle between Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and New York celebrity businessman Donald Trump in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Cruz represents ideologically committed conservatives, although he has appealed with some success to populist voters. Trump has given big government populists, who have aligned with the GOP mostly for cultural reasons, a champion, while appealing to some...

Bob Dole, the former Kansas senator and 1996 Republican presidential nominee, has never been fond of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. But in an interview Wednesday, Mr. Dole said that the party would suffer "cataclysmic" and "wholesale losses" if Mr. Cruz were the nominee, and that Donald J. Trump would fare better. "I question his allegiance to the party," Mr. Dole said of Mr. Cruz. "I don't know how often you've heard him say the word 'Republican' - not very often." Instead, Mr. Cruz uses the word "conservative," Mr. Dole said, before offering up a different word for Mr. Cruz:...

Wednesday on his radio show, conservative talk Rush Limbaugh offered his analysis on Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump's rise, which he argued wasn't a sign that conservative orthodoxy was winning the day, but instead it was a pushback against the modern-day Democratic Party and President Barack Obama. And that according to Limbaugh is a sign of the rise of nationalism and populism overtaking conservatism. "What's happening here, nationalism, dirty word, ooh, people hate it, populism, even dirtier word," Limbaugh said. "Nationalism and populism have overtaken conservatism in terms of appeal. And when this has happened, when it exposes -- what...

UPDATES - The Guardian's Ben Jacobs, on the scene in Ames, Iowa, reports that Aissa Wayne, daughter of country film star John Wayne, made a huge (yuge?) misstep while warming up the crowd before the expected appearance of Donald Trump and half-term governor Sarah Palin: Aissa Wayne committed a major #gaffe while opening for Trump and Palin. The rally is taking place in Ames on the campus of Iowa State University, whose sports teams ares the Cyclones. At the end of her remarks, she told the crowd "go Hawkeyes!" The Hawkeyes is the name of the sports team of Iowa...

A specter is haunting the conservative movement. From the dark underbelly of corrupt Washington, D.C., an unyielding "Republican establishment" has come out to feast upon the mutilated corpses of Reagan, Goldwater, and Buckley. The smarmy hucksters who make up its rank are masters of disguise: During the day, they insist that they represent the great silent majority of conservative Americans; at night, they prove that they're in it only for the money, the power, and the Georgetown social scene. The monsters have names - such as Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Nikki Haley, Trey Gowdy, Mike Lee, and ... wait, what?...

The biggest story in America today is the roaring return of Andrew Jackson's spirit into the political debate. Not since he fought with Nicholas Biddle over the future of the Bank of the United States has Andrew Jackson been this controversial or this central in American political life. Jacksonian populism, the sense of honor-driven egalitarianism and fiery nationalism that drove American politics for many years, has never been hated and reviled as often as it is today, and many American academics and intellectuals (to say nothing of Hollywood icons) are close to demanding that Jacksonian sentiment be redefined as a...