FYI!
I see that the three self appointed pallbearers for conservatism showed up for work early today...
(((((PING)))))
Reagan also showed the Rockefeller wing how to win.
A lesson the Rockefellers refuse to accept and hate to this day.
So they always seek to go back to their losing ways.
Very well-put.
Ronald Reagan was one of the greatest Presidents of the 20th. century. He is missed and rightfully so.
Still, this is a different time and the nation is faces different challenges than it did when Reagan guided it. We need to think outside the box and look to new approaches when we choose our next President.
Looking to model less than 2 decades old isn't exactly preposterous. The article implies that Reagan was ancient history and people who wish to emulate him are 'stuck on stupid'.
Strange. This paragraph was repeated, word for word. A copy/paste error I suppose.
....move where?
"An unmentionable irony,'' writes Diggins, is that big-government conservatism is an inevitable result of Reaganism. ''Under Reagan, Americans could live off government and hate it at the same time. Americans blamed government for their dependence upon it.'' Unless people have a bad conscience about demanding big government -- a dispenser of unending entitlements -- they will get ever larger government. But how can people have a bad conscience after being told (in Reagan's first inaugural) that they are all heroes? And after being assured that all their desires, including desires for government-supplied entitlements, are good?"
Reading that, helps to explain this:
"We asked him three times to explain why President Bush and the Republican Congress have increased discretionary non-defense spending at such an alarming rate, and why the party has embraced the expansion of the federal government’s roles in education, agriculture and Great Society-era entitlement programs. “Those questions have been decided,” was his response. The public wants an expanded federal role in those areas, and the Republican Party at the highest levels has decided to give the public what it wants.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/975049/posts
Emphasizing the last two paragraphs by duplicating them into the four, would not make the point stronger. Besides, the main thrust of Reagan's analysis is weak: he very well knew how to frustrate the people's [of special interest variety] desires, starting from the air controllers' strike and continuing further.
Eight years of Nixonian Republicanism has wrought only our own destruction.
That said, Will is wrong this time. Reagan conservatism is a viable political philosophy.
I only wish more Republicans would stay the course he set.
The liberals and so called moderates want to belittle Reagan, and his legacy, so that Republicans will lose their inspiration to forward men like Duncan Hunter for the presidency.
Before such disempowering PATHOS, conservatives are supposed to shrug and vote for a trashy moderate Republican candidate instead of a Democrat?
Nope. This is not the conservative consensus as described iun this article. Conservatives are merely wondering why the Republican party persists in the tyranny of 7 senators who helped form the gang of 14 ,and under the guise of bipartisanship traduced the legislative agenda that Republicans were elected to put in place. The House of Representatives never wavered, but the Senate caved.
Now Republican intellectuals iterate underwhelmingly that those Senatorial hijinks were a good thing? It was their foolish, paternalistic, aristocratic tyranny, which rejected the fruits of democracy. And conservatives are them meandering and confused? I think not. We laugh at the Republican leadership that wants we conservatives to follow a bunch of belicose, jingoistic RINOs. We knnow the kind of leadership we need and want, and so far, the presidential nominee candidates are laughable, except for Hunter and Gingrich.
So I am afraid that Diggins and Will are all wet on their position about Reaganites. We are simply biding our time, and watching the sick peregrinations of little men who wish only to play with the electorate instead of representing it.We will send them on their way soon enough.
He does very much come at history and politics from a "fallen world" "tragic choices" perspective that's very different from Reagan's. Arguably, that chastened and disillusioned point of view can't muster the enthusiasm to get things done in the real world, though it does hold us back from overconfidence.
Anyway, it's good that Diggins recognizes Reagan's greatness, and it's an indication of what later historians will think. I'm not so sure Reagan's mother was a Unitarian or unitarian, though. "Disciples of Christ" is what the encylopedia says.
Reagan: "Although George Will has written some good conservative columns, it's time to move on."
In their book, THE RIGHT NATION, authors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, stated that conservatism in the 1950s tended to fall victim to "one of three intellectual aberrations: paranoia, eccentricity, and nostalgia." From reading a lot of the comments on FR from the "true conservatives," the movement is sinking back into the state it was before Reagan, back in the 50s -- we see plenty of examples of eccentricity, nostalgia, and a heaping helping of paranoia on these threads.
The authors also pointed out that as "National Review" rose as the journalistic spokesman for conservatism, NR "didn't just attack the Left; it mauled 'the irresponsible right.'" It seems that conservatism has slipped about 50 years, back to a time when a significant portion of American conservatism could be characterized as nostalgic, eccentric, paranoid, and irresponsible.
I'm sure it gives his enormous ego a boost to find that another academic supports his views, even while many of this crop of Republican candidates claim Reagan as their role model.
The one vital thing that Reagan brought to conservatism was optimism and a vision for the present and the future, not simply a longing look into the "good old days." It was this optimistic, visionary conservatism which won in 1980, and which carried the congress in 1994. A conservatism that lacks optimism and vision is doomed to defeat. I hope that real conservatives always retain optimism about this country and its place in the world. A lot of folks on this forum who claim to revere Reagan's legacy are anything but optimist and visionary.