The time to re-form, mobilize and counter-attack has been upon the conservatives for decades. This isn’t 1955 anymore. You can’t run the Green Bay Packers (or the Giants, Colts, Bears, etc.) playbook from 1955 and expect to win. The game changes. When (if) you put the TV on, Lawrence Welk and the band ain’t performing anymore (at least not live), you get some drivel from MTV.
I’ve aways viewed the AIDS outbreak as the start of radical leftism really organizing and getting in peoples’ faces. After coming out of the closet in the late sixties/early seventies and then accumulating some power and money, they used the power of the group or mob (albeit small) to intimidate and bend change to their favor.
The time to rethink conservatism as something that is just reactionary in nature and counter-attack is LONG overdue.
Now is the moment in America's history for a principles-based debate. For too long, we have allowed politicians always to focus attention on this or that "issue." And, as a result, we have allowed freedom and opportunity to be limited, and liberty for citizens to be diminished. Coercive government control, whether by a king, a feudal lord, or three branches of a government, is still coercive control by some imperfect persons over other persons.
The current debate is not solely about health care. It's not about the auto industry, or the banking establishment. It's about liberty for individuals in a society versus tyrannical government control over the livelihoods, the earnings, and life and death decisions of each of those citizens.
The American Constitution was not supposed to allow that! Its Framers intended, through its protections, and through Article V, to put "We, the People" in charge to "bind them (elected officials) down by the chains of the Constitution" (Jefferson). They seem to have forgotten that.
Can anyone who reads Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Madison, or any other Founders actually believe their Constitution allows the principles of the Declaration to be violated in such a way by those elected to positions of power in government?
Any citizen whose passion is liberty should not be tricked into accepting such "compromises" of their liberty. There is a time and place when liberty is so threatened that, on behalf of our posterity, we should stand and declare to our elected officials in both Parties:
"This is a matter of principle. It is not negotiable. Stop taking away our Creator-endowed rights to be free to succeed or fail. Stop your arrogance in believing you were elected by us to take what we work hard to earn and 'redistribute' it in the name of 'compassionate conservatism' (R) or 'economic justice' (D). Sometimes you even try to fool us by redistributing it back to ourselves, as in 'cash for clunkers.' It is neither compassion nor justice! It is tyranny! Don't compromise away the future of your great-grandchildren!"