Ping. Almost Burkean in its analysis.
There are victories that are both hard-won and not so very visible. One of these is that in this country the framework for debate and the ultimate criterion for judgment is written on paper and grounded in such principle that cannot simply be discarded as a relic of the past. It is a common ploy of the Marxist Left in Europe to marginalize conservative opponents as defenders of an old, repressive, aristocratic tradition. The incredibly strident and increasingly transparent campaign to cast America as an imperialistic monolith is very much a part of this pattern of behavior. Where it has succeeded - campus, the shallower intelligentsia - is where the Left has made its greatest advances.
However, as the author points out, here certain doors are guarded with a vehemence seldom seen elsewhere in the world, the First Amendment being one of these, the Second being another. (I hope to live long enough to see the Fourth and Fifth regain their former entrenchments). Here the epithet "unconstitutional" still carries a sting. Here individual liberty cannot - yet - be dismissed as a relic of the past.
I have, however, heard it earnestly asseverated that individualism itself as a basis of politics is moribund, yes, on campus by an individual who would be horrified were that criterion applied to her. That the lesson learned from the 20th century was that statism and collectivism were far better founded scientifically. I wanted to ask this individual where she had been since 1989 - in mourning, apparently.
The advantage we have as conservatives (if we may even be called that) in the United States is that one may proceed forward under the same principles that got us here. The principles of distributed, representative government and the repository of political power within the individual citizen are not throwbacks to an imperialistic past, they are guideposts for the sort of future that has a proven track record in the past, which is far more than can be said of any jargon-laden socialist utopian fantasy that never was because it cannot be.
The collectivists will still argue, but it will be on our terms, because if it is ever otherwise we will discover rapidly that such terms as there are, are those of the Left: arbitrary, dictatorial, and very much the mark of a new aristocracy taking place under the Divine Right Of Party. That is a relic of the past.