Mark Tapscott over at Glenn’s place [1]:
And yes I’m going to take the whole post, because it doesn’t exerpt well:
CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT FAILED: Writing in the American Spectator, Scott McKay argues the conservative movement is dead, if it is defined as the Old/New Right Plus Bush Chamber of Commerce Republicanism:
“When you’ve gone from surrendering on gay marriage to failing to summon up convincing arguments for obvious things like ‘boys shouldn’t play on girls’ sports teams’ or that the least racist nation on planet Earth was founded to promote slavery, you aren’t really conserving much of anything anymore, are you?
“When you went from failing to reform government programs like Social Security and Medicare, when it was patently obvious they would eventually bankrupt the government, to signing off on a trillion-dollar bacchanal of ‘infrastructure’ spending only a quarter of which can reasonably fit in that definition, you’re not a fiscal conservative.
“When you progressed from creating a security state capable of spying on everyone in the world with marginal accountability to having little to say when that security state gets politicized and nearly effects a coup d’etat on a duly-elected American president, we can’t really say you’re conserving our liberty.”
McKay advocates a new “Revivalist” movement that sounds an awful lot like what I heard one night in October 1964 on television when a guy from “Death Valley Days” came on the screen and delivered what became known as “The Speech” that launched the Reagan Revolution.
He wasn’t perfect, but he won the Cold War and got Congress to pass the biggest tax cut in American history, rebuilt American military might and respect, and showed how presidential leadership can restore a large measure of the shared civic spirit that once was the norm.
I was one of the legions of idealistic young Americans he inspired to enlist in the movement to save America and who in some key respects were the “Wide Awakes” of our day. Reagan was the right man for the time. But that was 1980. This is not. A revival would be great but would it be enough?
It certainly would be sufficient, in fact more than sufficient, absent the GOP establishment and it’s 70 year long fight against anything that is smacking of actual conservatism The John McCain’s,Miitt Romney’s, the Jonah Goldbergs, Steve Hayes, the Bush family and so on.
The Reagan revolution didn’t fail because it was unpopular, nor did it fail because it’s ideas were not spot on. It failed ultimately because the GOP establishment spent the next 25 to 30 years expunging the list of successes that Reagan policies brought us to. I’ve spoken of this [2], many [3] times [4] before [5].
(And, yes, there are far more examples of this over the years, including some specific agreement with Tapscott, previously. And let’s not forget the establishments reaction to the Gingrich revolution of 1994.)
The sad fact is, that crowd is doing precisely the same thing to the record of one Donald j Trump. They’re doing it right now as you read this.
The main part of the problem here would seem to be the number of career Republicans who have come to love the power of government too much…. Enough to sacrifice their actual Republican principles so as to maintain their own power and position.
To prevent overriding and overwriting the successes of actual conservatism, we need to not only defeat the Democrats but the GOP establishment with them… A tall order, certainly.
Term limits would be a start in the right direction toward overcoming this.
The difference you see between the Democrats and the establishment GOP is that the Democrats aren’t pretending to be conservative.