Posted on 06/08/2008 6:37:34 AM PDT by vietvet67
The first boss I ever had, in 1968, was a Nixon-hater. A Democrat from upstate New York, he kept a coffee mug emblazoned with a Nixon $3 bill, and he could recite the litany of Nixon's red-baiting campaigns. First there was Jerry Voorhees in 1946, then there was Alger Hiss and the pumpkin papers. Then there was Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950. You can imagine that I was surprised when Nixon won the presidency that November.
We learned later that Richard Nixon's victory over Hubert Humphrey in 1968 was the first victory of Nixon's "southern strategy," a deliberate attempt to woo Southern Democrats in the years after the passage of the landmark civil rights acts of the mid 1960s. "States rights" and "law and order" were racist code words calculated to appeal to the racist hearts of white Southern voters.
Over the years this meme seems to have become all-consuming and all-explaining for our Democratic friends. On the net there are hundreds of liberals for whom politics is defined by the Democrats' support of civil rights versus the Republicans' racist Southern Strategy. In Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America Rick Pearlstein tells us that today's divisive politics is all the result of Richard Nixon's cunning rise to power. We are the divided nation that Nixon created.
Even John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira in The Emerging Democratic Majority,a generally optimistic prophecy of future Democratic dominance, need to poke Republicans in the eye on civil rights.
After 1964, the Democrats embraced, and the Republicans rejected, the cause of civil rights. The new conservative movement took root in opposition to the federal civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965.
(In the Chicago Spring of Reverend Wright and Father Pfleger, the above statement is hereby declared inoperative.)
Now comes The New Yorker's George Packer to expand on this in "The Fall of Conservatism." Pat Buchanan and Richard Nixon, he writes, saw the potential for a right-wing coalition back in 1966.
"From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority," Buchanan told [Packer]... "What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.'s New Deal coalition[.]"
So off they went to sow division in the Democratic Party, using a politics of "positive polarization." It "ensured that American politics would be an ugly, unredeemed business for decades to come."
But now in 2008 "the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought to power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Gingrich radicalized, DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces" is over. America is moving on into a new political era, for neither John McCain or Barack Obama got signed up in the Sixties for the culture war. According to David Brooks, "there's just no driving force, and it will soften up normal Republicans for real change."
It is certainly true that conservatives and Republicans feel disoriented and confused this election season. But it misses the point to say, as Packer does:
Now most conservatives seem incapable of even acknowledging the central issues of our moment: wage stagnation, inequality, health care, global warming. They are stuck in the past, in the dogma of limited government.
On the contrary, conservatives have rather clear ideas on the "central issues." Conservatives have a cure for wage stagnation and inequality. It is called education reform. Conservatives have a cure for inequality. It is called Social Security reform and aims to get lower-income Americans onto the wealth creation ladder. But we can't enact reform because Democrats won't let us. We'd like to reform health care by curbing the wasteful third-party payment system, and we are making some progress under the radar with Health Savings Accounts. But Democrats are pushing one-size-fits-all top-down changes to health care policy instead.
If you look back over the last 30 years, back over the record of conservative reform, there is one thing that stands out. Conservative reform never had a chance unless there was a crisis. The Reaganomics of hard money and low tax rates only got done in the crisis of Carter inflation/recession. The Bush tax cuts only got passed in the tech meltdown. Welfare reform only got passed when Newt Gingrich put a gun to President Clinton's reelection prospects in 1996.
The problem that today's conservatives face is that things aren't bad enough on the Social Security front, on the education front, or on the health-care front for the American people to be ready for "change." So Republican primary voters sensibly nominated John McCain, a man to fight the war on Islamic extremism while holding the line on domestic issues.
If you want to be cheered up about conservative prospects, you need only take a look at the resurgent Conservative Party in England. Eleven years ago Tony Blair got elected as "New Labour" to improve public services, supposedly wrecked by "Tory cuts." But after a doubling of health care expenditure and huge increases in education costs there is no improvement and the voters are hopping mad.
Now that he is 20 points ahead in the polls, what are the "central issues" for Conservative leader David Cameron? School choice, welfare reform, and police reform.
Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his roadtothemiddleclass.com and usgovernmentspending.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
We'll know after the election. If they're dead, they'd have voted for Obama.
They’re not dead, they’re just pining for the fjords.
For now.... Dead
Like the Demos were dead 4 years ago with Kerry/Edwards who had little new ideas except to oppose the republicans.
It’ll take a leader like Reagan to bring conservatives back. How long that’ll take no one knows.
Kerry/Edwards received more than 48% of the popular vote in 2004. That's dead?
LBJ's 1964 tv ad campaign showed KKK klansmen burning crosses and tried to link them to Goldwater.
LBJ's 1964 tv ad campaign showed a small child pulling the petals off a daisy and suddenly being killed in a nuclear holocaust by the goony Goldwater.
Yeah, 1966 was WHEN politics turned "ugly".
Sell that story someplace else.
Conservative are neither dead nor resting. They have been betrayed forgotten ignored and abandoned ... at the GOP’s peril. If we didn’t have such a dangerous Marxist asshat running on the other side who IMO MUST be kept out of the WH at all costs ... a third party would be in order
Not dead. Just preparing for battle with which ever liberal is elected.
I’m not Dead or Resting. I’m just tired of voting for the lesser of two evils!
“It’ll take a leader like Reagan to bring conservatives back. How long that’ll take no one knows.”
Not that he could have filled Reagan’s shoes but I think the country missed an opportunity with Fred Thompson..
We are broken right now. A ship without a rudder.
I think there were never as many Conservatives as we thought. Many Republicans but not so many of them were conservative. That is the only thing I can think of to explain McCain’s success.
The article believes that Senator McCain will hold the line on domestic issues. The article is mistaken.
Senator McCain’s support for the recently shelved Lieberman Warner Climate Security bill tells me Sen. McCain is left to far left on domestic issues.
Even President Bush, who has allowed government spending to go unchecked, threatened to veto Lieberman Warner.
Senator McCain’s support of Lieberman/Warner was enough to cost him my vote. It was the proverbial last straw.
I was all set to vote for the lesser of two evils one last time. Then Lieberman/Warner came along and convinced me otherwise.
That was a big miss.
Real big. Now we have Juan MxCain. Or Mr. Hussien.
I could puke but instead I am back to gathering sell-sufficiency infrastructure items in case the unthinkable actually does occur.
The modern conservative movement has been split by some social conservatives who want to establish a theocracy,
Oh please, maybe you should look up the word “theocracy”.
“Not that he could have filled Reagan’s shoes but I think the country missed an opportunity with Fred Thompson..”
That needed to be posted again!
It's not the liberals who destroy conservative thought, it's the moderates and rino's within our own party. And if repubs keep voting and embrasing these progressive social ideas and with canidates who hold them, liberals will win the day.
Many Conservatives are realy just politically lazy.
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