Posted on 10/04/2009 7:59:24 AM PDT by 1rudeboy
Bush '41.
David Brooks.
You get the idea.
The only leftist who comes to mind, whose mind I can truly respect, is Camille Paglia.
But I still think she ought (literally) to be tried for crimes against humanity due to her take on abortion.
Cheers!
Not suprised because he the writer in question knows that Levin has had a number 1 book and would take him on.
Reagan wasn’t considered an intellectual, even though he was smarter than those who went by that name. He was simply a WINNER. We need winners. Now more than ever.
Good points. No mention of people like Walter Williams or Thomas Sowell.
Yet, the author lists Charles Murray, of all people, as one of the great conservative writers. I know Murray has fans here, and while I disagree with him on certain points, I agree on a few others. But, at the core of conservatism is individualism, and anyone who believes our fates are determined by a test score, and students should be grouped accordingly, is not really an individualist.
That said, I agree with the overall point of the article about “soundbite” conservatism.
If you agree about the overall point of the article about “soundbite” conservatism.
Then you must also concede that Liberalism is at the very core of soundbite sloganeering.
It is not as if the Right doesn’t have anything other than soundbites.
Its just that we are fighting the Libs on that level because the libs have been so successful at that level.
A disaster? Really?! Was Reagan's foreign policy a "disaster"? His foreign policy team was laced with neoconservatives. Indeed -- even though his own move from New Deal liberalism to conservatism preceded the main "neocon" exodus (precipitated by aghast reaction to disaster that was Jimmy Carter) by a little over a decade -- Reagan himself could be arguably classified as a "neoconservative".
I guess I fail to understand the clique here that is continually railing against "neocons". The term ultimately means "new" or converted conservatives. Don't we want converts to conservatism? What's the point of a movement if it's intellectually anti(it's own)growth?
Agree with you on "common sense," but not on idealism. "Idealism" is a Whiggish tendency that leads to the embrace of progressivism.
The modern conservative movement looks pretty whiggish to me. Abe Lincoln was, after all, a Whig. Not exactly the same as the English party, but pretty close. And in England it was the Whigs who were generally behind the advance of markets and meritocracy, and the Tories who sided with aristocracy and antigrowth (neofeudalist) economic theories.
I exaggerate some, but only to countervail your own exaggeration. Clearly (IMHO) modern conservatism emerged through fruitfully combining elements of moderate Whigism and traditional Toryism, and concomitantly repudiating both the radicalism of extreme Whigism and stultifying influence of extreme Toryism. To repudiate either strand in the heritage of modern conservatism is to assail and diminish it's genius.
Walter Williams is a smart guy -- most of the time -- but he's no Thomas Sowell.
Dalrymple's British. He's smart and right about a lot of things, but it's hard to translate his deep ... I guess you could call it pessimism ... into votes and policy.
I find this claim simply unhistorical. The most active period of American (so-called) "imperialism," when America most actively and energetically involved itself in attempting to establish and defend civil societies in territories such as Cuba and The Philippines and elsewhere, was under the series of conservative Republican Presidents preceding Woodrow Wilson: Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Wilson (and latter Presidents) scaled back and devoted far less effort and attention to such projects.
Levin brings this home, and Heyward conveniently ignores this giant.
Steven F. Hayward is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (www.aei.org) in Washington, D.C., and a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute (www.pacific-research.org) in San Francisco.
I was a subscriber back in those days and I remember NR quite differently. I can not remember any policy agenda that was capable of being translated into legislative action. In fact, I remember a bit of confusion on the part of staffers during Reagan’s first term who were tasked with developing policy. It was said that they had to gather previous speeches and attempt to piece together their legislative agenda without Reagan’s help.
And while NR may have been the arena where you remember the Reagan wing advancing ideas, it was clearly not the place that Americans went for their voting guide.
Try to imagine Buckley or any of the writers you name actually running for office. Think their ideas would have pushed them over the top? Never would have happened. Reagan elected Reagan, no matter how ignorant you may believe that to be. He won two elections because of who he was and the way he presented himself. Buckley could never have pulled it off.
Dalrymple is pessimistic about social liberalism
So who's that, stylin' with the hat?
People forget that Dick Cheney was originally a Nixon guy, and that he brought a lot of Nixonian baggage with him.
Nixon, in turn, was a Rockefeller Republican, a Business Wing guy (West Coast chapter) who brought Gov. Earl Warren and the nomination to Dwight Eisenhower over Main Street Republicans' man, Bob Taft, in 1952.
Nixon also imposed wage and price controls and invented minority-majority gerrymandering. He sought the support of conservatives in 1968 and then shafted them repeatedly (thus Ralph Whalen in Catch the Falling Flag, who was a conservative campaigner who left the Nixon Administration in less than a year), just as he had shafted them in 1952 and in the Mayflower Hotel deal in 1960 that secured the nomination for Nixon.
Nixon was a quintessential "big government"/"economic" (only) conservative, and it shows in the policy moves and dicta of Dick Cheney, 40 years later.
Thanks for making the author's point: we need more people with intellectual firepower on our side, not some random bulletin-board idiots who go after other people on the internet for posting an article they find interesting.
Updating to current history. Reagan conservatism was not afraid to talk with enemies or to withdraw troops from failing missions [Lebanon]. New conservatism is refusing to talk with enemies and seeing mushroom clouds where there are no mushroom clouds. Reagan believed that ideas were more convincing than bombs.
Would you call him, then, something like the wine waiter delivering the (shocking) bill at liberalism's party table?
Important distinction: he credits them, but simply does not list them in the same category as Buckley, Bloom, Fukuyama, Murray, et al. And look at the people here on FR who turned on Coulter when she took a swipe at the Birther movement. That's the problem he's identifying, and I'm not surprised the same sort of people are letting his point go right over their heads.
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