Free Republic

More telling than Barack Obama's victory is the consensus, steadily building since Election Day, that the nation has sunk -- or been plunged -- into its darkest economic passage since the Great Depression. And, as Obama pushes boldly ahead, apparently with public support, the right is struggling to reclaim its authority as the voice of opposition. The contrast with 1993, when the last Democratic president took office, is instructive. Like Obama, Bill Clinton was elected in hard economic times and, like him, promised a stimulus program, only to see his modest proposal ($19.5 billion) stripped almost bare by the Senate...

Meacham: So how bad is it, really? Your title doesn't quite declare conservatism dead. Tanenhaus: Quite bad if you prize a mature, responsible conservatism that honors America's institutions, both governmental and societal. The first great 20th-century Republican president, Theo- dore Roosevelt, supported a strong central government that emphasized the shared values and ideals of the nation's millions of citizens. He denounced the harm done by "the trusts"—big corporations. He made it his mission to conserve vast tracts of wilderness and forest. The last successful one, Ronald Reagan, liked to remind people (especially the press) he was a lifelong New Dealer...

The editors of two of the country's most powerful publications, conducting a gloat-fest over the corpse of Reaganism last week, described their idea of true conservatives: Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham asked a remarkable question of Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, in New York's Greenwich Village Wednesday evening: "Isn't Barack Obama the most significant Burkean in American politics today?" "Burkean" refers to Edmund Burke, the 18th-century British parliamentarian who sympathized with the freedom-loving revolution in America while vehemently opposing the anarchistic revolution in France. Tanenhaus, author of an impressive biography...

Parody on Sam Tanenhaus' book "Death of Conservatism"

Dream up a gargantuan backlash against Barack Obama’s left-wing gospel, and you still could not invent the notion of a relatively unknown, conservative Scott Brown knocking off an Obama-endorsed, liberal, female attorney in liberal Massachusetts — in a race to fill the seat once held by Ted Kennedy. If a liberal senatorial candidate can be defeated in Massachusetts, eleven months after the Obama hope-and-change blitzkrieg, it is hard to believe that any liberal seat is necessarily safe anywhere. So the real story is not a populist backlash, but a growing populist backlash, whose ultimate nature and magnitude are as yet...

What went wrong? A year ago, he was king of the world. Now President Obama's approval rating, according to CBS, has dropped to 46% — and his disapproval rating is the highest ever recorded by Gallup at the beginning of an (elected) president's second year. A year ago, he was leader of a liberal ascendancy that would last 40 years (James Carville). A year ago, conservatism was dead (Sam Tanenhaus). Now the race to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in bluest of blue Massachusetts is surprisingly close, with a virtually unknown state senator bursting on the scene by turning the...

WITH the death on Tuesday of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Baptist minister and founder of the Moral Majority, and the announcement on Thursday that Paul D. Wolfowitz would resign from the presidency of the World Bank, two major figures in the modern conservative movement exited the political stage. To many, this is the latest evidence that the conservative movement, which has dominated politics during the last quarter century, is finished. But conservatives have heard this before, and have yet to give in. Weeks after Barry Goldwater suffered a humiliating defeat in 1964 to Lyndon B. Johnson, his supporters organized...

WASHINGTON -- It is that time of year when we depart for summer vacation. We head for the woods and mountains. Unless we planned to visit the Gulf, we head for the beach. Oh, what the hell. Even if we planned to visit the Gulf, let us head for the beaches. All the beaches I have seen there look pretty clean. So let us hit the beaches there, too. It is cheap! America is a vast continental country, so we have various locales to infest during summertime vacation. I prefer the beach, but maybe you prefer the mountains or even...

Books discussed in this essay:It's Even Worse than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein;Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party, by Geoffrey Kabaservice;The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, by Mike Lofgren; The Death of Conservatism: A Movement and Its Consequences, by Sam Tanenhaus;and Dead Right, by David Frum. The Republican party has gone insane. Not whacky-but-basically-harmless, Uncle Joe Biden insane....

All but hidden in the fulsome eulogies for Ted Kennedy lurk a few serious ideas worthy of more than romancing history or waxing sentimental over a death in a famous family. These ideas are about the very nature of liberalism and conservatism, the connections between personal virtue and public morality, and how emotion shapes ideology. The passing of "the last liberal lion" comes amidst a national debate over health care "reform" that grows fiercer by the day. President Obama, who has tried to stand above the messy details of whatever emerges from Congress -- tacking first left, then right, then...

WASHINGTON -- Here I am on the campaign trail, frenetically promoting my book, "The Death of Liberalism." I appear on scores of radio interviews, in and out of the studio. I appear on Fox News and C-SPAN. I hardly have time for dinner, but it could be more demanding still. I could be invited to appear on mainstream media, as it is still quaintly called. Yet I am not. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC do not call. I, the editor of a major magazine from the right that has been around for 45 years, have written a book arguing...

What went wrong? A year ago, he was king of the world. Now President Obama's approval rating, according to CBS, has dropped to 46 percent -- and his disapproval rating is the highest ever recorded by Gallup at the beginning of an (elected) president's second year. A year ago, he was leader of a liberal ascendancy that would last 40 years (James Carville). A year ago, conservatism was dead (Sam Tanenhaus). Now the race to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in bluest of blue Massachusetts is surprisingly close, with a virtually unknown state senator bursting on the scene by turning...

The inestimable James Taranto reminds us brilliantly of the large number of prognosticators who were dead wrong about this Read it all, this is just a sample: Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, last year published a quickie book, "The Death of Conservatism," based on a February 2009 piece in The New Republic. "As Tanenhaus sees it," National Public Radio's Robert Siegel explained in introducing an interview, "American conservatism has degenerated into a hollow echo-chamber of movement die-hards and talk show hosts, disconnected from the broad public, which until recently it spoke for." NPR put the...

It must be difficult to work at The New York Times, surrounded every day by true believers in conservative ideals. Luckily for the rest of us Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the paper’s “Book Review” and “Week in Review” sections, has emerged from that hothouse to write for us, the little people, a small book titled “The Death of Conservatism.” More in sorrow than in anger, Tanenhaus begins by claiming that, in the realm of ideas and argument, “conservatism is most glaringly disconnected from the realities now besetting America.” Oh? “Conservatives remain strangely apart, trapped in the irrelevant causes of another...

Not long ago, September 2009 to be exact, Random House published The Death of Conservatism by New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, which, according to Publisher’s Weekly, “argues that Republicans must moderate their focus on ideological purity if they are to return from the political wilderness.” The same review also tells us the book “argues that the contemporary Right define[s] itself less by what it yearns to conserve than by what it longs to destroy — and that pragmatic Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have usurped the Republicans’ once winning focus on social stability.” Well, fourteen...

Over his decades as a columnist, lecturer, TV host and debater, William F. Buckley Jr. lost his cool in public only once--when he threatened to sock Gore Vidal "in your goddamn face" on the third night of their joint appearances on ABC during the ill-fated 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Three nights on a television set with Vidal might drive anyone mad, yet Buckley also tangled with the roughest players on the left, from Jesse Jackson to William Kunstler, with unfailing composure. But suppose that instead of his formal addresses and his weekly "Firing Line" show on PBS, Buckley...

Sam Tanenhaus, editor of “The New York Times Book Review” and “Week in Review,” and the author of the book, “The Death of Conservatism,” went on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC talk show Monday night to discuss her being featured in a fundraising letter from the right-wing John Birch Society. But the friendly chat soon veered off into a comparison of the nationalist John Birch Society to the Tea Party movement, with Tanenhaus confidently proclaiming “there are no serious ideas left on the right.”

Soon after Barack Obama's inauguration Sam Tanenhaus opined in The New Republic and later in a stylistic book, The Death of Conservatism, that liberalism had won a lasting political triumph in the 2008 elections and that conservatives were the wave of the past. Tanenhaus, who edits the influential Week in Review section of The New York Times, was expressing post-election conventional wisdom when he declared that conservative doctrine had "not only been defeated but discredited" by Obama's election... Another 2009 book, by the Democratic strategist James Carville, put the case bluntly. In 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule...

When in 1962 Clinton Rossiter published a revised edition of Conservatism in America, he gave it the subtitle The Thankless Persuasion. A decade earlier, Raymond English had touched upon a similar theme in an article in The American Scholar titled “Conservatism: The Forbidden Faith.” Their point was that conservatism as a political philosophy runs against the American grain and thus will always play something of an incongruous and subordinate role in a revolutionary nation dedicated to equality, democracy, and restless change. While the conservative case for order, tradition, and authority may be useful as a corrective for the excesses of...

I DON'T FALL IN LOVE with politicians – the last presidential candidate I voted for with ardor was Ronald Reagan in 1980 – and my heart doesn't break when those I support don't win. Nor am I a party loyalist. As a conservative I vote for Republicans more often than not; for those of us committed to free enterprise, limited government, military strength, and a healthy civil society, there is usually no better option. But the Republican Party isn't the conservative movement. And a GOP defeat doesn't mean conservatism – or the GOP, for that matter – is in crisis....