He lays out how the conservative movement has only itself to blame for the country's descent into unapologetic statism.
A snippet:
Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and using the gravity of the [Clinton] impeachment process on something that required the fly-swat of pest control were strategic errors. Would that blame could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves. We have lived up to no principle of conservatism.
BlueCarp recommends reading the whole thing.
P.J. nailed it. My minor quibble: The reference to Goldwater in the article is misplaced. Barry did not oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because he believed in the "separate but equal" policy as P.J. implies.
ReplyDeleteThis explains Goldwater's position well:
Most of the twenty-seven senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act were Southern segregationists. Goldwater was not a segregationist, nor was he any kind of racist. He was, in fact, a lifelong opponent of racial discrimination. At the beginning of his political career, as a city councilman, he had led the fight to end segregation in the Phoenix public schools; his first staff assistant when he went to the Senate, as Perlstein tells us, was a black woman; he was a member of the N.A.A.C.P. Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act because he believed, as a conservative, that the federal government did not have the power to compel states to conform to its idea of racial equality, or to dictate to individuals whom they must associate with.
from http://rickperlstein.org/storm/nyer
Sounds like the kind of principled conservatism P.J. finds lacking today.