And lets not forget the first president to call for national healthcare.Who was it? Teddy Roosevelt.

I was 19 in 1979, and I’m puzzled over what this can refer to.

Shall-issue laws, routine today, would have been widely considered nuts in 1979.

In 1979 Jimmy Carter had just begin to dismantle a regulatory state whose like no one dreams of restoring.

In 1979 the Clinton era welfare reform would have been considered so draconian that it would not be implemented until, well, the Clinton administration.

In 1979 crime was skyrocketing, and everywhere liberals could be heard insisting that ‘locking people up is not the answer’. Today, while there are concerns about the sheer number of people incarcerated, there’s not much interest in returning to the lax sentencing of the 1970s.

Of course political changes over the last three decades have been too complex to sum up as ‘move left’ or ‘move right’. Examples of ‘leftward’ movement include gay rights and growing interest in drug legalization. Falling crime rates and the effects of DNA testing have eroded the popularity of the death penalty.

Regarding health care, it occurs to me that Republicans have been reluctant to press for market oriented reform because more competition is, as always, the last thing existing industry leaders want. Note what a pitiful job the McCain campaign did of selling its reform plan. Popular dissatisfaction with the present system has nowhere to go but towards more state involvement. But I concede that health care is an area in which popular opinion has moved left, for whatever reason.

On the overall size of government, I would say there has been a small shift to the left.

In 1979 the federal budget took 20.1% of GDP, and discontent with such levels of spending was widespread. It would contribute to Reagan’ s victory the following year.

In 2008 the federal bite was somewhat larger, at 20.9%. Discontent, while evident, is not nearly so great as in 1979. (I expect that will change as the cost of Obama’s policies sinks in.)

Overall, though, I would say popular opinion in 2009 is significantly further ‘right’ than in 1979. What am I missing?

And to the point here in this discussion, just what do YOU mean by “resolve themselves along conservative lines”? If there is one thing that this thread has firmly established, there is no overarching philosophy that falls under the rubric of “conservative”.

Jake

But more and more, whether rational or not, the electorate consider “issues of social and private morality” to be largely put of political bounds. In response, the institutional GOP has more or less been co-opted by (or versa visa, it makes no difference) Neoconism — which seems to me be a fusion of Ashkenazi Jewish — Evangelical Dispensationalist fascism couple with Country Club morals (gutter morals dressed in Brooks Brothers), which largely correspond to those of the ever more metrosexual electorate.

Hence, traditional conservatives more and more are flocking to the strategy of Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.

Dr. Paul is trying to recapture the GOP using the old Goldwater formula but with a marked de-emphasizes on the conservative social/moral agenda. He is not a libertine libertarian (e.g., CATO), but rather is wisely avoiding off-putting debates about hot-button social and moral issues on anational level by appealing to federalism. Of course, he hopes, but is not saying out loud that, at the state level, these issues, which are so divisive on a national level (i.e. the Red country v. the Blue cities) will mostly resolve themselves along conservative lines, which would be a solid incremental victory for conservatism against the libertinism of the sexual revolution, which has become a bedrock plank in the Democratic Party Platform. Dr. Paul knows from experience that a frontal conservative attack on in national politics will not gain any sort of victory for conservative social policy but rather increase the liberal (libertine) strangle hold on these issue.

Instead, for his national-issue talking points, Rep. Paul focuses on paleocon fiscal conservatism, fair trade, enforcement of immigration laws for the sake of law and order, and foreign non-interventionism — which are all issues that do resonate with the electorate on a national level, as both the Bush administration and the Democratic Congress took hidings in opinion polls precisely for being on the wrong side. A presidential candidate running on these four major issues, and pushing social policy to the state level, might indeed have a chance at beating the current Democratic, “Rainbow” Coalition as well as the decadent, Necon Chicken Hawks.

And, if the conservative wing of the GOP cannot get a Ron-Paul conservative candidate nominated next time around, and we are faced with yet another Neocon nomination, it will then most certainly be the time for the Old Right of Coolidge, Taft, Goldwater, Buchanan, and Paul to form a third-party strategy or join the ready-made Constitution Party.

Jake

Actually from ‘When She Was Good’ (1967) to ‘The Human Stain’ (2000) Phillip Roth has portrayed working-class, rural whites with a great deal of sympathy and some genuine insight. After Joyce Carol Oates there may not be another contemporary American novelist of stature who has so continually evoked the great masses of Americans who didn’t go to college, live in coastal cities or benefit from the economic changes and military adventures (they, of course, actually fight our wars) of the last forty years.

Ironically (but, alas, not surprisingly), Kauffman’s comment smacks of the kind of ignorance and rabble-rousing that the Larrison post decries.

The underlying assumption would seem to be that Roth is a highbrow, foulmouthed, autobiographical Jewish writer who despised Nixon and Bush therefor he must be contemptuous of “provincial America.” Not true. Just the rantings of yet another “conservative” writer who’s a loud, ignorant blowhard (Kauffman).

Somewhat sad. Though perhaps typical, not just for the current GOP but for ‘The American Conservative’, which still all too easily slides into frothing Taki mode.

As it is, being anti-abortion, with very few exceptions, locks you into the GOP, and the GOP no longer has a seat at the table, which I take to by your point, “The only problem is that social cons sometimes tend to substitute being against abortion for having a platform,…” And it is my point as well – if social cons insist that anti-abortion is THE litmus test for their support, they will remain marginalized, however valuable their other thoughts on life might be.

Jake

So Wall Street laissez faire Republicans will support socially conservative views that they themselves will never live by, because they need socially conservative votes to keep their own interests in the game. And social conservatives will support neocon wars because they have ceded foreign policy to that i interest group, in exchange for support of their views. Etc. What we end up with is a party of rather insane contradictions that has no internal glue to hold it together. At least the old Democratic party interest group coalition had an overal ideological consensus that did not generally involve gross contradictions of interest, and it was meat-and-potatoes trade-offs that held them together, not blind indifference to their own interests.

For the GOP, ideology has become everything and nothing, because the label “conservative” is all they have left to hold themselves together. So they call “conservative” all kinds of policies that have almost nothing to do with either one another, or with any historical movement that could rightly be called “conservative”. As long as no one sees the man behind the curtain, all seems well and good. But for some time now the curtain has been torn and dragged through the mud, and the wizard has been revealed as a puny little man with nothing but a labeling machine he uses to slap the word “conservative” on whatever he thinks others will rally around. I get the sense that most people in the GOP are wondering how long they can put up with this charade.

If there were evidence backing the proposition, it would be worth evaluating. All available evidence suggests that being anti-abortion is net positive for any candidate. The only problem is that social cons sometimes tend to substitute being against abortion for having a platform, a mistake that would be more forgivable in other times.

Modern movement conservatism is a bit of both – principles in the domestic are abandoned to gain power, in part in order to implement foriegn policies which THEY believe are conservative, but which many conservatives believe are not at all conservative.

Because for the typical American, the realization of how much they stand to lose and how close they are to losing it hasn’t hit yet.

For fifty years or so, the fiscal consequences of the entitlement state are a boiled frog: the temperature keeps getting hotter but our amphibian body politic manages to adjust. But that’s in the process of ending. For us mainstream conservatives, _we_ have the way out and no one else does. Let’s just hope the body politic finds us in time.

When I read histories and political discussions from England and the rest of the world, there’s an acknowledgment of the historical tendencies behind the terminology being used. That is, in American political discourse, you never hear the term “classical liberal” being used to describe the American political system, even though historically, that’s what it is. Saying “liberal conservative” – which is historically a meaningful term, as one who supports the ideals of classical liberalism while rejecting dramatic and revolutionary changes – would make American political heads explode.

I see two major reasons for this. First, Reagan’s successful change of the term “liberal” into an epithet, and second, the 24-hour news cycle, talk radio, and bloggers turning the discourse of the American public sphere into referendums on the Democrats and the Republicans.

The even bigger question is, of course, what to do about it. And on that I have no idea short of moving off-grid into some agrarian utopia, but I know I’m not ready for that yet.