LET’S LEAVE 1986 AND TAKE A LOOK at the following randomly selected events from recent headlines.

* Leftist students shut down a presentation by representatives of the Minutemen border patrol group at Columbia University.

* New CBS anchor Katie Couric’s ratings plummet after barely a month on the air.

* North Korea tests a nuclear weapon after promising the Clinton administration that they would never do so. Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acknowledges that the North Koreans cheated on their promise.

Each of these issues touches on core principles of the conservative revolution which Reagan led and why he had so much long-term confidence in the response of the American people to those conservative principles. ~Jeffrey Lord, The American Spectator

You might be surprised, gentle reader, to know that Katie Couric’s ratings problem touches on a “core principle of the conservative revolution.”  One would have thought that it had something to do with the vapidity of Ms. Couric or the decreasing popularity of the Big Three newscasts, which is a function of the growth of cable news and alternative media as much as anything else.  Not so.  It’s all about Limbaugh, you see, “America’s anchorman” (yes, this is what Mr. Lord actually called him), whose brief appearance on Couric’s program, and the higher ratings that went with it, showed the appeal of Limbaugh’s perspective and underscored CBS’ underlying liberal tilt.  Well, okay, I suppose Limbaugh does draw a bigger audience than the uninformative snooze-a-thons that pass for the evening news these days, but what exactly does this have to do with “core principles”?  Is it a “core principle” that the major networks are liberally biased?  If we followed Limbaugh’s watered-down, pseudo-conservatism, we might think so. 

The other two “core principles,” we are informed, have to do with free speech (conservatives are for it!) and opposing “appeasement” (appeasement, you see, is Bad, and the alternative of large-scale war must perforce be Good).  Of course what the students at Columbia did in stifling and suppressing the speech of the Minutemen was atrocious, and it is unfortunately a standard tactic of left-leaning students against speakers with whom they disagree, but when exactly did free speech become a “core principle” of “the conservative revolution”?  There are a whole lot of conservatives who are not big fans of what is now defined as “free speech” when it comes to obscenity, pornography, flag-burning and the like, and there are good reasons why they are not big fans.  You might argue that these things are abuses or distortions of free speech, and you would have a point, but, I ask again, since when was free speech a “core principle”?  On the whole, I would rather keep speech less regulated rather than more, but there are reasonable limits to the exercise of free speech; I just happen to disagree with the rather rigorous enforcement of fairly narrow, constricting limits imposed by the unofficial permissible range of debate and the official criminalisation of speech in Europe.  (It is now a crime to deny the Armenian genocide in France, which reflects a fine idea–acknowledging a genocide that Turkey still refuses to acknowledge–and absolutely horrendous implementation that shows the relative bankruptcy of intelligent discourse in Europe when basic historical questions cannot be debated and discussed on the evidence but instead the ‘right answer’ must be mandated by law.)  

Naturally, opposing appeasement–or at least whatever the propagandists pejoratively call appeasement–has entered into the blood of many conservatives, especially those who cannot turn around for all the new Hitlers they see in the world, but no one has ever explained to me what the steely-eyed, Churchillian response to North Korea’s threats to develop nuclear weapons in 1994 would have been.  The bombing starts in five minutes?  I think not.  If that is not a realistic option today in the age of crazy pre-emption, it was even less realistic back then.  Neocons screamed and shouted appeasement in 1994, and they were quite literally correct: like it or not, Clinton pursued the course that would avoid a war with North Korea and in so doing probably saved hundreds of thousands of American and Korean lives.  In the atmosphere of enthusiastic Clinton-bashing, in which everyone on the right participated to one degree or other, finding fault with their North Korea policy was mandatory, and for some of the wild-eyed neocons war with North Korea was actually a reasonable way to “solve” that particular problem.  Had Reagan been in office, I find it hard to believe that he would not have pursued a similar, if not identical, course of action.  This is, of course, the gravest heresy to hold, because it means that Clinton probably made the best of bad choices (which loyal partisans cannot ever admit).  Reagan was wise and it is well that he was not aware of what so much of the conservative movement he did so much to promote later became when the only words that sometimes seem to exist in the conservative vocabulary are “appeasement,” “fascism,” “moral clarity,” “resolve” and the various euphemisms devised to talk about torture without saying torture.  This is not 1986,  Bush is certainly not Reagan, and this is not your father’s “conservative revolution.”