In the tumultuous history of postwar American conservatism, defeats
have often contained the seeds of future victory. In 1954, the movement's first
national tribune, Senator Joseph McCarthy, was checkmated by the Eisenhower
administration and then "condemned" by his Senate colleagues. But the
episode, and the passions it aroused, led to the founding of National Review,
the movement's first serious political journal. Ten years later, the right's
next leader, Barry Goldwater, suffered one of the most lopsided losses in
election history. Yet the "draft Goldwater" campaign secured control
of the GOP for movement conservatives. In 1976, the insurgent challenge by
Goldwater's heir, Ronald Reagan, to incumbent president Gerald Ford was
thwarted. But Reagan's crusade positioned him to win the presidency four years
later and initiate the conservative "revolution" that remade our
politics over the next quarter-century. In each instance, crushing defeat gave
the movement new strength and pushed it further along the route to ultimate
victory.Today,
the situation is much bleaker. After George W. Bush's two terms, conservatives
must reckon with the consequences of a presidency that failed, in large part,
because of its fervent commitment to movement ideology: the aggressively unilateralist
foreign policy; the blind faith in a deregulated, Wall Street-centric market;
the harshly punitive "culture war" waged against liberal
"elites." That these precepts should have found their final, hapless
defender in John McCain, who had resisted them for most of his long career,
only confirms that movement doctrine retains an inflexible and suffocating grip
on the GOP.