Conservatism is Dead; Long Live Conservatism?

Conservatism is Dead; Long Live Conservatism?
By Selwyn Duke

It seems like just yesterday that many were reading liberalism's epitaph. After the Reagan years, Republican Revolution of 1994, retreat of the gun-control hordes after Al Gore's 2000 defeat and George W. Bush's two successful presidential runs, many thought conservatism was carrying the day.

Ah, if only.

We might ask: With conservatives like President Bush and many of the other Republicans, who needs liberals?

While the media has successfully portrayed the Republicans as the party of snake handlers and moonshine, the difference between image and reality is profound. Bush has just spun the odometer, proposing the nation's first ever $3 trillion budget. On matters pertaining to the very survival of our culture -- the primacy of English, multiculturalism, the denuding of our public square of historically present Christian symbols and sentiments -- Republicans are found wanting. As for illegal immigration, both the president and presumptive Republican nominee support a form of amnesty.

Yet many would paint America as under the sway of rightist politics, and some of the reasons for this are obvious. Some liberals know that the best way to ensure constant movement toward the left is by portraying the status quo as dangerously far right. If you repeatedly warn that we teeter on the brink of rightist hegemony, people will assume that to achieve "balance" we must tack further left toward your mythical center. Then we have conservatives influenced by the natural desire to view the world as the happy place they'd like to inhabit. Ingenuous sorts, they confuse Republican with conservative, party with principles, and electoral wars with the cultural one. But there's another factor: One can confuse conservative with correct.

When is the right not right, you ask? When it has been defined by the left.

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http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/02/conservatism_is_dead_long_live.html