Conservatives have a lot to be pessimistic about lately. The President won re-election; the Republican Speaker of the House wasted no time in caving on the most monolithic of conservative principles—taxes; the presumed rising star of the Republican Party, Marco Rubio, has entertained the idea of regulating the Internet. It’s reasonable to ask when, how, and if conservatism will make a comeback.
The answer to “if” is yes. But when, and how?
The promising point that seems to have been lost in the conversation is that liberalism didn’t win last November. Among the diverse and often ridiculous reasons pundits posited for the election going the way it did wasn’t the President’s performance. Romney lost it. It might have been the perception that he was a rich guy only concerned with helping the rich, or perhaps that he wasn’t a bona fide conservative.
Whatever the case, no one other than recipients of Obama phones (who, it’s safe to say, didn’t vote in droves) has suggested that Obama earned a second term. The hallmark of his first term was health care, and those in his party who voted for it suffered electoral consequences. Liberalism isn’t popular these days, both among the electorate and among those in Congress who continue to embrace it.
Meanwhile, Conservatism has been conspicuously absent at Republican Party headquarters around the nation. Battered wife syndrome is alive and well and burning the party. Republicans are more afraid of being called names than of abandoning principles in order to avoid the name calling.
Enter sequestration, an Obama idea now being touted as the end of the world. The administration’s thinking is and always has been that Republicans will agree to more taxes—two rounds of them in two months—because the only thing more sacrosanct to the Republican Party than taxes is military readiness.
Both, of course, are as important as they are symbiotic. Without lower taxes to grow the economy, there’s only so much you can do to be militarily strong. And President Obama, as evinced by his choice of Chuck Hagel to be defense secretary, wants a weak military.
So what’s on the horizon, politically? Hagel as Secretary of Defense, and, assuming higher taxes with Republican complicity, a slower economy. In other words, liberalism will be practiced—and, as always when it is, it will fail.
It hasn’t been until recently (thank you, the Internet) that the immediate results of bad policy have been immediately evident. The “how” answer about conservatism’s comeback is technology. It exposes the truth.
As to when it happens, the answer lies not in technology, but rather in how long it takes for conservatives en masse to recognize that the people are on their side.
By: Will Anderson
