The Old Conservatism is Dying

I’ve been thinking more and more about the CPAC straw poll that Ron Paul won.  I’ve also had trouble listening to the regular talk radio show pundits because they’ve refused to acknowledge it.  Rush Limbaugh even said that Ron Paul isn’t a conservative and that there must’ve not been conservatives at CPAC.

So let me get this straight.  The one man who has enough integrity to vote against pretty much every unconstitutional piece of legislation that comes through the Congress is not conservative?  Why would the likes of Limbaugh do that?

It really isn’t too hard to figure out, so long as you know the history of conservatism in the last half century.  In the 1950s, the conservative movement was formed by William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell, Jr. as an anti-Communist movement.  Basically, their top priority was to stop the Soviet Union dead in its tracks.

But they didn’t argue against the Soviet Union on economic terms.  They did so based on a Christian vs. atheist theme.  Brent Bozell, Jr. once touted that he’d see the whole world destroyed in order to stop the Soviets.  I’ve probably taken that out of context, but it was something that shocking and demonstrates that the conservatives of old were more interested in defeating the Soviets than pushing for limited government and free-market economics.  No wonder Ayn Rand said they defaulted when they gained any level of power.

In the same vein, Rush Limbaugh is a second-generation Buckley conservative.  He once said that conservatives are for big government, like military spending.  For the past 20 years or so, the conservative movement as led by Limbaugh and others like him, have looked for some superpower enemy to contend with.  When the Berlin Wall fell, all that was left was the Democrat Party, which had it’s share of leftover communists from the 1960s, and following 9/11, Islamic terrorists.  Now, I’m not downplaying the threat posed by either to the American people.  Islamic head choppers are a serious threat.  But they are no superpower.

It amazes me that when I point out that we spend over 1 trillion a year on military spending that many conservatives just shrug that off and attack me for being unpatriotic or something (did I mention that nationalism was monopolized by the Buckley conservatives as well?).  The fact is, however, that many young people are fed up with their parent’s breed of conservatism.  The movement, by and large, has failed to deliver a return to Constitutional principles.  Now, they will blame Democrats or Republicans, but in the end they need to admit that they have not been an effective movement.  The Soviet Union would have collapsed eventually because no Socialist state can survive its parasitic ways.  In fact, what is happening now in Europe and here is more than likely what what happening to the Soviets circa 1980.

And yet Limbaugh refuses to even accept the likes of Ron Paul or even entertain his ideas.  The old conservatism is dying and the movement is changing for the better.  We are shedding the likes of Keynes, Friedman, Buckley, and to some degree Reagan as well.  We are embracing Ludwig Mises, Murry Rothbard, and Ron Paul as the new ideological standard.  Your ideas have failed us.  It’s time for something more radical.