Jonah Goldberg: The Right Isn’t Waving a White Flag

The conservative Götterdämmerung is finally here. “Like dazed survivors in a ravaged city, America’s conservatives are wailing and beating their collective breasts,” opines The Economist’s “Lexington” columnist. “A leading conservative thinker,” asked by The Economist to “list today’s conservative ideas, laughs bitterly and replies, ‘Are there any?’”

Reaganite former congressman Vin Weber (R., Minn.) laments in the conservative journal Policy Review, “I have never been so concerned about the future of conservative ideas.”

A Washington Post columnist announced that “the long descent of the Republican Party into irrelevance, defeat, and perhaps eventual disappearance” has finally begun. William Kristol of The Weekly Standard concludes that the “conservative movement, which accomplished great things over the past quarter-century, is finished.” His magazine has dedicated an entire issue to the “conservative crack-up.”

These epitaphs are all from yesteryear. The bits from The Economist and Weber were published in 1992. Kristol delivered his death sentence after various conservatives lost the New Hampshire primary in 2000 (the “crack-up” issue was in 1997). And the funereal Washington Post columnist? That was the late Robert Novak in 1976, four years before Ronald Reagan’s 1980 triumph.

And that’s just from the right. Since the conservative movement was born, liberals have been insisting it was dead.