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New Ideas? Just Say 'No'

By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services on

"Conservative ideas are only produced when they have to be produced," Robin, an associate professor in political science, told me in a telephone interview. "When real power and privilege are being threatened, that's when the conservative defenders of those powers and privilege recognize they have to come up with a new defense."

Of course, conservative thought leaders have been as varied as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand and Jack Kemp, to name a few. But the constructive obstructionism, as I would call it, that links them all was captured best in a much quoted line from National Review founder William F. Buckley's mission statement: The magazine, he declared, "stands athwart history, yelling Stop."

Indeed, there are times when conservatism plays a valuable role in checking the excesses of the left. But the right has little reason to rise up with new ideas these days, Robin says, because ironically "they already have won. The administration of Barack Obama is proof of that in a bizarre kind of way. Here you had the most progressive candidate to come along in a generation ... yet he has governed like an Eisenhower Republican."

Indeed, despite a previous voting record that conservatives blast as "the most liberal in the Congress," President Obama has governed mostly as a center-left moderate who admiringly quotes Ronald Reagan. Even Obama's embattled health care overhaul and stimulus packages took as much fire from the left as from the right for giving away too much, even before negotiations began.

Besides, despite all of the paranoid right-wing myths about Obama as a Marxist-Kenyan-Muslim, Obama's unthreatening moderation is revealed in the failure of moderate establishment Republicans to rise up against him with anything resembling the far right's panic. True conservatives know when they have something valuable to conserve, beginning with their sanity.

 

So those of us who would like to see a more vigorous debate from the right will just have to wait. There's no need to come up with new ideas when a simple "No" will do.

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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage(at)tribune.com.


(c) 2012 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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