Conservative Losses Historically Follow Abandonment of Core Principles, and Precede Prompt Revivals

Is conservatism dead? 

Like clockwork, overeager liberals believe that the answer is “yes.”  Following Barack Obama’s closer-than-predicted 53% to 46% victory this week (during a year in which political tides should have created a twenty-point margin), liberals are already making that claim. 

CBS News historian Douglas Brinkley, apparently lacking any sense of irony or recognition that his example undercut his very point, told Katie Couric that, “the age of Ronald Reagan is coming to an end tonight.  I think you have to go back to 1964 when Lyndon Johnson had such a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater to see how momentous this is.” 

Apparently, Richard Nixon’s and Ronald Reagan’s own 49-state landslides, which exceeded Johnson’s 44-state victory, weren’t as “momentous” in Mr. Brinkley’s mind.  And nevermind that Johnson’s victory was so “momentous” that the demonized Republican Richard Nixon was elected four short years later. 

Regardless, the reality is that this election is merely another example of the periodic autumn that invariably leads to spring revival. 

As proof, Americans should remember three dates:  1964, 1976 and 1992.  In each instance, liberal commentators and political figures gleefully pronounced conservatism dead, its coffin sealed once and for always. 

In 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson trounced Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater by a 61% to 39% popular vote margin, and by a 486 to 52 Electoral College margin. 

But Democrats’ triumph was short-lived and disastrous.  Johnson overestimated his mandate, and commenced the disastrous “Great Society” and other counterproductive social programs.  He also conducted the Vietnam War in such a tepid manner that the conflict only festered as a stalemate.  As a consequence, four short years after winning his landslide victory, Johnson was so unpopular that he didn’t even compete for his own party’s nomination, and Nixon won the White House. 

Similarly, Jimmy Carter’s 1976 victory over Gerald Ford, which followed Republican abandonment of conservative principles in the form of price controls, soft foreign policy and big-government economic micromanagement, elicited another sanctimonious and premature obituary from the left.  In its now-ironic November 10, 1976 editorial entitled The Future of the G.O.P., the New York Times attempted to mark a collective grave for conservatives: 

Throughout the Middle West from Ohio to Iowa, Republicans began losing town and county offices and state legislative seats in 1964 – and many of them have never been regained.  This trend has now spread to New York and California, where in the aftermath of the Rockefeller and Reagan administrations, the party is weaker than ever before.  What do these grim statistics portend for the G.O.P.?  For the immediate future, they mean that the party heads toward 1980 with aging, battle-scarred leaders.  At 65, Ronald Reagan would seem too old to contemplate another Presidential race in four years’ time…  The 1976 election proved, however, what moderate Republicans have long contended.  With a good campaign, their party can still win at the Presidential level, or at least make a close race in the East and the industrial Middle West.  Had he adopted somewhat more progressive policies in the last two years and chosen a more sympathetic running mate, he might easily have reversed the outcome. 

Memo to Republicans:  follow at your peril the New York Times’s admonition to pursue a “moderate” campaign so that you can “make a close race.”    

Fast-forward to the next election that a Democrat actually won, again following Republicans’ abandonment of core principles like their violation of the “read my lips – no new taxes” pledge, and the Groundhog Day nature of the liberal commentary is just as amusing. 

On November 4, 1992, Chicago Tribune commentator Charles M. Madigan imprudently declared yet another end to conservatism: 

The size of Clinton’s electoral vote victory, comparable to Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide victory over Herbert Hoover in 1932, and Woodrow Wilson’s defeat of William Howard Taft in the three-way contest with Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, undoubtedly will be interpreted as a call for a sharp turn away from the conservative Republican theories that have dominated the executive branch since 1980.  In that sense, the election results signaled the end of the conservative era, and perhaps the beginning of another cycle in American politics and history – one that will carry the nation into the 21^st Century.

Two short years later, of course, voters were so fed up with Clinton’s incompetence and unpopularity that they swept Republicans into majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954. 

And now, following a tenure in which Republicans have largely abandoned their core principles of limited government and fiscal discipline, voters have sent the GOP into the same sort of “timeout” that they imposed in 1976 and 1992.  If history is any guide, however, the party will use this latest exile to clear its deadwood, rediscover its core ideals and mount its likely comeback. 

Accordingly, the simple answer to whether conservatism is dead is, “no, but the latest episode of politicians pretending to be conservatives is.” 

Just as we would never have enjoyed Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 without the disastrous Jimmy Carter era that began in 1976, conservatives needed this week’s rebuke in order to clear the deadwood and reclaim its core conservative principles.  Just as in 1964, 1976 and 1992, the nation should quickly realize that it prefers conservative principles to the liberal alternative, and the leftist ascent should be brief.