Standing on the Verge of Greatness

摘要

This isn't a crisis; it's a pri- mary. A dispiriting one, to be sure, but it shouldn't obscure the significant strengths of contemporary conservatism. The historic 2010 elections that produced a conservative majority in the House led to the passage in that chamber of a genuinely transformational budget in the form of the Ryan plan. Every Republican presidential candidate swung around some version of that plan, the centerpiece of a party wide policy consensus that is to the right of any other in recent memory. There are robust conservative alternative media across all platforms, a mature network of national and state-based think tanks and an aroused grassroots movement that sprang up spontaneously in 2009 and breathed life into a GOP discredited by the decadent phase of the Bush years and devastated by its defeat in the Obama sweep. American public opinion is broadly conservative and highly distrustful of the federal government. If this is a crisis, every ideological movement should want to suffer one.