NYT on “Debate Over the Party’s Road Map Back to Power”

It pains me to say it, but this is a pretty good, if brief, synopsis from the New York Times on the debate amongst conservatives regarding how the movement might recover from recent events.
Nearly 30 years after Ronald Reagan ushered in a period of conservative ascendancy in American politics, how should the movement re-energize itself? [...]

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Rod Dreher on the Conservative Civil War

Our very own Sun Journal ran a good piece from conservative blogger Rod Dreher today, whose CrunchyCon blog is one I read regularly.  By this column, and some of his other posts, I’d put Dreher in the Ross Douthat/David Frum/Rammesh Ponnuru/Rich Lowry camp of conservatives, which is to say the camp that believes it is [...]

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America a center-right nation? Not so fast…

It has become an article of faith among conservatives that we needn’t panic to much about the recent election. Yes we have work to do, but this is still, after all, a conservative country.
Or is it?  The Hoover Institute’s Tod Lindburg writes the following in today’s Washington Post:
We are now two elections into something big. [...]

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“Republicans Rebranded” from the Boston Globe

A thoughtful take on the future of conservatism, from a New England perspective:
The underlying problem for Republicans is the absence of a compelling conservative vision for the future that is aligned with New England’s more tolerant and civic-minded political sensibilities.
Typically, political observers say that the national Republican Party has moved too far to the right [...]

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David Brooks on the future of conservatism

From Brooks’ column today in the NYT:
It’s only been a week since the defeat, but the battle lines have already been drawn in the fight over the future of conservatism.
In one camp, there are the Traditionalists, the people who believe that conservatives have lost elections because they have strayed from the true creed. George W. [...]

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Things will be fine for conservatives…or not.

So was the recent election simply a repudiation of the Bush administration and its GOP allies in Congress, or a more substantive “realignment” of political philosophy by the American people?  Are we moving to the left, or not?
Depends on who you talk to.
In yesterday’s WSJ, pollster Scott Rasmussen suggests that President-elect Obama may not have [...]

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More on the GOP “losing the middle”

NR’s Ramesh Ponnuru, in the New York Times, on how the GOP lost more of the middle this past election than it gained on the right:
Based on the exit polls from 2004 and Tuesday, Republicans have lost more ground among self-described moderates than among conservatives. Even if Senator McCain had won the same percentage of [...]

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David Frum on the GOP’s college-educated voter problem

David Frum’s National Post piece from last week talked about the problem the GOP has with college-educated voters, who went overwhelmingly for Obama last Tuesday
A generation ago, Republicans dominated among college graduates. In 1984 and 1988, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush won states like California, Pennsylvania and Connecticut – states that have been “blue” [...]

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NR’s Rich Lowry on the GOP’s future

In today’s Washington Post, National Review editor Rich Lowry outlines his thoughts for where the GOP needs to go:
Connecting better on the economy and middle-class pocketbook and quality-of-life issues will go a long way toward alleviating the troubles the GOP had in reaching moderates, suburbanites and even Latinos this year. It will require refreshing the [...]

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WSJ Op-ed on the collapse of the conservative intellectual movement

For the past couple of weeks, I have been reading, or rather listening to on CD, William F. Buckley Jr.’s autobiographical collection of columns and essays titled “Miles Gone By.”  Among many, many other things, (Buckley was CIA agent!) the book describes both the development of National Review and the exhaustive process by which issues [...]

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