Has Obama’s radical liberalism given birth to a radical conservatism?

The opportunity for an unprecedented type of conservatism has been opened up by the left’s unprecedented radicalism, argues Tony Blankley in an exciting column. Since modern conservatism began, he says, it has always been hamstrung by the prevailing liberalism. Any move to roll back the imposing construction project of liberal statism, as distinct from merely slowing its advance, was considered extreme even by most Republicans, and failed to gain enough support to get anywhere. As a result, any politically viable conservative agenda was always a deeply compromised, half-conservative agenda at best. Obama, Blankley believes, has changed all that. His seizure of one sector of the economy after another, climaxing in the passage of the health care bill, has frightened conservatives to the core and brought them to the point of opposing unconstitutional statism as such, and thereby opposing many aspects of the modern state they have long accepted and even supported. The Obama revolution has thus created for the first time the conditions for an anti-liberal conservatism that is both genuine and politically viable. To this hopeful insight Blankley adds the advice that Republican politicians need to be bold and go with the new anti-statist wave.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 16, 2010 12:08 AM | Send