Noemie Emery: Return of the 'can't do' conservatives

In the wonderful spirit that burst out after the drubbing last autumn, many conservatives searched for the sane thing to do when one has just lost an election, and came up with much the same answer - throw large parts of their old coalition away.

Talk radio denounced intellectual pundits.Pundits who prided themselves on reason and intellect denounced talk radio (and Sarah Palin) as being too crude, too personal, and too vitriolic, and attacked in terms that verged on unhinged.

Others insisted the problem was southern conservatives, who were neo-confederates, and who squeezed out all others with their narrow and bigoted ways. Too true! Who knew that John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and Sarah Palin all hailed from Dixie, and were part of the race-baiting Right?

Who knew Arizona, Alaska, Massachusetts, Michigan, and New York of all places, had all taken the wrong side in the not-so-recent unpleasantness that began with the attack on Fort Sumter, and are still hotbeds of bigotry?

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker went so far as to claim that the current leader of the angry white Southern males is.....Sarah Palin, a working mother of five who hails from the tundra, made her name as a good-government reform politician, and to anyone's knowledge has never uttered a racist word in her life. Parker's complaint about Palin is that she is irrational, deals in crude stereotypes, makes sweeping irrational judgments based on emotion, and pays no attention to facts.

Others think that the party ought to pull back in the world, drop the contentious democracy project, and recast itself as the party of prudence, that stresses the limits in life. There are three problems with this course of conduct: It is impractical in view of the needs of the moment; it has been a loser thus far in electoral politics, and it runs against the grain of the national character, which is assertive, and likes to crusade.

Where conservatism in Europe has long been nostalgic and static, conservatism in America was, until Ronald Reagan, chronically angry, and focused on what it opposed. It was Reagan's genius to fuse the Goldwater view of a limited government with the proactive foreign agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt, (which Democrats then dropped after John F. Kennedy), and make something different and new. He also absorbed the Roosevelt buoyancy, and made his the party, and movement, of hope.

Where conservatism in Europe has long been nostalgic and static, conservatism in America was, until Ronald Reagan, chronically angry, and focused on what it opposed. It was Reagan's genius to fuse the Goldwater view of a limited government with the proactive foreign agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt, (which Democrats then dropped after John F. Kennedy), and make something different and new. He also absorbed the Roosevelt buoyancy, and made his the party, and movement, of hope.

He attacked President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale for big government policies in 1980, but also for the state of malaise they engendered. He attacked "realists" Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and Carter on account of détente.

He appalled realists with his stated belief that people in Latin America, East Europe, and the Philippines were not immune to the lure of democracy. "We have it in our power to begin the world over again," he quoted Tom Paine, appalling George Will,who supports a troop drawdown. It is the reason Reagan won 49 states.

Robert A. "Mr. Republican" Taft ran on small-government realism, and never reached national office. Sen. Barry "Mr. Conservative" Goldwater did the same thing, and carried six states, all but one for all the wrong reasons.

By contrast, Reagan, "Mr. Republican" and "Mr. Conservative" became Mr. President when he added the social and neo-conservatives, many of them former Democrats to his coalition, many of whom would have not voted for him for his financial agenda alone.

Small government conservatives run the risk of losing these voters if they drop the causes that attract and inspire them. The main thing this kind of politics limits is the number of votes it can get.

Four presidents from the 20th century are making the cut into the 21st as national icons

Three of the four were extremely good looking. Four of the four were charming and witty. Two of the four had adorable families. Four of the four had charisma on stilts. Four of the four believed in American greatness, and defined themselves in the main as defenders of freedom.

None of the four was a can't-do conservative. Nor will be their successors and heirs.