This year we will see if America is still a center-right country, or if Obama’s two terms will mark a historic shift to the left.

2014: 

Year of Decision

 by Bruce Thornton

This year we will see if America is still a center-right country, or if Obama’s two terms will mark a historic shift to the left. History and recent events give cause for optimism, subject, of course, to unforeseen events.

The champions of big government, wealth redistribution through taxation and entitlement transfers, and a coercive, intrusive regulatory regime have many times exaggerated the death of conservatism and the final victory of progressivism. Remember this famous pronouncement by culture critic Lionel Trilling in 1950? “In the United States at this time Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation . . . But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Even as Trilling wrote those words, the work of Russell Kirk, F.A. Hayek, Richard Weaver, Whittaker Chambers, William F. Buckley, and many others were developing a powerful conservative philosophy that would bear fruit in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Or those of a certain age can remember the triumphalism of the left after the disgrace of Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, which was followed a year later by the debacle in Saigon and the seeming repudiation of the conservative view of America’s role as the defender of freedom against communist expansion. But the incompetence and naïve idealism of Jimmy Carter’s four years as president quickly made plain the deep flaws of the progressive ideology, as stagflation at home and foreign policy retreat abroad taught us once again that the utopian fever dreams of the progressives threatened our prosperity and endangered our security. The failure of the Carter presidency created the conditions favorable to conservative ideas, and galvanized a people receptive to the philosophy of prudence, self-reliance, and the Constitutional principle of limited government.

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