Conservatism died.
It died of natural causes, which I will explain.
I can approximate the time of death.
It was some time after the "Republican Revolution" of 1994, and prior to the 1996 presidential election.
But the truth is conservatism as an ideology was never really viable from the very start. It was artificially animated for a period of time by the inspired political leadership of Ronald Reagan.
Reagan's gone. He's not coming back. It's time for conservatives to rethink their strategy – their very identity.
Let me begin my observations with a little personal history.
I always was, am and always will be a newsman. The best newsmen, and I like to think of myself as one, seek the truth, no matter where it leads.
In the 1980s, my search for truth led me to accept the basic tenets of conservatism. The policies President Reagan promoted and pursued worked. It was that simple. America was in steep decline when he was elected president. His force of personality, combined with wise decisions and determination reversed that decline – economically, culturally and with regard to America's position in the world.
To put it as simply as possible, he advanced freedom.
But as soon as Reagan left office, the inertia of decline resumed. We still benefited as a country and as a people from some of his policies. The final glorious act – the disintegration of the Soviet Union – would come after he left the political stage. Yet, it was Reagan who wrote the script.
By 1994, conservatives tried to re-establish the magic by laying out a legislative agenda for change – the Contract With America – in a bid to recapture the magic and to capitalize on the way Reagan had popularized their ideals and values.
It worked as a political strategy, and Republicans assumed control of Congress for the first time in decades. It even appeared that these Republicans who had taken power were Republicans in the mold of Reagan, not Rockefeller.
But, alas, the Republican Revolution failed. Now it's time to recognize why it failed and why conservatism died with that failure.
First, one must understand that conservatism is, by definition, a defensive agenda. When one's goal is simply to "conserve," or preserve, or to hold onto what is good and right, you have abandoned the idea of advancing. In military terms, your objective would be holding on to turf, rather than attacking, defeating the enemy, taking new ground.
That is essentially what happened after Reagan was gone. Reagan, despite his embrace of the "conservative" cause, intuitively understood that defeat was certain if your fight is limited to defending. To give you a contemporary illustration of how this works in the real world of conflict, the U.S. won the first part of the war in Iraq, when it fought aggressively to defeat the defined enemy. After that, the focus shifted to defending. And the result should be obvious to all.
Reagan was on offense – in his domestic agenda and, especially, in his foreign policies.
The fundamental flaw of conservatism is its tendency toward defense. It is simply a natural law that you don't win conflicts this way. And, make no mistake about it, politics is about conflict.
Reagan overcame that fundamental flaw in his adopted ideology by fighting, uncharacteristically for conservatives, on offense. He took the fight to his adversaries and put them in the unusual position of adopting a defensive strategy.
At its essence, the success of the Reagan Revolution was really that simple. But to make it work, it required a unique personality driven by uncompromising values. Even then, with that, perhaps, once-in-a-lifetime kind of leadership, it was often beset by losses.
Conservatism is also hopelessly inadequate as an agenda because of its near total reliance on "politics" as the battle ground. The real battle for the hearts and minds of the people doesn't take place in election cycles. It takes place every day when they watch television, when they read their newspapers, when they go to church, when they go the movies, when they send their children to school, when they listen to music, when they go to college.
Those are all battlegrounds where core values are shaped. Those cultural institutions are almost totally out of the control of conservatives. They will not be won back because of any election victories. At the same time, election victories become tougher and tougher for conservatives because of the power their adversaries have over the culture.
Let me give you some illustrations of how this works.
In 1984, during the height of the Reagan Revolution, a friend of mine, Phyllis Schlafly, led a heroic victory over ratification of the federal Equal Rights Amendment. No one really expected it to turn out that way when Phyllis first got started. The ERA was seen by the cultural elite as a no-brainer. But Phyllis waged a relentless, tireless, courageous political fight against it that culminated in the ERA's defeat.
Yet, in the succeeding 23 years, many of the worst nightmares ERA opponents predicted if it were ratified have become realities. That's because conservatives' adversaries are always on offense and don't limit their combat to one field of engagement. Who could have imagined, for instance, 23 years after the defeat of the ERA that we would have same-sex marriage in its wake? What they couldn't accomplish in the world of politics, they accomplished in the world of culture – a world in which they face little or no opposition.
As sure as you are reading this column today, the culture will lead America into tyranny. It's not that conservatives' opponents knowingly seek tyranny. What they seek is government's intrusion into every part of our lives. It just so happens that is the definition of tyranny.
There are basically two worldviews in conflict here: One is a socialist vision in which government plays god. The other is a freedom vision in which government is subservient to God.
Man's world is not worth conserving. But God's ideals for our world are worth a fight.
When I tell you conservatism is dead, I speak from personal experience. I adopted the conservative label in the 1980s because of the advances in freedom I witnessed during the Reagan years. As a newspaperman, in those days, I was content, even privileged, to direct the editorial operations of conservative newspapers.
But I noticed a couple things about the world of newspapers during those years.
My adversaries fought a war of extermination against my newspapers. They couldn't accept the idea that a few conservative voices could even be permitted to exist in their cultural stronghold of the media. While my newspapers were always labeled by my colleagues as "conservative," I noticed no such labeling was done when liberal papers were mentioned. Boycotts were launched. News racks were vandalized. Once, my entire newspaper building was surrounded by demonstrators demanding my head on a platter.
When all else failed, those newspapers were purchased by media conglomerates.
But notice what conservatives did while this war raged – nothing. They didn't buy newspapers. They didn't infiltrate the culture to ensure their ideas could compete on an even playing field. They just kept looking for the next political messiah to lead them to the Promised Land. In other words, they played defense.
They can't help it. It's their nature. There are exceptions, as I mentioned. Reagan was one. Ann Coulter is one. Rush Limbaugh is another.
Yet, none of them figured out the fatal flaw of conservatism. It is a recipe for slow defeat. It is a blueprint for losing ground. It is a roadmap for perpetual retreat.
There's another fundamental problem with conservatism. No one can really define it. It means different things to different people at different times. Therefore, the term itself is subject to abuse. Notice that the socialist dictators in Beijing are sometimes called "conservatives." Iranian mullahs who offer the world jihad are "conservatives." In the days of the Soviet Union, those running the Kremlin were "conservatives."
What many Americans do not understand is that the conservative movement is a very new thing – less than 50 years old. It served a purpose during the last five decades, but I suggest it is time to rethink identity and strategy. You know what they say about the definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
The contributions and leadership of Ronald Reagan, so closely identified with the conservative movement, cannot be overstated. But it's time for conservatives to reinvent themselves. At some point, you have to look around your world and determine whether simply "conserving" what's left is enough of a goal – a worthy objective.
I'm hoping that now, after six years of George W. Bush and the midterm elections of 2006 and the continued retreat of American values and the betrayal of our way of life, that conservatives are going to stop being conservative and at least consider a new way.
I bring you this well-considered message in the spirit of love. It has been more than a decade since I called myself a conservative. Personally, I rejected the label long ago.
How we see ourselves helps define what we do. If you see yourself as a conservative, chances are you won't do much more than complain. And you will have plenty to complain about as your world slowly degenerates and your enemies increase.
So how should we see ourselves? How should those of us who seek to advance freedom at home and around the world see themselves?
It's time to consider who our real heroes are. I love Ronald Reagan. I admire Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was a great man. But he didn't invent this great experiment in freedom we call the United States of America. He merely recognized what a great experiment it was and sought to continue it.
We need to read our history. We need to rediscover our Founding Fathers. We need to recognize what a unique breakthrough in liberty they inspired. It's their vision to which we need to rededicate ourselves. It's the biblical values they held that caused the greatest outbreak of freedom the world had known.
By the way, they weren't conservatives.
They wouldn't even know the term.
Instead, they laid out a radical break from the past – a new way of thinking about freedom and independence and strict limits on government.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and John Adams were not conservatives. These men risked everything in the hope of changing the status quo. They fought a War of Independence from the Old World. They fought a revolution against the assumptions of the past.
They did this, by the way, at a time when life was not so bad. But they were wise enough to see a better way for themselves and their posterity. Thank God they did.
It's time for conservatives to stop being conservative. It's time to get radical. It's time to remember our heroic heritage. It's time to take risks. It's time to stop business as usual. It's time to stop repeating the mistakes of the past. It's time to see we're losing ground.
It's time to fight for something worthwhile – not just the preserving of freedom, but the expansion of freedom.
For a more in-depth exploration of the ideas mentioned in this column, read "Taking America Back" by Joseph Farah