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Tim Schieferecke

Forced busing proved a flash-in-the-pan--and did not help the coalition.

Why?--Because Republican leaders were not on board opposing it. So the South went heavily for Carter in 1976.

And people corrected for the problem by either putting their kids into private schools or moving. Issue was largely done.

Agreed that opponents of abortion hadn't come into the coalition in the 70s. They had nowhere to go--given lukewarm opposition by both Nixon, Ford, and Carter. It was the 1980 election that brought them in big time. Not the early 80s (nope--as much as you'd love to think it, but there was no winning conservative coalition before the social conservatives got on board). I know it--my parents who voted for Johnson in '64 and Carter in '76 (not sure of what they did in '68), came on board in 1980 and have voted Republican nationally ever since.

Not just anecdotal evidence. Look at how the South flipped big time between 1976 and 1980.

In addition, as to your comment that judicial activism reached a "zenith" in 1970s--agreed as to the pace of change, but the courts have NOT retreated from any of those positions (except the death penalty), and have continued pushing, with less speed, more and more judicial "resolutions" to contested issues.

"People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors." -Edmund Burke

A Texan

I'm going to be lazy and not check the dates, but I would guess that Haley Barber, Trent Lott, Thadd Cochran and others from the deep South moved from being Democrats to Republicans in the mid 70's and one issue drove them there; forced busing and forced school desegregation by the Federal government. I did check on Lott, he switched parties in '76.

But again, my contention is that the term "conservative" had much more to do with issues besides abortion until the mid 80's. I recall Reagan running as much against Communism, anti-American sentiment and the over extensive reach of the Federal government and not on a social conservative set of issues.

Going to a bit of recent history and read the "Contract with America" of 1994. Outside of the "The Personal Responsibility Act", there is very little there for social conservatives. It was a good government, fiscal responsibility document first and foremost and Republicans who ran on it won!

Point being, the uber social conservative definition of what is a conservative party is a fairly new phenomenon and outside of helping get George Bush elected had not been a dominate set of issues until then. I'd also probably argue that the Terry Schiavo affair was a bit of a watershed moment within the Republican party, with many not all that pleased with the insertion of the Federal government into what had been the providence of State government. (Carefully tip-toeing around starting a blog fight all over again).

But mostly, your blog is a good discussion of what the heck does the word "Conservative" mean, "C" or "c". Thanks!

______________________________________
Proud member of the Barry Goldwater wing of the party !

My family was active in pro-life causes. We were very enthusastic about Reagan because he was unambiguously pro-life. The 1980 platform was the first calling for a Human Life Amendment.

Still it's hard to assess questions of emphasis. How much did it play a part??

True, he talked more about tax cuts and resisting communism

Still, at the time, folks spoke of the "Moral Majority" being decisive in bringing evangelicals from Carter to Reagan, and in defeating many Democratic senators.

(And incidentally, when Goldwater barely won in his last election in 1980--he endorsed the amendment, only to "evolve" by 1983, when he voted against even a federalist-return-it-to-the-states amendment).

"People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors." -Edmund Burke

Pro-life sentiment was at a low point in the late 80s and early 90s. Republicans were abandoning previous pro-life positions, the MSM still had a monopoly and was brutal in distinguishing "moderate" Republicans (anyone who was pro-choice, even if they favored executing mentally ill teenagers) from the "extremists."

The Clintons were so disastrously bad, crime had not yet begun to fall. Social conservatives were still needed, but their support could be counted on--and there were so many independents who were just fed up.

Social conservatives were very much still there, but were not as prominent as they had been and became again.

"People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors." -Edmund Burke

Attacking pornography and the Supreme Court decisions legalizing the same was a huge part of the ur-conservative Goldwater campaign. Your dog won't hunt.

so please do not take this comment to mean either that you, the GOP, or any other individual is/was/ever has been racist. I'm a liberal, but I like to think I'm at least a courteous one who doesn't go flinging accusations.

I, another fellow with roots in the Deep South (any deeper and I'd have been in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Dauphin Island), agree that opposition to many aspects of federal civil rights legislation (including forced busing) was a, if not the, primary reason that the South went GOP after Nixon and others sided with many southerners in favor of "states rights"* in the face of such legislation.

This fact bothers me, though, and is one of the reasons I am now a Democrat. I'm not saying that forced busing was an ideal solution to the problem with race in the South, but the alternative was more "separate but equal" education. The "solution" to the forced busing "problem" was white people pulling their children out of the public school system, setting up private schools, and then defunding the public school system rather than have their children go to school with African American students. In addition, they found an ally in the Republican party and its new-found love of "state's rights." (cf. the Wikipedia article on "Southern Strategy" for a brief history, not that I'll vouch for it or any other Wikipedia article in the details). How is this anything other than simple racism?

It seems to me that if one is going to write an honest history of conservatism in America, one has to deal with the fact that, at least in the South, a large factor was conservatism's (or at least the GOP's**) willingness to at least tolerate racism to expand its constituency. I was thrilled to hear RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman apologize for this complicity, and I really believe the most in the GOP have moved on. After all, Redstate has a wonderful tribute to MLK right there on the front page. Any honest history of conservatism in America ought to at least mention this messy period, though.

*It should be noted that just because "states rights" was synonymous with "racism" for a certain time in a certain region, "federalism" is in no way implicated any more than trains running on time is synonymous with Italian fascism.

**It should also be noted that it wasn't only the GOP that tolerated Southern racism. The Democratic party put up with it from the end of the Civil War until Humphrey's 1948 speech at the DNC convention in order to placate the constituency.

in The South. It is, somewhat, a chronology of The South's passage from the Democrat Solid South to being somewhat Republican. One can argue that fiscally The South is not so much conservative as cheap, at least since the WBTS, but the behavior is the same. Socially, it has long been the most conservative of places. It is a high-context culture formed in its frontier days by the migration of families, clans, and church groups. Everyone knows everyone, is at least somewhat related to everyone, and the opinion of that everyone matters greatly. Such societies definitively do not embrace change, and that is the essence of social conservatism. The religion-based "social conservatism" is a newer thing, for historically The South had an easy tolerance for both other faiths and for sinners. That whole faith by works and missionary work amongst the sinners and heathens was very much a Yankee thing and Baptist churches in The South split over it on doctrinal grounds between the predestinarian Primitive Baptists and the more "progressive" Missionary Baptists. To this day, the Primitive Baptists are the country churches and the Missionary Baptists the town churches.

And, of course, The South has long been somewhat bellicose, so the DefCons find a natural home in the Republican Party these days; not much room with the Ds for good ole boys who like to fish and hunt and keep score by how many rods and guns you have.

In Vino Veritas

I would also point out that social conservatism (in any variety) is a fairly new aspect of the GOP's platform. Before the Southern Strategy with it's attempts to pick up white southern votes, the GOP was more a pro-business party than anything. When the GOP and the South allied though, the GOP picked up the South's social conservatism and the South picked up the GOP's fiscal conservatism. Before that, the South loved FDR-style programs; before Reagan, my grandfather always complained that "the Republicans don't care about the workin' man."

The catalyst for the combination, though, was "states rights" and all that goes with it. If modern conservatism is equal to the Reagan coalition, I definitely think this catalyst needs to be taken into consideration.

CC

As a "victim" of a forced movement of children from one school to another, I have very strong feelings on this topic. There was no intent to imply that the Republican party was or is racist, but the facts are that the Democratic party of the 70's turned hard left on race relations in the view of many Southerners, and many white suburban voters were attracted to a party that wanted to leave things like schools to the local authority.

The trap, if there was one, is that sure return the issue to the local authority, but overwhelmingly that power base was the very same Jim Crow Democratic party of the South.

But again, I do have a bias in this topic area, having been one of those who were offered up to the altar of achieving this great equality.

______________________________________
Proud member of the Barry Goldwater wing of the party !

Thankfully for me, I was born at the tail end of that battle (1980), and I didn't have to deal with the effects of segregation and desegregation. I think a lot of folks in my generation tend to forget that there were very real effects for the childhoods of both white and black people and instead simply focus on the long-overdue undoing of the injustice of segregation.

I should have pointed out that the effectiveness of the Southern Strategy is debatable. In any case, it seems to have only been immediately effective in the presidential elections of '68 and '72 (Leaving aside '80 and Reagan's possible appeal to the Strategy in mentioning "states rights" in Mississippi, a debate I certainly don't want to start here).

Watergate almost undid any effect the strategy had at all, once a Carter, a good Georgia boy, got the Democratic nod before running the country into the ditch.

I don't think that the only reason the South is now in the GOP column is Nixon's willingness to tolerate unreconstructed racists. I do think that the Southern Strategy was the catalyst that got the GOP listening to the South and vice versa in the first place, though.

maybe it worked in '68 to some extent, but I can tell you as someone who grew up in the deep south. The reason that so many southern states began to support Republicans instead of democrats. (this didn't really happen until the 1980's) is that the old racist white democrats mostly just died out.

People like my uncles were yellow dog democrats who would never have voted for a republican no matter what. The younger people like myself, and lots of people who migrated out of the rust belt during the 1980's were turned onto the Reagan message of self reliance and low taxes.

Meanwhile a lot of previously apolitical religious people began to organize based on opposition to abortion. Those are the three main reasons the south turned Republican.

"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle

By the mid-seventies, the County Sheriff had more to fear from the FBI than from the Klan and the "Big Men" in politics. Being an outright vocal racist was no longer a profitable position. Once that power structure broke down, the whole house of cards that had been the Southern Democrat Party came crashing down. The demogogues couldn't use the racist appeal to the "Wool Hat Boys," to use Gene Talmadge's phrase, because they couldn't deliver. End of power. For the first time since the Civil War, the Southern wage earner could vote for his interests rather than his race.

In Vino Veritas

but by then the civil rights issue had been more or less settled.

Your uncles aside, it was in the '60's and the '70's that the GOP made inroads into the South. Goldwater carried the Deep South in '64 with his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Nixon tried to appeal to the South and keep that vote in 1968 but lost it because Wallace was running a blatantly racist campaign against him. The Southern Strategy went into full effect in 1972, allowing Nixon to sweep the South.

Once again, this is not to say that the reason the South votes GOP today is because it's full of backwards racists. By the '80's civil rights wasn't as much of an issue (at least for southern whites; it's arguably still very much an issue today for African Americans). Opposition to desegregation was the means by which the GOP pried the South out of the hands of the Democrats, though. This new alliance, which eventually (after civil rights ceased to be a major issue) culminated in the Reagan coalition eventually became the conservatism that we have today.

and you're not going to give up on it, but it was much, much more complicated than that. The Democrat Party is still alive and well at the local and county level in much of The South even today. Only at the federal level has there been a large conversion and the state governments are still very much in transition.

If you are White and of the age that came to voting in the late sixties and early seventies, and which happens to be the generation that pretty much runs The South and this Country, the only political words dirtier than Republican were Yankee and Yankee Republican. It took a lot to make those people change their voting persuasion and Zell Miller does a good job of explaining it, though he never took the final step.

Race alone wouldn't do it because the die was cast and no R was going to take The South back to 1953, go slower on the changes maybe, but not back and anyone with a brain knew that; contrary to popular belief, Southerners born in the days of Jim Crow did indeed have brains.

The ever mounting intrusion of the federal government, the ever mounting intrusion of a culture with which most Southerners wanted nothing to do, even the headlong rush to industrialization and a wage economy had a lot to do with it. Even though it was not in there interest to do it anymore, Southerners loved and longed for subsistence agriculture the way Westerners long for the single section ranch. The headlong dash to modernity made much of The South look for someone who advocated putting on the brakes. Nixon offered some hope of more measured change. Carter was a Southerner and that counted for more than anything else, but he was not an old boy Southerner, and Southerners knew that. By the time of Reagan's secoond run, there had been a political sea change as the old racist demogogues had been forced to fade away or conveniently died. For the first time since the Civil War, arguably for the first time ever, the Southern working man could vote his interest and he saw Reagan as representing his interests.

In Vino Veritas

I am only talking about the GOP on the federal level (and I'm especially focusing on the presidential elections). You are right about the state level remaining Democratic, but guess what the one thing that state-level Democrats and federal-level Republicans had in common in the '60's and '70's...opposition to desegregation. Show me a piece of common ground between southern Democrats who ran state offices and Goldwater (who carried the South in '64), Wallace ('68), and Nixon ('72) that wasn't opposition to desegregation and I'll consider abandoning my "liberal meme."

It's also worth noting that the South didn't oppose federal "intrusion" when it was in the form of New-Deal style programs. I would agree with you that there was a "culture with which most Southerners wanted nothing to do." That culture was called desegregation. "Conservatism" in the South in the '60's and early '70's meant conserving the old system where blacks knew their place.

I've already said that the 1980's were a different story. The GOP had already started listening to the South and vice versa. The cultural conservatism of the South blended with the economic conservatism of the GOP, and even after the catalyst of anti-desegregation was removed the relationship continued. Once again, this is not to condemn the Reagan coalition as somehow being "crypto-racists" or some such silliness. If one is to explain to current lay of the land with regard to conservatism, however (especially as concerns African-American refusal to embrace it), it's a pretty necessary part of the story.

The specifics--when, where--are tough to pin down. But I think this is true: Republicans lost the black vote to the Democrats because among political leaders, it was primarily, tho not exclusively, some northern Democrats who took the lead--Humphrey, Truman, etc.--in seriously demanding that the 14th and 15th Amendments be enforced.

Conversely, white souterners began taking another look at the Republican party once northern democrats turned on them.

And Republicans certainly got a look-see from southern, racist whites in 1964 because Goldwater opposed the '64 Act on federalism grounds.

As to a common policy uniting Wallace, Goldwater, and Nixon--all of them decried American weakness in Vietnam, and all opposed any precipitous withdrawal.

And I'm pretty sure all denounced the Supreme Court's banning prayer in public schools.

"People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors." -Edmund Burke

but I doubt it played much of a role in the 1964 election, since the ground war didn't begin until 1965. In addition, LBJ, who defeated Goldwater but lost the South, was hardly a dove when it came to Vietnam.

I'm not sure about school prayer. I've done a bit of reading on the period, but I've never heard that as making up a major campaign platform for any candidate during the '60's/early 70's. I may well have overlooked it, though. In any case, I doubt that school prayer played a role anywhere near as prominent as anti-desegregation in Goldwater's and especially Wallace's success in the South.

of all time was the "Girl with Daisy" ad that LBJ ran which insinuated that a vote for Goldwater would lead to nuclear war. The whole LBJ impetus was that a vote for the putatively bellicose Goldwater would lead to escalation in Vietnam and confrontation with the Soviets. The LBJ forces spun Goldwater's "In your heart, you know he's right" them by adding "but in your guts, you know he's nuts." War, both Vietnam, which already had a sizeable troop contingent, and or relations with the Soviets were major issues in the '64 Campaign. It was said wryly after LBJ's escalation in Vietnam, "They told me if I voted for Goldwater, we'd be at war in Vietnam - and they were right."

I don't remember how much attention School Prayer got in the campaigns, but the whole issue was very much on people's minds. There were lots of "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards in those days.

In Vino Veritas

You are right that Goldwater was seen as more bellicose than LBJ, and a vote for Goldwater was portrayed as a vote for nuclear war. My point stands, though, that LBJ was no McGovern. Unless you have some evidence that the South would have been particularly more inclined to support potential use of nuclear weapons against the Soviets, though, I don't see what difference it makes. In either case, it had nothing to do with support or opposition to military action in Vietnam, and it especially didn't have to do with troop withdrawal, since the war hadn't even started yet.

Also, the Impeach Earl Warren billboards had at least as much to do with Brown v. Board of Education as with Murray v. Curtlett (which wasn't decided until '63, well after the signs began appearing).

In any case, sure there were other factors that might have played a role in the southern shift to the GOP in the '60's and early 70's. Trying to say that the primary factor in that shift was not anti-desegregation, though, is like trying to say that the Civil War was primarily about tariffs rather than slavery (which I've seen attempted).

in both the Civil War era and the Civil Rights era was Southern reaction to what any White Southerner of either time would have described as "Yankee Meddling."

Actually, the Impeach Earl Warren billboards were a Bircher iniative that was generally about the Court's liberalism and activism on a variety of fronts, and certainly not specifically about Brown. Brown was just the foremost example.

I've never argued that Goldwater's success in The South in '64 was about anything other than his opposition to the Civil Rights Act. If fact I've posited that in other threads. That said, it made no real difference in the overall politics of the Democrat Solid South. The transition that you try to conflate with both Goldwater's success as an R and Wallace's success as an independent came much later and was for far more complex reasons.

And if you knew anything about the War Between the States beyond the government school canon, you wouldn't sneeringly toss of the line about tariffs. Slavery was undoubtedly the factual predicate of the secession of the Lower South states. It is a much different question whether slavery was the factual predicate of War. If I grant you the common Yankee notion that all Southerners then and now are ignorant brutes, perhaps you'll grant me the proposition that they were at least able to count, after all they had to keep track of their slaves. There was no way that a Lincoln Administration or a Republican Congress could abolish slavery. Even today, the 13th Am. could not be ratified if all the former slaveholding states held their ground. Even slaveholding Southerners were smart enough to do that math. They were also smart enough to do the math and conclude that the new Administration would not be able to garner the votes to declare war should they secede, and in fact it never did even with no Southern delegations seated. That said, the 1860 Election did demostrate to The South that a purely regional Party could control the US without regard to The South. Heretofore, any party or person had been forced to accommodate The South if it was to govern. The stark fear of the slaveholders was not that a Lincoln Administration would free the slaves, but that a purely Northern Administration would control all the federal offices in The South and an abolitionist supported Party would refuse to interfere with abolitionist inciting of a slave revolt and opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act, which act several states were already refusing to observe.

The stark fear of the mercantile North was an independent free trade South with control over the mighty flow of commerce on the "Y" formed by the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers and the Port of New Orleans. The only international commerce in which The North engaged was the Golden Round otter fur trade with China, a rich trade but inconsequential compared to Southern natural resource, particularly cotton, trade, from which the US Government derived some three quarters of its revenue through the customs houses of The South. The great Southern objection to federal "internal improvements," prohibited in the CSA Constitution, was that tariff revenue raised in The South was being used for canals and railroads that forced the trade east to NY and Philadelphia rather than south to New Orleans. It is most interesting to read the Northern editorials in that vital fall and winter of '60-'61 as they evolved from "let them go" to we must do something, see, e.g., Greeley's writings. Ultimately, the new administration refused to cede the customs houses and forts and when they took steps to re-supply the US fort on the sovereign territory of South Carolina, the rash Carolinians performed a great service for the US, an act decried by many of the most ardent secessionists, e.g., Robert Toombs. It is neither coincidence nor serendipity that the first US objective in the ensuing War was to grasp the Ohio and Mississippi and the port of New Orleans while attempting to blockade the remaining Southern ports.

Anyway, enough of this; it isn't going to convince you of anything. It is the Liberal way to try to make very complex motives and events simple so that they fit the accepted narrative.

In Vino Veritas

1) I've never attended a "government school." I attended Protestant private schools for my elementary and secondary education. Having spent the first 18 years of my life in Mobile, Alabama, I know that the Civil War was more complex than slavery (in fact, slavery was dramatically downplayed in any telling of that history that I received, and Robert E. Lee was and is hailed as the greatest man who ever lived where I grew up).

2) I apologize if I implied that I was giving a full history of the events leading up to both the Civil War and southern abandonment of the Democratic party in favor of the GOP. That was not my intention. My point was that in the former the primary cause was slavery and in the latter it was anti-desegregationism. Of course there were secondary factors in both, but your highlighting the secondary factors and downplaying the primary factors neglects a major task of any historian...to major in the majors.

3) Summarizing and conflating is the nature of history-writing (especially if one is doing so in a blog comment). As long as one does not distort history (by presenting primary causes as secondary and vice versa, for example), there is nothing wrong with doing so. Simply pointing out that secondary factors existed alongside primary factors does not refute the fact that these primary factors were in fact primary. Unless you are claiming that slavery was not the primary cause of the Civil War (or at least the secession which led to that War) and that anti-desegregation was not the primary reason that the GOP gained a foothold in the South (neither of which I think you're doing), I don't see how the secondary factors you bring to bear in any way impact my argument.

4) Finally, you are right that both the Civil War and the opposition to desegregation were in response to "Yankee meddling." You fail to point out, though, that the common thread was actually "Yankee meddling in how we treat our blacks" and that their "meddling" was to guarantee the right of all men to be treated equal, regardless of the color of their skin.

I unequivocally do not believe that the United States went to war to free the slaves. Even as Ohio ratified (and then rescinded) the 14th Am. they were passing laws that essentially barred Blacks from their state. The US went to War to preserve the Union, and that preservation was important to the US for all sorts of reasons, mostly purely economic. Yes, there were Yankees deeply, profoundly dedicated to Abolition, but they were by no means a majority and, as I stated earlier, had about the same standing and power in the Republican Party of '60 as the radical enviromentalists have in the Democrat Party of '08 - good for money and a reliable vote.

Likewise, much of the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th Century was a Cold War dynamic. America sat astride a pretty tall horse at the end of WWII with all our freedom, democracy, and anti-colonialism. The Soviets and their friends on the Left counterattacked where we were vulnerable; our territories and our minorities. The US responded by conferring statehood on Alaska and Hawaii, independence to The Phillipines, much greater autonomy to the other territories, and walking away from the ground it had conquered in Europe.

Sure, there were people in the Country, North and South, who were highly motivated to improve the lot of the poor in The South, many of whom were Black. The cause celebre in the 'Fifties and very early 'Sixties was poverty in rural America and specifically Appalachia. But, frankly, it was the fact that America could not castigate the USSR for its enslavement of millions while its White Only dirty laundry was hanging out for the World to see that most motivated the Government to act.

You want to ascribe pure and altruistic motives to both the WBTS and the Civil Rights Movement; I won't. Governments are neither pure nor altruistic; they aren't even moral or ethical, they just are, and they behave in their interest.

In Vino Veritas

The vigorous anti-communism of conservativism, and anti-anti-comunism of liberalism, was well established by the early sixties. This was a national issue that left intact the local fiscal-liberal dependency of Southern voters (and gives the Southern conservatives fits to this day.) That's why it was OK to continue voting in Dem congressmen for another 2-3 decades, but JFK's failures at anti-communism (Berlin, Cuba, etc) raised the national security leg of the conservative stool to prominence, starting and especially in the South, and insisted on subsequent anti-liberal votes for president.

To touch back on Education, the effects of the civil rights movement on education politics are most complicated. The insistance on forced integration (busing) and judicial overreach were most pronounced in the South. I agree that without it much of the South would have instituted de facto segregated semi-public schools. (You could call it a voucher system.) Instead of that we had the cultural effect of insisting that black kids could only learn if they were seated next to a smart white kid. With hindsight, can anyone be surprised that the response among young blacks was "Education is honkie stuff!" Being smart is "acting white." Act up! Drop out! Surely this is one major contribution to the disintegration of the black culture, particularly inner-city where peer pressure is stronger. Sowell's examination of pre- and post-segregation black education and culture is most enlightening.

Why is it that even Reagan, whose major small-government conservative plank was "Eliminate the DoEd" was unable to pull it off? I think the answer is as much classist as racist. Both Algore and Jesse Jackson sent their kids to private schools. Upper class whites and blacks (i.e., the political classes) benefit from the (relatively) better suburban public schools. Inner city and other lower classes are kept pacified in their decrepit schools by federal handouts and the insistance that the problems are not local, but federal. Without the feds to depend on (i.e., blame), the whole public school system would be apt to crumble. It is too entrenched.

In Vino Veritas

were (fairly or unfairly) portrayed as "soft on communism," but do you really believe that Goldwater's victory in the South had anything to do with anti-communism? After all, he was running against Mr. Domino theory himself, LBJ.

You may well be right with regard to education and race, and I'm sure that in hindsight there could've been better ways to desegregate schools than forced busing. That said, though, I don't believe for a second that any of those who were opposed to forced busing were so because they were afraid that African Americans might one day see education as "honkie." Goldwater might have opposed it on federalist grounds, but Wallace made it pretty clear why he opposed it. Furthermore, Nixon's advisor, Kevin Phillips, outright said that they were going to seek out the "white Negrophobe" vote as early as 1970.

Was not confined to Vietnam in '64. Nor was LBJ's campaign geared to confrontation in Vietnam (see the Daisy ad.)

Can you define "unintended consequences?" The option of ending forced segregation without enforced desegregation is the essence of federalism and conservativism, and obviously never occurred to the liberals, as you demonstrate above even now.

Huckabee was not merely a pure social conservative. We've seen them before--Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, Alan Keyes. He was and is just very good as a speaker, and an affable personality.

And at the same time, there was no George Bush (Sr. or Jr.) who could credibly claim to have a decent track record of standing with them (or to be more candid--"us").

"People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors." -Edmund Burke

I do think that if you asked Huckabee or McCain voters--which are you, liberal or conservative, the vast majority would have said "conservative"--and credibly so. They are enthusiastic about McCain, not because of campaign-finance reform or the Z-visa, but most would have put national security at the top of their list. Similarly, Huckabee voters probably largely said they wree "very conservative"--and what gest them to the polls--it ain't a national smoking ban. It's opposition to abortion, redefinition of marriage, judicial activism. These folks are indifferent--at worst--generally to other elements.

Reagan appealed positively to all parts of the coalition. And we desperately need someone to rally the coalition. We don't need someone as great as Reagan in terms of communication.

I think the appeal to the Founding principles is one that all elements would respect, and is a key to uniting the coalition--so it's not just united against a common enemy (and Clinton-Pelosi-Reid is a might motivating enemy), but also has a common basis of mutual respect.

"People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors." -Edmund Burke

The ACU Foundation has some great stuff on line, as does the Kirk Center.

I did a piece on this too, with a focus on what I believe is the most important key driver for a conservative mind...as I learned while growing up.

It's interesting that there seems to be a need in some of us to state what we believe conservatism really is.

After mulling it over, I've returned to the conclusion that, for me a deep respect for continuity is vital. If a candidate doesn't have it, I won't buy their conservative claims.

Better be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident security. --Edmund Burke

Blog: TMYN

I've been slogging through some pretty heavy reading, trying to boil down the thoughts of guys like Burke, Kirk, Reagan, Buckley, Goldwater, the Fed Papers into the most foundational core of conservatism. Which, add to that, there are a couple of flavors of conservatism.

The Kirk Center stuff is superb. Thanks a bunch! Also your post was very good upon reflection.

Kill the terrorists
Protect the borders
Punch the hippies -- Frank J

Better be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident security. --Edmund Burke

Blog: TMYN