Future of Conservatism

Richard Spencer at Takimag.com makes a good point about the issues that really work for conservatives and the various ways that elites pull their punches to their detriment politically:

Political parties are pretty malleable, so I think it’s a better idea to look at what those really big issues are that could unite a broad Right coalition. Mitt Romney tried to make himself the perfect GOP candidate by standing on the thee pillars of “economic conservatism” (“free-trade”), “national security” (pro-war), and “social conservatism” (vague references to “life”). But such things haven’t proved to work too well in the recent past. 

In truth, the Big Three that have had the widest popular appeal over the past five years have instead been opposition to racial preferences, opposition to amnesty/immigration restriction, and anti-war foreign policy. Ward Connerly’s civil rights initiative of 2006, which effectively banned affirmative action in the universities, won by a landslide—even though it was opposed by youth icon Barack Obama. The only time the conservative movement really showed its teach, and has been willing to go against the GOP, was during last summer’s battle over amnesty. I don’t need to go into Iraq, which is increasingly viewed as a disaster even by Republicans (and, more importantly, Reagan Democrats.)

These issues are perhaps the only three that can unite an increasingly fracturing youth population (within an increasingly fracturing population as a whole). And better still, they’re all natural conservative issues, and ones which, with the exception of the opposition to war, don’t really work for Democrats. 

And yet, on all of these issues, the GOP has come down on the wrong side—publicly even: opposing Connerly, sponsoring amnesty, and devoutly supporting the war to the point of self-parody.