The American Conservative has a piece on What is Left? What is Right? Does it Matter? In it Patrick J. Buchanan states the following (excerpted):
What Ms. Emery’s piece [in The Weekly Standard] reveals is that conservatism today is as shot through with corruption as the Church of Pope Alexander VI, two of whose brood of bastards were Lucretia and Cesare Borgia.
We are in need of a Council of Trent to redefine who we are.
Still —conservative— remains a respected term and the right term for those who devote their lives to family, faith, community, and country…
A few years ago, when called a —neo-isolationist,— I wrote,
Most of us … are not really ‘neo-‘ anything. We are old church and old right, anti-imperialist and anti-interventionist, disbelievers in Pax Americana. We love the old republic, and when we hear phrases like ‘New World Order,’ we release the safety catches on our revolvers.
As in New Deal days, our Cultural Revolution, and the high times of the Great Society, a conservative today must be a counterrevolutionary. While Bush’s judges and Supreme Court justices have been top of the line and his tax cuts conservative, his democracy crusade and his open-borders immigration policy, his Big Government conservatism and free-trade-í¼ber-alles globalism owe more to FDR and LBJ than Goldwater or Reagan.
But the returns are now coming in from the Bush experiment with a Rockefeller Republicanism that he calls —compassionate conservatism.—
The rising casualties and soaring costs of an unnecessary war in Iraq, an overstretched military, immense trade deficits that must bring down the dollar, the loss of sovereignty and economic independence, a bloated federal bureaucracy to which Bushites have added as much as LBJ, an unresisted invasion over our southern border, the selling of the party of Reagan to the money power—”all are the marks of an empire at the end of its tether.
What can save this Republic is the restoration of authentic values and policies of conservatism, imposed at some cost and hardship upon a people who may have lost the capacity and belief in the need to sacrifice to save what their fathers gave them.
…
Conservatives have seen their movement hijacked by ideological vagabonds and hustlers who are redefining it to mean what it never meant. We need to find who sold the pass. Before we can take back our country, we must take back our movement.
Yes, those who are corrupt, for whom the ends justify the means, will co-opt any movement to achieve their ends. That is why freedom of speech, debate, and adherence to values and principals is much more important than shifting in whatever wind blows.
Tip o’ the biretta to the Young Fogey.