The American Spectator

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Keeping the Coalition Together

By W. James Antle, III on 1.2.08 @ 2:08PM

John O'Sullivan makes a worthwhile point in this NRO symposium on the state of the Reagan coalition: "[The coalition] is not dead, but groups within it are increasingly irritated because they don't feel cemented by a grand unifying idea (like anti-Communism in the Reagan days) that justifies the concessions each makes to the others." I think we see this very clearly in the ongoing GOP presidential race.

I'm less sure that his proposed solution will keep peace on the right: Emphasizing "the omnipresence of an unaccountable bureaucracy at home and abroad that increasingly rules us while exempting itself from our democratic control. This bureaucracy annoys economic conservatives by overregulating the economy, moral traditionalists by using state power to spread moral 'innovation,' and nationalists by deconstructing the nation and transferring power to international bodies." This is all true, but it might be hard to turn into a "harnessing" issue in that same way as anticommunism.

topics:
Communism