BOY, HE'S IN REAL TROUBLE NOW…:

The Antiwar Right Is Ready to Rumble (DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, 11/07/04, NY Times)

AROUND 8 p.m. Tuesday, a gloomy mood was settling over the dozen conservative stalwarts gathered with martinis and glasses of red wine in an office in Arlington, Va., to watch the returns. Early exit polls showed President Bush trailing, and Richard Viguerie, dean of conservative direct mail, thought he knew who was to blame: the neoconservatives, the group associated with making the case for the invasion of Iraq.

“If he loses, they are going to have a bull’s-eye on their back,” Mr. Viguerie said.

Ronald Godwin, a top aide to Dr. Jerry Falwell, agreed. “I see a real battle for the Republican Party starting about Nov. 3,” he said.

The euphoria of Mr. Bush’s victory postponed the battle, but not for long. Now that Mr. Bush has secured re-election, some conservatives who say they held their tongues through the campaign season are speaking out against the neoconservatives, against the war and in favor of a speedy exit.

They argue that the war is a political liability to the Republican Party, but also that it runs counter to traditional conservatives’ disdain for altruist interventions to make far-off parts of the world safe for American-style democracy. Their growing outspokenness recalls the dynamics of American politics before Vietnam, when Democrats first became identified as doves and Republicans hawks, suggesting to some the complicated political pressures facing the foreign policy of the second Bush administration.

Since he was chosen to cover the conservative beat for the Times, Mr. Kirkpatrick has written one story after another about the disgruntled base and how it threatens the President’s grip on power. To look out upon the electorate that went to the polls on Tuesday–where the GOP

THE MOST UNLIKELY FELLOW TRAVELERS:

Strategy and the Idea of Freedom (Douglas J. Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, November 24, 2003, Heritage Lecture)

That was a time when we neo-cons, of which I was a junior member, and the folks we called the paleo-cons, made common cause:

To support beleaguered democracies,
To beleaguer the Soviet Empire, and
To advocate a US foreign policy of peace through strength.

The Heritage Foundation helped create the alliance of the neo-cons, those of us who started our political lives as Democrats, and the old-fashioned conservatives. It was an alliance of the profoundest type, anchored in philosophical principles. It was not tactical, not a political marriage of convenience.

The realignment of US politics that joined William Buckley with Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz – that bound together supporters of Barry Goldwater with supporters of Scoop Jackson and Hubert Humphrey – has helped change our country and the world. At home, it made the conservative slice of the political spectrum a lively place, intellectually scintillating, creative, ambitious to transform government, attractive to young people, and decidedly non-stodgy.

Abroad, the makers of the Reagan Revolution – with the Heritage Foundation as a key node in the network – elevated the status of ideas as weapons in the arsenal of democracy. The Reaganites understood Realpolitik; they grasped the importance of guns and money and the other “hard” realities of world affairs. But they appreciated also the potency of the human desire of freedom.

They saw the Cold War not as a balance-of-power exercise between two “superpowers” – much less an arms race between “two apes on a treadmill” – but as a noble fight of western liberal democracy against Soviet communist tyranny. They abraded conventional sensibilities by speaking of an “evil empire” and insisting that the truly representative voices in that empire were those of Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, Anatoly Sharansky and their fellow dissidents.

This engagement in philosophical warfare, I need hardly remind folks at the Heritage Foundation, created no small controversy in the politics and diplomacy of the western world. President Reagan’s talk of democracy and good-versus-evil and his exhortation to tear down the Berlin Wall were widely criticized, even ridiculed, as unsophisticated and de-stabilizing. But it’s now widely understood as having contributed importantly to the greatest victory in world history: the collapse of Soviet communism and the liberation of the peoples of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe without a war.

Which is why it’s so disturbing to see the palecons (Pat Buchanan and his Buchananeers in particular) on the opposite side of history at this time.