Winning Minds to Conservatism

Paul Rahe at ricochet.com says Barack Obama has given conservatives "a perfect recipe for a conservative resurgence." Pivoting off a reader's dispirited comment, Rahe argues Obama is forcing Americans to rethink their relationship with their government:

Consider what Barack Obama has done. He has unmasked the tyrannical potential of the administrative entitlements state, and he has once again demonstrated the defects inherent in Keynesian economics. He promised us that the stimulus would bring unemployment down dramatically. He acknowledged that if it did not do so he would be unelectable. He attacked religious liberty, attempting through a court case to interfere with a Lutheran church's ability to choose its own religious teachers as it saw fit, and threatening to make Roman Catholics, the Roman Catholic Church, and Christians and Jews who regard abortion as murder complicit with that act by forcing them to pay for abortifacients. He jammed through Congress a bill designed to undermine the health insurance industry and to institute healthcare rationing. He brought our government to the edge of fiscal insolvency. At a time of rising energy costs, he blocked the building of a pipeline that would bring petroleum from our northern neighbor and friend Canada to the United States and reduce our dependence on the Middle East.

In short, Barack Obama is forcing the American people to rethink the relationship that connects them with their government. Where many of them once saw a helping hand, they now see a threat to their livelihood, their personal and religious liberty, and their well-being more generally. 

Moreover, it is "demonstrably false," Rahe asserts, to argue (as Reader does) that the country is less conservative than it was in 1980 when Reagan won a landslide. Massive conservative national and state wins in the 2010 midterm elections dispel this argument.

...you underestimate our compatriots. They know that our culture is in severe decline, that the family is disintegrating, that our schools indoctrinate our children with secular theology -- and they know whom to blame. All that it would take to turn the present discontents into a realignment would be for a forthright woman or man able to point out the connection linking cultural decline, family disintegration, and political correctness in the schools -- not to mention massive unemployment and fiscal insolvency -- with the administrative entitlements state and the doctrine that it is the responsibility of the government and not the individual citizen to make provision for his well-being. People rally to strength and confidence, not to weakness and timidity. 

Rahe challenges Reader (and conservatives generally) not to "go wobbly" but to "take the bull by the horns:"

One must indict those intent on creating “a new despotism” in which “a small group" is concentrating "into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives.”

A good little spine-stiffening read.