Political movements have a life cycle. Liberalism has gone through a number of reinventions over the last century because the current trends run their course and become stale. Wilsonian Democracy petered out with World War I and was replaced two decades later with the New Deal liberalism of FDR. That ran out of steam and was replaced with the New Left and the sixties identity politics. That fell apart in the 70′s and Carter stagflation. The Liberal Revivalism of today was a replacement for the largely defunct New Left. There are a lot of interesting things to explore here, but that’s a topic for another day. The fact that today’s liberal spasm is really a walk down memory lane for aging lefty boomers is worth a book or two, I bet. Anyway, the point is movements have a life cycle and they eventually either die or stagnate.

Conservatism seems to have stagnated and may very well be headed for the dust bin of history. A good example of this is National Review. It was one of the founding publications of the conservative movement, a response to New Deal liberalism. The insanity of the sixties breathed life into the movement eventually leading to Reagan and the conservative reformation of the 1980′s. Throughout those years National Review was the platform for radical conservative thinkers to spread their ideas. Today, it is a market platform for conventional mediocrities looking for talking head gigs on the cable channels. Anyone that is slightly edgy gets tossed out and the magazine mostly functions to promote dullards like Ramesh Ponnuro and Rich Lowry. Neither of who have said or written anything anyone has bothered to remember. As John Derbyshire once told me, they are just career men with mortgages and families.

One magazine is no big deal, but it is emblematic. They have a piece up by that slovenly old statist and parasite Newt Gingrich. For two decades now Gingrich has been peddling his brand of conservative and getting a warm receptions from the “movement conservatives.” The fact that there’s nothing remotely conservative about the old hack seems to be lost on everyone. Within living memory, the editors of National Review would have been railing against Gingrich and his crackpot ideas.  Today, the collude with him to sell books to the rubes. The gist Gingrich’s pitch is that the every growing state should meddle in your life so you do things Newt things are neat like inventing dinosaurs. You get the same nonsense from guys like Ramesh Ponnuru who want the state to whip you into having more kids and going to church more often.

That’s why the Right is dying. Young people, we are told, are more libertarian. The makeup of the typical Ron Paul rally says this is correct. But young people are always more libertarian. The young hate rules because rules favor old people. Reagan’s appeal to young voters was largely the result of his repetition of the claim that government was the problem and needed to be swept out of the way. That always appeal to the youth. Gingrichian appeals for new agencies to whip the young whipper snappers into shape sounds fogyish and crazy. It also sounds crazy to Gen X types who remember Reagan. The thought that keeps coming is how in the hell did the GOP become the “me too!” party? We remember when conservative ridiculed that sort of capitulation. Today, Conservative Inc writes books extolling the virtues of submission to our liberal masters.

I don’t know what comes next, but conservatism is dead. Liberalism appears to be blowing apart as it tried to defy the laws of arithmetic. What comes next is a mystery to me, but it sure as hell is not anything like what that slovenly old fool Newt Gingrich is peddling.