Amazon.com Review
A leading figure in the American conservative movement for over 40 years, Mickey Edwards was a prominent Republican congressman, a former national chairman of the American Conservative Union, and a founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation. When he speaks, conservatives listen. Now, in this highly provocative and frank volume, Edwards argues loud and clear that conservatives today have abandoned their principles and have become champions of that which they once feared most.
Amazon Exclusive
Read a letter from Mickey Edwards, author of Reclaiming Conservatism.
Dear Amazon Reader,
Having been repudiated even in states they had long dominated, Republicans woke up on November 5th faced with the challenge of rebuilding a political party that had been transformed overnight from powerful to pitiful. They should have seen it coming. In my book, Reclaiming Conservatism, I describe precisely how Republicans in the White House and in Congress became the enemies of the principles they once stood for, a threat to constitutional government, and a party thoroughly deserving of the rebuke it has received. I explain specifically how conservatives can again earn the public’s confidence.
Now Republican leaders are trying to find the way back. In the process, they are continuing to look in the wrong direction, unwilling to face the reality of the disastrous choices that led to their defeat. So-called conservatives, they have abandoned true American conservatism--which is properly focused on limited (not small) government, individual liberty, and prudent governance--and have instead become the champions of wiretapping, government secrecy, federal deficits, questionable wars, and a nasty kind of politics that even questions the patriotism of those who disagree with their policies.
The Republican Party long stood for the principles at the heart of the American Constitution, including a belief in the wonderful possibilities of self-government (instead of the anti-government rhetoric it has since embraced). It celebrated ideas instead of the rabid anti-intellectualism it has come to cherish. It celebrated diversity (Barry Goldwater argued that there was no such thing as a merely common man) rather than demanding sameness in religion, values, and beliefs. The Republican Party does not need to re-invent itself--it merely needs to remember what it once was.
Sincerely,
Mickey Edwards
From Publishers Weekly
This book is a cri de coeur by former Republican congressman Edwards, a veteran conservative founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation who once ranked as the national chairman of the American Conservative Union. Edwards believes that conservatism has abandoned the ideas of limited government that once inspired it. This has been, he argues, the paradoxical price of conservative electoral success, and the process of winning and retaining this power has brought its own temptations. Taking Washington required coalition forming with neoconservatives, the religious right and former supporters of George Wallace who all owed little to the Goldwater-style conservatism in which the thing being 'conserved' was the liberal revolution embodied in the Constitution. According to Edwards, these other views have intensified as the Bush administration presides over an evolving security state, and the movement Edwards once held sacrosanct is now unrecognizable. This is a critique with force and eloquence, but its author is better at defining what has, from his perspective, gone wrong, than providing persuasive suggestions as to how conservatives of his mindset are meant to win elections today.
(Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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