Key passage:

No, the summer tea party revolution was not from the top. Institutional conservatism was just too compromised after Bush to rouse by itself this new mass of Americans concerned about what government will do to ruin their valued health and political systems. The intellectual case that government intervention is the root cause of the health crisis and that it will produce bankruptcy in the years ahead had not been made by any major political figure in years. Indeed, many conservatives have taken the position that the government health system is sacrosanct and should not be changed at all in order to rouse elderly opposition, ignoring the stacks of rightist think tank reports detailing the urgent need to put patients in charge rather than bureaucrats as the only way to prevent bankruptcy and rationed health care.

Conservatism post-Bush has been opportunistic rather than principled. If the GOP took control of Congress tomorrow, as indicated by a recent op-ed by the party chairman Michael Steele and what the Republican Congressional leader reinforced in California, there is no question it would support some compromise solution that would make the health care system more inefficient, more unfair and more expensive, further hastening insolvency.

The good news is that a critical mass at the grass roots is seeing through the bipartisan tomfoolery and will not take it any longer. Beyond the sloganeering Congressional speeches, the formulistic think tank studies and the hot air TV expert commentary, an exhausted conservative movement is being regenerated by activists who really care about political principles and are determined to do something serious to advance them. Conservatism’s regeneration is happening just as it did in the 1960s, out in the country, spontaneously, below the establishment radar, awaiting a leader and a favorable opportunity.

Read the full article here.

–S. T. Karnick