Conservative revolution took 45 years to prevail

In the final days of the last campaign, Al Gore took to entering coffee shops and approaching Mr. or Mrs. America with the following (rather indelicate) question: "How much do you make per year?" The hapless citizen would mumble some figure, whereupon Mr. Gore would reply, "Well, you'd get a bigger tax cut under my plan than under my opponent's." Mr. Gore also alleged that he, rather than George W. Bush, would shrink the size of the federal bureaucracy.

That the Democratic nominee for president should campaign this way is testament to what some call "the conservative revolution." Few now deny that such a revolution has taken place. The only question is whether it is the central fact of recent U.S. political history. It is.

The conservative revolution began (more or less) in 1955 when William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review. (I happen to work for this magazine, but, to give an honest account, must include it.) Mr. Buckley gathered around him a famously motley crew: classical liberals, right-wingers, Burkean conservatives, religious conservatives, atheistic libertarians. But they all had one thing in common: anti-communism, anti-collectivism, anti-(modern) liberalism. And they were prepared to do battle.

Their fight was certainly uphill. Conservatives now love to cite -- indeed, over-cite -- a statement made in 1950 by Lionel Trilling, the famed Columbia English professor: "In the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is a plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation." Mr. Buckley and his comrades would change all that, convulsively.

The next landmark year was 1964, when the Arizona senator Barry Goldwater managed to wrest the Republican presidential nomination from ... from whom? From the non- or anti-Buckleyites, the more moderate, Establishment Republicans represented by Nelson Rockefeller and even ex-vice president (and losing 1960 nominee) Richard Nixon. At the GOP convention, Goldwater declared, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." Polite society gasped. Goldwater went on to suffer a terrible drubbing at the hands of President Lyndon Johnson, but the ideas he put forward would have their day, and fairly soon.