The resignation of Justice William Brennan marks the termination of the modern liberal era in American politics. Liberalism has been kept alive for the last ten years only on an artificial life-support system provided by the media.
The American voters dealt a fatal blow to liberalism when they first elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, and they twisted the knife in liberalism’s death wound with his reelection in 1984. This changed the politics and the culture of our nation by proving that conservatism is not only right, but demonstrably popular.
The American people have been trying to vote for conservative Presidents and policies almost every quadrennium starting in 1952. But they’ve been getting liberal policies in no insignificant measure because of two grievous mistakes made by one of the conservative Presidents they trusted – President Dwight Eisenhower.
Ike ruefully admitted that his appointments of Earl Warren and William Brennan to the U.S. Supreme Court were mistakes, but his sincerely expressed regrets did not save us from their life-tenured mischief. We had to endure the Brennan mistake for 34 years, through the terms of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush.
Brennan became liberalism’s chief ideologue, but he didn’t just talk into the wind and mouth his movement’s cliches, as is the fate of so many ideologues. As a Supreme Court Justice, he was vested with the power to read his activist liberal opinions into the law of our land, all the while he was insulated from censure or second-guessing, veto, or reversal.
A widely-quoted aphorism says, the Supreme Court reads the election returns. If Brennan ever did read the election returns, it just made him more determined than ever to force his minority liberal views on the rest of us and try to live long enough to exit only when a Democrat President came to the White House. Fortunately, that day didn’t come before Brennan’s age and health compelled him to toss in the towel.
Liberalism won’t sell on its rhetoric and promises any more. Liberalism requires the power of government to force it on people. From the frozen plains of Russia to the banks of the Blue Danube to Tiananmen Square, people are rejecting the precept that overbearing bureaucracies should spend our money and override democratically-elected legislatures.
Liberalism’s failed policies and personnel no longer have a majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, but they still hold sway in the national media. Confronted with Brennan’s resignation, media liberals regrouped quickly and planned their ambush to intimidate President Bush.
The thrust of unremitting television reportage now is to give President Bush these orders: (a) avoid a “blood bath over abortion” (translation: appoint a pro-abortion Justice or suffer a repeat of the treatment they gave to Robert Bork), and (b) “preserve balance” of the High Court (translation: select someone approved by Senators Ted Kennedy and Howard Metzenbaum).
The liberals don’t believe in “balance”! They believe in using the Court for leftist ideological, activist, and patronage purposes. President Lyndon Johnson’s appointments of Abe Fortas and Thurgood Marshall, for example, were patently political payoffs.
Watergate of the 1970s infused the media with a messianic zeal to be players in the political process, not just reporters. Not that the media hadn’t been influential before, but at Watergate they became not only overt about it, but self-righteous.
For the last four months, the liberal media have orchestrated an obvious campaign to create what they call “conservatism’s identity crisis.” Liberal pundits have ground out commentary after commentary peddling the line that, with the collapse of the Iron Curtain governments in Easter Europe, Communism isn’t a threat any more, and so conservatives don’t have a cause that binds them together.
This is ridiculous. The causes that were conservatives’ original raison d’etre and have always been the principal engine of their movement are still at the top of our agenda: no new taxes, reduce current taxes, and cut back on oppressive government spending, regulation, and judicial activism.
We now have the hard evidence to prove that conservative theories work and liberal theories don’t. The Reagan era proved that tax cuts and less government are the key to jobs and prosperity; and Americans don’t want to go back to the discredited liberalism of the sixties.
The liberals are the ones with an identity crisis. Their disarray since the defeat of Michael Dukakis has given way to panic now that they’ve lost one of their last fortresses of power on the Supreme Court, and the day is coming when they may no longer be able to force their failed programs on an unwilling people.
