3 Points from the Corner All Net or A Red Letter Day in "I Told You So"

  Frank Rich's brilliant, exasperating and infuriating column in New York magazine is a wag of the finger to those overly optimistic about the progress of race relations in 2008. Giving teeth to John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's 2004 work The Right Nation, Rich reminds us that despite liberal/progressive optimism over the years, a defeat of the right at the ballot box, will only encourage a further shift to the right. Contextualizing the modern conservative movement within Goldwater's 1964 defeat, Rich argues the right has only lurched further to the right in search of greater levels of ideological purity and rigidity. I have always believed this to be an inherently conservative nation (restricting the franchise at the founding of the nation and maintaining legal slavery should be a tip off) and have rarely been confused about liberalism in this nation's history. It is the exception not the norm. What provides this nation with a sense of uniqueness is the delusion among many that liberalism is the norm and conservatism the aberration. What this country does is try to be a liberal society but that effort is always in context of the permanent conservative disposition and bloc. So in short what Rich tries to tell us is that if Obama were to win this election, it will not create some Republican implosion, in fact it will only encourage the movement to gird its loins and seek out true conservative warriors. Because as Rich analogizes, conservatives are the cockroaches of American politics, nearly indestructible and most busy in the dark.