In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher […] [T]oday it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts-a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war-led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his ‘conservative’ credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask. Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world ‘safe for democracy.’ It is John McCain who says America’s job is to ‘defeat evil,’ a theological expansion of […]