In the seventies, conservatives began to address more adequately the particulars of public policy, affirmative policies that served well, among other things, the two presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan. All of this led to the conservative political victories of the 1980s and 1990s, as Ronald Reagan himself is the first to acknowledge. But if our expectation is to solve every problem that flesh is heir to through political action, we will surely fail. Domestic perplexities persisted after eight years of a Reagan administration. The very weakness of our foreign adversaries present ever more tangled complications for American strategy.
Nothing is more certain than the ephemeral nature of political victories.
So, even as we celebrate the current muscular revival of political conservatism, we must keep one eye averted from the moving ball of politics and fixed on the permanent things. The conservative movement is now mature enough to sustain a counteroffensive on that last Leftist redoubt, the college campus. In addition to saving a remnant that renews the font of contemporary presence for conservatism on campus, and contest the left behind its own lines. In countering the agenda of the academic Left, alumni will doubtless be accused of having a conservative agenda of their own. If the impulse to reform is indeed conservative, it is the noble impulse to conserve the proper ends of an authentically humane education.