Reclaiming Conservatism

A leading figure in the American conservative movement for over 40 years, Mickey Edwards was a prominent Republican congressman, a former national chairman of the American Conservative Union, and a founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation. When he speaks, conservatives listen.
Now, in this highly provocative and frank volume, Edwards argues loud and clear that conservatives today have abandoned their principles and have become champions of that which they once most feared. The conservative movement—which once nominated Barry Goldwater for President, and later elected Ronald Reagan—was based on a distinctly American kind of conservatism which drew its inspiration directly from the United States Constitution—in particular, an overriding belief in individual liberty and limited government. But today, Edwards argues, the mantle of conservatism has been taken over by people whose beliefs and policies threaten the entire constitutional system of government. By abetting an imperial presidency, he contends, so-called "conservatives" have gutted the system of checks and balances, abandoned due process, and trampled upon our cherished civil liberties. Today's conservatives endorse unprecedented assertions of government power—from the creation of secret prisons to illegal wiretapping. Once, they fought to protect citizens from government intrusion; today, they seem to recognize few limits on what government can do. The movement that was once the Constitution's—and freedom's—strongest defender is now at risk of becoming its most dangerous enemy. Edwards ends with a blueprint for reclaiming the essence of conservatism in America.
Touching upon many current issues, this passionately argued book concludes that many of today's conservatives seem to have it all backwards. They have turned conservatism upside down—and this book calls them on it.

Publishers Weekly

This book is a cri de coeur by former Republican congressman Edwards, a veteran conservative founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation who once ranked as the national chairman of the American Conservative Union. Edwards believes that conservatism has abandoned the ideas of limited government that once inspired it. This has been, he argues, the paradoxical price of conservative electoral success, and the process of winning and retaining this power has brought its own temptations. Taking Washington required coalition forming with neoconservatives, the religious right and former supporters of George Wallace who all owed little to the Goldwater-style conservatism "in which the thing being 'conserved' was the liberal revolution embodied in the Constitution." According to Edwards, these other views have intensified as the Bush administration presides over an evolving security state, and the movement Edwards once held sacrosanct is now unrecognizable. This is a critique with force and eloquence, but its author is better at defining what has, from his perspective, gone wrong, than providing persuasive suggestions as to how conservatives of his mindset are meant to win elections today. (Mar.)

Mickey Edwards is on the faculty at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and is a Vice President of the Aspen Institute. After leaving Congress, he taught at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government for 11 years and was selected by students as the outstanding teacher in the school. He was a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and other major newspapers.