What can we learn from 2009? National Review Online asked a few friends to name the most important lesson of this past year.

RICK BROOKHISER

“Say not, the struggle naught availeth.” This is the lesson of 2009.

In 2008, liberalism was glorified in the person of Barack Obama. The apotheosis was election night, when the revelry continued into the wee hours (I even heard someone singing “The Star Spangled Banner”). The mood continued with the inauguration. I trained down to D.C. to cover it. In my car were Sir Ian McKellen and Moby. More important was the attitude of normal people. My trainer, a Bahamian immigrant, not a political man, bombarded me with questions: What is the first thing a new president does? etc. Obama came in on a tide of partisan triumph, history being made, and ordinary goodwill.

Flash forward. The economy limps. Congress is a cohort of hacks. Obama is a plain old president, at home and abroad. Most interesting, Obama has chosen the right policy in Afghanistan — but it is one that his enemies will support, and his base will oppose.

Happy days are not here again, obviously. I would still bet on Obama’s being reelected. Tea parties and Going Rogue are all good, but we need to do more, much more. But westward, look, the land is — brighter.

– Rick Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and author, most recently, of Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement.

MARK DEMOSS

John Ensign. Mark Sanford. David Letterman. Tiger Woods. This year has been a bad one for marriage. Men such as these from the worlds of politics, entertainment, and sports have been exposed for cheating on their wives and are quickly defended by their lawyers and PR representatives.

Of all the reactions I’ve heard or read since the world’s best “driver” shanked his Escalade into a fire hydrant after Thanksgiving and women not named Elin started coming forward from the gallery with tales of sex and romance, the one that bothers me most is this: “Everyone does it.” Increasingly, a public fascinated with sex and celebrity assumes every successful married male athlete, politician, or business person is living a double life.

I hate the impact these revelations have had on Darlene (Ensign), Jenny (Sanford), Regina (Letterman), Elin (Woods), and all their children, but I really hate the impact their husbands’ behavior has on the reputations of others in their professions who aren’t “doing it.”

For example, Stewart Cink, Zach Johnson, Justin Leonard, Paul Azinger, and Tom Lehman have won 41 professional golf tournaments, including three British Opens and a Masters, earning $110 million, and captained the last two American Ryder Cup teams — all while being faithful men of faith, honorable husbands and fathers, and credible role models. May 2010 be the year of those “who aren’t doing it.”

– Mark DeMoss is president of the DeMoss Group, an Atlanta-based public-relations firm, and author of The Little Red Book of Wisdom blog at First Things. DAVID GELERNTER Lesson of 2009: To understand Obama, look to Carter, not Clinton. Obama and Carter are the nation’s two McGovernite presidents. Both entered office with terribly earnest naïveté respecting the world at large — especially America’s enemies — with a dislike of Israel, a distaste for American power, and a native gift for big economic mistakes. Carter lacked Obama’s mouth-of-gold, but Obama lacks the fluffy squeeze-toy quality Carter had originally. Both brood deeply on the lessons of Vietnam, which they have both got wrong. Most presidents grow in office, but Carter and to date Obama have shrunk the office instead. Carter lost Iran, and Iran is one of Obama’s two biggest challenges and (so far) disasters. To learn the other, look to Carter: His happy-talk encouraged the Soviets in Afghanistan. Today’s dawning threat in not China but Russia; Russia wants her empire back. Obama has already undermined our Polish and Czech supporters. Khrushchev saw a weak, young president and danced right up to the edge of nuclear war. But that was long ago. Today Russian pride is in much worse shape, her rulers are far less happy with the map of the world — and Putin sees another weak, young president. Fasten your safety belts. – David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale and a contributing editor of The Weekly Standard. CHARLES KESLER The big lesson of 2009 is the resiliency of liberalism. A lot of conservatives thought that the Reagan Revolution and its aftereffects had permanently tamed modern liberalism. Indeed, in the 1990s, Pres. Bill Clinton seemed to have reached the same conclusion: that the era of big government was over, that the only kind of liberalism that was viable post-Reagan was the chastened, triangulating sort. Barack Obama never subscribed to that theory, and he’s been proven right. Liberalism remains in America’s political bloodstream, capable of flaring up into a major infection whenever the body politic’s defenses are sufficiently weakened, as they were in George W. Bush’s second term. Conservatism was then at a low ebb, and Obama saw his chance, his “moment.” The panic over the financial collapse made the moment even bigger. Now the Reagan Revolution faces the incipient challenge of the Obama Revolution. The patient has rallied a bit and liberalism is struggling, but no one should underestimate it. If Obama manages to sign some kind of health-care-reform bill, as seems likely, he will not only have fulfilled a promise made by Franklin Roosevelt 65 years ago, he will have contributed mightily to renewing the Left’s self-fulfilling myth of the inevitability of liberal social reforms. It’s the decline of that myth that Obama tried to counter with his campaign of Hope and Change. Soon he may have evidence that Hope avails and that the Change has begun. Victory in the health-care battle, even a partial and costly victory, will renew liberalism’s confidence that history is on the side of Big, and Bigger, Government. To counter that resurgence, conservatives will have to summon the will and the understanding for the kind of all-out, high-stakes battle they didn’t wage even under Reagan: the fight to repeal a major new entitlement program. That struggle will be the test of conservatism’s resilience, and of its seriousness. – Charles Kesler is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. JOHN J. PITNEY JR.

On Election Day 2008, I posted this passage from Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ: “A prophet is the one who, when everyone else despairs hopes. And when everyone else hopes, he despairs. You’ll ask me why. It’s because he has mastered the Great Secret: that the Wheel turns.”

At the time, that passage may have struck some as conservative wishful thinking. “Yep,” sneered AlterNet, “Keep waiting for that wheel to turn.” Thirteen months later, Rasmussen gives Republicans a seven-point lead in the general congressional ballot. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows the Democratic party’s image turning negative and puts President Obama’s job approval below 50 percent. “This survey underscores what I consider a dramatic and unmistakable change in the political landscape,” says Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart. The lesson is that winners may overreach and losers may learn. The wheel does turn. – John J. Pitney Jr. is the Roy P. Crocker professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College. With James W. Ceaser and Andrew E. Busch, he is co-author of Epic Journey: The 2008 Elections and American Politics.

ABIGAIL THERNSTROM

The first Carter administration was a breathtaking failure; why should anyone have thought the second would be any better?

– Abigail Thernstrom is the author, most recently, of Voting Rights — and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections. She is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

EDWARD WHELAN

In the realm of the courts, the most important lesson from 2009 is the political triumph of judicial conservatism.

When President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, all the elements seemed to be in place for an exhilarating triumph for the Left:

‐A sympathetic media.

But the confirmation process instead demoralized and disgusted many on the left, as Sotomayor, in close consultation with the White House, tried to disguise herself as a judicial conservative. “The task of a judge is not to make law, it is to apply the law,” she averred. Judges are “like umpires,” she said. She pretended to walk away from her support for freewheeling resort to foreign and international legal materials. And, perhaps most strikingly, she emphatically repudiated Obama’s own empathy standard.

The White House politicos advising Sotomayor understood what polling confirms: The American people overwhelmingly embrace the traditional understanding of the judicial role and reject liberal judicial activism.

– Edward Whelan is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and is a regular contributor to NRO’s Bench Memos blog.