The Next Ten Years

CONSERVATIVES LEARN slowly. It took conservative politicians more than a decade after Senator Taft’s final defeat to learn how to win a Republican presidential nomination, and even longer to learn how to win a general election. It may take just as long for them to learn how to run the Federal Government, instead of letting it run them.

The most inexcusable failure to learn on the part of conservative politicians concerns education. The American conservative movement began in the academy, and conservative scholars have said a great many wise things about education over the last thirty years. But conservative political leaders have proved singularly inept at translating that wisdom into practical political strategies.