All year, leading democrats from the president on down have argued that the Republican Party is in the midst of a catastrophic civil war. You know the story. Successive election defeats have narrowed the GOP's ideological range, and now an open struggle is afoot for control of its voice and agenda. Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, it seems, are out to destroy Republican moderates and commit the party to a radical course sure to relegate it to irrelevance. Only a move to the left can save the Republicans.

But Washington Democrats chose a different route. While they have been peddling the story of Republican self-immolation, they have actually been creating the conditions for a Republican resurgence. President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid have launched the country on a course of massive spending, a dramatic expansion of government, and a slew of new taxes in the midst of a recession. Finding themselves in control of Congress and the White House and so possessed of an unusual opportunity to pursue their ideological agenda, they have sought to make the most of it. But they have misjudged just how far to the left of the country as a whole the Democratic base now resides—and so, rather than strengthen their own brand, they have inadvertently done wonders to build and unify the Republican Party.

Source: Newsweek

My senior thesis in college was to examine the history of the conservative movement within the Republican Party.  When I wrote my thesis just five short years ago, Republicans were in control of Washington, DC and were the majority party in our state legislatures.  It was hard to imagine the collapse of the conservative order in 2006 and 2008.

One year ago, many a commentator went on television and posted on the blogosphere these rediculous ideas that "conservatism" was dead.  I warned at that time that those who believe in the death of conservatism were operating on a fools assumption and all they had to do was read their history of 1964 to understand that conservatism is and will remain a lasting movement of political thought.

In 1964, Republicans and conservatives were defeated across the country.  Many pundits wrote the obituary of conservatism only to see its restoration in 1966 and 1968 following the left-ward big government expansion of the Great Society.  From that point, conservatism dominated our political stage for 40 years.

I am not ready to predict a new realignment of conservative politics in the United States but it is evident that the growth of government initiated in the last 10 months under Democratic control combined with the unemployment rate has worked to unify conservatives. With no Republican in the White House, conservatives are free to challenge conventional wisdom. There has been a "rebirth" of real conservative ideas based on smaller government and individual freedom, a separation from the neo-cons of the Bush years. 

These are dire times for Democrats and the choices they make will determine how much time remains in their majority.  The mistake Democrats make is they foreget that America is a center-right nation.  They interpret election results as a change in social thought and attempt to redistribute power from the individual to the state.

It will be an interesting 12 months.  I am excited to study what happens and add to my history of conservatism in American politics!