Which Pill Did The Keanu-Cons Take?

"This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."


April 24, 2006 IssueCopyright © 2006
The American Conservative

Where Have All the Conservatives Gone?
The Republican Party’s top contenders for 2008 aren’t paleoconservatives—or any other kind.

By W. James Antle III

Come 2008, who will succeed George W. Bush at the helm of a troubled Republican Party? Though the next presidential race is far off, the question is already on conservatives’ minds.

The last few months haven’t been kind to Republican operatives who assumed President Bush’s slide in popularity would be temporary. Instead, his approval ratings have settled below 40 percent, averaging 38 percent over the last four Gallup polls, and the president appears determined to drag the rest of his party down with him. Bush remains committed to an increasingly unpopular stay-the-course position on Iraq and is actively pushing amnesty for illegal immigrants in defiance of the GOP base.

So far the grassroots have been generally reluctant to defy Bush in return. But public discontent with the White House’s immigration and foreign-policy initiatives could create as many opportunities for traditional conservatives as Democrats, something Bush Republicans are beginning to sense. The president has begun sprinkling his speeches with denunciations of “isolationism.” Fred Barnes declared, in the pages of The Weekly Standard no less, “It’s a paleo moment in America.”

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