Where the right went wrong

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Today, the right is politically dominant. Yet now, at what should be the flood tide of conservative power, many on the right are expressing open, even passionate disagreement with what has been done in their name, CNN Senior Analyst Jeff Greenfield writes.

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The discontent includes the sharp growth in government spending -- including the kind of domestic spending conservatives have long deplored -- to the growth of "pork-barrel" projects once seen as an emblem of how big government politicians hold power.

"They have increased the amount of government spending by a degree that no Democrat would ever dream of getting away with," said columnist Andrew Sullivan.

Many of the sharpest attacks on the mix of lobbyists and politicians that have sent prominent public figures to prison come from these voices on the right.

There are social conservatives who say the Republicans have taken them for granted -- and libertarians like Dick Armey and Sullivan, who say government has no more business in the bedroom than the boardroom. In "Right Gone Wrong," you'll see the sharp split over Bush's foreign policy, especially his sweeping goal of promoting democracy around the world. ("Loony," William Buckley calls it).
 
Buckley ought to know that these things are always cyclic. Just as "liberal" is now something of a dirty word in the political mainstream, so too will "conservative" be in twenty or thirty years. Again: just as it used to be.

And naturally it come back this way, given enough time.

That sort of emotional disappointment is what comes of confusing political "revolution" like what we saw during the 80s and early 90s -- and in the 30s before that -- with real, literal revolution.
 
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