With all the cackling of the Babbling class one would seem to think that conservatism began circa 1980.  Apparently Ronald Reagan is the Jesus Christ of Conservatism.  Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Reagan fan. My problem is that I like to look a little deeper at the historical events that brought us to our current condition.

The Babbling class would have us believe that the orthodoxy is being troubled by heretics.  The stakes are being set and with the blazing fire of rhetoric we will purify the sinner and keep the masses free from defilement.  The Bishops of Babbling have read from the Council of Reagan and have found these heretics guilty!

Do you get a sense of the religious fervor?  Not that it is unexpected.  The trouble is the tradition is getting cut short.  We've lost sight of the larger corpus of the tradition.  With the narrow focus we lose the big picture.  My hope in this blog is to bring back into focus the other events in our tradition that will broaden the gaze so that the beauty and fullness of the tradition comes into focus.  Let the sectarians babble, we have a tradition to maintain.

Thus I embark on a quest to identify crucial moments in our tradition, crossroads if you will, and see if we can garner any lessons from those events.  The 1940 Election year was a tough row to hoe for Republicans and the final choices made reflected a kind of resignation to reality.  The question for today is what realities must we face as a tradition and how do we respond?  The implications for our tradition is that the wrong choices today may lead to a dark age similar to the middle twentieth century.