30+ years after Alvin Toffler wrote "Future Shock" (in which the author argues that we have become shell-shocked by the fast rate of societal change) it seems a political party's success is less a reflection of its ideology (or non-ideology) than it's ability to act, as Jonah Goldberg writes, as a "port in the storm":
According to the conventional wisdom, Bill Clinton was the candidate of "change" in 1992. I don't think so. I think he was the candidate of order. He may have been the Man from Hope, but he played on peoples' fear and exploited an image of Bush as a passive, "aloof" president unconcerned with the roiling changes in society. People forget that the Harris Wofford senatorial race revealed and galvanized popular anxieties about healthcare. The central issue was that in an age of ever-increasing job-turnover, health care (and retirement) became a huge concern because your job was your access-point to a vast array of social services...
Indeed, one of the reasons Gingrich was such a useful foil for Clinton is the inherent contradiction within the conservative movement. Conservatives are the chief defenders of a capitalist, free-market system, and the capitalist, free-market system is perhaps the most profoundly unconservative social force in human history. Markets topple established customs, they raze settled communities and erase whole ways of life. Conservatives defend this system not out of greed, but out of principle. Freedom without economic freedom is a farce. And economic security provided by government planners has, historically, been the security of guaranteed impoverishment. But that doesn't negate the fact that as much as I like libertarian economic policies, they can be a real handicap at the polls.
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