The “Church Notes” section in the February 2, 1992, issue of National Review requires attention and a word in response. In this little essay, the editor of that magazine informs us that the traditional right is under some obligation to recognize that its adversaries who call themselves conservatives but are pragmatically committed to an ever growing leviathan state must be supported in their ambition because the alternative is unthinkable: permitting a Democratic triumph this next November. What is omitted from Mr. O’Sullivan’s calculus is the obvious fact that being swallowed by a liberalism that calls itself conservative and Republican is more dangerous to an earlier right than anything the honest left can accomplish. Big-government conservatism is indeed our mortal enemy, one which leaves us with no function and no legitimate ground upon which to stand. Confusion about this danger since the election of 1980 and the preemption of the leadership of the Reagan movement by a people who were not originally a part of it has paralyzed the American right. Apart from certain dramatic achievements, as in the appointment of a new judiciary and the strengthening of our military forces to put pressure on a declining communist power, we experienced the anomaly of two great conservative electoral victories followed by two terms of moderate Republican government. Now, under Bush we have a third, this time even more disappointing. There are circumstantial explanations for this situation in the partial or total Democratic control of Congress from 1980 through 1992. But they are not of sufficient force to justify the self-distortion that has come from forgetting that our only business is counterrevolution, and that sometimes such commitment requires an unforgiving posture toward all temporizers—soft Republicans who would never extend to us the loyalty that Mr. O’Sullivan recommends as our only legitimate course of action at the present moment.

The agreement to put being in power ahead of being right is a strategy for servility and self-degradation. And for final defeat. Devotion to that compromise has been the problem with New York and Washington conservatism in general. It is also what is wrong with National Review.