Audio: Rush Limbaugh asks Newt Gingrich if the Reagan revolution is dead

I’m not sure that Newt Gingrich is the best person to ask about the status of conservatism these days, since Gingrich has imbibed the snake oil that Al Gore is selling. And if you read Gingrich’s “Real Change” article with a critical eye, there’s less there than he pretends.

UPS locates fifteen million packages a day; FedEx eight million — while they are moving. In contrast, the federal bureaucracy can’t locate between ten and twenty million people in this country illegally. Perhaps, I said in the video, the federal government should send each of these people a package by FedEx or UPS.

It’s not that the federal government “can’t locate” illegal aliens. It’s that it doesn’t really want to, and state and local sanctuary policies make the feds’ job harder even if they did want to do it. It’s not then so much a question of competency, as it’s a question of political will and priorities. Newt’s “world that fails” fails because someone, in this case business interests on one hand and the post-national left on the other, benefits, and they have found a way to own the government in a way that average citizens can’t. Sensing that problem, Gingrich says:

Real change must begin at the individual level, with each person deciding that the special interests, the bureaucracies, and the forces of the past will not determine the course of the future.

But Gingrich himself empowers the very people who are standing in the way of progress in one of the problem areas he cites in the interview with Rush. The US is the only major industrialized country in the world that isn’t actively seeking to exploit the fuel reserves that exist within its own territory. The only one. Why? Because the environmental lobby has successfully made keeping oil rigs off our shores and out of ANWR a higher priority than energy independence and national security. Gingrich’s embrace of Gore’s version of environmentalism and global warming isn’t helping. Sure, Newt promotes a more market-friendly approach than Gore, but that gets lost in the noise.

But for all of these flaws, the interview is interesting. Neither seems to agree with the Huckabee/Rollins view, that the Reagan coalition itself is outdated or that either economic conservatives, national security conservatives or social conservatives should no longer be a part of that coalition.