CPAC shows Republicans must stake out new territory to win 2016 election

More than 30 years after Ronald Reagan left office Republicans are still stuck hankering for a bygone era. It is time to move on, writes Peter Foster Phil Robertson of television show Duck Dynasty speaks at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor, Maryland

It began back in 1973 with a score of Ronald Reagan acolytes meeting in a Washington DC hotel and forming the advance guard of a "Reagan revolution" that promised to reclaim American vitality from the economic and social morass of the 1970s.

Some 42 years later, when the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) met in Washington this week, it required a 5,000-seater conference hall and a glitzy stage to accommodate the multi-million dollar industry that American conservatism has become.

And yet paradoxically, for all the obvious material progress the movement has achieved since that first meeting at the Madison Hotel, this week provided yet another reminder that American conservatives still instinctively look backwards, not forwards when seeking solutions to the challenges they face.

Nearly 30 years after he left office, the ghost of Ronald Reagan was summoned to the CPAC stage on an almost hourly basis, as speaker after speaker lined up to bash Obama's America and lament the passing of Reagan's mythical "shining city on a hill".

As Republicans consider how they will win the 2016 general election – after losing five of the last six popular votes – it was remarkable how little time potential candidates spent enunciating what a new American century might actually look like under Republican leadership.

For two days a longlist of potential nominees to take on Hillary Clinton in 2016 pandered to an audience of pitchfork political activists that rejoice in defending what's left of old, white, God-fearing America rather than seizing territory that is new.
It was the kind of political habitat where Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, was perfectly at home, a natural fit in the company of pundits and politicians who were having a personally jolly time defending what is already mostly lost.