This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 12, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Tea partiers don't have a positive agenda to sell, and that, says Daniel McCarthy,

editor of the American Conservative magazine, is a big problem for

tea partiers if they're at all interested in governing.

The establishment GOP, he argues, isn't yet ready for the most important debate. What is government for?

Over the last 60 years really, the Republican presidents who've actually been successful

at getting elected have oftentimes not governed as conservatives and

the heroes of the conservative movement have oftentimes even failed fallen short of

attaining the Republican nomination.

So Ronald Reagan is unique because he's the one guy who is a

conservative grassroots hero and who also actually gets the nomination and becomes elected

as president and serves two terms. So he's unique and I think that there's a reason for his uniqueness, which is that basically in the

late 1970s, the Keynesian consensus in the United States and in fact a kind of big

government socialist consensus all around the world had started to break down and

Ronald Reagan was the right leader at the right moment to take advantage of that in the

United States.

And you also saw a sort of renaissance of a great many sort of conservative passions or at least

passions that were not considered fully enlightened, which had been thought to be

sort of pass say over the last 50 years or so before Ronald Reagan, namely the forces of

religion, religious fundamentalism in particular, and nationalism.

And Reagan and the grassroots movements that supported Reagan, they were all able to take advantage

...