“Bluntly stated, conservatism is Ronald Reagan,” one Wheel columnist wrote during last spring’s primary season. It seems as if this is the conclusion that prominent Republicans, forced into involuntary introspection by their resounding defeats two weeks ago, are starting to reach. From the “National Review” to FOX News to the halls of Congress, the conclusion seems nearly unanimous: Republicans must return to the principles of the Reagan administration.

And yet, to paraphrase the hallowed ex-president, Reaganism isn’t the solution to our problems; Reaganism is the problem. Contrary to popular conservative lore, in which the heroic Republicans spent years wandering the desert until they found a leader to take them to the promised land, Ronald Reagan is perhaps the worst thing that ever happened to the conservative movement.

Listening to one of Reagan’s speeches, it is hard for a conservative to not find some inspiration. The lofty anti-government, libertarian rhetoric, the explicit denunciation of communism as the morally bankrupt system that it is — such speeches warmed the hearts of a movement that had been shunned from American political life for too long. But we must distinguish between Reagan the rhetorician and Reagan the president. It was Reagan the rhetorician who promised to make drastic cuts in the budget, even eliminating the Department of Education, and Reagan the president who allowed such programs to continue. Reagan the rhetorician denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; Reagan the president invaded Grenada. Reagan the rhetorician campaigned on fiscal discipline; Reagan the president drastically increased U.S. defense spending.

But his rhetoric worked, and worked well. For a generation of conservatives, the Reagan myth became more powerful than the truth, which was that, pragmatically, Ronald Reagan fit in quite well with the post-New Deal status quo. Republicans became enamored with this allegedly conservative president, and thus there emerged the most damaging consequence of the Reagan years: they convinced what was once a committed group of anti-statists that what was bad was not the state per se, but only the liberal state. A conservative state would be just fine, and all that was necessary was for conservatives to get in positions of power and direct the resources of the state to their own ends. And so we see the arrival of Bush’s faith-based initiatives, which are sold on the basis of empowering religion and civil society but in reality corrupt them by bringing them into the government fold. We see socialist bailouts for Wall Street and any other industry that “needs” one justified by free market principles, and invasions of sovereign nations justified by the need to spread our way of life. If this all sounds more Leninist than Burkean, then perhaps you see how the Reagan myth has corrupted what was once a noble ideology.

When Republicans speak of reforming their party, they only mean that they want to erase the Bush years and return to the Reagan years. But they fail to realize that the Bush years were not a corruption of the Reagan legacy — they were the natural outgrowth of it. What they advocate is the equivalent of returning to a less advanced stage of a certain disease, rather than curing it. And yet the force of the establishment conservative think tanks, media and political organizations continue to vigorously defend the Reaganite camp.

Ayn Rand wrote that when the weight of the world is stacked against you, the best course of action is not to engage in futile battles, but simply to withdraw your support. For an entire generation, the Republican name has become inextricably tied to Ronald Reagan, George Bush and the warfare state they stood for. So it is time for libertarians and principled limited government conservatives to simply walk away. Reforming the Republican Party from the inside would take far too much time and effort and involves a give-and-take process in which the give far outweighs the take. Witness the Ron Paul delegates to the Republican National Convention, who, in a vain attempt to win “respectability,” cast their votes for the neocon John McCain. If ever there was a betrayal of principle, it was this. In fact, the longer libertarians and the libertarian-minded stay within the Republican fold, the more vulnerable they will become to charges of hypocrisy.

Without its libertarian wing, the Republicans will quickly degenerate into little more than Democrats who like torture and wiretaps. But so it goes. When history is written, we may see that 1980, the year that supposedly saw the Republican’s greatest triumph, was actually the year that spelled their doom.

Kelse Moen is a College senior from Sharon, Mass. He is president and co-founder of Emory’s Young Americans for Liberty.