Conservatives with pink cheeks: Joe Scarborough stands athwart history, yelling "slow down.".

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: The Last Best Hope: Restoring Conservatism and America's Promise, by Joe Scarborough - Book review

The Last Best Hope: Restoring Conservatism and America's Promise, by Joe Scarborougb, New York: Crown Forum Publishers, 271 pages, $26

GIVEN now THE last eight or so years have worked out for them in far-flung battlefields and domestic ballot boxes, you'd think that conservatives in general and Republicans in particular would be pretty gun-shy about war rhetoric. But here's Joe Scarborough, a former GOP Florida congressman, letting it rip in The Last Best Hope: Restoring Conservatism and America's Promise: "Congressional leaders will ... need to take a more prudent path on the environment by declaring war on foreign oil."

And in case you're wondering, just saying no to such a glorious future is not an option. "Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, a Libertarian or a Marxist, understand that it is historically inevitable that the 'Age of Conservatism' is coming soon," writes Scarborough, the Hegelian author of Rome Wasn't Burnt in a Day (2004). "The winds of history provide us no other choice."

If this book is indeed the last best hope of conservatism and America's promise, well, it was nice knowing you. Scarborough offers not a choice but an echo of the Bush-Obama status quo regarding everything from bailouts to stimulus spending to rendition policy. He unwittingly tells us that conservatives can at best stand athwart history yelling "slow down" but can't fundamentally change its direction.

Scarborough is the host of morning Joe on MSNBC, the most consistently engaging morning talk show on cable television. His co-host, Mika Brzezinski, and a stable of regulars that includes the plagiarist Mike Barnicle and the John Demjanjuk enthusiast Pat Buchanan are a genuinely spirited crew who discuss and debate the news of the day with a rare mixture of conviction, knowledge, and humor. Compared with, say, Fox & Friends, Scarborough's show is the Algonquin Round Table on steroids, or at least Vivarin.

Yet The Last Best Hope is less a serious manifesto than a breezy bull session. Scarborough argues that rightwingers seeking to recapture Ronald Reagan's box office mojo need to embrace environmentalism (they should be "going green for God"); acknowledge the permanence of troubled entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare ("everyone is going to have to give until it hurts"); and pursue a humble foreign policy (except when they don't: "Most Republicans, including myself, were steadfast in their support for the war" in Iraq).

On...