Editor’s Page

It’s a sour moment. The right has attained new power, but its intellectual, not to mention moral, bankruptcy has never been more evident. The GOP’s “Contract with America” regurgitates Reaganesque ideas that brought this country to many of its present difficulties. In the meantime, Newt Gingrich maligns Great Society programs and “the counterculture” as sins that begot an American fall.

Which allows him to sidestep what the 1980s wrought—a welfare ...