Conservatism

Excellent article by Alan Wolfe in the Washington Monthly - Why Conservatives Can't Govern. Now that Ann 'Kill 'em all' Coulter is what passes for a Conservative Intellectual (kind of like horse poop passing for Chanel no 5, but that's a debate for a different day) and any pretensions along the lines of 'Conservatives are more efficient' have been blasted to hell and back, the grey hairs of the movement are wringing their hands at the 'hijacking' of the Conservative movement.

It takes me back to a childhood spent in Bengal, in India, where the collapse of the Soviet bloc was dismissed by leftover Stalinist types with one simple retort - what was in practice was never 'true Marxism' as Marx would have defined it. If it were 'true Marxism', it would never have collapsed. Apart from the elegant circularity of the logic, in this case it is the delicious irony that you have to love - ideological opposites resorting to using the same scraps of tattered dogma to keep reality out.

Wolfe has a simple premise - if someone with an ingrained belief in the evil of government runs government, the results are exactly what we see in the US today. All the guff about how this is not 'true Conservatism' is just that - guff. I'm curious as to why there haven't been more furious, Bill O' Reilly style denunciations of this article - but then one of the conditions of joining Faux News or the NRO could be an inability to focus on one thing for more than two seconds. I would expect the worthies of the Standard to weigh in on this though.