Conservatism and the GOP

Somebody asked me a few days ago whom my favorite bloggers are. Daniel Larison was at the top of my list. Even when I don't agree with him, which us about half the time, I almost always find his posts interesting, provocative and well written.

In his latest post, he builds on an earlier observation that self-identified conservatives are about the only group still sticking by the Republican Party by noting that these same conservatives loudly claim that the party has abandoned them. Why this disconnect?

It is not the case, on the whole, that these reliable Republican voters who call themselves conservatives have come around to adopting a strict version of the principled conservatism that either marginal critics or mainstream conservatives have in mind, but rather that the label has become a marker of belonging and evidence of one’s good sense as defined inside the movement and party. In other words, it has become a word on the right, like the word diversity in other contexts, that people use to show that they are bien-pensant people.

What damage has this caused to the image of small government or conservative ideas?

Even when it is true, for example, that the Republicans eventually lost the country because they failed to heed conservative wisdom (e.g., by abandoning prudence, restraint and caution and invading Iraq to the detriment of the national interest), it is very difficult for those outside the party to credit the idea that the antiwar conservative represents Real Conservatism, not least because most people who call themselves conservatives even now back the war and believe it was the right thing to do. They may be more likely to conclude, along with Bill Kauffman, that “for half a century, “conservative” has been a synonym for–a slave to–militarism, profligacy, the invasion of other nations, contempt for personal liberties and an ignorance of and hostility toward provincial America that is Philip Rothian in its scope.” The dissident conservative naturally wants to say that all of this is an abuse and perversion of the meaning of the word, and it is, but I think it is fair to say that most people are not going to investigate things that deeply. Why would they? It is not their responsibility to discover how the word has been abused–it is up to conservatives to stop embracing policies that encourage the distortion and abuse.