From the Annals of Useless Polling:

From "The Atlantic":

Even with the president’s approval rating showing signs of life and the Republicans busily bashing themselves over the head — “one is a practicing polygamist and he’s not even the Mormon,” retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently quipped about her party’s two frontrunners — America continues to track right, according to polling data released by the Gallup Organization last week.  

Americans at this political moment are significantly more likely to identify as conservative than as liberal: conservatives outnumber liberals by nearly two to one. Forty percent identify as conservative, 36 percent as moderate, and 21 percent liberal.

Define "conservative" -- using a Reagan wig and pair of Confederate flag clown pants big enough to fit everyone from David Frum and David Brooks to Rush Limbaugh, Tom Tancredo and Jefferson Davis -- and then get back to me.  Because when it comes to the actual history of Conservatism in America -- issue by issue, ideological pillar by ideological pillar -- the Movement and the Party both stand in the shadow of one of the longest, most ruinous and most publicly humiliating series of failures, reversals and repudiations in American history.

From Salon:

The right’s lost causes

From the culture war to foreign policy, conservatives have been defeated on every front

American conservatives are deranged by anger — and why shouldn’t they be? For decades, they have been losing on multiple fronts. From the culture war to the welfare state to foreign policy, conservative initiatives have been rejected by the American people and repudiated by public policy. At most they have won a few battles while losing the war.

Consider what Pat Buchanan and other social conservatives called “the culture war” in the 1980s (after Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church in 19th-century Imperial Germany). Even with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade is in no danger of being overruled. The most that conservatives can do is back state-level initiatives like forcing pregnant women to view sonograms of fetuses — initiatives that are soon slapped down by the federal courts.

Gay rights? Since the 1970s and 1980s, when Miss America winner Anita Bryant led a nationwide crusade against gays and lesbians, public attitudes and public policies have been revolutionized. ...
... 

Even as they have witnessed the collapse of their efforts to roll back the liberalization of laws governing sex and censorship, American conservatives have met defeat in their efforts to dismantle the middle-class welfare state created by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. ...

To make matters worse, from a conservative perspective, the lawmakers whom the right elected to shrink the welfare state have steadily expanded it. Republicans as well as conservatives supported the expansion of the earned income tax credit, a subsidy to poor workers, and the child tax credit, a European-style childcare subsidy championed by Newt Gingrich, among others.
...

In foreign policy, the neoconservative right appeared for a time to have prevailed. Beginning with the Clinton administration’s war in Kosovo, many neoliberal Democrats joined Republican hawks in celebrating global U.S. military hegemony and “liberal interventionism.” But the Bush administration overreached after 9/11 when it invaded Iraq shortly after it invaded Afghanistan. The costs of those two debacles quickly soured the public on “the war on terror.”
...

This is not to say that conservatives have not won some lesser victories in the last generation. But in most cases they did so only because centrist and liberal Democrats themselves were divided on the subject. ...

Don’t hold your breath waiting for liberals to admit that they are winning most of their battles... But the right isn’t going to repeal the great accomplishments of liberalism and remake America on the basis of sexual repression and censorship, free-market radicalism and American empire. Conservatives tried to do that and failed. No matter who wins this year, the right won’t get a second chance.

And yet, has 40 years of staggering from one pulverizing failure to another dented the Conservative's invincibly Dunning-Krugerian sense of their own brilliance and superiority?

Not in the slightest.

In fact you could say that the single defining characteristic that binds all Conservatives together -- the  Reagan wig and Confederate flag clown pants big enough fit both Andrew Sullivan and Sarah Palin -- is their truly otherworldly ability to implacably ignore objective reality when it conflicts with whatever silly-ass nonsense they are lying about this week.

Which leads us right back to the the only clear conclusion I can suss out of this data: a powerful correlation between people who strongly self-identify as "conservative" and people who are "pig-ignorant" and "fundamentalist".

A correlation with which I can take no issue.