Oh shut up, Andy.

The first part of this from Andy Sullivan’s blog I have no problem with.

Malkin Award Nominee
06 Jul 2007 04:24 pm

"What do the four [senators] share in common except a loss of confidence in the troops and their ability to win? Senator Voinovich is 70; Senators Domenici and Lugar 75, Senator Warner 80. Though Senator Voinovich only joined the club in 1999, Senator Domenici has been in the Senate for 35 years, Senators Lugar and Warner 29 years. The combination of advanced age and long tenure in government seems to increase a senator's sense of self-importance even as it decreases their connection to the GOP's base," - Hugh Hewitt, on his blog.

It's hard to get a clearer definition of Jacobinism. Contempt for age, and experience, immunity to the practical arguments all these senators have made, description of policy disagreements as an attack on the troops, and an insistence that the only valid qualification for office is ideological conformity with "the base".

But the last bit, not so much.

If conservatism is ever to recover, it is going to have to leave radical zealots like Hewitt behind.

“If conservatism is ever to recover, it is going to have to leave radical zealots like Hewitt behind.”?

Are you fucking kidding me?

Why not just say that if the patient is ever going to recover, everything below the eyebrows will have to be amputated?

Because “conservatism” as Andy Sullivan imagines it has never come close to existing anywhere but in the masturbatory recesses of the Randite imagination of people like Andy Sullivan, and as dog-whistle rhetorical flourishes in GOP stump speeches.

“Conservatism” as Andy Sullivan imagines it was mortally wounded the cradle and has been dying ever since.

The reactionary racist-recruiting project known as the Southern Strategy put a Confederate rifle to its head.

The Moral Majority and all of its Christopath whelplings pulled the trigger in the name of sweet baby Jebus.

The Conservative acolytes of Wallace/Atwater/Rove/DeLay/Gingrich Slash and Burn politics stripped the flesh from the corpse and danced in it.

And from coast-to-coast, Hate Radio pisses on its grave every single day.

In fact, perhaps we would do well refer to it by a much more accurate name:

Antebellum Conservatism ™

Because the Now-we-shall-soldier-on-to-Glorious-Victory “Conservatism” Andy Sullivan and others like him increasingly reference sounds like nothing so much as this description of another Noble Struggle fallen on hard times.

(From this speech by Jefferson Davis in 1865 [with a couple of small revisions added by me]:

…
We have now entered upon a new phase of a struggle the memory of which is to endure for all ages and to shed an increasing luster upon our country.

Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points winning elections or persuading people, important but not vital to our defense, with an (imaginary) army free to move from point to point and strike in detail the detachments and garrisons of the enemy, operating on the interior of our own country, where supplies are more accessible, and where the foe will be far removed from his own base and cut off from all succor in case of reverse, nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve. Let us but will it, and we are free; and who, in the light of the past, dare doubt your purpose in the future?
…

But Andy Sullivan’s “Conservatism” didn’t fail because of the “radical zealots”.

Andy Sullivan’s “Conservatism” failed because, as Robert Borosage puts it here, “…it gets the world wrong.”

…
Over the first six years of the Bush administration, conservatives largely had their way. With Bush and Karl Rove pursuing a political strategy of feeding their base, Tom DeLay ramrodding the conservative majority in the Congress, and the corporate lobby enforcing discipline, movement conservatives set the course of the country -- with catastrophic results.

Each of the signature Bush follies -- Iraq, Katrina, Enron, privatization of Social Security, the Terri Schiavo case, trickle-down economics that didn't trickle -- can be traced directly to conservative ideas and the conservative think tanks and ideologues that championed them. In every case, conservatism failed, not simply because of corruption or incompetence, but because of original conception. Sensate conservatives have, in the words Irving Kristol once applied to liberals, "been mugged by reality." Actual existing conservatism fails because it gets the world wrong.

And yet because facing this ugly, naked truth is more that their Beautiful Minds can bear, Andy Sullivan and the rest of the followers of a “Conservatism Of The Mind”, like the crazed, scattered, furious True Believing survivors of the collapse of their beloved Traitor South, still fly their Confederate Conservative Flags by torchlight.

Still mutter about how their Leaders – who simply enacted fanatical Conservative Confederate dogma by translating it into real-world action and policy -- somehow betrayed them.

Still scheme in the shadows for the Glorious Restoration of a Sacred Cause that never was.