War discredited neocons' foreign policy ideas

Dallas Morning News | Rod Dreher :

“The liberal writer Rick Perlstein once identified a bad intellectual habit of conservatives when he said that for us, 'conservatism never fails; it is only failed.' Well, the kind of foreign-policy conservatism championed by the Bush administration and other leaders of the American right failed, and failed with grave and lasting consequences.”

Rick Perlstein had it right. Rod Dreher understands this. But why did it take almost until the last paragraph of his essay for Rod Dreher to write that? Why did he lead his essay with this?

Conservatism didn't lose the election; Republicans did. That's the line many of us conservatives are comforting ourselves with these days. And it's mostly the truth.

It's as if Rod Dreher is debating himself. "Conservatism failed." "No it didn't." "Yes it did." Mr Dreher thrusts and parries from the points of view of neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, traditionalist conservatives. Only the "crunchy cons" are never mentioned, maybe from modesty. In the end, he finally found wisdom in Rick Perlstein -- a liberal, no less.

Meanwhile, Tom Pauken, former head of the Republican Party of Texas, has been trying to convince us that the neoconservatives don't belong in the conservative tent at all. In his Dallas Blog review of Mr Dreher's essay, he says he seconds almost everything said by Mr Dreher except his point that the neoconservatives "make up the dominant strain of American conservative thinking". In Mr Pauken's taxonomy, the neoconservatives are not "true conservatives" at all.

With the Iraq War, with Hurricane Katrina, with earmarks and Abramoff and Cunningham and DeLay and Foley, with all of that, the conservative dominance of American politics has collapsed. The conservative label is splintering into a dozen shards as different factions try to assume leadership of this failed political movement. Are they doomed to failure, too? You'll know for sure that conservatism's day has passed for good when conservative politicians begin to wriggle out of being called conservative by arguing that "labels aren't important." Keep your ears to the ground.