Andrew Ferguson has an excellent article in The Weekly Standard's 10th anniversary issue debunking the conservative triumphalism that's all about in the air:

Anyone who's been paying attention will have felt forced to adjust his view of the conservative movement since then. The Republican takeover--which is to say, political success--dealt the mortal blow. Conservative institutions, conceived for combat, have in power become self-perpetuating, churning their direct-mail lists in pursuit of cash from the orthodontist in Wichita and the Little Old Lady in Dubuque, so the activists can continue to fund the all-important work of . . . churning their direct-mail lists.

I think that's just right. Institutional conservatism has gotten really good at acquiring office for its allies, enriching itself, and using some of those riches to further acquire office. In terms of advancing conservative policy goals -- small government and the maintainance of traditionalist views about sex and gender -- it's been an incredible failure. Naturally enough, many disagree, but Ross Douthat backs Ferguson up with a lot of the relevant details. Indeed, I think Ross even concedes too much here: "The point is not that conservatism's overall position hasn't improved since, say, 1950. Of course it has."

From one point of view, this is quite right. In 1950 there was a regnant "liberal consensus" in America and many people thought conservatism was quite literally dead as a force. Nobody would say any such thing nowadays. The thing of it is that the liberal consensus of the time was actually very conservative by contemporary standards. In 1950, after all, there was no Medicare, no civil rights for black people (which very much was a plank of the conservatism of the time, National Review ran an editorial in 1957 titled "Why The South Must Prevail"), no anti-poverty spending of any sort, no EPA, indeed hardly anything of what passes for liberalism nowadays with the two non-trivial exceptions of Social Security and union rights. All that said, I do think Ferguson mistakes the source of the problem:

The current story of Jack Abramoff's lucrative self-dealing, involving as it does such movement stalwarts as Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, may seem lunatic in its excesses, but the excesses aren't the point. The point is the ease with which the stalwarts commandeered the greasy machinery of Washington power. Conservative activists came to Washington to do good and stayed to do well. The grease rubbed off, too.

Ferguson's done excellent work on the Abramoff story, but I think his general view of the problem -- roughly, that the generals have gone a bit soft feathering their own beds in Washington -- is a little naive. Relatedly, he misses the other big thing conservatism has accomplished alongside the feather-bedding -- a large upward redistribution of wealth. Making the rich richer isn't supposed to be the central aim of conservatism. Certainly getting tax and regulatory favors for large corporations isn't. Nevertheless, that's been the bulk of the policy-output of conservatism in power. This isn't, I think, because the institutions are run by people who've been personally corrupted. The trouble is that the institutions were conceived in sin.

Roughly speaking, these institutions were built not by convincing people that conservatism was a good thing as an abstract matter, but by appealing to self-interest on the part of those with money to give. As Irving Kristol said, making the case for building a conservative machine, "Corporate philanthropy should not be, and cannot be, disinterested." Now his idea was that rather than giving money out in a disinterested way to uplift the poor and support the arts, corporate giving should be directed at advancing self-interest by defending free market economics and, not coincidentally, conservatism.

The trouble here is that free markets and small government really are a disinterested cause. Rich people can advance their self-interest just fine by shifting the burden of taxation onto the working class or by financing the government through borrowing -- they don't need small government. Corporations will take subsidies and regulatory favors of free markets any day. And when you build your machine through appeals to self-interest, the machine winds up serving the ends of self-interest.

Now in defense of Kristol and those who were like-minded at the time, it seems that they believed -- quite sincerely -- that liberal market democracy was genuinely in crisis at the time, threatened by resurgent Communism abroad and growing radicalism at home. If that's what you thought, you'd naturally be willing to compromise the pure vision quite a bit in order to preserve the general idea. But whatever sense that point of view might have had a long time ago, it surely doesn't stand up anymore. From that point of view, however, the tendency toward overstating the threat of Islamist terrorism becomes understandable. It's not only a useful tool in conservative efforts to maintain political power, but -- perhaps more importantly -- a useful tool for conservative leaders who don't want to face pressure to really deliver on their ostensible ideology.