It was a brutal year for the conservative movement, which at long last came crashing down after dominating American politics for nearly 30 years. One small consolation for at least some leading thinkers on the right is that they began to demonstrate perceptiveness that by and large eluded them in preceding years. Here are the top twelve insights of prominent conservatives in 2008:

P.J. O' Rourke, The Weekly Standard

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble.

David Brooks, The New York Times

Now it's just a circular firing squad with everybody attacking each other and no coherent belief system, no leaders. You got half the party waiting for Sarah Palin to come rescue them. The other half waiting for Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana governor, to come rescue them. But no set of beliefs, really a decayed conservative infrastructure. It's just a world of pain.

Matthew Continetti, The Weekly Standard

The GOP is shell-shocked from last month's election results. The gains the party made in the years since the 1994 Republican revolution have been erased. Republicans are without a clear agenda. People say that Republicans don't have any ideas, but that isn't entirely true. They have plenty of ideas--but too many of them are about which part of their coalition is to blame for their current misfortunes.

This sort of squabbling is less than useless. It's inward-looking, woolly-headed, and only furthers the perception that the GOP is out of touch. Unfortunately, when Republicans have tried to be in touch, they've been tempted to be irresponsible. In September, more than a few were ready to risk the global banking system's collapse in the hopes that they could ride anti-Wall Street populism to victory.

Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman

I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.

The crisis is at two levels - the dreadful incompetence and incoherence of the Bush-Cheney administration, which has poisoned the Republican brand for more than one generation, and the emergence of inherent flaws in several strains of conservative thought.

The banking crisis is so close to us and so unresolved it's hard to see it in context, but I fear that Greenspan is right: it's a huge flaw that cannot be explained away by government. The limits of hard power are, in fact, perfectly in line with conservatism's deeper insights into human affairs, with Bush and Cheney acting more as over-reaching utopians than conservative statesmen. And the social conservatism problem has been a function of Christianism: an inability to shape society as it is because their theological doctrine demands adherence to eternal dogma not development of pragmatic policy. So we have their rigid refusal to countenance any legal abortion or any civil recognition of gay couples.

Grappling with any one of these problems would be serious enough. Untangling all three at once? The GOP had better hope Obama really screws up.

Rod Dreher, Beliefnet

There is a conservative Establishment -- a political establishment, yes, but also a think-tank establishment and an opinion-leader establishment -- that has become ossified in its thinking and, over time, more interested in policing its heretics than in thinking creatively about conservatism and its application to the challenges facing our nation and our culture at this particular time. That establishment is dying.

Ross Douthat, The Atlantic

Conservatism in the United States faces a series of extremely knotty problems at the moment. How do you restrain the welfare state at a time when the entitlements we have are broadly popular, and yet their design puts them on a glide path to insolvency? How do you respond to the socioeconomic trends - wage stagnation, social immobility, rising health care costs, family breakdown, and so forth - that are slowly undermining support for the Reaganite model of low-tax capitalism? How do you sell socially-conservative ideas to a moderate middle that often perceives social conservatism as intolerant? How do you transform an increasingly white party with a history of benefiting from racially-charged issues into a party that can win majorities in an increasingly multiracial America? etc.

Watching the McCain campaign, you'd barely even know that these problems exist, let alone that conservatives have any idea what to do about them.

Kathleen Parker, syndicated columnist

The movement created by that superelite, but never elitist, William F. Buckley Jr. was handed over to Joe Six-Pack. Know-nothingness was no longer a stigma, but a badge of honor. The Republican Party's Baghdad Bobism with regard to Palin, a denial so pernicious that party operatives were willing to let her sit a heartbeat away from the presidency in a time of war and financial collapse, revealed what really ails the party. The 'P Factor' isn't a single person but a sickness that will have to be acknowledged and cured--Republicans will be reciting their newly tailored principles only to themselves.

David Frum, American Enterprise Institute

Sarah Palin symbolizes a party that has decided that we just don't care about making the government work anymore.

Colin Powell, former Secretary of State

Can we continue to listen to Rush Limbaugh? Is this really the kind of party that we want to be when these kinds of spokespersons seem to appeal to our lesser instincts rather that our better instincts?

Rich Lowry, The National Review

Tuesday's Republican debacle was, as the social scientists say, 'over-determined.' It had many causes. Was it brought on by congressional corruption, Bush administration incompetence, intellectual exhaustion or John McCain's failings as a candidate? All of the above -- and then some....

One temptation will be to say that if only Republicans had stayed truer to the faith, especially on fiscal discipline, none of this would have happened. Earmarks unquestionably contributed to the culture of corruption that has so bedeviled Republicans in recent years. But fighting them became an overriding obsession of some conservatives and of McCain, as if opposing earmarks alone -- 1 percent of federal spending -- would constitute a winning economic agenda.

William Kristol, The Weekly Standard and The New York Times

I can't help but admire some of my fellow conservatives' loyalty to the small-government cause. It reminds me of the nobility of Tennyson's Light Brigade, as it charges into battle: 'Theirs but to do and die.' Maybe it would be better, though, first to reason why.