I'm sorry, but even as my colleagues parse the Israeli elections, I'm not quite done with Sam Tanenhaus, David Brooks, David Frum, William Kristol, and others who insinuated themselves so brilliantly into public discourse as "conservatives" in the 1990s and did so much damage to the American civil society and republic and therefore, not incidentally, to Israel itself.

Now they're trying to give American conservatism a decent burial as they strive, with unseemly haste and some inexcusable assistance, to get us to think well of them.

A few hours ago in Open Democracy I wrote that I'm not buying. These men should bury themselves for awhile -- in good books, long walks, quiet conversations, and, above all, public silence. Then I may forgive them for making the mistake of their lives -- and ours. But I doubt that I or, for that matter, honorable conservatives, will think well of them soon. Here's why.

There is a noble conservative sensibility or wisdom that many liberals are the poorer for missing. Conservatives are sometimes quite right about how liberals have been wrong. I've made such criticisms myself often enough not to disdain these men for strictly ideological or partisan reasons.

I disdain them for having betrayed the American republic and themselves as Americans, and for continuing to do it even as they re-position themselves without grounding themselves in the republic's deepest truths and strengths.

Why does their re-positioning matter? Well, Tanenhaus edits both The New York Times Book Review and the paper's Week in Review. Brooks is a Times columnist, syndicated in dozens of other papers, and a regular on NPR and PBS. Frum, the wunderkind conservative manifesto-writer of the 1990s and ex-Bush speechwriter who coined "Axis of Evil," is running an ecumenical salon in his elegant Washington home. Kristol, now dumped from his Times column, has been taken up on a monthly basis by the Washington Post's embarrassing editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt, and he also still edits the Weekly Standard and opines regularly on Fox Noise.

Still, so what? Isn't it true that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al needed no prompting or guidance from these neo-con savants and cheerleaders?

Actually, Tanenhaus, Brooks, Frum, Kristol proved invaluable as the conservative movement's and the Republican Party's propagandists, interpreters, and apologists. At critical moments in our verbose and semiotically overblown public square, they successfully beguiled or intimidated decent civic-republican doubters and critics. So doing, they unwittingly highlighted some problems within conservatism itself.

1. They sold us a National Security Strategy, a national security state apparatus, and indeed a global war on terror that weakened the American republic and civil society even before these men led the stampede into the Iraq war. This horrified many honorable conservatives, and quite rightly so.

2. The question before America in those years wasn't whether we had enemies to defeat, but how to fight the "good fight" against them. I've read enough of these men's work to know that they understood very little about what makes a civic-republican society strong.They understood virtually nothing about the difference between authority and power, and between power and violence. Their grand strategies were close enough to Grand Old Opry or Grand Theft Auto to doom the Grand Old Party.

3. To control or displace the damage they were doing, they consorted with, and covered for, would-be Grand Inquisitors in and out of the Justice Department.

4. They made a devil's bargain with "free markets" that aren't free or liberating -- a willful self-delusion on their part and a lasting fraud on the public.

5. They charged that liberal education had to be rescued from liberals, not realizing that liberals' obvious campus follies were reactive, not causal, to more powerful military-industrial and market-driven riptides that are compromising the humanities and civic-republican leadership training. They charged that universities had become nunneries for failed and aging leftist activists, only to end up funding and celebrating campus nunneries for failed and aging neo-cons like themselves.

Why did they do all this? Let me be frank, as one who knows from experience and much study: They did it in no small part out of preternatural and distinctively Jewish insecurities that fit hand-in-glove with the preternatural insecurities driving a Joe McCarthy (who had his Roy Cohn), a Richard Nixon (who had his Henry Kissinger), Dick Cheney (who had his Irving "Scooter" Libby) or a Karl Christian Rove.

This demands a careful, historically informed accounting, so I'll say no more here. A strong chapter in the Yale sociologist Jeffrey Alexander's The Civil Sphere, while not about Tanenhaus, Brooks, Frum, or Kristol, maps and tracks social and historical currents that mark them far more deeply and predictably than they know. So does Amos Elon's The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933.

Do you find this chilling? Good. We're talking about the deep harm done by a dark, sorrowful history to these victims who've become Vulcans and have done a lot of harm themselves. But you should also be grateful that the American republic has proved better than they are and than other societies have been in the past. That's something to keep faith with, not batten onto and exploit, as they have done so blindly, for all their supposed patriotism and prescience.

By the way, some 80 percent of American Jews kept faith with the republic by voting for Obama, thereby rebuffing Tanenhaus, Brooks, Frum, and Kristol, not to mention the more-cankered neo-cons such as Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League and Daniel Pipes of Campus Watch.

Precisely because our society is so open, however, these men's talent and cleverness enabled them to mount its great stages too early in life and to do what came to them almost instinctively before they knew quite what they were doing or why. Self-importance, a universal human temptation, took over from there.

Now they need to take a break from themselves. And we from them. Earnest, younger people who've admired them, like Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, whose Grand New Party I review in the current Commonweal, need to take a big step back and find a new path.