The Bush administration has done many things to damage America and one of my chief interests has been the damage it has done to the ideal of political conservatism. I do not know how many self-described liberals or progressives actually care about conservatism's fate but they should. Understanding the transformation of political conservatism in this country over the last 40 years is, in my opinion, the single most important and lasting change to occur in our political culture since the New Deal.

And of course, there would be no conservative movement without the New Deal. Postwar conservatism is a reaction to and, as a political movement, reaction against the liberal welfare state conjured up by FDR and his brains trust in the 1930s. Since relief of economic disaster was immediately followed by response to a military crisis, there wasn't much traction to the idea of seriously challenging the liberal consensus until after the war. It is no accident that the seminal books of the conservative movement would appear at or soon after the war's end, notably The Road to Serfdom (1944), Ideas Have Consequences (1948), The Conservative Mind (1953) and most important, the magazine National Review (1955). The books argue that there is an alternative to the liberal welfare state (classical liberalism) and further that the ideas and theories underpinning political liberalism have had disastrous consequences for American civilization, political freedom and even Western Civilization itself. And with Kirk's exploration of the roots of the conservative mind and National Review's demonstration that conservatism could be taken seriously again, the stage was set for mounting an assault on the theoretical as well as political foundations of liberalism.

All of this is important to understand the current dilemma conservatives find themselves in. Important criticisms of the Bush administration have been growing in frequency, quantity and intensity from the right for some years now. Yet many self-described conservatives continue to support Bush and enthusiastically support whoever will emerge as his more right-wing successor. The obvious question is, "who are the real conservatives?" I make the distinction between the genteel, aristocratic and intellectual conservatives who founded the postwar movement and the more populist, jingoistic and authoritarian conservatives who are the foot soldiers of the subsequent political movement. Given this basic division, the question isn't one of "who is the real conservative," it is "which is more dependent on the other?"

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the conservative intellectual movement was critical to the later successes of the political movement. They provided the theoretical foundations that would generate credible challenges to liberalism and peel off converts like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Irving Kristol, Henry "Scoop" Jackson and most significantly, Ronald Reagan. They founded the magazines that would allow conservative ideas to flourish and develop. They organized and networked and created college and youth organizations that gave identity to the next generation. I must agree with Richard Weaver's conclusion that ideas do indeed have consequences.

But without political power, conservatism was only theory, not practice. That all began to change with the political movement that sprung up around Barry Goldwater first in 1960 and with greater impact in 1964. A dispassionate assessment of Goldwater's politics reveals that he was a classic libertarian, socially and economically. But he gave a face to a movement ripe for leadership. He was, as his ghost-written book was appropriately titled, the "conscience" of conservatism. And while the intellectual movement was largely supportive of Goldwater's candidacy, their aristocratic tendencies instinctively recoiled at the bottom-up popular support of his constituents. Lasting damage to the movement could be caused not only by Goldwater himself--whose propensity for gaffes and off-the-cuff remarks were legendary--but by his supporters who were dedicated, ravenous and sometimes dangerous and deranged. National Review had to decide what to do with the John Birch Society, for instance, which promoted such absurdities as Dwight Eisenhower being a communist conspirator. Ultimately the magazine took the wise step of denouncing Robert Welch, the Society's founder, personally, so as not to alienate the Birchers themselves, who were a necessary component towards electoral victory.

For well documented reasons the Goldwater campaign was a disaster that resulted in a landslide victory for LBJ. Also well documented is the triumphalism of liberal journalists, academics and pundits. The "center" held. The "end" of ideology had been achieved. The liberal consensus was here to stay, a permanent fixture of American political life. They were all wrong. Conservatism had not been defeated in 1964, only Goldwater; the movement itself had been triumphant, decisively shifting the center of power in Republican politics away from the Northeast to the South and the Southwest. The conservative populists now ran the party machinery, disciplined by their work on the Goldwater campaign. And they even had a future spokesman, the ex-liberal, smooth talking, fatherly and reassuring natural, Ronald Reagan. He had supported the Goldwater campaign and successfully presented himself the the public days before the election in the televised "A Time for Choosing," which not only displayed the conservative vision with eloquence, but even caused, according to some reports, observers to wonder whether he or Goldwater was the candidate.

During the 1970s conservatives were busy building the alternative think tanks, message machines and political foundations that would form the basis of their power and influence today. And a new generation of conservatives, some activists, some intellectuals, started careers which were not shaped by the postwar ennui of conservatism, but were forged when liberalism was conspicuously in decline. The tension, in my view, never disappeared from these two groups, and what emerged was the sense that conservatism was not only historically, morally, intellectually and factually correct, but that it also was in the public sentiment. Reagan's victory in 1980 created this illusion. It wasn't an electoral realignment, but a political realignment within the Republican party which had occurred. But today's conservatives--young and old alike--seem unable to see past the Reagan mythology that has been deliberately erected in place of his actual record.

On account of this, the scales have only fallen off the eyes of those whose allegiance was always to conservative puritanism; that is the ideals of the movement. They see that George W. Bush is not a conservative and has in fact done the opposite of what a pure conservative would do. Some have come late to this conclusion, deceived as many were, by the aftermath of 9/11. And now that conservative government, as it were, is demonstrably a total failure and disgrace, conservatives must grapple with that fact. Today, the columnist George Will attempts to do just that, making his "Case for Conservatism." I was eager to see how Will, a Reagan-era conservative aristocrat, would argue for returning to conservatism's roots. I was disappointed, to put it lightly. This column reads as though it was written in 1979, when these ideas were somewhat fresh, not 2007, when those ideas have been totally discredited. It is an essay that asks us to forget Bush (who isn't mentioned once) and dutifully works to conjure up every stereotype about the liberal welfare state imaginable. In an article supposedly about salience--he is, after all, making a political argument--his arguments are vintage 1970s: bureaucratic waste; government dependence; interest group dominance; arbitrary egalitarianism. But we are not living in the 1970s. We are living in a world that has been shaped--again, unprecedentedly in my opinion--by the very conservative movement Will was part of. This is ignored. The liberal welfare state and Democratic interest groups, apparently unchanged since the 1930s, are still the paramount problem. Savor this vintage prose:

Conservatism's recovery of its intellectual equilibrium requires a confident explanation of why America has two parties and why the conservative one is preferable. Today's political argument involves perennial themes that give it more seriousness than many participants understand. The argument, like Western political philosophy generally, is about the meaning of, and the proper adjustment of the tension between, two important political goals -- freedom and equality.

With the exception of the first sentence, this could have been written at any time between 1950 and 1980. The freedom-equality debate is an ancient one that has become central to the conservative argument for limited government. Confined to these two dimensions, there has been less freedom and less equality under Bush, effectively the "authoritarian" quadrant. Will doesn't mention that, merely insisting that

I suppose it depends on what conservatives we're talking about. Certainly not the current GOP presidential candidates, who don't think the Patriot act goes far enough or that Guantanamo is large enough or that torture is being used in an arbitrary enough manner. But we'll grant Will that classical conservatism does emphasize freedom and that modern liberalism does emphasize equality of opportunity. Will is, after all, casting the two camps as Platonic ideals at this point. It doesn't last:

Steadily enlarging dependence on government accords with liberalism's ethic of common provision, and with the liberal party's interest in pleasing its most powerful faction -- public employees and their unions. Conservatism's rejoinder should be that the argument about whether there ought to be a welfare state is over. Today's proper debate is about the modalities by which entitlements are delivered. Modalities matter, because some encourage and others discourage attributes and attitudes -- a future orientation, self-reliance, individual responsibility for healthy living -- that are essential for dignified living in an economically vibrant society that a welfare state, ravenous for revenue in an aging society, requires.

Will uses "dependence" to describe liberalism four times in his article, and repeatedly makes dubious pronouncements about liberalism's core intents and goals, such as:

Hence liberalism's goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market's role in allocating wealth and opportunity.

Or this

Racial preferences are the distilled essence of liberalism, for two reasons. First, preferences involve identifying groups supposedly disabled by society -- victims who, because of their diminished competence, must be treated as wards of government. Second, preferences vividly demonstrate liberalism's core conviction that government's duty is not to allow social change but to drive change in the direction the government chooses.

In Will's depiction, greedy teachers and union laborers keep well-intentioned but clueless Democratic politicians on a short leash, forcing government to grow, and with it, dependency. And on the other side of the coin, the "impersonal" (yet somehow benevolent?) forces of the market are stifled, which reduces individual freedom. The political and economic self-interest of individuals are combined, which forms the basis of Reagan-era conservative populism (libertarian individualism): the government is taking from the hard-working and giving to the shiftless, minorities, and other parasitic leeches on society. Whatever you think of the validity of this argument, it was undeniably what elected Reagan. Throw in the macho foreign policy response to liberal weakness in Vietnam and towards the Soviets and you've got an effective and lasting governing ideology.

But that was then. Macho foreign policy has led to Iraq and the costs of that hubris reach deep into the future. "Supply-side" economics has reacquainted middle and working-class Americans with the term "Gilded Age." And conservatives have been at the helm of government for over a decade. People know Republicans are responsible for the deep hole we find ourselves in and that is why self-identified Republicans have plummeted in recent polls and about 70% of the country thinks we're on the wrong track. But for George Will, recent history does not exist. He is, and perhaps always was, living in the 1970s when the conservative movement was about to triumph. Bush is the culmination of the conservative political movement and for Will to ignore that fact is effectively for him to deny it. And denial, perhaps more than anything else, is the defining feature of contemporary conservatism and that which must be overcome if they are to be viable politically again.