Why are conservatives in disarray?

Rick Perlstein addresses the problem. There is no question. Conservatives in 2008 are in severe disarray. Why?

A very short summary of Rick Perlstein's article is that they are in disarray because for the first time since the Goldwater movement, conservatives were given the total reins of control of Congress, the Presidency (Bush) and the Supreme Court -- and they have totally failed in their efforts to implement conservatism in government. Their efforts have been a completel disaster. Now they are looking for someone to blame, and they are doing whatever they can to avoid looking into mirrors.

Let me excerpt some of Rick's article:

1) There has been, by conservatives own self-definition, a "modern conservative movement" at least since the Goldwater campaign of 1964. Ever since, they been explicit and sedulous about their goal: first control the Republican Party, then control the government. In 2001, with Republican control of the presidency, congress, and the federal courts--and conservative control of the Republican Party--for the first time since the inauguration of the movement, for the first time, and on their own terms, conservatives had a chance to govern. They governed, too, with exceptional popular wind in their sails (at least since 9/11/01), and with the benefit of an extraordinary infrastructure that let them staff the federal government from top to bottom with personnel steeped in the ideas and habits of an extraordinarily self-conscious "conservative movement." This single blunt fact cannot be overstated: here was the first chance in the modern era conservatives have had to prove themselves. And they failed. [Snip]

2) Consider P.J. O'Rourke's famous joke: "conservatives say government doesn't work, and then they get elected to prove it." Conservatives make much of their movement's plurality, their intellectual divisions. But all the while they united around Ronald Reagan's nostrum from his 1981 inaugural address, "government isn't the solution to our problems, government is the problem." The point is obvious, and frequently stated: people who despise government have trouble governing. But when you look at the question of disarray, the question goes deeper. How to reform "conservatism"? Certain "reformers"--Douthait and Salam, Brooks--say, Stop despising government. But if that's the reform, again, disarray, mutual recrimination, confusion, anger, are only to be expected: it forces an identity crisis. You can't simply turn on a dime against something that was supposed to be a core principle and not suffer wounds. [Snip}

3) A culture of bad faith and cheap grace. I presume you saw my review of Edwards' book:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/01/AR200805...

Note how Edwards seems to have comforted himself all these years with a "fact" that is simply untrue: that the line-item veto--and, by implication, the imperial presidency itself--was something liberal Democrats, not conservatives, supported. Nearly every conservative has some version of this--some way of saying that if self-identified conservatives fail or fall short, it's because they're not "really" conservative. But the standards of what is a "conservative" are subjective, shifting, self-contradictory, and always self-serving. A conservative will always give himself the out of saying "conservatism has never been tried." The culture feeds off its own refusals of personal intellectual responsibility.

There is no doubt that Bush has had complete control of all three branches of the federal government working for him. There is no doubt at all that Bush has failed. The excuse that conservatism has not been tried doesn't wash. If under the most favorable circumstances ever conservatism was placed in control and then "was never tried" then what circumstances are possible in which it would be tried?

Conservatism has failed totally, and it has failed because - in the most favorable circumstances possible - it simply could not deal with the reality that government has to handle.

These guys - conservatives - are true believers. They are in disarray because their ideology - to which they have devoted much of their lives - simply has not been up to the task it faced. True-believer Communists faced the same crisis of Faith when the Soviet Union collapsed after Gorbachev tried to correct its numerous and by then obvious flaws. The true-believer conservatives, like the true-believer Communists before them, cannot deal with the failure of the ideology to which they have decidated so much time, treasure and effort.

So now they are resorting to rewriting history and lying, both to each other and to the rest of us. The true-believer conservatives simply are not going to accept the absolute failure of their ideology. But no one else is going to trust them to run government again as long as the events of the last seven plus years remain in living memory.

That's why conservatives are in such disarray. They and their ideology has been seen publicly to have totally failed its major test. All they have left now is lies and fantasies. A new generation is already rejecting them. And they can see it coming. They just don't want to look.