The Conscience of an (ex-)Conservative
A blow-by-blow report of a dissolution of a political marriage

Leaving an organization can be hard. Leaving a movement, harder. And leaving an idea — unless you realize that the movement has deserted the idea, and that it’s time to say so — traumatic.

The proximate cause of my recent departure from Discovery Institute, Seattle’s main conservative think tank, was my opposition to President Bush’s Iraq war. But I also left because I could no longer abide the purposes of the movement. Over the last several years, I’ve become sadly convinced that American conservatism has grown, for lack of a better word, malign. Not exactly a congenial conclusion for someone who started out with Goldwater in ’64 and ended up writing defense memos for Steve Forbes in 2000.

But this farewell is not about the Republican Party, which forms merely one symbiotic half of a larger entity, the Republocrats, dedicated über alles to the perpetuation of their power, their perks, their own prosperity and to treating the American people as passive, malleable consumers and servants of government. It’s about American conservatism in general — a 50-year movement that did some good, especially in taking down the Soviet Union, but ultimately splintered into several factions, each in its own way pernicious.

No, not splintered. Metastasized. American conservatism, Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy” guff notwithstanding, was always a fractious affair. “No Friends on the Right” too often seemed its credo. A conservative philanthropist once told me that he found the task of getting conservatives to talk with, let alone support each other, akin to herding cats. Christian paleocons, the Bill Buckley/National Review crowd, didn’t always coexist peaceably or productively with Jewish former-Marxist neocons, or urbane Easterners with polyester Sun Belt self-satisfieds whose reading consisted of the Bible and the Neiman-Marcus catalogue, not necessarily in that order. And there was always a darker side to this particular force — segregationists, Birchers, militias, homophobes and male supremacists (words I do not use lightly), plus the “Christ died so we could tell you what to do” brigades. But there were a few core principles, still worthy of regard.

What were they? Where are they now?
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  thanks to wood s lot