The reason I ask is that I am operating under the assumption that these are not the same, and that the pundits do not speak for many, if not most, people who self-describe as conservative or who profess to believe in the principles of conservative government.

This comes up in every discussion of the obvious abject failure of Republican governance in America. This idea that the leaders of the party do not properly represent what it means to be a conservative since they failed to act in ways concordant with stated conservative abstract princples (shrinking government, balancing budgets being most common).

The refutation of this is that we must judge conservatives by what they do in power, not what they say they'll do. Self-described conservatives rallied around Reagan and Bush in near uniformity. The Republican congressional delegation, awash with self-described pure traditional conservatives has held united on every key Admistration goal, even to the point of suffering a massive electoral defeat, and even after on hugely popular programs like SCHIP.

At this point, the verdict is clear, these people cannot be described as some aberration of conservative governing principles, they are the real world manifestation of it. A feature, not a bug.

It might be an interesting academic debate to argue that the conservative failure is that they're singularly unable to filter out phony conservatives using their principles to attain personal power and wealth, and that if they remedied that somehow a viable conservative government could form. But in the real world of politics and policy, until they do that, we must consider them a tainted end result.

Of course too, conservatives were never keen to accept the cries of the few remaining marxists that proper marxism was never implemented and that Stalin or Lenin perverted it and thus communism should not be judged by those results. So I'm loath to give conservatives that sort of benefit of the doubt either in claiming a similar thing.

My take in short, is that conservatives cannot "walk the talk" they espouse and this is a key inherent flaw in their ideology. It has proven true far too often in many nations to be some mere fluke.

divadab: Thanks. You're welcome to it. I'm certainly planning on shamelessly ripping myself off with that line, I was pleased with it as I wrote it, and I'm glad someone read it.

I think there are some conservatives with conscience out there. I honestly do, even if they are a small minority. John Dean, for instance. They are just not part of the GOP at this time.

I concede this is possible with the stipulation that these intellectually honest self-described "conservatives" do not meet the modern conventional defintion of the term, and as you say are not even considered "conservative" by the actual conservatives in power within their movement.

Certainly there can be long debates about the exact defintions, but I'm confident that by and large we must judge their ideology by their actions and the results.

Or to put it in left wing context, if the left-wing were so badly off the rails as the right currently is, the existence of intellectually honest communists or anarchists would not redeem liberalism. Actually, to this point I note that almost to a one, the worst Democrats who enable the meme that the "two parties are identical" are to a person the self-described centrists, moderates, and conservatives who eschew the label "liberal" most directly. I find this mollifying and reassuring. All that is most broken about the Democratic party are the parts tainted with conservative ideals.

Yes, you replied to something topical and then immediately turned the discussion to you, in the form of an attack on "liberals" for not replying to you in a completely different discussion on another blog entirely.

Shit, even Shooter managed to stay loosely on topic with discussions of good or bad court decisions and judicial activism.

You're sowing dischord and irrelevancy and I'm calling you out on it. You're obviously doing it on purpose.

BTW I’ve noticed a few comments talking about Bush v. Gore and I think it may be worth pointing out that it is probably not the best example of the right’s own judicial activism. It was widely reported at the time (and still is for that matter) that the decision was 5 to 4. However, if one carefully reads the opinion (as convoluted as it is with nearly every justice writing separately) one realizes that the final count was 7 to 2 as to the substance of the claims with either Kennedy or O’Conner authoring the opinion. The 5 to 4 number comes from the vote taken by the justices on whether to hear the case in the first place and that I suppose could be argued was activist in its own way. At least that is my recollection of the case from having read it at the time of the decision.

Please read my comment immediately above yours, and the Ronald Dworkin article URL I gave.

The portion that was 7-2 was defensible, but the right has twisted this to mean all 7 were on board for the manifestly stupid and partisan portions of the actual ruling. Not so.

It was a case of 7 agreeing in principle to a problem and 5 proposing a legally indefensible "remedy" to that problem.

Like saying you and I agree poverty is a problem, and my solution is to kill all the poor people. It would be wrong to characterize the resulting massacre as "unanimous" on our parts.

There's a reason the court explicitly limited the Bush V. Gore ruling to not be used as precedent for other cases, even they were ashamed of what they did. Tobin's book on the court has the revelation that one of the liberal justices thought of resigning in disgust over the ruling.