In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

Slate's Jacob Weisberg asks:

Irving Kristol saved the right from intellectual bankruptcy in the '60s. Who will save it now?

Well, that's a good question. Because right now Conservatism is dead, it's being led by people who revel in ignorance, racism, stupidity and hatred, and nobody has a reason why people should embrace true conservatism other than WE HAVE A BLACK PRESIDENT, THE HORROR. Weisberg continues:

How did this prudent outlook devolve into the spectacle of ostensibly intelligent people cheering on Sarah Palin? Through the 1980s, the neoconservatives became more focused on political power and less interested in policy. They developed their own corrupting welfare state, doling out sinecures and patronage subsidized by the Olin, Scaife, and Bradley foundations. Alliances with the religious right skewed their perspective on a range of topics. They went a little crazy hating on liberals.

Over time, the two best qualities of the early neocons—their skepticism about government's ability to transform societies and their rigorous empiricism—fell by the wayside. In later years, you might say Kristol and the neoconservatives got mugged by ideology. Actually, they were the muggers. "It becomes clear that, in our time, a non-ideological politics cannot survive the relentless onslaught of ideological politics," Kristol wrote in 1980. "For better or for worse, ideology is now the vital element of organized political action."

There was no clearer sign of that shift than the effort by Kristol's son, William, to prevent any health care reform legislation from passing in 1993—on the theory that the political benefit would accrue to the Democrats. Today, that sort of Carthaginian politics has infected the entire congressional wing of the GOP, which equates problem-solving with treasonous collaboration. Though the president has tried to compromise with them in crafting the last missing piece of the social insurance puzzle, even allegedly moderate Republicans are not interested in making legislation more effective, less expensive, or in other ways more conservative. They are interested only in handing Obama a political defeat.

They stared into the abyss. The abyss not only stared back, it decided it was perfect to run the Republican Party for the last two decades, climbed out, and took over.

And yes, all conservatism has now can be summed up in three sentences:

1. War, power, and money is good.
2. Anything else the government does besides pursuing those three aims is pure evil.
3. Also we hate Obama and we hate him a lot, like Madeline Kahn hated Yvette in Clue.
   

And that's it. That's all they've got. Government by lowest common denominator.