Many of them seem to be as Christophobic as the most secular of liberal Democrats. They are even promoting the wrongheaded, hypocritical and convenient notion that Christians -- but not those of other worldviews or religions -- should relegate their religion to the privacy of their own homes and churches and stay out of politics and the public square. Sadly, this idea receives the unlikely aid of many apolitical evangelical Christians who wrongly -- in my opinion -- fail to grasp the interrelationship between politics, religious freedom and cultural wholesomeness.
Then there's foreign policy, which is rife with schisms among conservatives following the end of the Cold War and its unifying influence. On the one end, we have the neo-isolationists, who seem to believe that nothing short of a full-scale invasion by the armed forces of another nation on the territorial United States constitutes a threat to our national security that requires a military response.
On the other end are the neo-conservatives who appear to believe that we have not only the right, but the duty to invade other nations and establish democracies that will spread like a contagion into surrounding areas and lead to peace and prosperity for everyone.
In the middle are mainstream conservatives who believe our foreign policy ought to be governed first and foremost by our national interests. They believe the terrorist enemy is global in scope and design and that we must use all available tools to defeat it, that we were justified in attacking Iraq and removing Saddam and that encouraging Iraqi self-rule is the best of the imperfect options. They do not believe democracy, especially when not undergirded by Judeo-Christian principles, is a panacea.
President Bush has been erroneously assumed to fit into the neoconservative category because of his obvious enthusiasm for the pacifying effects of democracy. But I don't believe he ever would have attacked Iraq had he not believed we had a strategic interest in doing so quite apart from nation-building.
The antidote for what ails the Republican Party and the nation today is not to surrender to the destructive policies of the Democratic Party. But in the next few years, conservatives need to resurrect a defining, unifying message, which might result in some realignments. The guiding philosophy should be Reagan conservatism applied to today's set of similar (and different) problems. As the elections proved, Republicans cannot rely on the Democrats' bankruptcy to bail them out -- and they shouldn't.