For decades, a conservative ideology - a set of "correct" views forming a lens through which one views reality - did not exist. The conservative movement, such as it was, contained former communists and anti-communists, free marketers and compassionists and private-sector welfarists; unionists (Ronald Reagan's "hardhats") and those driven by a commitment to the Taft-Hartley Law's section 14-B; Burkeans, traditionalists, libertarians, religionists, and believers in living one's life according to an individualized secular virtue; neocon refugees from the liberal swamp.
The conservative umbrella kept the rain off all these disparates; the conservative tent had room for just about anyone.
Conservatives took over the Republican Party and drove it to political power. On their way to consolidating power, two things happened:
1. They demonstrated time and again that they were not particularly good at government - that in many ways they don't do the governing thing well, often not so well as liberal Democrats.
2. They coalesced around a set of views and values one generally had to embrace in order to have one's claim of allegiance to the conservative flag accepted.
As President, Bush has deviated from the ideologized conservative norm - particularly in federal spending and federal intrusiveness. In his federally financed compassionate conservatism, the notion of limited government disappears up the chimney. It may be that truly compassionate conservatism can be achieved in no other way. Yet following Katrina, which dismayingly put human faces on the sterile data of poverty, the Bush commitment of a $200 billion solution hardly conforms to any tenet of today's conservative ideology.
And the Miers nomination joined the Katrina response in breaking the back of certain conservatives' trust in Bush's devotion to the Ten (or however many there may be) Conservative Commandments.
The fundamental political problem in Washington and many state capitols is not so much the division between Republican and Democrat or between conservative and liberal, as a division among Republicans. Many have failed to work with the others; now, Katrina and Miers may prove to be bridges too far. Major realignment may be in process, with the Democrats the principal beneficiaries in the short term.
Can they capitalize on Republican/conservative division in the long term? It's difficult to believe Howard Dean will attract many disaffected Republican conservatives. Ditto regarding Al Gore, that profound thinker (and self-proclaimed inventor of the Internet), who these days is saying such weighty things as (a) declaring "American democracy in grave danger" from within, and (b) pronouncing dead "the marketplace of ideas that was so beloved and so carefully protected by our Founders" - a datum that will come as major news to many people.
Another Democratic heavyweight - James Carville - said the other day, "Sometimes the problem with being a Democrat is being a Democrat." To paraphrase what Israel's U.N. ambassador Abba Eban said famously of the Palestinians: So devoid of energy and ideas are today's Democrats that they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Certainly it's premature to count Bush and the conservative Republicans out. But they need to get their game together - and soon.