The Golden Age That Wasn't

Soft headed Democrats are already hoping that 'real conservatives' will again emerge to offer 'valuable insights and arguments' about public policy.

They never existed. Buckley's 'conservatives' were states-rights apologists for segregation. Go back and read their own words.

Bush was a fraud. His dad was a CIA agent. Reagan was a spokesman for GE. Nixon was a crook. Goldwater was a cracker-barrel philosopher hijacked by the Buckley crowd. As far back as you go, there is no conservatism, just a bunch of corporate lawyers intent on keeping power in the hands of the few. Get back to the 19th century and you have a Republican party spending money as fast as possible to force the federal government to maintain high tariffs for revenue collection purposes.

Nobody even knows what a real conservative might look like. Thomas Mann probably came closest to nailing it with his slippery character Naphta, in The Magic Mountain, who eventually commits suicide. Conservatism always gestures vaguely to a past which, on inspection, turns out not to have existed.

Yearning for 'real conservatives' displays an abysmal ignorance, of history in general and American history in particular. Just shut the fuck up already.