Conservatism is an identity more than an ideology,
Modern conservatism is shame-proof.
The history of small men on the wrong side of history matters not.
Truth matters not.
Conservatism has retreated into a welcoming form of comfortable stupidity.
It has become a world view typified by shock jocks and outrage-merchants, as well as an absolute revulsion to commonly-accepted science.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal referred to the Republicans as the "Stupid Party", echoing John Stuart Mill’s jibe about the Tories. Perhaps no one better epitomizes this better than Donald Trump, a man with the seemingly unique gift of having no redeeming features whatsoever.
American Right-wing commentators, in an appeal to their increasingly male audience, have tried to pretend the philosophy is more macho than it actually is, when in reality many conservatives by nature are quite literally driven by fear and childish selfishness. Likewise in Britain, where tabloids take on the conservative banner against a socially liberal broadsheet and broadcasting media, the Right has become associated with deliberate anti-intellectualism and even villainy.
These are observations, not opinions. And yet this quackery wins elections when in fact it should not even be in contention. Since the 1960s the west has gone through the biggest cultural shift in half a millennium, an epochal change similar in some ways to the Christian takeover of pagan Rome and the 16th century Protestant Reformation. Both of these events led to revolutions in public ideas about morality and eventually to culture conflicts – and conservatives, like the Roman polytheists and Catholics before them, are today on the losing side.
The bad news is that this second reformation is going to be long, painful and boring, and both sides are going to get more tedious, mundane & hysterical, just as divisions the last time around drove Catholics and Protestants into prolonged periods of insanity. Conservatism will see revivals but it will become increasingly dominated by it's own sort of dreadful identity politics it once loathed, a phenomenon already developing in both continental Europe and Trump’s America.
While I suggest conservatives are entirely wrong - I do not contend that the left is always right.
It's more a matter of getting some things right. Barack Obama said of al-Qaida, (another group of guys not entirely comfortable with the modern world) that they were "Small men on the wrong side of history."
This can be said of all conservativism today.
