In a piece tackling some eugenic nonsense, Will Wilkinson provides an elegant conservative critique of contemporary Republicanism:
I think grasping the inevitability of the cultural evolution of ideology is helpful in clarifying the role of the intellectual. The task is not to discover and promote the true final philosophy. (And certainly not to promote the inclusive fitness of the true final philosophy’s adherents!) The task is to help steer the distributed process of cultural evolution toward truth and/or goodness by acting as a virtuous selection pressure. The attempt to enforce an orthodoxy–to protect a doctrine against cultural evolution–is the religious apologist’s task. The only plausible way of making the content of an ideology stable enough to sustain the hope that our grandchildren will believe what we believe is to make an institutional religion out of it.
Intellectuals who spend their time enforcing ideological orthodoxy as though it were a religion, but without the aid of religious institutions, are wasting it.
That's a pretty good definition of today's right.
There are a few infallible, eternal truths that must be adhered to, like a papal bull, if one is to remain in good standing with the GOP – regardless of the circumstances. So cutting taxes is sacred if we are in a boom or a bust, if we have soaring debt and if we have a healthy surplus. The same with foreign policy, where the orthodoxy demands constant intervention abroad, a crude reliance on firepower as a measure of strength, and a public stance of us-or-them belligerence personified by Palin and phonily mimicked by Romney.
All of this assumes an untruth: that ideologies need not adapt to changing circumstances. And that is why I have long argued that today's Republican party, in its eternally fixed ideological purism, is actually a deeply unconservative movement.
As Burke well understood, what cannot change will not survive.
The Dish 