One of the great things about being a conservative is that contrariness is not only expected but, in some ways, encouraged. I suppose it comes from a lifetime of questioning a liberal culture that has been the dominant fact of living in this country for almost 50 years. However, once you start questioning the world around you, it’s hard to stop with simply critiquing your opponent’s positions and personalities. Challenging your own assumptions by investigating and weighing critical arguments from the other side is a necessity if you wish to remain true to yourself and what you believe.

This is not “wishy washiness” nor is it faithlessness toward conservatives or conservative ideology. Coming to the realization that the prosecution of the Iraq War has been horribly botched or that George Bush has shown weakness and incompetent leadership on issues from immigration to homeland security does not make me any less of a conservative than a Republican partisan who supports the President down the line and brooks no criticism of his performance in office. And I will challenge anyone who says otherwise.

The kind of conservatism practiced by many bloggers and their readers today is unrecognizable to me and I suppose many of my generation who came of political age during the late 1970’s and early 80’s. It is impossible to recapture the excitement, the intellectual ferment, the sheer joy of going to work in Reagan’s Washington during that time. After being in the political wilderness for so long, it was pretty heady stuff to suddenly realize that your ideas actually mattered, that your beliefs were being validated almost on a daily basis.

Back then, conservatives didn’t pay much attention to their differences. And believe me, there were plenty of them. The religious conservatives had only recently organized and flexed some muscle at the ballot box although I don’t think too many other conservative factions gave them much thought. Ronald Reagan certainly didn’t – at least not in any other context than giving lip service to their agenda.

Some may forget that Reagan was hardly a social conservative in the George W. Bush mold and while his rhetoric gave them comfort, his actual support for Constitutional amendments banning abortion, allowing school prayer, as well as early efforts to ignite the culture wars was tepid to non existent. Like FDR who managed the Henry Wallace wing of the Democratic party by adopting some of their class warfare rhetoric and appointing a few of them to positions in government, Reagan used the electoral raw material of the religious right but kept them somewhat at arms length.

I can recall my bemusement when discussing the religious right with my conservative friends. We didn’t dismiss them out of hand but saw the Jerry Falwell’s of the world as loose cannons, liable to say something that reflected badly on the President at any time. All of us were more enamored of conservatives like Irving Kristol whose intellectual journey from left to right mirrored that of so many of my generation. And we admired many of the new conservatives who had come to Washington; back bench Republicans like Newt Gingrich, Vin Weber, and Bob Walker – all smart, savvy politicians who didn’t shy away from combat with either the liberals in Congress or their own leadership.

All that has changed now. The social conservatives have become the most reliable Republican voting bloc in the conservative coalition. They dominate many state and local parties. They have done a fantastic job of organizing to the point that their issues now are at the forefront of the national Republican agenda. They engineered the Congressional majorities in the 1990’s and elected George Bush twice. And they have made themselves into the shock troops for Republican candidates in primaries and elections.

In the meantime, conservatives like me feel left in the dust, We occupy an intellectual backwater and feel out of the Republican mainstream. Like children at a big family gathering, we are sitting at the “little people’s table,” casting jealous glances over where the adults are sitting and cursing the fact that we aren’t old enough to take part in the conversation. The differences that didn’t seem to matter a generation ago now take on an entirely different coloring as politicians wishing to run for national office now shade their past positions on social issues to reflect the electoral realities of being a Republican and running in a party dominated by litmus tests and virtual loyalty oaths.

Just what kind of conservative am I? Am I a “traditional” conservative? A “libertarian” conservative? A “moderate” conservative? A “neo-conservative?” In my intellectual wanderings over the past quarter century I have probably at one time or another been all of those things and more. I gave up trying to peg myself years ago, realizing the futility in trying to define something that has no definition. I am what I am and believe what I believe and those who wish to label me as “this kind of conservative” or “that kind of conservative” will have to deal with it.

But it evidently matters to conservatives who dominate the internet as well as those attending the CPAC conference in Washington this weekend. Straying from orthodoxy as laid down by God knows who – sort of like Justice Marshall’s observation on obscenity being something not definable but recognized when seen – will almost certainly draw withering criticism your way. One can attribute it to the current state of our polarized politics where ideological apostasy in either party generates a fear bordering on panic that the other side will benefit by your abandonment of this or that sacred issue. This is the genesis of lock step liberalism and conformist conservatism. In politics as in war, everyone has got to carry a gun and march into battle toward the enemy. Anything less is treason.

The fact is, everyone knows that the old conservative coalition is a ghost of its former self. When 20% of self identified conservatives actually voted for Democrats in the 2006 election, you know that the right has splintered and that putting the pieces back together may be impossible.

The fault line has always been between the social conservatives and those who consider themselves “libertarian” or these days, “traditional” conservatives. Writing 4 years ago in The American Conservative, James Antle wrote:

The combination of libertarian and traditionalist tendencies in modern American conservatism was due in part to the need to gather together that ragtag band of intellectuals lingering outside the New Deal consensus who were opposed to the rising tide of left-liberalism. An alliance made out of political necessity, it drew some measure of intellectual consistency from the efforts of the late National Review senior editor Frank Meyer. He argued for the compatibility of innate individual freedom with transcendent morality, emphasizing that liberty has no meaning apart from virtue, but virtue cannot be coerced. Meyer saw libertarianism and traditionalism as two different emphases within conservatism, neither completely true without being moderated by the other. In fact, he held either extreme to be “self-defeating: truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny.”

“Fusionism” was the name for Meyer’s synthesis, and while it was never without critics, it worked well enough for most conservatives and for the development of an American Right that counted anti-statism and traditional morality as its main pillars, alongside support for a strong national-defense posture. When Ronald Reagan became the Republican presidential nominee in 1980, this even became the basis of the GOP platform: smaller government, family values, and peace through strength.

Antle notes that the single unifying factor that created this fusion between social and more libertarian conservatives was the cold war. The fact that the Democrats had abandoned any pretense of confronting the Soviets or maintaining a strong national defense meant that many former Democrats – myself included – felt perfectly comfortable in joining a coalition that stressed standing up to the Communists and rebuilding our national defense and whose rhetoric that promised American renewal and ascendancy was a refreshing change from the cynical, defeatist words coming from the left.

But from what I’ve seen coming out of the CPAC conference – beyond the eager college kids and bloggers as well as activists who make up the guts of the Republican party – is evidence that my kind of conservatism really isn’t welcome anymore.

Perusing the agenda one is struck by how social issues and social activism seem to dominate. Even a seminar entitled “Strategies for a Bold Conservative Future” – which I would ordinarily be interested in attending – has as its participants Phyllis Schlafly, Kenneth Blackwell and Richard Viguerie. To posit the notion that these three able and intelligent people, all closely identified with social conservatism, would have much to say about building a conservative future that I would be very interested in is silly. (John Fund, a more traditional conservative, also participated).

And that is but one example. I realize the reason for this; the stars of the conservative movement, those who are best known, are social conservatives and that in order to goose attendance, it is best to have well known people running the seminars. But it points up the fact that the gulf between people like myself who don’t believe social issues should be such a dominant factor in the conservative movement and those who believe they should has grown to where it may be impossible to re-unite the factions even long enough to win elections.

Libertarians have already largely abandoned the Republican party and rarely agree with conservatives about anything – even the war. Traditional “small government” conservatives are disgusted and stayed home in droves during the 2006 election. (In 2004, conservatives made up 34% of those voting and fell to only 20% in 2006.) Neo-conservatives have largely been discredited and were never really a large part of the coalition anyway.

Whither me?

A third party is out of the question. Such would be a wasted vote in my opinion. I suppose if the Democrats keep tacking to the right, they may eventually capture many of the libertarian conservatives – especially if they can demonstrate fiscal responsibility. But for quasi-traditional, semi-neocon, somewhat social conservatives like me, I may be stuck at the table eating with the little kids for quite a while.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin is at CPAC and will be updating all day I’m sure.

Ed Morrissey on McCain’s absence:

McCain has gone out of his way to stress his conservative credentials, especially on hot-button topics such as abortion and the war. If that’s true, then what does he have to fear from a conference of conservatives predisposed to his positions? In fact, if he claims to represent conservatives, why should he fear speaking in front of a group of them?

We debated this quite a bit on Blogger’s Corner yesterday (which is somewhat misnamed, since we occupy a row and not a corner, but that’s another story).Someone made the point that the eventual nominee needs the people in this conference to act as foot soldiers in the general election. What does it say to those foot soldiers if that nominee is too afraid to face them because he might get booed—a slim possibility in any case? How does that nominee inspire loyalty in those he explicitly spurned out of the gate?

I think most analysts now think McCain’s campaign is stumbling at this point and whether it can right itself to challenge the Rudy juggernaut is now a legitimate question.

McCain is the closest thing to an “establishment” candidate the GOP has. He has lined up impressive endorsements in the early primary states but has yet to excite many grass roots activists. But he is still a war hero and many establishment types are grateful to him for sticking with Bush in 2004 and not pulling a Hagel. How that translates, as Ed wonders, into support in a caucus state like Iowa or a state like New Hampshire where volunteers are crucial is unknown.

UPDATE

Thanks to UberMitch in the comments who corrects my obscenity attribution above. It was Potter Stewart not Thurgood Marshall who said about obscenity, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

Interesting aside: In Woodward’s book The Brethren, the justices evidently looked forward to cases where they got to decide if a specific movie was obscene. Some, like Justice Douglas didn’t think anything was obscene so he never showed up for the screenings. But the other justices didn’t mind viewing the porn one bit.