First of all, all my appreciation to the excellent diary by just about the same title. The title is homage to that diary, and mine is not in any way an attempt to argue with the fist author's points.
Mr. Brooks,
Please stop it. It's no use.
You could never save conservatism by pitifully attempting to ditch the repub party, like a parasite tries to survive its dying host. You could never do it, now less than ever.
The repub party is the political arm of conservatism. Without it, your corrupting ideology would have never been given equal, much less overwhelmingly more-than-equal, time in public.
In the first place, it was conservatism, out-of-control militarism and unchecked capitalism that brought down the repub party, not the other way around. And now, the collapse of the repub party, in turn will finish conservatism off, along with the nauseating reminders of what passes for capitalism in this day and age.
Conservatism depends on those with weak consciences to spout sophistries and slogans in its support, and on those with weak minds to swallow those sophistries and parrot the slogans. You are an intelligent man, and couldn't possibly be surprised that the repub party is anti-intellectual. The repub party is anti-intellectual because CONSERVATISM is anti-intellectual and anti-educated. How was conservatism ever to survive among principled intellectuals? Not one, not one of your sophistries has ever or will ever stand up to the devastating attack of a rational critique. The best one could ever do was to give your verbal gyrations the benefit of the doubt on earnestness, but that is a privilege, Mr. Brooks, which you have abused, time after time, and you no longer are granted it by sensible people.
How could the repub party not embrace class, race, education, sex, and religion warfare when the essence of conservatism is internal social warfare? Only through division and internal social strife can conservatism temporarily inhabit an otherwise balanced mind.
No Mr. Brooks, Sarah Palin is not the cancer. Conservatism - the ideology that rationalizes inequality - is the cancer. Imperial 'capitalism' is the economic form of the cancer, imperial militarism is its public service form, and the republican party is its political form.
It's time now for conservatism to go dormant again for many decades, except where relegated to the insane and unredeemably racist fringe. Then, long after your life span, even long after your miserable sophistries will have stopped being pointed out as examples of its inherent treachery, conservatism will try to find a new, non-immune host that it can infect, corrupt and eventually devour before it is inevitably expelled. And when it does, I hope to be still here to bear witness to its past ravages, although it will be up to future generations to fight it back and eventually defeat it, as it always has been and always will be.