Recently, there has been lamenting that conservatives do not have their "A-team" in the race for POTUS. In particular, Rich Lowry has said this, as noted in this diary by Barbara Morrill.
But who would be the conservative A-Team?
Partly, of course, this depends on what you mean by "conservative". This word, like many, has changed meaning over time. But the current meaning seems to include a few variations: 1) Anti-government 2) Pro-fundamentalist Christianity (and anti all other religions) and 3) Anti-science, anti-urban, pro-"small town" value type of thing.
The different variations, or flavors, have different A-teams, and one problem the Republicans are having is that the three don't really mesh that well.
For some more thoughts, follow me below the squiggle.
The anti-intellectualism, anti-urbanism, anti-rights, nativist positions are those that were most loudly professed by Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, etc, but none of these capture the anti-government fervor. However, they were an "a-team" in that they captured whole nations. And all of these expressed these views. Hitler, for example, wanted to capture much of Europe (and kill a lot of the residents) to provide lebensraum so that Germans could return to a "simpler" life in villages. Pol Pot was probably the most purely anti-intellectual of any leader of a nation in recent times - he ordered everyone who had a college degree to be killed, along with everyone who had glasses and a great many other groups. And Mao, with the "great leap forward" and "cultural revolution" combined several of these traits. And, of course, all three were strong believers in the exceptionality of their own nations.
Extremist religious views have been common in many times, but Christians who hold these views have been less successful lately. For this A-team, we have to go back a bit in time, to the likes of Torquemada, Cotton Mather, many European leaders during the wars of religion and before. These views were pithily expressed in the saying "kill them all, God will know his own" allegedly said by Arnaud Amalric during the Albigensian Crusade. For modern successful groups of this ilk, we could do no better than the leaders of Saudi Arabia, who hold with one of the most extreme forms of Islam: Wahhabism
Politicians who are strongly anti-government tend not to be remembered - because they are agents of their own demise. Weak governments and anarchies are forgotten. Who knows the leader of Somalia? But, outside of politics, there is Ayn Rand. It is inconvenient to conservatives that Rand hated Christianity.
I am not saying that any of the current crop of Republicans are the people I list above; rather, I am saying that the people I list above are the natural exemplars of Republican attitudes, only more "successful" than the current crop of Republicans are, or, I certainly hope, ever will be.