Given that I am a strategist of some skill, why would you ever expect me to subscribe to such an amorphous, strategically flawed ideology:
As society is successfully transformed by those who detest the status quo, the status quo changes. This means that the great defender ideology of the status quo, conservatism, will change with it.
“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.” — G.K. Chesterton
Both liberals and conservatives have shape-shifting visions. This is because the definitions of conservative and liberal are determined by the “position” of the given society ‘s political spectrum. Shift that spectrum left or right by altering the collective ideology of a nation, and the definitions of those two words will change commensurate with the degree of that shift…. This isn’t to say there is no difference between liberal and conservative visions. Liberals construct their vision based on opposition to the conservative one; conservatives’ vision is a product of the now accepted, decades-old vision of the left. Thus, liberals promote today’s liberal vision; conservatives defend yesterday’s liberal vision.
This isn’t new, but it’s a usefully succinct explanation of the strategic flaw inherent to conservatism. Like the feminism, communism and secularism it still tends to oppose at the moment, it is a temporally self-refuting ideology. Yesterday’s liberal is tomorrow’s conservative, as the neocons are demonstrating in bloody spades.