Rod Dreher: Zombie conservatives at the schoolhouse door.

[elocs]

He is a columnist for the Dallas Morning News and this editorial was in my local paper this morning. Interestingly, he calls himself a conservative.

http://lacrossetribune.com/news/opinion/article_bec9b5c2-a23b-11de-9f01-001cc4c002e0.html

Last week, the president delivered an education speech that fell somewhat short of the standard set by Lenin in his address at the Finland Station, launching the Bolshevik Revolution. In fact, Barack Obama told America's schoolchildren to work hard, respect their teachers and take responsibility for their own success. Which, in the language of the tinfoil-hatters, reads: Allahu akbar, comrades.

It would be a pleasant surprise if conservatives who took the president of the United States addressing youths as an opportunity to stumble toward the fainting couch realized that they had made fools of themselves. Fat chance. Obama Derangement Syndrome is pandemic on the right - and it's leaving conservatives like me politically homeless.

I've always taken complaints about the Fox News Channel as evidence of liberal whining and intolerance. But I don't watch TV news. And then I tuned in to Glenn Beck's popular Fox show the other night and saw him tutor his audience on the president's conspiratorial plan to institute "oligarhy" (sic) in America. And I thought: How does a paranoid like this get on national TV?

He ends with:

Despite what Sam Tanenhaus says in his current book, conservatism is not dead. Rather, it's undead. The conservative movement is herking and jerking like a zombie, dedicated to little more than frenetic gestures execrating Obama, and to regaining power. To what end? Given that they're birthing a conservative party whose instincts are dictated by loudmouths, reactionaries and crackpots, and overseen by cynics, it's dispiriting to contemplate.

Where can those who wish to think and debate clearly about a serious politics of the right go? The degenerate form of populism now dominant on the right loves to praise "freedom" - but it has no use for freedom of thought, or thinking much at all. In turn, increasing numbers of thoughtful conservatives have no use for it.

Apparently there are still some rationally thinking conservatives who feel there is no place for them in their own party, much the same way some Democrats feel.