‘Crunchy con’ — Reagan has left the building

Dallas Morning News op-ed columnist and self-styled “crunchy conservative” Rod Dreher plays the St. Paul Requiem for the alleged “Party of Reagan.”

Here’s some outtakes:

The Palin pick, vivifying though it is, does not erase the fundamental philosophical problems besetting the GOP. This week's GOP convention will, in effect, be the last hurrah of the Republican Party as we've known it for a generation.

The Republicans come to St. Paul to praise John McCain, but whether they know it or not, they also come to bury the party of Ronald Reagan. …

Neither Mr. Reagan nor his successors truly sought smaller government, hence the unintended honesty in GOP Rep. Mike Pence’s pathetic 2006 boast: “We may be the party of Big Government, but they are the party of Really Big Government.” If it's an epitaph for the Reagan GOP you seek, that's as good as any.

Dreher, who is NOT about to announce some surprise move to the left, then wonders if the GOP has been asking the wrong political philosophy questions in recent years.

“Conservatives really don't understand that culture trumps politics,” (conservative) screenwriter and novelist Andrew Klavan told me recently. “A Ronald Reagan can change the political culture for 20 years, but that change can completely vanish, and conservatives will not even know how they got there. How does that happen? Through the culture. But we don’t even see that over time.”

Dreher then says conservativism of the true-blue nature will win out in the end.

He says that the coming hard times of Peak Oil, an overextended military and other issues will spell an end to cultural liberalism and individualism.

Funny, last time we had really hard times, it led to the New Deal, which didn’t involve Republicans at all, except in grumpy opposition, Rod.

Dreher then goes metaphysical, including with this nonsense quote: “History is cyclical, not linear.”

That implies that there is such a thing as History with a capital H — history of the metaphysical Hegelian type.

One might argue that Rod Dreher isn’t even sure what building he’s in, in the first place.