And now...the rest of the story

Here's the rest of my answer to my friend who asked me to explain why conservatives are in disarray. Nothing that will be new to longtime readers, who—newbies, too!—are invited to contribute their own reflection in the comments:

1) There has been, by conservatives own self-definition, a "modern conservative movement" at least since the Goldwater campaign of 1964. Ever since, they been explicit and sedulous about their goal: first control the Republican Party, then control the government. In 2001, with Republican control of the presidency, congress, and the federal courts--and conservative control of the Republican Party--for the first time since the inauguration of the movement, for the first time, and on their own terms, conservatives had a chance to govern. They governed, too, with exceptional popular wind in their sails (at least since 9/11/01), and with the benefit of an extraordinary infrastructure that let them staff the federal government from top to bottom with personnel steeped in the ideas and habits of an extraordinarily self-conscious "conservative movement." This single blunt fact cannot be overstated: here was the first chance in the modern era conservatives have had to prove themselves. And they failed. Imagine if somehow Leon Trotsky had survived and was restored to the leadership of the Kremlin, after generations of "Trotskyists" had built an entire culture around the notion that if only they were in the Kremlin, the revolution would have succeeded. But their reign proved to be shit from start to finish. The psychic wounds would be profound. The disarray, mutual recrimination, confusion, anger, are only to be expected.

2) Consider P.J. O'Rourke's famous joke: "conservatives say government doesn't work, and then they get elected to prove it." Conservatives make much of their movement's plurality, their intellectual divisions. But all the while they united around Ronald Reagan's nostrum from his 1981 inaugural address, "government isn't the solution to our problems, government is the problem." The point is obvious, and frequently stated: people who despise government have trouble governing. But when you look at the question of disarray, the question goes deeper. How to reform "conservatism"? Certain "reformers"--Douthait and Salam, Brooks--say, Stop despising government. But if that's the reform, again, disarray, mutual recrimination, confusion, anger, are only to be expected: it forces an identity crisis. You can't simply turn on a dime against something that was supposed to be a core principle and not suffer wounds.

3) A culture of bad faith and cheap grace. I presume you saw my review of Edwards' book:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/01/AR200805... [1]

Note how Edwards seems to have comforted himself all these years with a "fact" that is simply untrue: that the line-item veto--and, by implication, the imperial presidency itself--was something liberal Democrats, not conservatives, supported. Nearly every conservative has some version of this--some way of saying that if self-identified conservatives fail or fall short, it's because they're not "really" conservative. But the standards of what is a "conservative" are subjective, shifting, self-contradictory, and always self-serving. A conservative will always give himself the out of saying "conservatism has never been tried." The culture feeds off its own refusals of personal intellectual responsibility.