Daniel Oliver had an essay in The American Spectator last month, "Alphaomegaizing the Conservative Movement," in which he explains that Buckley's Movement is over:

"...George W. Bush is clearly an intelligent man, but not perhaps a thoughtful man, or at least not a man who thinks about political philosophy. Henry Kissinger wrote that you have to do your thinking before you come to Washington. Once in power, politics is -- has to be -- about the exercise of power. There isn't time to think about philosophy. George W. Bush may have become seriously interested in politics at the national level in 1980, when his father became vice president (though he had already run for the House of Representatives in 1978), but probably only in the power part, which at that point was all his father had time for. And by then, the conservative movement had ended. And apparently, among the hundreds of books Bush read in his reading marathon with Karl Rove, he never came across one about the conservative movement -- perhaps proving Kissinger's point.

(Yet...the remarks Bush read when he honored Bill Buckley and National Review on its 50th anniversary seemed to acknowledge, implicitly, the existence of the movement. Bush said Buckley had gathered an "eclectic group of people" to write for the magazine and that it was hard to imagine that there was once a time when the only conservative game in town was Bill Buckley and National Review.)

"Look," Bush said to Latimer, "I know this probably sounds arrogant to say, but I redefined the Republican Party." Yes, Mr. President, you did. You redefined it right out of power because you didn't understand how it had gotten into power, because you didn't understand conservatism. Or the conservative movement.

When did the conservative movement begin? How do you tell, exactly? And does it really matter? The most plausible date is November 1955, when William F. Buckley Jr. launched National Review. Why then? Because the Conservative Movement -- we'll dignify it now with initial caps -- was a small intellectual movement, all of whose exponents could fit into a phone booth. One of its goals, of course, was to win elections. But it was mostly about ideas -- ideas that were worth defending even if they did not win elections. No one really expected to win elections right away.l.Continue reading on The American Spectator >>