“I think I’ve got you figured out,” the reader wrote a year or so back. “You’re not really liberal at all. At heart, you’re a conservative.”

I smiled a little, I think. The reader might have been onto something.

But it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? I’ve written of how I once called myself a conservative, though at the time I didn’t really know what conservatism meant, or what it was supposed to mean. Since then on several occasions I’ve referenced conservatism as tribalism, but that’s how it really was for me: Your friends and your family were conservatives, people you knew and respected were in that camp, so surely it was the place for you as well.

As for actual conservative principles - well, what was there besides hating liberals and backing a strong military, really? At the time, during the Reagan era, there must have been more meat on those bones, but for me - that was enough. That’s what conservatism was about. Intellectuals might argue about federalism or free markets, but for the vast group of populist conservatives, hating liberals and loving militarism is still very much what conservatism is about.

Increasingly, though, that’s no longer enough for those who have called themselves conservatives. There’s been a veritable parade of rats from the sinking ship; Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week of how the administration, on the immigration bill, has told conservatives themselves to stuff it. Our Leader, she said, has the gall to suggest that conservatives who oppose the bill are unpatriotic, and ”don’t want to do what’s right for America.”

“Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens?” Noonan naively wondered.

If she was been paying attention, she might see a parallel with how the administration, how the conservative movement itself, “spoke” to those who opposed the war in Iraq. The administration “speaks” this way, Ms. Noonan, because that is how it has always “spoken,” how the conservative movement that propelled it to power has always “addressed” its opponents.

Now - because the sneering hostility is directed toward the good guys! - she decides it’s all too much. Or rather, Noonan writes, she decided it was all too much a few years ago:

The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.

What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom - a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don’t need hacks.

The mouth-breathing Rush-listeners, of course, have no idea what she’s talking about.

But while Noonan is quick to blame the administration for failing conservatives and conservatism, Rod Dreher says conservatives themselves can’t weasel out of the blame:

I’ve got no strong objection to Noonan’s analysis, and indeed I’m thrilled to see it. But it seems to me that we conservatives need to avoid falling into a historical revisionism that allows us to portray ourselves as passive victims of a feckless president.  …

Bush has failed conservatives, yes, but we have also failed ourselves. It doesn’t take much courage to stand up for conservative principle to a president as weak as this one has become. It would have taken real courage to stand up for conservative principle in 2002, 2003, 2004, even early 2005. How many did? I know I didn’t - not until Katrina and Miers, which came late in 2005. If we’re looking to blame someone for the failure of Republican government and the conservative crack-up, look to the White House, yes, and look to the late, unlamented Republican Congress. But also look to the conservative talk show hosts, the conservative columnists, and finally, in the mirror. The only way we’re going to rebuild after the present and coming political shattering is through honest reckoning, and taking responsibility for what we’ve done.

But the conservative movement is constitutionally incapable of this. As I’ve written so many times, the crowd that spends so much time crowing about “personal responsibility,” exhibits virtually none itself; and while “thinking” conservatives like Noonan or Dreher might want to wrest control of this thing called “conservatism” from the populists, they will not do it. This is Andrew Sullivan’s great conceit, that he and those who think like him will rescue conservatism from those who have sullied its great name. He’s wasting his time.

Conservatism is no longer the “principles” that “thinking conservatives” like to hold high above their heads. Conservatism is tribalism, as I’ve described it; conservatism is hating the liberals and loving the military, following the Leader. And even if populist conservatives do break with this president over immigration, the movement itself will continue to hew only to those “principles”; the movement is incapable of embracing anything broader.

The movement imperils the future of conservatism itself.

To paraphrase the title of a post from a few days ago - that which made the conservative movement strong now makes conservatism weak. The populist movement, those who have marched beneath the banners, those who have been faithful and loyal - conservatism shall not be wrested from their hands. It belongs to them now. And, as the movement will tell you, those who would do the wresting are traitors, hated just a tad shy of liberals themselves.

So those who would have conservatism stand for something are going to have to stand somewhere else. I have in the back of my head this idea that I might stand there as well. Because this has never been a binary choice; it’s never been a matter of conservatism as defined by fools and the liberalism of the 1960s. Conservatives have portrayed it that way, but - and I hope the Democratic Party realizes this; sometimes I think they do, other times it’s clear they don’t - you don’t move forward by returning to the past.

If my own politics these past few years have been reactionary, borne of dismay at both the Leader’s incompetence and the blind, snarling tribalism of the movement itself, then the “liberalism” of the future, in which there might be a home for those disaffected conservatives, needs to specifically embrace the things that conservatism, these past few years, has rejected. It needs to be entirely “reality-based.” It needs to be based upon the “simple wisdom” Noonan invokes. It needs to be about prudence rather than recklessness. It needs to be flexible rather than dogmatic. It cannot be the same old, rebranded. Which, to be honest, is why I like Obama over Hillary.

Conservatism as we have known it is dying. And it deserves to die. The Noonans and the Drehers and the Sullivans may wish for something to spring, Phoenix-like, from the ashes, but it cannot happen on that side of the fence. My hope is that it could happen on this side of the fence - and that they, ultimately, might decide to hop it, and come take a look.