Jonah and Peter Beinart have a high old time debating the distinctions between the conservative movement and the ‘Netroots, based on Jonathan Chait’s piece in the New Republic arguing that they are very much alike. I think Jonah gets the better of the argument — as he says, broadly understood, over the past 40 years, the conservative movement has not been a handmaiden of the Republican party so much as it has been an effort to keep the Republican party honest.

It was the Right that reacted with dismay to detente — a Republican administration policy — and to Gerald Ford’s asinine statement during his debate with Jimmy Carter that there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.

Even during the Reagan administration, there was distance between the movement and the politicians. The Heritage Foundation called (very foolishly, in my view) for the firing of Secretary of State George Shultz on the absurd ground that Shultz was somehow the captive of his bureaucracy when in fact he was the most independently minded secretary of state in our time. Some guy – not a Goldwater conservative but a leader of an important new element of the intellectual ingathering on the right – wrote a 1982 piece about his anguish at Reagan’s foreign-policy choices.

The conservative movement rose as one to denounce George Bush the Elder’s decision to raise taxes in 1990 — a move celebrated by the non-movement Republicans at the Concord Coalition and other places.

I think, however, that something did change after the election of 1994. That election was seen as a movement election. Leaders of the conservative movement were materially involved in the victory, and Congressional staffers raised from high school in the tenets of the movement found themselves in power and in clover for the first time.

The results were both good and bad, and in unexpected ways. Newt Gingrich’s visionary effort to do something about runaway Medicare costs, derived from conservative intellection, was a noble act. But it was politically catastrophic. Similarly, the pugnacious desire of movement conservatives to see a government shutdown — again, for reasons of principle and good governance — helped stiffen the spines of Gingrich and Co. But they helped give Bill Clinton a new lease on life.

In part because of Clinton, the movement and the politicians did remain unified in the 1990s even as Congress fled from its fiscal conservatism in 1998 to save its own hide.

Conservatives were set to start moving away from George W. Bush before 9/11, as David Frum’s book attests, owing to deep disappointment with No Child Left Behind and the sense that Social Security reform was dead. 9/11 sand the wars changed things.

One final point. Beinart says that movement conservatives still defend Ann Coulter. It’s hard to square that with the fact that NRO kicked her off its pages in 2001. No liberal book in recent years has received the drubbing from liberals that Dinesh D’Souza’s new book received from conservatives. And NRO and others, including me, were involved early on in the move to remove Trent Lott as Senate Majority Leader owing to his off-the-cuff intimations about how we’d all be better off if Strom Thurmond’s segregationist ideas had prevailed.

It’s a complicated question, this interweaving of movements and parties.