I mostly (and mostly emphatically!) agree with Dan’s column today, that “conservatism doesn’t need more adjectives; it needs proven principles.”
One point to add:
Not all but a great deal of the “Let’s invent a new kind of conservatism!” stuff is what I call Tracy Flickism — starting a new club for the purpose of giving yourself something to be in charge of. Some of our readers will be old enough (or will have studied the history enough) to know that much of the self-styled paleocons’ bitterness toward the neocons dates to the 1980s and began with complaints that the neocons were getting all the best jobs in the Reagan administration and the think tanks, presumably to the disadvantage of the Buchananites and their brethren.
There is still a lot of that going on today, which is why some of those more excitable right-wing websites spend so much time bellyaching about National Review, why the streaming services that want to be the new Fox News are populated in such considerable part by people who failed to make it on the old Fox News, why certain would-be leaders on the Right take AEI and Cato to be their main enemies, etc. And most of us who have been around the activism/journalism world long enough have seen assorted leopards change their spots — often more than once — when it was professionally advantageous to do so.
I wish I could remember (so that I could give credit) who first observed that in the United Kingdom journalism is thought of as a branch of the literary world, while in the United States it is considered a branch of politics. Frustrated novelists and poets in need of a paycheck make for a very different sort of media environment than do failed politicians and aspiring kingmakers, though I suspect that the advent of social media and such has erased some of that difference. This tendency is of course much more pronounced in openly partisan or activist journalism, and it is as prevalent in left-wing circles as it is on the right, though it is more intense on the right because right-wing writers are mostly cordoned off in right-wing institutions, whereas left-wing writers have relatively easy access to the so-called mainstream media.
Thus the churn: The principles may be eternal, but ambition is fluid.