[Conservatives] do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

- Lionel Trilling

They haven't really improved much in the fifty years since that quote was spoken, but now, as per the NYT, the people that call themselves conservative can at least point to a thick volume that claims to offer an exhausting look at what passes for thought on the right side of the aisle.

The partisans are pleased. "Feel the heft of it", to quote Lee Edwards, a former aide to the very dead and very right-wing Barry Goldwater, seemingly confusing two meanings of substance, or perhaps quoting Victorian pornography, which would seem apt.

The simple fact is that conservatism does not have a lot of ideas, and I would surmise that the 'heft' noted above stems in large part from explaining the contradictions between those ideas it does have. I'd add that I consider the people who call themselves conservatives these days to be empty shams, because they're not conservative in any sense of the word, and that because of this, what calls itself the 'conservative movement' is dying, but that's another post. So back to those vaunted ideas.

Essentially, cons are against big government, except when they're for it – as when big government builds prisons, subsidizes donors, investigates ovaries and develops a prurient interest in consensual sex. That kind of big government is fine, as is the kind that sells national parks to oil companies.

Cons are for values – in other people. They themselves are, due perhaps to the get-out-of-jail-free card that comes with advocating for "standards", absolved from living up to them.

Cons support a lot of things. The troops, freedom, religious liberty, the American family, the rule of law, mom, a balanced budget, apple pie, you get the idea. The only problem is that this support is very much open to revision as expediency demands; their support of the troops doesn't include, say, getting them the hell out of a god-damn shooting war. They love the family; there had just better not be any ass-fucking going on between members of any family. And so on.

It's interesting to me that this encyclopedia is coming out at this moment in time – because the movement it describes has run out of ideas, if indeed it ever had any. Bush-Coulter conservatism is withering at this writing, not least because it does not work and makes no sense.

That's not going to change with a single volume, no matter how hefty.