Remember how, one year ago today, the rightward half of us somehow became convinced that Gillette had joined the worldwide feminist conspiracy and hated all men?
Politics does terrible things to the mind. Be less political. Ask less of politics. Try to keep it at arms' length from two other, much better areas of life: commerce and culture.
There was a time when--at least aspirationally--conservatism meant behaving with decorum, and modesty, and restraint. Conservatism may have had other problems, and it did, but a deficit in these qualities was not among them.
Weird, I know, but as recently as the 1990s conservatism generally meant looking down on boorish behaviour rather than praising it or making excuses for it. It also meant protecting the weak, rather than protecting their attackers.
Yes, "protecting the weak" usually meant protecting women, and yes, that brought its own problems with regard to sexism. But such problems are much preferable to the ones we get when conservatism feels it has to defend the boors and the bullies of the world.
It might be nice if someone were to reconstruct that older, more gentlemanly conservatism, just without the older, more gentlemanly sexism that often went with it.
I think what happened ultimately goes back to the civil rights era, when activists rightly and successfully tried to inspire guilt and shame for racist attitudes and behaviours. But at the same time, the sexual revolution was pushing the idea that at least sexual guilt-tripping was wrong and to be shrugged off.
As the various progressive cultural causes have experienced considerable success, conservatives have come to feel that they are "punching up" against guilt-tripping when they do things that used to be (or still are--leave that aside) "punching down."
As a result, conservatism became rebellious, and an overall rebellious stance is incompatible with an ethic of restraint. I suppose that means that it was inevitable that "conservatism" would cease to be conservatism and become instead a kind of insurgency.