Conservatives

Think back to the spring of 1968. The U.S. is mired in Vietnam. The country is in turmoil. The sitting Democratic president abruptly pulls out of his campaign for reelection, and the leading conservative columnist of the day neither gloats nor does a victory dance. It's nearly impossible to imagine this happening today. We could chalk this up to the deterioration of civic discourse and the rise in political polarization (or is it the other way around?). But it's really part of a much more significant shift that has fractured the right side of the political spectrum.

For decades now, liberals have been agonizing because conservatives seem to win even when polls show that the public generally disagrees with them. In their postmortems, liberals have placed blame on the way they frame their message, or on the right-wing media drumbeat that drowns out everything else, or on the right's co-opting of the flag, Mom and apple pie, which is designed to make liberals seem like effete, hostile foreign agents. It's understandable that liberals prefer to think of their subordination as a matter of their own inadequacies or of conservative wiles.

Amid a rebirth of conservative activism that could help Republicans win elections next year, some party insiders now fear that extreme rhetoric and conspiracy theories coming from the angry reaches of the conservative base are undermining the GOP's broader credibility and casting it as the party of the paranoid. Such insiders point to theories running rampant on the Internet, such as the idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is thus ineligible to be president, or that he is a communist, or that his allies want to set up Nazi-like detention camps for political opponents.

The economic downturn and the election of the nation's first black president are contributing to a resurgence of right-wing extremist groups, which had been on the wane since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, according to a U.S. intelligence assessment distributed to state and local authorities last week.

Last weekend, Cindy Wilkerson, a 44-year-old former social worker, helped organize three busloads of protesters who rode from Mississippi to Washington for the big protest targeting President Obama and his policies. The passengers, all white, wore T-shirts identifying themselves without irony as "Freedom Riders." Decades ago, that phrase evoked something quite different. It was bestowed on the predominantly black and white activists who traveled to the Deep South to challenge segregation -- and were sometimes met with hostility and violence.

Do only Prius-driving, gay-marriage-supporting, organic-crazed liberals shop at Whole Foods? Not anymore. Since Aug. 11, when Whole Foods CEO John Mackey published an Op-Ed article in the Wall Street Journal opposing President Obama's healthcare reform ideas, customers who disagree have boycotted -- or at least have claimed to be boycotting -- the high-end supermarket chain. In response, a lot of other people, who oppose the proposed reforms, have apparently developed a sudden taste for organic kumquats.

Faced with a new federal policy that opens the door for more embryonic stem cell research, conservatives have geared up for a political battle at the national and state levels that goes to the core of their beliefs about the sanctity of human life. Since President Obama lifted the eight-year ban on nearly all federal funding for stem cell research this week, conservative leaders have stepped up efforts to lobby Congress to preserve some restrictions, they said.

With John McCain racking up delegates on a steady march toward the Republican presidential nomination, deeply conservative voters are at a loss. They don't like McCain. They've tried, and failed, to stop him. So it was with growing frustration, and an unaccustomed sense of impotence, that many conservatives surveyed the electoral map Wednesday. "We're in a political dilemma, as well as a personal dilemma," said Jessica Echard, executive director of the conservative advocacy group Eagle Forum.

After seeking it so long, John McCain can now see the Republican presidential nomination almost within reach. He knows the need to reconcile with those conservatives who have so long sought to deny him the party's prize. But even such an obviously sensible strategy has its limits. Chatting with reporters as his campaign plane flew from St. Louis to Chicago, McCain was asked about radio host Rush Limbaugh's frequent jabs at him.

Leaders of the Episcopal Church formally ousted the bishop of California's breakaway Diocese of San Joaquin on Wednesday, saying John-David Schofield had abandoned the communion of the church in a bitter, years-long struggle over homosexuality and the Bible. In December, Schofield's Fresno-based diocese became the first in the nation to secede from the Episcopal Church over the issues, placing itself under the authority of a theologically conservative Anglican archbishop in South America.