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With apologies in advance, I'm borrowing both the title of this post and the excerpted material in full from Glenn Greenwald.

You don't get much more conservative than Rod Dreher; the man has written for no less than the National Review on numerous occasions. But as his recent NPR essay shows, the man is having some serious second thoughts about his political beliefs . A conservative forced to rethink conservatism in the face of the behavior of this administration isn't exactly noteworthy at this point, I suppose. But in this case, it isn't what Dreher is saying that matters, it is how he is saying it. Here's Greenwald's intro and excerpt ( or if you'd prefer, NPR's original broadcast):

Dreher, 40, recounts that his "first real political memory" was the 1979 failed rescue effort of the U.S. hostages in Iran. He says he "hated" Jimmy Carter for "shaming America before our enemies with weakness and incompetence." When Reagan was elected, he believed "America was saved." Reagan was "strong and confident." Democrats were "weak and depressed."

In particular, Dreher recounts how much, during the 1980s, he "disliked hippies - the blame America first liberals who were so hung up on Vietnam, who surrendered to Communists back then just like they want to do now." In short, Republicans were "winners." Democrats were "defeatists."

On 9/11, Dreher's first thought was : "Thank God we have a Republican in the White House." The rest of his essay:

As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool's errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic.

But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.

In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did.

The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government's conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me.

It wasn't supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.

I turn 40 next month -- middle aged at last -- a time of discovering limits, finitude. I expected that. But what I did not expect was to see the limits of finitude of American power revealed so painfully.

I did not expect Vietnam.

As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.

I had a heretical thought for a conservative - that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word - that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot - that they have to question authority.

On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn't the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?

Will my children, too small now to understand Iraq, take me seriously when I tell them one day what powerful men, whom their father once believed in, did to this country? Heavy thoughts for someone who is still a conservative despite it all. It was a long drive home.

I've always found it deeply ironic that a generation that fought so hard to allow individuals to "do their own thing" would eventually end up dividing into two deeply entrenched, all or nothing, us versus them political camps. The truth is that, yes, the "hippies" (whatever that means) were right. As were the conservatives. Both, in part, were right about what they saw happening to their country. And both, in part, were wrong.

Beyond the "hippies" comment, what is most interesting to me about this is how clearly it reads as a story of one man's loss of faith. Over the last decade of so, "faith" has become the bedrock of modern conservatism. And by faith I mean more than just the belief of many conservatives in a specific brand of christianity. It reaches much further than than.

Over the last decade or so, a movement that began based almost entirely on a lack of faith in others, and most particularly, in large groups of others, has transformed into a movement that exists almost entirely on faith in an unquestioned set of ideas, policies, and people. Tax cuts are good. Liberals are bad. Republican presidents and everything they do are good. Democratic presidents and everything they do are bad. Us versus them. Our team versus yours. White hats versus black.

How conservatism morphed from a movement centered on doubt to one centered on certainty is a topic for another day. As for why it did, well... I think Mahablog may be on to something with this:

Like so many loyal soldiers of movement conservatism, Dreher’s earliest political memories are of the Carter Administration and the Iranian hostage crisis, followed by the triumphant ascension of Ronald Reagan. He was 13 years old when Reagan was elected, so you can’t fault him for viewing these events through a child’s eyes. The problem is, as it is with so many of his fellow travelers, that his understanding of politics remained childish. He seems to have retained a child’s simple faith that Democrats (and liberals) are “bad” and Republicans (and conservatives) are “good,” so one does not have to think real hard to know who’s right or wrong.

I'm a few years younger than Dreher, and I had my "loss of faith" moment much sooner in life than he did (that too is a topic for another day), but I nevertheless absolutely understand the lens through which he sees the early Reagan years. Go back and listen to the part of the essay that Greenwald summarized where Dreher talks about Carter, Reagan, and the Iranian hostage crisis. I was a few years younger than Dreher at the time, but I know exactly what he is talking about here.

Its weird, because I was only nine at the time, but I can vividly remember the Iranian Hostage Crisis. For over a year, the people on TV counted the days we as a nation had been held hostage. And then along comes Reagan, the hostages are released, and the nation is saved. Of course the truth is far more complex than that, but as a kid that's how it looked on TV. Add to that both Reagan's promise to stand tall against the "evil empire" and that same empire's subsequent fall less than a decade later, and you can start to see how faith and certainty might begin to thrive, particularly among those who came of age during that time.

As I said earlier, along the way I lost that faith and certainty, but apparently Dreher, and many other conservatives of his generation, did not. But they are now. It's been pretty easy to see this coming for some time now. But never, not in my wildest dreams, did I think one of them would take to NPR to announce that the hippies had been right.