Has conservatism failed?

Keith Preston has a brief but insightful discussion of the history of American conservatism in a book review on the Takimag site.

His final paragraph sums up the ultimate futility of conservatism in the US during the last half century:

Indeed, given the phenomenal success of the “conservatives” in expanding military spending and military interventionism, and their phenomenal failure everything else, one might be tempted to argue that the former was the only issue that ever really mattered all along, and that the grassroots economic, fiscal, social, cultural, religious and patriotic conservatives who comprised the activist base and key voting blocks were, to use an ironic Leninist term, nothing more than “useful idiots.”

But read the whole essay – his case is convincing.