The Conservative Political Action Conference began yesterday. According to Politico, more than 11,000 conservatives are attending. I passed up an offer to go from former Collegian columnist Brad DeFlumeri because of my classes, but even so I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about American conservatism.

On the one hand,  I can’t help but feel that American conservatism is getting up in age and starting to pay more attention to its 401k, planning the mortgage-burning party and hoping it’ll leave its dependents enough money for funeral expenses because it was so excited by the Coolidge administration it never bought life insurance.

As Reason’s Nick Gillespie wrote yesterday, “There’s been a lot of talk recently about conservatism as a ‘three-legged stool,’ a popular Reagan-era analogy positing that the small-government movement includes fiscal cons, social cons and defense cons. If these legs aren’t the same length, runs the implication, you get a wobbly seat.”

Gillespie went on to say that fiscal conservatives have been revealed to be as big spenders as their liberal counterparts, defense conservatives “did nothing well” and “social cons have lost, period.”

The tea party movement was like one more burst of activity just after retirement, but it won’t last for long. A Republican might even win the presidential election in 2012, but conservatism will be dead within 25 years, I’m certain. You see, like the Soviet Union in the late 80s, the movement is lying to itself.

Basically, conservatism today is trying to use cosmetic techniques and wishful thinking to stay young, but one more go on the dance floor could cost it a hip. It refuses to admit its frailty or mortality and its Botox and bad toupee will become even more noticeable as time goes by and the country changes demographically. To be blunt, conservatives are too white and not nearly nerdy enough. That’s one of the reasons xenophobia has started outweighing sense in the debate on immigration policy.

Over the next few years conservatism will enter its grumpy old man stage, yelling at the neighborhood kids to stay off its lawn and wondering why its children (who have grown up and now live in the suburbs of Philadelphia and California’s Orange County, respectively) never call or visit.

And America will have lost one of its greatest assets.

The conservative will to dominate, to force conformity and make people do things that may be abhorrent to them, such as school prayer or jingoistic and even racist and misogynistic American history curriculums, impose restrictions on sexual activity, censor music and literature – all this and more has combined in the American public pool of excess, capitalism, exploitation and imperialism into the most profound outburst of cultural innovation not seen since drugs were legal.

There is no rebellion in an open and tolerant culture – there’s just no need for it. It’s one thing to be an itinerant folk-rock musician singing Iraq War protest songs and recording them with a MacBook to sell on iTunes or post on YouTube and it’s an entirely different thing when at any moment the draft board could send you to Vietnam, or the police could arrest you for “obscenity” for reading Allen Ginsberg poems out loud or using a word referring to waste excreted by humans in a newspaper.

The need to mock and cut authority figures down to size runs deep in the human psyche, but it’s so much more fun when those people are resistant to the idea of change and get tripped up in their own self-righteousness. The end of conservatism harms us young people the most. The generation that came of age in the mid-60s to mid-70s still defines the idea of rebellious youth. Student protests are still measured against the standard of Columbia University, youth activism is measured against Students for a Democratic Society and “Lost” is measured against “Lost in Space.”    

So farewell, American Conservatism and may a flight of angels sing thee to thy rest. Enjoy the afterlife’s verdant fields and coal-filled hills to strip mine, bask in the warm sun of the heavenly country club before retiring to drill for oil and build a heterosexual, Christian and Americans-only city upon a hill. We’ll shroud your body in a good Republican cloth coat and plant an American flag at your tombstone every Memorial Day.

With you gone, I don’t know what will be left to form a counterculture to, but I’m sure we’ll find something. Corporate media will always be here.

And don’t worry; we’ll bury you with your favorite Reagan doll.

Matthew M. Robare is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].