A profound sadness arises when seeing participants at the Conservative Political Action Conference consistently live down to the worst caricatures the media lays on conservatives in general. An even more profound sadness comes from knowing that, for now at least, CPAC is almost precisely representative of conservative popular culture.
Eric Hoffer’s seminal 1951 book The True Believer, once a touchstone for conservative thinkers, warned against the sort of angry fanaticism evident in CPAC attendees’ lusty booing of every mention of recent Republican standard-bearers John McCain, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and the Bush family. Hoffer and conservative intellectual Russell Kirk both warned against the dual dangers of rigid ideology and of leader-hero worship.
