Yes, says Justin Raimondo:
"The political disintegration of the Republicans was preceded by a long, drawn-out intellectual decline that dates from the time of the neoconservative incursion into GOP ranks during the Reagan presidency, when the Scoop Jackson Democrats first landed on right-wing shores and carved out a beachhead in the conservative movement. The birth of "Big Government conservatism," and the role this oxymoronic set of ideas played in leading to the GOP's present debacle, sounded the death-knell of the movement as a coherent set of ideas historically rooted in American traditions. Since 9/11, conservatism has reverted back to European-style absolutism, as evidenced by the Right's embrace of the revisionist theory of the "unitary presidency," which elevates the president in wartime to monarchical status. That Bruce Fein, a leading conservative legal theorist of the Reagan era, is now calling for the impeachment of Dick Cheney, on the grounds that his office has been the intellectual nerve center of this administration's bid to rule by edict, signals the end of the GOP coalition as we know it."
