We knew it would run out of gas, but not this fast. But thanks to the Texas cowboy, the conservative movement is in its last throes.

Honest ones amongst them are acknowledging that the brand is in trouble. Tom Davis said that, “Members instinctively understand that the Republican brand is in the trash can. I’ve often observed that if we were a dog food, they would take us off the shelf.”

Some conservatives leave the room that maybe the brand could be rejuvenated, reinvented or reincarnated. My friends, it is over. It is as over as Hillary Clinton’s run for president.

Looking at it now, we must give the movement some credits for the dent it made in history. It is a crazy idea that “The past is prologue. And future is history.” The mere fact that the concept found a footing on any land is probably the greatest fraud in modern history of thoughts.

This is the central idea of conservatism: that a limited government run by titans of the free markets that is fiscally shrewd can endlessly buff up the military industrial complex in order to flex its muscles around without taxing the wealthy or caring about the poor but yet insisting that it must control what a woman does with her body and sternly punish society’s renegades without assigning any blame for their emergence on the society itself.

Such idea is inherently full of contradictions. Yet, it finds favor in a world that cherishes the division of its humanity - a world where the privileged few feels it is its place to direct the affairs of the rest with tough love often called compassionate conservatism and tough choice often called individual responsibility.

It succeeded in its purest form in a country like America because America is inherently a country full of contradictions. For America that is physically isolated and yet on top of the world, it is easy to find advocates and adherents. What has proven to be hard is the pursuit of “ordered liberty.”

Russell Kirk in The Conservative Mind presented the following as the core values of conservative movement: That a divine intent, as well as personal conscience, rules society; That traditional life is filled with variety and mystery while most radical systems are characterized by a narrowing uniformity; That civilized society requires orders and classes; That property and freedom are inseparably connected; That man must control his will and his appetite, knowing that he is governed more by emotion than by reason; and that society must alter slowly.

From Eisenhower through Reagan and now to George W. Bush, the conservatives have had their run. By recruiting the Christian right, exploiting the fear of the communists, and the cultural distinction of the South, the movement had a run that is ending up flat on its stomach.

In the new world that has emerged, divine intent has been redefined. The question of whose divine intent is now harder to answer. In the new world, America’s conscience is no longer synonymous with the world’s conscience. In fact, it is scrutinized more than ever. In the new world, the varieties of life are poised on swallowing the traditional. In the new world, orders can no longer be used to maintain classes. In the new world, the control of property and freedom has drifted away from home.

Confronted by a new world created in their own image, the movement crumbled for lack of an adequate response. Able to replace the fear of communism with the fear of radical Islam, the movement running an indebted government of an indebted people failed to galvanize a trusted constituency for the new war it is unwilling to pay for by taxing even the rich. Having substituted free markets for government, the movement lost control of government and free market when the people are being left behind by the riotous free will of the markets that are naturally responding to the shift of the world’s center away from America.

The last act of the conservative movement will be the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. When that is achieved, the movement will finally receive its funeral. Until then, we shall be entertained with its long requiem high mass.