Not all are lemmings.

Digby reviews an article by an intelligent conservative:
"What is most refreshing about this piece, and perhaps unprecedented, is that Bramwell does not just fault flawed execution or creeping liberalism. He considers the movement empty in all its forms, even as his temperament and view of human psychology shows him to be what everyone used to think of as a conservative."

Quoting Bramwell:
"Like Orwell’s “Inner Party,” those at the top of the movement have almost perfect freedom to decide what opinions count as official conservatism. The Iraq War furnishes a telling example. In the run-up to the invasion, leading conservatives announced that conservatism now meant spreading global democratic revolution. This forthright radicalism—this embrace of the sanative powers of violence—became quickly accepted as the ineluctable meaning of conservatism in foreign policy. Those who dissented risked ostracism and harsh rebuke. Had conservative leaders instead argued that global democratic revolution would not cure our woes but increase them, the rest of the movement would have accepted this position no less quickly. Millions of conservative epigones believe nothing less than what the movement’s established organs tell them to believe. Rarely does a man recognize, like Winston Smith, his own ideology as such."