Rick Perlstein, yesterday:

Nearly every conservative has some version of this–some way of saying that if self-identified conservatives fail or fall short, it’s because they’re not “really” conservative. But the standards of what is a “conservative” are subjective, shifting, self-contradictory, and always self-serving. A conservative will always give himself the out of saying “conservatism has never been tried.”

What always gets me about this defense is that it’s a page straight out of the old Marxist playbook. Criticize Marx for what the Soviet Union had wrought and you got a standard answer: don’t mistake “actually existing Communism” for “true” Communism.

I suppose in general that this rhetorical ploy is one every utopian movement needs for that inevitable moment when history refuses to cooperate with the best-laid plans of mice and men. (And don’t for a second doubt the utopian subtext of the conservative movement.) As Perlstein says,

This single blunt fact cannot be overstated: here was the first chance in the modern era conservatives have had to prove themselves. And they failed. Imagine if somehow Leon Trotsky had survived and was restored to the leadership of the Kremlin, after generations of “Trotskyists” had built an entire culture around the notion that if only they were in the Kremlin, the revolution would have succeeded. But their reign proved to be shit from start to finish. The psychic wounds would be profound. The disarray, mutual recrimination, confusion, anger, are only to be expected.

But Perlstein’s little thought experiment encourages the thought that there might be something more direct (and less metaphysical) than historical irony at work in the conservative parroting of a central Marxist apologia. The thought, for instance, that they actually did learn it from Marxism.