WASHINGTON — “I was conservative

yesterday, I’m a conservative today, and I will be a conservative tomorrow,”

declared Fred Thompson to the Conservative Party of New York, billing himself

as the “consistent conservative” in the GOP race — in contrast to ex-New York

Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

In his defense, Giuliani cites

George Will as calling his eight years in office in the Big Apple the most

conservative city government in 50 years.

And, truth be told, Thompson was

reliably conservative in his Senate years. But so, too, has John McCain been,

and Ron Paul, Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo. Hunter, however, splits with

Thompson and McCain on trade. Paul disagrees with all six of them on the war.

And Tancredo assails McCain for backing Bush’s amnesty for 12 million to 20

million illegal aliens.

Will the real conservative please

stand up? Or perhaps we should recall John 14:2, “In my father’s house there

are many mansions.”

What does it mean to be a

conservative — in 2007?

Sixty years ago, Robert A. Taft

was the gold standard. Forty years ago, it was Barry Goldwater, who backed Bob

Taft against Dwight Eisenhower at the 1952 convention. Twenty years ago, it was

Ronald Reagan, who backed Barry in 1964. Reagan remains the paragon — for the

consistency of his convictions, the success of his presidency and the character

he exhibited to the end of his life. About Reagan the cliche was true: The

greatness of the office found out the greatness in the man.

Reagan defined conservatism for

his time. And the issues upon which we agreed were anti-communism, a national

defense second to none, lower tax rates to unleash the engines of economic

progress, fiscal responsibility, a strict-constructionist Supreme Court, law

and order, the right-to-life from conception on and a resolute defense of

family values under assault from the cultural revolution that hit America with

hurricane force in the 1960s.

With the collapse of the Soviet

Empire and the breakup of the Soviet Union, anti-communism as the defining and

unifying issue of the right was gone. The conservative crack-up commenced.

With George H.W. Bush came the

advent of what Fred Barnes of The New Republic hailed as Big Government

Conservatism. Some thought the phrase oxymoronic. But when Bush stood at the

rostrum of the U.N. General Assembly in October 1991 to declare that America’s

cause was the creation of a New World Order, the old right reached reflexively

for their revolvers.

In 1992, with foreign policy off

the table, the Bush economic record a perceived failure and Ross Perot running

on protectionism and populism, Bush refused to play his trump card with the

Clintons: the social and moral issues he and Lee Atwater had used to beat

Michael Dukakis senseless in 1988. And so, George H.W. Bush lost the

presidency.

Now, 15 years later, what does it

mean to be a conservative?

There is no pope who speaks ex

cathedra. There is no bible to consult, like Goldwater’s “The Conscience of a

Conservative” or Reagan’s “no-pale-pastels” platform of 1980. At San Diego in

1996, Bob Dole told his convention he had not bothered to read the platform.

Many who heard him did not bother to vote for Bob Dole.

And so, today, the once-great

house of conservatism is a Tower of Babel. We are big government and small

government, traditionalist and libertarian, tax-cutter and budget hawk, free

trader and economic nationalist. Bush and McCain support amnesty and a “path to

citizenship” for illegals. The country wants the laws enforced and a fence on

the border.

And Giuliani? A McGovernite in

1972, he boasted in the campaign of 1993 that he would “rekindle the

Rockefeller, Javits, Lefkowitz tradition” of New York’s GOP and “produce the

kind of change New York City saw with ... John Lindsay.” He ran on the Liberal

Party line and supported Mario Cuomo in 1994.

Pro-abortion, anti-gun, again and

again he strutted up Fifth Avenue in the June Gay Pride parade and turned the

Big Apple into a sanctuary city for illegal aliens. While Ward Connerly goes

state to state to end reverse discrimination, Giuliani is an affirmative-action

man.

Gravitating now to Giuliani’s

camp are those inveterate opportunists, the neocons, who see in him their last

hope of redemption for their cakewalk war and their best hope for a “Long War”

against “Islamofascism.”

I will, Giuliani promises,

nominate Scalias. Only one more may be needed to overturn Roe. And I will keep

Hillary out of the White House.

A Giuliani presidency would

represent the return and final triumph of the Republicanism that conservatives

went into politics to purge from power. A Giuliani presidency would represent

repudiation by the party of the moral, social and cultural content that, with

anti-communism, once separated it from liberal Democrats and defined it as an

institution.

Giuliani offers the right the

ultimate Faustian bargain: retention of power at the price of one’s soul.