Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained.

The elite isn't leading anymore. It's trapped.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

In the week since [the poll] ... we've seen almost every leading conservative opinion leader, jurist, come out against this nomination.

[In his 1994 book] Dead Right, ... Frustrated on economic issues and apprehensive about social issues, post-Bush conservatives look back on the accomplishments of the early Reagan years the way seventh century Romans must have looked at their aqueducts: to think that we once built all this!

This is truly a desperate situation.