Going Down Screaming - by Andrew Sullivan - New York Times (1998)
Starr report and its aftermath represents not simply a case study in wh has gone wrong w an Amer Presidency, but also wh has gone wrong w Amer conservatism. To be sure, Bill Clinton goaded the indep counsel into some of this detail by th hairsplitting of his legal defense. But Clinton was not resp for the *prurient, lip-pursing moralism* of the report, nor for the subseq egregious outspilling of grand-jury testimony. proof of perjury or obstructn of justice req none of this, as most Amers understood. This *moral obsessiveness* was the creation of Kenneth Starr & sth far larger, a *conservatism become puritanism*, a conservatism that has long lost sight of the principles -privacy, restraint, modesty, constitutionalism- wh used to be its hallmarks.

Amer conservatism has bn in prd radical intellectual reconstructn, in journals & magzs & seminars largely unnoticed by general public, but openly discussed among the conservative intellectual elites. The dominant ideas that have emerged in the last few years bear only the faintest resemblance to the major themes of the 1980's: economic freedom, smaller government, personal choice. Although libertarians are certainly numbered among the intellectuals of the right of the late 1990's, they are clearly on the defensive. What is galvanizing the right-wing intelligentsia at century's end is a different kind of conservatism altogether: much less liberal, far less economic, only nominally skeptical of government power. It is inherently pessimistic -- a return to older, conservative themes of cultural decline, moralism, the need for greater social control.

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Our Kristol Problem - And The GOP's 9:40 AM (1 hour ago)

from The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

One paragraph from 1998:

This scolding, moralizing conservatism is one with a lineage; it is the construction of a cadre of influential intellectuals who bear as much responsibility as anybody for the constitutional and cultural damage this moment may have already wrought. And they will bear an even greater responsibility if the ultimate victim of this spectacle is the reputation and future of conservatism itself.

Some of us saw this implosion coming for a while.