Conor Friedersdorf, one of my favorite online conservatives, wrote a must-read disquisition on the nature of modern conservatism and the vacuity underlying many vocal conservatives’ pogroms to purge the heretics.

The deeper I wade into these conversations, the more I realize how ahistorical, unprincipled and arbitrary are those who’ve appointed themselves the inquisitors of movement conservatism. They complain that certain people shouldn’t call themselves conservatives, but refuse to say why in any detail. Efforts to ground a conversation about a political philosophy by referencing philosophers is mocked… and then other philosophers are invoked as better litmus tests. Worldly, nonreligious conservo-libertarians like me are told that we only think religious, Benedict-option-loving folks like Rod Dreher are conservatives because we define the movement according to the strands we like personally. Huh?

This is the kind of incoherence that results when your impetus for branding someone a heretic is that they criticized Mark Levin, or that they think the GOP’s current electoral strategy is incoherent, or that they wrote an item at The Huffington Post, or because they raise chickens in their backyard and assert that maybe there’s something troubling about corporate farms pumping antibiotics into featherless foul stuffed into tiny cages. This is what happens when you define a good conservative as someone who is hated by liberals, or someone who goes to the mattresses for inarticulate, underqualified vice-presidential candidates because liberals unfairly maligned her… or she’s “just authentic”… or she excites people at rallies.