Conservative Collapse?

David Brooks offers a very Sullivan-esque column on the failings of the modern GOP, which he traces to the hardening of conservative ideology into a firm creed rather than a Burkean disposition:

To put it bluntly, over the past several years, the G.O.P. has made ideological choices that offend conservatism’s Burkean roots. This may seem like an airy-fairy thing that does nothing more than provoke a few dissenting columns from William F. Buckley, George F. Will and Andrew Sullivan. But suburban, Midwestern and many business voters are dispositional conservatives more than creedal conservatives. They care about order, prudence and balanced budgets more than transformational leadership and perpetual tax cuts. It is among these groups that G.O.P. support is collapsing.

Maybe. I feel, though, that it's easy to overestimate the depth of the crisis facing the Republican Party. They've implemented some policies that have not worked well, and so they've become unpopular and look set for significant losses in 2008. One could, however, easily imagine nothing in particular changing -- especially nothing as abstract as shifting he balance of credal and dispositional cosnservatism -- before they bounce back in 2010 or 2012. How many articles were written in 2005 about the "new Republican majority" and trying to explaining the pseudo-fact of how it came about.