The American Prospect has just published a fascinating piece called “the Coming Conservative Crack Up.”  It is simultaneously un-original and wrong-headed, a bizarre kind of journalistic achievement.

I have been reading articles and books predicting the imminent death of the conservative movement since 1989.Remember when the death of communism was supposed to foreshadow the end of the greatest nemesis as we moved into a “post-ideological world”?

Then came the first two Clinton years and a spate of “conservatism is dead” articles. Remember: Reaganism was dead and Bush killed it?

The Gingrich triumph, seizing Congress for the GOP for the first time in 40 years, put an end to this profitable line of pessismism.

But the conservative-movement-is-dead meme came back like Lazurus. R.Emmett Tyrell published a book called The Conservative Crack-Up in 1997. Death notices for conservatism continued to appear until Bush was narrowly elected in 2000.

As soon as the Iraq war seemed more quagmire than triumph, conservatism-is-dead returned with a vengeance.

Howard Fineman foresaw the end of the conservative movement in Newsweek in 2005: The “movement” – that began 50 years ago with the founding of Bill Buckley’s National Review; that had its coming of age in the Reagan Years; that reached its zenith with Bush’s victory in 2000 — is falling apart at the seams.

So the Prospect gets no credit for oringinality. But what about the thesis? The author confuses the conservative movement with the Republican party. In American history, political parties do die–remember the Whigs–but it happens rarely. Political movements also die (Free Silver, No-Nothingism), but ones that create institutions last for a long, long time. The labor movement created unions and other insitutions. The civil-rights movement created the NAACP and many other institutions. So movements can last for decades after they have accomplished their goals, if they build institutions or take over existing ones. Conservatives have built an impressive array of institutions: think tanks, foundations, magazines, even schools and art centers. No election will take away those things.

Finally, the Prospect author refuses to admit the popular appeal of conservative ideas. More than one-third of the country accepts all of the conservative agenda as its own and a majority have adopted large parts of it (balanced budgets, low taxes, strong foreign policy, tougher policing, welfare reform).

In 2050, we will be reading predictions of Conservatism’s death. And worried conservatives, under the pressure domes on Mars and in the floating sea-cities in the Pacific, will hold conferences and meetings and coffee klatches, wondering what to do.

UPDATE: Tim Noah, over Slate, has posted a piece entitled “GOP,RIP.” It is more of the same. Here’s his conclusion:

This is not, I’ll confess, the first time I’ve believed that the Republican ascendancy has ended. In 1994, I felt sure that the warmed-over Reaganite nostrums of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” spelled defeat in the midterm elections. Instead, the Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress for the first time in four decades. I also thought the GOP was cracking up in 2000, when, desperate to find fault with every last aspect of the Clinton administration, it started bad-mouthing prosperity. I got that wrong, too. So maybe the GOP isn’t really dead.

It sure looks dead, though.

Isn’t this liberal triumphalism starting a little soon? I mean, measuring the White House drapes before the election and all…