Posner on ConservatismMike Rappaport

Richard Posner is often described as a conservative, but he is certainly not.  Just ask him.  Consider his recent post on the Future of Conservatism:

In the Republican Party [ideological conservatives] fall into three main groups: believers in (1) free markets, low taxes, and small government; (2) believers in tough criminal laws and a strong foreign policy; and (3) social (mainly religious) conservatives, who are hostile to abortion, gay marriage, pornography, and gun control.

All three groups have been hurt by recent events, and all three are moving apart because of the hits on the others. The financial crisis has hit economic libertarians in the solar plexus, because the crisis is largely a consequence of innate weaknesses in free markets and of excessive deregulation of banking and finance, rather than of government interference in the market. Believers in a strong foreign policy have been hurt by the protracted and seemingly purposeless war in Iraq (the main effects of which seem to have been discord between the United States and its allies, increased recruitment of Islamic terrorists, and the strengthening of Iran and of the Taliban in Afghanistan and of al Qaeda in Pakistan) and the Bush Administration’s lack of success in dealing with Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. And social conservatives have been hurt by the stridency of some of their most prominent advocates, who all too often give the appearance of being mean-spirited, out-of-touch, know-nothing deniers of science (e.g., evolution, climate change).

For myself, I would be happy to see conservatism exit from the political scene--provided it takes liberalism with it. I would like to see us enter a post-ideological era in which policies are based on pragmatic considerations rather than on conformity to a set of preconceptions rooted in a rapidly vanishing past.

This is exactly as Posner seems to me.  He exhibits a strong dislike of any kind of what he regards as an ideological conservative.  But he also seems to me to have an excessively negative attitude towards the different conservative groups, as the excerpt above shows.