Andy Bacevich, who presented the conservative case for Obama in our pages back in 2008, has been critical of BHO’s policies since taking office — because they are Bush’s policies, too. Wick Allison, who succeeded William Rusher as publisher of National Review, also takes back his endorsement. Not that this means President McCain would have been any less disastrous: as Allison says, the 2008 election gave voters a choice between Bush Squared and Bush Lite (and Obama is looking heavier all the time).

There’s nothing novel about being confronted with terrible choices at the ballot box. What has changed in the last 30 years is that these choices are no longer meant to be concessions to a strictly political reality; now a choice of party or presidential candidate is supposed to entail a vast philosophical, even religious, commitment. This change can be attributed to the success of the conservative movement in repolarizing politics — and what a success it has been. Politicians are straitjacketed by single-issue ideologues, while the ideologues themselves, to preserve their access and power, can’t propose anything philosophically radical. The result is that people who should be daring thinkers become publicists for politicians (Paul Ryan, Ronald Reagan), while politicians who should get their hands bloody “making sausages” become doubly incapacitated, terrified of ordinary voters and their own party’s metaphysicians alike. Partisanship infects the life of the mind, while mental abstractions overtake politics.

We can’t say David Hume and Michael Oakeshott didn’t warn us.