I’m not sure I agree with all of Tim Stanley‘s conclusions, but they are interesting:

Two recent events have renewed my faith in conservatism’s eccentricity. The first was Secession 2012!, wherein thousands of Americans responded to Obama’s win by collectively threatening to leave the country. The endless online debates about the legal validity of such a move illustrated how historically literate the average American actually is – while the revelation that the leader of the Alabama secession movement was doing it to get his topless car wash back showed just how deliciously bloody minded they can be, too. “From my cold, dead hand…”

The second curio came from England, where the Anglican Synod voted down an attempt to introduce women bishops. It was a reminder that there are one or two people left in the British Isles for whom religion isn’t just about cake sales for Africa. There are very few of these traditionalist dinosaurs still walking the Earth, as the narrowness of the defeat showed. But by compelling Parliament to intervene and forcing Left-wing journalists to write about theology (Wikipedia must have crashed with all the traffic), they have truly become a grain of sand in Heaven’s eye. …

By contrast, isn’t it remarkable how liberalism has become the ideology of the establishment? There was a time when to be a conservative was to want to preserve the ethos of a country’s great institutions: finance, culture, church, education. Today, however, those institutions are largely in the hands of liberals. For instance, I am old enough (just about) to remember when the stereotype of an Anglican priest was an angry old man from Tunbridge Wells who would write frequent letters to The Times complaining about smut on television. Today, the cliché is a liberal-minded guitar-strummer of indistinct gender with more cardigans than sense. Crucially, the social democratic consensus has inhabited even those institutions that are explicitly conservative. Today’s Conservative Party is really just yesterday’s Liberal Party, while the Republicans are only as Right-wing as they appear because their base compels them to be. After the defeat of Mitt Romney (the most centrist nominee since Gerald Ford – discuss?), the Grand Old establishment has largely bought the line that the only way to win 2016 is to embrace immigration reform, tax increases and culture war surrender. On the US Right, for every Reagan you can find a Rockefeller.

Perversely (and fascinatingly) this recasts unreformed conservatives as counter cultural rebels. Finding themselves locked out of the very institutions that they once cherished, they are now the folks with the pitchforks banging on the castle gate. At best, they have become a force for philosophical leverage. In the UK, the electoral success of UKIP has made the Conservative Party reconsider its position on Europe. In the US, it is the Tea Party and not the mainline GOP that raises the conservative standard – and it is probably thanks to the Tea Party that the House Republicans are stressing entitlement reform over tax increases. And within the Anglican Church, it was the laity that helped defeat women bishops – not the overwhelmingly liberal clergy. Therein lies the greatest irony of all. Most religious conservatives highly prise obedience to priests, yet here they are defying the priestly establishment. In defence of traditional authority, Christians are now forced to defy traditional authority. In a final, delicious twist, this compels liberals to become the brutal enforcers of the status-quo – the latter-day Inquisition. The world is turned upside down.