The parameters for the possible in politics are determined by the culture's spiritual infrastructure. Both political liberalism and conservatism offer nothing because they are both products of an obsolete (or decadent) cultural configuration. The forms remain, like cadavers, but spirit and life are long departed from them.
Along thesle lines read this very good short piece on the spiritual failure of consrvatism by Claes Ryn in American Conservative. I think he's spot on with regard to William Buckley's missing superficiality. He was smart, but not particularly profound:
Modern American conservatism did not take to heart the insights of its most perceptive minds. Those who came to set the tone in the movement as a whole, William F. Buckley Jr. prominent among them, were political intellectuals. It seemed to them that dealing with the moral-spiritual and cultural foundations of civilization was not the most exciting and pressing need. The political intellectuals drew attention and respect away from efforts whose relevance to politics was not immediately obvious. That advanced philosophy and artistic imagination might over time do more than politics to change society did not even occur to most of them. Other than politics, what most interested them was economics. Some paid lip service to philosophy and to what Russell Kirk, following Edmund Burke and Irving Babbitt, called “the moral imagination,” but the humanities seemed worthy of little more than a polite nod.
The problem, simply put, was lack of sophistication—an inability to understand what most deeply shapes the outlook and conduct of human beings. Persons move according to their innermost beliefs, hopes, and fears. These are affected much less by politicians than by philosophers, novelists, religious visionaries, moviemakers, playwrights, composers, painters, and the like, though truly great works of this kind reach most minds and imaginations only in diminished, popular form.
Yet the conservative movement did not direct its main efforts toward a revitalization of the mind, imagination, and moral-spiritual life. There it relied on shortcuts. In the area of ethics, for example, it assumed that churches would handle the job. But the churches, too, had been deeply influenced by the general moral, intellectual, and aesthetic trends of society. The god worshiped by many was a figment of a polluted, sentimental imagination. The so-called evangelicals did little to break out of their accustomed intellectual poverty. Roman Catholics formed a core within post-World War II conservatism. Their church had more than superficially resisted major destructive trends in Western society. But as conservative intellectuals they, too, cut corners. For the most part avoiding an advanced engagement with philosophy and the arts, they were satisfied with upholding “orthodoxy,” which they did with Protestant-like earnestness.
The kind of intellectual, aesthetic, and moral-spiritual renewal that might have transformed the universities, the arts, the media, publishing, entertainment, and the churches never quite came off. Without a major reorientation of American thought and sensibility, conservative politics was bound to fail.
That being said, it's one thing to recognize what was needed to have transformed cultural life; it's another thing to actually make it happen. I suspect that Buckley and others took the short cut because they simply didn't have any ideas robust enough to effect such a transformation. Buckley's conservatism, as a result, was more about using political power to defend an empty shell, than effecting any political/cultural transformations. As such conservative politics never had anything to offer except a saying No to the excesses of secular liberalism. It was an empty No filled, if anything, with a grumpy anti-modernism at best and at its worst filled with toxic resentments and powerlust .
Effecting such transformations is not simply a matter of human will and determination; grace is the fermenting agent without which nothing good comes. Grace abounds, and people are living the life of grace in innumerable ways--but on the social periphery. In the center there's nothing anymore to conserve. The creative destructive power of capitalism swept away everything worth keeping there. That's the chief irony of pro-capitalist Buckleyan conservatism that I'm wont to point out from time to time. But the main thing for us now is to embrace that we are wandering in the wilderness. There's no going back to Egypt, but it's simply unclear when the time will be right finally to move into something more promising.