New author: Conservatism is dead. TCC: We should only be so lucky...!

Heard an interview on NPR's weekday-afternoon news show All Things Considered today some of you might find interesting...for one reason or another, depending on your political leanings. Author Sam Tanenhaus, expanding a recent article from The New Republic into a full-length book, The Death of Conservatism, argues that what we know today as "movement" conservatism in the US bears strikingly little resemblance to traditional conservatism as it was practiced even as recently as a few decades ago, let alone in the days of its nominal founder Edmund Burke...and that the current "revanchist" form of the doctrine has essentially committed political suicide over the last few years by its own acts:
Why Liberals Should Lament the Death of Conservatism in America
Now if only we could convince Limbaugh, Hannity, Norquist and Coulter et al. to buy this guy's line... Personally, I do agree that the sort of Burkean conservatism he recalls does indeed make us on the liberal side "think better," and that having both sides expressed in public policy and debate is healthy for society. I would not, however, mourn for so much as a picosecond if the movement as it exists today—or its minions in the Republican Party—truly were to be doomed to extinction. Would to all the gods that ever were, are or will be that it were so.