Just look at Frank Rich's column today, which like MSNBC to FNC, which is the same dynamic, and the same understanding of politics, and its purposes. In this worldview - which is now the worldview in American political analysis - ideology has infiltrated everything, it has saturated public and private, it has invaded even something sacred like religious faith, in which the mysteries of existence have been distilled in writing or even understanding the churches into a battle between "liberals" and "conservatives."

People accuse me of pedantry or semantics in insisting that all of this - on the right and the left - is in fact a sign of the death of conservatism as a temperament or a politics, rather than its revival. But I have been arguing this for more than a decade. Conservatism, if it means anything, is a resistance to ideology and the world of ideas ideology represents, whether that ideology is a function of the left or the right.

In the mid-twentieth century conservatism revived itself by a profound critique of liberal hubris and rationalism, of liberals' belief that they really could transform the world through better government, of the new left's critique that the personal is political, and of the stifling of human nature, individualism and freedom that socialism and communism had wrought.

From the green shoots of Hayek and Oakeshott and Friedman to the final blooming of Thatcher and Reagan, this regenerated conservatism really did restore the balance between state and society toward society and away from the state. It harnessed traditional impulses - nationalism in Britain, evangelicalism in America - but it never fully gave into them. Its pragmatism remained in the Reagan tax hikes, Thatcher's retention of socialized medicine, their mutual outreach to Gorbachev, and Thatcher's insistence on international law. In some ways, I believe, the pinnacle of this conservative achievement came in the presidency of George H W Bush and the premiership of John Major (see my 1999 NYT essay, The End Of Britain"). They both solidified the reforms of their predecessors, were the final forces that reformed the left, and made hard decisions - like raising taxes, entrenching international law in the liberation of Kuwait, or staying out of the euro - that look better and better the more time goes by. That the first Bush is so widely reviled by the "movement" that passes for conservatism in America today, in favor of the brain-dead ressentiment of Palin or the philistine pseudo-intellectualism of Gingrich or the neo-imperial radicalism of the neoconservatives, is the smell of a decomposing corpse, not a newborn child.

I believe that although Obama is indeed a liberal in the sense that he believes government really can and must improve the lives of its citizens, he is much much more like a real conservative than his detractors on right and left. The change he still represents at home is an abandonment of this ideological, red-blue abstract form of politics toward a realistic, pragmatic, reasonable center. Abroad, he represents an attempt to defuse the dangerously polarizing religious and cultural warfare that is fomenting terrorism, and further fusing religion and politics in so many places across the world. In this sense, I regard him as a vital, indispensable figure standing against the forces of ideology and religious warfare, whose failure could lead to catastrophic consequences for our future.