Conservative, and its dread twin, liberal - are both political constructions of the Enlightenment. They bear little or no validity to discussions of the Classical World. Socrates was in fact, neither. However, he was pretty much a gadfly, and that can rub people, many in fact, the wrong way. Though all of that stuff comes to us from Plato, so no one knows what Socrates really thought. Though in their own way, the Gorgias, Meno, Apology, Crito, and Phædo still have a lot to offer the modern reader regardless of who wrote them, or why. Gorgias in particular is stunning in an era where the skill of Gorgias - inculcating belief rather than knowledge in the minds of his audience; he requires no knowledge to win such a debate, and as a result he tells the people what he knows they want to hear rather than what is truly best for them - has been raised to an art form in and of itself. It perhaps also has the clearest vision of Socrates notion of happiness coming from being virtuous and self-disciplined, which is not all that bad an idea.
But back Herr Limbaugh and his fan club. Far from not being an intellectual, what Limbaugh is, in fact, the most dread of the modern academic intellectual types, practiced and skilled at the art of deconstruction, with little to no skill to put anything back together once he gets it all apart. It was fine for old Rush to deconstruct liberal America, perhaps even past time to do it, but what he, and people like Newt, and later BushII lacked was any sort of cohesive vision of what a new society would be like. They were like the kid with a screwdriver who discovers he can take apart the alarm clock, but once its in pieces on the floor, can't put it back together, much less make it function again.
It's groovy to say "Wow, governement is way to big, we ought to cut back" but unless you know, and can see the vision for exactly how big government ought to be, you're going to go too far, and we see the result of that.
And, that's were this line of thinking (both Rush and a lot of academic feminism) have left us, a bunch of parts on the floor, but no function.
