36. ridgerunner:
Perhaps conservatives would replicate this situation if they simply acquiesced to every leftist demand. Let leftist policies kill the host society, as long as the conservatives remain sufficiently well-armed to reconstitute civilization later. Would that make more sense than fighting a multitude of small battles to mitigate every leftist proposal and, in doing so, reducing the shock value of the host’s death upon a populace which has a limited attention span??

What you propose is to re-create the American experiment in a leadership vacuum. Conservatives must contest every inch of ground in order to establish themselves in the minds of a majority of the people as “those guys who had the ideas we hated but turned out to be right after all.” Without establishing the right to lead a priori the task of reconstituting the previous social order in an environment of swirling chaos will prove at best much more difficult and maybe impossible. Now is the time for conservatives to establish their street cred as the guys who saw it coming and called it right.