Over the past year or so, it seems that the Conservative movement is experiencing a resurgence. The Tea Party movement and the thousands, if not millions, who have been drawn to it, are at the heart of this reawakening to our Constitution and the conservative principles our nation was founded upon.  Many who have been politically apathetic or complacent are now charged for action, ready to roll back the tide of liberalism and government run amok.

The Republican Party has rushed to capture this uprising and to capitalize politically on the conservative groundswell. On the surface the GOP would seem to have the rightful claim on these renewed patriots and the principles they espouse, but careful scrutiny reveals a different story. While there may be plenty of conservative smoke in Republican circles, there’s not a whole lot that passes for fire.

The GOP has for the last several years undergone an internal wrestling match for the soul of the party. Some party leaders, urged on by the media and political elites, wanted to take a more centrist approach and de-emphasize or eliminate what they considered to be the conservative fringe of the party. As recently as the days following Obama’s election, there were many around the party saying that the age of conservatism and its patron saint, Regan was through. Now, with the onslaught of the Tea Party movement, those pronouncements have been silenced, and Republicans are doing what they always do in an election cycle: run to the Right.

Further damaging the GOP’s claims on conservatism is their record as a governing party. We must remember that our country didn’t arrive at this dire juncture over night. The growth of government and the resulting limits on individual liberty happened on the Republican watch too. It is the height of hypocrisy for those Republicans who traded in pork and spent like drunken sailors to now condemn the Democrats for their tax-and-spend policies. We’re only a generation removed from the Regan presidency and less than 20 years from the watershed Congressional elections of 1994, and yet there is little left to show for those efforts. Indeed, there wasn’t all that much to show from the outset. Where are the term limits? Where are the Federal agencies and departments that have been shuttered? Where is the return of power to individual states? They simply are not there. Most were never even attempted.

In truth, the Republican Party’s claim to conservatism is largely due to the continuing move to the Left by the Democrats, the media, and most of popular culture. The Democrats have become so radical in their policies, that it’s quite easy for Republicans to seem conservative by comparison. Why else would proponents of gun ownership, being pro-life, and reducing government be called the Far Right? The media and their Democrat cohorts have succeeded in setting the terms of the debate much further left than we even give them credit for.

This paradigm shift has actually played into the GOP’s hands rather nicely. Republicans don’t have to shrink government; they can merely slow the pace of growth, and are hailed as heroes of fiscal austerity. There’s no need to enact real tax reform when they can make modest cuts and create new tax loopholes for their big business donors and seem like the champions of the free market. They can quote the Founding Fathers and beat their chests on the stump, but when they get back to Washington or the state capitol, they practically dislocate their shoulders trying to reach across the aisle.

In essence, the Republicans can take the political path of least resistance, plowing the squishy center ground and let the off-the-chain liberals in the Democrat party make them look incredible by comparison. That’s not what I’d call leadership, and it sure isn’t what I’d call Conservative.