Conservative Majority?

Jonah Goldberg has a good article up on NRO today about the ever-expected "great conservative crackup". On the current in-fighting within the Republican party, he suggests this is a fairly normal occurrence within an ideologically diverse ruling faction (such as FDR's coalition in the '30s and '40s).

But more interestingly (at least to me) he emphasized that one of the reasons the conservative coalition is inherently unstable is that the majority of the country is not in fact 'conservative':

The simple, tragic fact is that conservatism isn't popular. It just ain't. (Nor is doctrinaire liberalism, to be sure.) If you drafted a political program designed to implement National Review's idea of nirvana, it would get crushed at the polls. Americans like government more than card-carrying conservatives do. They value security where libertarians celebrate freedom, and they celebrate freedom where conservatives emphasize virtue.

Thus, the current dominance of the Republican party is not so much a result of the majority of the voters actually adhering to any particular brand of conservatism, but rather because the mix of programs and opinions currently coming out of the conservative coalition appeals more (on the whole) to the populace than what they're hearing from the liberal coalition.