What’s a “conservative?” Is it the same as a right-winger? What about “Tory?” Can we apply that name to this new Alliance-Conservative concoction?

I don’t feel right about it myself — Stephen Harper is no Tory — and I’m peeved at the loss of this grand old expression, not to mention the loss of the thing itself which in its original form consisted of a certain grumpy but dignified resistance to change, now transformed into a sort of foghorn for greed and corporate domination.

As the drama unfolds, the task at hand is to save the new Conservative party from being swallowed whole by the old Canadian Alliance and its leader, Stephen Harper.

There’s apparently a growing desperation to this. A headline in The Globe and Mail recently announced: “Canada’s right heads for civil war.” It was about Tony Clement jumping into the ring as the “Progressive Conservative” and therefore “moderate” candidate, after Peter MacKay and Bernard Lord bowed out.

Clement was health minister in the ruinous Mike Harris government which left Ontario with a bag of scorpions, including a hidden $5-billion deficit. And he lost his own seat in last year’s Liberal sweep.

Oh, well. If not him, there’s always the prospect of Prime Minister Belinda Stronach, said to be as rich as Paul Martin, and whose main claim to political fame so far is her role in getting the Ontario Tories to deliver their last budget in her father’s auto parts plant.

In other words, even those trying to salvage a bit of the old Toryism aren’t really Tories anymore — except for the few still lurking in the woods of Atlantic Canada. How sensible Joe Clark and Robert Stanfield appear compared to all this.

And it’s not just us. There’s the same kind of trouble cooking on the right in the U.S., where libertarians and certain old-fashioned republicans who believe in sound finances, small government and civil liberties and are wary of foreign military adventures are turning on the Bush administration for its fiscal profligacy, its intrusive Patriot Act, and its lies to justify the Iraq war.

I picked up a copy of The American Conservative recently and was flabbergasted. It’s even more scorching against Bush than any critique from the left. Under a headline that reads “Red ink conservatives,” one story denounces the “mongrel of big government and big war.” Another reports with alarm on a policy group in the Pentagon working to justify the use of “mini-nukes” in the war on terror and denounces “the fanaticism of the neo-conservatives.”

The testiness is in fact everywhere in the serious conservative press in the U.S., where the word “neocon” is increasingly spat out with contempt. These progeny of conservatives are no longer that. In the gathering view of many conservatives themselves, they are the opposite — liars, extremists and dangerous adventurers, all the more so when they’re at the helm of the ship of state.

At a time when the speed of change always threatens to overwhelm us, the true conservative would be a useful thing — one who can tell the children not to be so quick to dump the old ways and who could denounce pretentious humbug wherever it’s found. In fact, this instinct does exist in most of us. To the extent that the old Tories, or the American Republican party, gathered some of that as a political force, now they no longer can.

The moderate conservatives have been marginalized by the radical ones for whom only money and power count. In fact, these “new conservatives” want to conserve nothing except corporate prerogative, and as such are radical agents of change. They are arguably more “liberal” than “conservative” — confirming the accuracy of the French expression for “neo-conservative” which is, of course, “néo-libéral.”

Insofar as conservatism was originally about a resistance to change, it always amazes me to contemplate that little more than a hundred years ago, Sir John A. Macdonald ran an election on the platform, “The old party, the old flag, the old policy.” It indicated a far higher confidence in things as they were than we have now, after more than a century of “progress,” when no one, conservative or otherwise, would ever dare run on a platform of “no change.”

Or, as John A. once famously said, “No one respects what is called old-fogey Toryism more than I do.” And now Toryism, old-fogey or otherwise, looks pretty well dead. Pity.