Five Justices make a winning hand.

Jeffrey Hart has a penetrating philosophical overview of Conservatism in the Tuesday WSJ that even Matthew Yglesias in the American Prospect makes positive observations about. I consider myself an independent-conservative, with some personal divagations leftward when it comes to capital punishment and social safety nets. However, I must also agree with Hart when he chastises the Republican Party for being captured by "Hard Wilsonianism," [read neo-conservatism]. Hart correctly observes that this is:

no more plausible than the original Soft Wilsonianism, which balkanized Central Europe with dire consequences. No one has ever thought Wilsonianism to be conservative, ignoring as it does the intractability of culture and people's high valuation of a modus vivendi. Wilsonianism derives from Locke and Rousseau in their belief in the fundamental goodness of mankind and hence in a convergence of interests.
George W. Bush has firmly situated himself in this tradition, as in his 2003 pronouncement, "The human heart desires the same good things everywhere on earth." Welcome to Iraq. Whereas realism counsels great prudence in complex cultural situations, Wilsonianism rushes optimistically ahead. Not every country is Denmark. The fighting in Iraq has gone on for more than two years, and the ultimate result of "democratization" in that fractured nation remains very much in doubt, as does the long-range influence of the Iraq invasion on conditions in the Middle East as a whole. In general, Wilsonianism is a snare and a delusion as a guide to policy, and far from conservative.

Hart goes on to note that

Conservatives assume that the Republican Party is by and large conservative. But this party has stood for many and various things in its history. The most recent change occurred in 1964, when its center of gravity shifted to the South and the Sunbelt, now the solid base of "Republicanism." The consequences of that profound shift are evident, especially with respect to prudence, education, intellect and high culture. It is an example of Machiavelli's observation that institutions can retain the same outward name and aspect while transforming their substance entirely.

Andrew Sullivan damns the Sunbelt/Southward shift with faint praise:

The alliance between conservatism, as it was once understood, and the historically Democratic American South is, in my view, a brilliant maneuver for gaining political power, but something that has mortally wounded the tradition of limited government, individual rights, balanced budgets, political prudence and religious moderation that were once hallmarks of conservatism.

But Sullivan, Hart and Jonah Goldberg as well as the other commentators I have read miss the massive shift in the ‘80s by Reagan Democrats [read socially conservative often Irish-heritage Roman Catholics] to the Republican Party.
Hart could have insightfully mentioned the Catholic influence when he says:

What the time calls for is a recovery of the great structure of metaphysics, with the Resurrection as its fulcrum, established as history, and interpreted through Greek philosophy. The representation of this metaphysics through language and ritual took 10 centuries to perfect. The dome of the sacred, however, has been shattered. The act of reconstruction will require a large effort of intellect, which is never populist and certainly not grounded on emotion, an unreliable guide. Religion not based on a structure of thought always exhibits wild inspired swings and fades in a generation or two.

The rugged Catholic brand of natural law conservatism has produced four Supreme Court Justices who value the natural structures of human nature and the human condition underpinning the law. If Samuel Alito is elevated to the SCOTUS, that will make a majority of Justices with a structure of thought which resists Hart's apt description of what he might have called another "Great Awakening" that inspires "wild inspired swings and fades in a generation or two."