Because we live so obviously and obliviously within the tyranny of the moment—don’t be bitter about Twitter—it’s easy as apple pie to miss the steps on the way to the conservative abyss.

William F. Buckley Jr., the late loquacious Godfather of the movement, famously said of feminists: “Give them an inch, they’ll take a mile”—this as a proposition to be debated with Germaine Greer. In the 21^st Century, the Right is giving up inch after inch on a myriad of social issues so as not to appear both absurd and irrelevant. Creationism, gay marriage, and climate change are the power trio of this kind of conservative political impotence.

Start with Creationism, literally “in the beginning” for the Religious Right. Creationism bombed but no matter: Intelligent Design, positing a God smarter at software than Bill Gates, popped up—only to be crushed almost as quickly as Creationism. Now the movement toward teaching the Bible in science classes has regenerated in the name of “academic freedom.”

The logic of this particular re-branding: if you can’t accept the theory itself, then accept the fact that academics should have the right to debate the theory.

Before you say get that weak stuff out of here, move to the left with the Right on rights for homosexuals. For decades, perhaps forever, equal rights for homosexuals was not even on the table for the Right: foggedaboudit! But once the inequities became obvious—and civil unions and gay marriages a real and present danger—the Right quickly switched over to a new idea faster than you can say transvestite. With bigotry as the only real real option, the Right took equal rights for homosexuals to heart…as long as gays stopped short of marriage.

Third and even more damning and dangerous is the way the Right changed its game about climate change. As the evidence piled (and piles) up, the Right has pulled the old switcheroo and no longer denies the climate is changing. (Vide: Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin in the Vice-Presidential debate.) Instead, the Righties have switched to a new argument—used by Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner as recently as Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopolous—that climate change is real but there’s no proof yet that it’s man-made. Watching Boehner argue this point with G Steph was as stupidly funny as anything seen on “The Daily Show with John Stewart.”

Pity poor Boehner and his tea-bagging minions as they preside over an aging breed and a dying creed. The new credo for the Right might be as simple as this: give up the ghost, inch by inch, in the hope that no one will notice.