The New Yorker magazine is out this week with a dispatch on “The Fall of Conservatism,” claiming that the Republicans are “brain dead,” with “no energy, no fresh thinking, no ability to capture the concerns and feelings of millions of people.” Like many left-wing theories, this one has the advantage of not being vulnerable to being dis-proven by the facts. “This will be true whether or not John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, wins in November,” the article says.

Hmm. Would it be true also if Mr. McCain wins by a landslide? Would it be true if the Republicans also win the presidency in 2012? And here we had thought an advantage of elections was that they were a test of whether political candidates or parties were able to capture the concerns and feelings of millions of people.

The New Yorker makes its odd claim about even a McCain victory failing to prove conservative energy by claiming that Mr. McCain was “the least conservative” Republican in the 2008 race. That’s preposterous. The conservative position is for free trade, and Mr. McCain, a self-proclaimed free-trader who supports NAFTA, was more conservative that Governor Huckabee. The conservative position is for lower taxes, and Mr. McCain is more of a tax cutter than Mr. Huckabee, who raised taxes as governor of Arkansas.

The conservative position is pro-life, and Mr. McCain, who has been consistently anti-abortion, is more conservative on that issue that Mayor Giuliani, who is pro-choice, or Governor Romney, who was pro-choice before he was pro-life. The conservative position is hawkish on the Iraq War, and Mr. McCain was the most hawkish on the war of any of the Republican presidential candidates.

We’ve had our differences with Mr. McCain over prescription drug re-importation, campaign speech regulations, and other policy matters, but to call him the least conservative of the 2008 Republican candidates is just not supported by the facts.

Another claim that seems unmoored from reality is that “much conservative journalism has become just as calcified and ingrown.” The support for this claim seems to be the choices of new editors of National Review and Commentary. The Web sites of both magazines crackle with postings, as does the online home of the American Spectator. The speaker at Commentary’s annual dinner last night was Senator Lieberman, a sign of the way that conservative ideas have attracted even the Democratic Party’s vice presidential candidate from 2000.

The past decade has seen the astonishing growth of Fox News Channel, the emergence of conservative blogs such as Powerlineblog.com and Michellemalkin.com. The New York Times, amid declining circulation, has looked to the Weekly Standard to fill its roster of op-ed page columnists. Conservatives dominate the list of top talk radio shows, from Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity through Glenn Beck and Laura Ingraham.

What the New Yorker calls a lack of “fresh thinking” may be a surfeit of abiding principles and enduring ideas. The Bible is thousands of years old. The capitalism of Adam Smith is hundreds of years old. Freedom is as universal and God-given a right today as it was when it was set forth in the Declaration of Independence. What matters is less whether the ideas are “fresh” than whether they are correct. And the latest panic of beltway Republicans or New Yorker writers notwithstanding, the view from these columns is that the death of conservatism has been greatly exaggerated.