I think there’s nothing “conservative” about the leaders you highlight. They are “authoritarian”.

But beyond that observation, I believe you’re on target with your analysis of the problem.

Authoritarian leaders uniformly fail to develop a cadre of people who will deliver honest analysis, critique and proposals. Instead, authoritarians develop cadres of people who merely reflect back to the leader what the leader wants to hear.

Thus, their decisions grow increasingly flawed because their inputs are mere reflections of themselves.

And that’s exactly what the founders of this country attempted to counter with their checks and balances, branches of government and accountability to the people through elections.

Conservatives “conserve”, and American conservatives were those whose words and actions sought to conserve this American experiment of “We the People” exercising self government.

What we have now is a mob of radicals who have set fire to the Congress and Judiciary, and with their hell bent for leather ideas concerning a “unitary executive”, are turning the presidency into a dictatorship.

There’s nothing conservative about today’s “conservatives”.

And as we can plainly see, the decisions being made by this presidency are increasingly divorced from what “We the People” want or desire, and more and more simply the whims of a man-child surrounded by a gaggle of “yes men”.
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I remember reading once an article about the power of group decision making. It reviewed several different ways of assessing the accuracy of a group’s perception versus the accuracy of only one person’s perception. One of those ways was the old “How many jelly beans are in this gallon jar?”

A number of adults were asked to guess the number of beans in the jar. Unsurprisingly, no single guess managed to guess the right number.

But surprisingly, and repeatedly as this particular experiment was repeated over and over- when you calculated the average of all the guesses- that derived number came closest to the number of beans in the jar.

The power of the group in making decisions.

That’s the power that was captured in our Constitutional order. At least... better than any other form of government that existed.

And that’s what true conservatives are committed to conserving.