I did not know that Jeffrey Hart, whol wrote several conservative books in the 1980s, and one about the American commitment to sports, had turned left.
To hear him tell it, "Obama is the Real Conservative". But of course, if you spend decades defining yourself as a conservative when you change your mind and change sides, you won't admit that you've gone over to the other guys.
My analysis:
1) Hart really didn't like Bush and viewed him as deeply unconservative: the wars, the enthusiasm for regime change, etc. For some people it's deficits and spending as well, for Hart it was abortion and stem cells. That last part doesn't sound especially conservative, but if you've been Mr. Conservative for decades you can assume that it is.
2) There's some letdown among old cold warriors. We won, and that's enough. They don't want to take on new crusades in old age when they're finally making peace with the world, so they give new movements and enthusiasms the cold shoulder.
3) Jeffrey Hart been living among liberals for 60 years or so, and sooner or later it had to rub off. Also, sooner or later, everybody whose family had money during the Great Depression, even modestly, becomes a Democrat -- I don't know why that is, but so many of them have that it becomes inevitable -- then they die. Hart and Allison are converts to Catholicism, but they still have a lot of that old mainstream or liberal WASP Planned Parenthood spirit -- but then it seems most Catholics nowadays do too.
4) The "curmudgeon" or "maverick" or "dissident" thing gets addictive. You may change the world, but then you get dissatisfied with what you've created. Even WFB said that to achieve what he did in his own time, someone would have to start on the left, because his own ideas had been so widely accepted.