It's not that they were asleep at the wheel. It's that the strain(s) of conservatism that have risen in popularity over the last couple decades are the strains that have long been reactionary and isolationist. Withdrawing from mainstream cultural institutions like academia, media, and the arts (and setting up their own parallel institutions) has been a hallmark of populist conservatism for over 100 years. The left didn't just "walk into" them - the left was always there. The right ran away from them, often pointing them them as some sort of enemy. You can't spend decades talking about how universities and public schools and hollywood and the mainstream media are terrible and ought to be torn down while still expecting to retain a viable influence within them.
Yes part of it may be being asleep in the past as to how bad things could really get, but there's another thing - the idea of "fighting dirty". The conservative mind is by its very nature opposed to cheating and fighting dirty, whereas the Leftist mind is all about that, and really about nothing else. If you're facing a guy in a street fight and you're going to follow some rules, and he's not going to follow any rules, you're probably going to lose. It's a tough conundrum for conservatism.
You mean like calling people pedophiles or communists when they're neither?
I think he was referencing Ephesians 6:12.
