John Cassidy poses a question an SCGOP cheerleader answered way long ago:
It all got me pondering anew a question that’s been been on my mind
every day since Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan as his running mate: Where
are the real conservative intellectuals these days? Surely there must be
some, but sometimes it seems like all the right has to offer is a
soap-box mountebank like Ryan, a trio of embittered Supreme Court
Justices, and a few gnarled old Washington fixtures like Bill Kristol,
George Will, and Charles Krauthammer. Given this vacuum, it’s relatively
easy for an energetic and disputatious blow-in like [Niall] Ferguson to emerge
as one of Obama’s most visible, if not exactly persuasive, critics.
... But what of the right in general? Where does that stand?
Reaganism/Thatcherism, for all its faults, was a genuine intellectual
movement, or counter-movement. These days, the right seems unable to
rise above rabble-rousing. The end of the Cold War robbed it of an
external enemy. The tensions between its social and economic wings
robbed it of any internal cohesion. The financial crisis and Great
Recession robbed it of a creed—laissez faire. It’s still got plenty of
willing foot soldiers, and a lot of big money behind it, but where is
the fresh thinking and intellectual direction? All that’s left is
anti-government posturing, waving the flag, and Obama-bashing. And even
in pursuing this limited agenda, it often gets its facts wrong.
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