Yes, We Have No Ideas

In the wake of Republican defeats in the 2008 U.S. elections, conservatives are fighting among themselves over who's to blame and how to revive their movement. Edwin Feulner of the Heritage Foundation says not to worry: "If you want to see when conservatives were in trouble, go back 35 years to 1973, the year The Heritage Foundation set up shop. We were just a handful of people in a few rented rooms. At that time there were no cable outlets like Fox News. There was no conservative talk radio, because the Fairness Doctrine was still in effect. Al Gore hadn't invented the Internet, so there were no conservative bloggers exposing the biases of the mainstream media and delivering conservative commentary to millions of readers." Today, by contrast, "In addition to Fox News, hundreds of talk radio programs and scores of national magazines, conservatives have achieved a staggering presence on the Internet." But conservative blogger Jon Henke worries that Feulner is "exactly wrong." ... As The Economist pointed out recently, the Right has been losing the intellectual battle of ideas, becoming 'a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world.' ... What effective ideas has the Right had recently? How far have those ideas gone? Where are we? ... The Right has replaced strategy with tactics. We are tinkering with an agenda that is not going anywhere."