The next conservative thinkers

Many Republicans fret that the party of ideas has gotten stuck. Here are four who might help unstick it.

By Drake Bennet

BostonGlobe

July 12, 2009

By definition, conservatism prefers the past to the present - in William F. Buckley’s famous formulation, history was something to be stood athwart and sternly told to stop - but over the past half year, the present has been particularly trying for American conservatives.

Politically, they’re in the wilderness, with Barack Obama’s popularity stubbornly high, and wide Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. But there’s also a deeper sense of crisis: a worry within the movement that the Republican Party has lost its identity as the party of ideas.

Like all political movements, modern conservatism was driven by demographic shifts and economic changes, but it was also an intellectual insurgency. It gave pride of place to thinkers like Milton Friedman, the towering free-market economist; Russell Kirk, the cultural critic who mapped conservatism’s currents back through centuries of Anglo-American philosophy and literature; and Whittaker Chambers, who eloquently warned of communism’s dangerous seductions. In postwar America, this powerful intellectual bedrock helped the Republican Party unite cultural conservatives, economic libertarians, and military hawks into an effective and cohesive political alliance.

Today, though, those adhesive ideas have lost much of their power. The public has grown suspicious of two wars meant to spread freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan; free-market economics are being publicly reappraised even by Alan Greenspan; and cultural outrage appears to be ebbing over issues like gay marriage. Some of the most prominent voices in the broader conservative coalition have begun to worry that the movement is suffering from a problem it hasn’t had for generations: intellectual fatigue. In op-eds and articles and blog posts and speeches, these thinkers worry that last fall’s electoral defeats signaled that conservatives are no longer articulating persuasive modern ideas that translate into compelling politics. Richard Posner, a federal appeals court judge and legal scholar, an unorthodox thinker but also an icon for economic conservatives, wrote two months ago on his blog, “I sense the intellectual deterioration of the once-vital conservative movement in the United States.”

(Continued here.)