Scott McConnell, writing in the American Conservative back in December, took a look at the state of neo-conservatism.
This election season ends with neoconservatism widely mocked and openly contemptuous of the president who took its counsels. The key policy it has lobbied for since the mid-1990s—the invasion of Iraq—is an almost universally acknowledged disaster. So one can see why the movement’s obituaries are being written. But the group was powerful and influential well before its alliance with George W. Bush. In its wake it leaves behind crises—Iraq first among them—that will not be easy to resolve, and neocons will not be shy about criticizing whatever imperfect solutions are found to the mess they have created. Perhaps most importantly, neoconservatism still commands more salaries—able people who can pursue ideological politics as fulltime work in think tanks and periodicals—than any of its rivals. The millionaires who fund AEI and the New York Sun will not abandon neoconservatism because Iraq didn’t work out. The reports of the movement’s demise are thus very much exaggerated.
I don’t find anything here to disagree with. The biggest disadvantage we have is that the people that are trying to lead a counteroffensive to neoconservatism are not well funded. Increasingly it seems that they are not even very well respected by their own audiences. They rarely appear on television, they don’t get gigs at the LA Times or Washington Post, and their radio appearances seem limited to Air America. We don’t have paid internships. He have no think tank. And, as soon as anyone takes a paying job, they lose a ton of street cred.
Is there any way for progressives to overcome their money disadvantage? Are we so suspicious of power that we refuse to do the things that increase our power?
