It’s simultaneously hilarious, depressing, and frightening to read this Politico piece by Jonathan Martin and Ben Stein. I found myself resisting the predicate of the whole piece, which is that there is an actual conservative intelligentsia. Let’s consider the intellectuals who are quoted in the piece: William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, the Wall Street Jounal editorial board, Yuval Levin, Ross Douthat, Danielle Pletka, and Ramesh Ponnuru. These people are well-educated, I guess, and they know how to write. But they occupy a narrow intellectual spectrum spanning from diabolically well-paid liars to the terminally obtuse. The idea that Ramesh Ponnuru is serious about policy is risible. The idea that Kristol and Krauthammer are wonks is impossible to accept. You might as well tell me that James Carville, Paul Begala, and Terry McAuliffe are intellectuals.
The truth, at best, is that this list of prominent Beltway conservatives is looking to support someone who is serious about policy. Carville, Begala, and McAuliffe saw in Bill Clinton someone who had the intellectual chops to be a good president, but that didn’t make them, by themselves, intellectuals. They were political operatives.
True wonkinshness on the right seems to be extinct. Why would a young thoughtful person get into the business of thinking about policy when the Republicans have no interest in changing things through reforms, but only through repeals? How long does it take to think of the right way to devolve Social Security and Medicare to the states, or to privatize some other function of government? If you don’t want the federal government to do anything, then why even have a wonk-shop? All your aims can only be achieved through the acquisition of more power, or through the steady destruction of the treasury until your opponents are compelled to go along with your budget cuts.
For Republicans, the only domestic priorities emanating from the executive branch are to keep deficits high (and revenues low) and to continue to work on taking over the judiciary. There are no conservatives thinking about how to better serve the Native American community or how to improve the Veteran’s Health Administration. They’re thinking about how to gain access to mineral wealth, or how to game the financial sector.
Part of their solution over the past thirty years has been to cultivate the yahoos and religious freaks by pandering to their cultural conservatism and their propensity to fear and hate intellectuals. So, now they have the following dilemma:
From the Weekly Standard to the Wall Street Journal, on the pages of policy periodicals and opinion sections, the egghead right’s longing for a presidential candidate of ideas — first Mitch Daniels, then Paul Ryan – has been endless, intense, and unrequited.
Profoundly dissatisfied with the current field, that dull ache may only grow more acute after Ryan’s decision Monday to take himself out of the running.
The problem, in shorthand: To many conservative elites, Rick Perry is a dope, Michele Bachmann is a joke, and Mitt Romney is a fraud.
They don’t publicly express their judgments in such harsh terms but the low regard is obvious: The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, the bible of conservative intellectual orthodoxy, pretty much excommunicated Romney from the movement in May for his health care sins. Then, last week, the editorial board suggested that Bachmann and Perry couldn’t be elected, and that “now would be the time” for “someone still off the field to step up.”
The editorial spoke, as it said, for “desperate” voters — but they could have been talking about themselves.
This is what happens when you cultivate the Stupid for decades and then weaponize it.