The MSM’s top conservative crybaby, Ross Douthat, is out with another column decrying the fact that his fellow right-wing pundits just won’t listen to him. As a consequence, they’ll all have to go to the woodshed until the tide turns in America.
According to him, conservative "intellectuals" (among which he is pleased to include himself) made three big boo-boos:
- They were too supportive of the obvious train wreck of the Bush administration. It seems their populist base figured out that something was badly wrong with Dubya's crew before they did, and as a result abandoned them as leaders of the movement, even as they robotically continued to sing worshipful songs to St. Reagan. Douthat laments: “If those same conservative intellectuals had shown more policy imagination over all, if they hadn’t assumed that the solutions of 1980 could simply be recycled a generation later, the right’s blue-collar voters might not have drifted toward a man [Trump] who spoke, however crudely, to their more immediate anxieties.”
- They failed to see that the populist wave was about to overwhelm them. They made excuses. They opted to go along to get along. They made their peace with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. They deluded themselves that they could control the movement, while “in reality political conservatism’s leaders — including high-minded figures like Paul Ryan — turned out to have no strategy save self-preservation.” [OK, Paul Ryan isn't my idea of “high-minded”, but let's not quibble.]
- Worst of all, they failed to convert the power they acquired from this deal with the populist devil into a movement of the "managerial class” toward conservative ideology: “…the same Bush-era failures that alienated right-wing populists from their own intelligentsia also discredited conservative ideas within the broader elite. …So it is that today, three generations after Buckley and Burnham, the academy and the mass media are arguably more hostile to conservative ideas than ever, and the courts and the bureaucracy are trending in a similar direction." Horrors!
Put these together, and the picture that emerges for me is a bunch of craven, cowardly, unimaginative lapdogs happy to take the money and tell their billionaire paymasters what they want to hear, contrary evidence be damned. In fact, Paul Krugman responded to the column with a tweetstorm that basically said Douthat's hoped-for conservative renaissance is a pipe dream because the moneyed classes don't want to update their low-tax, pro-corporate agenda. If you’re what passes for a conservative intellectual, being an obstinate hack is a feature, not a bug.
So boo hoo for Li’l Ross. He may be gunning for the label of the “honest, serious conservative pundit," but I think he's just pissing in the wind.