Paul Krugman on Prodigal Conservative Intellectuals (They've Always Been Wrong!)

[BurtWorm]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/prodigal-intellectuals/

Prodigal intellectuals

So I see Richard Posner has decided that modern conservatism is intellectually bankrupt. And Bruce Bartlett has a new book saying it’s time to let go of Reagan.

At one level it’s good to see decent people showing some intellectual flexibility (Bartlett, in particular, has always come across as someone with whom one can have honest disagreements.) And yet — why, exactly, should we listen to people who by their own admission completely missed the story? I mean, anyone who actually listened to what Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey were saying in 1994, let alone what passed for thought in the Bush administration, should have realized long ago that if there ever was an intellectual basis for modern conservatism, it was long gone.

And the truth is that the Reaganauts were a pretty grotesque bunch too. Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back — and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren’t advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization.

So the idea that we should pay any attention to people who somehow failed to see all this until very late in the game — and, in the case of Posner (not Bartlett), waited to express their doubts until conservatism had lost power ….

[gratuitous]

1. No! Conservatism didn't fail - its practitioners failed conservatism!

Even now, you hear the bleating from the increasingly lonesome dead-enders*, if only the Republican party really, truly got totally conservative-y with creamy conservative-y goodness, the nation would be saved! Apostates who go into print to tell us how the scales have fallen from their eyes, and they no longer see men as trees walking, deserve no consideration from either the right or the left. Krugman's quite right once again.

*Lonesome, but not alone. They'll always have a live mic and camera on them courtesy of our fair and balanced media, who can't seem to leave the likes of failures such as Newt Gingrich or Dick Cheney off the air.

[Hardrada]

2. You have to go back to Russell Kirk and Irving Babbitt

for the perceptive conservative intllectuals. And back beyond them to Edmund Burke.