View source for Conservative Intellectuals: Follow the Money

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[[Category:Paul Krugman]]
[[Category:Wingnut Welfare]]
[[Category:Wall Street, Corporatists, Neoliberals And Plutocrats]]
[[Category:Political Libertarianism]]
[[Category:How Libertarian Ideas And Attitudes Are Spread]]
[[Category:Kochtopus]]
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{{DES | des = Libertarians are conservatives in terms of property, distinguished only by dislike of government.  Their ideas, funded by plutocrats, are wrong because "because being wrong in the right way has always been a financially secure activity." | show=}}
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Both Ross Douthat and David Brooks have now weighed in on the state of conservative intellectuals; both deserve credit for taking a critical look at their team.

But — of course there’s a but — I’d argue that they and others on the right still have huge blind spots. In fact, these blind spots are so huge as to make the critiques all but useless as a basis for reform. For if you ignore the true, deep roots of the conservative intellectual implosion, you’re never going to make a real start on reconstruction.

What are these blind spots? First, belief in a golden age that never existed. Second, a simply weird refusal to acknowledge the huge role played by money and monetary incentives promoting bad ideas.

On the first point: We’re supposed to think back nostalgically to the era when serious conservative intellectuals like Irving Kristol tried to understand the world, rather than treating everything as a political exercise in which ideas were just there to help their team win.

But it was never like that. Don’t take my word for it; take the word of Irving Kristol himself, in his book “Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea.” Kristof explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: “I was not certain of its economic merits but quickly saw its political possibilities.” This justified a “cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or financial problems”, because “political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”

In short, never mind whether it’s right, as long as it’s politically useful. When David complains that “conservative opinion-meisters began to value politics over everything else,” he’s describing something that happened well before Reagan.

But shouldn’t there have been some reality checks along the way, with politically convenient ideas falling out of favor because they didn’t work in practice? No — because being wrong in the right way has always been a financially secure activity. I see this very clearly in economics, where there are three kinds of economists: liberal professional economists, conservative professional economists, and professional conservative economist — the fourth box is more or less empty, because billionaires don’t lavishly support hacks on the left.
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