Obviously, Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, and Eric Cantor are very influential. Paul Ryan has become the standard-bearer of the conservative economic message. Eric Cantor is Speaker of the House. Mitch Daniels is the Governor of Indiana, and is about to announce his candidacy for president.
George Will and David Brooks are probably two of the best known major columnists in America.
Nick Gillespie is a major figure on the libertarian side of the aisle. David Boaz runs the Cato Institute. John Stossell has his own TV show on Fox Business channel, and due to his previous position on 20/20 is probably the best-known libertarian in America.
Megan McCardle is extremely well known on the internet and is a columnist for The Atlantic. She may be one of the most-linked bloggers on the right side of the internet.
Mark Steyn is a best-selling author and has been a substitute host for Rush Limbaugh.
I could go on, but I listed the people I did because they are intellectuals who are currently active and influential in conservative/libertarian circles.
No, it’s a valid talking point in this thread. If the other side of the debate has also given up on intellectualism, then it seems likely that anti-intellectualism is simply the nature of politics today (rather than a right-wing-specific viewpoint).
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
I could go on, but I listed the people I did because they are intellectuals who are currently active and influential in conservative/libertarian circles.
[/QUOTE]
Cantor is as anti-intellectual as any politician short of Lou Gohmert. Ryan I don’t know enough about to render judgment, but his much-touted budget plans are ridiculously impractical and appear to be his only claim to policy chops.
It’s more than that, you need to define conservative.
The easiest answer to the OP is that the intellectual conservatives migrated to the Democratic Party where they were drowned out by the crazies of the left.
The Republican Party didn’t abandon intellectualism or conservativism, they embraced winning as a party platform. Fox News isn’t meant to be the modern intellectual conservative movement, it’s meant to generate ratings.
Canada saw this pattern in the early 90s has the Liberal Party adopted fiscally conservative policies and made traditional conservatives question what the Reform and Progressive Conservative Party actually stood for. Eventually, the two right leaning parties were forced to merge and then push their crazies to the back of the room in order to get the intellectual conservatives to come back. Even now when you watch Canadian politics the conservatives that try to talk about abortion and gay marriage get silenced.
The US unfortunately still doesn’t give a shit about intellectual conservatives. People either vote for unions or they vote to ban abortion. Intellectual conservatives are silenced and ignored by the Democrats as much as by the Republicans. There can’t be reasoned middle ground, it’s either far right or far left. A person can’t promote a balanced energy plan without taking flack from the left for supporting oil exploration and flack from the right for subsidizing green energy plans. You can’t promote health care reform without being labeled a heartless monster or rabid socialist.
If nobody’s ever heard of them, to what extent can they really be leaders?
Quoth Mr. Moto:
Ordinary tea partiers are certainly birthers, and probably racist. If you’re a non-birther and a tea partier, that makes you the extraordinary one, not them.
Non-conservatives who get their stereotypes from what the liberal media says about Fox News and don’t ever bother reading righty blogs have never heard of them, in the same way that no one who writes for the New York Times has met a principled opponent of abortion (hint: it’s not because they don’t exist, it’s because no one who writes for the NYT knows any opponent of abortion personally). It’s been demonstrated that GOP foreign policy for a decade was driven by pencil-necked chickenhawk “deep thinkers.” The righty types on this board had no trouble trotting out dozens of real or would be brainiacs who are household names in serious conservative circles and whose writing is cited extensively in policy debates.
Gingrich could serve as the poster boy for this entire thread. Compare his record then with his recent rantings about America turning into a Secular Atheist country run by Islamic Fundamentalists.
As I recall, in 1995 or so he proposed the death penalty for possession of 10 ounces of marijuana, so maybe he’s always mixed the crazy with the sensible.
As perhaps a concrete example, here is an interesting post (part of a larger discussion) from one of Sam Stone’s conservative intellectuals, Megan McCardle: Should We Re-Evaluate Carbon Taxes? - The Atlantic
You may notice she is discussing (with Jim Manzi among others) the potential effects of a gasoline tax. Here are a few quotes:
[QUOTE=Megan McCardle]
I’ve long been an advocate of some form of carbon taxation–gas tax, source fuels tax, even cap-and-trade if nothing else is available. The tax seems like a three-fer: raise revenue, discourage use, and encourage innovation.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Megan McCardle]
…such taxes are almost always regressive, and though there are various ways we could make them less so, none of them fully solve the problem.
[/QUOTE]
So a question - is there a single national-level GOP politician that supports a gasoline tax? Or that doesn’t support one for the reason Megan highlighted?
So a very useful, interesting discussion about energy taxation becomes “drill baby drill” and “no more taxes”.
The intellectual wing of the conservative movement still exists, they just aren’t driving the bus anymore. They have all become a bit more hard core and populist many have compromised their integrity for political viability but they are still there.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/right-wing-organization-profiles-index
Here is a list of right wing groups and think tanks. They get many appearances of Tv news and especially the Sunday morning shows, without being identified as right wing groups. The wealthy benefactors finance these groups and other groups while staying away from the limelight. The tea baggers are financed and organized by some of the old right wingers, but they do not show their faces at rallies.
There are two kinds of people in the group we can loosely define, for want of a better term, as conservative intellectuals.
The first group is dumb as shit, although describing them that way is being unfair to the deductive capabilities and reasoning power of shit. These are the people who actually believe the nonsense the movement produces. Facts and evidence just don’t matter to them, they’re true believers. A lot of the journalists and media people fall into this category.
The second group are the flim-flam guys. They know that they’re pushing absolute nonsense but they’re doing it to achieve what they want, which is an America back in the 1920s in terms of size of government, regulation etc. Guys like Paul Ryan and his ridiculous budget are mambers of the flaim-flam wing of the conservative intellectual movement.