Steven Hayward Notices That The Right Is Out Of Ideas And Out Of Thinkers And Claims Glenn Beck Is Now The Best They've Got In The Brains Department

Glenn Beck is what passes for modern conservative intellectualism

Few people who have heard of his work would question Steven Hayward's credentials as a prominent right-wing nutcase, a full-blown anti-environmentalist quack employed by the American Enterprise Institute. And that's what makes his OpEd questioning the intellectual viability of American conservatism in today's Washington Post so noteworthy. Discerning people would intuitively ignore any of the blatant corporate shillery Hayward publishes. Today, however, he's joining the parade of aghast pundits and observers worried that the GOP's lurch toward the right-wing fringe could be fatal for the party. He recognizes that Hate Talk Radio and Fox "News" have "dumbed down" the conservative movement and that sloganeering has replaced thought, while "the blend of entertainment and politics is too outre."

He rues the day conservatives traded in a cool, composed and intellectually confident William F. Buckley for the likes of Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and Glenn Beck. He frets that today's conservative movement "has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas" and worries that conservatism has been reduced to a series of sound bites and bumper stickers. "The brain waves of the American right continue to be erratic, when they are not flat-lining."

Consider the "tea party" phenomenon. Though authentic and laudatory, it is unfocused, lacking the connection to a concrete ideology that characterized the tax revolt of the 1970s, which was joined at the hip with insurgent supply-side economics. Meanwhile, the "birthers" have become the "grassy knollers" of the right; their obsession with Obama's origins is reviving frivolous paranoia as the face of conservatism... [I]t was not enough just to expose liberalism's weakness; it was also necessary to offer robust alternatives for both foreign and domestic policy, ideas that came to fruition in the Reagan years. Today, it is not clear that conservative thinkers have compelling alternatives to Obama's economic or foreign policy. At best, the right is badly divided over how to fix the economy and handle Iran and Afghanistan. So for the time being, the populists alone have the spotlight.

While singling out Glenn Beck for opprobrium, calling his "on-air weepiness... unmanly, his flirtation with conspiracy theories a debilitating dead-end, and his judgments sometimes loopy," he admits that Beck is all the right has left and that he's more intellectually competent than either of Fox's two other main clowns, O'Reilly or Hannity.

As if calling Beck the right's one hope for intellectual legitimacy wasn't whacky enough, Hayward loses it entirely when he cites as a source for the good old day's of conservative intellectualism none other than one man freak show, John Derbyshire who was on the air the other day intellectually arguing that women shouldn't be allowed to vote and talking about what a grave mistake the Civil Right Act of 1964, guaranteeing voting rights for minorities, was.