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.

Should Women Have The Right To Vote On The Same Basis As Men?

Should this alien be deported?

A few months back I was continually blogging about Mike Lux's fantastic new book, The Progressive Revolution: How The Best In America Came To Be and what I tried getting across-- and I believe what Lux has tried getting across-- is that all the best in America, from the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the Bill of Rights, the emancipation of the slaves, the right of women and minorities to vote, the right of working people to form unions, the minimum wage, to Social Security, Medicare, the national parks, consumer protection, etc-- was a pitched battle between progressives pushing for these things and conservatives trying to prevent each and every one of them. Conservatives have always been, and continue to be, on the wrong side of history.

Yesterday a prominent conservative author and pundit, John Derbyshire best known for his reactionary columns in the National Review, was on the radio defending a chapter in his new book that has gotten some attention, "The Case Against Female Suffrage.” Basically, he is willing to admit what conservatives in general believe but keep to themselves, that their vision of the American Dream does not, has never, and will never include women being allowed to vote.

“The conservative case against it [women's suffrage] is that women lean hard to the left,” Derbyshire explained to an appalled Alan Colmes. “They want someone to nurture, they want someone to help raise their kids, and if men aren’t inclined to do it-- and in the present days, they’re not much-- then they’d like the state to do it for them.” Like most conservatives, he doesn't just want to take away the right of women to vote. He also doesn't see why minorities should be voting and freely admits opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Are all conservatives as reactionary as Derbyshire? If you dig deep enough, absolutely. The Republican gubernatorial nominee in Virginia, Robert McDonnell, has written about how America would be a better place if women stayed home and didn't trouble their little heads with such things. And what about women conservatives, some of whom will certainly be voting for McDonnell and others like him? Yes, them too!

DERBYSHIRE: Among the hopes that I do not realistically nurse is the hope that female suffrage will be repealed. But I'll say this-- if it were to be, I wouldn't lose a minute's sleep.

COLMES: We'd be a better country if women didn't vote?

DERBYSHIRE: Probably. Don't you think so?

COLMES: No, I do not think so whatsoever.

DERBYSHIRE: Come on Alan. Come clean here.

COLMES: We would be a better country? John Derbyshire making the statement, we would be a better country if women did not vote.

DERBYSHIRE: Yeah, probably.

Imagine the tizzy fits and paroxysms of rage and reveling in victimhood, conservative's default mode, were someone to ever go on the radio and make a case that men-- particularly wealthy white men, those who have done so much for so long to make the world unbearable for so many-- should be deprived of their right to vote. Think about it for a minute or two.