Bumper-Sticker Politics As Usual
Originally @ Stanford Review If the ascendancy of the Tea Party has signaled anything in American politics, it is the striking of the death knell for mainstream conservative intellectualism. Gone are the Milton Friedmans and Irving Kristols of the conservative movement. Replacing them are droves of opportunists tapping into general frustrations with government and the economy, posing flimsily as faux libertarians. Gone are the policy prescriptions of the right, swapped for ungrammatical Twitter updates from Sarah Palin and angry rants from Glenn Beck. Speaking on the dearth of intellectual conservatism, Brink Lindsey, a former Cato Institute researcher, recently remarked, “Some who sympathize with libertarian and free-market causes are cheered by the anti-government rhetoric and Tea Party theatrics now increasingly in evidence on the right. Perhaps, they think, the old Goldwater-Reagan conservatism is making a comeback. … On the contrary, I worry that good free-market ideas are go