Is Conservatism Brain Dead?

By GottaLaff

I could snark all over the place about this topic, based on Greg Sargent's title (used for this post) alone. But I'd rather stay away from sarcasm at the moment, because this issue has blown up into something bigger... harsh negativism, threats, hate speech, incitement springboarding into the unthinkable.

Thomas Friedman made some good points about that, broadening the consequences scope even more in his column of a few days ago.

Now we have this piece by American Enterprise Institute fellow Steven Hayward, via The Plum Line:

President Obama has done conservatives a great favor, delivering CPR to the movement with his program of government gigantism, but this resuscitation should not be confused with a return to political or intellectual health. 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…

The best-selling conservative books these days tend to be red-meat titles such as Michelle Malkin’s “Culture of Corruption,” Glenn Beck’s new “Arguing with Idiots” and all of Ann Coulter’s well-calculated provocations…Conspicuously missing, however, are the intellectual works….

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.

Populists? Blech, Malkontent, The Madam's Apple Coulter...? Really? Okay, well maybe one teeeeeny tiny snark fragment about how their mental instabil....

Never mind. They're not worth it. Maybe later. Sargent adds this:

Many on the right see polls showing rising public anxiety over government’s proper role and scale as a sign of conservatism’s resurgence. But those anxieties could very well reflect fear of the unknown — Obama is attempting change of dizzying scale and ambition, and it’s understandable that people would sweat about the outcome — rather than reflecting public aversion to the basic ideas underpinning Obama’s approach on major domestic issues. [...]

Glenn Beck’s shouting can only obscure that reality for so long, and if the economy picks up and a health care reform proposal passes that Americans decide they like, the illusion that conservatism is even part of the conversation in any meaningful sense anymore will be that much tougher to sustain.

Even ear-splitting, overtalking wingnut spew won't be able to blot out Obama-driven legislative victories that actually bring some relief to Americans. If they keep it up, those wacky brain dead "populists" will look even more foolish than they do now, if that's even possible.