Douthat on the conservative cocoon

English Tories became like that around 1995 - thinking it was everyone else's fault that everyone else didn't like them. They kept on thinking that if only they could get back to Thatcherite basics, everyone would like them again. They thought that people liked Blair because Blair was dishonest and false. It took them over a decade to reconnect with the way ordinary people think.

Chronicles is doing very nicely in Rockford, Illinois, thank you.

They can be quirky at times, but they publish a lot of good stuff.

Distinctly non-DC in sensibility, even less NY.

Move ALL the media out and around the country. Too much group-think is coming out of NY, LA and DC. The result is a polarizing punditocracy that discounts most of the country.

When I first moved from Pennsylvania to California I thought everyone was nuts. Twenty or so years later when I moved to Nevada I was shocked at how narrow I had become, especially since I thought I was now so much more open-minded. The MSM is blinkered in a box. Set them free for all our sakes!

Rod, I think that there should be conservative news and opinion publications based in places other than DC and New York City. The solution is not relocating publications like The American Conservative and National Review, it is begining new ones.

Rod, I'm curious. Don't you think a blog could do this much better than an old-school journal? What if a bunch of writers were to come together on one blog and contemplate the future of American conservatism online?

I don't know about anyone moving, but I think it could make sense to base a new conservative magazine in say

Colorado Springs, Colorado
Jacksonville, Florida
Indianapolis, Indiana
Cincinnati, Ohio
Arlington, Texas

Rod - have you *really* heard people say that Charile Gibson and Katie Couric are "evil"? Did they use those words? And that "anyone who disputes this is a TRAITOR to the CAUSE" (emphasis mine)?

Or are you just engaged in a little exaggeration... a little bit of your own self-validating demagogery? Or are you possibly ascribing the vitriol that hits your email inbox to the views of average Republicans?

Just curious. I'm just a bit incredulous that you have had actual conversations with actual people who spoke in those terms.

The Man From K Street: "Conservatism ... DOES need wiki-like information-sharing architectures built on databases of voters and of financial transaction monitoring--with IT-skilled ideologues to keep those architectures running and current and available to those local cells that need to come online in the coming Obama Administration. In short, conservatism will require 21st century versions of Committees of Correspondence"

K Street, I found your suggestion intriguing, although I was not ALTOGETHER clear what you're driving at (chalk it up to lack of imagination -- on my part!)

I recognize that you wrote it on the fly. Perhaps, then, you could point us toward an article that provides more details or to examples of how this is already occurring (perhaps on the left). Many thanks.

One always has to consider Dougherty's Law in these discussions. I think policy is more just a symptom of the problem than the issue. At least as far back as the early 90s, conservatives made a systematic choice to abandon traditional institutions and create their own. By doing so, they ceded the traditional institutions. They are now largely out of touch with current thinking. For example, the greatest concern of businesses stopped being taxes a while ago. Rather than accept this, the cogniscenti kept acting like the political support would just materialize. Small government as a philosophical goal is fine and is probably appropriate for a movement that labels itself conservative. It is not however an exercise in politics. Politics is about bringing likeminded people together to advance your agenda. As has become clear in this election, the Republicans (as opposed to conservatives) do not have a broad based coalition of like minded people. The number of Republicans staying in the party over just one issue is truly amazing.

The failure of conservative policy to eschew military adventurism, promote an all sizes fits one tax policy that unduly benefits a very small portion of Americans, a laissez-faire regulatory policy that inevitably will always lead to abuses, a self-righteous sense of its own morality that demonizes the majority of the population, an unbelievably anachronistic attitude toward scientific discovery and intelligence (as if these were elitist values, rather than necessary elements of governance in the 21st century) are the reasons conservatives are in the fix they're in. Conservatives write off the Bush failures as merely a matter of his incompetence, when in fact he has had all the same people--first 6 years a contract with America Congress, the Cheney, Rumsfeld, Elliot Abrams administrators that go back as far as Nixon and Reagan. Until conservatives get out of their ideological cocoon and really examine why so many of their hypotheses have led to so much catastrophe, they will continue to remain in disarray. The nation needs a spectrum of political outlooks, but conservatives have reduced themselves to an ostrich like head in the sand, extremist populist McCarthyism in this campaign that by and large the American populace finds repugnant.

asleep06, I'd kindly disagree. Rod's post is pretty spot on.
I'm one of those shallow youths that you're putting down; I've just hit the big 3-0. Though my views in foreign policy and fiscal matters are pretty conservative, I consider my social views as libertarian to liberal (unfortunately, many social conservatives rightly want the government to stay out of their billfolds and their health care choices, but are happy to invite the government into their bedrooms, their churches and their private lives).

At this point in time, the more conservative 'Blue Dog' Democrats jive with my politics.

Going forward, a good model for the GOP should be Great Britain's David Cameron and the surging Tory revival. He's a younger British conservative who's incorporated some of Tony Blair's policies on environmental and education issues into his platform. While Tories are still foreign policy and economic conservatives, they've moderated on their social views.

You have to remember, the broad middle of the public aren't all conservative or liberal on every single issue; we're a hodgepodge of various stances, issue by issue. The broader and more welcoming the Republican tent can be, the better for its future.

For myself, as a liberal rationalist, it is precisely this quality that I find the most alarming. Republicans have been sold a political package in which the members have been conditioned to dismiss the very concept of a universal Truth. For them, there is no community truth, only personal, individual truth. Movement conservatives have demonized so many formerly somewhat reliable apolitical institutions (the media, science, justice dept, etc.) that the perception of biases allows them to ignore them when they are presenting the truth.

This is sinister in my opinion and it is deliberate. The conservative puppetmasters have bred a class or movement of rightwingers for whom no evidence, fact, idea or opinion can be shown to them which could possibly change their minds or opinions. They have created a political movement which is impervious to not only rational thought but resistant to shame itself, like a virus that has become resistant to antibiotics.

And this attitude is really manifesting itself in the framing of themselves as America itself and the opposition as being "anti-American". It feels as though they have seceded from the Union.

The response by the rightwing to my argument here would obviously be that I'm just as bad, that I would root for my "team" no matter what, just as they would. But this is simply not the case. In fact it is one of the major differences that DEFINES one person as a Republican and one as not these days.

What has happened is that these people have come to trust the political product that they have bought over those who break bread with them. Bill O'Reilly is the one supposed "looking out for you", not your brother, friend or fellow parishioner.

You got it completely wrong, @asleep. The Dems were in exactly the same doldrums as the GOP is currently complaining of -- unable to get people 30-44 to join the party, desperate to appeal to youth but mostly unsuccessful -- until a, yes, transformational figure appeared in the person of Barack Obama. The Dem organization would have nothing to do with him in my VA town (37,000). Hey, no problem, a parallel group sprung up on the ground. A friend and I threw an impromptu thank you party for the volunteers right before the primary--over 200 people (teens to octagenarians) showed up at a private home to eat BBQ and listen to live bands, NONE of whom were members of the Dems' City Committee OR elected officials OR party regulars. The local chair of the party came over, just to be polite b/c the friend and I are both former elected officials, and left looking completely shell-shocked because what she was witnessing was the spectacle of her coming irrelevancy. (Hillary would have been lucky to draw 10 women to a cocktail party back in those days.) People aren't drawn to the Obama camp for shallow reasons of celebrity--maybe that's not what you were saying but you're totally off track if it is--but because of a tremendous hunger to be a part of a solution. And this is something people haven't realized: once this election is over, whether Obama wins or loses, these trained foot soldiers are going to turn their attention to their local communities and then you better watch out. Believe me, the party apparatus around these parts is SCRAMBLING to keep up with the Obama nation--who haven't asked for permission or guidance. They're just brushing the old heads aside. This was cause for TREMENDOUS resentment and anxiety during the primaries and fueled some sharp rhetoric in the lull before the convention with all the old heads predicting disaster. Now that this organization and money has turned into the rising tide lifting some pretty unexpected boats downticket, everyone's acting all kumbaya--like they were believers from the start. But it's clear to me that Obama's change is going to be either a wake up call or a swift kick in the you-know-what for Dems who want to play the old games the old way. This new crowd--not just youths, but turned-off moderates, independents, folks who have never in their lives belonged to a party or voted--think the election is about them. And they're not fighting this fight to then turn around, join somebody's party, hand over their money, and go home to watch other people run the country. Both the parties need to be on notice. I really responded to the young Republican saying the folks in the party simply wouldn't listen to his concerns or those of his peers. I used to hear the same thing in my town--earnest hand-wringing about the aging demographic of the party combined with a complete refusal to make the process more open or to engage people on their own ground... Well, now, those days are gone. I watch the Obama nation in my town, and I get the strong impression that none of these people are interested in playing the same old reindeer games. They may end up as Dems because of the historical accident of Obama's being a Dem--but it will *not* be your mama's Democratic Party after they're done.

I think it would be helpful if the republicans had there own musical group.You know,like the village people except with "joe sixpack,"Joe the plumber" and "hockey mom".There hit single could be"republicans think your morons".Or maybe a cartoon?

For many years the GOP braintrust has used the notion of "the other" to demonize its opponents. That's not to say that many of these opponents didn't step into it by embracing ideas that most Americans do rightly classify as narrowly liberal -- federal funding for abortions, complete and utter bans on handguns, and so forth. But little by little, "the other" came to mean Americans who opposed wanton wars in the Mideast, government-sponsored torture and surveillance, and utter de-regulation of financial markets. The cocoon is what allowed them to grow so out of touch. They became arrogant in their belief that "middle America" or "flyover country" or whatever they called it was with them. but their corridor-centrism and, more crucially, the wealth they enjoyed being the self-anointed spokespeople for middle America corrupted them. Why doesn't a think tank or major rightist media entity base itself in Toledo, or Des Moines, or St, Louis, or Omaha, or Jacksonville ... ? Because the cocoonists have no interest in such a life. That's fine for the "folks" -- so long as they follow the marching orders, and by the way don't invite me to the bowling alley or VFW Post because I'm having cocktails with the AEI. Middle Americans respect shoe leather more than soft-shoe.

The bubble is nationwide, thanks to the talk shows: so-called conservatives are brainwashed by Fox News and Boortz and Rush and Hannity to believe the same moronic rubbish that the inside the beltway idiots spout. So moving stuff to Jacksonville won't help.

I have noticed the same phenomenon as "werenotgonnatakeit" in regard to family members placing greater faith in media pundits than with their own kin. I have even brought this to their attention with such questions as, "Who do you think cares more about you, myself or Bill O'Reilly?" "Which one sends you birthday cards?" etc. I encounter the same imperviousness to rational thought as the previous poster mentioned and find it profoundly disappointing and disheartening.

I think a large part of the problem is the aging populace tends to spend more and more time in front of the TV as their physical and mental capacities diminish. They become very easy prey for the worldview being promulgated via, predominantly, right-wing blowhards on TV and radio. It reminds me of when I was a kid and how every year a couple of my most elderly relatives got very excited upon receiving Publisher's Clearinghouse sweepstakes in the mail--thinking they were actually sweepstakes winners.

I created a post awhile ago that may be stuck in your spam filter, since I used a bunch of links and html that your filter may flag. The comment response said it was successfully entered, and awaiting approval.