Over the past several years, many former or reformist conservatives have wondered how the Republican party might be reclaimed from its volcanically angry, Fox-News-and-talk-radio-driven base. One ex-conservative, The Week columnist Damon Linker, suggests that righty intellectuals ought to catalyze the process.
In a Friday column, Linker wrote that he couldn’t understand “how an intelligent, well-read” person of any political stripe could have watched last week’s GOP presidential debate “and not come away disgusted.” He’s especially disappointed that his “conservative intellectual friends appear not to be bothered in the least” by the debate’s high volume of “transparent nonsense.”
Linker challenged those friends: “Conservative intellectuals are better than this, smarter than this. The time has come for them to speak up and call the GOP field what it is: ignorant, insulting, and dangerous.”
From Linker’s column (bolding added):
Partisan liberals might consider it an oxymoron, but there is such a thing as a conservative intellectual. Indeed, I used to be one…
I can't grasp how an intelligent, well-read man or woman, regardless of ideological commitments, could watch the Republican debate in Milwaukee on Tuesday night and not come away disgusted…
Somehow, my friends on the right don't seem to hear anything troubling, anything intellectually offensive emanating from the mouths of the Republican candidates. And I just don't get it.
I don't just mean the obvious stuff…[The] petty anti-intellectualism of Marco Rubio denigrating philosophers by contrasting them unfavorably to welders…Or Donald Trump's xenophobic promises to build a 2,000-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexican border and round up and deport eleven million undocumented immigrants…
And neither do I merely mean the dumpsters full of dubious assertions that are by now so deeply embedded in conservative ideology that every candidate tosses them out without making even the most cursory effort to bolster them with facts. Like the claim that America's relatively slow growth rate in recent years is a product of our tax burden…Or the related contention that taxes can be drastically cut without massively increasing the budget deficit because the cuts will spur such enormous growth that tax revenues will actually increase…
…[A]t Tuesday's debate, there were so many…specific policy proposals that amounted to nothing more than transparent nonsense…
…And yet, my conservative intellectual friends appear not to be bothered in the least.
…[Carly] Fiorina wants us to believe the [federal tax] code can be shrunk to three pages. Which is obviously, indisputably, offensively ludicrous…
…Ted Cruz took the usual supply-side happy-talk about tax cuts producing massive economic benefits to new, unusually concrete levels…
The Republican Party's 2016 presidential candidates have descended into vapid, puerile bleating. Conservative intellectuals are better than this, smarter than this. The time has come for them to speak up and call the GOP field what it is: ignorant, insulting, and dangerous.
