What I did on my summer vacation

I roped Noah into walking me through Kathy G.'s tirade against conservatism! (Prompted by this mash note and the subsequent discussion.) It was much more fun than hitting the beach.

John Schwenkler and I were both pretty offended by the post, coming as it did hot on the heels of Matt Yglesias' pronouncement that "the problem with the conservative movement is that it's fundamentally malign," but a little context went a long way in talking me down from challenging Kathy to pistols at dawn. Just as the two parties' infrastructure envy is cyclical--they used to be jealous of our think tanks, now we're jealous of their netroots--the "new ideas" meme seems to have switched addresses, too. If Matt and Kathy got sick of hearing that liberalism's electoral failures were due to the fact that the conservatives had better and more exciting ideas, and if that's why they sound so shrill when they talk about the Right, then I can find it in me to read their outbursts with a little charity.

On the other hand, I still have a problem with the sentence "Friedman-omics provided the figleaf of intellectual respectability which covered the moral depravity of much of their politics," the "figleaf" part especially. It's a difficult line to walk between "There are non-braindead conservatives, but they aren't where the votes live (and, truth be told, by letting themselves be used to further the political ends of bigots, xenophobes, and plutocrats, they've made themselves little better than dupes)" and "There are no non-braindead conservatives"; I'm not sure Kathy has learned how to walk it yet, or is even interested in learning.