We’ve talked a lot about the recent intellectual and spiritual failings of conservatism in America.  The spiritual failing, in part, is that Republicans have squandered their ethos since 2000 (and maybe since 1992) as a party who cares about all Americans, not just the unborn.  The intellectual failing is that they’ve gone rogue, appealing to a populist kind of anti-intellectualism that was supposed to appeal to Real America, but in fact appeals to nobody.  It’s not a crime to use big words, as long as you do it judiciously. 

For the past 40 years American conservatism has been politically ascendant, in no small part because it was also intellectually ascendant [...] Magazines like the Public Interest and Commentary became required reading for anyone seriously concerned about domestic and foreign affairs; conservative research institutes sprang up in Washington and on college campuses, giving a fresh perspective on public policy. Buckley, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Peter Berger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz — agree or disagree with their views, these were people one had to take seriously.

Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia, asks, “So what happened”

How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? It’s a sad tale that began in the ’80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an “adversary culture of intellectuals.”

Read on, and tell us what you think.