Matt Yglesias thinks the big problem confronting conservatives today is a lack of practical solutions to problems.
Not that there’s nothing wrong with being impractical, of course, but I think the most noticeable “ideas gap” on the right is precisely a lack of practical solutions. Given how few Republican Party elected officials there are right now, taking potshots at Obama and poking holes in his agenda is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But I think it’s still the case that for years now there conservative movement has been very bad at identifying concrete problems in people’s lives and laying out things they’d like to change that would ameliorate those problems. The “drill baby drill” episode from last summer at least has the right formal properties, though I’d hardly call it an “idea.”
I disagree with this analysis. For the past 30 years, conservative practical solutions always relied on three fundamental beliefs—social problems can be solved by adherence to traditions, economic problems can be solved by allowing the free market to function without restraint, and foreign policy problems can be solved through overwhelming military force.
But these are not practical solutions to problems so much as they are general theories about how things work from which rather simplistic practical proposals follow.
The Bush Administration really tried to implement these theories and thus proved them to be deeply flawed.
So I don’t see how the conservative “ideas gap” can be bridged by coming up with practical solutions. What they need are better theories that provide better explanations of how things work than the older discredited theories could provide.
Of course, conservatives may not need any ideas if they can tap into the resentments toward elites that are bound to bubble to the surface if unemployment stays high. That seems to be Palin’s new gambit. She is no doubt crazy but she may be crazy like a fox.
At any rate, I doubt that she is pulling her copy of “The Road to Serfdom” off the shelf in order to discover where it all went wrong.
