Ok, so it's the admittedly left-leaning E. J. Dionne, but this nevertheless captures how I feel:
"The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity--and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces."
I don't think the second sentence is a big deal--it's an election year. But I think the first is spot-on. In 2005 I attended a conference in Indianapolis on Robert Nisbet, and I'll never forget the way that Peter Lawler essentially apologized to the audience for Nisbet being explicitly pro-choice, and how he had to make the argument that Nisbet's ideas were still worth taking seriously despite the fact that he was pro-choice (and for Nisbet, the decision was based on the idea of the family as a structural unit and the family's dominion over its own house, so it was actually a pretty limited sort of pro-choice).
I'd add Steyn and Hanson to the list with the talk radio hosts who are eager to throw out people like Noonan and Brooks for bucking the party line in favor of an strangely intense anti-intellectual movement that won't bother to read Burke, Strauss, Nisbet or Buckley, much less engage their ideas. Even the more academically minded conservative youth will toss out Nisbet because he doesn't fit their definition of 'conservative.' The movement seems more interested, and registers more excitement, in producing Palins and Hannitys than Buckleys.
If you turn this microscope on the left there's the same phenomenom (Olbermann, Matthews, etc.) but without the theorized and well-considered underpinning (no Left version of God & Man at Yale, for example), a void that perhaps helps explain the triangulating electoral and (presumably in the case of Obama) governing strategy of Clinton/Obama. (Though I guess you could throw Bush in there too... is anyone on the right yet willing to call Bush a Democratic Republican president the same way Clinton is called the first black president?)
