Always right, never wrong

Jonathan Chait
December 11, 2005

LAST WEEK, I wrote that conservatives think they have "won the war of ideas" when, in fact, they have simply reduced their ideas to a few simple bromides. There's also another reason why conservatives have such misplaced confidence in the superiority of their beliefs: They refuse to ever question them.

Liberal writer Rick Pearlstein explained this recently when he appeared at a conference on conservatism. "In conservative intellectual discourse, there is no such thing as a bad conservative," he said. "Conservatism never fails. It is only failed." So whenever conservative policies crash and burn in the real world, rather than rethink their ideas, conservatives simply redefine the failures as un-conservative.