Digby: Becoming Goldstein

Perhaps some of you already came across this amazing essay in the American Conservative, but I had missed it. It is written by a lawyer and writer named Austin Bramwell, who was, until recently, a director and trustee for the National Review. It's an impressive analysis of the failure of the conservative movement and one that I guarantee you will find very interesting.

Here's a little excerpt:

The movement’s leaders may be better informed, but they have no clearer idea of what they actually think. What they need is analysis: the skeptical tradition extending from Machiavelli to Hobbes, Hamilton, and Burnham that seeks to understand the world as it is rather than as we might like it to be. Analysis, however, requires intellect, but the movement’s mainstream, perhaps to avoid embarrassment (some mainstream figures favorably compared Bush not just to Ronald Reagan but to Abraham Lincoln), has increasingly ostracized its brightest minds.