You wonder if any of these wirters other Slate writers currently enjoying a traditional bout of What’s Wrong With Conservatism ever bother to read these fray replies.

I rather think not. The reason for that is not just based in the obvious nature of their blind arrogance or in the fact that they never reply to top posts but in the undeniable fact that none of them ever learn anything new.

I recall just a few years ago when conservatives were still on top of the political world and wondering in a butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth way what intellectuals would rise forth to save the liberal movement. Remember not that very long ago when conservatives declared liberalism dead and buried in this nation? Sure you do.

So what happened? All it took for liberals to surge forth again was consistent and determined and endless seeming screwing up from the Bush Administration and a runaway rubber stamp congress and then the rise of a charismatic leader on the left. Of course SHE did not get elected, but Obama will do as a substitute [wink].

Gasp! Look what is happening today! Why, as I live and breath and THINK, it does appear that once again we have a runaway rubber stamp congress and a leader who seems determined to be a dedicated and consistent and endless seeming screw up. Obviously I don’t expect any liberals to agree with me, but then, in my mind, they are simply the funhouse mirror inversions of the conservative hysterics and fanatics of only a few years ago who KNEW that G.W. Bush was a living saint and that his policies were pure gold.

I sort of like fanatics because at least they have fire in their souls, but I don’t necessarily listen to them and I DON’T follow where they lead. But that’s me. Obviously your mileage and habits may vary.

So we have an avowed liberal fanatics in this particular Slate article – and one other such by Jacob Weisberg currently running on Slate -- wondering in a butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth way what happened to the conservative intellectuals and who’s going to arise to replace those vanished creatures.

So who arose to replace the liberal intellectuals? Nobody. There are no new liberal thinkers and certainly no new liberal ideas. It’s all just rancid old pap repackaged at best and then sent around the legislative tables as something new.

Really, all that the right needs is for two things to happen, for people to once again get fed up with the morons in Washington [both in the White House and Congress] trying to push this nation and its policies hard left and for a charismatic leader to once again rear his or her head.

That’s all that’s really necessary for conservatives to regain power and to once again start screwing over the nation just as liberals are screwing it over today.

It’s ALL ABOUT POLITICS; and intellectualism need not apply.

Setting aside the notion that anyone to the left of Atilla The Hun is a limp willed "liberal" - which irrationally seems to underpin much of your posts, you take a good point but mix it with the biased observations and end up with at best a weak conclusion.

It is ALL ABOUT POLITICS in many ways. And Politics is about getting the power to get YOUR ideologies put into place.

So to that extent "intellectualism need not apply" has some near term logic to it. That is why extremely intelligent and well read individuals like Newt Gingrich, and yes Hannity do not worry about a reasoned discussion or putting forth a viewpoint that integrates all the facts. They are drawn to winning (some argue Hannity is just in it for the money) in the bloodsport of politics for whatever reasons motivate them.

But without a consistent foundation this leads to a hyper-opportunistic policy thrashing that people eventually catch onto, be it the Flip Flop by conservatives on the importance of Medicare - even now as they vigorously defend ALL of Medicare in the political arena, they invoke Medicare expansion as evidence of GWB's abandonment of conservative beliefs - or the hodgepodge internally contradictory "Acts" of the Contract With America.

And this is where intellectual underpinnings matter. And it is also where Conservativism AND your arguement go off the rails.

Yes Conservatives, having hamstrung Clinton and Gore's subsequent campaign with impeachment while hanging onto legislative majorities through gerrymandering other tricks of incumbency felt that "liberalism" had finally run out of intellectual steam.

And Yes, liberalism was having a tough time gaining POLITICAL traction in the face of a combination of 9/11 and dishonest political strategems like SBVFT. But Liberalism never actually abandoned its intellectual underpinnings. Yes the Politicians like Clinton stepped back from strongly advocating for it, but their core actions still were consistent with liberal intellectual ideals.

Where conservatives screwed up is that they equated political victory with a discreditting of the ideals themselves. Their own ideology blinded themselves to the fact that the USSR, and the PRC were nowhere near "liberalism" - and were in fact closer to "conservativism", and thus they felt they had won the intellectual debate as well. Yet the data to the contrary continued to pile up.

So contrary to current conservatives assertions as Gatewood does here... GWB did NOT "screw up" - at least not that massively and where he screwed up is not where you think he screwed up:

• Katrina - the Katrina disaster was a quintessential implementation of Conservative Ideals: regional autonomy, where the Federal Government has no business telling a state or city how to protect itself and until civil order breaks down, no proper role. According to Conservative Dogma, GWB's actions during Katrina WERE NOT A Screwup (politically yes, but not by conservative values)
• Afghanistan/Iraq - again Afghanistan was quintessential Conservative dogma - US Might allowing the flowering of local democratic aspirations but no "nation building" who cares if that means we lose Bin Laden. and Iraq was all about "Walk Loudly and Carry a Bigger Stick" militarism that Reagan and McCarthy posited so ardently
• Economic meltdown - Legislative deregulation (Gramm Leach Bliley) of financial markets straight out of Reagan's playbook, combined with further relaxing of existing regulations via "waivers" was 100% consistent.
• The explosion of the deficit - well this is Atwater/Gingrich/Laffer's "starve the beast" philosophy. Who cares if 1/3 of the tax cuts left the US economy
• Business Deregulation - "Clean Skies" iniatiatives FDA etc - what matters is the business lobby not the science
• NET Job Loss - deregulation of capital flows that allows for offshoring of jobs is quintessential conservative dogma

These are the big "screwups" of GWB. Yet each and everyone traces directly to the "intellectual" underpinnings of Conservative PHILOSOPHY. And this IS where "intellectualism matters" - because each of these dogmatic beliefs, PROVED THEMSELVES WRONG in the REAL WORLD.

Unlike Liberal ideals - which had a tough time in the face of less than honest political attacks, but which at their core have been proven as quite functional in much of the world, Conservative ideals failed IN THE REAL WORLD.

Liberalism did not need an intellectual revamping, it needed a better poltiical articulation.

Conservativism OTOH had great political articulation, but its core beliefs have been proven to be disconnected from reality.

And now the PT Barnum adage about all the people all the time comes home to roost. Without a redefinition of intellectual principles. the conservative leadership is left with that small permanent minority that are the "True Believers" for whom real world validation is unnecessary.

I think you see only what you want to see but I can't fault you for the depth of commitment to your version of reality.

The problem is that you are a liberal. I am neither a liberal nor a conservative. I am a radical centrist. No, I won’t explain what I mean by that.

I can see both the corruption and the intellectual faults of both political extremes. Rather than put you into the position of reflexively defending liberalism or what the liberals are currently doing with the nation I will return here to bashing the conservatives for illustrative purposes.

The overt intellectual underpinnings of conservatism tend to be rather blunt in nature, which is why they are easy to grasp by all those drooling, knuckles dragging, red neck bubbas out there with their Fortune Five Hundred companies and Harvard Law and Business School degrees. Work hard, stay out of debt, go to church, tithe, be good family people, be patriotic. All conservatives share that much in common.

Then you have the subgroups; the gun nuts and the bible thumpers, business sharks and warmongers. They each embrace a special subset of conservative ideals that sometimes allow them to pray on one another. For instance a good conservative business person delights in having the nation flooded with illegal aliens because he can pay those people below living wage minimums [thus screwing the usually blue collar gun nuts, bible thumpers, and warmongers by taking a living wage OUT of their hands]. Neat, eh?

But none of these people actually run the conservative party [just like there really is no longer a democratic party there is really no longer a republican party]. Well, some few of the upper level business moguls definitely have a hand in running it but the real leaders are unknown [just like with the liberal party, as a matter of fact]. Those are the people who created and finance all those conservative think tanks where the conservative intellectuals ARE to be found.

So just as Moveondotorg and ACORN can arguably be at least part of the intellectual and ethical center of modern liberalism, Halliburton [with their clandestine black ops] and the Heritage Foundation can arguably be at least part of the intellectual and moral center of modern conservatism.

In my opinion both polar opposite political extremes have problems and do cause problems for our nation. Perhaps that is why I refuse to be either a liberal or a conservative.

I'm more of an intellectual than a libera. There are things I "believe" which I full well recognize have no factual underpinnings - and hence I am wary of those beliefs. I seek facts, reason and analysis,

I disagree with you on the analysis of conservatvism and its intellectual underpinnings:

Work hard, stay out of debt, go to church, tithe, be good family people, be patriotic. All conservatives share that much in common

First of, most business conservatives love debt, they are highly leveraged and believe in leverage. And their rate of church attendence is fairly low, as is their tithing.

"being good family people" may be a STATED belief of conservativism, but again it isn't something that conservatives practice. Their rates of divorce, extramarital sex and domestic abuse are straight up and down the national median.

Patriotism is also a curious term. More Democratic pols and Democratic leaders have served in the military than conservatives More children and siblings of Democratic leaders ARE serving than of conservatives.

So if you believe in a "look at my deeds not my words" to better understand the ACTUAL underlying belief systems (as opposed to the social conformity statements), you see something a bit different as the common theme.

Conservatives are much more closely aligned with what I consider to be the historic mythos of the USA - all nations have a mythos: French are about beauty and style, Italians are lovers, Brits are shopkeepers, germans and swiss are machine like in precision, Danes and swedes are egalitarian, Russians are depressed... etc. The historic mythos of the USA is that of Calvinism:

• Mankind is inherently sinful and must be coerced by rules and structure to be good
• You can only be saved by grace, but your "works" can cast you from grace
• Mankind's intellect is not to be trusted, Belief matters more, and beliefs will be tested
• Mankinds' creations are inherently corrupt
• There is only a Christian God
• While everyone has access to God, those that are more learned in God's ways are to be believed and followed

Now in this context suddenly the disparate beliefs that make up the hodgepodge of conservative ideology make more sense:

• Big Government is a creation of mankind, therefore it is inherently corrupt
• The world is a dangerous place
• Only a christian hierarchy/family can be trusted against the world
• anyone who challenges these beliefs is evil
• Facts are not as important as beliefs
• Success and failure are aspects of God's Grace.
• Hardwork matters, and failure must be the consequence of a lack of hardwork. or a lack of grace or both.
• Any organization (Schools, Courts) that emphasize facts and logic in place of Belief are corrupt.

Now one of the curious things is that modern brain research tells us that some of these traits are associated with neurophysiological brain structure

Now as for MoveOndotOrg - they are the underpinnings of the modern Democratic Party, but that's hardly synonymous with liberalism.

And ACORN is aimed purely at lower socieoeconomic status folks, and the intellectual underpinnings of liberalism come from high status intellectuals. The two aren't even linked.

They ARE linked in the minds of conservatives who see anything that is not "with them" as "against them" and therefore liberal.

You're a bright person, try doing a little research. Check out the 5 solas first.

I assume you don't mean Safety Of Life At Sea. I don't see anything in the the Solas as I read them now, or as I was taught them as a child that contradicts what I've written.

salvation by grace because of poor works--sola gratia. For the TULIP acronym, either the I or the P fits.

Stop-truth-decay:

salvation by grace because of poor works--sola gratia. For the TULIP acronym, either the I or the P fits.

Fair enough in a purely calviinist sect. But mix it in with anglicanism and the Puritans (the originals not the "conservative christians") and you get the core mythos of the USA - which believes that works can condemn you but not save you.