"dwarfs conservatism's in size, scope, and sophistication"

Well, there could never have been any doubt about sophistication.

I don't think the Dems' comeback since '06 was about ideas/policy, so much as the disaster of Republican governance finally forcing people to vote their wallets rather than their Bibles/guns/fear-of-foreigners.

"Hope", "change", etc. are vague slogans. Give the economy a chance to recover, and the culture wars will again be the main show. What's frightening is how many people voted for McCain/Palin under the circumstances.

Conservatives do have the kind of infrastructure liberals have built. They've simply allowed it to decay.

Think tanks that do nothing but support the incumbent administration aren't think tanks; they're cheering sections. AEI and Heritage have been in cheering section mode for eight years, and before that they devoted much of their energies to the effort to get an administration they could cheer for. Conservatives haven't looked to these institutions for ideas, but for enthusiasm and plausible explanations of why the government ought to do what the White House wants. So what use are they now?

The liberal organizations given birth over the last two years ought to look at the decay of the conservative infrastructure as a cautionary tale. The same thing could happen to them if they let it, and I say this as someone who will probably disagree with them more often than not.

A lot of the credit goes to George Soros, who, characteristically, has worked quietly during this century to encourage and fund liberal thinktanks to counter the Hoover Institution, American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation. No wonder the right hates him so much. An ancillary effect is to provide some counter to the only-too-true CW that if you're Right, you have a job for life; if you're Left, you have the opportunity to volunteer for free, then contribute on top of it.

The right just doesn't have the talent to devise infrastructure at this point. They can mimic like fake Chinese merchanidise, but they will not be able to 'one up' the left. Most progressives are also progressive in technology and management. The left has been attracting "out of the box" thinkers for years and it's starting to show.

The Left and Center have a clear advantage in setting up an "intellectual infrastructure," having a near monopoly on actual intellectuals (as opposed to glib ideologues, a species the media often confuses for intellectuals). All that was required was the effort to organize the existing assets.

I think the real imbalance the still exists in conservative's favor is the media. We have two shows on MSNBC, and Matthews is less offensive, but we are not setting the narrative, for sure. If you look at how differently bailing out banks was framed compared to car companies, the "center right" nation - the narratives have, by and large, been about keeping Obama from moving center, center-left, keeping Bush's tax cuts, and limiting spending.

Anyone interested in media narratives should look at Maddow and David Sirota - he's out there saying the right thing regarding tax cuts.

With clean coal, however, I noticed Gore was ready to push back.

This is good to know. Progressive think tanks are out there. However, they are NOT visible in the MSM like all the conservative think tanks. Unless it's on TV, they aren't quite "visible" yet and in the mainstream conscious.

I liked Zathras' explanation better than my own:

After years of putting a priority on being the kinds of guys people want to drink beer with, they're too drunk to think straight.

An 8 year bender is hard on the brain cells.

Building intellectual infrastructure is as much about networking and coordination of effort as it is about generating actual policy proposals. If like-minded people are not in touch with each other and working together, then it's harder if not impossible to take advantage of each opportunity; but if they are, it's much easier. An example: during the Florida election controversy of 2000, the Republicans were able to marshal an army of volunteer lawyers to harass poll workers and assist with legal proceedings. Lawyers working for Gore thought, "where did all these people come from?" Answer? The Federalist Society, a widespread and well-established network of conservative lawyers. After the Supreme Court's decision came down, some of Gore's former lawyers got together and founded a progressive counterpart, now called the American Constitution Society. Now, ACS has thousands of members, ACS board members are on Obama's transition team doing tasks such as planning the reform of federal agencies, and the outgoing Executive Director of ACS is going to be Obama's White House Staff Secretary. It's not a partisan organization, but it creates a huge network of progressive attorneys whose efforts can be drawn on when things need to get done.

I'd also throw in there Air America Radio, Campaign for America's Future, the NETROOTS, and groups like "J-Street" focusing on peace in the Mideast.

If this infrastructure existed why did I spend the whole primary season seeing Michelle Branard commenting on the Democratic nomination as if she was some sort of progressive?

The problem with 'Infrastructure' conservatives is they got six years controlling all three branches of government and found out that their 'tools', the Republican'ts, were as broken as their theories.

I mean, I like have fiscal conservatives and libertarians around for balance, but now I have to look to the Blue Dogs caucus to find them. The Republican'ts represent nothing but Theocratic wingnuttery and Chicago School of Economics indiocy.

Memekiller (12:19pm) nails it.
Yes, it's good to have a solid theoretic underpinning for policy proposals. It's great to be able to marshal support from history, expert opinion, controlled studies, etc. It's helpful to have repositories and generators of thinking and thinkers from which to draw when necessary.
But the utility and value of all that is heavily limited -- and I suspect approaches 0 in areas most threatening to the corporatocracy -- if we don't also have at least some voices in the mainstream / mass / trad / drive-by / dinosaur / [insert yr fave name here] media.
Last time I checked, over 60% of the American public still thought Saddam Hussein had been involved in 9/11. It doesn't take a high-end think tank to know that's a lie. But it does take actual journalism to counter the lie.
If I had to choose just one or the other, I'd trade all the new institutions referenced in the Ben Smith post for just one TV network -- even if it were just cable -- that really was "liberal" media. ("Liberal" defined here as simply doing actual journalism: discovering and disseminating actual facts about events and issues of actual relevance.)