What would they call it, the Center for American Regression?

I'm not sure I agree. If DHE really believes that Heritage and AEI are outmoded, cumbersome and slow to respond, building a new infrastructure would certainly be easier, leaner and more flexible than trying to gut the old one.

The issue is, however, as Matt Yglesias states, would this new enterprise really be willing to look beyond tax cuts and terrorist boogeymen.

it's an awesome conundrum. Conservatives don't want to change the message, they only want to figure out a mgical way to make that message resonate with 50 percent plus one of the voting public. OR disenfranchise their opponents so that their shrinking minority becomes a 50 percent plus one majority.

They need to change their message in order to resonate with the current zeitgeist. Which, by their own definiton, will make them Democrats.

Holtz-Eakin acknowledges there are already powerful conservative think tanks.

Yeah, and their ideas suck, and have sucked for the better part of a century.

Conservatives don't need a better infrastructure to push their ideas -- they need better ideas.

Then again, since their ideas are impractical and, when understood by the public, unpopular, I guess a better infrastructuure to sell their policies is what they need. Problem is, the liberal infrastructure movement conservatives are ruing was developed to counter conservative bullshit, so I see nothing but fail for conservative rebranding after all.

The Center Against American Progress. Conservatism is, by definition, against change, and everyone knows that Republicans have failed because they weren't conservative enough.
Their logo could feature a cartoon of Bill Buckley standing athwart a history book, screaming "stop!" (drawn in the style of John Tenniel to give it that old-timey feel).

The problem isn't their infrastructure - it's the think within the infrastructure. They are so rooted in the 1980's and 1990's that they forget it is 2009. They are trying to solve today's problems with last decade's mentality with no recognition that the world has changed and they haven't. The Republican infrastructure (party, media, think tanks) is run by white guys in their 50's or older, who have no real clue how the under 30 crowd thinks and lives while their under 30 crowed is either neutered or just as clueless. Until the fix that no CAP or Twitter is going to work.

Well it sounds like the point is not merely just another thinktank, but rather an innovative policy development center. Heritage and AEI can't do that because they are dedicated not to solving problems but to selling an ideology. It's much easier to start something brand new than it is to try to change the mission of existing institutions.

The most interesting aspect of this proposal, though, is the tacit admission that conservatives are losing the intellectual battle. Back in the heyday of George Will and William Safire and William F. Buckley, intellectualism (albeit the snobbish, elitist kind) was the hallmark of conservative ideology. But that breed of pundit has apparently died childless.

I think everyone's missing the real point here. Although the left has developed some very good resources, they've become popular with the public because public attitudes about politics and government have changed. We are not a "center right nation" any more no matter how many Republicans repeat that line on teevee. The Bush Administration saw to that by filling government with incompetence. We are currently a center left nation at the very least, if not a left leaning nation, and all the think tanks in all the towns in all the world won't change that opinion very soon.

If the policies that Obama has set in place succeed, the public will tilt even further to the left for several years to come. The right's only hope, really, is to side with Limbaugh and hope the president fails. Which is why they all side with Limbaugh.

Intellectual? Is that supposed to mean "knows big words and has a bow tie", or "has a brain, and uses it"?

Conservatives don't need a better infrastructure to push their ideas -- they need better ideas.

Bingo. When their basic policy proposals are the same proven failures, it doesn't matter what shade of lipstick you put on the pig.

But the far right can take some comfort in the fact that the left has completely ignored the right's most basic propaganda tool: everyone's ultra conservative Uncle Billy Bob who forwards the pass-around wingnut scare emails written in 24 point red font. The left has never quite grasped the power and simplicity of viral hate factory email chains.

If people like Holtz-Eakin could realize the actual problem with right-wing "think" tanks, then creating a new one probably would be a better solution than trying to fix the old ones. The conservative think tanks were created in part because academia was "liberal," and they wanted something that looked academic (filled with "senior scholars" and "fellows" publishing papers), because that helps you get taken seriously as an intellectual, but that would produce conservative positions.

The problem is that academia isn't inherently liberal because of bias or discrimination against conservative. It produces somewhat liberal answers because, as we've learned the hard way, reality has a well-known liberal bias, and reasoning logically will tend to produce answers saying that things need to change, not remain the same.

So in order to consistently produce conservative "scholarly" works, they had to set up an infrastructure where the only requirement is that you reach the predetermined "right" answers. It doesn't matter how insane or flawed your reasoning is, no one on the right will seriously question it and you won't lose your job. None of the generation that grew up in this hothouse environment would survive in a real academic environment, just as the ideas they produced failed disastrously in the real world.

There have always been actual conservative academics, of course, ranging from the few who produce actual ideas to the ones who provide a useful perspective that changes proposed may not be the right ones or may be worse than the status quo, to curmudgeons who attempt to justify or defend the status quo. But apparently that wasn't enough to build a movement on. Now that the movement built on PR and pseudo-academia is crashing and burning, perhaps someone will decide it's worth a try.

What would a conservative "Center for American Progress" be called?

Center for American Regress?

So-called conservatives lost any chance for intellectual vigor when they and Ronald Reagan sold out the Republican party to the moneyed interests and identified themselves with the interests of corporate America. (Sort of like what the Dems are in the process of doing, actually.) Abraham Lincoln stood for a strong central government, Teddy Roosevelt stood up to the trusts, and Dwight Eisenhower understood that the best interests of Ameriza were not identical with those of big corporations. As long as the main constituency for conservatives is "easy street" America, it will always be Groundhog Day, except they'll never learn.

While these Reich-wingers may proclaim a need for more organizations to provide ideas, the truth is that AEI, Heritage & the like exist to provide income to out-of-work rethug politicians. More organizations are needed because there are going to be even more rethug pols out of work. No amount of remarketing of crap is going to take the stink out of it.

To be fair, the anti-trust division of Obama's DOJ is stepping up their efforts. As opposed to doing nothing.

The problem for "conservatives" is that so-called "conservatism" in America today is a fake, phony, trumped-up, scripted, teleprompted, corporate-sponsored pseudo-ideology, manufactured by propagandists for America's corporate oligarchy for the purpose of bamboozling the American people into supporting the corporations' class warfare against everyone else.

The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and the rest of their ilk are not actually "think tanks". They are corporate propaganda mills, who are paid by huge, ultra-rich corporations to deceive and mislead the American people. They aren't promoting any principled ideology, they are promoting corporate interests, with lies.

That's why it is "conservative" to deny the scientific reality of global warming. That's why it is "conservative" to deny that smoking tobacco causes cancer.

Because "conservatism" is about using talk radio and other top-down, centrally-controlled broadcast media to create a zombie army of mental slaves who will do whatever they are told, and say whatever they are told to say, and believe whatever they are told to believe -- as long is it is branded "conservative".

And who will, most importantly, blame all of their problems and fears on "liberals".

Indeed, for the typical Ditto-Head "conservative", other than slavish adherence to right-wing articles of faith (e.g. global warming is a hoax), "conservatism" has little actual content other than hatred of "liberals".

The problem for "conservatives" is that they really have nothing to offer but corporate bootlicking propaganda, malicious lies, and hate.

And while there is and will always be an audience for that, what we seem to be seeing nowadays is that that audience is limited.

I suspect the answer is that leading conservatives like Holtz-Eakin have noticed that outfits like Heritage and AEI are slow, narrowly focused, hopelessly confused, wedded to outdated ideas, lacking in creativity, and fundamentally unserious about public policy.

The "conservative" think tanks were politically engaged from the start. Their luxurious funding guaranteed that they would also be havens for the nation's intellectual dead wood. Their purpose was and is to disable and dismantle the social safety net, which the rich regard as an insupportable drain on their ability to suck every last dime, every last resource, and every last hour of labor out of the rest of the world.

This impulse to kill the golden goose has plagued every miser: the concentration of wealth, carried to its logical extreme, is unsustainable. Any think tank organized to defend the right of the rich to refuse to consider the fate of the rest of the world is intellectually bankrupt from the start. It's a group of intellectually neutered, ethically bought and paid for, spiritually damned actors attempting to dominate the political stage by spending and pretending that greed is not destructive and reprehensible.

Every think tank they build, every new brand they launch, will be hollow, populated by miseducated, overpaid, overprivileged, underequipped, overwrought poseurs who are defenseless against reality and rigorous analysis.

Why create yet another think tank for the right? ... [T]he answer is that leading conservatives like Holtz-Eakin have noticed that outfits like Heritage and AEI have already picked their top players, so there'll be a much better shot at the wild, WILD, wingnut welfare checks on an expansion team.

Fixed.

The only way that Republicans can make a comeback is if they break the chains that enslave them to corporations and the Religious Right.

The purpose of the Center for American Progress is to offer progressive solutions to the problems facing the American people. The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute have evolved to focus almost exclusively on proposals that will increase the profits of their corporate sponsors -- often at the expense of the American peolpe.

Take the debate on health care. The American people want their elected representatives to offer solutions to the structural problems in the current health care system that makes health care inaccessible, too expensive, impossibly complicated, and poor quality. Republicans are limited to offering only those "solutions" that don't cut the profits of their corporate masters. Inevitably they will lose the debate as pressure to do something builds to the breaking point.

Likewise, the Religious Right permits no compromise on the issues it deems most important. Democrats will, reluctantly, accept compromises like "civil unions" as incremental steps toward full civil rights for GLBT citizens. Republicans are purged if they make the slightest move toward compromise. In fact, when you hear the Religious Right talk, they want to take the country backwards and return to the days when "sodomy" was a crime.

It's going to take a new generation of Republican leaders -- one that didn't come of age blindly following corporate and theocratic dogma -- to recognize how their party was lead off a cliff.

This strikes me as sublimely ridiculous on its face. The difference is that CAP is made of people who still value fact. The GOP has painted itself into a fact-free corner, and thus cannot do anything better than their existing Heritage Foundation, proud daily sponsors of the Sean Hannity (Radio) Show.

It would take an advertising scheme of monumental proportions to create a wingnut organization that anyone in their right mind would want to be associated with, at this point. (And don't think ad agencies everywhere, and Hollywood thinktanks--you remember, Frank Luntz made much ado about launching his second career in Hollywood--aren't working on it right now.)

...um, as Steve wrote in the post immediately below, the one I hadn't read before the above post, re: Luntz...

Conservatives don't need a better infrastructure to push their ideas -- they need better ideas.

Part of the reason Republicans have always been able to punch above their weight is that their infrastructure - at least within the Beltway - has been pretty good, and more importantly, plentiful. But the gap between the beliefs of the nation's citizens and the ideology of the right has now gotten too big to bridge with mounds of bullsh*t. The Republicans will have to change (barring some massive exogenous event in their favor) to get elected outside the South.

"I suspect the answer is that leading conservatives like Holtz-Eakin have noticed that outfits like Heritage and AEI are slow, narrowly focused, hopelessly confused, wedded to outdated ideas, lacking in creativity, and fundamentally unserious about public policy"

If that's the case why do you spend every day devoting nearly every blog post to the talking point issued by these think tanks?

Much of the right wing's development of their think tank system stemmed from the hatred of the left by William Simon, Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury. Simon despised the partisan attacks on Nixon in Watergate. So, he spent a great fortune funding right wing tanks to take no prisoners.

Perhaps Holtz-Eakin can emulate Simon in throwing buckets of cold water over his children's heads to awaken and toughen them. Makes better soldiers of zealotry. Say what you will about the fossilzation of the right wing tanks, but AEI had the clout to get Cheney's speech live on cable networks. The media still loves to put far more of their "experts" on the air, than any from the left.

I have always felt that the Republican party is the party of rich, racist old white men. I am beginning to think I was right.

This is something I was thinking about a few weeks ago. As I see it, the biggest problem for "conservatives" is that they really are not conservative . . . they are authoritarian.

This means that the leaders tend to believe in top-down planning and control, of course, but -- more importantly -- their authoritarian followers like recognizing authority and top-down planning as well.

A great deal of psychological literature has been created looking at the "authoritarian follower" mindset, starting in the 50's -- psychologists wanted to know what were the traits that could lead to such massive movements as fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

What they found was that authoritarian followers like to identify themselves with whoever happens to be in charge and with whatever power structure currently exists. They believe in "unity," and in working one's way up through the power structure by supporting it slavishly and devoting themselves to its protection. The power structure is perceived to be the only legitimate force out there, and anything that challenges it is therefore necessary bad or, even, evil.

This, of course, lends itself to a top-down organization.

Now, for most of human history, the only way to efficiently mobilize large numbers of people was to implement centrally controlled, top-down organization. The "friction costs" of organzing were too great for people to spontaneously come together to get things done. One always needed to have a central planning committee and game plan in place in order to get a large group to do anything.

And, since this is all then-existing technology offered, those people naturally inclined to gravitate to such organizations -- i.e., authoritarians -- had a certain natural advantage in their organization.

The problem, of course, is that placing all the control in the hands of a few people means that the organization is incapable of responding quickly and adequately to situations that the few people in charge either don't see or misapprehend. The USSR's economic top-down economic policies were obviously much less adept at responding to the intricacies of real-world economic events than the much more loosely controlled capitalist societies of the West.

But, politically, that has been changed by the vast rise in the internet and other communication technologies. Now it really is possible for vast amounts of people to come together in a single forum, argue, debate, change ideas, and move a political party forward at the grassroots level without the necessity for central planning and top-down organization. DailyKos, the HuffPost, MoveOn, etc., etc. are great examples of people-powered organization having a direct impact on a national party and the candidates that party will run . . . and win.

So, the more fundamental problem for these people who call themselves "conservatives" is that -- while the technology exists to allow them to do what the progressives have been doing -- it may be entirely unlikely that they ever will take advantage of that technology to do so. Because these people are really Authoritarians, and their strong inclination is to join an existing power structure, support it, and take orders/instructions/talking points from it.

I think that the current group of Republicans (leaders and, more importantly, voters) are inherently incapable of engaging in the grassroot, people-powered spontaneous organizing that has been seen on the left for the past 10 years.

And, by the way, Hallelujah for that!

If that's the case why do you spend every day devoting nearly every blog post to the talking point issued by these think tanks?

Because you cannot counter talking points without an understanding of what drove it, why it is incorrect and what is correct.

And I agree with all the others; how do you market ideas which do not exist?

If that's the case why do you spend every day devoting nearly every blog post to the talking point issued by these think tanks?

And if you actually believe your own bs, why do you keep coming back here every day to bitch about it--as opposed to, say, using google, like most other sensible people who actually have a life, and finding a blog that meets your high-minded standards?
Oh, right, then you wouldn't be able to bitch here every day like a two year old.

I think we're missing the point on this. My guess is that he wants to expand the wingnut welfare state to accommodate all of out of work hacks who have no prospect of gainful employment in the foreseeable future. This isn't about ideas this is about maintaining feeding the movement's troops.

They already tried their conservative "Daily Show" on Fox. See how well that turned out?

Don't they think they already have their own "Daily Show"? It's called the "Colbert Report."

Making a new conservative think tank without any genuinely new ideas is just putting lipstick on a pig. (...)

There must be a whole new generation of no-talent conservative youth who need a job that pays a lot without much real work, however, so that's probably why they want one.

Better than having Junior hanging around the house all summer begging for the keys to the Porsche all the time, right?

The left has always had mainstream media, the big gorilla.

Let's make reporters declare their politics and get this BS over forever. Stop denying that mainsteam "news" is anything more than leftwing propaganda. Polls always indicate Washington reporters are 90+% liberal Democrats.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19113485

"MSNBC.com identified 143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 16 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties."

OK Luther, so where are the Fox News people and a majority of their "guests" putting their campaign contributions???
The MSM bias is a corporate bias -- it sways towards where the money is which is somewhere between pro-business and sensationalism. It has little to do with actual news.
I can't see what is to be gained by the conservatives setting up more of the same "thimk" tanks etc with names that sound progressive unless it's to provide more jobs to middle-aged white guys.
Kinda reminds me of a particular grocery chain that used to rinse old chicken with bleach...