Read Fareed

Fareed Zakaria is a decent columnist, sometimes a little behind the curve, but good at summing up the big trends in ideas and politics.

Which I guess means that description applies to me too, since Fareed and I often write the same things at the same time (difference: he gets paid). So for today's morning article, I encourage you to read Fareed:

Ideas matter, Richard Weaver once wrote, and the Republican Party has become a party bereft of ideas or trapped by the wrong ones. The Reagan-Thatcher revolution of low taxes, deregulation and tight money seems irrelevant to the problems of underregulated financial products, huge deficits and a deepening recession. The Republican Party's social program
is out of tune with an increasingly young, diverse and tolerant electorate. As the conservative writer David Frum points out, "College-educated Americans have come to believe that their money is safe with the Democrats -- but that their values are under threat from Republicans."

Something similar has happened in foreign policy...[T]he vigorous unilateralism openly advocated by the administration is recognized by most Americans to have weakened the country's influence abroad. Its excessive reliance on military force has yielded few results
worth the costs...

Barack Obama keeps being advised (warned) by conservatives to govern from the center. But he should look at this new world, not failed Republican ideology, to find that center.

Yup. The conservative movement has run out of ideas, right as the liberal movement has started to get some.