My name is Ozymandireagan...look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Richard Posner, a conservative economist/judge, says that conservatism is an intellectually dead movement. Posner is a big deal (in intellectual circles), since he's one of the few conservatives out there who bothers to explain his positions and ideas to non-conservatives. And he's never said anything like this before, so this is a big deal:

The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the surge of prosperity worldwide that marked the global triumph of capitalism, the essentially conservative policies, especially in economics, of the Clinton administration, and finally the election and early years of the Bush Administration, marked the apogee of the conservative movement.... By the end of the Clinton administration, I was content to celebrate the triumph of conservatism as I understood it, and had no desire for other than incremental changes.... I saw no need for the estate tax to be abolished, marginal personal-income tax rates further reduced, the government shrunk, pragmatism in constitutional law jettisoned in favor of "originalism," the rights of gun owners enlarged, our military posture strengthened, the rise of homosexual rights resisted, or the role of religion in the public sphere expanded. All these became causes embraced by the new conservatism that crested with the reelection of Bush in 2004....

[T]he policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings... weak in conception... failed in execution... political flops.... The major blows to conservatism... have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

Brad DeLong, however, thinks that conservatism has been an intellectual dead letter for a long time now:

Richard Posner sees things wrong with Bush era conservatism:

• fiscal incontinence
• the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect
• cultural-conservative issues ("continued preoccupation with abortion" "religious criteria in the selection of public officials")
• the failure of military force as a first resort in attempting to achieve U.S. foreign-policy objectives

But weren't these also the key components of the Reagan administration. Ronald Reagan was the original fiscal incontinence. And the substitution of will for intellect--was it ever any greater than in the rush to cut taxes to raise revenues, or in Alexander Haig's belief that U.S. national security would be enhanced if the IDF gave the Syrian army a thrashing in Lebanon? We had to rely on the alliance of Nancy Reagan and her astrologer to get a sane policy toward Gorbachev, for God's sake. And cultural conservatives--if I understand Posner, his complaint is that Reagan paid them only lip service and they patiently sat in the back of the bus and were quiet, while Bush, Palin, and Joe the Plumber take them seriously.

And, of course, the piece of Reagan-era conservatism of which Posner was most proud--deregulation and the trimming-back of government--has either turned out to be (a) destructive, or (b) accomplished by Carter and Clinton.

How much intellectual steam did hte conservative movement ever have?

Well, DeLong has some good points (though I'm suspicious of his claim that all Reagan deregulations were destructive, and all good deregulations were Carter/Clinton). But I think he's missing a big point: What's intellectually relevant one day may be irrelevant or even stupid the next.

Example: If tax rates are 80%, cutting taxes is a reasonable idea. So then you cut taxes to 30%. Cutting taxes is no longer a reasonable idea.

Example: If there is a well-armed aggressive USSR actively interfering in the governance of many countries, counter-interference on our part might be a prudent precaution. Without the imminent threat of the USSR, interfering in other countries' regimes seems a lot less prudent.

I could cite other examples, but you get the point. And it is undeniable that, regardless of whether Republican policies actually were wise in the 80s or not, the problems those policies were crafted to address no longer exist. And yet, like a broken record, the conservative movement keeps repeating the same mantras - "cut taxes, deregulate, spend more on defense." Every single attempt to come up with "new ideas" or a "new agenda" for the Republican party falls back on these tired overplayed hits.

This should be deeply disturbing to any thinking person who calls him/herself a conservative. To those people, I say: You are aligning yourself with an army that has no ammo left in its guns. The American right has been reduced to flinging increasingly shrill names at the Democrats and delivering stale hagiographies to a president fewer and fewer people remember. It is not the kind of movement that has any chance of solving the problems America currently faces. Whatever glory it had 29 years ago is gone, gone.