Reihan has a detailed response to Patrick Ruffini's thought-provoking post on movement conservatism after Bush (which is the continuation of an interesting back-and-forth he's been having with Soren Dayton), so I'll confine myself to addressing this line:
A new conservative movement would, as the gravitational pull of these things go, make the GOP more conservative. And that would mean largely undoing the Bush legacy in domestic policy. A new agenda will not come from the pages of the New York Times or the Atlantic.
Um ... that would be the Atlantic that published James Q. Wilson's "Broken Windows," Dinesh D'Souza's "Illiberal Education," Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's "Dan Quayle Was Right," and Bernard Lewis's "The Roots of Muslim Rage" - to name just a few of what I think could be fairly described as "agenda-setting" pieces for the American Right. Now obviously the Atlantic is not a movement-conservative magazine, and thus it's never going to be the primary place where the Right's internal debates get hashed out. It is, however, a magazine with a long tradition of publishing interesting ideas and arguments from across the political spectrum, and it's a place that has historically been far more hospitable to conservatives than certain other general-interest magazines I can think of. And a conservative movement that writes off the Atlantic - and by extension any non-movement publication - as irrelevant to its agenda is a conservative movement with a serious cocooning problem.
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You're missing the point here Ross. Ruffini isn't saying that the Atlantic is irrelevant to conservatives, or that no important conservative ideas will be expressed in the Atlantic. He's saying that the Atlantic and NYT aren't going to drive a new conservative agenda. The point is actually made quite well by your examples - three of the four were important expressions of conservative ideas, but hardly added new items to the conservative agenda. Its not as though conservatives weren't already concerned with the liberal academy, islamic radicalism or single motherhood before the articles you mentioned were written.
The only piece that INITIATED a piece of the conservative agenda was Wilson's Broken Windows article. And while broken windows policing had very valuable effects, it was never more than a minor issue in the overall conservative agenda, and was entirely consistent with prior conversative views rather than an attempt to change the goals of the movement. Moreover, it wasn't sustained advocacy of the idea by Atlantic/NYT writers or their equivalents that caused conservatives to embrace it, but the early adoption and promotion of the idea by movement conservative institutions, primarily the Manhattan Institute.
So I'd say Ruffini's point holds up pretty well if you don't mistakenly take it as a dig at the Atlantic.
Posted by Alex | May 31, 2007 11:19 AM