More on the Party of No Ideas

by: Carnacki

Tue Dec 22, 2009 at 10:55:43 AM EST

Remember the post the other day how the West Virginia Republican "thinktank" blog hadn't had a post up in months? it is not just West Virginia Republicans bereft of any ideas. It's a major problem for the Republican Party nationally.

Does the Republican Party have any ideas? The query may have a familiar ring. Five years ago, the question of substance was demanded incessantly of the Democrats. Indeed, in one of those intellectual fads that periodically sweep through Washington, the political class became obsessed with the notion that conservatives had unambiguously won what everybody was calling "the war of ideas."

The notion was everywhere. The right gloated. ("Conservative thought," boasted right-wing foundation maven James Piereson, "has seized the initiative in the world of ideas.") Republicans scolded the opposition. (President Bush chastised Democrats in Congress: "[I]f they have no ideas or policies except obstruction, they should step aside and let others lead.") And Democrats internalized the accusation. ("It makes me realize," observed labor leader Andrew Stern in 2005, "how vibrant the Republicans are in creating twenty-first-century ideas, and how sad it is that we're defending sixty-year-old ideas.")

We don't need the benefit of hindsight to grasp how silly it was to claim that the Bush-era Republican Party had risen to power on the crest of policy ideas whose time had come, or that the Democratic Party lacked an agenda of its own. The taunts about Democrats' lacking ideas was less a serious analysis than an attempt to bully the party into cooperating with Bush's plan to gradually privatize Social Security. (Click here to read about the history of conservatives opposing insane progressive ideas, such as women's suffrage and child labor laws.) [1]

The obstructionist Party of No is also the Party of No Ideas.