1. This is a fair request. Never Trumpers, like moderate Republicans, can exaggerate the greatness and goodness of the bygone conservative movement/GOP when contrasting the past with the present shambles.
2. Many do concede that the current D'Souza/Trump variety of populism has a long history on the right, even if it hasn't always defined it. I wrote about that here: politico.com/magazine/story…
3. But it's a bad-faith assertion (at best) to claim that Newt Gingrich and Dinesh D'Souza were the "great conservative 'intellectual[s] of the early 1990s." Absolutely no one would have said that at the time.
4. Gingrich was interested in ideas; it was part of his appeal. But mostly he channeled techno-futurists like Alvin and Heidi Toffler: newrepublic.com/article/97536/…
5. The moderates who helped elevate Gingrich to whip and then speaker knew he was not an intellectual but a weapon. His scorched-earth attack on Congress was a regrettable but necessary means to end the 40-year GOP minority: nytimes.com/2013/10/04/opi…
6. What kind of leader do you imagine the Democrats will turn to if their current 8-year stint in the House minority extends for another three decades?
7. From what I remember of the culture wars of the late '80s and early '90s, most conservatives I knew viewed D'Souza as a slippery but useful polemicist. He wrote "Illiberal Education" because the universities' drift toward PC presented a big, inviting target.
8. Even at the time, though, the leading critiques of higher ed from the right came from the likes of Jacques Barzun, John Searle, Diane Ravitch, Alvin Kernan, Frank Kermode, Roger Kimball, Charlie Sykes, Gertrude Himmelfarb, William Bennett, and especially Allan Bloom.
9. C. Vann Woodward's defense of "Illiberal Education" sprang from genuine concern about free speech on campus. If you think today's campuses are meccas of intellectual diversity and free and open exchange, we must agree to disagree.
10. It's grossly misleading to reduce conservative intellectualism of that era to D'Souza and Gingrich while ignoring the output of Christopher Lasch, Roger Scruton, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, Eugene Genovese, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, Shelby Steele, Robert Hughes...
11. The '90s also brought in new voices on the neoconservative/neoliberal front like Michael Lind, Andrew Sullivan, John McWhorter, Richard Brookhiser, Mickey Kaus, Michael Kelly, William Kristol, John Podhoretz, and of course @davidfrum...
12. Not everything written at the time holds up, of course. Culture wars tend to produce more heat than light. Hyperpartisanship often substituted for analysis. And it's hard to read the '90s neocons now without seeing Iraq disaster looming on the horizon.
13. But the conservatives listed above were for the most part intellectually honest, interested in ideas, out to persuade the unconvinced, and capable of changing their minds in the face of conflicting evidence.
14. For a while, that helped keep opportunists like D'Souza and Ann Coulter in check, much as William F. Buckley had once prevented the likes of Ayn Rand, John Stormer, Pat Buchanan, and Robert Welch from defining the conservative movement.
15. The rise of Fox News, the conservative entertainment complex, and social media would break those restraints and change the incentives. To quote @KevinMattson: "Thinking is out; prejudiced assertions sans proof are in." democracyjournal.org/alcove/the-dem…
16. But honest historians can evaluate the conservative intellectuals of the early '90s (and their arguable responsibility for the current state of the right) on their own terms without recourse to presentism or partisan political allegory: newrepublic.com/article/119361…
17. Of course, when it comes to respectful, informed understanding of the conservative movement and the GOP, there are few such scholars in the current precincts of academe. But that's a whole other discussion. X
