One much quoted bit has it that:
My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, 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.I agree with much of what Posner has to say but think he also confuses some issues due to a lack of careful definition of terms and a failure to attend properly to intellectual history. The post-war right in the United States combined social conservatives with economic liberals (in the classical sense of the term). Contra Posner's post, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and George Stigler were never conservatives in any meaningful sense, they were classical liberals or libertarians. Hayek even penned a chapter in his book the Constitution of Liberty entitled "Why I am Not a Conservative". These two socially, intellectually and culturally disparate groups were united by two things: the battle against communism and the fact that, unless they combined in a tactical alliance, they could not possibly make any headway against the then-hegemonic force of what I like to call the establishment left.
The establishment left gradually lost its influence for the reasons outlined in Posner's post. Communism passed into the dustbin of history during the Bush I administration (despite his best efforts to prop it up in the name of stability). Since that time, the anti-communist coalition has come undone, as there is nothing to keep it together. Economic liberals have either had to suck it up, as some Chicago economists did by serving in the decidedly anti-intellectual Bush II administration, or retreat to more academic pursuits.
Because economic liberals made up much of the intellectual heft of the old anti-communist coalition, with Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley as notable exceptions, their departure or retreat into more academic pursuits has left a real void, though one that I think Posner somewhat overstates by neglecting, for example, his Chicago law school colleague Richard Epstein, economist-blogger Tyler Cowen and so on. I think Posner also forgets that the social conservatives have always been deeply populist and anti-intellectual. William Jennings Bryan had many (many) more followers than Russell Kirk ever had readers, as did Father Coughlin. Social conservatives, and populists more broadly, have also always been deeply suspicious of aspects of economic liberalism, as was illustrated in the recent failed presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee.
What will happen now is indeed an interesting question. There remain plenty of economic liberals. Many hang out with the democrats because they cannot abide the social conservatives who now dominate the republican party. The US political system militates strongly against third parties and, in any case, there will never be enough thoroughgoing liberals to allow the electoral success of even a moderate version of the liberatarian party. At the same time, the current democrat coalition is riven by contradictions between working class, socially conservative and economically illiterate but pro-growth rust belt voters and socially liberal, anti-growth, "new class" coastal voters. Is it a stable coaltion? For now it is as they party together in a collective spending binge but probably not for the long term.
We live in interesting times indeed.
