Not many liberals listened, and they won four years later when conservatives retreated from sounding a strong message. The conventional wisdom after Obama won the White House was that conservatives should get ready to spend time in the wilderness. To prepare for this camping trip, R. Emmett Tyrrell, the witty and erudite editor of the American Spectator, distributed 400 copies of the L.L. Bean catalogue to guests at his magazine's annual dinner. "Once in the wilderness, I planned to pitch my tent close to that of the comely Gov. Palin," he says. "As it turned out, conservatism's wilderness years only lasted a few months."
Though conservative Republicans didn't need Bob Tyrrell's tents and boots, they could use his more serious advice about how to return to the Promised Land (as Washington imagines it). In his new book, "After the Hangover: The Conservatives' Road to Recovery," he offers scathing criticism of where conservatives have gone wrong, and offers directions for getting it right once more: The "party of ideas" forgot the intellectual foundations of conservatism.
"Whereas in the past conservatism's most prominent voices had been intellectuals," he says, "by the 1990s the intellectuals had been replaced by personalities -- that is to say, outstanding controversialists, often astoundingly vulgar."
He quotes longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer's observation that "every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket."
Many conservatives were eager to join the rackets. They were courted as celebrities and earned huge sums of money running their mouths with clever sound-bites, but lacked a profound grasp of the conservative moment's founding principles of liberty and limited government, the fertile ground for intellectual growth. Intellect that was alive and energetic in other areas of American life, like Silicon Valley, took a sabbatical in politics, and conservatives never created the culture to fight the battle of ideas.
It's too early to tell if the tea party movement can actually spark a renaissance of conservative ideas, but if Jonathan Kahn is more than a passing fancy, the conservative counterculture may have found its Tambourine Man.