Daily Kos on the 'Rift on the Right'

Matt Lewis | October 15, 2008 1:58 PM

Markos Moulitsas and I obviously don't agree on political philosophy. But when it comes to fighting defeatist moderates in one's own party, who knows better than Kos?

Today, he has a smart post titled, "Getting invited to all the cool shows and parties." In my estimation, this post does a very good job of making the argument in favor of conservatives vs. the elite conservative media establishment (Brooks, Noonan, Christopher Buckley, et al.).

Here are a few key excerpts:

"NYC and DC sports a cocktail party circuit, and remaining in its good graces requires toeing the line of David Broder and Joe Klein. It doesn't mean "living the life of Hollywood starlets", it means being an accepted member of an elite self-reinforcing social set."

He then compared what conservative pundits living in DC or NY face today (regarding the pressure to conform to the establishment), compared to what he encountered in the past:

"Five years, awkwardly attending one of those parties in DC, I heard influential Democrats tell each other how Howard Dean could never win because "he was too liberal". And then in early 2005 I heard how letting Dean pilot the DNC would spell doom for the party, a surrender to "left-wing activists". And then I stopped going to those damn parties, which was easy since I'm anti-social anyway."

"Today, the establishment conventional wisdom is that Palin is a cancer on the Republican Party, and that CW is getting circulated at those cocktail parties, reinforced time and time again. And if those social-climbing pundits and establishment types want to keep their social graces, they must play along. Thus you see a rift forming on the Right -- between dogmatic conservatives and the establishment types. In this case it's the establishment that is right, not the ideologues, but that's beside the point. Fact is, we're starting to see the kind of insider-outsider fissures that were much more common on the Democratic side during the rise of the new progressive movement six years ago."