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South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint left the U.S. Senate this month to become the new president of the Heritage Foundation, once the nation's leading conservative think tank, where he intends to "launch a conservative revival." And what might that entail? DeMint has an op-ed in the Washington Post today that appears intended to present a vision for the future.
For the record, I'd love to see a revival of conservative intellectualism. For that matter, I strongly believe the political world would benefit greatly if the right's think tanks returned to focusing on policy and problem solving, with a renewed interest in intellectual vigor and substance.
And yet, the new head of the Heritage Foundation still seems woefully unprepared for the task ahead. DeMint Post piece argues that President Obama "took away the work requirements" in welfare law -- good lord, do we really have to correct this lie again? -- before laying out a plan for Heritage's future.
The election taught conservatives that we can no longer entrust political parties to carry our message.
We must take our case to the people ourselves, and we must start where all good marketing starts: with research. Conservative policies have proved their worth time and time again. If we're not communicating in a way that makes that clear, we are doing a disservice to our fellow citizens. We need to test the market and our message to communicate more effectively.
That's why Heritage will start this year to help the conservative movement understand how Americans from all walks of life perceive public policy issues and how to communicate conservative ideas and solutions.
DeMint and I seem to understand the meaning of "research" quite differently.
When I think of an organization, ostensibly focused on public policy, conducting "research," I think of experts, scholars, and all-around wonks looking at a challenge from different angles, and relying on rigorous academic study to better understand the nature of a problem and how to solve it.
DeMint believes "research" is about, in his words, "good marketing." The Heritage Foundation doesn't intend to focus on policy; it intends to focus on "messaging" and "communicating."
The goal isn't to publish scholarship, it's to provide talking points that have been carefully tested for their persuasive efficacy. DeMint doesn't intend to lead a think tank; he intends to use his think tank to become a message strategist for like-minded politicians.
And while this is a rather pathetic goal for a once-serious research organization, also note the extent to which DeMint buys into the notion that Republicans are in great shape -- they just aren't using the right words. There's a lot of this going around, but it's misguided.
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Okay, I'll bite. "Conservative intellectualism" is an oxymoron (at least for the last few decades).
And "Conservative policies have proved their worth time and time again" is the opposite of the truth and that's why they didn't do well this past election.
For a conservative to be an "intellectual", he would have to have a brain. DeMented is proof of what ten generations of Southern "inbreeding" does to that particular organ - atrophies it to the point on virtual non-existence.
There's no "There" there.
Actually, conservative intellectualism has always been an oxymoron. Not just for the last 3 decades.
Conservative intellectualism today is characterized by redefining and distorting American values. It starts with terms like "fair and balanced" which means just the opposite, but is repeated so often, that some believe it means what it has traditionally meant. "Freedom of speech" is another distorted value. It means that FoxNews can censor the President and not broadcast his speeches until they have had an opporturnity to edit his words. It means that hate speech is protected as free speech.
So many terms have been redefined. Even "conservative" which used to mean that, for example, the environment needed to be protected, but now it means exploiting the environment with fracking and harvesting the national forests.
I am sure that "conservative intellectualism" that DeMint will continue the Glenn Beck "anti-intellectual" redefinition process.
How many terms can you identify that have been redefined by the conservatives?
DWIA made a very cogent comment. Even the dean of American conservatism, William F. Buckley, didn't make very much sense when he opened his mouth. I saw him in action twice, once in a debate on feminism where his team, which included Adriana Huffington, got new distal digestive orifices ripped in them, and once in a panel discussion on TV where not even the other right wingers paid any attention to anything he said because none of it was relevant to the topic under discussion.
More like a stink tank, not a think tank
I can see the research questions now:
What word are you offended by more? Brown or white?
Of course we all know that brown will be more offensive.
So DeMint tells his minions, if we want to go negative we use the word brown, if we want to go positive, we use the word white.
I didn't intend for the above to infer race.
As opposed to "You identify yourself as a conservative. What do you think are the 10 most important things to the conservative movement in this country?"
DeMint doesn't want to LEARN, he wants to SELL.
Now seems like a good time to reflect that while Jim DeMint licked his chops over the prospect of bringing a Waterloo to the Prez on healthcare reform in 2009, the Prez still has his job, and it's Jim DeMint who's out of Congress.
They've learned nothing.
From the Unabridged Dictionary of Reich Wing Speak...
Research: An exercise involving reputed intellectuals to provide a justification for demolishing the social safety net while providing a set of talking points that will confuse the sheeple into agreeing and will continue to get the corporately owned media providing he said/he said/both sides do it coverage.
Apparently Mr. DeMint believe$ that bull$hit is not bull$hit when $pelled with a dollar $ign.
The work requirement lie again...
Is there a preset number of times people have to correct a lie before the Right accepts it and won't use it again?
Will we have to note in 2016 that you don't need 5 cents worth of nickel to make a nickel because the lie has not reached its set amount before the Right gets it.
So far they are still using every lie they ever came up with - hell, Colonel Step'n Fetchit even revived McCarthy's lie about the number of Communists in the Democratic Party. Given that DeMented still believes the political lies of his political great-great-greart-grandfather, Alexander Stephens, Traitor #2 of the Confederacy, back in 1861, you can see they never learn anything.
Framing the issues has been a republican specialty for years and it's one reason the far right has gotten as far as it has. Their frames became gospel (literally) in the minds of a lot of working people.
Another ruse they use is projection, a/k/a, pot calling the kettle black. The minds that devised the tactics were pretty sharp, maybe, but the ones who were put in charge of implementing them are appallingly dense.
The research he refers to is market research, specifically, finding the words and ways to explain failed policies so that people will like them again.
ie. Frank Luntz
Egg-zactly. Somehow, though, I don't expect the market research to be any better than their policy research. Witness all the radically wrong polling they did before the election.
"...DeMint buys into the notion that Republicans are in great shape -- they just aren't using the right words."
That's pretty much the problem in a nutshell with conservative thinking. I've used this analogy before, but when I was younger I tried my hand at standup comedy (Admission - I sucked more often than not). I'd go to open mic nights, and I'd see the same comics, week after week, telling the same jokes, often to the same crowds, but expecting different responses. They thought they were workshopping their material, and sometimes they were taking something and making it better. But more often than not, they were just telling the same story am ever-so-slightly different way, in the hopes that that week, the audience would respond more favorably. And if they did, that's the way they did it from then on, and if the crowd didn't respond as well the next week, they were stupefied. Because...it worked just last week! They laughed then, why aren't they laughing now? Maybe if I put more emphasis on THIS word instead of THAT word, it'll be funny again.
Insanity may be doing the exact same thing over and over expecting a different result, but there's something to be said to near-insanity being defined as doing almost the exact same thing over and over again expecting a different result.
It's the same deal, except with the current crop of conservative pundits, it may actually be funnier than those open mic nights. It's not what they're saying, it's how they're saying it. "OK, we on the right can all agree that a woman who is legitimately raped can't get pregnant. Now how can we explain it to the pro-choice nutjobs so that 'THEY' GET IT?"
"OK, I think we all know that the majority of people who voted for Obama are freeloaders who wanted free stuff. How do we explain this to the people who have jobs and pay taxes but voted for Obama so 'THEY' GET IT?"
"Everyone wants to be Christian. Why can't the non-Christian Americans accept this and join us? Or at least get shut up while we advocate prayer to the Christian God in school?"
"Global warming is a hoax, evolution is a myth, unionization is socialism, any gun control is fascism. Why don't 'THEY' GET IT?!?!?! Maybe if we shout it loud enough, we'll seem less crazy!"
A good start would be to conduct a study on how utterly ridiculous a man looks with a craggy old face and black hair.
Oh, gawd, here we go again...
Absolutely, DeMint is the New and Improved Conservative Thinker. How many times has some late-stage old dog conservative had the Grand Epiphany of turning over a new leaf for US politics, resulting in a New and Improved Conservative Message. The conservative movement then embraces same with raptured faces and no memory of the fact that the new message is just the old message with shiny new buzzwords.
No, now that DeMint is in charge, this time it'll all be different. He'll put Heritage money, better spent elsewhere, to use on research and polls and discussions, and carefully compile it until in the end, like after-election questions, it'll all be diluted into uselessness.
Heritage has no understanding of public perception, they'll looking for a new way to package their wants. That's all they care about, that's all Congress Republicans care about, that's all Mitt Whats-His-Name cared about, and that's what DeMint will promote, neatly labeled as "Perceptions of the American People".
Please let the real public whistle the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again"...
The Republican Doctrine : When All Else Fails, RUN!
What
GoebbelsDemint is telling the world is that Heritage is now going to be even more of the right's Ministry of Truth. More than it already was, that is.More communication about The Conservative Movement and the envisioned end result could dramatically backfire. The more people that understand it, the more Democrat voters there are.
If Jim DeMint is going to run Heritage, then by law, I think they should have to describe themselves as a Crazy Tank. :)
I remember a piece by David Frum about his time at Heritage. He was explaining to Ed Fuelner that he was late with a report he was assigned because he needed to do a bit more research before he could write his conclusions. He was told -- I won't put quite around it because I don't remember it verbatim -- but something along the lines of, David, here at Heritage we write our conclusions first, then we do our research. Heritage, of course, is and always has been, a propaganda mill not a research institution. What frosts my ass is that you and I are subsidizing this phony research with its tax exemption.
Ideological inbreeding begets intellectual deficiencies.
Steve,
I first heard the "taking the 'think out of think tank' line on one of the Sunday shows, and I believe it was Carville who coined it. Just saying...
The observation that the Heritage Foundation has changed from an actual think tank to a public relations organization is a bit late. This happened decades ago, practically as soon as it attracted national attention.