Look who's winning the battle of ideas.

Friday, April 7, 2006

Ignorance Is Strength: On a grim April day in the opening scene of 1984, Winston Smith looks out his window at a world only slightly more fictional than today's Washington and ponders the meaning of the word "doublethink." George Orwell was worried that totalitarianism would strip political language of all meaning, but he also knew the tendency of every power-hungry party to ignore outdated inconveniences like truth.

After two decades of practice, American conservatives now seem to have the art of cognitive dissonance down to a science. They believe in smaller government, even as they make it bigger. They believe that cutting taxes will balance the budget, even as those tax cuts (once again) send the deficit soaring. They think of conservatism as a font of new ideas, even as they keep making the same mistakes pursuing the same old, tired ones.

In the past year, the Bush administration has shown conservatives the hazards of seeing double: There's a good chance that you will fall flat on your face.

Republicans' 2006 game plan is a masterpiece of doublethink. They want to turn the fall elections into a national referendum on Democrats, but they plan to run the campaign on local issues. They know corruption is their Achilles heel, but they can't bring themselves to pass a real reform bill. They see immigration as the magic bullet that can rally their base in the fall, but now it turns out they were for it before they were against it. They denounce leaks, but from stem to stern, their entire ship seems to be leaking.

Dead or Alive: Whatever happens this fall, conservatives should be concerned that the other side is poised to pass them by in a sector the right has pretended to dominate for decades: ideas.

In the campaign hierarchy, ideas usually rank somewhere in the bottom tier of concerns, behind yard signs and getting enough signatures to be on the ballot. But more often than not, the party with a vibrant intellectual debate has an edge over the stale one. In 1992, Clinton offered a whole book full of new ideas—as did his main Democratic rival, Paul Tsongas, his running mate, Al Gore, and his general election rival, Ross Perot. The only thing Bush 41 read in that campaign was his watch. In 1994, Republicans put out a book of their own and waltzed to victory after Democrats spent the campaign attacking it.

The idea business has gone into a deep recession during the Bush years. The president cast aside the most interesting aspects of compassionate conservatism and had no interest in turning his White House into a hothouse of new thinking. In his second term, Republicans seem spent, intellectually and otherwise.

But the longer the country's problems go unresolved in this administration, the greater the chance that ideas will make a comeback in the next one. The latest hopeful sign appeared this week, as former Clinton Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin and would-have-been Kerry Treasury Secretary Roger Altman announced the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project, an attempt to bring some of the nation's brightest minds to bear on America's long-term economic problems.

The roster for the project's kickoff event looked like an assignment board at Slate.One panel featured Dismal Science regular Austan Goolsbee outlining his plan to eliminate the need to file tax returns and Jurisprudence contributor Robert Gordon explaining how to reward teachers for performance instead of credentials.