To everything there is a season, saith the Preacher. And in business too. Dig back into the history of that fine old family firm, the pride of Fifth Avenue, and you’ll find it was once a one-room store, founded by a crusty guy with dirt under his fingernails who saw his chances and took them. If the better sort of people sniffed at his methods, he succeeded where they had failed, and unlike them had a heart as big as a whale. His children, with fancy-pants MBAs, inherited a going concern and were lucky enough to be around for the payoff. But now new challengers, new upstarts, threaten the core business, and of the founder’s grandchildren on Ritalin it is best not to speak.

It’s like that in the world of ideas. Pick any great intellectual movement, one that seems so well-established in the academy, and you’ll find the same cycle of innovation, stasis and decrepitude.

In my area of law-and-economics, we began with a few, brilliant founders, people like George Mason’s Henry Manne, whose originality threatened the comfortably entrenched, and who was ridiculed and scorned as the enemy of every right-thinking person. But Manne refused to back down, and with a few others created a movement that today is represented in all the best law schools. I was part of law-and-econ’s second generation, people who were clever if not brilliant, who simply worked out the implications of insights taken from our elders. Of the future I’d rather not predict.

You’ll find the same kind of creative destruction in the idea factories on the right, in their think tanks and little magazines. The Heritage Foundation lost its president last week, but had lost its intellectual edge years before. Its moment, and that of the other great conservative think tanks, had passed. They had had a few great ideas, back in the day — then became prisoners of their beautiful orthodoxies. But what worked in 1980 no longer worked in 2016, for they missed what had changed in the interim.

That Obama putdown of Mitt Romney could be applied to them: The 1980s were calling and wanted their policies back.

The conservative think tanks ignored this. They told us that they were conservatism’s brains. But the brains had stopped working, and they had become the movement’s stomach. They gorged on the money from conservative donors, as Jeb Bush had, with about the same political impact.

They told the donors they were scholars who would simply sit around and think conservative thoughts. But, as any scholar will tell you, it’s more enjoyable not to think at all. And so the idea factories became the front for their fund-raising operations.

Like generals fighting the last war, these think tanks failed to recognize that an entirely new set of challenges demanded an entirely new set of politics, represented by a President Trump whom they loathed. What they forgot is the Red Queen effect (from “Through the Looking Glass”): When your opponents can react to your ideas, “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

Other think tanks, such as the liberal Brookings Institution, read what the conservatives had written, reacted, and became go-to places for smart ideas. The conservative think tanks didn’t return the compliment, and were left behind.

They’re not alone. Much of yesteryear’s conservatism has been left behind. Do you remember “the libertarian moment”? Always behind the curve, The New York Times discovered it in 2014. It was composed of a set of socially acceptable conservatives who (in the Times’ eyes) were on the right side of history’s arc where it mattered (same-sex marriage, abortion), and whose inconvenient and politically improbable views about the economy could be ignored. Or do you remember the 2013 Republican self-study that told us the path to victory in 2016 required amnesty for illegal immigrants?

They told us to “privatize, privatize, privatize,” and forgot that there are some things governments should do. They ignored the decline of the American Dream, the idea that this is the country where we can all get ahead, and blamed the victims. In their well-paid sinecures, they told us that nothing could be done to help the underclass.

They’ve been superceded by a new set of writers and thinkers. They’re churning conservatism, with new ideas that take on the received wisdom.

And they’re all terrible at raising money from donors.



F.H. Buckley teaches at Scalia Law School. His most recent book is “The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America.”