UPDATE. hellslittlestangel asks in comments why Ross Douthat didn't make the cut. It was a near thing, but we were running long. I'll reproduce it here, though:
As it sadly must any time conservatives talk about their future, Ross Douthat stuck in his oar. While admitting "it's true that the G.O.P.'s identity as the party of the wealthy has been quite resilient," he nonetheless believed "a little exit poll data can shed light on why would-be conservative populists, libertarian and otherwise, aren't just dealing in an ahistorical fantasy."
What Douthat noticed was that in Presidential elections between 1988 and 2008, the Democrats gained votes from the rich, and the Republicans lost them. (Douthat discovers inflation only in 2008, which makes his figures especially dramatic.) So Douthat saw where the votes were, and even acknowledged the "substantial question of how a G.O.P. that embraced economic populism would raise enough money to compete with the new Democratic money machine," an insight we thought was beyond him.
But in a follow-up column Douthat brought up the "court party"/"country party" distinction in 18th Century Great Britain, and declared, "there really is a kind of 'court party' in American politics, whose shared interests and assumptions -- interventionist, corporatist, globalist -- have stamped the last two presidencies and shaped just about every major piece of Obama-era legislation... the ruling class -- in Washington, especially -- has grown fat at the expense of the nation it governs." (Douthat was referring here to his previous insight that D.C. was a poor country town until the money started spreading into the black neighborhoods, whereupon it became a nightmare out of Hunger Games.)
Douthat left libertarian populists with this encouragement: "The original 'country party' critique of Robert Walpole's government was powerful, resonant and intellectually influential. But it still wasn't politically successful. Instead, the era as a whole belonged to Walpole and his court -- as this one, to date, belongs to Barack Obama." The message is clear: Find another country to take over and try your new ideas there. We propose Somalia.
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