Has that become an oxymoron?

Austin Bramwell, writing in “American Conservative” magazine, rehearses the oft-rehearsed tale of the decline of American liberalism:

Liberalism came of age in the New Deal, which finally succeeded in replacing representative government with a European-style administrative state, staffed by the nation’s ablest, most idealistic men. After World War II, when the national mood no longer favored reform, liberals turned to an even more elite institution�the Supreme Court�to continue remaking American society. For a generation, liberalism so dominated American life that, while conservatives saw conservatism as the taste of a saving remnant, liberals became convinced that their ideology expressed the natural sentiments of the American people.

Intellectual sclerosis, however, soon set in. Second-tier intellects such as Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith took over from Lippmann and Dewey and began to take liberal ideology as a given. They proposed not new ways of understanding the world but new ways of advancing liberalism. In the hour of their triumph, liberals became blind to their own ideological shortcomings, which later became all too manifest.

But what’s interesting this time is that this tale is told to illustrate another one: The intellectual decline of modern American conservatism. To be sure, the evidence is hardly glaring.

We may, on the contrary, be living through the high summer of conservative ideas in America. If in 1950 all the right-wing intellectuals in America could fit into a single living room, today they could fill Madison Square Garden; if in 1950 one could read their combined monthly output in a single sitting, today one could not possibly keep abreast of the voluminous popular and scholarly literature that they produce. From journalism, politics, and law to religion, economics, and international relations, self-identified right-wingers abound.

Even the (mainstream) liberals have grown accustomed to this new force and stopped calling conservatives “the stupid party.”

In the 1990s, Hillary Clinton posited the existence of a “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy,� an epithet become so hackneyed because it is not altogether inaccurate. Today, by contrast, leftists write thoughtful histories of the conservative movement 30 years after William Rusher and George Nash wrote theirs. Even Ronald Reagan has been apotheosized.

In recognition of this trend, the New York Times recently established a conservative beat whereby one reporter, rather than dismiss conservatives as malevolent extremists, tries to discover what they are actually thinking. Like all journalists, to make sense of the blooming, buzzing confusion of the world, he settles on what seems to him the most interesting theory: every disagreement among conservatives augurs the opening of ideological fissures. Hence, the Times regularly treats its readers to stories on conservative debates and suggests that we will see more of them in the future.

The conservative establishment invariably reacts with hoots of derision. Silly Gray Lady, didn’t you know that we have always had debates among ourselves? Then they congratulate themselves for tolerating opposing points of view�unlike those rigid liberals at the Times.

But, according to Bramwell, the conservatives are making a big mistake. As they’ve gained success, they’ve stopped thinking — specifically, they’ve stopped seeking the “Holy Grail,” the object of conservatives in the wilderness years of the 1950s and ’60s — the big proof that liberalism was fundamentally flawed and could be dismissed. Instead, he writes, modern conservatives act and write as though they had the Grail, and overlook the fact that they don’t.

Take, as a case study, libertarianism. Unlike most other right-wingers, libertarians have a distinct idea of what they stand for: less government. They also have, in free-market economics, the Right’s most fruitful research program and, in F.A. Hayek, the only recent right-wing theorist to command serious attention from the Left. What libertarians do not have, however, is a comprehensive argument for their ideology.

Their failure to uncover this argument stems from no lack of trying. Even more than other right-wingers, libertarians love abstract debates over why their views are correct. Richard Epstein, for example, the brilliant libertarian law professor at the University of Chicago, subtitled his latest book, “A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism.� It is his third contribution to the literature of libertarian apologetics, a somewhat occult genre dating back to the 1920s.

To put it bluntly, the genre is a failure. No economic model can prove that government interference in the economy by nature tends to do harm. While economics can show that some government programs will fail�rent control, say, or confiscatory tax rates�it cannot show that all government programs will fail. As for the various moral arguments for libertarianism, they are even weaker. Liberal theorists such as Ronald Dworkin and Amartya Sen have long since shown that libertarians simply fail to grasp the full dimensions of equal liberty, which does not demand, as libertarians would have it, that everyone should be equally free to starve, but that everyone should have a fair chance to pursue his goals freely. This principle may require a more active government than libertarians would allow.