How conservatives think

Celine painted-toe heels, spring 2013. Via.

Something funny from the short-paragraph factory at Heritage Foundation's Daily Dogwhistle, sorry, make that Daily Signal, their would-be counterpart to Think Progress:

War on women. Minimum wage. Climate change.

You hear liberals talking about these same topics all the time. Why?

Kevin Williamson of National Review believes it’s because the left is struggling to deliver new ideas and policies.

“I can’t remember the last time I heard a new idea from the left; they’re intellectually bankrupt,” Williamson told an audience at The Heritage Foundation for an event, “Where is Liberalism Going?”

It doesn't occur to Kevin Williamson that the war on women is still going on, the federal minimum wage hasn't been raised, and the need to deal with climate change is more urgent every day. Or that people, i.e. voters, really want these things fixed, and we keep talking about them because they haven't gone away yet. To him it's more like that stuff is just so last year: Ew, you're still wearing those?

That's because that's how conservatives think about policy initiatives. Conservatives have two kinds of idea-sets, one they can't talk about and one they can: the first is simply to provide whatever their corporate overlords want, a tax break here and a deregulation there, and the second is for whatever they hope to sell to the wider public, supplied in annual spring and fall collections, like the "Room to Grow" show recently rolled out by Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin.

Never mind the fact that there's actually nothing new in such proposals, as everybody has noted from Krugman to Forbes Magazine, just a tweak in the hemlines and some unexpected color combinations. What's really interesting is the nakedness with which they think that way, and can't understand that liberals don't.

Cross-posted at Booman Tribune.