It's hard to forget the dark days directly after the 2004 election, when Democrats, vainly searching for some correctable malfunction they could blame for their loss, decided that they had no ideas, were insufficiently familiarity with the field of cognitive linguistics, and should all convert to Catholicism (or something). A few short years later, it's the Republican movement that's exhausted its intellectual inheritance and now fears a vigorous and vibrant progressive ascendancy. But this question of ideas tends to strike me as a bit off the mark. Ideas, first, should be recast as "solutions." Conservatives like to argue that politics is about ideas, and to them, and many of the people who write about them, it is. But those ideas are politically useless unless they're understood by the electorate as solutions. Solutions, however, require problems. And that's what the GOP is lacking at the moment. The conservative movement has plenty of ideas for a certain universe of problems: Overly high taxes, say, or the need to respond to bluntly assert American power in response to foreign aggression. They have solutions for combatting a culture that's spun out of control and rebalancing a welfare state that's too generous to minorities. They have solutions for restoring order when the law no longer contains the crime.What they're lacking, right now, are the appropriate problems. Because they don't have solutions for 47 million Americans without health insurance. They don't have solutions for a failing invasion that's exposed American power as significantly more constrained that the world imagined it to be. They don't have solutions for high gas prices, or a credit and mortgage crisis, or a dawning recognition that we're ruining the only planet we have. ARE CONSERVATIVES OUT OF IDEAS?
It's hard to forget the dark days directly after the 2004 election, when Democrats, vainly searching for some correctable malfunction they could blame for their loss, decided that they had no ideas, were insufficiently familiarity with the field of cognitive linguistics, and should all convert to Catholicism (or something). A few short years later, it's the Republican movement that's exhausted its intellectual inheritance and now fears a vigorous and vibrant progressive ascendancy. But this question of ideas tends to strike me as a bit off the mark. Ideas, first, should be recast as "solutions." Conservatives like to argue that politics is about ideas, and to them, and many of the people who write about them, it is. But those ideas are politically useless unless they're understood by the electorate as solutions. Solutions, however, require problems. And that's what the GOP is lacking at the moment. The conservative movement has plenty of ideas for a certain universe of problems: Overly high taxes, say, or the need to respond to bluntly assert American power in response to foreign aggression. They have solutions for combatting a culture that's spun out of control and rebalancing a welfare state that's too generous to minorities. They have solutions for restoring order when the law no longer contains the crime.What they're lacking, right now, are the appropriate problems. Because they don't have solutions for 47 million Americans without health insurance. They don't have solutions for a failing invasion that's exposed American power as significantly more constrained that the world imagined it to be. They don't have solutions for high gas prices, or a credit and mortgage crisis, or a dawning recognition that we're ruining the only planet we have. 
