Frumptious

Everyone is talking about David Frum's missive about the explosion of fringe ideas and candidates in the Republican party, and I suppose it's noteworthy. But I think Frum has actually emphasized the wrong insight, perhaps out of a misreading--intentional or otherwise--of the political history of the current era. Yes, it's true that Republicans have embraced anti-intellectualism, but I don't think this explains it:

Liberals have used their influence in the courts and government bureaucracies to win political victories they never could have won at the ballot box. Conservatives have reacted by turning to populism -- to a defence of the commonsense wisdom of ordinary voters against the pretensions of know-it-alls.

Perhaps? But the origins of conservative populism are much more structural, aren't they? Their party, after all, only became popular again once they had taken it upon themselves to embrace constituencies with conflicting beliefs about the purposes government should serve. When it's your job to spend every day placating both business elites and religious people and racists--to keep the motley crue coalition together--you simply don't have that much to say that makes any intellectual sense. So it's not that Huckabee and Paul have emerged as a result of the conservative allergy to empiricism, but that conservatives had to reject empiricism to appeal to the natural constituents of Huckabee and Paul. And now we're seeing that loose union collapse in slow, but spectacular fashion.