"Part of the reason I'm drawn to the center-left blogs, including those cited above, Kevin Drum, Steve Benen, and others despite disagreeing with them while finding it increasingly difficult to find center-right blogs worth my time is that the former are much more likely to get beyond the debates of the 1980 election. There's almost no serious analysis of health care reform, urban planning, education, and many other issues that regularly crop up on the best lefty blogs on their conservative counterparts. If we read about those issues at all, they're framed as if Ronald Reagan were still aspiring to high office: Say No to socialism! Abolish the Department of Education! Government IS the problem!Well said. The Right are busy worrying about Obama being sworn in using a Koran and other non-issues, all the while ignoring Global Climate Change or skyrocketing income inequality. Even worse, claiming they don't exist.
While traditionalist grand theory is still valuable and worth discussion, it doesn't work as a blanket response to micro-level issues. And defining conservatism solely by "What would Reagan do?" is a political non-starter in a world that simply looks much different than in did twenty-eight years ago. It would be as if Reagan constantly droned on about the evils of Harry Truman. Time marches on. Debates must, too, in order to be interesting.
So, where are the right-of-center counterparts to Yglesias, Klein, and company?"
What is comes down to is the Left do not get Talking Points from a central source. The ideas and causes covered are always up for debate, no ideology with a set uniformity and conformity that we all must agree on. It's not a redundant extension of a mass mailing machinery.
That being said, the Right deserves everything they get. The beating they took in the last elections should have rang some bells, but it didn't.
Source: Steve Benen
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