Leave it to the New York Times to clue me in on an ongoing debate within the conservative movement. Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute kicked off the debate, arguing that an "epistemic closure" has creeped into the conservative movement. This means something to the effect that the creation of parallel information outlets to the mainstream media has proliferated factually suspect but ideologically convienient beliefs among conservatives.

I prefer my term "intellectual moron"--it rolls off the tongue better than "epistemic closure"--but I guess Sanchez's argument calls for a hifalutin rather than a populist term. That said, I agree with Sanchez's general point (which in fairness seems related to, rather than the same, as the pod-people point I made in Intellectual Morons). His point is not wrong but late--Austin Bramwell and others made this point during the Bush Administration, when the problem was actually worse. The chain of falsehoods embraced by talk radio, the blogosphere, and talking heads to rationalize the unprovoked invasion of Iraq was the moment when the phenomenon became real to me. Even after the Bush administration cried uncle on WMD, their votaries refused to give up the ghost. Alas, better late than never on recognizing a pernicious trend.

Milton Friedman, Russell Kirk, and William F. Buckley are dead, and it seems next to impossible for anyone of their intellectual gravitas to get heard without undermining their intellectual gravitas. I can't picture Kirk tweeting. I can't picture rising conservatives reading Kirk's The Conservative Mind. Blame txtng, television's omnipresence, the marginalization of books, etc. If you must blame conservatives for this, blame them for not "standing athwart history yelling stop."

Ironically, the most insightful observation in the Times piece on "epistemic closure" comes from David Frum, a man who I have criticized before and who was a prominent sufferer of "epistemic closure" during the Iraq debate. [Correction: Actually, the quote comes from a friend of Frum's] Conservative intellectuals are "the ones who are supposed to uphold intellectual standards, to sift actual facts from what you call 'pretend information,'" Frum explains. "Rush Limbaugh isn't any worse than he was 20 years ago. But 20 years ago, conservatism offered something more than Rush Limbaugh. Since then, the conservative elite has collapsed. Blame them, not talk radio." I like Limbaugh, but I think it reveals the decline of the movement that the perception of the talk radio king has gone from from popularizer to intellectual. In the former role, there is no better; in the latter, iceberg ahead!

The obvious retort to all this is that from muttering nonsense about how 1 in 4 women are raped to embracing kooks who allege Bush knew of 9/11 in advance, the epistemic closure on the Left has always been exponentially worse. Point granted. But since when did conservatives hold liberals up as a standard? We are supposed to be the independent thinkers, not the drones. Unfortunately, in taking the necessary step of setting up alternative outlets to the mainstream media, those outlets have often become negative images of the mainstream media. "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster," Nietzsche observed. "And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." Has this, to some extent, taken place within movement conservatism?

There is a place in a conservative movement for talk radio hosts, bloggers, and talking heads. Having played all of those roles, I would be a hypocrite, and a snob, to exclude them. But that place isn't to smother, or crowd out, conservatives who prefer original ideas to slogans, principle to party, and substance to style. In too many instances, this has happened over the course of the last decade.

It simply isn't true that the Left is effected to the same degree as the Right by epistemic closure.
http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2010/04/26/untethered/

Can anyone deny that the most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama today comes not from the right but from the left? Rachel Maddow’s grilling of administration economic officials. Keith Olbermann’s hectoring of Democratic leaders on the public option. Glenn Greenwald’s criticisms of Elena Kagan. Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn’s keepin’-them-honest perspectives on health care. The civil libertarian left on detainees and Gitmo. The Huffington Post on derivatives.

I want to find Republicans to take seriously, but it is hard. Not because they don’t exist — serious Republicans — but because, as Sanchez and others seem to recognize, they are marginalized, even self-marginalizing, and the base itself seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking. ~Marc Ambinder

Even within this recent blogosphere debate on epistemic closure we saw one bold person at NR take on Mark Levin and be roundly denounced by everyone else, including Mark Levin whose comments were pathetically made available on NR's The Corner as if he didn't have enough outlets for his comments already.

Keep posting stuff like this i really like it

There was no unprovoked attack on Saddam Hussein's Iraq. There were nineteen disregarded UN Resolutions to disarm and to PROVE that they disarmed. There was an assassanation attempt on President Bush Senior.

Furthemore, 500 WMDs have been found in Iraq. I know that you are aware of this because you blogged about them, dismissing them as inconsequential. Nonsense. 500 is not zero.

I really liked your books, Dan. But you are wrong about a great many things.

What were found were 500 weapons munitions containing mustard or sarin gas.

Artillery shell loaded with mustard and sarin. That is not what we were told we were going to war for. Nor we were told we were going to war to uphold UN Resolutions.

If violating UN resolutions and possessing unregistered weapons were grounds for war, we'd have a better reason to attack Israel than Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Which is not at all what I am suggesting, but it merely demonstrates the absurdity of the principle. The casus belli was an imminent danger of international terrorist organizations being equipped with WMDs (specifically, the phantom menace of them getting their hands on a nuclear warhead) courtesy of Saddam Hussein. There was never nearly enough evidence of such a threat to justify the massive effort we went to to remove Hussein from power, and to which we have gone since then to stabilize Iraq.

The real reason for attacking Iraq was a belief among the foreign policy thinkers in the Bush administration that a US-occupied Iraq would increase our strength in the region. Perhaps that is the case, it is still too early to say; either way, the case presented to the American people for invasion was a dishonest one, and I very much doubt the American people would have been willing to sacrifice the blood and treasure which we have and continue to sacrifice for the chance - impossible to calculate in advance - that we'll be in a stronger strategic position without Saddam Hussein in power.

What a great resource!

Are there really idiots out there who still believe that Saddam had no WMD? I thought these were limited to academia and the Kos Kiddies.

Once again, found in Iraq were 500 artillery shells loaded with mustard and serin gas.

There was found no ongoing WMD program, no necessary infrastructure to produce or deploy new WMDs, and no evidence of any channel by which Saddam Hussein's government would have transferred any WMDs to any international terrorist organization.