I had thought that Matt Lewis’s new book about the conservative Republican future, Too Dumb To Fail, had a title that was accurate but a bit ahead of its time. Then, on the eve of the book’s publication, Sarah Palin endorsed the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, with a rambling “speech” that thoroughly earned a New York Daily News front page headline “I’m With Stupid”. When real life proves your point more than any publicity campaign possibly could, it’s time for concerned conservatives to see what Lewis teaches us.
Lewis argues that the current conservative crisis stems from an intellectual crisis he terms the dumbing down of conservatism. As conservatism has increasingly become less tied to serious intellectual arguments, Lewis contends that it has become defined by its lowest common denominator, anger at the left. This, combined with the rise of an establishment that profits enormously from stoking that anger (he calls it “the Con$ervative Movement”), has created a conservatism that is both unable to argue rather than assert and uninterested in persuading Americans who are not already true believers to join their cause. This has resulted in “a sort of red meat-hurling style” that harms rather than advances the opportunities conservatives have to govern and change America. Moreover, since “the dumbing down of conservatism has (so far) resulted in the worst offenders failing forward,” (i.e., their stature and income grow as they make conservatism less appealing to the broader swath of Americans), “[t]hey are, in essence, too dumb to fail”.
