\n\n\n" }We tend to think of the conservative influence in purely political terms: electing Ronald Reagan in 1980, picking away at Social Security, reducing taxes for the wealthy. But one of the movement\u00e2\u0080\u0099s most lasting successes has been in developing a common intellectual heritage. Any self-respecting young conservative knows the names you\u00e2\u0080\u0099re supposed to spout: Hayek, Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Albert Jay Nock. There are some older thinkers too--Edmund Burke, for instance--but for the most part the favored thinkers come out of the movement\u00e2\u0080\u0099s mid-20th century origins in opposition to Soviet communism and the New Deal.
\nLiberals, by contrast, have been moving in the other direction over the last half-century, abandoning the idea that ideas can be powerful political tools.\u00c2\u00a0 This may seem like a strange statement at a moment when American universities are widely understood to be bastions of liberalism, and when liberals themselves are often derided as eggheaded elites. But there is a difference between policy smarts honed in college classrooms and the kind of intellectual conversation that keeps a movement together. What conservatives have developed is what the left used to describe as a \u00e2\u0080\u009cmovement culture\u00e2\u0080\u009d: a shared set of ideas and texts that bind activists together in common cause. Liberals, take note.
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