What if they held a war of ideas and nobody came?

It was only two years ago that conservatives, still basking in their triumph over the freshly slain corpse of John Kerry, were insisting near and far that they had triumphed in the War of Ideas. "[T]he plain fact," wrote conservative foundation honcho and current Giuliani adviser James Piereson in 2005, "is that modern conservatives have been engaged with the world of ideas to a far greater extent than most modern liberals."This has become a standard conservative rhetorical trope over the last 25 years. Just as ancient civilizations believed that their success on the battlefield proved that their gods had vanquished those of the enemy, conservatives have attributed their political rise to the power of their philosophical deities. With every Democratic electoral defeat, liberals have been made to endure the added ignominy of listening to every conservative op-ed scribbler and think-tank denizen lecture us on our intellectual deficiencies. These days, of course, the Republican Party has been routed and conservatives are beset by panic and gloom. You'd think this would, at minimum, give us a small respite from boasts about the right's victory in the War of Ideas. But no. They're still at it. The new line, put forward by the likes of Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby and Hoover Institution fellow Peter Berkowitz, is that conservatives are more intellectually serious because they're having deep debates over first principles, while liberals enforce stultifying conformity. As Jacoby puts it, "[T]he right churns with serious disputes over policy and principle, while the left marches mostly in lockstep." Berkowitz bemoans "the absence on the left of debate or dissent," which he attributes in part to liberals being "blinded by rage at the Bush administration." Presumably Iraq, where the right's ideology has collapsed most disastrously, should be a delicate point for conservative intellectual triumphalists. Instead, it's their favorite example. "Democrats today," complains Berkowitz, "are nearly united in the belief that the invasion has been a fiasco and that we must withdraw promptly." Meanwhile, conservatives are fiercely divided. Ergo, the right is "wrestl[ing] with the consequences of change more fully than progressives." As an attempt to make propaganda lemonade out of the lemon of the Iraq war, this is probably about as good as conservatives could hope to do. Since we're likely to be hearing this line repeated for a while--probably until the next GOP electoral triumph, when conservatives can go back to straightforward gloating--it's worth considering a few wee logical flaws. First, it's not true that liberals all agree that "we must withdraw promptly" from Iraq. Some liberals certainly favor this, but others favor partial withdrawal, partitioning Iraq, enforceable benchmarks to pressure Iraq's government, or a myriad of other plans. The notion that all liberals agree about Iraq would come as a surprise to both Carl Levin and the many antiwar protesters seeking to drive him from public office. Second, if memory serves, liberals had a lot of arguments about the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003. Some of them involved me, in fact. I don't recall any conservatives at the time citing these debates as evidence of liberalism's intellectual seriousness. Instead, the right-wing press offered up headlines like "democrats' war in ranks imperils chances in '04" (Washington Times) or "democrats in a time of war: we're looking at another liberal crack-up" (National Review). Meanwhile, pretty much the only conservatives who openly opposed the war were libertarians or Buchananites, who already had the loosest ties with the movement. A handful of conservatives in good standing, such as William F. Buckley and Jeane Kirkpatrick, have recently confessed to harboring doubts about the war all along. But, of course, the fact that they felt obliged to keep their initial misgivings sotto voce hardly speaks well of conservatism's intellectual openness. Third, it's certainly true that conservatives today are more divided than liberals about whether the Iraq war has been a fiasco. I simply disagree about what this fact tells us. Conservatives see their split on this proposition as evidence of intellectual acuity. I see it as evidence that roughly half of all conservatives are barking mad. On last year's National Review cruise, as Johann Hari reported in these pages, Norman Podhoretz called the war "an amazing success" and insisted that "it couldn't have gone better." To believe this, you have to believe it was worth 3,500 American military deaths, many times that number wounded, tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and hundreds of billions of dollars to convert a brutal secular Sunni thugocracy into what may be, in a best-case scenario, a somewhat less brutal, but far more theocratic, Shia thugocracy. Maybe it's the blind Bush hatred talking, but I'm not terribly embarrassed that liberals are united in rejecting this notion. What explains the right's insufferable need to declare philosophical victory at all times? In part, it reflects the natural insecurity that comes with being conservative in a scholarly milieu. If I were an academic or a writer who made his living defending a party that routinely wins elections by appealing to rabid anti-intellectualism, I'd be a little defensive, too. But it also reflects the fact that conservatism is more of an ideological movement than liberalism. Conservatives insist that, unlike liberals, they're "acutely conscious of their intellectual forebears," as David Brooks once put it. Such boasts are usually decorated with references to Kirk, Hayek, and other philosophical patron saints of the right. Like communists, conservatives have a tendency to believe that every question can be answered by referencing theory. Berkowitz, for instance, describes the conservative debate over the war as one of pure philosophical abstractions: Defenders of the invasion, he writes, believe in "planting the seeds of liberty and democracy in the Muslim Middle East." Whether or not the war actually has accomplished these ends is not an issue of much interest. I admit that liberals don't generally look to our intellectual forebears to tell us whether the Iraq war is going well. But, then, we don't have to. We can read the newspaper.