Fox News, AEI, Weekly Standard Rules

In The American Conservative, Daniel McCarthy gives the reasons why most any Tea Partyers elected to Congress this fall will just become establishment conservatives, as I suggest yesterday in my post on Palin/O'Donnell:

Not only are Fox News, the Weekly Standard, and AEI going to be defining the program for whatever Republicans get elected in November, but successful Tea Party candidates will for the most part have to draw upon the same pool of staffing talent that all the other Republicans draw upon, a reservoir composed of cadres of political professionals who live to build careers and sidle up to power, not to shake things up in Washington. Not all staffers will be of that ilk, but even those of a better sort may quickly find themselves dependent upon studies carried out by the establishment’s think tanks and vulnerable to attacks from the establishment’s media organs.

Even beyond personnel and policy, the Tea Parties are vulnerable at the philosophical level, where more articulate and comprehensive views tend to assimilate inchoate ones. The Tea Parties don’t like Obamacare, big spending, or bailouts. But that’s not a worldview, it’s a set of preferences that can be incorporated into any of several worldviews — and subordinated to the overall thrust of whatever ideology it is integrated into. Certainly in the past the GOP has enfolded libertarian and anti-establishment impulses into an ideology whose chief concern was with expanding military and executive power. In order to resist being co-opted again, the Tea Parties would have to stake out a different general view of the world — but who will do that staking out?

Of all the Tea Party candidates, Rand Paul is in the best position to build a viable opposition to the establishment on all fronts, since he can draw upon the intellectual and publicity resources of the Austro-libertarian movement that his father has been instrumental in advancing. Pure libertarians are a rare breed, however; a successful counter-establishment will need to appeal to many types of people. Rand Paul has found come under fire from the purists for doing precisely that.

If the Tea Parties are not going to be assimilated by the very establishment forces who are currently demonizing them, a broad intellectual counter-establishment will have to provide them with an alternative to the policies cooked up by Rove and friends. Not only are there few exponents of such policies at the moment, but I suspect the Tea Parties have been conditioned more strongly than they realize by an establishment that would have them believe that all of the country’s problems can be ascribed to liberal Democrats and “RINOs.”