Ben, I don’t see it. I and others on the left use “Clintonites” all the time as a shorthand. What, “people who used to work for the Clinton administration in some capacity or really liked him” is better?
Anyway, LK didn’t get why you posted it either, so could you distill the point of the article into a neat paragraph?
The conservative media has taken the postmodernist approach - nothing is objective reality; it’s all just intrepretation; everyone has an agenda - and cranked it up to 11, to the point that Bush literally refuses to listen to experts on any topic.
Lack of post-war reconstruction: ignoring the experts in favor of ideological fantasies. Threatening to fire that guy if he released an accurate Medicare cost estimate, completely locking out policy experts from the SOTU process, overriding the FDA decision on the morning-after pill, booting the CEA out of the White House, refusing to believe the CIA’s assessment of Iraq, the politicalization of the CBO, fucking up the EPA’s carefully researched paper on global warming - all cases of knowledgable experts being ignored because the facts conflicted with ideology.
I think it’s orthogonal to the Strauss thing.
Movement conservatives, near as I can tell, have responded to reality not going their way by inventing ever-more-fanciful ideological just-so stories and accusations of bad incentives and corruption on the part of non-ideological researchers. It’s kind of like how Marxists insist on the whole “false consciousness” thing to explain why none of their theories pan out. Eventually the whole artifice has to come crashing down on them, but I guess we’re going to find out how much Lysenkoism society can take before that happens.
It’s not like Bush invented this; as the article points out, the good neoconservative corrective back in the 1970s that “science and analysis can’t solve everything” has mutated into “all science and analysis is a corrupt attempt to shove liberalism down our throats.”
The bit where Nixon invites Galbraith & Friedman into his office to argue their respective cases is illustrative: Bush would no more do that than grow wings.