Reacting to Rick Perry's New Deal heterodoxy, Paul Waldman reflects on the GOP's faux intellectualism:
Are Republican politicians just more interested in ideas? Not exactly. What they’re interested in is big, sweeping ideas. Not technocratic fixes, not proposals for a new agency, but ideas that upend the bases of how we think about politics and what we consider reasonable and insane.
Jonathan Bernstein complicates Waldman's notion of "ideas":
No, what Republicans are getting from these books aren’t ideas. What they’re getting are talking points to justify their prior policy preferences. Don’t like stimulus? That’s okay; FDR caused the Depression. Don’t like regulations? That’s okay; Wilson was a fascist. When Republicans do care about policy, they don’t turn to those types of books; they turn to actual ideas. That’s the story, more or less (and for better or worse), of neo-conservative foreign policy during the Bush years.
The Dish 