The decline of conservative periodicals is continuing – first went the Hoover Institute’s Policy Review, and now Reagan’s old favorite, Human Events, is also folding. Jacob Heilbrunn suspects that the faltering publications on the right are symptoms of its fundamental confusion:
Younger, more aggressive conservative websites have captured much of the audience that might once have thronged to Human Events, which used to be a lodestar of what conservatives were thinking—a kind of tip sheet to the mind of the right. In the end, it couldn’t move fast enough to keep up with the morphing of conservatism into its current incarnations. Human Events was no shrinking violet, but on a more elevated plane, the end of the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review suggests some of the dilemmas of conservatism as a calming rather than a raging intellectual force.
The truth is that it is becoming more difficult to discern what the right wants, or whether it even knows what it would really like–where the movement, in other words, would like to move, other than remaining stuck in reverse gear.
For more signs of epistemic closure captured by the Dish, head here.
The Dish 