-"Great numbers" of "serious, weighty right-wing intellectuals"? This is -like talking about herds of unicorns, Leo. I don't credit right-wingers as -being thoughtful at all. I can't fathom why you and Justin persist in -kowtowing to the non-existent intellectual splendor of these grubby -opportunists.
What defines "intellectual splendor? That you agree with them? Yes, many rightwingers do their intellectual labor on the Right because the financial rewards are larger there, but that doesn't mean that they don't help contribute to rightwing intellectual hegemonic work.
It is self-defeating delusion not to recognize the intellectual conversions some of those smart rightwingers have made, not just among opportunists but among many of the students, journalists and other intellectual workers in society who produce the common sense understandings of how society works, thereby influencing policy debates across the board.
One thing I notice about the rightwing organizations, from the Heritage Foundation to the Federalist Society, is that they regularly invite liberals and even leftwingers to their events on the assumption that they will only make their arguments convincing by testing them against the best intellectual opposition possible. Most leftwing organizations never invite conservatives to their events. The results have been that rightwingers have gotten much better at addressing the left-leaning concerns of the population than the Left is at addressing the right-leaning concerns of that same population.
The reality is that even the Right admits that a generation or two ago, a conservative intellectual was an oxymoron. They spent decades very deliberately building up an infrastructure of training and institutions to create their cadres. In fact, they modelled thmselves on earlier generations of leftwing activists and their intellectual institution building.
I wish more leftwingers would copy the practices of the rightwing, which would actually be copying the left's best practices from the past in struggling for intellectual hegemony.
-- Nathan Newman