Rom-Com Symps, or, Wake Me When the Wake Is Over Itself

Head of a Damned Soul by William Blake, after Fuseli

Having in November found in the blue waters of the Caribbean the most blood-rich of feeding grounds for such among their red-state sharks as Ralph Reed, the Deep Thinkers who pant after pockets deeper still over at the National Review "Institute" have decided this month to book the next meeting of their group-griping donors' support group in post-electoral grief a mere glass-housed stone's throw from the bloodier waters still of the Potomac. Among the "Confirmed Speakers" scaling this latest among the magazine's Six-Inch Summits for the Two-Inch Man: John Allison, the new president of a venerea-, er, venerable DC policy shop calling itself The Cato Institute, the tracing of whose reasons, utterly predictable in their decadence, for finding himself in the clammy embrace of such elite company within the ranks of the damned, is left as an exercise for the reader.    
Commentary asks its 53 symposiasts in decadence "What Is the Future of Conservatism in the Wake of the 2012 Election?"

Conor Friedersdorf decides to pay them the compliment as unwarranted as their own bottomless messianic self-regard of taking them seriously - but then, he writes for The Atlantic, now, doesn't he, and thus, having made one choice earlier, has little such later.

I, though, merely thank the editors for their omnibus scrolling before the jump of even the littlest among the names of the high-chair hoisted (Abrams, Brooks & Brooks, Frum, Gerson, Goldberg, Hanson, Hewitt, Kimball, Kristol, Pipes, Rove, Rubin, Taranto ... Hassenpfeffer Incorporated...) and especially their paywalling of the ensuing punditry in the interests of public hygiene, thus sparing those among us Cavaliers who feel only a Martian anthropologist's solidarity with the Roundhead roundtable of philistine Gothamite-right culturati and Beltwaysted tink-thankers so cobbled, but who in our temptational weakness are as prone as the next among poor sinners to worrying an aching tooth with our tongues, the loss of time in the pointless assaying of their world-saving ratiocinations we'd never get back this side of this week's run-up to the Fukuyaman End of History.

Here's a partial list of the contributors to Commentary in 1965 - useful, I should think, the next time you for some reason choose to subject yourself to the complaints of the faithful that The Left, as commonly and crassly and monolithically defined, and it alone, is responsible for The Degradation of The Culture, The Lowering of Educational Standards, and - sniff! (continues slicing Onions) - The Squandering of Our Priceless Patrimony:

Henry David Aiken, Robert Alter, A. Alvarez, Claude Brown, Lewis Coser, Marcus Cunliffe, David Daiches, Theodore Draper, D.J. Enright, Jason Epstein, Henry Fairlie, Herbert Gans, Peter Gay, Nathan Glazer, Herbert Gold, John Gross, Dan Jacobson, George Kateb, Stanley Kauffmann, Joseph Kraft, Walter Laqueur, Christopher Lasch, George Lichtheim, Seymour Martin Lipset, Staughton Lynd, Osip Mandelstam, Leo Marx, Robert Nisbet, Kathleen Nott, Cynthia Ozick, Ernst Pawel, Richard Poirier, Chaim Potok, V.S. Pritchett, Mordecai Richler, Harold Rosenberg, Richard Rovere, Bertrand Russell, Bayard Rustin, Kenneth Stampp, Ronald Steel, George Steiner, Stephen Toulmin, John Weightman, C. Vann Woodward, and Dennis Wrong.

We might also, in our pith-helmeted excavations in the pharaonic dusts of 1965, unpack the inaugural issue from the Fall of that year of The Public Interest - Barzun, Bell, Glazer, Heilbroner, Kristol, Moynihan, Nisbet, Solow - from which empyrean the gold-to-silver-to-bronze declension came rather early.

The adducing of other shaming contrasts in the history of what used to be called The Higher Journalism is left as an exercise and a link for the reader(s). 
From a post by Friedersdorf on "The Ascendant 'Smear Wing' of the Conservative Movement":

The notion that "turnabout is fair play" is now endemic in the conservative movement. Right-wing partisans, who conceive of the left as deeply immoral, have no compunction about copying what they perceive to be the tactics of "the other side." They're increasingly willing to do so without shame, as Matthew Continetti showed in his mission statement for the decadent and unethical Washington Free Beacon. It's apparently very easy for partisans to embrace a sort of moral relativism where they routinely justify behavior in themselves that they'd excoriate if "the other side" did it. I have no insight into their moral reasoning, if they even bother with such a thing. But I can tell you that they're part of the reason the average American looks at the battles of Washington, D.C., and concludes that everyone engaging in them is a petulant hypocrite. It's no wonder that so many young people who fit more naturally on the right than the left are so horrified by the conservative movement and the Republican Party in their present incarnations that they'd never dream of joining either. When all a movement stands for is beating the other guys, no matter how odious the tactics, it doesn't attract converts.