The Conservative Future

Ezra comments on Brooks's cadre of young conservatives:

These new thinkers on the Right seem fairly disengaged with the machinery and centers of power within their party. I agree with quite a bit of their critiques, but in the case of the libertarians, there's not much interest in engaging with the Republican Party, and in the case of Ross and Reihan, there's not much effort to seriously engage with the task of reforming the Republican Party. Now, it may indeed be that the work of these folks is to create the ideas infrastructure and wait for a propitious moment when a broken and desperate party adopts it. As Ross said at a book event the other day, this is a decades-long project. But for now, it is entirely an intellectual one. Brooks is right that these are immensely interesting and provocative thinkers. I read most of them daily. I'm still waiting, however, for the dedicated and cynical reformers.

They may have to lose a couple of elections first.