While I have much regard for David Klinghoffer, I wasn’t much swayed by his op-ed in the L. A. Times. He writes:

Once, the iconic figures on the political right were urbane visionaries and builders of institutions — like William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol and Father Richard John Neuhaus, all dead now,” Klinghoffer laments. “Today, far more representative is potty-mouthed Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart.

I respond in my column:

. . . there are many competing agendas among those lamenting the populist enthusiasms of the Right today. Some seem to want to displace and replace today’s leaders; others are simply beautiful losers in forgotten struggles eager to tear down the winners.
But what undergirds a lot of this is simply nostalgia. A conservative populism is sweeping the land, and although I think it is for the most part justified and beneficial, you cannot expect millions of people to get very angry — deservedly angry — and expect everyone to behave as if it’s an Oxford seminar.
Buckley, Kristol, and Neuhaus (and Reagan and Goldwater) understood and appreciated the hurly-burly of American democracy. Buckley famously insisted he’d rather be governed by 2,000 random names in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard. He passionately defended Joseph McCarthy, and he admired J. Bracken Lee, the 1950s Utah governor who makes Sarah Palin look like Sandra Day O’Connor on Ambien. Oh, and he was a Rush Limbaugh dittohead. Kristol was an admirer of the Christian Right and a supporter of the populist tax revolts of the 1970s. Neuhaus was a leading champion of the religious revival on the right.
Nostalgia, wrote the great sociologist Robert Nisbet, “is even at best a rust of memory, often a disease.” Nostalgia causes us to exaggerate what we liked about the past while editing out what we didn’t. Indeed, Klinghoffer is doing precisely that when he says that Buckley, Kristol, and Neuhaus were “iconic.” Buckley, sure; he was a true media celebrity. But Kristol and Neuhaus? Kristol famously thought that having anything more than a few thousand subscribers to his magazine, The Public Interest, was a sign of failure. Both could walk through most airports unrecognized.
These men are my heroes, too, and their influence was staggering. But those who pine for the good old days fail to grasp that the good old days were, in the ways that matter, often quite bad. The heyday of the “institution builders” was a low-water mark for conservatism’s political success. (That’s why they built institutions!) Conservatism hardly lacks for top-flight intellectuals these days, but the intellectuals aren’t the avant-garde anymore. Thanks to their success at building institutions and spreading ideas, the battle has been joined. And now is not the time to wax nostalgic for the planning sessions.

Meanwhile, Doc Bainbridge was much more taken with David’s piece and offers ten reasons why he finds conservatives and/or Republican embarrassing these days. I find the list to be pretty unpersuasive.