“How the right’s think tanks stopped thinking”

F.H. Buckley writes:

You’ll find the same kind of creative destruction in the idea factories on the right, in their think tanks and little magazines. The Heritage Foundation lost its president last week, but had lost its intellectual edge years before. Its moment, and that of the other great conservative think tanks, had passed. They had had a few great ideas, back in the day — then became prisoners of their beautiful orthodoxies. But what worked in 1980 no longer worked in 2016, for they missed what had changed in the interim.

That Obama putdown of Mitt Romney could be applied to them: The 1980s were calling and wanted their policies back.