Les Républicains américains sont à court d'idées. Telle est en gros l'analyse du New York Times qui présente la panne intellectuelle de la droite US. Les "think tankers", les penseurs, les intellectuels semblent perdus. Ils ne savent plus que penser - du moins à droite.

Symptomatique est ce message que l'Heritage Foundation a publié sur son site : “What Would Reagan Do ?” Que ferait-il en effet ? Nul ne le sait.

Et pourtant certains intellectuels de droite tentent de repenser... le projet intellectuelle de la droite américaine. Un projet plus complexe qu'il n'y paraît.

 

EXTRAIT : "Conservative Thinkers Think Again" (le New York Times)

Almost anything can happen in an election year, but among conservatives, nearly everyone seems to agree that no matter who captures the White House in November, the movement that has ruled the Republican Party since the 1960s and mostly dominated American politics since 1980 has lost its way. Across the spectrum of the right, writers and thinkers have turned their relentless analysis inward, a kind of political EST seminar aimed at self-transformation.

Consider the case of the American Enterprise Institute, which last week announced that Arthur C. Brooks, a business and government professor, would succeed its president, Christopher DeMuth, who is stepping down after 22 years. Under Mr. DeMuth, A.E.I. became the most influential of Washington think tanks during the Bush years. Its wood-paneled offices on 17th Street — in the same building that houses The Weekly Standard — attracted former administration officials like Paul D. Wolfowitz, John Bolton and David Frum, not to mention advisers and allies like Richard Perle (one of the most conspicuous supporters of the Iraq war) and Fred Kagan (who helped develop the strategy to deal with problems that war caused).

Today, all of these policy cooks — as well as others who sit in nearby offices — are pushing wildly different ideas about which direction the party should take. A.E.I., like so many other bastions of the intellectual right, has returned to the kitchen to whip up a fresh menu of possibilities for disaffected conservatives looking for solutions to emerging problems like energy, the environment and immigration, as well as a way to comfortably fit these new ideas into a conservative ideological framework (...)


Lire l'article complet sur la panne intellectuelle de la droite US dans le New York Times