Bellwethers

This morning, I found out that the House GOP failed to deliver Obama even a single vote on his stimulus package, regardless of meeting after meeting with the new administration, during which Obama was said to have done his best to open up the stimulus plans to debate -- a magnanimous gesture, considering he neither required Republic support, nor often found it curried from the previous administration, when he himself was a congressman.

It's a political statement, to be sure. But what the content is I do not know, and I suspect that most Americans are feeling the same way. Ten years ago, the GOP could have made the issue about spending, and perhaps they want to reclaim that mantle. But I won't be convinced, after the largest and most reckless spending increase in US history was presided over by that party. And at a time when most Americans are asking for government intervention, I have a hard time imagining what the Republicans think they're going to get out of being, as Mike Allen put it in this morning's Playbook, "the party of No."

I guess that Boehner and company decided that if they didn't stand up to the Obama plan, they would look like a bunch of sissies. This is the RedState model of goon politics: oppose because it's the other guys. Don't offer your own vision for the future (since you don't have one). Play the game like you played in your clubhouse when you were a kid: nobody else was allowed to come in -- it didn't matter that once you were inside, all alone, you were totally bored.

I bring all this up because, even as dialogue on Capitol Hill seems to have screeched to a halt, we plebes out here in the nosebleed section have also suffered a serious loss: Culture 11 has announced it is folding, due to lack of funds.

I don't have much to say about C11 that Freddie didn't already mention. I think he's right to point out that perhaps its most exhilarating success was the feeling that it was a bunch of regular guys, talking right alongside a bunch of famous (politically speaking) guys. (I still remember the excitement I felt when Conor was the first to ever leave a comment on this blog, back when nobody was reading).

I'm glad to have been able to read C11 for as long as I did (which was daily for the last six months or so). It opened the door to a whole world for me, where intelligent conservatives were carrying on a lively political debate well outside the mainstream intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican party.

I'm trying not to be angry about the closure, but it's really hard for me to understand how a site like that can't find donors these days. Amidst all the talk of how the right needs to re-conceive itself, I can't help but feel a connection between the failure in the House and this failure. Here we had an incredibly vibrant community, made up of many young conservatives and many curious young liberals, who were daily exposed to great essays and reporting from a conservative point of view. A place where up-and-comers in intellectual conservatism were operating comfortably in a new media environment. Are there no Republicans out there willing to shell out a few bucks for such a phenomenon? Isn't Culture11, in its own small way, exactly what GOP leaders claim to be looking for?

It's only too fitting that the end of C11 should come as the GOP remembers how to be the bunch of worthless hacks it has been for so many years (and their commenting class starts doing things like recommending Rush Limbaugh to the NYT.) At C11, you might have thought they had a chance. But I suppose not. (It's perhaps a measure of their true integrity as conservatives that, should any of C11's editors be reading this right now, they're most likely vehemently disagreeing with the idea that their demise is somehow a bellwether for the conservative movement's near future. God bless'em for this.)

I can't help but quote that incredible Vanity Fair piece (in which David Kuo, the C11 founder, had a prominent role) one more time. It's the headline for the Culture 11 obituary:

"MISSED OPPORTUNITY. MISSED OPPORTUNITY."