I got this via Andrew Sullivan and I thnk inadvertentely cuts to the heart of the problem with conservatism.
The movement offers entire career tracks for aspiring conservatives. Moreover, the movement preaches hostility to non-movement institutions. From the moment a movement conservative starts his career at his college conservative paper, he learns to conceive of conservative organizations as the City of God and traditional establishment institutions as the City of Man. The two Cities, he believes, are antagonists. Hence, movement conservatives have not generally succeeded in reaching sympathetic outsiders – if anything, they have actively sought to alienate them.
The movement has failed to catch on with sympathetic outsiders because so much of conservative thought is obviously wrong. Anyone who doesn’t have a vested interest in making the conservative movement a success, i.e. employees of conservative think tanks and republican congressional candidates, can easily see that you can’t raise government revenue by reducing taxes. Just like it is pretty obvious that invading a country is not going to make them llike us. If you pay enough people to agree with you, yeah, they will probably find a way to pretend what you said makes sense, but for the rest of us it is pretty silly stuff.
As an additional note if anyone from the Heritage foundation would like to start paying me a six-figure salary I will be happy to pretend I agree with you.