TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Matt Bai comments on the role of think tanks and thought in our political discourse:

Podesta’s think tank has been extraordinarily effective as a convener of various Democratic constituencies and as a high-tech message machine, and its scholars have generated a mountain of policy ideas to buttress the party’s core philosophy, but what it hasn’t done is to provoke any fundamental (or necessarily divisive) rethinking of how that philosophy works in a new century.

Perhaps the pace and shallowness of our political culture — the echo chamber of pundits and bloggers in which the shelf life of some new slogan can be measured in weeks or even days — makes it all but impossible to sustain a serious public argument over a period of years. Something like Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay on the “end of history,” which influenced a generation of conservative foreign policy, probably wouldn’t resonate today beyond the next news cycle or partisan branding session. Which is a shame, really, because there is an urgent need, on both the left and the right, to modernize rusting ideologies.

That’s only true, I think, if we let it be. There’s plenty of smart and honest people with various political ideologies. What we need to do is connect them, so we can have a real discussion.