Evening Must-Read: Heroes of NoahSmithian Weblogging: James Pethokoukis:

Noah Smith: Heroes of NoahSmithian Weblogging: James Pethokoukis:

American conservatism needs to start thinking again. The Reagan-era package… reached the end of its usable shelf life sometime in the late 90s and went plunging off a cliff in the Bush years, finally degenerating into the dead end that is the Tea Party. Many people have been cited as thinkers who were destined to reform the movement…. But as I see it, Jim Pethokoukis, a blogger for the American Enterprise Institute, is the best of the crop…. He has aggressively promoted the monetarism of Milton Friedman… that inflation is not the big danger when there is slack in the economy… actively worries about the plight of the unemployed, the unemployed, and families for whom income has fallen… the ‘rise of the robots’ and the replacement of human jobs with automation. But he’s no liberal convert – he’s trying to find a new way for conservatism to be relevant to the majority of working, struggling Americans, not to cave in and embrace the positions of the Left.