Some years ago, I lost one of my prized possessions in a minor flood.  The loss of the physical item caused me some grief, but I can take some solace in the fact that my memory of that item is eidetic.  It was a pre-printed blue post card from the offices of National Review, sent in reply to a letter I had sent to the editor when I was 13 or so.  What made it special was the scrawl across the bottom: "I tend to agree, which means you're batting well.  I usually prefer to disagree.  WFB" WFB was, of course, William F. Buckley.  It doesn't matter what the letter was about, nor does it matter that in retrospect, I think I was wrong and Buckley was right.  What mattered is that William F. Buckley took the time to respond to my letter in person.
That memory is made a bit more poignant by the fact that Buckley is gone, having died in the only way appropriate for him-working at his desk.  And what makes Buckley's death particularly sad is that it seems as though the intellectual conservative movement died with him.  Of course, it was on life support even before he passed away.  The neo-cons were, and are, ascendant.  While I'm sure there are serious thinkers in that movement, I have no idea who they are.  I certainly know who the bellowing buffoons are, despite my careful avoidance of Fox News.
By now, you can fairly ask just what the hell I'm driving at.  It's this-I think part of the reason the conservative movement has gone so terribly awry (and I'm taking it as axiomatic that it has) is that the movement is almost totally lacking in popular intellectual voices.
Buckley is often credited with bringing gravitas to a movement regarded as an intellectual backwater.  It's certainly true that National Review granted some public credibility to conservative positions, but to credit WFB with inventing serious thinking on the right wing is simply wrong.  People of the right had several intellectual heavyweights to draw inspiration from.  While it's possible to debate where Leo Strauss fits on the political spectrum, it's undeniable that he influenced generations of conservatives.  Russell Kirk made a career of stuffy conservatism.  Robert Bork, roughly a contemporary of Buckley, was a devastatingly brilliant thinker, even if he was deeply wrong about important issues.  Libertarian thinkers like Isabel Patterson, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Jay Nock, Rose Lane, and Bastiat offered carefully thought out positions and defended them publicly.
Perhaps there are minds of a similar caliber on Team Red these days.  But again, I don't have any idea who they would be.  I'll grant here that my perspective is not the best.  I no longer associate myself with conservatism.  I've long since given up on National Review.  (Jonah Goldberg isn't fit to to occupy the same room as WFB's typewriter.)
My point isn't that conservatives were once right, and now are wrong.  My point is that there was a time when even when conservatives were defending deeply wrong positions, some of them did so in interesting and intelligent ways.  I miss that.