Obama Adviser Fareed Zakaria: Today's Conservatism Has Lost Touch with Reality or Something

So nice to see Time's in-house Obama adviser passing along advice to conservatives. How could the conservative movement possibly survive without his sage advice?

Conservatives used to be the ones with heads firmly based in reality. Their reforms were powerful because they used the market, streamlined government and empowered individuals. Their effects were large-scale and important: think of the reform of the tax code in the 1980s, for example, which was spearheaded by conservatives. Today conservatives shy away from the sensible ideas of the Bowles-Simpson commission on deficit reduction because those ideas are too deeply rooted in, well, reality. Does anyone think we are really going to get federal spending to the level it was at under Calvin Coolidge, as Paul Ryan's plan assumes? Does anyone think we will deport 11 million people?

We need conservative ideas to modernize the U.S. economy and reform American government. But what we have instead are policies that don't reform but just cut and starve government — a strategy that pays little attention to history or best practices from around the world and is based instead on a theory. It turns out that conservatives are the woolly-headed professors after all.

And of course all liberals policies aren't based in theory but in a concrete reality with all the wonderful results pointing to nothing but success. Those Social Security and Medicare programs really worked wonder, didn't they?

And who out there is talking about deporting 11 million people? I don't see anyone campaigning on that. Of course, deportations have increased under the guy Zakaria is advising. Are you even aware of that, Fareed?

Always be wary of sleazy lefties when they're giving your side advice. They're not doing it out of your best interest, that's for sure.