I dunno, I think the growth of think tanks like The Brookings Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and obviously Fox News has done an enormous amount of what I would call damage, but what anyone would have to call shifting of the center of the discourse. There is no denying that Eisenhower would have been forced out of the Republican Party as it exists today. The gradual disintegration of the educational system bears a lot of the blame, as does the mind-numbing effect of most television and the growth of evangelic Christianity... Reagan's dopey brand of self-satisfied American exceptionalism, borrow-and-spend radicalism and smug anti-intellectualism has left a tragic mark on a once vibrant society. Dumber people, dumber policies, dumber discourse.