A New Conservatism?

Noah Smith hopes that Peter Thiel is in the vanguard of a new conservatism (h/t Mark Thoma):

And then, at the end of his rant, Thiel slips in the paragraph that has the potential to change American conservatism:

Let us end with the related question of what can now be done. Most narrowly, can our government restart the stalled innovation engine? 

The state can successfully push science; there is no sense denying it. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo program remind us of this possibility. Free markets may not fund as much basic research as needed. On the day after Hiroshima, the New York Times could with some reason pontificate about the superiority of centralized planning in matters scientific: “End result: An invention [the nuclear bomb] was given to the world in three years which it would have taken perhaps half a century to develop if we had to rely on prima donna research scientists who work alone.”... 

Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years. (emphasis mine)

HALLELUJAH. Public goods FTW!!!

Peter Thiel recognizes and admits what doctrinaire conservatives have been loath to admit: government is not always and everywhere the problem. Sometimes, when externalities and public goods exist, government is the solution.

Conservatives, wedded to the drown-government-in-a-bathtub approach that worked so well for them in the 80s, have since been forced into taking the untenable, indefensible, goonball-"libertarian" position that public goods don't actually exist - that the unfettered market will provide plenty of basic research, infrastructure, etc. But regulation has been slashed, non-entitlement spending has been slashed, tax rates have been slashed, and essential government functions have been privatized...and, if Thiel and Cowen are right, innovation and progress have still slowed down. The Grover Norquist dog is no longer hunting.

I guess I'm a little pessimistic on the likelihood of conservatives embracing government funding of scientific research.  I guess it is too many attacks on the National Science Foundation, cuts to which I considered to be about the worst way to save a few billion dollars a year.  Considering that Republicans are calling for even more tax cuts for "job creators," even though the Bush tax cuts have been in place for approximately a decade with almost no new jobs at all, I think we're not going to see a conservatism of reason anytime soon.  The content of the answers at the multitude of recent Republican debates also leads me to despair.  Republicans will have to wander in the wilderness awhile before they give up on the '80s taglines.