Let's talk credentialism. Before Franklin Roosevelt, credentials weren't a big deal in government. The people who ran government, with some exceptions, mostly weren't academic types. The first big flood of academics into government came under the New Deal.

Post World War II, America went on a university building spree and combined with the GI Bill, the number of people getting degrees skyrocketed. Over time, and it was definitely visible by the 70's when Collins wrote "The Credential Society" it was becoming difficult to get good jobs, or to be taken seriously on intellectual matters, if you didn't have a piece of paper to wave around. Today, of course, if you don't have at least a B.A. you can't even apply for most good jobs.

The Conservative movement looked at the university system and decided that it was irretrievably liberal and secular. While, to this day, they take runs at the system, (with Horowitz currently tilting away) they decided that fighting to turn it to their purposes probably wouldn't work.

Instead they created their own institutions. This includes their own universities. Liberty University, whose graduates flooded into the Justice Department under Bush, is just one of many. At Liberty University, every course is taught with a religious and conservative bent to it. They could hardly be considered one of the "best" law schools, but they can be relied on to do the "right" thing, and so it goes. And they have the law degrees, BAs and so on that you need in order to get ahead in society, without ever having had to go through the cleansing of secular reason that universities represent to the right.

The second tier is the "think tank" explosion. All a think tank is, fundamentally, is an organization that calls people "fellows", pays them some sort of salary, and in the case of the better run ones - pushes their work out to the press, politicians and perhaps to the public. They hire right wing intellectuals who can't get or don't want university jobs, the university being rather hostile to such folks (and not for entirely good reasons. Faculties often despise and look down on public intellectuals and "popularizers", forgetting that knowledge is meant to be disseminated and used in the real world.) Since in general it's believed that if someone is willing to pay you a salary, you must be worth that salary, getting money for being an intellectual, policy wonk, or pundit is the sign that hey, you must be worth listening too. Of course, the right wing's tanks are almost all funded by a small group of very rich families whose payoff is the reduction in taxes, especially estate taxes, but that didn't factor in, and still doesn't. The rich have tons of money to throw around, and more and more every year, on retainers, but the fact hasn't really sunk in to public culture, or into how the media gatekeepers operate.

The third tier are vetting organizations. The most famous, and perhaps powerful, of these, is the Federalist Society. The Federalist Society exists to pull lawyers onto a conservative track, to spread conservative readings of the law, and to push the careers of conservative lawyers. If you want a judgeship under a Republican administration, even if you aren't a member of the society, they'd best like you, or the odds of getting one, unless you have significant juice, is minimal.

Credentials work in a society when they are matched to limited resources and to a requirement to perform the job which they ostensibly credit one with doing. As the US has become awash with useless money at the top, and as those at the top have taken to spending that money to hire ideological shock troops the assumption that "no one would spend money on someone unless he knows what he's talking about" has lost its force. The majority of major think tankers and pundits on the right got everything wrong on Iraq. There have been, for them, no consequences. Competence is not the point - at least not competence in terms of "getting it right fairly often". All that matters is loyalty and an ability to argue whatever point you're supposed to argue for your political masters. If it's war with Eurasia today, you argue it. If it's perjury is worth impeachment, you argue it, and if a few years later one of yours commits perjury, you argue it's no big deal. The ethics of the common prostitute, combined with enough intellectual sophistry to argue whatever point is necessary are the defining characteristics of such "fellows" and the pundit class they serve.

So, at the end, you're back to the old problem. Credentials are just pieces of paper. Titles are just titles. And a salary just means someone is willing to pay you to do something. Arguments stand on their own, and intellectuals and pundits must stand on their own. And if you rely on credentials to tell you who knows their shit, or who has integrity, or who isn't on the take, well, you'll get suckered every time.

And that's what the conservative credentialing factory is counting on.