Trying to curry favor with liberals? Bad idea. Borrowing liberal arguments to attack fellow conservatives? Much, much worse:
The upstart who desires to gain a reputation as an "innovative" thinker is welcome to seek employment outside conservative politics, if he is not content to find new ways to celebrate old verities or new arguments with which to eviscerate liberals.
Instead, what we see over and over -- see [David] Brooks' disastrously influential "National Greatness" as a textbook example -- is an enthusiastic race to get ahead of the Zeitgeist, to become the Promethean author of a new Welltanschauung, to establish one's place as the founder of Some Other Conservatism.
Wise men are not deceived by these pretentious intellectual hustlers. When a self-described conservative begins slinging around words like "creativity" and "progress" in political discourse, it is not generally taken as evidence of doughty resolve. Rather, it is wise to suspect such a person of being what the Brits would call a trimmer.
That's from a much longer essay, inspired by Dan Riehl's discovery that certain Young Turks are borrowing their ideas from Sam Tanenhaus, a liberal Democrat whose advice to Democrats was quite the opposite of what the Young Turks are trying to do to the GOP.