Crossfire gone. Kristol gone. Who is coming in?

I was definitely one of the people who cheered Jon Stewart's stinging words directed at television talk shows like  Crossfire.  Soon after that, quite a few talking-heads shows disappeared from television.
Dan Drezner has a good question: did Stewart do us a favor, or did he kill any remnants of potential for conversations across ideological divides?  Drezner's point is to:

question what replaced these kinds of shows on the cable newsverse.  Instead of Hannity & Colmes, you now have.... Hannity.  Is this really an improvement?   

As inane as the crosstalk shows might have been, one of their strengths was that they had people with different ideological and political perspectives talking to (and sometimes past) each other.  You could argue that the level of discourse was pretty simplistic and crude -- but at least it was an attempt at cross-ideological debate.  People from different ideological stripes watched the same show and heard the same arguments.  

He has a good point there.  While it might not have been a direct result of Stewart's criticism, these shows are gone and have been replaced by single-perspective shows.  Drezner notes:

Instead of Crossfire-style shows on cable news, you now have content like Hannity, Glenn Beck, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, etc.  These programs have no cross-ideological debate.  Instead, you have hosts on both the left and the right outbidding each other to see who can be the mostbatsh**t insane ideologically pure.  These shows attract audiences sympathetic to the host's political beliefs, and the content of these shows help viewers to fortify their own ideological bunkers to the point where no amount of truth is going to penetrate their worldviews.  Which allows these hosts to say any crazy thing that pops into their head and hear nothing but "Ditto!" after they say it. 

Now, in the intellectual print world, the death of Irving Kristol has revealed the vacuum that exists.  Jack Shafer writes:

Without a substantive challenge, liberals grow smug and lazy. They overreach and overspend. Conservatives need to return to civic responsibility, not just to check their opponents, but to offer the country a valid alternative. They need some new neoconservatives. They need the old Irving Kristol.