alien & sedition.

Back from the Dead?

2008-11-08T17:00:00.002-05:00

Two items via Andrew Sullivan: In one, Ross Douthat mulls over the question of what might constitute the most promising shape for a future GOP coalition: an aliance of "Joe the Plumber and Joe the Office Park Employee," or one that would appeal to "upper-middle reformism" as formulated by David Frum? Douthat is somewhat skeptical as to whether a message aimed at "the Obama-voting, ex-Rockefeller Republicans making $150,000 a year" would harmonize well with one pitched at the Wall-Mart Republicans he and Reihan Salam have argued should be at the center of a conservative revival, arguing that

building a coalition of social conservatives and social moderates from the middle of the income and education distribution makes much more political sense than trying to hold together a coalition of social conservatives from the middle of the distribution and social liberals from the upper end.

At any rate, Douthat's entire analysis is premised on the revival of the GOP as, in his words, "a party that restores its reputation for competence and policy seriousness." Trouble is, as Mark Lilla explains in the Wall Street Journal, the Sarah Palin episode - and, one might add, the retrenchment of conservative movement elites in its aftermath - is dispositive evidence that the right has not only abandoned that reputation, it has comprehensively repudiated intellectual seriousness in favor of a debased appeal to talk-radio populism and "anti-elite" know-nothingism.

This is not news, I realize. But it does at any rate cause pretty serious complications to the efforts by genuine intellectuals like Douthat to plot a way forward for their party and their movement. He's forced to compete with compatriots who think it's a great idea roll the Republican clock back to 1994.

The thing of it is, in a two party system, the opposition doesn't necessarily need to be especially coherent or appealing. While it might spend a somewhat longer time in the wilderness, even an intellectually and ideologically stunted GOP is likely to find its way back into power eventually - the wheel turns, and all that. Count me with those who hope that reformers like Douthat are able to help their party evolve into a reasonably responsible institution before that day comes, but it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility that the neanderthals could simply wind up frozen in ideological ice, only to one day stumble back onto the scene as a result of some inevitable glacial shift.

(And no, I'm not necessarily saying I'm back. But I'm not not back, either.)

Rudy Dances with the Fundamentalists

2007-10-09T07:32:00.001-05:00

Rudy's trying to make nice with the Christian right rebels. The LA Times reports that Giuliani has accepted an invitation to attend, along with the rest of the Republican field, the "values voter summit" sponsored by Tony Perkins's Focus on the Family in Washington on October 20. Perkins, of course, is one of the "secretive" Council for National Policy illuminati who has been talking up the idea of a Christian right third-party campaign should Giuliani win the GOP nomination.

While, as Matt Ortega has reported, a recent poll indicated that such a campaign could pull away more than a quarter of the Republican vote -- and as much as I'd like to see that happen -- let me continue to be the guy who cautions you about reading too much into this. For one thing, as Rasmussen points out in its analysis:

The latest poll highlights the potential challenges for Giuliani, but the numbers must be considered in context. A generic third-party candidate may attract 14% of the vote in the abstract at this time. However, if a specific candidate is chosen, that person would likely attract less support due to a variety of factors. Almost all third party candidates poll higher earlier in a campaign and their numbers diminish as election day approaches. Ultimately, of course, some Republicans would have to face the question of whether to vote for Giuliani or help elect a Democrat.

Of course, even despite such considerations an anti-abortion third-party candidate could do well enough to throw a close election to the Democrats. But the calculations will weigh on the movement leaders themselves. If they really believe they can draw 14% of the electorate, they may go forward with it. But they can't afford to look weaker than they already do. This would be a desperate move by a coterie of Christian right leaders who can't be eager to test exactly how far their influence has eroded. A break with fusionism and the conservative coalition is no small matter for these people.

The calculation will have to include saving face, since face may be all they have. As the LA Times post notes, Giuliani has continued to defy laws of political gravity that the fundamentalists thought they wrote. One gets the sense that this rebellion is aimed as much at their own straying flock as at Rudy himself: remember who your real leaders are. The problem, further illustrated by this weekend's New York Times article on religious conservative voters, is that the Council crowd may include the most famous figures in evangelical circles, but they don't necessarily dictate the political views and actions evangelicals take. The article uses the example of James Dobson's attempt to take down Fred Thompson, which achieved nothing but sparking an embarassing backlash.

That's why Giuliani's strategy seems to be aimed at offering the rebel leaders a way to save face. He'll never be what they want him to be, but he can court them just enough to flatter their need to believe in their own continuing relevance; he can play along with the notion of that relevance in the hopes that they won't feel the need to try and prove it with a breakaway campaign. That may be just enough to stop them from pulling the trigger, given how much they know they have to lose if they do.

It's still a delicate situation, and it could yet lead to a confrontation that I think neither side really wants. But we're not there yet.

Rudy, the GOP, and Spending: The Binge-and-Purge Mentality

2007-10-06T10:47:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

The notion that the GOP lost in 2006 because of spending is absurd. It's not just absurd; it's verging on insane. While it may be true that ridiculous earmarks like Don Young's "bridge to nowhere" helped contribute to the general air of corruption surrounding the Republican party, spending per se had nothing to do with the GOP's midterm defeat.

But, for reasons I'll get to in a minute, Republicans themselves like very much to tell themselves that the defeat had everything to do with spending. And Rudy Giuliani is indulging them. He may actually believe what he's saying -- when it comes to economics, Giuliani believes in a lot of very silly things, like the notion that cutting taxes always leads to an increase in tax revenue. Or he may simply be saying it to curry favor with the Club for Growth crowd (if so, it's working). In either case, Rudy insists that he's the only one who can restore the GOP's mythical fiscal discipline. Again, this assertion is logically incompatible with his embrace of supply-side ideas. But neither is it supported by his record as mayor of NYC.

While Giuliani likes to take credit for "23 tax cuts" during his time at City Hall, FactCheck.org has documented that the truth is quite different:

A new radio ad boasts that Rudy Giuliani "cut or eliminated 23 taxes" while mayor of New York City, a boast he and his supporters have repeated many times on the campaign trail. We find that to be an overstatement. Giuliani can properly claim credit for initiating only 14 of those cuts.

In fact, he strongly opposed one of the largest cuts for which he claims credit, reversing himself only after a five-month standoff with the city council. In addition, the ad's claim that Giuliani turned the budget deficit he inherited into a surplus, while true enough, ignores the fact that he also left a multibillion-dollar deficit for his successor, not including costs associated with 9/11.

As CNBC reports:

[A] closer look at the numbers show he's claiming credit for some tax cuts that weren't his idea to begin with. And others that he actively opposed.

For instance, seven tax cuts that he says were his were actually initiated by New York State. Giuliani may have supported the measures, but they were never floated by his office. That's according to the Independent Budget Office, a publicly funded watchdog group.

Then there's the granddaddy of New York tax cuts -- the ending of a 12.5% surcharge on personal income tax. Giuliani cites it as his No. 1 achievement on taxes -- and he did initially propose it, but then later dropped his support for the measure, even fighting it before finally giving in to the city council. It was the largest New York City tax cut in history.

Of course, even if we do give Giuliani credit as a tax-cutter, that has little to do with fiscal discipline, while that multibillion dollar deficit is a good indicator of his lack of it.

In an era where Republican politicians have gone over to the supply side en masse, does it even make sense to associate the GOP with "fiscal discipline" anymore? Giuliani's right about the breakdown in that reputation, but for entirely the wrong reasons.

Ultimately all this conservative self-flagellation over spending serves a particular purpose -- by a strange kind of alchemy, it transforms the GOP's well-earned reputation for corruption into a reaffirmation of conservative principle. Spending itself becomes corruption. The answer to government corruption, we're told, is to cut government spending. Personally, if there's a party that can't tell the difference between government and corruption, I don't want that party in government.

The modern Republican party has a very strange relationship to spending. It's almost like an eating disorder -- the party binges on wars, tax cuts, pork, and ill-conceived efforts to win voters away from the Democrats on issues like Medicare. Then it rhetorically purges, denouncing universal health care as "socialism" and promising to drown its own ugly governing body in the bathtub. It all seems very unhealthy to me.

Social Cons, Econo-Cons

2007-10-01T11:05:00.001-05:00

Ramesh Ponnuru raises some interesting arguments, building off a debate with Thomas Edsall from May. His original point was that "The relative social conservatism of the Republican party has increased over the last twenty years, not decreased."

This comes up now in the context of a related question: can socially conservative candidates prosper even as society in general becomes steadily more liberal? Ponnuru argues that yes, they can. I'd say this point is self-evident, given the history of the post-war U.S., but let's look at a couple of his arguments.

One is particularly interesting in light of the last post.

Abortion has been the biggest of the social issues. For three decades, Gallup has asked Americans whether they think abortion should never be permitted, should always be permitted, or should sometimes be permitted. The results from 2005 do not look markedly more liberal than the results from 1975. So these polls give us no reason to think that opposition to abortion has lost political power, or is likely to do so.

If this is so, then it's all the more ironic that abortion has lost political power -- not thanks to public opinion, but thanks to the maneuvering of the economic conservatives who have been consolidating their control of the GOP coalition. Abortion was one of the political pillars of the Republican party, and now the party is abandoning it altogether? Either the issue really has lost salience, or the GOP is undertaking a curious strategy indeed. I think it's a little of both, myself, but time will tell.

At any rate, I think Ponnuru gets the larger dynamic right:

A society can simultaneously become more socially liberal and create new political opportunities for social conservatives. It is, after all, the liberalization to which the conservatives react.

Now of course public opinion on an issue can change so much that the old conservative position is no longer tenable, and successful candidates can no longer take it. If only 10 percent of the population still opposes gay marriage in 20 years, it won’t be an issue then, either. When public opinion changes that much, however, the issues get redefined. A new conservative position emerges, more liberal than the previous one but less liberal than the contemporary liberal one. And this new conservative position sometimes has a lot of political power.

This speaks to why I think that social conservatism represents a stronger electoral future for the GOP than economic conservatism. Particularly so considering that the so-called fiscal conservatism embraced by the party's current opinion makers isn't really fiscal conservatism at all, but the weird cult of supply-side economics.

Bigger picture: I think the Rudy Giuliani model represents a very bad option for the GOP. But don't tell them I said that.

Dobson's Choice

2007-10-01T10:38:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

First things first: can we please stop referring to the Council for National Policy as "secretive"? The CNP is the most publicity-seeking "secret" organization on the planet. It's made up of prima-donna religious right leaders who enjoy their public positions of political influence; if it were truly clandestine it wouldn't be alerting the national media every time it has a significant meeting.

So the CNP is considering backing a third party candidate if Rudy Giuliani wins the nomination. Again, it's no secret that the group has been casting around for candidates for some time now: back in February, for instance, it was deliberating over whether to throw its support behind a Christian conservative in the GOP primary -- Huckabee, or Brownback, or South Carolina governor Mark Sanford. Christian Right heavyweight Paul Weyrich described the Council as "split 50-50" over whether to unite behind a second-tier candidate, or to just split up according to individual dictates of conscience and calculation. The discussions ended without consensus, and the CNP's main movers have mostly sat out the primary race since then, which should tell us something about how much all this talk really means.

The problem was with the notion of backing a horse that couldn't win. And if the Council wasn't willing to support a second tier candidate in the primary, why would it be willing to take the much longer odds of organizing behind a third party candidate in the general?

There's no denying the seriousness of the dilemma facing Christian conservatives. Their influence within the GOP is fading fast; they've never been much more than cheap foot soldiers to a party run by a business lobby with little interest in social issues either way. If they allow the Republicans to nominate a pro-choice candidate, and fail to challenge the decision, they stand to lose much of what remains of their political credibility. But at the same time, they hardly seem to be spoiling for a fight. It's true that they could throw the election to the Democrats by winning only a couple of percentage points next November. But what will that win them? Do they really want proof that all they can draw is a couple points? It could make them look every bit as marginal as Ralph Nader.

This is indeed a dangerous moment for the Republican party. It seems that the party is calculating that its mass support, once built on the backs of the anti-abortion movement, can now be drawn from the legend of perpetual war. Over the long run, I suspect that's not likely to be a winning strategy. But in the very short term, understand that, for the "secretive" CNP, the decision to support a third-party candidacy will not come easily, and it very well might not come at all.

Back to Rangoon

2007-09-25T09:48:00.000-05:00

When I lived in Southeast Asia, I wanted to visit Burma, but the official word from the democratic opposition was that foreigners should stay away as part of a general boycott of the military regime. I'm not sure whether that particular form of sanction is productive or not, but that's what they ask, so that's what we observed.

While democratic revolutions swept the world at the end of the 1980s, Burma has thus far been unable to redeem its failed uprising of 1988. The current demonstrations by the Buddhist monks -- the only institution in the country with anything close to the influence of the military -- offer the best chance since then to force open the door to freedom.

Thailand-based Irrawaddy News Magazine is an excellent source for coverage of the ongoing developments, and of Burma in general.

Details Aren't the Devil

2007-09-24T10:35:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at Alien The Right's Field.

Democratic candidates offer a wealth of ideas, explained in rich detail. Republicans offer a few vague platitudes and promise to get back to us after the election.

Steve Benen says that, infuriating as it may be, the Republican approach may be savvier:

I’m not sure Republicans are wrong about this. When a GOP candidates says, “Vote for me — and I’ll work out the details later,” I’d love for there to be consequences. There never are. In 2000, Bush’s vague and ambiguous tax plan didn’t make any sense. Al Gore tried to make it a campaign issue, but the media ignored it and voters didn’t care. In 2004, Bush said more than once that he could privatize Social Security without raising taxes, raising the deficit, cutting benefits, or raising the retirement age. How did he propose to pull that off? He didn’t — he just mentioned ideas and goals without any details. There were no political consequences.

In fact, American voters don’t seem to care all that much about the details in advance. A candidate talks about what he or she finds important, and how he or she would approach the issue if elected. Voters either agree or disagree. If a candidate were to make some kind of outlandish campaign promise — free ice cream for everyone, every day, for four years — there would probably be a higher expectation to explain how that might work, but a more general policy prescription needs a lot fewer support materials.

One of the neat tricks Republicans managed to pull off during much of the past decade or two was to earn a reputation as both the party of principles and the party of ideas. Logically, those two things may be connected, but as Benen's analysis suggests, in a practical sense it can be difficult to wear both hats at the same time. When you spend a lot of time on wonky policy details, it can be hard to express basic foundational principles in a clear way. At the same time, when all you talk about are principles, your rhetoric can be so divorced from reality that it becomes meaningless.

This is just an impression, but I think that Republicans, having achieved a reasonable sense of balance between principles and ideas for quite some time, are tilting over into meaningless abstractness at this point. Much of this has to do with the exhaustion of the Goldwater conservative movement, which seems finally to have reached its Waterloo in the era of Bush the Lesser. Movement conservative ideas simply came to their logical and practical limits -- if the ideas worked, Bush would have implemented them successfully. They didn't and he couldn't, and all the rest of what conservatives say about it is just excuse-making. Does anybody really think there's a future in social security privatization or "health savings accounts"? Honestly?

Bush knew that conservatives couldn't simply slash away the social insurance state, but the price of a politically-feasible transition was too much for the right's ideology to bear -- as the Part D debacle proved. And that was just a preview of the costs that would be associated with any privatization of social security. There just isn't any way to remake America along Goldwater-conservative ideological lines. You can't go back again. There are new, young conservatives out there with some interesting (if embryonic) ideas of their own, but they aren't influential enough yet to have much impact on the presidential race, so what we're left with is a field of candidates repeating the rhetoric of conservative years past, even as that rhetoric has lost its relevance to the details of governance.

Republicans are usually the party that attracts those who crave transcendence and the appeal of pure ideology. Democrats are usually the party of pragmatism, ideological muddle, and practical government. There's nothing wrong with that basic dichotomy. A party gains an advantage when it is able to reach beyond its basic mode and do a little bit of what its opponent can do -- a strong GOP has at least some good, wonky ideas, and a strong Democratic party has at least some ability to appeal to the voters' civic-spiritual side.

My point is that Benen may be right, but he's thinking of a Republican party that was able to achieve that balance more effectively. Even just in the past couple of years it has lost the balance. Both its domestic agenda and its foreign-policy credibility have come undone. I'd like Democrats to talk about principles more, but let's let them be the party of details, too. In the end, details do matter.

Study: Conservatives Dominate Op-Ed Pages

2007-09-23T08:57:00.000-05:00

This Media Matters report won't surprise you, but it should infuriate you. They actually contacted almost every daily newspaper in the U.S. on an individual basis to collect the data to show that conservatives are greatly over-represented in the opinion pages. On the plus side, I remember coming of age in the 90s just knowing this was true -- it was obvious -- but back then it seemed like there was hardly anyone willing to say or do anything about it. That, at least, has changed.

Still, the findings are depressing. For instance:

Sixty percent of the nation's daily newspapers print more conservative syndicated columnists every week than progressive syndicated columnists. Only 20 percent run more progressives than conservatives, while the remaining 20 percent are evenly balanced.

In a given week, nationally syndicated progressive columnists are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of 125 million. Conservative columnists, on the other hand, are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of more than 152 million.

The ten-thousand pound gorilla in all this is -- again, no surprise -- George Will, who reaches half of America's newspaper readers, which comes out to slightly more readers than Alien & Sedition reaches in an average millenium.

Editor & Publisher reports on the report; the article interviews Alan Shearer, editorial director of the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates Will and other columnists. Shearer suggests that the bias comes about largely because newspapers publishers themselves tend to have conservative leanings. MyDD's Shai Sachs offers a more nuanced analysis, examining the effects of regional variation and the syndication business -- noting that "the real winner is the Washington Post Writers Group."

Sachs does what a good political analyst should do: rather than complaining about the state of affairs, she asks: "Is there an opportunity for a liberal entrepreneur to step into this space and offer low-cost but popular progressive syndicated columnists?" This is an excellent question. The syndicates, as Sachs notes, are unimaginative and stagnant, offering the same fare nationwide and ignoring the growing wealth of online voices. This could present an opportunity:

I'd be very interested to see a liberal entrepreneur create a new syndicate to compete with the titans of the syndication industry. Certainly, the raw materials for such a company are in abundance: the progressive blogosphere is well-stocked with a diverse collection of intelligent, articulate writers who can give George Will and Cal Thomas a run for their money. Aside from a chorus of fresh progressive voices, such a syndicate could offer services like localization (helping newspapers identify columnists in their region), integration with social networking sites, and increased writer/reader interaction. No doubt, it would be tough to drum up business, but I think it would be an interesting experiment, and it could help restore balance on op-ed pages.

I can't stress enough how important this kind of thinking is (and, again, how different from the hopeless 90's). One of the most fundamental lessons one learns, studying the conservative movment, is that when a movement is shut out from existing institutions, it must innovate. This Media Matters report is an opportunity for progressives, not to complain about how unfair the world is, but to develop innovative strategies to get around that unfairness.

On Hiatus

2007-09-20T11:53:00.000-05:00

A&S is on hiatus for the next few days, but we'll be back soon.

NY Times Ending "Times Select"

2007-09-18T07:50:00.000-05:00

After two years, down comes the pay-wall:

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free. [...]

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

A good decision by the Paper of Record.

GOP Frontrunners Snubbing Minorities Again

2007-09-17T10:45:00.001-05:00

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

MyDD's Melissa Ryan wrote about this yesterday: Giuliani, Romney, and McCain have all turned down invitations to participate in Tavis Smiley's All American Presidential Forum on September 27. She cites Jack and Jill Politics:

Tavis did a 'Shout out' to his fellow Black Republicans, asking them why they were so silent on this matter. They keep on yapping that the GOP is a valid alternative for Black America, yet, when a nationally televised forum is put together so that GOP Candidates can present what they believe are GOP answers to concerns of the Black community, three of their Major Candidates don't even bother to respect Black Americans with their presence.

Melissa adds:

I don't know about you but I'm begining to get the impression that much of the Republican field just doesn't care for debates and forums. If it's not a choreographed staging of tightly scripted interactions with supporters enthusiastically waving campaign paraphernalia they're just not interested.

I agree, and it certainly has something to do with why the GOP candidates have been so leery of the YouTube debate. But the snub to nonwhite voters is worthy of notice over and above any general reluctance to debate. As president, George W. Bush has done little but damage to minority interests. But as a politician, he has been unusually keen -- for a Republican -- to win minority support (no, it doesn't add up, but that's par for his incompetent course). Right from the 2000 campaign, Bush and his advisors have made it a point to reach out symbolically to African-American and Hispanic voters (who can forget the demographics onstage during the RNC in Philly?), while his surrogates in the conservative movement work to convince their compatriots of the importance of gaining votes among those constituencies. Such efforts were not fueled by the Bushies' personal hunger to improve race relations, but by cold hard electoral math.

But so far in this 2008 cycle the GOP has presented nonwhite voters not with a friendly face, but with a series of cold shoulders. While it's clear to anyone who keeps up with intra-conservative debate that any candidate hoping to win the nomination will have to distance himself from a good number of Bush's perceived sins against the right -- not least of them his embrace of so-called "big-government conservatism" -- it's remarkable to think that the effort to expand the GOP beyond its white Christian base may be considered one of those sins. Perhaps it's because, in the end, the administration's effort failed. But that doesn't change the math. Bush tried and failed. The current Republican contenders aren't even going to try.

All in the Family

2007-09-13T13:31:00.000-05:00

In an Opinion Journal piece reprinted from Commentary, Kay Hymowitz offers a notable exercise in conservative critique of libertarianism. It's timely: as Hymowitz herself observes, with the growth of the internet as a political medium (and for a number of other reasons), the libertarian voice in conservative discourse is more prominent now than it has been in quite some time.

In her review of two new books by prominent libertarians (Radicals for Capitalism by Brian Doherty, and The Age of Abundance by Cato's Brink Lindsey), Hymowitz, unsurprisingly, does not take particular issue with the authors' economic analysis. I've added Lindsey's book to my long list and will discuss its economic aspects in more detail when I get to it (it may be a while), but the most interesting part of Hymowitz's review is her focus on "the cultural contradictions of libertarianism."

Hymowitz writes:

Despite Mr. Lindsey's protestations to the contrary, libertarianism has supported, always implicitly and often with an enthusiastic hurrah, the "Aquarian" excesses that he now decries. Many of the movement's devotees were deeply involved in the radicalism of the 1960s.

Nor should this come as a surprise. After all, the libertarian vision of personal morality--described by Mr. Doherty as "People ought to be free to do whatever the hell they want, mostly, as long as they aren't hurting anyone else"--is not far removed from "if it feels good, do it," the cri de coeur of the Aquarians. To be sure, part of the libertarian entanglement with the radicalism of the 1960s stemmed from the movement's opposition to both the Vietnam War and the draft, which Milton Friedman likened to slavery. But libertarians were also drawn to the left's revolutionary social posture.

But of course this simply isn't true. There's a universe of difference between "do what you will so long as you cause no harm to others," and "if it feels good, do it." It seems that the failure to understand this difference is what defines a social conservative, and this is why liberals (including, in this case, libertarians) have such mistrust for conservatives: those who cannot recognize such boundaries cannot be trusted either as moral agents on their own, nor as the guardians of others' morality.

Hymowitz makes much of libertarians' supposed disdain for the family, and in so doing she falls back on standard fusionist logic to argue that they ought to make preservation of the traditional family a priority:

On the one hand, libertarians make a fetish of freedom; it is their totalizing goal. On the other hand, libertarians depend on the family--an institution that, in crucial respects, is unfree--to produce the sort of people best suited to life in a free-market system (not to mention future members of their own movement). The complex, dynamic economy that libertarians have done so much to expand needs highly advanced human capital--that is, individuals of great moral, cognitive and emotional sophistication. Reams of social-science research prove that these qualities are best produced in traditional families with married parents.

Family breakdown, by contrast, limits the accumulation of such human capital. Worse, divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing leave the door wide open for big government. Dysfunctional families create an increased demand for state-funded food, housing and medical subsidies, which libertarians reject on principle. And in courts all over the country, judges who preside over the manifold disputes occasioned by broken families are forced to be more intrusive than the worst mother-in-law: They decide who should have primary custody, who gets a child on Christmas or summer holidays, whether a child should take piano lessons, go to Hebrew school, move to California, or speak to her grandmother on the phone. It is a libertarian's worst nightmare.

Hymowitz disputes Lindsey's assertion that "the instincts and abilities for liberty . . . are innate," arguing that such attributes can only be instilled in children who are properly raised by proper families.

All of this concern for the family is interesting, if slightly nauseating, coming from a party whose leaders are currently engaged in stripping health care away from children. Conservatives worry about what libertarians would do to families not in a material sense, of course, but in a spiritual one. The American Scene's Peter Suderman offers a libertarian rebuttal:

Few libertarians, I suspect, would argue that strong traditional family structures are a bad thing. In fact, I’d bet that the vast majority of them would be perfectly pleased to find families doing well. But I think a number of them would resist the idea that, somehow, there’s a social obligation to perpetuate the traditional family structure, and most would also argue that other forms of social arrangements are worth allowing, and might even prove fruitful. This stance might be less supportive of deploying government muscle in order to advance one's personal preferences than some would like, but it's hardly anti-family.

Suderman helpfully points out that the old fusionist equation -- "when families fail, government steps in" -- does not express the only government threat to the family; another is presented by the overbearing efforts of conservatives to ensure that everyone's family is socially correct.

Daniel Larison's response to both pieces constitutes a far more interesting social conservative engagement with libertarian theory than Hymowitz's article. Larison suggests that the real threat libertarianism presents to the family is in its tolerance of the displacements caused by capitalism and unbridled immigration; at the same time, he takes issue with the way that "families" are privileged within the internal conservative debate:

In fairness to the libertarians, labels such as pro-family and anti-family are absurd in a way. There are significant social and political consequences that result from legal and property arrangements that bind large, extended families together or from those that encourage the break-up of a household into many separate households. A public authority worried about the dangers of corruption, nepotism and civil strife created by extended family networks would implement laws to discourage that kind of family life, which might earn it the "anti-family" designation from those adversely affected by the change, while a booster of state authority might define it as a pro-family measure if he redefines what family is. Public authority has a vested interest in governing what kinds of families exist, because the different forms of families have consequences for social and political life that extend beyond the walls of the family home.

The point is that every act of legal recognition, permission or reinforcement of this or that social arrangement is equally "artificial" in one sense, and the decision to not privilege one form over another is a decision by default to support the emergence of alternative forms.

Larison recognizes one of the fundamental flaws of libertarian theory in general: there is no such thing as public neutrality on most issues. For Larison, the important question is "whether there are certain kinds of family life that are most conducive to human flourishing" -- as a genuine social conservative, he believes that the argument is unavoidable and worth having, and if we've come to an agreement, then the question is how to get government to encourage the best kind of family life.

Liberals, of course, apply the same critique to libertarian economic theory: the idea that government can avoid substantive engagement in the economy is simply nonsense. Even when it refuses to choose, it thereby tacitly makes a choice in someone's favor. And in a certain sense, we agree with Larison on the fact that government is inevitably involved in social matters as well. But "do as you will but cause no harm to others," properly understood, has very different consequences in economics than in the purely social sphere.

I still believe that, despite the optimism of the current crop of libertarians, they'll never really challenge the social conservatives for dominance on the right -- though I should note that by "social conservatives" I don't mean Christian fundamentalists per se; the latter are just a subset of the former, and their political import is likely to change significantly over the coming years. But at any rate, if the libertarians force social conservatives to more critically examine their assumptions about ideal social order, they will have done us all a favor.

Being Fred Thompson

2007-09-13T12:50:00.000-05:00

Hoover Institution fellow and former Reagan advisor Richard Allen has a rambling endorsement of Fred Thompson at the National Review. The point of the piece is to validate the Thompson-as-Reagan idea, but it mainly consists of nostalgic anecdotes about the political genius of the Gipper. Allen says little of substance about Thompson (despite mentioning that he's known him "for many years"), and the whole thing comes off as illustrative of precisely the mindset Thompson must be counting on among conservatives: a willingness to suspend disbelief, fueled by ever-fuzzier and ever-fonder memories of That Other Actor.

Says Allen:

It is undoubtedly too early to attribute the same comprehensive and plain-spoken vision to Fred Thompson, although his out-of-the gates speeches and remarks are very reminiscent of Reagan. But if they are there in Thompson they will reveal themselves; the Reagan qualities cannot be feigned or sustained for very long. Deep conviction will always be apparent as a campaign wears on, and the scarcity of it thus far in the wildly early presidential race has been conspicuous by its absence.

I've talked about the performativity of modern conservatism a great deal, but what's particularly interesting is how that acting is linked to a sense of conviction. The latter is seen as superior to knowledge, experience, discretion, or skepticism; it's a quality to be treasured in a leader and emulated in practice. But because it trumps knowledge, experience, discretion, and skepticism, because it triumphs over them, conservative conviction ends up being fixed to nothing, really, beyond a self-referential concept of abstract principles. I believe in individual freedom; the meaning and consequences of that statement of belief have nothing to do with testable results and everything to do with how well I project my conviction in that belief.

That's why, when we talk about conservative performativity, about conservatives as actors, it doesn't mean we're calling them phonies (except for those, like Mitt Romney, who really are phonies). They genuinely believe in their act, and they act to maintain their belief in their beliefs.

I know this is both abstract and probably well across the line into pop psychology. But I think it also has a lot to do with why Fred Thompson, despite his dismal resume and his disorganized campaign, has such purchase on the conservative imagination.

Yes, I'm Alive

2007-09-12T15:17:00.000-05:00

Allow me to indulge in a blogger cliche: sorry for the lack of posts recently.

I'm beginning something of a career transition and it's taking a toll on my blogging time; what time I've had lately has mostly been spent over at The Right's Field, where I've been writing about the Republican presidential field.

Despite a few notable incoming links, A&S remains a low-traffic blog, which is fine, but it also means it's harder to write when I'm less energetic. I expect to continue to use this site to post in-depth analysis of the conservative movement, but the pace around here will be slow for a while. I'm not going away -- I just want to make sure that what I do post is high-quality. In the longer-term future, I might look at ways to expand this project beyond the limited efforts I'm able to make here.

At any rate, have you read this article by TNR's Peter Keating? He explains his skepticism of claims that either Rudy Giuliani or Barack Obama can really change the American electoral math. Given that one bias in political analysis is to overestimate so-called "re-alignments," I'd say his arguments are worth taking seriously.

The Cognitive Question

2007-09-10T16:23:00.000-05:00

Do liberals and conservatives think differently? Yes, according to yet another study. I have mixed feelings about this sort of thing. I largely agree with Peter Suderman, who wonders: what's the point?

But other than giving the blogosphere a secondary story to argue about this week during breaks from analyzing the ~~Patraeus~~ Bush report, there doesn't seem to be too much point to these stories. Yes, conservatives and liberals are different, and some of their differences can ocassionally be shown in stastical form. How novel.

It is fun and somewhat instructive in a way. You read a paragraph like this:

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

...and you can't help but be amused at the article's very dry way of suggesting that conservatives ("structured and persistent") are stubborn and allergic to facts. The methodology is interesting:

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

Researchers got the same results when they repeated the experiment in reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when a W appeared.

The study's lead author attempts to soften the blow for conservatives by suggesting that their resistance to new information might be useful in certain situations that require focus. But when we're talking about who has his finger on the button, would you really ever want somebody who insists on seeing an M when they should be seeing a W?

But then again, so what? Should we insist on cognitive therapy for conservatives? Isn't that what politics is supposed to be? Of course the study's authors aren't claiming that conservatives are mentally ill, and rightly not. While we might like to tell ourselves that -- say after a bad election night -- it doesn't really lead us anywhere useful.

Last Night's Debate: The View from the Right

2007-09-06T12:06:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

For all the fun we in the netroots can have watching the Republican sideshow, we forget that they aren't doing it for our own amusement. They're trying to win support from the right. And with that in mind, here's a sample of conservative reaction to last night's Donnybrook in Durham.

Hoping to wrap things up on a positive note, the National Review's Kate O'Beirne instead sets herself up for a delightful little pratfall. "All three frontrunners have had a good night," O'Beirne says:

The frontrunners are confident, likeable, articulate - conservative enough on issues. Will be interesting to see reactions from Frank Luntz's focus group - more representative than most of us.

More representative than a National Review editor? Imagine that! So what did the focus group think of our "likeable, articulate" GOP candidates? David Freddoso fills us in:

Not only did the individual candidates do poorly, but the field performed badly as a whole. After the debate, not one of pollster Frank Luntz’s 29 focus-group members expressed satisfaction with the men on the stage.

The people have spoken, the bastards.

Freddoso, as the excerpt above suggests, takes a grim view of the entire exercise. The winner -- "by attrition" -- was John McCain, a man with virtually no prospect of climbing his way back into the lead. Huckabee was "unimpressive," Duncan Hunter "bored the crowd," and Sam Brownback "said nothing that anyone will remember tomorrow." Romney blew a question on taxes, was forced to squirm when confronted by a servicemember's father, and worst of all, "even [his] normally perfect hair was a bit askew." And Rudy?

Rudy Giuliani’s performance was probably his worst since the first debate. He not only urged voters to ignore his private life, but also said that his private life has not been “terribly different than at least some people in this country.” (“Whoever hasn’t called a press conference to dump his wife and introduce his mistress, let him cast the first stone…”)

It wasn't all doom and gloom. Mona Charen liked the exchange between Huckabee and Ron Paul over Iraq, and thought that McCain "managed to make [Romney] look like an overly tentative technocrat." John Pitney, though (same article), seems to think that Rudy could use some more practice weaseling out of questions about his personal life. NRO's Jim Geraghty gives the gold to an "unflappable" Rudy, while pouring scorn on the highly-flappable Tom Tancredo, whom he describes as "an eyeball-popping, jumpy, loud, jittery 1970s sitcom character." Geraghty has praise for Huckabee's "charisma" and McCain's "solid"-ity, but thinks Romney had "an off-night," especially on Iraq. NR Editor Rich Lowry, meanwhile, calls it for McCain, agrees that Romney was "wobbly" on Iraq, and says he dug Rudy, but he wishes the man would shut up about New York already.

The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes is likewise crowding onto the McCain Wagon, praising "his muscular position in favor of the 'surge' in Iraq." And, like Lowry, Barnes is tired of all this New York talk from Giuliani:

And while Rudy Giuliani was no slouch, he became tedious by droning on about his accomplishments as mayor of New York

Whaddya gonna do, Rudy? People are tired of hearing you bang on about 9/11 all the time. Now they're tired of hearing you bang on about being mayor of NYC all the time. What do you have left to talk about? The ferret menace?
Redstate's Dan McLaughlin thinks that "most of the candidates played fairly well to their pre-existing images," and gives some credit to Romney for his attacks on the "sanctuary cities" issue. McLaughlin, a Giuliani supporter, thinks his man had "a very good night... despite the ugly eruption of his personal life" (that happens to him a lot, doesn't it?). And agrees with a very common point in all of these reactions: the night's big loser was Hollywood Fred Thompson, who wasn't up to debating and who chose instead to spend the night on Jay Leno's couch.

But Mac Johnson of Human Events suggests that the real loser might be America -- which, judging by the evidence on stage last night, is "almost certainly doomed":

I saw gifted candidates. I saw correct-thinking candidates. But I never saw both these traits in the same person. Granted, I was just called up from AAA ball to cover this major league event, but I’m telling you our bench is just not that deep. Somewhere, somehow, conservatism has gone astray at the highest levels of the movement. Where are our leaders?

Johnson, speaking for the base, was encouraged by all the talk of immigration, and particularly by Mitt Romney's "channeling Tom Tancredo" -- though he doesn't trust Multiple Choice Mitt ("an ambitious man") to stick by Tancredo-ist positions for a moment longer than he deems it politically expedient. On Iraq, meanwhile, Johnson is annoyed by the perception that "most of the candidates talked more about how soon we could withdraw than of how important it is to win."

If Johnson really does speak for the base, his analysis casts the right's field in an interesting light. On stage in Durham last night, they tried as best they could to toe the movement conservative line, offering the platitudes and positions Republican candidates are expected by the conservative establishment to express. Yet there may have seemed to be a lack of conviction in it all -- maybe the candidates are demoralized to find themselves caught between the intensity of the conservative base's demands on the one hand, and the widespread disapproval of the American public on the other.

Whatever the cause, it left Johnson feeling depressed:

All told, by the end of the evening I was left depressed, unable to see conviction, correctness and charisma emerge in a single candidate. This depression was made worse since all night long, the candidates had invoked Ronald Reagan -- the exemplar of conviction, correctness and charisma for the conservative movement. They invoked him in an attempt to inherent some of his power -- to associate themselves with a dead hero of old. But the comparisons had the opposite effect. All eight on the stage seemed smaller in the shadow of the great man.

The same shadow they were struggling to escape three months ago -- and no progress. Maybe they should try a surge.

This Is Why Everyone Hates the MSM

2007-09-05T16:05:00.001-05:00

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with these people? Bad enough we've had to be subjected to years of vacuous chatter about which presidential candidates people would enjoy having beers with (despite the fact that neither of our last two presidents have actually been beer-drinkers). Now ABC, in all its investigatory splendor, demands that the public discuss whether we'd rather go on a road trip with Hillary or with Giuliani.

Christ.

For the record, neither. It would be weird and awkward and unpleasant to go on a road trip with either of them. I can't even imagine going on a road trip with Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani. The hypothetical has no conceivable bearing on anything even approaching reality. You might as well ask whether I'd prefer Hillary or Rudy as a ham sandwich.

Yeah, I'm no fun. But really -- ugh.

Republican Decline, Part XXVII

2007-09-05T13:24:00.000-05:00

It isn't just wishful thinking, it's real data showing the decline of the Republican party. Today's Wall Street Journal has the latest, reporting on a study by prominent Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio:

For Republicans hoping the 2008 campaign will bring a fresh start after the troubled tenure of President Bush, there are sobering signs: Evidence indicates that the party's problems with the American electorate are much bigger than the president and won't go away when he leaves office.

Recent voter surveys, including private polling done by a leading Republican strategist, suggest a broader erosion of Republicans' appeal. In particular, three groups crucial to Mr. Bush's goal of a "permanent Republican majority" are drifting away: younger voters, Hispanics and independents.

The reasons include the Iraq war, conservatives' emphasis on social issues such as gay marriage, abortion and stem-cell research, and a party-led backlash against illegal immigrants that has left many Hispanic and Asian-American citizens feeling unwelcome. The upshot is that Republicans face structural problems that stem from generational, demographic and societal changes and aren't easily overcome without changing fundamental party positions.

Fabrizio found -- consistent with his findings in a comprehensive study of Republicans earlier this year (discussed here) -- that the GOP is growing both older and more conservative. This isn't surprising, given that the present Republican party coalition is dominated by a sharply ideological conservative movement whose ideas and leadership have their origins in the Goldwater era.

The Bush administration's efforts to overcome these structural problems seem to have failed in multiple ways. Their initial efforts to overcome the party's image for fiscal meanness and to broaden the GOP beyond its white base -- thus "compassionate conservatism" and the constant references to "the Hispanic vote" and "the black vote" -- have been undermined by backlashes from fiscal conservatives (who moan endlessly about "big government conservatism") and race-baiting strategists from the party's own Congressional wing. And the idea that they could rally around social security privatization seems both cynical and naive -- an attempt to exploit the anxiety of younger Americans while ignoring the fact that young voters are more supportive of activist government than are their elders. And, of course, nothing they could do would be enough to overcome the damage caused by their disastrous medacity and incompetence in Iraq.

All of this is why the pressure is on the current crop of Republican candidates to come up with the ideas to revitalize the Republican party, perhaps by redefining conservatism for a new era. We've seen that some candidates, on a symbolic level at least, seem to represent the efforts of those feeling their way toward new models. But we've seen very little in the way of actual, working ideas.

Part of the problem is that Republicans remain captive to the conservative machine, and that machine is deeply invested in the delusion that its own preoccupations represent majoritarian sentiment. They don't. Republicans are beginning to understand how disadvantaged they are electorally, but they don't see how marginalized they are ideologically. Until they do -- and as Peter Beinart has suggested, maybe it'll take the efforts of a Republican Leadership Council -- they won't find themselves on the road to recovery. Like weak parties at any point in American history, the best they'll be able to hope for is to steal occasional victories with glamorous candidates. But that won't do anything to reverse the rot within.

Manufacturing Shared Prosperity

2007-09-05T11:07:00.000-05:00

Cato's Daniel Ikenson follows up on his own thesis about the allegedly-surprisingly-vital state of American industry with a mention of Peter Goodman's recent article, which provided a case study in the same phenomenon.

As Goodman describes it:

The United States makes more manufactured goods today than at any time in history, as measured by the dollar value of production adjusted for inflation — three times as much as in the mid-1950s, the supposed heyday of American industry. Between 1977 and 2005, the value of American manufacturing swelled from $1.3 trillion to an all-time record $4.5 trillion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

With less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States is responsible for almost one-fourth of global manufacturing, a share that has changed little in decades. The United States is the largest manufacturing economy by far.

Ikenson offers his own thoughts on the implications of this "metamorphosis" in American manufacturing:

During the most recent decade, U.S. manufacturing has become increasingly oriented toward the middle and upper ends of the value-added spectrum. Opportunities abound for workers with skills or the willingness and wherewithal to acquire them. In fact, the title of the National Association of Manufacturers tenth annual Labor Day Report on the state of U.S. manufacturing is “Rising Incomes Cushion Economy,” and its subtitle is “Finding Highly Skilled Workers Remains a Challenge for Manufacturers.” It seems to me that rising wages should make more workers willing to get the skills, and the need to find highly-skilled workers should induce manufacturers to assist on the wherewithal front.

The story about the current economy continues to be the disconnect between the optimists and the pessimists: the former seem completely unable to understand the latter, even though pessimism about the economy is the lived experience of most Americans.

Wage growth in fact remains relatively slow. But if we take Ikenson's analysis on faith and concede -- happily -- that there is increasing demand for highly-skilled manufacturing workers, then we should also take seriously the question of "wherewithal." Specific investment in advanced skills is a risky thing, as Jacob Hacker has pointed out. And it becomes an increasingly difficult question of "wherewithal" when seen in the context of the many other risks facing American workers: lack of portable, affordable health care, unreliable defined-contribution pension schemes, low savings and high levels of debt, and an increasingly volatile housing market.

Certainly it would be a good thing for high-value-added manufacturers to invest in helping train workers to fill the jobs they need filled. But addressing those other sources of insecurity would go a long way toward encouraging workers to make their own investments in obtaining advanced skills -- or even in starting up their own ventures.

Good social insurance can be capitalism's best friend. And in the long run, experience has shown us that economic growth most benefits society when government helps ensure that the newfound prosperity is shared by all.

If we're having a "second industrial revolution," as Ikenson calls, it, let's not forget the lessons of the first.

GOP Abandons Latinos; Latinos Abandon GOP

2007-09-04T15:32:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

As sure as night follows day, if you abuse a constituency long enough, it'll turn on you. As Republican candidates ignore real Latinos and play to the white GOP base's fear of imaginary ones, we can start to see the consequences on the horizon. For instance, via Soren Dayton, here's the Dallas Morning News's William McKenzie on how Republicans are losing Hispanic evangelicals:

A note here for Mitt, Fred, Rudy and the gang:

You guys gunning for the GOP nomination really should pay attention to the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez and the many other Latino evangelicals who think like the California pastor. They are natural Republicans, but if your party keeps up its anti-immigrant rhetoric, you can forget them coming your way.[...]

The defeat [of the immigration bill] has Mr. Rodriguez wondering whether "the GOP is the party of Jeff Sessions, Tom Tancredo and James Sensenbrenner or the party of George W. Bush and John McCain?" In other words, those like Mr. Tancredo who strongly opposed immigration reform or those like Mr. Bush who strongly favored it.

Right now, Mr. Rodriguez thinks, "xenophobia has triumphed over an appreciation for diversity. They completely abandoned us."

Wow. And, remember, this is a guy who likes Republicans.

Rodriguez wasn't the only Latino evangelical leader telling McKenzie about Hispanic anger at the GOP. While conservatives have been congratulating themselves for their "triumph" on the immigration bill -- deluding themselves into believing that they somehow represented the will of the majority -- the other shoe may be about to drop.

As Dayton points out:

Moderate evangelicals are swing voters, as are evangelical Hispanics. They gave Bush 1.8m votes. Those are not margins we can throw away.

Right Back Atcha

2007-09-04T15:01:00.000-05:00

The National Review's editors argue that Republicans should stop complaining about the Democrats' "do-nothing Congress":

Democrats have already responded to the charge by saying that they would have passed a lot of bills if not for Republican obstruction. The solution, they will say, is for voters to remove enough Republican senators that no more filibusters will be possible, and to take the veto out of Republican hands. This advice will fall on receptive ears.

Instead, our editor friends say, Congressional Republicans should try a bit of ju-jistu:

Republicans should shift their focus from the Democratic pass/fail record to the underlying reason for it. Democratic bills are failing because they are too far left to win strong bipartisan support. This Congress has tried to raise taxes, to force taxpayers to finance the killing of human embryos, to micromanage the war, and to move toward nationalized health care. It is a Congress that wants to do much too much: in short, a liberal Congress. Maybe that’s what Republicans should call it.

The problem for conservatives is that all of these Democratic positions (no matter how the right caricatures them) are majoritarian ones. The reason the bills aren't getting bipartisan support is because the Republicans aren't a majoritarian party; they're increasingly a fringe party.

It's nice to have the courage of your convictions, but there's a fine line between courage and self-destructiveness.

Alien & Sedition Will Be Back

2007-08-31T11:29:00.001-05:00

...after Labor Day. I'll be bringing back the "advisors" series, and, eventually, the conservative history series.

Also, what the hell is wrong with the Mets? Ugh.

Blah Blah Blah Hates America

2007-08-29T14:05:00.000-05:00

Even the more respectable members of the conservative commentariat seem susceptible to the strange game of parsing the political significance of pop culture for the sake of determining whether x is good or bad for The Cause. The newest question: is The Bourne Ultimatum anti-American? Yes, really -- that's the question.

The whole thing begins, as so many delightful discussions do, with Bill O'Reilly, who complains that, in the film, "the CIA guys are bad, bad, bad," and also Matt Damon and Julia Stiles are communists in real life. Fulfilling his role in the ecosystem of hackery, Micky Kaus apes O'Reilly's ravings from his own faux-centrist "contrarian" perch:

The problem is the film is unredeemed by any sense that America or the American government ever stands for or does anything that is right. It is a big hit overseas. ...

From here the debate moves into tonier intellectual quarters, as Ross Douthat ponders whether Paul Greengrass's film wanders too far into the "large gray area between generic 'corruption in high places' films that don't have a broader anti-American message and exercises in explicit Amerika-bashing like Dogville."

Ultimately it's left to neo-paleocon Daniel Larison to tamp out the fires of conservative outrage:

The first mistake anyone who flings the “anti-American” accusation makes is to equate the government with the society as a whole. If someone or something is critical of the U.S. government, it is very often deemed anti-American or, if the person doing the criticising is American, unpatriotic. This plays by the state’s rules: it makes patriotism dedication to the state, rather than the country, and it makes the state into the embodiment of America. This is simply not true, and it’s a very good thing at times that this isn’t true. That doesn’t mean that the citizens don’t have some small part to play in the dreadful policy decisions made by the state (it is our government, after all), but the decisions being taken in Ultimatum are the sort that the public is never supposed to know about because the average citizen of this country would still probably be horrified at ordering the deaths of foreign journalists in the name of protecting some part of the behemoth security state. [...]

Mickey Kaus’ main complaint is that “the film is unredeemed by any sense that America or the American government ever stands for or does anything that is right.” Here’s the crucial point, since the movie is not concerned with America in general, but is very specifically concerned with one nasty corner of the American government.

I'll give Douthat a mulligan on this one. But it's fascinating that the very basic level of nuance Larison brings to the debate is completely beyond the grasp of people like Kaus and O'Reilly, who, for whatever reason, are unable to differentiate between certain people in a government and a nation in toto. Meanwhile even the smartest conservatives find themselves spending their intellectual energies in pop culture controversies drummed up by knuckle-dragging shouters and their vapid enablers. I suppose that's the price you pay for an attachment to a political movement that believes in the primacy of culture. But it looks pretty silly.

A Telling Silence

2007-08-29T11:36:00.000-05:00

On the second anniverary of the New Orleans levee failure in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, d-day offers an instructive comparison between the two American political parties. While each of the frontrunning Democratic candidates for president has a comprehensive plan for reconstruction, the Republican candidates have, er... not so much:

Rudy Giuliani: Three-line press release, no specifics.
Mitt Romney: Nothing on the front page.
Fred Thompson: Nothing on the front page.
John McCain: Three-paragraph press release, no specifics.
Mike Huckabee: Nothing on the front page, at the top of the site is a news flash that "Gov. Mike Huckabee to Participate in the New Hampshire Republican Presidential Debate on September 5, 2007."
Sam Brownback: Nothing on the front page.

Katrina was a natural disaster. The catastrophe in New Orleans, though, was a disaster of conservative government. The fact that conservatives continue to have nothing to say about it suggests that they remain as great a danger to public health and well-being as ever.

Iraq: Whose Failure of Will?

2007-08-29T11:01:00.000-05:00

Subbing for Andrew Sullivan, Hilzoy reposts a fantastic essay examining the common right-wing trope that victory in Iraq is primarily a matter of will -- and its corollary, which is that those who oppose the endless prolongation of the war are a "party of defeat," since they sap the nation's will to victory.

Hilzoy asks:

[W]hose will and resolve failed us in the war in Iraq? And to the extent that any sort of success in iraq was possible, whose feckless irresolution and lack of full commitment should we blame for our failure?

And these seem to me like critical questions. At the heart of it is the simple proposition that "if you really want something, you will not make fundamental or careless mistakes about it." By this measure, it seems incontrovertible that the Bush administration has never really cared about "victory" in Iraq. The administration, from the beginning, refused to plan for the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, relying instead on careless faith in its own platitudes.

Says Hilzoy:

But none of the people who led us into war could possibly have really cared about succeeding in Iraq. If they had, they could not have made the mistakes they did. And so, led by these feckless and irresponsible people, who were not nearly afraid enough of "defeat, nor dishonor, nor an Iraq under the terrorist heel," we invaded Iraq. Their failure of will predictably led to the present catastrophe. The consequences of our defeat will be disastrous, most of all for the Iraqi people, but it is not at all clear that those consequences can now be prevented. We have made too many mistakes, and while they could easily have been avoided had anyone cared enough to do it right, no one did. And they cannot be undone.

The wider failure of will, Hilzoy argues, was by the American people in general, who, swayed by muddy trivia like the details of John Kerry's purple hearts and whether or not the Democratic challenger had changed certain of his positions, cast their votes for the tough-talking Bush, despite ample evidence that Bush's management of the war -- tough talk and all -- was diastrously incompetent. By this measure, it could be said that the American people, in voting for Bush, demonstrated their lack of seriousness about "victory" in Iraq.

National elections are complex things, and it's their nature to turn on all kinds of issues and ephemera, much of which seems distressingly trivial, especially in retrospect. I like Hilzoy's argument slightly better when it's focused on the cult of Very Serious People in both the Beltway and conservative movement establishments:

The party of Josh Trevino [et al] has had complete control over the war in Iraq. Given the feckless and criminally irresponsible way this administration has conducted that war, as well as the complete irresponsibility of supporting Bush's reelection when his incompetence in Iraq was clear, I think it's a bit much for them to be lecturing the American people on their lack of resolve now.

They were the ones who led the discussion, who framed, and continue to frame, the constant enabling of the Bush crowd as the only route to victory. They're the ones with access to the information that contradicts such nonsense. They're the ones who are to blame for defeat in Iraq.

But enough of me -- read Hilzoy's post in its entirety. It's really very good.

Way Over Yonder

2007-08-29T10:18:00.000-05:00

Has it really been ten years since the release of Mermaid Avenue? Almost -- and Alan Jacobs wonders why the project never gained the kind of fame that a very similar collaboration -- the Basement Tapes -- did.

Of course, as Jacobs concedes, neither Billy Bragg nor Wilco has anything like the star power of Bob Dylan. But I agree with him that their musical animation of lost Woody Guthrie lyrics is a masterpiece, and a decade later, it's still not too late to spread the word.

Republicans at a Fork in the Road

2007-08-27T10:49:00.000-05:00

Following on the previous post, let's return for a moment to the "Movement 2.0" conversation. Consider these two points from Soren Dayton's post about possible ways forward for the GOP coalition:

Another option would be to continue to play for the working class, as Bush so incredibly succeeded in 2004, with "the party of capital" winning the white working class vote by 23%. The problem is that we lost a bunch in 2006, and we are unlikely to succeed in 2008. However, that would be the strategy of the Sams Club Republican advocates....

Another option would be the resurgence of a reformist movement in the GOP. This would be a strategy for holding on to the upper-middle class and appealing to students. There would be process reforms like earmark reform, which is clearly a Republican issue, and ethics reform, which could be. There are more complicated parts like redistricting, which is a Republican issue in California, but Democratic in places where GOPers lose from it. There’s actually a natural technological niche here with things like the Sunlight Foundation, Ruffini’s open API stuff, etc. There is a historical antecedent in the TR Progressive movement, and it doesn’t damage the existing coalition too much. Right now, this is a post-partisan issue rather than a partisan one. But once the Democrats take charge, it will quickly become a partisan one. It is already starting. In fact, we could use the cover of a Hillary Clinton presidency to co-opt the anti-Hillary anger into a constructive direction.

Dayton says he favors the latter approach, though he concedes it may be "too post-partisan" for many conservative activists. He also hints at melding a reformist politics onto a redoubled pro-war line.

There's no doubt that pro-war voters are a crucial component of the Republican base right now, though while Dayton sees this constituency as "part of the answer" for the GOP coalition, there's also the possibility that they are part of the problem for Republicans, forcing the party's candidates into a hard-line position that repels mainstream voters (including critical constituencies like Hispanics and young voters).

But let's broaden the frame. Dayton has a series of very interesting posts on the subject of conservative renewal. In one, he observes:

[T]he deeper problem is that we need to re-evaluate and re-configure our core issues so that they appeal to 60-70% of the American people. After all, and as I have noted, you cannot win elections without independents. Right now the Dems are winning because the GOP is not competing. "You can’t beat something with nothing."

The problem is how to get to that 60-70%. It seems that, among the brighter young conservative activists, two broad approaches are emerging, and right now they are competing against each other.

Here's how Reihan Salam defined them:

I see two ways to do this: a moralistic domestic reformism that ties together the applied neoconservatism of welfare reform and crime-fighting, the social conservatism of moving to reduce the number of abortions (through restrictions or abortion alternatives) and income-splitting and other marriage-friendly and family-friendly measures, and a civic nationalism that emphasizes America's common culture and the central importance of assimilation and integration....

Or War on Terror nationalism, which focuses on the defeat of America's enemies to the exclusion of domestic issues.

Right now, WOT nationalism is surprisingly potent, certainly in the Republican primary race. In part, this is a function of the collapse of the GOP's big tent. My sense is that the shelf-life of War on Terror politics is limited. Over the long term, I think a commitment to WOT nationalism will shrink the Republican Party.

Dayton essentially makes the contrasting case in a series of posts criticizing Mike Huckabee for the candidate's nativism, economic populism, and isolationism. If Dayton seems to favor a combination of "post-partisan" reformism, libertarian-esque economic policies, and something like the "war on terror nationalism" Salam identifies, Huckabee apparently represents the specter of "Buchanan/McGovern Republican[ism]," which would amount to "isolationism, protectionism, and "'culture war.'"

This is where I begin to put words in mouths, creating oppositions where the original authors might be more inclined to look for nuance, but let's take all this discussion as an opportunity to outline two broad possible futures for the right's coalition.

One is something like "moralistic domestic reformism," which would meld a slightly softened form of social conservatism to a right-wing version of economic populism. The other is a kind of libertarian pro-war nationalism with an added focus on procedural reform issues. We've seen how critics of each approach might characterize them. It's probably safe to say that inasmuch as there is a presidental candidate to represent each tendency, it's Huckabee for the former and Giuliani for the latter.

It's difficult to escape old paradigms. Dayton cites James Antle's warning that "the fusion of economic populism and social conservatism has generally been a losing strategy in Republican politics," even while noting that "there are fewer economic conservatives in the party than there used to be." The concept of fusionism itself has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years; conservatives seem torn between declaring the old fusionism outdated and reminding themselves of the inherent value of the concept itself. Yet if the balance has been thrown -- if there is no longer equal weight between fiscal and social conservatives -- can fusionism really mean anything at all? Does it make sense to speak of a "new" fusionism, or was there only ever one kind of fusionism -- one which expired when the balance of forces it expressed began to shift?

In one sense, it's unfortunate that Giuliani and Huckabee enter this race with such a disparity in resources -- it would be fascinating to watch the battle between them develop along these ideological lines. Of course, there's an excellent chance that neither man will win the Republican nomination. It's possible that GOP voters either don't recognize, or simply aren't willing to pursue, the large-scale philosophical questions currently confronting the Republican party and the conservative movement.

Kids All Right; Republicans, Not So Much

2007-08-27T10:39:00.000-05:00

This is bad, bad news for the GOP:

A Democracy Corps poll from the Washington firm of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner suggests voters ages 18 to 29 have undergone a striking political evolution in recent years.

Young Americans have become so profoundly alienated from Republican ideals on issues including the war in Iraq, global warming, same-sex marriage and illegal immigration that their defections suggest a political setback that could haunt Republicans "for many generations to come," the poll said.

The startling collapse of GOP support among young voters is reflected in the poll's findings that show two-thirds of young voters surveyed believe Democrats do a better job than Republicans of representing their views - even on issues Republicans once owned, such as terrorism and taxes.

(h/t: Donklephant)

Note which Republicans duck the trend. One is Rudy Giuliani -- but his own efforts to identify with the hard right on war and terror issues will cost him the youth vote as the campaign gains more attention.

The other:

[Arnold] Schwarzenegger, by supporting issues "once owned by the Democrats," such as the environment and education, has lured many young voters to support him and "closely identify themselves as Schwarzenegger Republicans," Mendelsohn said.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: in Sacramento, the Republicans have a model for how to resuscitate their party in blue/purple states and on a national level. But Schwarzenegger's politics are precisely the kind that conservative activists have spent 40 years trying to purge from the GOP.

Victory in Sight!

2007-08-24T11:28:00.001-05:00

The right is in full-on pony mode over Iraq now, between Bush's latest speech and the upcoming ~~Petaeus~~ White House report. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and wherever else unmitigated bullshit is sold.

It seems that every time Bush ratchets up the absurdity, the war party ups their buy-in. The actual news might not do justice to their fantasies, but what the hey, that's the liberal media for you. I'm not sure how much insight anyone else can bring to this, when it comes to probing the mysteries of American conservatism. Once you've started serving up the Kool-Aid you really can't go back, I guess. All you can do is more insist that the horrible scene unfolding around you has to be the prologue to a better world. Perhaps their strategy is to grind us down though the sheer relentlessness of their own tiresome foolishness. I know I hardly feel like trying to respond to them on the merits of their arguments anymore. What evidence do we have that reality-based analysis has any impact on them anyway?

It's a howling crescendo of self-delusion, and the only question is, once it all finally explodes, which way will the blast travel?

Keep Your Eye on the Dolchstosslegende

2007-08-22T13:48:00.000-05:00

William Kristol is an intellectually bankrupt thug. It's a point that hardly needs elaboration, but Jon Chait elaborates quite satisfyingly on it anyway, coming to a nice summation of the state of the Dolchstosslegende:

The theme of traitorous liberals is becoming a Standard trope. Last week's cover depicted an American soldier seen from behind and inside a circular lens--as if caught in the sights of a hostile sniper--beneath the headline, "does washington have his back?" The Weimar-era German right adopted the metaphor of liberals stabbing soldiers in the back. Kristol is embracing the metaphor of liberals shooting soldiers in the back. I suppose this is progress, of sorts.

There was a time when neoconservatives sought to hold the moral and intellectual high ground. There was some- thing inspiring in their vision of America as a different kind of superpower--a liberal hegemon deploying its might on behalf of subjugated peoples, rather than mere self-interest. As the Iraq war has curdled, the idealism and liberalism have drained out of the neoconservative vision. What remains is a noxious residue of bullying militarism. Kristol's arguments are merely the same pro-war arguments that have been used historically by right-wing parties throughout the world: Complexity is weakness, dissent is treason, willpower determines all.

Ross Douthat objects to Chait's piece -- not on the merits, but because Chait's magazine, the New Republic, has never taken a coherent stance on the war.

This, to me, seems entirely beside the point. Matt Freeney agrees, pointing out the structural reasons why TNR hosts a range of opinions on the issue. He also invites Douthat to offer his own opinions on whether Kristol's buffoonish rants should be taken at face value, or seen as something a little more performative.

To my mind, authentic or not, the Dolchstoss discourse has the same effects. And what's peculiar is that Douthat himself has denounced it in the past:

Myself, I think that liberals should be praying that the Right embraces the "stabbed in the back" theory of what went wrong in Iraq (and possibly Iran as well), because it will push conservatives toward political irrelevance. Yes, many conservatives have long nursed the belief that we could have won in Vietnam if liberals hadn't turned gutless and anti-American, but this belief hasn't won the Right any elections ...

So when Dinesh D'Souza tells conservative cruisegoers that "it's customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who's 'we'? ... The left won by demanding America's humiliation," he isn't broadening conservatism's base - he's shrinking it. Which is what a post-Bush conservatism that obsesses over how the liberal media undid the Iraq Occupation by failing to "report the good news" would do as well.

This is a pragmatic argument, not a principled one, though there's no reason to believe that Douthat has any sympathy for Dolchstoss talk on any level. Maybe he was simply using Chait's piece as an opportunity to grind an axe over TNR's editorial policy. But it sure would be nice if he, as a conservative, would also take the opportunity to denounce the thuggery of his ideological cousin.

Katrina: Conservative Gold

2007-08-22T11:44:00.001-05:00

Sensible people saw Hurricane Katrina as a horrific natural and human disaster. They also saw it as an illustration of the serious drawbacks of the anti-government mentality.

But our conservative friends are not sensible people. Rick Perlstein takes a look back at the aftermath of Katrina, when conservatives saw the disaster as a "golden opportunity" to demand everything from the suspension of wage regulations and the elimination of the capital gains tax, to the privatization of Social Security, to the abolition of the Public Broadcasting System.

Read the whole post -- though you may want to cover your eyes when you get to the part where Jack Kemp mutilates the memory of Bobby Kennedy.

Huckabee Would Abolish Birthright Citizenship

2007-08-22T11:36:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

Soren Dayton observes that Mike Huckabee seems to have flip-flopped on immigration. Whereas at one time Huckabee endorsed comprehensive immigration reform and said that opposition to such reform was "driven by just sheer racism," now he has indicated that he would abolish a core American principle: birthright citizenship:

" ‘I would support changing that. I think there is reason to revisit that, just because a person, through sheer chance of geography, happened to be physically here at the point of birth, doesn’t necessarily constitute citizenship,’ he said. ‘I think that’s a very reasonable thing to do, to revisit that.’ "

This is a naked appeal to the sheer racism of the kind of people who rant about "anchor babies," and while Huckabee may see an immediate political advantage in it -- as Dayton notes, it's just the kind of thing that'll help him pull in the Paul/Tancredo crowd -- it undermines his core utility to the GOP.

The reason I've long considered Huckabee so dangerous to Democrats, besides his personal charm and speaking skills, is that his politics represent the best chance for Republicans to rebuild an enduring majority coalition. As a Baptist minister who speaks the social justice language of the emerging constituency of liberal and moderate evangelicals, he's in a position to secure and expand the evangelical vote for Republicans just when the party is in danger of losing its advantage there. And his "Main Street over Wall Street" rhetoric, combined with his defense of government and his willingness to talk (somewhat) honestly about taxes (FairTax aside), is perfectly in tune with the American mainstream, who remain uninterested in the fiscal conservative orthodoxy to which most Republican candidates feel they have to chain themselves. If Barack Obama is trying to run to the center and move it left, Mike Huckabee is trying to run to the center and move it right.

But if Huckabee is going to violate his own religious beliefs and sell himself out to the nativist crowd, he risks surrendering all these advantages. Anti-immigrationism, as intoxicating as Republicans find it, is the route to a long-term GOP minority, not a majority. Maybe Huckabee is eager to consolidate whatever gains he achieved in Ames by going after cheap support. But that support will come at a dear long-term cost for Huckabee and his party.

History Makes the Baby Jesus Cry

2007-08-21T11:12:00.000-05:00

I haven't read any of this yet, so I can't vouch for it in any meaningful sense, but Liars for Jesus looks like an interesting effort to debunk, in detail, the religious right's peculiar revisionist version of American history.

Of course, the frustrating thing about this sort of exercise is that the burden of proof isn't on us -- it's up to the revisionists to prove that their claims are correct. But they don't roll that way. So, a little reminder of the truth is nice now and then, and here's hoping this turns out to be a good one.

h/t: Five Before Chaos

Fred Barnes's Road to Oblivion

2007-08-21T10:19:00.000-05:00

(Photo by Ahubu)

"Follow me, comerades!"

Fred Barnes maps out the route to recovery for Republicans. A word of advice: next time you're lost, don't call Fred for directions.

First we get the counterfactual approach. I've seen this before, and it never fails to amuse me -- here is a party that has, for the past few years, insisted that reality itself would bend to their will. Now they're putting stock in the hope that reality will stop being so pesky:

What if military success by Gen. David Petraeus, the American commander, is matched by a political breakthrough engineered by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki? Or matched by the acceleration of political reconciliation at the provincial rather than the national level in Iraq? Either scenario is possible....

Nothing would boost Republicans more than visible progress in Iraq, yet other conceivable events would help. Mr. Bush can't erase the memory of his inept handling of Hurricane Katrina. But if another disaster occurred and the president responded effectively, that would counteract the memory of his Katrina performance.

So would a serious confrontation with Congress over spending, assuming Mr. Bush and Republicans win public approval as thoughtful budget cutters. And so, too, would the absence of an economic downturn as the president prepares to leave office enhance the reputation of Republicans for pursuing sensible economic policies. In short, a positive turn of events, while unpredictable, is the best hope of the GOP.

Wishful thinking on the war and the economy is one thing. And the budget battle may be a distinct possibility. But is Barnes actually rooting for another major natural disaster? Imagine the crucifixion scene if a Democrat talked this way.

At any rate, we also have the "big dumb idea" approach:

As Karl Rove has noted, Republicans need a big idea. The best available is the one Mr. Bush abandoned: ownership. Allowing private investment of payroll taxes for Social Security would only be a start. An Ownership Society would allow individual Americans, rather than government, to control how and where their health care, public education, 401(k) and IRA funds are spent.

My Republican friends, please listen to Fred Barnes. Run on Social Security privatization and the "ownership society." I hear the Whigs are looking for company in the dustbin of history.

Complacency Alert

2007-08-21T09:52:00.001-05:00

I'm not sure I quite agree with this, though I can see why the diary is getting such a positive reception. Traditionally, the American newsmedia aims for objectivity yet often fails to rise above vapidity. But it's not inherently conservative, if conservatism is understood as a particular socio-political project in America. Indeed, conservative success with media has come about largely as a product of decades of careful work cultivating an alternative to mainstream media, combined with strategies to pressure journalists and take advantage of the objectivity-vapidity paradigm. The legitimacy granted to what is, as the diarist points out, actually a rather fringe ideology, is not primarily the result of a "top-down" media structure, but of a movement that had the audacity to refuse to play by the rules of what was modern American journalism.

It's certainly true that the internet has helped broaden the range of information and opinion available to Americans, and that's undoubtedly a good thing for progressives. Online communications strategies have been critical in the emergence of the new progressive era. But that's because, like the conservatives before us, we're refusing to play by the rules of a media structure from which we've been locked out for the past few decades. We're taking advantage of new technologies, and innovating.

I bring this up in part because I think that if we become too comfortable in our assumption that new communications technologies will bring us "47 consecutive" Democratic presidents, we'll experience some pretty nasty whiplash when the other side innovates right past us again. And it will happen. The only thing we can do is try to stave it off as long as possible, but getting smug pretty much guarantees it'll happen sooner rather than later.

GOP vs. Health Care for Kids

2007-08-21T08:09:00.001-05:00

As often happens when a government does something particularly loathesome, the Bush administration waited until Friday evening, in the middle of a congressional recess, to announce its drastic new restrictions on SCHIP:

The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families....

In interviews, they said the changes were intended to return the Children’s Health Insurance Program to its original focus on low-income children and to make sure the program did not become a substitute for private health coverage.

After learning of the new policy, some state officials said yesterday that it could cripple their efforts to cover more children and would impose standards that could not be met.

“We are horrified at the new federal policy,” said Ann Clemency Kohler, deputy commissioner of human services in New Jersey. “It will cause havoc with our program and could jeopardize coverage for thousands of children.”

The new policy, coming as Bush promises to veto any bill expanding SCHIP, makes it nearly impossible for states to to cover children in families whose income is over 200% of the poverty level. Keep in mind that the poverty level for a family of four is an absurdly low $20,650. Trying to feed four kids on an income of $41,300? Good luck with the health insurance -- you're on you're own. The Bush administration is trying to prevent states from offering health care to kids whose families need the help. Dennis Smith, Bush's director of the Center for Medicaid and State Operations, said that the point of the new rules was to prevent states from "sustituting for private coverage." This is purely ideologically driven -- we're talking about denying kids health care for the sheer bloody-minded sake of satisfying the conservative think tanks. It's arrogant, cruel -- and perfectly in line with the opinions of every single Republican candidate for president.

As Paul Waldman has pointed out, the only GOP candidate to support expanding SCHIP was Tommy Thompson, now out of the race. Rudy Giuliani said it would make kids "wards of the state." Duncan Hunter called it -- what else -- "socialized medicine." As Waldman points out, the Republicans' real problem with SCHIP is that it is a widely popular government program that works well. They hate it because they are ideologically against the notion of government-supported health care. They want to take health coverage away from kids because they hate anything that shows that government can work, when it's not in the hands of incompetent Republicans.

They hate SCHIP because it shows America just how wrong and heartless the conservatives really are.

UPDATE: Gene Sperling (h/t DemFromCT) systematically dismantles the Bush administration's stated reasons for opposing the SCHIP expansion, and sums up:

Before, "compassionate conservatism" may have seemed like a political bumper sticker. Now it seems like the punch line of a sad joke, at the expense of millions of impoverished children.

A Note on Instrumentalism

2007-08-19T13:05:00.000-05:00

Upon further review, I can see how this post, in which I remarked on conservative instrumentalism, contradicted this one, in which I sympathized with Ross Douthat's defense of Kristol and Kagan on the question of whether they were giving too much weight to the interests of the conservative movement in staking out their foreign policy positions.

I think I was insufficiently critical of Douthat. While it's certainly true that there is inevitable overlap between one's domestic political interests and one's views on foreign policy, the major difference between liberals and conservatives over the past few decades has been that it's the latter who have had a self-identified "movement" in need of care and feeding. Certainly one can't imagine establishment liberals using space in their foreign policy papers to reflect on the priorities of the "liberal movement."

The Immigration Quandary

2007-08-17T07:23:00.000-05:00

Returning to the question of "Movement 2.0" -- Ruffini and Dayton, while they seem understandably intrigued by the galvanizing possibilities, for conservatives, of a Hillary Clinton nomination, nonetheless recognize that Hillary hatred would not suffice as an ideological basis for a new movement. They go on to review a number of issues around which such a movement could potentially be organized.

The approach is interesting in how it seems to reflect a very common pattern of instrumentalist thinking among conservatives. In other words: here are two conservatives saying, "we need a movement -- what issues can we use to build it?" It seems to me that the liberal habit is the opposite: "We need health care -- how can we get it?" This is a gross oversimplification, of course, but I do think it has something to do with why conservatives have shown such a genius for politics -- for them, politics is the point; ideas are the means. In its more vulgar forms this instrumentalism manifests, for instance, as the "Konservetkult" culture war mentality so vividly described by Brad Reed and Roy Edroso; this is the mentality that brought us such joys as the Half Hour News Hour and the "Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs of All Time." Ruffini and Dayton are serious thinkers, not themselves prey to such mania; it's just interesting, on the larger level, how a useful adaptation (a flair for politics) can mutuate into a serious deformity.

With that long aside out of the way, let's briefly consider the first instrument in the new movement's potential arsenal of ideas. Ruffini says:

Even if Movement 2.0 is two or more years away, there are things we should be doing now to prepare. At this point in the Clinton years, MoveOn had already started. Perhaps the analog to that is the immigration issue, where the right kicked ass. But, again, what did we create with the immigration issue? Where is the million person email list of people who got involved because of immigration, and can now be activated on other issues? It sounds like people were thinking of the right techniques for radio, but not for online.

I can understand why conservative activists are tempted to see immigration as an issue upon which they can build. After all, in a pretty bad year for the right, it's where they scored their most significant victory. It fires up the base and it can be milked for patriotism points.

At the same time, I'm astounded. The victory was tactical, not strategic. Conservative activists forced Congressional members of their own party to react to the demands of the base and kill the immigration bill, even though the bill's provisions were broadly popular among the general public. And, of course, achieving the "victory" meant months of noisy activism that put the rather vicious bigotry of so much of the Republican base on public display, even as the party's more sober thinkers have realized that, if it cannot expand beyond white Christian nationalism, the GOP is doomed to long-term minority status. Thus Dayton says:

Yesterday, one of the stand-ins at Andrew Sullivan’s blog argued that perhaps we could add African-Americans through railing on immigration. I, personally, find the idea both morally repugnant and unlikely to succeed. We want to get African-Americans back by increasing racist sentiment? Probably not a winner. Nevermind that we would lose our Hispanics, so it might not even add votes. And business wouldn’t tolerate a protectionist agenda....

Another [option] would be to try to organize and reach out to Hispanics. Bush tried that with immigration, and the party revolted. (wrongly, in my opinion).

Dayton is entirely correct. The experience of "victory" seems to have confused very many conservative activists and pundits, but if they don't pay close attention to the bigger picture, that victory will be Pyrrhic (more than it already was). Immigration is an issue that divides the existing Republican coalition, prevents outreach to a crucial new constituency (and no matter how much conservatives reassure themselves that "a lot of Hispanics oppose illegal immigration too," there's simply no way the GOP can act on the issue without unleashing the bigotry that will cost them even those Hispanic votes), and puts them on the wrong side of majority opinion. I can't see how any sensible conservative could possibly imagine that it would make a useful issue for a Movement 2.0.

Enough

2007-08-16T18:40:00.000-05:00

For whatever reason, I haven't been able to log into Blogger all day. I've had enough -- I'm moving this blog over to WordPress as soon as I have the spare time.

Meanwhile, you can check out a post I was going to cross-post here: my analysis of the "FairTax" movement currently creeping its way into influence in the Republican primary.

All the Conservative World's a Stage

2007-08-15T16:30:00.000-05:00

Henry Farrell responds to Ross Douthat on the question of whether (and to what degree), when they wrote their infamous paper "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan were more concerned with the political fate of the Republican party than with the national interest.

Douthat, I think, is correct to note that theorists usually believe that what is good the nation will be good for their party, and vice-versa. Otherwise, they wouldn't believe what they believe. At any rate, Farrell, in his response, links to a paper he wrote a couple of years ago, and I bring this all up because he cites a very interesting passage from that essay:

As Corey Robin has argued, both neo-conservatives like Irving Kristol and David Brooks and more traditional conservatives such as William F. Buckley appear to have been in the market in the late 1990’s for an existential struggle between good and evil, a rationale for crusade that would make politics seem exciting and meaningful. In David Brooks complaint, “The striking thing about the 1990s zeitgeist was the presumption of harmony. The era was shaped by the idea that there were no fundamental conflicts anymore.” It’s obviously easier to cast politics in sweeping moral terms when you can use a struggle of this sort as a metric, even if the struggle isn’t really there, or isn’t the kind of struggle that you claim it is. It’s also easier to galvanize the conservative movement into action:
[quoting from Kristol and Kagan]Without a broader, more enlightened understanding of America’s interests, conservatism will too easily degenerate into the pinched nationalism of Buchanan’s America First, where the appeal to narrow self-interest masks a deeper form of self-loathing. A true conservatism of the heart ought to emphasize both personal and national responsibility, relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic, which has been sorely lacking from American foreign policy—and from American conservatism—in recent years.
This emphasis on conservatism as a movement which must have a sense of the heroic lest it dwindle into mere selfishness, has the paradoxical effect of emptying out the core of conservatism. Kristol and Kagan suggest that what matters is a sense of “national greatness” rather than a specific set of virtues, or goals, or policies. Rather than being a defence of a particular set of transcendent values, conservatism becomes a kind of perpetual crusade, a continued attempt to create a sense of national greatness and of heroic endeavour. The content of politics – the particular tasks that the heroes must carry out, and the dragons that they must slay – becomes secondary to the heroic form. Here, conservatism is reduced to nothing more than a more-or-less aesthetic disposition towards politics, a kind of “proto-cognitive itch.” Not so much a commitment to a set of transcendent values, or even a pragmatic Burkean attachment to tradition, as a desire that politics provide a sense of the heroic.

Emphasis mine. I think that such impulses have been pretty apparent in both the behavior of the Bush administration and the rhetoric of its apologists -- the endless references to Churchill and Lincoln and "long wars," etc. I suggested just a few days ago -- in what was hardly an original observation -- that there has long been a link between the Republican party and the portion of Americans, particularly in the elite, who feel a need to attach themselves to some promise of "transcendence." What's fascinating is how performative conservatism seems to have become in many respects -- less a set of beliefs than a way of acting, and a way of watching oneself acting. One very often gets the impression that conservatives are trying to convince themselves that they're well-suited by the costumes they wear. This self-conscious performance moves to the center of the conservative experience, which, as Farrell says, is in turn emptied of any permanent content of its own.

Aping the Surrender Monkeys?

2007-08-15T07:46:00.000-05:00

MyDD's Todd Beeton examines whether it will be possible for any Republican to run as a "change candidate" this cycle, noting that many in the beleagured party of George W. Bush have been looking to French President Nicolas Sarkozy as an example of how to do it. As Todd points out, it's Newt Gingrich -- framing expert, nutty futurist, and current "none of the above" candidate -- who seems most fixated on le chemin Sarkozien:

So Sarkozy comes along and he's brilliant and he understands that [the French] are in a crisis of their culture. And he's in, in terms of the current politics of where we are in Washington, he is in the second term of a 12-year presidency, which has been decaying. Chirac was unpopular. So if you set up the normal political science equation, the left is going to win because after 12 years of the center right they've run out of energy and he manages to put together this magic formula of arguing that the greatness of France requires real change. So even though he is in Chirac's cabinet, he is the candidate of real change and Royale is the candidate of reactionary bureaucracy.

Speaking Tuesday at the National Press Club, Gingrich elaborated on what Sarkozian strategy might mean for the GOP:

Sarkozy, he said, did two important things.

First, Sarkozy established 16 Internet channels that were like YouTube and rigorously avoided trying to communicate through the French media, which Gingrich defined as hostile to conservatives.

"What (Sarkozy) said is, 'If I can communicate with you, then the news media can watch our conversation,' which is very different than having a conversation with the news media which (average people) watch," Gingrich said.

"The second thing is he made a very important speech where he said we must have a clean break" from Chirac, Gingrich said. "And I would say to (Republican) candidates, there is a lot of parallel there."

Gingrich used education as an example, asserting Republicans can win by advocating bold changes and framing failing schools as economic and national security issues. Gingrich said Democrats are too beholden to teachers' unions to match that argument.

Gringrich also spoke about the threat of economic competition from China and India, particularly in light of lagging American education standards, the usual terrorist stuff, and the evils of "government bureacracy."

A couple of points:

1) Gringrich's Sarkozian strategy seems to involve perpetuating the conservative impulse toward counterculture. Why do Republicans need to circumvent the media through internet channels? Don't they have Fox News? AM Radio? Over the past few decades, conservatives have built an entire parallel communications apparatus, one they use to talk amongst themselves while studiously ingoring the experiences and opinions of the American mainstream. This looks like little more than a Gingrichian pseudo-futurist twist on traditional conservative paranoia.

2) The United States, it turns out, is not France. The structural problems we face are nothing like those facing the French. There's an argument to be had over whether France needs a dose of Thatcherism; Sarkozy's election should be understood in that context -- this is the France of the 35-hour work week, powerful unions, and rather astonishing job security laws. The problems in the United States are entirely the opposite -- after decades of conservative ascendancy, our public investment and social insurance fall woefully short, leaving both our physical and social infrastructure crumbling. After Katrina, how can anyone credibly make the argument that the US needs more Thatcherism, more conservative economics? Conservatives want to use their own failures in government to discredit the notion of government itself; the only "change" they represent is an accelerated degradation of the ability of government to do what Americans expect it to do.

In the end, as always, Gingrich's rhetoric is mostly for show. He dresses up old conservative hobbyhorses as something fresh and futurist, but he offers nothing genuinely new or original. Much of what he says directly contradicts itself -- for instance, he raises the specter of economic and educational competition from China and India, only to use it as an opportunity to launch into yet another denunciation of teachers and yet another argument for undermining the funding and accountability of our schools through vouchers and "school choice." This is astonishing -- he uses the rise of our competitors to insist on the very things that would further damage our competitiveness!

You can't blame Republicans for looking wistfully across the Atlantic to the country they so recently demonized. They understand how deeply unpopular they have become after a catastrophic era of conservative government, and naturally they look to the one example they can find of conservatives finding a way to win despite their own unpopularity. Unfortunately for the Republicans, though, the similarities are only superficial. Again, and as these same patriots were at such pains to remind us only a few short years ago, the United States of America is not France.

On Movement-Building and Politician-Hatred

2007-08-14T10:50:00.000-05:00

More on the conversation about "Conservatism 2.0"... I should point out that in this analysis, the new movement is meant to be an upgrade over the first generation of the "online right" (e.g. Drudge, Free Republic, Instapundit, etc.) -- in other words, the "1.0" implied here is not necessarily the whole post-Goldwater conservative movement per se. My own analysis, though, is that that whole movement is in fact at a crossroads, and that the challenge facing next generation activists like Patrick Ruffini and Soren Dayton is not just to redeem the movement of the 1990s, but to find a new logic for a coalition that was in fact assembled beginning in the 1950s. This means the problem goes considerably beyond issues of technology -- though Ruffini and Dayton seem to understand that.

Ruffini asks, "when does Movement 2.0 get started?" Do conservatives have to wait for Hillary Clinton to galvanize them? If so, why hasn't that begun to happen already? And just what is the conservative relationship to the Republican party these days? Dayton points out that, just as the online left is about "basic politics, constituencies, etc., rather than technology," so the new new right will need an organizing principle -- and he reviews a few possibilities. Ruffini responds with some agenda ideas of his own.

I want to comment on a few aspects of this exchange; I'll break up my thoughts into two or three posts. As with the Ruffini-Dayton discussion of a couple months ago, there are very real implications here as to what may become of our conservative political opponents over the next decade or two.

My first thought is on the question of whether Hillary Clinton can serve as an organizing catalyst for a movement -- whether any person can really do so -- and on how much significance lies in the difference between a catalyst and a principle. Ruffini writes that "opposition galvanizes political movements, and not just online" -- and I don't disagree. On the other hand, as he acknowledges, there hasn't been much galvanizing going on so far:

But a lot of folks also hoped that we’d be at least partly there by now. With Hillary looking good on the Democratic side, and Republicans in the opposition (and on offense) in Congress, have things gotten any better? Is there any evidence that the Stop Her Now stuff that was so effective in 2000 is working this time around? I haven’t gotten as many direct mail letters or fundraising e-mails with Hillary front and center as I would have expected by now.

The other side of this coin is Dayton's assumption (shared with most of his conservative compatriots) that "opposition to Bush," or, in a more common phrasing, "Bush-hating," has worked as an "organizing principle" for the progressive netroots. As Dayton himself notes, such a "principle" is not the same thing as an actual idea.

By now the endless harping about "Bush-hatred" (the subtext is always: "irrational Bush-hatred") has grown stale enough that it's hardly worth the exercise of trying to parse and explain how liberals actually feel about the man and his administration. I'm content enough to reply that "Bush-hatred" is in fact a rational thing. Beyond that, the notions that people tend to personalize politics, and that "opposition galvanizes political movements," are basically truisms. It would be silly to claim that intense anger at George W. Bush hasn't helped fuel the growth of the new progressive movement -- both online and off (movements, plural, if you prefer).

I don't think I'm saying anything with which Ruffini or Dayton would disagree (other than the part about Bush-hatred being rational), and they seem to recognize that progressives have been working to lay far more durable foundations for our movement. Opposition can galvanize a movement, but it does not make a movement. Progressives are in fairly broad agreement on a number of policy fronts, among them the need for universal health care, for an end to the war in Iraq and a rational, multilateral foreign policy, for serious efforts to address the climate change crisis, for the protection of social security, for the preservation of the balance of powers and a more transparent, ethical government, and so on. Devotion to those ideas is precisely what fuels "Bush-hatred." Contrary to caricature, we don't all loathe the Bush administration because Dubya is a bumbling fake cowboy. We loathe it because it tramples on our principles and in so doing, in our estimation, seriously harms America.

I often get the sense that conservatives talking about "Bush-hatred" are projecting based on their own experience of Clinton-hatred during the 1990s -- making it all the more ironic that some of them seem to be waiting with bated breath for a chance to experience the hate all over again. But Clinton-hatred, I think, was a symptom of a decadent and confused conservativism. Some of it was no doubt fueled by rage at the Clenis (despite, or perhaps because of, the sick hypocrisy of so many of the president's prominent critics). But it really took off after the GOP's defeat in the 1995 budget showdown, and culminated in impeachment -- its purest and most impotent expression. Clinton-hatred was what the conservative movement turned to when it abandoned political philosophy. It amazes me that serious conservatives are nostalgic for it today.

One could defend conservatives, arguing that Clinton-hatred derived from the very sort of frustration I described liberals as experiencing -- that it was the product of a movement frustrated by its inability to legislate according to its own principles. Let's say we express all these frustrations affirmatively, as political ideas. What causes were lost to the conservatives, that drove them over the edge? Were they causes with which the majority of Americans would identify?

If politician-hatred is ultimately a manifestation of frustration over thwarted principles, perhaps it's better to lay our principles on the table. Again, progressives have health care, an end to the Iraq war, etc. What do conservatives have? Are they politically viable ideas? This is where Ruffini and Dayton turn next. In the meantime, I'd suggest that anyone looking to Clinton-hatred to kickstart Conservatism 2.0 isn't addressing the root challenge facing the right.

The Ongoing Extinction of the Moderates

2007-08-13T10:27:00.000-05:00

Ron Brownstein describes the dual pressures eroding the last remnants of the GOP's moderate wing, as the party continues its process of self-marginalization:

Some moderate Republicans, including Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter and former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee, also have confronted arduous primaries from conservative challengers in recent years, and Maryland's Wayne Gilchrest, a leading House centrist, is facing one now. But for most of the remaining GOP moderates, primaries are no longer the principal danger. Instead, because they mostly now represent swing or even Democratic-leaning constituencies, the moderates face a growing danger in their general election campaigns. In 2006, the Republican Party suffered heavy general election losses in the affluent, white-collar suburbs where moderates tend to be located and where they once thrived (especially along the coasts and in the upper Midwest). And "the environment for them in 2008 could be as bad or worse," said independent election analyst Stuart Rothenberg.

As Brownstein says, "moderate Republicans have been in decline for so long that decline itself has become part of their tradition." This is not a simple process of evolution: it's the result of decades of deliberate and determined efforts by the conservative movement. As the conservatives see it, there's only room for one queen in the hive, and the Goldwater bee has accordingly gone to work stinging the Rockefeller bee to death.

Brownstein also observes that -- Lamont v. Lieberman notwithstanding -- Democrats have not seen such vicious internecine warfare:

This difference is rooted in the fact that the Democrats today are much more of a coalition party than the Republicans: Polls show that only about half of Democratic voters consider themselves liberals, while three-fourths or more of Republicans call themselves conservatives. That means to win elections, Democrats depend more than Republicans on the votes of moderates -- which compels them to accept more dissent from party orthodoxy.

It's unfortunate that Brownstein resorts here to the old ideological self-identification canard. As we've seen, on the issues, and on basic questions of political philosophy, moderates have much more in common with liberals than they do with conservatives. The difference is that people with liberal views are not necessarily trained to think of themselves as liberals, whereas conservatives have paid close attention to building their "brand." The conservative movement has spent the last 40 or so years working both to get its people to self-identify as conservative, and to recognize the importance of killing off the moderates. In so doing, I think they've created a new kind of political actor. When voters are asked whether they think of themselves as liberal, moderate, or conservative, I suspect those in the last column are defined as much by their unique ways of understanding strategy and tactics, as by any differences over policy.

Fall of a "Genius"

2007-08-13T09:43:00.000-05:00

So Karl Rove is resigning. Words I'd been wanting to type for some time now (though not as much as I've wanted to type, say, "Rove Frogmarched to Federal Prison; Norquist Eaten By Howler Monkeys," but it's an imperfect world, so hey). Why he's leaving isn't so clear -- though Marcy Wheeler has some theories. I can't speculate as to whether he might be in any legal jeopardy, but when Wheeler suggests that "Republicans think he's a loser," she's at least partly right. That may not, in itself, be why Rove is leaving, but it's certainly hard to imagine that many in the GOP will be shedding tears to see him go (I'll look at conservative responses to the move a little later).

Michael Tomasky has a good piece at the Guardian, arguing that Rove's twin legacies are "incompetence and duplicity." With regard to the former, Tomasky points out that, for all the "genius" talk, Rove's actual electoral record is pretty shabby. He lost in 2000 and 2006, and 2004 is not exactly the stuff of legend:

So Rove engineered only one successful presidential election. By a bare 3 million votes (or just 70,000 votes in Ohio, if you care to count it that way). Against a mediocre candidate who ran another bad campaign. For an incumbent president during wartime. Not really a feat for the ages, but okay, a win is a win.

Matt Yglesias, drawing off a new Atlantic article by Josh Green, suggests that "Rove's talk of masterminding an electoral realignment wasn't just bluster, but played an actual causal role in his thinking about the administration's political and policy choices." I think this has been pretty clear from the beginning, in fact. Generally speaking, as much as we (righfully) demonize Rove as the catalyst of so much of the Bush administration's mendacity and cynicism, it's important to keep a clear analytical picture of the role he played within the GOP coalition. He was the strategist who aimed to create a lasting Republican majority with a combination of "big-government conservatism" and a broadened appeal to minority voters.

And that combination, I think, has a lot to do with why Rove is marginalized these days. Big-government conservatism has become the bete noir of the establishment right, while the minority-outreach strategy -- never really much more than a fantasy given the political realities of our era -- foundered on the twin shoals of Katrina and anti-Latino nativism. Wheeler notes the irony of this last point:

I said there was one exception to the rule that Rove simply "creates his own reality" and makes policy promises without delivering on those promises. The exception was supposed to be Latino voters. That is, Rove really did want to court the Latino vote, rather than just claiming Republicans had Latino support. The reason is obvious: if Republicans don't get Latino voters, they're sunk.

Of course, this conflicts (and has, in noticeable ways) with the nativist instincts of the base of the Republican party. About the only thing, at this point, that could mobilize the Republican base (and save some Congressional seats, if not the White House) is to give in to these nativist instincts, and start attacking brown people with gusto. But I doubt Rove would stick around for that--he knows the numbers too well. So it's possible that Rove is out so the Republicans can turn into the full-fledged racist party they've always been.

But then, that's the broader historical irony surrounding Karl Rove's turn at the wheels of power. He failed because he was a bit stupid, and because he was so dishonest, and because he was so easy to dislike. But mainly he failed because he was simply unable to overcome the challenges he correctly identified as needing to be overcome. There's a very good case to be made that Rove's basic strategic instincts were correct. The Republican party can't remain the party of white Christians and survive. And it must come to terms with the fact that the majority of Americans do expect the government to provide effective services and to act on behalf of the common good.

Rove was no humanitarian; he was a hack who happened to notice the major structural problems facing the Republican coalition. Thanks in large part to the incompetence of his boss and the stubbornness of his party, those problems loom at least as large today as they did in 1999. Karl Rove, it seems, simply wasn't possessed of the genius to find the answers.

Conservatism 2.0?

2007-08-09T14:12:00.000-05:00

This is a few days old, but I wanted to bring it up anyway: Patrick Ruffini has some very interesting thoughts on Yearly Kos and its relation to the conservative movement -- past and present. Ruffini points out that, while conservatives wonder "where's our Yearly Kos?", YK itself arose out of the question among progressives: "where's our CPAC?" Any progressive will admit -- will explain at length -- that our movement was largely modeled on the one built by conservatives beginning with the Goldwater campaign (though of course we've come up with innovations of our own).

The point is pretty basic: when you're locked out of the market, you're forced to innovate. That's what conservatives did beginning in the 1950s, and it's what progressives have been doing over the last few years. However, political technologies are like any other kind, in that early adopters risk finding themselves over-invested in models that can quickly become obsolete. Ruffini is concerned about precisely such a dilemma:

The conservative analog to YearlyKos is 30 years old. The 800lb. gorillas of the conservative Web initially went online in the 1995-97 timeframe. And many have failed to innovate. They are still Web 1.0, where the Left jumped directly into Web 2.0 in the Bush years.

Ruffini goes on to describe how poorly the conservative web -- Drudge, Free Republic, the right blogosphere, et al -- is aging (it's worth reading the post for the digs at Freepers alone). Are conservatives locked into outdated technologies?

It would be one thing if we didn’t have any of these institutions, and could start from scratch just as the netroots did. My fear is that we have a bunch of institutions that still function somewhat well, but are long past their prime. With that, there is the danger we will slowly die without knowing it, as our techniques gradually lose effectiveness year after year. Just like newspaper circulation numbers. And there are a number of people on the right who are still complacent about this.

Ruffini and Soren Dayton follow on this post with a pretty good exchange, about which more later. But I think there's absolutely something to this -- after all, social institutions rely on accumulated legitimacy, which can hold them back when it's time for those institutions to reinvent themselves. This is a lesson for the left as much as for the right.

The more immediate question for A&S purposes is this: When (it's when, not if) the conservatives do manage to reinvent themselves as a "2.0" movement, what will that mean? How would such a movement look? How different might its policy preoccupations, rhetoric, and internal cohesion requirements be? Is Conservatism 2.0 in the works already?

You might say those questions are what Alien & Sedition, ultimately, is all about.

So What's Happening Here?

2007-08-09T13:25:00.000-05:00

What does it mean that Barack Obama is currently the third choice of Iowa Republican voters in the general election -- after Romney and Giuliani but before Thompson and McCain? What does it mean that, as the campaign goes on, abortion apostate Rudy Giuliani is losing strength not among conservative voters, but among Republican-leading independents?

Of course it's far too little data to draw any real conclusions. But for the sake of positing a theory, let's go back to the Fabrizio poll we discussed about a month ago. As you may recall, the poll described, among other things, the emergence of two very interesting constituencies within the GOP coalition: "Heartland Republicans" and "Government Knows Best Republicans." My capsule description:

The former, constituting 8% of the GOP electorate, are "more pragmatic and less ideological," worried about gas prices but supportive of government action on economic issues and climate change, and somewhat Midwestern. The latter group are 13% of the party, the "strongest supporters of government intervention to solve social and environmental problems," as well as being "skeptical of the Patriot Act" and of military spending generally, heavily female, and "more likely to be found on the coasts."

So here you have a good 21% of 2000 Republican voters with distinctly moderate -- we might even say progressive -- politics. And who, in the current crop of GOP presidential candidates, represents them? McCain has glued himself to Bush on the war. And Giuliani's standing with R-leaning independents has sunk precisely during the time in which he has run away from his previous reputation as a moderate and made a name for himself as one of the most belligerent, partisan candidates in the race.

There's at least a fifth of the Republican party up for grabs if the GOP's own candidates continue to amp up the partisanship and crowd each other on the right side of the spectrum. One data point -- that Iowa poll -- suggests that Barack Obama, with his "post-partisan" rhetoric, might be the Democrat best positioned to peel their support away from the GOP. But all the Democratic candidates might be well advised to take note of them. I'm not saying they should flee the Democratic base -- far from it. Rather the point is that candidates should be confident that in making the case for progressive values, they're actually taking the fight to the Republicans.

John McCain and the "Transcendent" War

2007-08-08T12:05:00.000-05:00

John McCain, during the recent Republican debate, says:

I also firmly believe that the challenge of the 21st century is the struggle against radical Islamic extremism. It is a transcendent issue. It is hydra-headed. It will be with us for the rest of the century.

Josh Marshall, who is skilled at doing this sort of thing, lucidly analyzes the absurdity of the remark:

Now, think about that. That's ninety-three years. My old graduate school advisor Gordon Wood used to say that humans have a very hard time seeing more than fifty years into the future. Of course, even a year into the future is difficult. But more than a few decades and we haven't the slightest idea what the world is going to look like ...

But John McCain states it as a matter of fact that the war against militant Islam will still be the defining national security threat for this country in 2099 and for years after.

I know we customarily give a rather wide berth to rhetorical excess in the theater of politics. But what on earth is McCain talking about? Not long ago it was enough to sate the historical vanity of the War on Terror mongers to dub it a 'long war' or 'generational struggle', which it may well be. But apparently even that is now insufficient. Only an entire century will do. It is almost as if as the concept in the real-world present looks more and more ill-judged and foolhardy its credentials must be buffed up by giving it more and more ridiculous lifespans ranging off into the unknowable future.

The Carpetbagger Report expands on this:

We’re engaged in an undefined, open-ended war against an undetermined enemy that spans several continents and is unaffiliated with any specific nation-state. I’m rather surprised McCain was willing to limit his vision to just the 21st century.

Indeed, as long as we’re looking at this in a big-picture kind of way, a McCain-like vision of a “war on terror” can’t end until we’ve “won.” I’m curious how those who share McCain’s ideology would define “victory” in this context.

When the Middle East is dominated by democracies? That won’t do it; people can vote for terrorists. When al Qaeda is destroyed? There are other networks that can and would take its place. When religious extremists are no longer motivated by their faith to commit acts of violence? That might, um, take a while.

The two writers note other aspects of the "transcendence" of this struggle: for one thing, as Marshall points out, it puts McCain, Bush, and their ideological fellow-travellers beyond the realm of mere evidence -- and ultimately beyond judgment and consequences altogether: "the future is the only territory where empirical evidence or -- more plainly put -- reality can't be brought up to contradict you." I've suggested before that "victory" in Iraq, as it is postponed ad infinitum into the future by its neoconservative devotees -- always just around a corner or two -- is a similarly unassailable concept. Lest we forget, our travails in Iraq are, in the minds of the neocons, bound up conceptually into the general "long war" McCain was describing during the debate; indeed, there's no particular reason to believe that, given the unity and "transcendence" of the war as described by McCain, we should expect "victory" in Iraq to arrive at any point during the front end of that 93-year struggle. If Iraq is the front line in the war on terror, and the war on terror is expected to last a century, well...

Of course, the front line may shift. To where? It hardly matters. That's the fun of transcendent war -- it has little to do with actual circumstances or actual decisions or actual people with actual lives to be lived and lost.

From what has this war transcended? And to where? It has transcended, I think, from being a collection of actual issues, often only tangentally related to one another, and subject to management by competent people using empirically-tested methods, to being a holy cause, given rhetorical unity and subject first and foremost to the demands of faith (and political advantage). The claims to competence of the actual experts are degraded, and the experts themselves frequently become convenient and amusing subjects of abuse at the hands of the initiate. And for the nonbelievers, there's a lake of political fire.

Why does it seem so important for American conservatives to have a transcendent war to wage?

Perhaps because American conservatism -- that peculiar strain of hyper-aggressive, bowdlerized right-liberalism punctuated by bouts of Burke-inspired self-loathing -- has accomplished some things, but as a whole and on its own, it lacks a convincing internal logic (even though it believes strongly in the importance of such a logic) and is uninspired by the duties and challenges of actually governing. It seems to me that Democrats -- right back to the days of Andrew Jackson -- have generally been the party of the incoherent, non-ideological, pragmatic majority. Seekers of transcendence, on the other hand, have tended to be much more attracted to the Republican party. This has given us abolition, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and progressivism, but it has also given us Prohibition, "the Evil Empire," and the Moral Majority. It's difficult for the right to get by, politically speaking, without a transcendent cause to which it can attach. If the details of the cause -- the actual people, the actual circumstances, the fact that it can't really be described as a "cause" at all -- get in the way, said details should be rubbished and ignored. This is the mindset of the faithful.

What's the cash value of these ruminations? I don't know. But Prohibition and the Moral Majority went away sooner than many people thought they would. I imagine that neo-Reaganism will, as well. Transcendence feels great when you first inhale it, but the high never lasts as long as it should, and the real world comes rushing back hard.

They're Doing It Again

2007-08-07T16:36:00.000-05:00

Alien & Sedition's Law: Conservatives can't govern, because conservatives don't believe in government.

The Katrina Corollary: Conservatives will blame the failure of conservative government on government itself (also known as the Walter Reed Corollary).

Noah of the November Blog called it:

But just wait, Republicans will use this bridge collapse as an excuse to decry how awful things get when government tries to handle the public's infrastructure and safety. And they will call for more private control, and more"free market" expansion.

They wouldn't dare, would th-- oh, right. Of course they would:

But in this case, anger is an appropriate response, and it is proper for that anger to be directed at government - government at all levels.

Why? Not because of massive underinvestment in American infrastructure during an era of conservative governance. No:

Maintenance is necessary but boring, and since government is made up of human beings who abhor boredom, few elected officials or high-level managers are all that interested in this mundane task. Instead, they want to do big, exciting, bold new things - things they can claim for their own.

And in the past half-century, American government has redefined its core responsibilities. No longer does government exist for the purposes of maintenance and upkeep. Instead, it is seen as a means - perhaps the only significant means - of healing social flaws and reweaving the social fabric.

See, our bridges are collapsing because government inevitably prefers to spend its time cramming gay marriage down our throats (always down our throats) than doing boring maintenance. Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, sends an email to his list claiming that, when it comes to rebuilding, government will be the problem, not the solution:

The lessons are clear, as these cases prove. Yet, already some in Minnesota are calling not for unleashing American ingenuity but instead for more taxes to feed the same failing bureaucracies.

Their answer is to further punish Minneapolis drivers by raising the gasoline tax. This knee-jerk reaction is precisely what happens when the right lacks an effective vocabulary of solutions to compete with left-wing tax-and-spend policies.

Raising taxes to spend on bureaucracies -- which in all three cases were the main impediment to a safe, efficient and speedy rebuilding effort in the first place -- is exactly the wrong answer.

For the nth time, my conservative friends: the fact that you find it impossible to govern competently, does not mean that competent government is impossible.

Inequality, Sin, and Law

2007-08-06T15:24:00.000-05:00

Reihan Salam has some very interesting comments on Daniel Gross's review of Robert Frank's Falling Behind. Frank's book (which I have not read) is about inequality in America; he apparently argues that the experience of relative deprivation (owning, for instance, a smaller house than one's neighbors) fuels a kind of inflation of consumption, by which each income bracket, struggling to keep up with the one above it, raises the consumption bar for the brackets below it. In Gross's description, this "societywide arms race for goods" has dangerous effects in the context of ever-deepening American inequality:

But since 1979, gains have flowed disproportionately to top earners. In an economy where the wealthy set the norms for consumption and people at every rung strain to maintain the consumption of those just above them, that spells trouble. In today’s arms race, the top 1 percent are armed to the teeth and everybody else is scavenging for ammunition. Between 1980 and 2001, Frank notes, the median size of new homes in the United States rose from 1,600 to 2,100 square feet, “despite the fact that the median family’s real income had changed little in the intervening years.” The end result? Frank methodically presents data showing that the typical American now works more, saves less, commutes longer and borrows more to maintain what he or she views as an appropriate standard of living.

Frank's proposed remedy is a progressive consumption tax that would slow the arms race from the top down. Salam's response is a very interesting exercise in what you might call neo-traditionalist conservative thinking. In an earlier review of Frank's book, Salam wrote:

But what if the real inequality problem isn’t a technical problem? What if it really is a moral problem? Not moral as in “envy is a corrosive thing, so get over it.” Moral as in no progressive consumption tax will prevent people from building overlarge houses or custom cabinets at the expense of spending time with family and friends. A culture that is plagued by materialist excess won’t be cured by a progressive consumption tax. It can only be cured, if at all, through a revival of postmaterialist – or, if you will, prematerialist – family values. It could be that this eminently “progressive” concern can only be successfully addressed with a “conservative” solution.

Now he expands on this by revisiting the question: "what does this mean for us as political actors?" Salam distinguishes between "right-liberals" (by which I presume he means American "conservatives" of the free market-worshipping variety), who see no problem at all with inequality and the consumption arms race, and "left-liberals," who see a problem of justice and advocate institutional solutions. But neither group, he argues, sees anyone as doing anything "wrong" -- an outlook he questions:

What if there is some kind of wrongdoing, in some meaningful sense? As a nonreligious person, I'm not very conversant in the language of sin, but I have a sense that there are some kinds of consumption, perfectly voluntary, that have a deleterious effect on the moral ecology we share. So what if there is a moral problem, and that it's a problem that is not all that susceptible to an institutional solution? After all, no progressive consumption tax will teach children right from wrong, or prevent them from becoming frankly gluttonous adults. A progressive consumption tax would be a very good thing. But it's clearly not enough to teach a culture, which is to say us, restraint. What if, rather, this moral problem in fact indicates a need for some kind of civic education, or a renewed cultural emphasis on the many ways a fulfilling life is at odds with excessive consumption?

This is very interesting -- very Burke-with-a-human-face, suggesting an emphasis on cultural solutions to problems liberals view through the prism of injustice. Justice, of course, does imply an institutional framework; it implies law, civitas, action in the public sphere.

Just as there are "right-liberals," I think there are "left-conservatives," who themselves are primarily interested in culture and moral judgment as against collective action in the public sphere -- the basis for institutional solutions. If anything, I think the left has, over the past few decades, often been too countercultural in this regard. In any sense, they certainly aren't mutually exclusive paths.

For liberals, inequality is primarily a problem of justice as it relates to income distribution, not consumption. That's why we focus on institutional solutions: we're not naive enough to believe that you can tell economic elites to just be nice and share more. You can't legislate everything, but clearly the very premise of law is that the public welfare requires a set of dispassionate institutions, willing to enforce what we can best determine to be the most just rules by which everyone must live. Again: no reason that the moral and the institutional must be mutually exclusive, but neither is it healthy to let a preoccupation with culture distract us from the age-old pursuit of justice.

Whitewashing Racism

2007-08-06T11:11:00.001-05:00

Rick Perlstein brings to our attention this excellent essay by Nancy MacLean, in which she examines the history behind Justice Roberts's decision prohibiting schools from pursuing diversity plans. As MacLean points out, the decision has its orgins in a concerted effort by segregationists to apply PR techniques to gain the advantage in the fight over civil rights:

Roberts’s decision, which denied local communities the right to choose race-conscious methods, is replete with quotable phrases from the lexicon conservative strategists honed in their think tanks in the 1970s and then carried into the nation’s courtrooms through their various legal societies.

Titans of the conservative movement like William F. Buckley, Jr., Frank Meyer, and Irving Kristol were involved in the effort to use the language of civil rights to accomplish racist ends. Read the whole piece.

Sometimes Politics Is What You Need to Play

2007-08-03T14:23:00.000-05:00

K-Lo and her Senate "friends" are shocked at Harry Reid's statement that the Minnesota bridge collapse should be a "wake-up call" as to the need to reinvest in our crumbling infrastructure -- investment the anti-government Republicans have manifestly, and now disastrously, failed to accomplish.

Underinvestment -- a consequence, in part, of conservative government -- is a serious problem and will lead to more, similar disasters if not corrected. The political crisis contributes to the disaster. So why is it not appropriate to use the spotlight on that disaster in an attempt to solve the political crisis?

It's entirely appropriate, of course -- but it's politically inconvenient for Republicans.

Meanwhile, Ross Douthat suggests that Republican candidates like Romney and Rudy can issue their own calls for infrastructure investment. Given the two candidates' eagerness to sell themselves to the anti-government ideologues of the right, though, the message might come out sounding a little ironic.

Newt Gingrich Is a Strange Duck

2007-08-02T17:39:00.000-05:00

He's one of the most adept and infuriating propagandists in the GOP, but then he'll say stuff like this. There is, undoubtedly, more to the story. I'll follow up if I can figure out what he's up to.

Is It Murder or Not?

2007-08-02T14:18:00.000-05:00

I'm certainly no expert on the abortion issue, but I can recognize bad logic when I see it, and NRO's "symposium" in response to Anna Quindlen's new column is full of it.

Quindlen, writing in Newsweek, asks the obvious question for "pro-lifers" bent on overturning Roe: "how much jail time for women who have abortions?" Unsurprisingly, none of the anti-abortion activists who have been asked can answer. Very few have even thought about it. Quindlen accuses anti-abortion activists of "ignoring or infantilizing women, turning them into 'victims' of their own free will." Anti-choice activists claim, in effect, to want to protect women from themselves. This, she quotes Ruth Bader Ginsburg arguing, is an "anti-abortion shibboleth" reflecting "ancient notions about women's place in the family and under the Constitution—ideas that have long since been discredited."

Quindlen zeroes in on the fundamental flaw in anti-abortion discourse:

Lawmakers in a number of states have already passed or are considering statutes designed to outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned. But almost none hold the woman, the person who set the so-called crime in motion, accountable. Is the message that women are not to be held responsible for their actions? Or is it merely that those writing the laws understand that if women were going to jail, the vast majority of Americans would violently object? [...]

[T]here are only two logical choices: hold women accountable for a criminal act by sending them to prison, or refuse to criminalize the act in the first place. If you can't countenance the first, you have to accept the second. You can't have it both ways.

Apparently the argument strikes a sore note for the "pro-lifers," as NRO recruited no fewer than 17 scholars, activists, and writers to offer rebuttals. What's striking is that none of them can answer the question, either. That's because it is logically impossible to agree with all four of the following propositions: 1) Women are human beings with free will; 2) Abortion is murder; 3) Murder is a crime deserving serious punishment; and 4) Women should not be seriously punished for having abortions.

Every single one of the responses dodges this dilemma. They all pretty much fall into one or more of the following categories:

1. Infantalization. We are told several times that "the woman is the second victim of abortion." Anti-abortion laws are for the "protection, not punishment" of the woman. Abortion is a "billion-dollar-a-year industry" preying on its patients/victims (as though abortion providers were the only medical professionals to accept fees for services, when in fact they're among the least likely to be doing what they do for profit -- but I digress). Women who have abortions are typically in states of mental duress and frequently coerced into the procedure by the men in their lives. Women who have had abortions are "punished" by the inevitable trauma and depression that results from the decision and that will plague them for the rest of their lives. It's interesting that the most common response to Quindlen's argument is precisely to reaffirm what she is saying.

2. The legal dodge. A number of respondents insist, as Hadley Arkes puts it, that "the law does not need to invoke the harshest penalties for the sake of teaching moral lessons." Wendy Long says that:

The law assigns differing degrees of culpability in various situations -- including killing other people -- all the time. If you kill someone in self-defense, you get zero punishment. It does not mean that the guy lying on your kitchen floor with a knife sticking out of his chest is not dead — or not human.

But, of course, killing someone in self-defense is not murder. Is abortion murder? Or is it a lesser sort of killing? If the latter, it can't be because the act is lesser. Are social conservatives tacitly admitting that a fetus is a lesser "victim" than a person?

If abortion is homicide, what kind is it? It's certainly more than criminally negligent homicide, since it involves an intent to kill. It's almost certainly more serious than voluntary manslaughter, which at its worst involves killing "in the heat of the moment" -- hardly the case when the "killer" has planned the appointment ahead of time. Indeed, it's hard to imagine that the "crime" could be anything less than premeditated murder -- murder in the first degree. And perhaps the lawyers reading this will forgive me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of "duress" is that it excuses a person from culpability in committing a crime only if "[she] had good reason to believe, that she would be seriously harmed if she did not participate and had no other way of escaping serious harm." The various excuses the pro-lifers offer would seem to add up to little more than the kind of mitigating circumstances lawyers present in order to secure sentences of life in prison, rather than death, for their clients.

Imagine if Joe Blow kills Jake Smith -- writes "kill Jake Smith" in his appointment book for April 12th and goes out as scheduled and does the deed. Can Joe use the defense that he was stressed out, "young" and "unmarried," without a wife "standing by" him? Can his lawyer argue that "the law does not need to invoke the harshest penalties for the sake of teaching moral lessons?" How would the social conservatives react to such a defense?

Matthew J. Franck accuses Quindlen of committing the "fallacy of the complex question -- treating a compound question as though it were simple." Why do I have a hard time imagining conservatives making this argument when Joe murders Jack -- no matter how complicated the reasons for the killing might be? Is abortion murder or isn't it? If it's not murder, but another form of homicide, why is that? And if it is murder, then does murder deserve serious punishment or doesn't it?

3. The way-things-used-to-be dodge. Walter M. Weber claims that "Quindlen ingores history." Echoing some of the other respondents, Weber argues that, since women were not locked up for abortions prior to 1973, why would they be after Roe is overturned? This seems like a particularly silly argument. Just because Americans tolerated a moral and logical contradiction before, doesn't mean they should tolerate one today. Women were not treated as full human beings in 1972. Should we revert to that mentality? Weber is implying that we should.

4. Ad hominems. There's a distinctly embattled tone in many of the responses -- clearly, anti-choice theorists have heard this argument before, and clearly it frustrates them. Quindlen is derided as an out-of-touch "Manhattan socialite" and an "abortion-industry rep;" her arguments are dismissed as "sophomoric," "desperate," and "smug." None of the nasty adjectives do anything to help these seventeen writers overcome their logical dilemma, though.

5. It's Not the Point. This is in some ways the most interesting response. Again, it dodges the central logical problem, but at least it points to something of a way forward. Ramesh Ponnuru puts it this way:

The crucial legal goal of the pro-life movement is not any particular set of punishments. It is that unborn children be protected in law.

Franck actually comes closest to putting his finger on the problem when he says that "the proper approach (after Roe) is to ask, what policy would reduce the number of abortions as much as possible now?" This is one of the most peculiar failures of the anti-abortion movement. They are so consumed with outlawing the supply of abortions that they are willing to almost totally ignore truly constructive approaches to reducing the demand. This obsession even limits Franck to imagining that somehow policies to reduce the number of abortions can only be developed "after Roe," when in fact there are a number of potential policies -- focusing on women's health, access to birth control, and sex education, among other things -- that could drastically reduce the need for abortions much sooner.

If the goal really is reducing abortions, then why focus on prohibition, which doesn't work? Why not adopt pragmatic policies that will work? Seems to me like a pretty good way around the logical dilemma facing the "pro-life" movement as currently constituted -- at least those who don't want to make the argument that women are not, in fact, human beings, lest they be forced to admit that abortion is not, after all, murder.

VRWC Nods to VLWC

2007-08-02T14:11:00.000-05:00

At the National Review, Byron York pays tribute to YearlyKos, in a surprisingly moderate tone. Of course, he has reason to mention it: he "predicted" the rise of a "Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy" back in 2004. York quotes Markos of Daily Kos, who said at the time that York's analysis was "about 2 - 5 years too early." As he now observes, the progressive netroots -- who never had as far to go as the Goldwater conservative movementeers -- might now properly lay claim to a certain vastness. He also suggests that we've been helped along the way by Republican blunders, the war chief among them, and I don't disagree -- though I happen to think we're more in tune with the American public than are the conservatives on a pretty broad range of issues.

Anyway, to all you Kossacks in Chicago -- have a blast. Wish I could be there, but I guess I'll see you at the barricades.

On Rudy Giuliani, Frontrunner

2007-08-02T11:37:00.000-05:00

The latest NBC/WSJ poll suggests Rudy Giuliani has stablized a bit after losing support earlier in the summer; the results indicate that Giuliani has expanded his lead over Fred Thompson from 9 to 13% since June. Some of this may have to do with Thompson's own troubles, as the lobbyist/actor looks to be losing momentum in advance of his official declaration. There's plenty of time for the dynamics of the race to change, but meanwhile it's interesting to watch conservatives mull the implications of Giuliani's frontrunner status.

The cover story in the current Weekly Standard suggests that the reasons why conservatives haven't fully thought through the ramifications of a Rudy nomination are the same reasons why Republican voters have responded so well to the former mayor in polls: they're swept up in the assumption that Rudy is the best candidate both to claim the war-and-terror mantle, and to beat Hillary Clinton. But the article's author, Matthew Continetti, points out that such preoccupations may come with a price to the GOP coalition:

Giuliani doesn't talk about a new GOP. Indeed, he and his campaign go to great lengths to emphasize his similarities with the conservatives who make up the single largest Republican voting bloc. His policy initiatives and public statements are designed to assuage conservatives. He says he would not attempt to rewrite the Republican platform. Still, a Giuliani candidacy would alter the Republican party. For one, it would de-link the Republican presidential nominee from opposition to Roe v. Wade for the first time in decades. And it would divorce the Republican presidential nominee from much of the conservative movement for the first time since 2000.

This would be a considerable transformation. Pro-life voters compose a significant portion of the GOP's volunteer corps. There's a chance that they will sit out 2008 if the Republican candidate doesn't share their views on abortion. If that happened, writes the Republican political operative Soren Dayton, "the GOP, out of necessity, would need to recruit a whole new set of volunteers," shattering "the grip that social conservative activists have on the grassroots of the party." There's also a chance that fears of a Clinton restoration and the overall importance of the war on jihadism will subsume party differences over abortion. The conservative grassroots will remain more or less intact. But what if that's not the case? [...]

Many people, including most of his competitors for the Republican nomination, don't seem to have thought through the consequences of Giuliani's ascendance. They haven't arrived at a compelling argument for why his candidacy would be harmful. The only candidate really to go after Giuliani in the Republican debates was former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, and he recently dropped out of the race. Romney spends most of his time attacking McCain, and Kansas senator Sam Brownback spends most of his time attacking Romney.

Thomas Edsall, writing for the New Republic, has argued that Giuliani represents the future of the GOP -- a future that will only arrive after a fairly radical transformation of the coalition as we've come to know it over the past several decades. This gives rise to a number of questions. Are conservative movement elites ready for such a transformation, and are they willing to allow the party to detach itself from the movement they've built? Assuming that not all the elites view the question the same way, what is the relative strength of the different factions as they jostle for influence, and will the Giuliani campaign provide a focal point for a serious internal struggle within the movement? Is there a new conservative movement in the offing? Is a hybrid of war-and-terror nationalism and doctrinaire supply-side-ism really the best way forward for the GOP in the long run?

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

The Bush Doctrine, Repackaged

2007-08-01T13:59:00.000-05:00

Bob Kaufman calls it "moral democratic realism," and is apparently seeking to salvage some kind of legacy for it. George Weigel approves.

Says Kaufman:

Moral democratic realism offers a ..compelling framework for American grand strategy...because it takes due measure of the centrality of power and the constraints the dynamics of international politics impose, without depreciating the significance of ideals, ideology, and regime type. It grounds American foreign policy in Judeo-Christian conceptions of man, morality, and prudence that innoculate us against two dangerous fallacies: a utopianism that exaggerates the potential for cooperation without power; and an unrealistic realism that underestimates the potential for achieving decency and provisional justice even in international relations. It rests on a conception of self-interest, well understood, and respect for the decent opinions of mankind, without making international institutions or the fickle mistress of often-indecent international public opinion the polestar for American action...

Weigel compares this approach to the old "Catholic International Relations" theory of America and Commonweal. He seems to find in it some kind of appealing middle ground:

Kaufman rightly rejects alternative grand strategies on prudential grounds. Isolationism of the Pat Buchanan sort ignores the lessons of history and, to our eventual endangerment, abandons any American commitment to helping build order out of chaos in the world. Neo-realism (think Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, and most of the permanent State Department bureaucracy) imagines that messes like the Middle East can be managed by manipulating "our thugs;" yet this is precisely the approach that helped create conditions for the possibility of 9/11. Jimmy Carteresque multilateralism is hopelessly unrealistic, and thus dangerous.

We are presented with the argument that this Bush-derived theory of IR means detatching American policy from thuggery: risum teneatis, as images of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition and all the rest come to mind, and the words of their neoconservative defenders echo in our memories. And we are meant to believe, after the utter debacle of unilateralism in Iraq, that it's the traditional multilateral approach (the approach that won the cold war) which is somehow "hopelessly unrealistic"? One wonders whether distinguished academics like Kaufman and Weigel have paused at any point during the past six years to peer out from their ivory towers onto the landscape of the real world. Perhaps they have been too busy doodling in their notebooks, coming up with grand-sounding phrases like "moral democratic realism," which, in case no one else has already made the joke, I would suggest sounds neither moral, nor realistic (the "democratic" aspect of it is probably neither here nor there).

Still, take note: the Bush doctrine, that recipe for catastrophe, continues to have its defenders, and they are determined to refine it into a permanent school of conservative international relations theory.

Hating the Media, and Being It

2007-08-01T13:29:00.000-05:00

Nicholas Beaudrot points us to this 1996 piece by James Fallows on "Why Americans Hate the Media." It's an excellent read, every bit as relevant today as it was a decade ago. Matt Yglesias says the whole thing is so good that it's hard to focus on any one particular part; I agree, but I'm going to highlight one passage anyway:

The natural instinct of newspapers and TV is to present every public issue as if its "real" meaning were political in the meanest and narrowest sense of that term—the attempt by parties and candidates to gain an advantage over their rivals. Reporters do, of course, write stories about political life in the broader sense and about the substance of issues—the pluses and minuses of diplomatic recognition for Vietnam, the difficulties of holding down the Medicare budget, whether immigrants help or hurt the nation's economic base. But when there is a chance to use these issues as props or raw material for a story about political tactics, most reporters leap at it. It is more fun—and easier—to write about Bill Clinton's "positioning" on the Vietnam issue, or how Newt Gingrich is "handling" the need to cut Medicare, than it is to look into the issues themselves.

It is easier and more fun to focus on the game as opposed to the issues; I'm no professional journalist but in my own blogging I know that whenever I'm feeling lazy or rushed, my work gets distinctly hackier. But perhaps more to the point, such a shallow approach -- because it's quicker and easier -- is much better suited to the media driving contemporary American political discourse. Fallows was writing in an era of talk radio and the 24-hour cable news cycle, but I bring this up because the internet -- particularly the blogosphere -- is subject to the very same pressures.

Writing about policy is labor-intensive and time-consuming. But cable news is based on feeding viewers a continuous and ever-changing stream of stories, varying content and getting it out there before competitors do. It's very similar in the blogosphere. The number one rule of blogging (which I've thoroughly violated over the past couple of weeks) is Thou Shalt Post. The equation is really simple, and bloggers know it: the more you post, the more readers you get. Post less, your traffic declines. It's practically a law of nature. Doing in-depth research and analysis means you can't keep up the stream of content necessary to make a dent in a vast blogosphere. That's not to say there aren't some bloggers who do very good in-depth work and find readerships willing to wait for it, but generally speaking they're swimming upstream.

Even the best blogger-journalists, meanwhile, retreat to game-analysis on a fairly regular basis. In part that's probably because political blog readers are more interested in that sort of thing than the general public. But given the ferocity of the blogosphere's media criticism, it's interesting to note how much we're subject to the same forces. As Fallows puts it, the tendency is that "all issues are shoehorned into the area of expertise the most-prominent correspondents do have: the struggle for one-upmanship among a handful of political leaders." A lot of bloggers do a much better job avoiding this trap than do the titans of TV news. But given the imperatives of our medium, it remains a trap into which we can fall, if we aren't careful.

And We're Back

2007-07-31T18:32:00.000-05:00

I'm home, and sporting a serious farmer's tan. Way sexy. Too much to catch up on to post tonight; I'll be back for real tomorrow morning.

Going Camping

2007-07-23T11:54:00.000-05:00

The vacation continues. This week I really won't be posting much if at all. Back on the 30th or 31st. Until then, have a great week.

Getting Over Bush's Messiah Complex

2007-07-20T10:09:00.000-05:00

David Brooks writes a column about George W. Bush's child-like devotion to his own failed war policy. This is not delusion, says Brooks:

Rather, his self-confidence survives because it flows from two sources. The first is his unconquerable faith in the rightness of his Big Idea. Bush is convinced that history is moving in the direction of democracy, or as he said Friday: “It’s more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom. And I will tell you that is a principle that no one can convince me that doesn’t exist.”

This graf sets off a chain of reaction from conservative writers who are ready to pronounce themselves fed up with Bush's self-aggrandizing theological fantasies. Andrew Sullivan writes:

[A]s a political or historical principle, this is dangerous, delusional hogwash. There is a distinction between theology and politics, a distinction between theory and practice: distinction at the core of the very meaning of conservatism. The notion that free will or even human freedom is destined to be humanity's future, and that this destiny can be achieved by a Supreme Leader, is a function not of conservatism in any sense, but of a messianic, eschatological ideology.

Bush, says Sullivan, is not a conservative statesman; he is a "delusional fanatic:"

If you define liberalism broadly as the belief that human society is perfectible, that heaven can be created on earth by force of will, then Bush is one of the most recklesss enemies of conservatism who has ever held high office in America.

Rich Lowry thinks it sounds suspiciously liberal, too:

Bush believes the spread of liberty is "inevitable." If that is the case, why not spare ourselves all the effort and let the inevitable flowering of liberty take hold? Now, he does say that there will be different expressions of liberty and a different pace—"but we've all got the same odds of achieving the same result." That strikes me as flat-out wrong, an otherwordly leveling of all the culture and history that separates various societies.

Rod Dreher says Bush is "living in a dream world," in thrall to a "social engineering ideology [which] is anti-conservative to the marrow:"

Well, look, I believe there's an Almighty too, and that He desires his human creatures to live in freedom. But good grief, you can't start wars based on that messianic principle, and continuing them on the same grounds!

Ross Douthat is a bit more vehement:

I'm fed up with the President's messiah complex, and I don't bloody well want to hear any more about Bush's "theological perspective" that freedom is the Almighty's gift to all mankind, and so history's on our side in the Middle East, and yada yada yada.

Douthat also emphasizes the distinction between theology and politics:

The gift of freedom that Christ promises is far more real than anything else in this world, if Christian teaching on the matter is correct. On the other hand, there's nothing that's political about that promise, and the attempt to transform God's promise of freedom through Jesus Christ into a this-world promise of universal democracy is the worst kind of "immanentizing the eschaton" utopian bullshit.

All of this is very interesting: it's a return to a sort of ur-conservative thinking; it's a revival of Burke in an era when the American right has been driven by a very un-Burkean revolutionary zeal. One of the key tenets of traditional conservatism has been its mistrust of politics. As Burke said:

Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. (Reflections on the Revolution in France)

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously defined it thusly: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society."

From the traditional conservative view, an over-emphasis on politics as opposed to culture means social engineering at home; Wilsonianism and "nation-building" abroad: all of these things are to be abhorred. But the modern conservative movement, the movement that ultimately brought Bush to power (even if it mistrusted him) succeeded because of its political skill and innovation. The movement has talent for politics, and an instinct for it, and we should hardly be surprised to find that that instinct has eventually found its way into its foreign policy. This is not, in fact, Wilsonianism; it is the traditional interests and preoccupations of the conservative classes cross-bred with a distinctly un-Burkean aggressiveness. That it has learned to broaden its appeal by using Wilsonian language should not distract from its essential nature.

Even when the movement has emphasized culture as a pre-political concern, it has been more Gramscian than Burkean, waging an aggressive war of position to further a transformative agenda that the movement itself understands is too radical for the tastes of most Americans.

This is not to let American conservatives escape by creating a distinction between Bush and "true" conservatism. That's a political version of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy; we didn't accept such excuses when Marxists made them and there's no reason we should accept them from conservatives. American conservatism is what it is, and there are undoubtedly reasons why it seems so frequently to escape the careful bounds of Burkean wisdom. One possible reason is that the United States is not a Burkean state; it is a liberal, constitutional regime, whose legitimacy is derived from popular sovereignty and a dedication to upholding the natural, abstract rights of human beings. Ramesh Ponnuru, in the same debate discussed above, reminds us of this, when he cautions:

Now it may be unconservative to think that an aggressively liberty-promoting foreign policy follows from the idea that all human beings have a God-given right to be free, and certainly Christians are not obliged to believe that it does so follow. But the proposition that our rights are a gift from God is neither un-conservative nor un-Christian; it is a commonplace observation in the context of American political history.

A couple of notes here: for one thing, when Ponnuru says that the observation is not "un-conservative," it is "in the context of American political history." Conservatism in the context of American political history is something very different from conservatism in other contexts. It's a conservatism rooted partly -- but not wholly -- in a devotion to the very kind of liberal order to which conservatives once defined themselves as opposed. This creates all sorts of odd effects, including especially the strange American conservative relationship to politics, which is often enthusiastic but tortured, destructive, and prone to inspire bouts of conservative self-loathing like the ones witnessed above.

The other note, and what should have become apparent here, is that I don't think this is really a debate about theology at all: it's about politics. When these commentators talk about Bush's "messianism," they may be referring to religious expression in an immediate sense, but in more significant sense they're talking about the frightening effects of a conservatism that has too readily embraced politics. The dramatic irony is that they can see the tragic results of such an embrace, but as American conservatives they can't quite disentangle themselves from its legacy.

The Path to a Brokered Convention?

2007-07-19T11:15:00.000-05:00

Gary Andres explains how it isn't just Democrats who are looking at a real possibility of winding up in a brokered convention next year. Republicans may find that none of their candidates will be able to take a majority of delegates into St. Paul, though for different reasons.

The wild cards in the GOP process are the "winner take all" primaries, used by Republicans in 20 states. Andres observes that Giuliani is well positioned to work around poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire by winning key early WTA states like Florida, California, New York, and New Jersey. Still, other frontrunners may be able to counter:

But Fred Thompson and Mr. Romney may also do well in other early WTA states like South Carolina, (47 delegates), Georgia (72 delegates), Missouri (52 delegates) and Tennessee (55 delegates), which all take place on or before February 5. And Mr. Romney's current lead in New Hampshire and Iowa could bode well for generating momentum going into the WTA primaries. This all has the makings of a topsy-turvy end-game.

A brokered GOP convention would be a fascinating exercise in testing the relative strengths of different parts of the conservative coalition. Is it likely? Maybe not. But it's perhaps a stronger possibility this cycle than it has been in quite a while.

Rudy Hearts Right-Wing Judges

2007-07-19T10:40:00.000-05:00

Rudy Giuliani spent yesterday stumping in Iowa -- not his usual territory. Along the way, he made it quite clear that he intends to govern from the far right. Besides his continued support for a disastrous and deeply unpopular war, besides his opposition to the kind of universal health care favored by a huge majority of Americans, there's his commitment to nominating extremist judges.

That commitment was his primary message yesterday, as he heaped praise on the current Supreme Court's right wing, and insisted that while "the abortion question is not a litmus test," he would only name "strict constructionists" to the Court.

In the speech, he went out of his way to praise the four most conservative members of the current U.S. Supreme Court - Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, and two nominees of President Bush, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.

"These are the kinds of judges I would appoint," he said, calling them "strict constructionists" who interpret, rather than rewrite, the U.S. Constitution.

The term "strict constructionists" is often used by religious conservatives who say they want judges who will overturn, among other past decisions, the landmark abortion rights ruling Roe vs. Wade.

Religious conservatives may or may not find Rudy's words convincing. But ordinary Americans should be alarmed by it. Following his appointment of a group of hard-right judicial policy advisors, Giuliani's rhetoric in Iowa suggests that he is putting his promise to appoint ultra-conservative judges at the center of his campaign. PFAW's Right Wing Watch sees what's happening:

Giuliani may not be the Right’s favorite candidate, but with no clear front-runner emerging, he appears to be seeking to position himself as the candidate most committed to fundamentally and lastingly shifting the balance on the Supreme Court in favor of the Right – a temptation he hopes just might be enough to weaken the resolve of even his most hardened right-wing foes.

There is no such thing as Rudy Giuliani the moderate.

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

Another Travel Day

2007-07-18T10:51:00.000-05:00

Off to S.F. Man, I love Seattle, though. Sometimes I almost think I could move back here. But who would look after Brooklyn?

I'll try to be back tomorrow, but things are likely to continue to be sparse here for the next week and a half.

Have you been reading your Perlstein and Scher? Do.

From Direct Mail to Email

2007-07-17T12:25:00.000-05:00

Patrick Ruffini, Republican web guru, has a very interesting post on how the GOP is learning to adapt to the use of online media. The modern conservative movement was largely built on direct mail (it's why Richard Viguerie keeps getting attention, even when he shouldn't), which as Ruffini points out is something that can be targeted toward your supporters and invisible to your opponents. If a key goal of politics is to be heard disproportionately by your own constituencies, conservatives -- from direct mail to "dog whistle politics -- have been masters of the technique. But the internet and email come with a different set of challenges, and as Ruffini says, the external environment matters a lot more:

At the end of day, your message carries your online fundraising. In a good environment, the message is the good environment and how great you’re doing. That’s why the Democrats have a baseline advantage right now. In a bad environment, it becomes incumbent on you to use the viralness of the Web to orchestrate a massive pushback against the environment itself. That’s why Fred is tapping the frustration of the rightroots. And, as a friend pointed out to me the other day, McCain now has no choice but to use the Internet as a strategic vehicle for turning things around, because he certainly can’t afford to do it any other way.

It's worth noting that, of the various GOP candidates' online operations, Ruffini seems to think most highly of Fred Thompson's.

Talking Up an Iran-Al Qaeda Connection

2007-07-17T12:00:00.000-05:00

I haven't read the new National Intelligence Estimate (as if! I'm on vacation), nor have I read much of the reporting on it. But the mainstream reports I've seen so far do not allude to the subject at the center of this article in the neocon New York Sun: an alleged link between Iran and Al-Qaeda. Sun correspondent Eli Lake says:

One of two known Al Qaeda leadership councils meets regularly in eastern Iran, where the American intelligence community believes dozens of senior Al Qaeda leaders have reconstituted a good part of the terror conglomerate's senior leadership structure.

I have no information to give context to this allegation, so I merely note it for the record, with the warning that we may end up hearing a lot more about this from Iran-warmonger types.

The Corner, for instance, is already flogging it.

"Lower-Middle Reformism" and the Battle for the Midwest

2007-07-16T11:38:00.000-05:00

Frank Luntz, self-exiled in LA, pops up to tell Republicans that they should run in 2008 as the party of optimism and reform. Take a moment to stop laughing, and then read on, because there's a worthwhile nugget of discussable material in his piece (plus it'll make you feel good). Note these points:

A GOP victory is not absolutely out of the question, of course, but getting there would take a forward-looking agenda, unparalleled message discipline, a strict focus on the millions of independent voters, an innovative candidate and campaign and a lot of luck....

To be perfectly blunt, no Republican can win the White House without winning Ohio. Although readers of this column would no doubt like to see and hear the presidential nominees up close, the reality is that California, at least when it comes to elections, is as blue as the Pacific. A successful Republican candidate in Ohio will have learned how to articulate a culturally conservative message fused with government accountability and economic opportunity specifically tailored to voters in the industrial heartland. Without the support of the anxious working class, Ohio will also turn deep blue. And so will the United States.

Daniel Larison and Ross Douthat are quick to jump on this, because they've spent a good deal of time arguing precisely this sort of thing (despite Jonah Goldberg's painfully embarassing attempt to condescend to a group of writers who are 1) smarter and 2) no younger than he). As Larison once put the basic argument:

[S]mall-government conservatism doesn’t sell and “strong government” conservatism does... I don’t like it, but it is true. Ceteris paribus, a GOP that does not attempt to co-opt or develop its own answer for ”lower-middle reformism” or populism is a GOP that is much more likely to lose in a nationwide contest with a party that has started turning to precisely that kind of politics. It will in all likelihood lose the presidential race if it does not address this weakness and instead continues to trot out the old “tax cuts and deregulation” mantra.

Larison now points out that the Republican candidates best positioned to carry a "lower-middle reformist" message ("Huckabee, The Other Thompson, Hunter") are stuck in the second tier of presidential contenders, while the frontrunners seem unable to learn the lesson of how to talk about economics. If Luntz is right, then the Republicans are getting the geography all wrong:

Giuliani and McCain poll better in named match-ups with Democratic contenders than the other two “leading” candidates, but on trade and economic policy they have nothing to offer Ohio, Pennsylvania and other Midwestern states. Leave aside their foreign policy craziness for a moment, and remember (if you somehow had forgotten) that these two are the strongest pro-immigration advocates in the field. That will not, already does not, play well with Republican voters, and it likely will not play very well with the electorate in Ohio, either. Needless to say, the state that went for Bush in ‘04 at least partly thanks to the gay “marriage” ban referendum is not going to be a good fit for Giuliani.

The Republicans need to be able to compete in Ohio and Midwestern states like Ohio, and they appear to be gearing up to nominate a candidate that will make them relatively more competitive in either the South (Fred), California (McCain), the Northeast (Giuliani) or nowhere in particular (Romney). They have apparently learned nothing from the close call in 2004 and the repudiation of 2006.

A very important point here is the different direction the parties are heading in when it comes to economic rhetoric. It's not just the candidates, it's the entire conservative message apparatus, which seems determined to ignore what Larison calls the difference between "economic indicators" and "political reality," as witnessed by Bill Kristol's latest Kudlow-esque "everything is fine, stop whining about he economy" piece in the Weekly Standard. Democrats, meanwhile, are finally taking just the opposite tack, noting that while the numbers may look good, the lived experience of the American economy these days is one of insecurity and doubt. Pundits will surely warn the Democrats away from their new populism, but Democrats are starting to understand the economy as Americans do, not as Beltway economists do, and that's going to give them a huge advantage next fall.

Still Punching in the Court Fight

2007-07-16T11:09:00.000-05:00

Conservative judicial activist Kenneth Blackwell takes to takes to the New York Sun today to argue that conservatives should not rest on their laurels after their recent string of 5-4 victories in the Supreme Court. I'm always impressed by how right-wing writers are able to strike such a consistently victimized, even apocalyptic, tone when they discuss the courts -- as though they are always, even when they win, just holding out on some judicial Masada, waiting for the activist liberal judges to overrun the last bastions of God-fearing, "originalist" jurisprudence.

Blackwell looks at Hein v. Freedom From Religion Foundation, in which the Court sharply limited taxpayer standing to sue over violations of the Establishment Clause. Panda's Thumb has a good explanation of the decision, which narrowed the scope of, but did not overturn, Flast v. Cohen -- the decision that affirmed such standing to begin with. Roberts's Court ruled that Flast does not apply in cases where Congress does not make a specific decision to use tax money to support religious institutions, but instead gives the funds to the executive branch in lump sums, leaving it to the administration to decide how to distribute the money. In fact, the decision was muddled, with Roberts claiming that he was not overturning Flast's precedent, while Scalia criticized Roberts for the hair-splitting. The efforts at nuance leave Blackwell cold, too: he argues that Hein "showed that this is no longer a liberal court, but neither is it a conservative one":

Conservatives should consider Hein both a victory and a missed opportunity. The fact that Flast was not expanded means what would have been a whole new line of attack by the Left against churches and ministries has been stopped. But the fact that Flast was not overturned means that all the current attacks will continue until such a time when one more conservative justice is confirmed to the Supreme Court.

Hein shows that conservatives have gotten halfway to the Court they desire, but are most definitely not there yet. Conservatives can celebrate, but they need to double their efforts in the 2008 elections.

Blackwell warns that liberals will be politically energized by the latest string of decisions, while conservatives might be tempted to let down their guard. Given the immense investments of time, resources, and spin that right-wing judicial activists like Blackwell have made in taking control of the courts, it's hardly surprising that he should insist on keeping up the fight. Is his op-ed a sign of the conservative rhetoric to come during the 2008 electoral cycle?

Postcard

2007-07-13T12:14:00.000-05:00

Cool and cloudy in Seattle this morning, which means all is right with the world (I understand it was sweltering just a few days ago). I'll pick up with real analysis next week, but in the meantime you can drop by The Right's Field, where I've posted a few items on the presidential race.

Have a great weekend.

I'm Off

2007-07-12T11:55:00.000-05:00

Travel day. I'll try to check in tomorrow, though as I said things are going to slow down here for a couple of weeks.

See you soon.

Giuliani Hires Norman Podhoretz, Neocon Warmonger

2007-07-11T11:01:00.000-05:00

Via Think Progress: The Giuliani campaign unveiled its foreign policy team yesterday, and prominent among the names is Norman Podhoretz, the murderous lunatic who recently demanded that the United States "bomb Iran" despite his own admission that such an attack could "unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we’ve experienced so far look like a lovefest."

Podhoretz is an unapologetic extremist of the very same neoconservative crowd that has been so thoroughly discredited by its role in formenting the Iraq war. His advocacy of war with Iran is insane not just from a moral but also a strategic standpoint: an attack on Iran would not stop, and would likely accelerate Iran's nuclear program, and would almost certainly benefit the very hardliners the neocons claim to be so worried about. Podhoretz is an addled ideologue, not a serious foreign policy thinker, and by hiring him, Giuliani has demonstrated that he is determined to stick to -- and possibly expand upon -- the failed policies of the Bush administration. Some conservative commenters have hinted that they'd like to see Iran at the center of the debate during the 2008 election; Rudy seems intent on granting them their wish.

I'll do a full post on Podhoretz, as well as other members of Giuliani's foreign policy team -- which includes notable conservative names like Peter Berkowitz -- as part of the policy advisors series. Look for the Podhoretz profile soon.

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

The Huckabee Menace

2007-07-11T09:49:00.000-05:00

Ben Weyl at the Iowa Independent has an excellent post on the not-quite-forgotten Mike Huckabee. As I've written before at this blog, and discussed recently at The Right's Field, Huckabee has enormous talents and is probably the conservative candidate best poised to thrive in a liberal era (to thrive as a conservative, not as a Schwarzenegger-style centrist).

Ben compares Huckabee's own rhetoric to the "Party of Sam's Club" ideas advocated by Ross Douthat and Reiham Salam, and puts them in the context of this analysis by liberal pollster Stanley Greenberg:

Huge majorities want the government to be more involved in a range of issues including national security, health care, energy, and the environment. To tackle global warming, two-thirds of Americans support stronger regulation of business. When it comes to health care, the results are dramatic. By a two-to-one margin, people opt for a universal health care system rather than separate reforms dealing with problems one at a time.

The Republican field in this cycle's presidential election has been pretty void of ideas so far. But it looks like there's a pretty natural match between what Huckabee is saying and what the conservative movement's smartest intellectuals are saying. Of course, they have the albatross of "big-government conservatism" around their necks, which may sink them, but I remain convinced that this kind of synchronicity is why Huckabee, should he somehow overcome his terrible fundraising and lousy poll numbers, would be a very dangerous candidate for Democrats -- someone who, as Ben says, could "steal much of their message and cut deeply into their natural constituency of working Americans."

STILL Not Gonna Happen

2007-07-11T08:11:00.000-05:00

Given all the recent noise about defections in the GOP Senate caucus over Iraq, I'd like to call attention to this post by Jonathan Singer, which takes a little bit more of a critical look at what the cash value of these developments might be. Says Singer:

Neither in the [Washington Post] article nor in other reporting has there been much of an indication that Senators like George Voinovich -- or John Warner or Pete Domenici or Susan Collins or Richard Lugar or almost any of them on the Republican side of the aisle -- have a willingness to do what it takes to bring forward an end to the Iraq War. Sure, they'd be willing to support the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group -- recommendations that might have made a difference had they been implemented last year when they were released but today would do little to either improve the situation on the ground in Iraq or help move us closer to an end to the war -- but they remain unwilling to support legislation that would actually mandate the draw down of forces from Iraq with the goal of ending U.S. military involvement any time before the end of the Bush presidency.

I stand by my previous assertion that virtually all the expressions of Congressional Republican "dissent" on Iraq, no matter how breathlessly reported, are meaningless -- full of sound and simulated fury, signifying nothing.

Wallyworld, Here I Come

2007-07-11T07:53:00.000-05:00

One feature of life on the long tail is that solo bloggers, save for a handful of superhumans, have to take breaks. I'll be on vacation for the next couple of weeks, which means posting will be sporadic until about the end of July -- though I promise not to abandon you completely.

I hadn't really thought about this much until now, but so you know: the door is open at A&S for anyone who might want to contribute occasional guest posts analyzing the conservative movement (or closely related topics). That goes for not just while I'm on vacation, but any time. Just email me, and I'll set you up.

I'll check in later this afternoon with a real post or two; much to be done at the day job before I go away.

The UK Conservative Breakdown

2007-07-10T07:59:00.000-05:00

Conservatism is in crisis not just in the US, but in Britain as well. I don't pretend to know the nuances of the British political situation, but the latest developments make for an interesting point of comparison with the tribulations of our own American right.

At the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum frets that the Tories, having finally seen a glimmer of hope for their electoral prospects during the malaise of the late Blair years, have been thoroughly demoralized by Gordon Brown's strong start:

The polls are quite a blow: Buoyed by Blair's personal unpopularity, by dissatisfaction with public health and education, and above all by dislike of the Iraq war, the Conservatives were just beginning to whisper of victory in the next general election, which must be held by 2009. But by late last week, at least one of my Tory acquaintances had already lost faith. "We'll lose," he told me, matter-of-factly.

For Applebaum, as for many American conservatives, the worst thing the Tories can do is continue to move left in reaction to Labour's triangulation; she suggests that such a path may lead to the end of the party itself:

Political parties have life cycles much like the human beings who create them. They are born, they mature, they gain wisdom. Then, sometimes, they die -- and not just in Britain.

Her final sentence may imply a warning to a Republican party struggling over its own conservative soul, though the path to extinction may seem to head in different directions depending on one's point of view (for what it's worth, I think the sentiment is overstated when it comes to the Republicans; the Tories have been mired in a far deeper ideological crisis than the GOP).

One of the latest attempts to define a conservative agenda for the British Conservatives might be found in Breakthrough Britain, a report released by former Tory leader Ian Duncan Smith's Social Justice Policy Group. The report suggests for Conservatives a policy slate of moralist ideas, with tax breaks for married couples at the center of it. The Guardian has a good summary.

You can get a decent sense of the thinking behind the report from a column by Duncan Smith published in the Times last December, titled "Breakdown Britain." As the title indicates, Duncan Smith paints a bleak picture of British society, where "in every area life is getting worse." Unable to attack Labour on economic issues -- since the British economy has been robust -- he describes a country wracked by social failure: drug abuse, crime, dependency. Such themes provide the impetus for the new report.

Writing at the Guardian, Polly Toynbee denounces Duncan Smith's "reactionary mood music," and warns current Tory leader David Cameron against abandoning "their present uneasy course towards liberal modernity:"

Here is why the Breakdown Britain theme is a dangerous temptation. Most people are easily persuaded that everything is getting worse, the young are decadent, morals and manners are in freefall, community is collapsing, children are neglected, family is fragmenting and nothing is what it was in a golden age imagined somewhere safely beyond memory, in our grandparents' youth. It is the human condition to believe in perpetual decline. All societies have "something deeply wrong" with them, and Cameron's marriage talisman captures strong political emotions.

But the more he hammers away at this theme, the more he loses his drive for modernity and falls captive to the praise of the Mail and Telegraph.

Toynbee argues that while the Conservatives might reach for low-hanging political fruit -- social negativity, tax cuts, and hardline rhetoric on immigration -- such a party will find itself wedded to "that solid 30% of core Tory voters," a constituency that will strain even within itself to uphold a commitment to old and unrealistic moralist policies. In other words, implies Toynbee's argument, the death of the Conservative Party may result from precisely the treatment Applebaum would prescribe.

Greetings from the Long Tail

2007-07-10T07:11:00.000-05:00

Open Left looks to me like a pretty positive development -- as far as I can tell, a worthwhile effort to link the netroots with the progressive establishment in a more comprehensive way. The dirty little secret of any influential political "movement" in America is the disconnect between the rank and file and the Beltway leadership. Any attempt to bridge that has to be a positive thing.

If you haven't already, check out the latest by Chris Bowers on the state of the progressive blogosphere. As he points out, the divide occurs within the netroots itself, between the increasingly-established "short head" of the blogosphere, and the vast "long tail" trailing out into obscurity. I more or less agree with him as to the characteristics of and reasons for that divide, though I think his point can be simplified. When blogging was a new medium, early adapters could make their mark even if nobody knew who they were. Now that the reach and the dynamics of the medium are better understood, those with the most resources -- financial, social, political -- are able to leverage their advantages into the blogosphere.

Bowers is also right to imply that during the recent blogroll wars, this phenomenon was often mischaracterized: it's not a matter of the early adapters pulling the ladder up after them. As he points out, and as all the evidence I've seen indicates, blogrolls play a very small role in driving traffic. It seems to me that some very talented people let their bruised egos get in the way of a more hardheaded analyis of what was going on. Those with resources were getting in on the game; the early adapters were just about the only "provincial" bloggers able to make the transition at the highest level, since they at least had the resource of having been early adapters.

I say this as someone standing on the unfashionable end of the long tail -- and thanks again to those of you who make the effort to come all the way out here. We in the netroots masses must be able -- as Bowers acknowledges -- to influence the short head and the Beltway establishment. After a brief interlude during which we thought we were the new establishment, collectively and en masse, we're being brought back to earth, and now we'll have to focus on the challenge of figuring out how to re-open the channels a bit.

Still, we're in a better place than the status quo ante. Even with the emergence of a blogospheric short head connected to an enduring movement establishment, the new forms of technology and discourse, and the expectations we have created through them, have given us peasants significantly expanded access to national politics from the days when were expected to vote, send checks, and at best carry worthless membership cards around in our wallets. The tail may not yet wag the dog, but we can move him a little better than before.

The Advisors: Bill Simon, Jr. (Giuliani Policy Director)

2007-07-09T11:09:00.000-05:00

The premise behind this series is simple: if, during the 2000 presidential campaign, more of us had thought more about the significance of George W. Bush's choice of policy advisors -- from Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz to Marvin Olasky and Myron Magnet -- not only would we have heard a lot less about how there was "no difference" between the two major candidates, but we would have also had a pretty good idea just what kind of president Bush would be.

When Rudy Giuliani named William Simon, Jr. to head his policy team, he was undoubtedly guided by strategic calculations, not by faith in the dynamism of Simon's ideas. Simon, a financier and former California gubernatorial candidate (described by one commentator as "the only person less popular than incumbent Gov. Gray Davis back in 2002"), is not a particularly distinguished man. But his selection as policy director says something about how the Giuliani campaign seeks to define itsef.

Simon's father, William Simon, Sr., served as treasury secretary during the Nixon and Ford Administrations. He was a hard-charging financier and movement conservative; the son, by contrast, was apolitical and, according to some accounts, happy enough to lead the comfortable life of a wealthy heir. From 1986-88 Simon worked for Giuliani as an Assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of New York; following that stint he took up the family business, moving to Los Angeles as an executive of the William E. Simon & Sons investment firm. He has at times shown signs of questionable judgment in his business decisions, as a San Francisco Chronicle article reported:

There have been some noticeable failures, including a savings and loan seized -- unfairly, Simon said -- by the government; a disastrous deal with a former drug lord to invest in Southern California pay phones [in 2002 a California jury found Simon's firm guilty of defrauding the drug trafficker; the judge later overturned the verdict]; and the bankruptcy of two companies that left hundreds out of work.

A 2002 article in The Nation investigated Simon's ties to Enron; as a board member at the Houston company Hanover Compressor, Simon conceived a number of joint-venture ideas through a partnership with Enron called Joint Energy Development Investments. The Nation article also reported on questions raised about Simon's work at Hanover independent of the Enron dealings:

Simon was also involved in Hanover in matters separate from the Enron deals that could raise legal concerns. Hanover said in February that it would have to restate its financial results beginning in January 2000 because of improper accounting for a partnership that--as with Enron--made the company appear more profitable than it was. Over several years during this time, according to the Wall Street Journal, Hanover officers sold millions of shares of stock--again much like Enron, where officers who were allegedly aware of the company's accounting practices were encouraging employees and others to buy shares even as they were selling their own. Hanover is now the target of at least four class-action lawsuits by shareholders who have alleged the company misled investors; and it is also under investigation by the SEC.

Simon wasn't a member of Hanover's board at the time of the improper accounting, but a week before Hanover made the announcement, the company reported that every annual report it has issued since going public in 1997 contained errors. Simon, as a member of Hanover's audit committee, was responsible for approving the company's annual reports. The audit committee, according to Hanover's investor relations department, was held responsible by Hanover for the error.

Simon's challenge to incumbent California Governor Gray Davis in 2002 delighted conservative pundits, who saw the political novice as one of their own. William F. Buckley, Jr. praised him as a sort of "Superman"-in-waiting, poised to rescue the state from Davis's spending; The National Review's John Miller called him "the sort of candidate conservatives can get excited about," someone who had, almost literally, been born into the movement. Davis labelled Simon a "true-blue think-tank conservative;" what was meant as a pejorative sounded like high praise to conservative ears.

Calling himself a "candidate of ideas," Simon ran for governor as both a social conservative -- anti-choice and a supporter of California's Proposition 22, the "Defense of Marriage Act" -- and a tax- and budget-cutter. His proposals for solving the latter equation were vague; he promised cuts in unspecified "new" programs and pledged to "hold the line" on taxes. He also expressed opposition to college tuition and drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants. Despite his opposition to abortion (except in cases of rape or incest), Simon had "no plans," according to the Chronicle, to reduce state funding for reproductive health care. On education, Simon advocated "restoring local control" of schools, but conceded that "the voters have spoken" against tuition vouchers, indicating that he would not press the matter. Simon won the Republican nomination after the Davis campaign trained its fire on LA mayor Richard Riordan; in the general election he earned 42.4% of the vote, losing to Davis by five points.

As Giuliani's policy director, Simon has so far refused to discuss the specifics of his candidate's domestic policy positions. One of his major roles is simply to reinforce Giuliani's right flank against social conservative attack. He claims to "have an assurance" that Giuliani is in favor the Hyde Amendment (which would forbid "taxpayer-funded abortion") and makes much of a statistic showing a decline in New York's abortion rate during the Giuliani mayoralty.

Simon was reportedly the main author of Giuliani's "12 Commitments" speech. The speech itself, a laundry list of wild, unsupported conservative promises, gives little indication of what Giuliani would actually do as president, though Simon does suggest that a President Rudy would be a free-trader and a supporter of "portable free-market solutions" (possibly "Health Savings Accounts?") to the health care crisis. Despite his fiscal conservative appeal, Giuliani has refused to sign Gover Norquist's "Taxpayer Protection Pledge," a decision Simon has been forced to defend to supply-side fanatic Larry Kudlow.

California is a critical state in Rudy Giuliani's path the the GOP nomination. It's also a state that presents the former mayor with something of a problem: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Pundits have compared Rudy to Arnie, discussing the ways in which each represents a "new" kind of Republicanism -- coastal, pro-choice, "liberal." The political consequences of this kind of talk are very different for Schwarzenegger than they are for Giuliani, and it's hardly a surprise that, in the primary at least, Rudy would want to draw a sharp distinction between himself and the Governator. By making Bill Simon, Jr. his policy director, Giuliani was doing just that. Simon is possibly the most prominent figure in the conservative wing of the California Republican party, which makes him a valuable asset for Rudy. A blue-blood businessman, Simon reinforces Giuliani's fiscal conservative cache; an anti-choice conservative Catholic, he sends a reassuring signal to the social right. And as a "true-blue think-tank conservative," he tells the right that Rudy, far from being a different kind of Republican, wants very much to be anchored to the orthodox conservative movement.

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

Is It All About the Lindens?

2007-07-06T11:33:00.000-05:00

Every so often in the modern era somebody crops up with a loopy, poorly-considered manifesto about how this technological development or that cyber-whatsit proves the case for libertarianism. Twelve years ago it was the "Californian ideology" of Wired and Mondo 2000 and other bright and ignorant young tech geeks; lately Newt Gingrich has been carrying the standard for those unable to grasp the relationship between technology, public investment, and the real world.

Now comes Michael Gerson, who writes that Second Life is "a large-scale experiment in libertarianism." Gerson, a social conservative, is not out to argue that the experiment is a success, but it got me thinking.

You may or may not be into SL. I had fun, for about a week, running around with my avatar ("Cosmo Mills," which I thought was a decent name for a character in a manufactured universe) looking at all the neat stuff and pretending to have a soul patch and a jacket made of shag carpeting. That was about as far as it went for me, but I can understand why people like it, especially when they get involved in what is, undeniably, a working economy of the game. But Gerson seems to buy the claims that it's somehow relevant to actual political economy:

Instead of showing the guiding hand of an author, this universe is created by the choices of its participants, or "residents." They can build, buy, trade and talk in a world entirely without rules or laws; a pure market where choice and consumption are the highest values.

Now, Gerson is actually using SL to criticize libertarianism, arguing that the game reveals the bankruptcy of a world without "moral rules" or "social obligations" or negative consequences to bad choices (thus resulting in too much random sex and consumerism). (Ramesh Ponnuru points out a flaw in Gerson's logic.)

At any rate, I've seen this claim before, from SL enthusiasts: that the game is somehow one big exercise in libertarianism, a "pure market" as Gerson calls it. Do people really believe that a "pure market" consists of a world in which there is no need for food or shelter or medicine, no scarcity at all beyond an economy of status items?

The Enduring Appeal of the Reactionaries

2007-07-06T07:24:00.000-05:00

Last seen proposing a grand alliance between liberals and libertarians (I explained why I think that would be a bad idea here), Cato's Brink Lindsey resurfaced last week to try his hand with the conservatives, taking to the pages of the National Review to offer advice from a "well-wishing outsider." It won't shock you that Lindsey's advice to the right is much like his appeal to the left: an invitation to think like libertarians do.

Lindsey proposes that conservatives set aside their "traditionalist" objections to things like gay marriage and Mexican immigration, commenting that "much of what has defined modern social conservatism — namely, political resistance to the incessant cultural change engendered by economic development — is not authentically conservative at all. It is reactionary." Social conservatism assumes a fragility to American culture that is not borne out by the evidence; more importantly, it's on the wrong side of history, in a sort of historical-materialist sense.

Naturally we progressives will be more enamored of his arguments when he is directing them against the assumptions of social conservatism, though Lindsey is careful to frame his case in a way that flatters the traditionalist preoccupations of decades past -- even as he rightly condemns the right's record of getting it wrong on things like civil rights and the entry of women into the workforce. He puts it this way:

The culture wars are over, and capitalism won. The question now is: Will the Left or the Right be the first to figure this out? The answer may well determine the future balance of political power.

Lindsey surveys post-war American history on a broad level, arguing that we have arrived at this juncture after mid-20th century prosperity first unleashed a tidal wave of cultural change:

As the post-war boom took off, however, the unprecedented development of technology and organization made America the first society in human history in which most people could take satisfaction of their basic material needs more or less for granted.

The story of post-war America is thus the story of adaptation to fundamentally new social realities, particularly mass affluence. Time-honored practices that had developed during the long reign of scarcity were now in need of serious revision or even wholesale abandonment. At the same time, new values and priorities began to assert themselves. Wrenching cultural conflict was unavoidable.

In Lindsey's telling, the prosperity brought by unfettered capitalism triggered cultural changes both positive -- feminism, sexual liberation, the end of legal segregation -- and negative. On the negative side, Lindsey describes "a radical assault on all traditions, all authority, and all constraints" -- a sort of general "Aquarian" madness (I wasn't around at the time, but reading the right's literature I imagine that a typical day in, say, 1971 probably involved packs of cannibalistic hippies raiding churches and boiling peyote in the hollowed-out skulls of former Mouseketeers. But I digress.). Social conservatives, he says, were right to push back against the chaos and crime thus unleashed, but now, in saner times, they have reached a crossroads:

The fundamental question for conservatives today is: What should they be seeking to conserve? The great American heritage of limited government, individual liberty, and free markets seems the only viable answer. As Peter Berkowitz has frequently and wisely noted, a truly American conservatism must have at the core of its concerns the defense and preservation of the liberal tradition. Which makes it a special kind of conservatism indeed: Its function is not to arrest change generally, or even slow it down, but rather to preserve the institutions that are both the chief source of change and the primary means through which we adapt to new conditions.

One obvious flaw in Lindsey's narrative is that he, a committed libertarian, ignores the important role of government investment and social insurance in fueling that post-war boom and widening the scope of its public benefits. But for the purposes of a debate with social conservatives, another problem stands out. Lindsey argues that they, clinging to their traditionalist views, are at odds with the march of history. Yet, as Ramesh Ponnuru points out in a rebuttal, Linsdey has also said that traditionalists were right to resist that march in certain ways at certain times. In that case, each social conservative argument must be judged on its merits; you can't simply dismiss them all with the proposition that, if we take care of capitalism, capitalism will take care of the rest. Ponnuru, in a sur-reply, writes:

[A]nyone who has taken up a social-conservative cause or two, or declines to sign on to all of Lindsey’s arguments, is supposed to don sackcloth and ashes and take historical responsibility for other conservatives’ having been segregationists. (Speaking for myself: No thanks.) The demand makes sense if all social conservative causes are the same, impermissibly reactionary thing, except when they happen to further “the logic of social development under capitalism,” whatever that means.

Ponnuru acknowledges, and I agree, that Lindsey is correct in pointing out that material forces, not just ideas, move history. As Ponnuru puts it, "Feminism didn’t happen when it did just because Betty Friedan wrote a book, which is why anti-feminist books can’t undo it."

Lest I sound too much like a defender of the traditionalists, let me add that we needn't simply let Ponnuru and his compatriots wiggle out from under the historical burden of social conservatives' many serious mistakes -- nor should we allow them to pretend that their arguments really do always resonate on their philosophical merits, when we all know perfectly well that naked bigotry provides much of their constituency. Whether or not Ponnuru wants to accept it, when we judge social conservative arguments on gay marriage, we can and must consider the precedents and legacy of their positions on civil rights and the role of women in society. For that matter, the record shows that a considerable number of the very same social conservatives leading the reactionary charge today still haven't abandoned the racism and sexism of the previous era. Ponnuru doesn't have to wear the sackcloth, but that doesn't mean his movement won't be judged by its own historical sins.

Ultimately, the negotations break down, with Ponnuru dismissing Lindsey's views as marginal -- just as Jonathan Chait did from a liberal perspective. The debate will be between the Ponnurus and the Chaits. I do believe that the traditionalists will continue to lose -- as they always do -- and they will lose in part because capitalism and other large-scale forces will continue to undermine the appeal of their prejudices. But I don't think they'll disappear, or that the right will limit itself to a simple defense of "classical liberalism." The social disruption and insecurity wrought by capitalism's "creative destruction" (to use a favorite libertarian term) mitigate against such reductionist politics. Social conservatism may be reactionary -- a misguided response to those dislocations -- but it's not going away.

Liberal Wall Street?

2007-07-05T17:20:00.000-05:00

One thing that struck me about Craig Shirley's jeremiad in Conservative Battleline was his pairing of the hated "GOP elites" with "their master’s voice, corporate America." It's not the first time I've seen anti-Wall Street sentiment expressed in recent conservative denunciations of where the GOP is heading.

So then I read Dana Goldstein's piece at TAPPED about Fortune Magazine's glowing assessment of Hillary Clinton. Goldstein mentions a few of Hillary's Wall Street supporters -- people like John Mack of Morgan Stanley, Jeffrey Volk of Citigroup, and James D. Robinson III of American Express. And he cites this passage:

Clinton's GOP business supporters say they have other priorities [than tax issues]. Volk wants to see the federal budget balanced. Robinson wants health-care and education policies that will improve American's competitiveness. Hillary Clinton says simply, "It's important not to have a tax discussion separate from [deciding] what are our goals."

Goldstein also suggests that this may be part of a trend:

[Y]ounger corporate types really do have a different set of priorities. They may not be ready to support John Edwards, but they're increasingly calling themselves Democrats.

One can react to this kind of thing with all kinds of populist suspicion, but let's set that aside for the moment. Without wanting to read too much into this -- and it remains the case that the Republicans are the party of big business -- there's an ever-so-faint echo here of the 1950s, when upstart conservatives excoriated the decadent Republican elites, who along with their northeastern capitalist class generally, had come to an accomodation with labor and the social safety net.

Take the historical parallel for what you will.

Religious Right Abandoning Mitt for Fred?

2007-07-05T14:30:00.000-05:00

Another good post by Dayton, who looks at evidence that religious conservatives (or at least their leaders), after an initial flirtation with Mitt Romney, are beginning to move into Fred Thompson's camp.

Republicans Abandoned by the Mainstream

2007-07-05T12:15:00.000-05:00

Conservative blogger Soren Dayton uses a poll about the Libby commutation to note a trend that should disturb Republicans. Comparing ideological self-identification ("conservative"-"moderate"-"liberal") to party ID, he notes:

The GOP and conservatives are, basically, the same with Republicans being 30% and conservatives are 29%

Liberals are, however, only half the self-identifying Democrats with self-IDing Dems being 40%, while liberals only 19%

In other words, 50% or so of self-identified moderates feel comfortable identifying as Democrats.

In other words, almost no moderates are identifying as Republicans.
The GOP is not appealing to moderates at this moment while half of self-identified Democrats are moderates. That should scare us.

As Dayton notes, caveats apply. Bush hasn't helped the right's numbers, and it's plausible that they could recover after he's gone -- though given the GOP's current commitment to a war-and-terror strategy, they might not. At any rate, this is not a good sign for Republicans.

This Time I Really Mean It

2007-07-05T11:15:00.000-05:00

At Conservative Battleline, Craig Shirley says it's time for conservatives to consider declaring their independence from the GOP -- emulating the actions of the "Manhattan Twelve," who, in 1971, confronted Richard Nixon over his deviations from conservative orthodoxy:

True conservatives are now faced with this choice once again. In order to save their ideology, should the conservative movement declare it’s independence from the Bush Administration and the GOP? The arguments for doing so are compelling.

The immigration bill, most conservatives believe, is a sellout of everything they hold dear – the rule of law, justice, freedom and sovereignty. But rather than listen to the grassroots American people, the GOP elites are listening intently instead to their master’s voice, corporate America....

The war has held together the unhappy shotgun marriage of the elitist GOP and the populist conservatives, but the D-word (“divorce”) is now on the lips of many in the movement.

The arguments for at least a trial separation are legion; from steel tariffs to federal mandates to the states educational systems, to the biggest entitlement since the Great Society to the corruption of Republican “lawmakers” and Enron and the GOP K Street walkers, whose main job is to convince GOP lawmakers into doing un-Republican things. Arrogance, ignorance, the unseemly pursuit of power over principles and betrayal of conservatism are the hallmarks of the current GOP.

Shirley doesn't really identify who the "GOP elites" are -- the Bush administration, one supposes, but who specifically, and why should we believe that they will continue to be the party's "elites" in 2009? And would conservatives have as much leverage with a self-absorbed lame-duck as they did with Nixon, who after all was about to seek re-election? What about the candidates for 2008? And what does a "divorce" from a major party mean? A third party?

In fact Shirley is simply calling for the conservative movement to lead the party, as it did in the 1970s. Unfortunately for Shirley, the movement is a lot less coherent now than it was in the days of the "Manhattan Twelve."

At any rate, Shirley and his compatriots got their way on the immigration bill. Articles like this one might serve as reminder not to mistake conservative sound and fury for any actual plan to break with the GOP.

Wishing the Manicheanism Away

2007-07-05T10:28:00.000-05:00

You may have seen the excellent pair of articles at the New Republic revisiting the work of two heroes of post-war conservatism. Sam Tanenhaus writes about Whitaker Chambers, while Alan Wolfe takes on Russell Kirk.

Over at Red State, Kevin Holtsberry has a lengthy rebuttal to Tanenhaus's piece. I'm not familiar enough with the history to comment with much authority on the merits of Holtsberry's arguments with regard to Chambers (I'm reading Witness and may write about it in a few weeks), but I can't resist commenting on Holtsberry's rhetorical strategy. Holtsberry finds Tanenhaus "infuriating" because, on the one hand, he seems to "poke" at certain "odd leftists," yet on the other hand he insists on criticizing conservatives -- or worse, using one conservative to criticize others:

In the liberal world there are only two kinds of good conservatives: those that attack other conservatives (see the New York Times editorial page) and those that are far enough removed from today’s troubles as to seem harmless and/or useful in carrying out the first point.

Holtsberry is not wrong, but he demonstrates an odd lack of reflection in failing to note that conservatives act the very same way with regard to liberals. It's simply one of the most common habits of political writing, even among those who strive to achieve balance; it's a product of believing in the validity of one's own set of views.

Beyond this Holtsberry launches into a tiresome defense of the indefensible, though, to him, it is the complaints themselves that are tiresome: war, torture, extra-constitutional detention, exploitation of terror for political ends, etc etc. He refuses to acknowledge that the Bush administration has been polarizing and fear-mongering since 9/11, and he considers it frightfully declasse ("the stuff of the Democratic Underground") to even allege such things. It's as though he was in a coma for the entire 2002 and 2004 elections.

Alan Wolfe once responded to Peter Berkowitz, who had said much the same kind of thing:

In the world according to Peter Berkowitz, there are no right-wing bloggers calling the president's critics traitors, no Swift-boating of Democratic candidates, no violations of civil liberty associated with our Republican president, no authorized leaks of the names of CIA agents, no dramatic increase in the use of presidential signing statements, no use of torture, no suspension of habeas corpus, no breaks with our historic allies over such methods, no biased editorial pages and networks, no Rush Limbaughs, no vigilantes patrolling our borders, no invented quotations from Abraham Lincoln, no manipulations of intelligence, no appeals to racial and religious bigotry.

I don't know whether the life of Whitaker Chambers is or is not an appropriate metaphor for, or critique of, the current conservative Manicheanism. But it's no use pretending that that Manicheanism is all a figment of fevered liberal imaginations.

Happy Independence Day

2007-07-04T11:36:00.001-05:00

I'm off to see if I can get into the New Pornographers show at Battery Park.

Meanwhile, to celebrate the birth of our nation, you can read in the National Review about how you and your illegal immigrant friends aren't patriotic enough (they're actually using that cheesy eagle-with-a-flag-on-its-face graphic).

Or you can check out the successor to Steve Gilliard's site, the Group News Blog.

Or you can read my analysis of the GOP candidates' Q2 fundraising over at The Right's Field.

See you tomorrow!

Rise of the Right Blogosphere?

2007-07-03T12:06:00.000-05:00

In an example of the very triumphalism Linda Chavez is warning against, June Kronholz and Amy Schatz write in the Wall Street Journal about how the defeat of the immigration bill may be a sign that the conservative blogosphere has become increasingly influential:

But the immigration bill marked the first time conservative Web logs could claim to have targeted and derailed a major piece of legislation. The triumph underscored their increasing influence and signaled that the balance of online power may be evening out in the political arena.

Kronholz and Schatz suggest that conservative blogs can have the most impact when they work closely with right-wing talk radio.

There's plenty to be said on the subject -- a lot already has been said -- but a couple of quick points. For one thing, if the right's blogs are attaching themselves to the conservative machine, is that a sign of greater "influence" or simply a noticable increase in the noise level? Were the blogs actually driving the debate or simply amplifying it? I'll leave that as an open question for now.

Perhaps more signficantly, I would suggest that there's a difference between a blogosphere that pushes its party toward more popular positions, and one that helps move its party further toward political irrelevance.

Immigration: What Cost Victory?

2007-07-03T11:51:00.000-05:00

In a Washington Times op-ed, Linda Chavez calls the defeat of the immigration bill a "Pyrrhic victory" for conservatives:

Our borders will be less secure, not more. Employers who want to do the right thing and only hire legal workers won't have the tools to do so. The 12 million illegal aliens here now will continue to live in the shadows, making them less likely to cooperate with law enforcement to report crimes and less likely to pay their full share of taxes. In other words, the mess we created by an outdated and ill-conceived immigration policy 20 years ago will just get worse.

But you won't hear this if you tune in to talk radio over the next few days or read conservative blogs. There will be lots of gloating over having killed "amnesty." There will be claims that senators finally "listened to the people." And, no doubt, some conservatives will be emboldened to consider the next step in their war against illegal immigration, namely to deport those now here illegally.

Chavez, whose heresies on the immigration issue have helped draw out some of the vicious racism of the Republican base, warns that Democrats will be planning to revisit the issue in 2009, with what could be expanded control over both the legislative and executive branches. And she thinks they'll be right to do so, given the myriad contradictions and failures of current immigration policy.

What Chavez sees is a conservative noise machine grown fat and happy after its latest "triumph," oblivious to the consequences its short-term actions will have in the longer run. She argues that "Republicans who believe this will help them at the polls in 2008 may find themselves sitting on the back benches for years to come."

At this point, it probably doesn't even matter whether anyone else on the right is listening to her. On immigration, at least, the damage to the Republican coalition has been done.

Libby and the Right

2007-07-03T11:02:00.000-05:00

I won't pretend to do a comprehensive post on this, but we can sample some of the conservative reaction.

The National Review's editors are basically satisfied:

We wish the president had chosen a pardon. But as it is, he has removed the most onerous burden facing Libby as a result of this strange and maddening case, and for that we applaud him.

Byron York compares the decision to Bush the First's pardon of convicted Iran-Contra criminals, thus providing further historical evidence for the notion that conservatives expect a different sort of justice than the rest of us, since their crimes are committed for totally good reasons.

The Wall Street Journal is outraged -- that Bush didn't issue a full pardon. In the Journal's telling, Libby was merely trying to defend the administration's Iraq policies against mean old Joe Wilson, and when mean old Patrick Fitzgerald and mean old Judge Walton ganged up on the poor guy, Bush abandoned him. The commutation is par for this unfortunate course:

Mr. Bush's commutation statement yesterday is another profile in non-courage. He describes the case for and against the Libby sentence with an antiseptic neutrality that would lead one to conclude that somehow the whole event was merely the result of Mr. Libby gone bad as a solo operator....

Mr. Libby deserved better from the President whose policies he tried to defend when others were running for cover. The consequences for the reputation of his Administration will also be long-lasting.

Daniel Larison, on the other hand, thinks the WSJ editors are out of their damn minds:

It could have been written before the fact, but regardless of this it is a rich artifact of Bush-era propaganda. Mr. Bush is “evading responsibility” by failing to pardon Libby, when his act of commutation before Libby’s appeal was heard was something that he definitely did not have to do. He is “evading responsibility,” even though the WSJ position on this entire matter is one, long evasion of responsibility, moral, political and legal. These people are simply amazing. The commutation is a “dark moment” in the history of the administration–and not because it is giving cover to a convicted perjuror! It is a “dark moment” because the President did not misuse his pardon power to completely exonerate a felon. That is what these people mean. The WSJ said that Libby deserved better. Actually, he deserved to go to jail. He should be glad that the President was willing to do this much for him. So should his moronic defenders.

Andrew Sullivan jeers as "the aristocracy rejoices":

The wealthy, connected, powerful coterie around Scooter Libby are reveling in their power to subvert the decision of a petty bunch of know-nothing jurors in favor of their best friend.

Alas, Larison and Sullivan are not typical of conservatives in their reactions. As Todd Beeton reports at MyDD, the GOP presidential candidates, as well as 2/3 of their conservative base, fall somewhere on the spectrum between "it was a good decision" and "it should have been a full pardon." That puts them at odds with 60% of the American public, who believe that Bush should have respected the judge's decision. As Todd notes:

Once again, pandering to their base will marginalize them with the electorate at large and serves as further evidence of just how far outside the mainstream the Republican Party has become.

To drive the point home, the Carpetbagger Report has some questions we might ask the GOP candidates over the next few months:

* Will you, as president, routinely overturn criminal sentences for unrepentant convicted felons before they serve time behind bars?

* If obstruction of justice and perjury are not serious crimes deserving of serious punishment, what other felonies are you inclined to disregard?

* Will your White House out covert CIA agents in a time of war, too?

* If there are two systems of justice — one for politically-connected Republicans, and one for everyone else — how will you decide who makes the cut?

* Why is privilege more important than justice?

He Are Serious Writer

2007-07-03T07:05:00.001-05:00

Tired of waiting for Jonah Goldberg to finish Liberal Fascism? Not to worry: Jon Swift has it in LOLcats form.

A Failure of Compassion

2007-07-02T15:42:00.001-05:00

I have a rather long post over at The Daily Gotham about how the Bush administration's commitment to ideological fanaticism is undermining its own much-trumpeted efforts to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS worldwide.

The very short version: USAID and HHS, at the instigation of Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), attached a requirement to the disbursement of PEPFAR (that's Bush's $15 billion anti-AIDS effort) funds requiring that any organization receiving the money sign an "anti-prostitution pledge" -- precluding them even from spending their own private money on AIDS prevention and assistance for sex workers anywhere in the world. The result has been that the most marginalized and at-risk segments of the population in many countries are being abandoned, and those who still seek to work with them are shunned by NGOs fearful of losing the funding. The whole thing runs directly counter to best practices in public health and humanitarian services, and threatens to make PEPFAR more an agent of harm than good, undermining much of the work that has been done so far, and sacrificing the AIDS-prevention cause to silly ideological nonsense. Last year a federal judge found the pledge unconstitutional, but the Bush administration has responded by only making things more difficult for relief organizations.

This video titled "Taking the Pledge" (it's about 13 minutes) has more, including interviews with relief workers affected by the policy. You can also read about the Open Society Institute's lawsuit against the pledge here.

Bush's Anti-Legacy

2007-07-02T14:28:00.000-05:00

By now you may have read the big article in the Washington Post, examining the state of a failed president who is too self-absorbed to feel as beleagured as he actually is. At this point, the article tells us, Bush is focused on Iraq to the exclusion of everything else, convinced that his legacy will ride upon that war alone.

Matt Yglesias reminds us that, arguably, his legacy lies equally in his extraordinary failure to have a legacy, particularly in domestic matters:

It's also true that for a two term president who enjoyed GOP congressional control for several years, he really does have remarkably few legislative accomplishments. Where other leaders would have seen an opportunity to push a governing agenda, Bush saw an opportunity to evade congressional oversight as he used the executive branch to commit crimes against the constitution, fill many executive agencies with incompetents, and fill others with people who helped his campaigns' financial backers rob the public. Which leads us to what's probably the most important aspect of Bush's non-Iraq legacy, his decision to provide an elegant demonstration of public choice theory and destroy public faith in the possibility of government action by showing exactly how poorly a government can be run.

Yglesias goes on to list some of the failures.

Compassionate conservatism, it seems to me, was the theory behind a potential agenda. But therein lies another legacy: our debate over why it failed as a governing philosophy. Because Bush wasn't sufficiently committed to the actual policies the campassiocon theorists prescribed? Because he was too incompetent to implement them properly, or to sell them to the public? Because ideas matter less to conservative elites than opportunities to enrich their friends and strip away irritating regulations? Or because they really weren't very good ideas to begin with?

GOP Candidates Snub Hispanic Forum

2007-07-02T11:58:00.000-05:00

While the seven Democratic candidates for president made appearances at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials conference on Saturday, the Republican contenders suffered from a mysterious case of scheduling conflictitis: of all the GOP candidates, only Duncan Hunter managed to make it to Orlando for the event. It was left to Florida Senator and RNC Chair Mel Martinez to make the excuses:

"When you're running a campaign, it is difficult to be everywhere you want to be," he said. He called it "wrong and unacceptable to draw from that the conclusion that the Republican presidential candidates don't care about the Hispanic vote or Latinos in this country. … As this campaign unfolds, I think that will become completely clear."

Asked about the harsh opposition to the immigration bill by several of the GOP candidates, including Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Thompson, he said, "This is a very politically toxic issue, and those that are running for office sometimes run away from tough problems."

While the Republican candidates were running away from a conversation with Hispanic leaders, the Democrats had plenty of time to comment on the nastiness fueling GOP rhetoric on immigration. Barack Obama mentioned the "ugly overtone" to the immigration debate, while Joe Biden suggested that it has become "has become a race to the bottom - who can be the most anti-Hispanic."

According to reports, there was plenty of "buzz" at the conference about the remarks by Fred Thompson seemingly comparing Cuban immigrants to terrorists. Hillary Clinton said the comments "appalled" her, adding: "Apparently he doesn't have a lot of experience in Florida or anywhere else, and doesn't know a lot of Cuban-Americans."

Thompson's comments will be particularly unhelpful to Republicans at a time when Democrats are seeking to expand their Hispanic support, even in Florida, where Cuban exiles have provided a stronghold for the GOP:

In Florida, Republican-leaning, anti-Castro Cubans have long dominated Hispanic politics, and most big-name Hispanic politicians are Republican. But Democrats see hope in the growing proportion of non-Cubans and in the generational erosion of Republican dominance among Cuban immigrants.

While Republicans are "conceding the Latino vote in Florida to Democrats," the Democratic candidates are "fully recognizing the importance of the Latino community in Florida and nationally," trumpeted a state Democratic Party press release about the candidates' forums at the conference.

The no-show on Saturday may only hasten the GOP's demographic doom. They fed the fires of the immigration debate and now they're being held hostage to the rages of their own shrinking base, watching as Democrats move in on the voters they have abandoned.

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

Novak: GOP Depressed

2007-07-02T11:47:00.000-05:00

Novakula reports on the mood in the Republican Senate caucus following the failure of the immigration bill. Republicans who stuck with the administration and voted for the bills are furious with majority leader Mitch McConnell, who abandoned them during the fight. And they are exhausted and demoralized, especially after the harrowing experience of reaping what their party sowed over immigration:

It is difficult to exaggerate the pessimism about the immediate political future voiced by Republicans in Congress when not on the record. With an unpopular president waging an unpopular war, they foresee electoral catastrophe in 2008, with Democratic gains in both the House and Senate and Hillary Clinton in the White House. That's the atmosphere in which these lachrymose lawmakers have for several months faced an increasingly hysterical onslaught from constituents demanding the death of the "amnesty" for immigrants they heard vilified on talk radio...

"This isn't a day to celebrate," McConnell said in his postmortem. Indeed, Republicans drove another nail in George W. Bush's political coffin and undermined hopes for winning the growing, and winnable, Hispanic vote. Contending that the time "wasn't now" for immigration, McConnell added: "It wasn't the people's will. And they were heard." He was blaming Republican failure on his fellow citizens, which seldom works in politics.

Now, don't let schadenfreude get the best of you: politics has a way of turning the depressed into the triumphant suprisingly quickly. But for the purposes of brightening a Monday morning (er...afternoon), you're allowed to feel a little bit of pleasure in the Republicans' pain.

Mitt: Fatcats' Favorite

2007-07-02T11:37:00.000-05:00

Why doesn't anybody use the term "fatcat" anymore? Anyway, the fatcats over at Barron's have judged the Rs and the Ds, and declared Mitt Romney "best Republican candidate [and the best overall] for stocks, bonds and the economy" (they like Richardson best of the Democrats).

The article, which is drawn from a questionnaire focusing on taxes, health care, energy, and other issues, is worth a read for those looking to get an idea where the candidates stand on economic issues (though you need to be a subscriber to get the full version). And it's worth noting that, if you believe that what's good for wealthy investors is good for America, Mitt's your man: he wants to abolish the estate tax, thus relieving super-rich heirs of the worry that they might have to give up the beach house in St. Tropez; he favors maintaining the Bush administration's low tax rate on capital gains and dividends, and he offers a vague promise to reduce marginal income tax rates across the board.

Of the rest of the candidates, Rudy Giuliani -- who has been seeking to burnish his supply-side credentials -- scores second, while John Edwards meets with disdain for daring to suggest that nurses working overtime should not be taxed at a higher rate than millionaire hedge fund managers.

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

Targeting the GOP Coalition

2007-06-30T10:59:00.000-05:00

There are a number of things worth discussing with regard to the Fabrizio poll of Republicans. One thing I haven't seen widely mentioned is that the poll was underwritten by a number of groups dedicated to moving the GOP toward the center on social issues: the Republican Leadership Council (which "supports fiscally conservative, socially inclusive Republican candidates"), Republican Main Street Partnership, Republican Majority for Choice, and the Log Cabin Republicans -- all of whom must be pleased with the survey's finding that Republican voters are much more socially moderate than the conventional wisdom would suggest.

But what I want to focus on in this post is how the data indicate that progressives should not pursue an alliance with libertarians, but should instead focus on building consensus around government-backed social insurance.

Debate about the prospects for a "liberaltarian" coaltion has been bubbling for several months (see Brink Lindsey's initial essay on the subject here; see also Jonathan Chait's rebuttal). Six years of Bush administration assaults on civil liberties and pandering to the religious right have lent the idea an undeniable appeal, but the results of the Fabrizio poll suggest that Lindsey's particular version of "progressive fusionism" would lead liberals in the wrong direction, away from a genuinely strong progressive coalition.

The poll breaks GOP voters down into seven categories, the largest of which are the "moralists" -- social conservatives as we know them, heavily evangelical and defined by a "laser-like focus" on issues like abortion and homosexuality. Yet these moralists constitute only a quarter of Republican voters, and even they retain a surprising degree of flexibility -- 33% would vote for a candidate with whom they disagreed on abortion, if the candidate shared enough of their other views.

Overall, by 53-42%, Republicans believe their party "has spent too much time on moral issues...and should instead be focusing on economic issues." Judging by the poll results, there's little evidence that the views of the moralists represent a GOP consensus on social issues. By 49-42% Republicans favor allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. By 77-18% (including a large majority even of moralists), GOP voters believe it should be illegal for employers to fire workers based on sexual orientation. Only 28% believe that abortion should be illegal under all circumstances (this does not of course mean that the majority of Republicans are pro-choice, but it does mean that the issue continues to be defined by its nuances, rather than by moral absolutes).

Particularly notable is that, setting the moralists aside, the most anti-government segments of the party -- "Free Marketeers" and "Dennis Miller Republicans" -- are not appreciably more socially liberal than the other groups. Only on one question -- how much impact religion should have on public policy -- do the Free Marketeers stand out as significantly more liberal than their compatriots, and even here the other non-moralist groups are closely divided. In fact, on the abortion and sexual orientation questions, two non-moralist groups stand out as more progressive than the anti-government groups.

These two factions -- the "Heartland Republicans" and the "Government Knows Best Republicans" -- are the most intriguing, from a liberal standpoint. The former, constituting 8% of the GOP electorate, are "more pragmatic and less ideological," worried about gas prices but supportive of government action on economic issues and climate change, and somewhat Midwestern. The latter group are 13% of the party, the "strongest supporters of government intervention to solve social and environmental problems," as well as being "skeptical of the Patriot Act" and of military spending generally, heavily female, and "more likely to be found on the coasts."

These two groups look to be classic examples of voters who are "theoretically conservative and operationally liberal." By large margins, they share with their fellow partisans the broad feeling that government is too big and spends too much, taxes are too high, and the budget should be balanced. But on questions of specific priorities, their views are much different. On economic issue after economic issue they favor government intervention over the invisible hand of the market: they believe that universal health care should be a right; they prefer fully-funded Social Security to private retirement accounts; they believe the federal government should be more involved in the education system; they think the government is not doing enough to combat global warming; and they agree that "government should be there with a helping hand for those who can't make it on their own." On some of these issues, they are even joined by a third group -- the "Fortress America" isolationists.

These groups look not unlike the independent voters Democrats seek to court. And keep in mind that, again, they are pro-government, but for the most part no less socially liberal than the libertarians.

All of this comes in the context of a new divide within the GOP, over war and terror issues. Republican voters overwhelmingly believe that Iraq and the war on terror now define the Republican party, though they are less united in how they feel about that fact. Here it's instructive to return to Reihan Salam's theory about the two Republican narratives most likely to emerge:

I see two ways to do this: a moralistic domestic reformism that ties together the applied neoconservatism of welfare reform and crime-fighting, the social conservatism of moving to reduce the number of abortions (through restrictions or abortion alternatives) and income-splitting and other marriage-friendly and family-friendly measures, and a civic nationalism that emphasizes America's common culture and the central importance of assimilation and integration.

Or War on Terror nationalism, which focuses on the defeat of America's enemies to the exclusion of domestic issues.

I largely agree with Salam, which is why I think that the kind of conservatism that he and his ideological compatriots advocate represents the right's best chance to build a majority over the long term. But I think that these numbers are even more promising for Democrats, if we take advantage of them.

Liberaltarianism represents an effort to build a firewall against moralist and authoritarian conservatism. But Fabrizio's data suggests that such a firewall is unnecessary, because it already exists within the Republican coalition. And building the liberaltarian wall would mean shutting out the very constituencies we should be trying to peel off: socially moderate, operationally-pro-government Republicans and independents. In this regard liberatarianism seems like a cousin of DLC triangulationism, which was driven in part by an elitist distaste for moralists and economic populists alike, and which sought to exploit the right's divide on social issues while ignoring the possibilities of exploiting its divide on economic issues (though, in fairness, the latter divide has widened significantly since the Clinton era).

There is, I think, room to assemble a coalition around sensible, well-considered social insurance ideas. Conservative reformists like Salam are hoping to get there first, and Democrats should realize the danger in allowing them to do so. One advantage for progressives, though, is that efforts to build a "moralistic domestic reform" conservatism will be slowed both by conservative institutional resistance to anything that smacks of compassionate conservatism redux, and by the right's current pre-occupation with war and terror. At the very least we should be in a position to negotiate social insurance policy with the conservative reformers from a position of strength. We should take advantage of the space these delays offer us to get a head start on building a real progressive fusionism.

Cross-posted at MyDD.

The Power of Spam

2007-06-29T16:37:00.000-05:00

Crazy right-wing chain e-mails take over our media, one small-town paper at a time.

To be fair, I think a lot of that stuff originates in the Wall Street Journal editorial offices.

Who are the Republicans? First Guesses

2007-06-29T12:35:00.000-05:00

As I said, I'll try my hand at more in-depth analysis of that big Fabrizio poll of Republicans when I've had a chance to dig through it more. Meanwhile, a couple quick notes on it:

Mark Ambinder gives a great rundown of the results. One part worth highlighting:

According to Fabrizio, the party’s social/cultural wing remains about the same size, while the economic wing has “shrunk by nearly two thirds.” Replacing those Republicans have been national security and defense voters. Free marketeers, per Fabrizio, comprise about 8 percent of the GOP electorate. They’re skeptical of government action, largely male, baby-boomerish, less frequent church-goers, and they’re not moralists. Fabrizio believes that these voters comprise Fred Thompson’s strongest voting block.

This speaks to the importance of conservative movement institutions in policing the GOP's ideological consensus. According to Fabrizio's results, social conservatives should be as strong as ever within the Republican coalition, while the influence of fiscal conservatives should be waning dramatically. Yet precisely the opposite is happening. Much more to unpack on this point.

Reihan Salam adds his analysis. Again, I'll comment more later, but on a first read, a couple things stick out. One is that Republican attitudes on economic issues are confusing and in many ways contradictory -- very many of them want both lower taxes and more activist government (though in that regard they're not unlike the public at large). Even more interesting is Salam's theory that two rough strategies emerge as ways forward for Republicans. One is "a moralistic domestic reformism," while the other is "War on Terror nationalism." Salam -- unsurprisingly, if you've read his work -- favors the former; he believes that the latter will, in the long run, end up shrinking the Republican coalition. I suspect he's right, which might make it all the more worrying to conservatives that their party's presidential frontrunner is the definitive War on Terror nationalist.

Of course, that fact worries me too, for other reasons.

Dealing with the Supremes

2007-06-29T11:55:00.000-05:00

Over at The Third Estate, Arbitrista looks at the Supreme Court mess -- highlighted by a week of awful 5-4 decisions -- and ponders what to do about it all. As he points out:

No matter what kind of political majorities Democrats are able to build in the next dozen years, no matter what sort of policies we manage to enact to reverse the disastrous course of the last seven (or twenty-seven) years, the right-wing Court will be there to stop us. It is the Supreme Court, not Iraq, that is George Bush's ultimate legacy.

While it was Bush who appointed Roberts and Alito, the coming era of right-wing jurisprudence isn't just his legacy, it's the legacy of almost half a century of conservative movement-building. The courts are the ultimate trailing indicator in American politics; seeds that are planted at the grassroots level of electoral politics will bear judiciary fruit decades later. The right's rhetoric in recent years, often so intensely focused on the courts, well-constructed and full of frustration, is testimony to this. The courts were the last bastion of the mainstream world to fall to the movement's forces; even in a right-wing era, years after the Reagan and Gingrich ascendancies, the judiciary branch refused to succumb, because change comes so glacially there.

All of which makes some of Arbitrista's recommendations even more striking:

A less extreme version of the strategy of confrontation would be to apply public pressure - congressional censures, public protests, and most particularly making the Courts and their decisions an explicit political issue. The Democrats in the next Presidential campaign should highlight these decisions, which if they were well-known would be extremely unpopular with the general public. No Supreme Court justice, and most especially not Anthony Kennedy, wants to see the Supreme Court become an issue in electoral campaigns. I believe that making Supreme Court decisions a major element in the campaign would also help Democrat electorally, since it could force the campaign to be much more substantive. The last thing the Republicans want to talk about is repealing environmental laws or gutting civil liberties.

Now some would say that we should not politicize the Courts. To which I respond - the Courts are already politicized. The days of moderate judges who invoke careful legal reasoning drawn from precedent is over. The Court is now ruled by the same clique that we just toppled from power in the Congress and that has drawn Bush down to 26% in the polls.

This, then, would be a liberal version of the very same strategy conservatives have pursued over the years. It wouldn't necessarily be unprecedented for the left, either -- FDR's court-packing scheme might have failed in its immediate objective, but it accomplished his larger purpose, which was to rally political pressure to get a conservative court -- again, a holdover from another kind of era -- to stop obstructing the New Deal. And it's not just about pressuring the courts directly; you also use the unpopularity of their decisions to motivate your base to get you elected so eventually you can appoint the judges.

Being as liberals are meant to value objectivity, fairness, and consensus, a strategy of politically pressuring the courts will be controversial, and I won't address the philosophical merits of the idea here. But history does tell us that ultimately it would be likely to work.

Consequences of Electability

2007-06-29T08:19:00.000-05:00

Despite Fred Thompson's dramatic gains on Rudy Giuliani in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Todd points out at MyDD that Rudy still retains considerable leads in all three states. Most signficant, though, are his extraordinarily strong favorability ratings in those states (54/28, for instance, in Florida), which are similar to his favorability numbers nationally. Says Todd:

A lot is made of Clinton's high negatives but not enough is said about Rudy' still high positives, which could end up being the Republicans' secret weapon in the general if he gets the nomination.

The same kind of analysis prompts a couple of conservative observers to declare that Giuliani is "still the frontrunner." At Real Clear Politics, Ross Kaminsky says this is for one simple reason: he's the most electable Republican:

[W]hile it is still VERY early in this process, internals of a recent Quinnipiac University poll show why I believe Rudy is still somewhat more likely to get the nomination than Fred: He is more likely to be able to win the general election.

For example, the Quinnipiac Poll shows Giuliani tied with or leading Hillary Clinton in three critical swing states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The analysis in the link above focuses on Giuliani's lead shrinking from prior polls, but that is not the key. The key is that Giuliani far outperforms the other Republican frontrunners.

Gary Matthew Miller agrees:

If enough GOP primary participants are persuaded that only the Mayor could prevail in November of next year, that just might be the fulcrum upon which the Republican nomination may pivot.

Of course, the John Kerry experience demonstrated that "electability" is a tricky concept, but there's plenty of reason to believe that Kaminsky and Miller are correct. Yet there's a puzzle at the heart of the equation. It's one thing for primary voters to make a calculation about electablity; it's another thing for the conservative ideological apparatus itself to use the same calculation to endorse a candidate who rejects key tenents of the longstanding conservative consensus. As broad swathes of the right's intellectual, financial, and media elites use Rudy's "leadership qualities," his fiscal conservatism, and his "electability" as excuses to abandon the socially conservative half of their fusionist coalition, the issue for those social conservatives becomes much starker.

Despite their threats, it's unclear just how prepared they are to break decisively with the GOP -- to endorse a third-party candidate should Rudy win the nomination. But keep in mind that the stakes for social conservatives are bigger than just this election. It isn't just about making sure there's an anti-abortion candidate in 2008. It's about the prospect of losing access to the mighty conservative political machine altogether. If they allow the rest of the conservative establishment to leave them behind, they may never recover their place at the table; they may be permanently marginalized within the movement. For social conservatives -- for the Christian right in particular -- Rudy's "electability" is a very dangerous thing, and there's reason to believe they won't let it go unchallenged.

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

A Way Forward on Climate Change

2007-06-28T10:07:00.000-05:00

This article by Peter Teague and Jeff Navin is the best thing I've read on the politics of climate change in a long time. Teague and Navin argue that environmentalists are headed for political doom if they don't take seriously just how sensitive Americans are to rising energy prices:

Americans' anxiety over rising energy costs is a serious challenge to anyone seeking a solution to global warming. The anxiety is real, and the vast majority of Americans perceive these costs as causing financial hardship for their families. Proposals that raise energy prices risk triggering populist anger; Americans uniformly reject government efforts to increase the cost of gasoline or electricity as a way of encouraging certain kinds of behaviors.

The authors use the failure of California's Proposition 87 as an object lesson, pointing out that the initiative floundered -- despite initial public support -- when advocates were unable to convince the public that its regulatory mandates would not cause gas prices to rise.

Teague and Navin make the case for a response to the challenge of global warming that goes beyond simply imposing regulations on carbon emissions, calling for an integrated approach involving massive public investment in the development of a clean-fuel economy:

Ultimately, the global warming crisis will be solved by the emergence of a new clean energy economy that is also capable of meeting the needs and aspirations of America's -- and the world's -- growing population. Regulation should be only one piece of a larger set of strategies designed to speed the emergence of that economy, with interlocking investment, tax, and fiscal policies also designed to send the right market signals and prompt private-sector investment and innovation. These policies must both solve the problem of climate change and have the political support to be enacted and sustained.

Good policy is therefore inseparable from good politics.

I haven't read enough of the literature on climate change to know how novel Teague and Navin's argument is. But I have read enough conservative writing on the subject to see its importance. As I've been documenting for a few months, the right's approach to the warming debate has been shifting from straight denial to a more nuanced position, which accepts the reality of global warming but rejects regulatory solutions and argues for letting the market take care of the problem -- call it the "Yes, But" approach. See, for instance, the cover story in last week's National Review, or this AEI paper by Samuel Thernstrom and Lee Lane, or this Robert Samuelson piece. It isn't a uniform shift across the conservative spectrum; there's still plenty of denialism mixed in, as well a sort of hybrid, defeatist mentality that accepts warming but would have us just try learning to live with it. But what all the approaches have in common, the pivot point between denialism and the "Yes, But" approach, is a focus on the costs of carbon regulation. What Teague and Navin understand is the power of arguments like the one made by Stephen Hayward:

Liberals in the 1960s and 1970s never comprehended how damaging "limousine liberalism" was to their cause. They seem even more oblivious to the self-inflicted wounds of "Gulfstream liberalism." Whatever the intricacies of climate science, middle-class citizens understand that Gore wants them to use less energy and pay more for it, while he and his Hollywood pals use as much as they want and buy their way out of guilt, like a medieval indulgence.

I know I've quoted that before, but I'm quoting it again, because it's tremendously important. This is the fatal flaw in any attempt to deal with climate change as a strictly regulatory issue, and it's why the whole notion of purchasing carbon offsets is wildly misguided as a feature of the public debate on the issue. I like Al Gore a lot, but the controversy over his energy bills was an example of the kind of thing that will be tremendously damaging to the environmental cause, and his response fell flat. We cannot afford to wind up on the wrong side of a class conflict when it comes to this debate.

Teague and Navin get this:

The "right-wing populist vs. liberal elite" frame is dropping into place with the help of those calling for the deepest cuts in carbon. The deep-cut mantra, repeated without any real understanding of what might be required to get to 60 or 80 percent reductions in emissions, ignores voters' anxieties. It also reflects the questionable view that these changes can be achieved with little more than trivial disruptions in our lives -- a view easier to hold if you're in a financial position to buy carbon credits for your beachfront house.

Labor has indicated a willingness to support action on climate change, but it won't support deep cuts if working people are the most affected. This will leave environmentalists up against the well-financed business lobby. Good luck holding onto moderate Democrats, let alone Republicans -- even those who are beginning to understand the need for action on global warming.

One of their key insights is that "today energy costs seem to generate the kind of ire taxes did a decade ago." Poll data show strong public support for government investment in a transition to a clean-energy economy -- read the article for more details on what that investment might entail -- while empirical evidence suggests that a strictly regulatory approach, by raising energy prices or even threatening to raise energy prices, triggers a backlash that harms the whole effort to fight climate change. Conservatives are preparing to stoke that backlash, even as they offer a faulty "market-based" alternative approach. Teague and Navin are absolutely right: progressives need to step up their game.

The Uses of Ann Coulter

2007-06-28T09:52:00.000-05:00

The big-picture side of me says it's bad for American political discourse that crazies like Ann Coulter are given so much of a platform in public debate.

The strategist side of me, though, loves it. The Edwardses know what they're doing here. Coulter is the right's Ward Churchill, only she actually speaks for a good portion of the right, who are too dumb to realize the damage she does to them.