One might hope that, if and when Rauf seeks to explain himself, his political adversaries will apply the same rules of extenuation, attention to context, and open-mindedness that they demand when one of their own is under scrutiny.  As welcome as a clearer picture on Rauf might be, however, it would not bear directly on the piece of mine that AP linked and discussed.  My post was entitled “Fight Them All Together:  The Conservative Reaction to the ‘Ground Zero Mosque,’” and I provide the title in full to emphasize a point (not for the first time in recent days):  The piece was only secondarily about the “Ground Zero Mosque” – Cordoba House – at all.

AP provides his interpretation of my position as follows:

A few days ago, Greenroomer CK MacLeod accused the mosque’s critics of playing into jihadists’ hands by conflating radical Muslims with all Muslims. Why punish all members of the faith collectively by denying them a mosque near Ground Zero, asked CK, when it’s the Bin Ladenites who are culpable for bringing down the towers?

The first sentence summarizes one major theme of my post.  I say “one major theme” because I do not argue only that many Cordoba House critics have “play[ed] into the jihadists’ hands.”  As if that would set them apart from everyone else!  I’d like to think I’ve said much more damning things than that.

The emphases in AP’s second sentence also aren’t mine, but his rhetorical question does go to my central argument, whose basis should be obvious to anyone who does not favor collective judgment as a doctrine or policy – anyone who, for example, supports the Nuremberg approach of holding individuals responsible for what they have done as individuals, neither allowing them to hide within a collective (“I was only following orders”), nor holding them or anyone else responsible for things that others did “in their name.”  At that critical moment following the end of World War II, as victorious Americans sought both to exercise and to show themselves worthy of moral leadership on a global and historical scale, we rejected any species of moral collectivism because it conflicted with our traditions, precepts, and interests.  Put more simply, we rejected collective judgment because embracing it would have turned us into what we had fought against for so long, and had defeated at such great cost, and knew we were already facing again.

In recent days I’ve read confounding and dispiriting attempts, some from friends or possibly former friends, to reject that tradition by in effect denying that Muslims are included among those “created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”  (And, no, I’m not concerned about, afraid of, or offended by Muslim pride in Ummayyad Cordoba – nor do I presume a right to judge.) Much more frequently, I see expressions of opinion that imply such a view.

I won’t provide a handy catalog of derogatory, intentionally blasphemous and offensive, calculatedly extreme remarks of the sort that are easy to search up at HotAir and allied sites.  (Others may prove less hesitant in this regard than I am.)  I’m not just saying that religious bigotry and lesser related offenses appear “permissible” under lax enforcement of whatever Terms of Service or, more charitably, a zealous commitment to freedom of speech.  I mean that such sentiments are common, while protests and counter-arguments are rare and weak, and, when offered at all, are more often energetically denounced than even meekly seconded.  I can’t imagine an average Muslim, or anyone sensitive to religious hatred and blasphemy, feeling comfortable on Islam-related discussion threads at many conservative sites.  What discussions are not taking place that could be – either because people are reluctant to speak up, or have long since moved on?  At what point does a failure to respond – and condemn – become tacit communal approval?

One reason for self-disfiguring and self-destructive insensitivity, aside from common xenophobia and ignorance – amplified by reaction to 9/11 and terrorism more generally, as of course intended – could be the insensitivity and aggressive stereotyping of Muslims practiced by opinion leaders, as represented, for instance, in the material I examined in “Fight Them All Together.”

Now having returned to the actual thesis of my prior post, we can also look at AP’s final question referencing “CK’s logic”:

If some imam decided he wanted to build a mosque on Ground Zero itself, at the foot of the never-to-be-completed Freedom Tower, shouldn’t we indulge him per CK’s logic? And if he decided he wanted to build it in the shape of an airplane — just to “reclaim the symbol” from the evil jihadists who attacked on 9/11, mind you — shouldn’t we indulge him that, too? At what point is it okay to question motives here?

I want and really don’t want to answer “yes,” “yes,” and “for us, maybe never” – to say that we’ve become such irretrievably pathetic mockeries of what we pretend to be, we don’t deserve a Freedom Tower; to say that at most we deserve a “Freedom” Tower or Freedom* Tower – or a burlesque airplane mosque; to conclude that we are in no position to question anyone else’s motives; and to wonder if there are deeper reasons why current progress at the site seems to say “unfulfilled promise.”

AP’s formulation does acknowledge what the convenient shorthand on this issue usually doesn’t.  Cordoba House is not really (planned to be) a “Ground Zero mosque.”  Even if we preserve the incessant and exclusive focus on the mosque, the mosque, the mosque, the actual location presents a difficulty for opponents – or should – in the form of a different question that once upon a time I would have presumed repugnant to an American patriot:  How far does the “Islamic worship exclusion zone” have to extend to be “OK” – maybe a mere yellow on the Outrage Scale?  (And I’ve seen attempts to answer that.)

What I mainly have against AP’s three questions, however, is that they don’t have much to do with “CK’s logic” at all.  CK appealed, in passing, to a conventional sense of proportion about Cordoba House:  “You’re getting this excited about a 15-story building in Manhattan?”  CK can consistently apply the same man-on-Park-Place standard regarding absurd or exclusionary or absurdly exclusionary uses of the actual WTC site.  Additionally, following prior appeals to a conservative’s local preference, CK could consistently, and confidently, defer to the Manhattan Community Board and others if anything resembling AP’s hypothetical ever came up.  CK’s screwy Islamophilia and unfair, unkind, condescending etc. up to evil, morally depraved, and treacherous judgments of good, solid conservatives don’t even enter the picture.

Nor does CK claim any copyright on the logic that tells him the following:  Those upset about any perceived absurd, insulting, or imprudent initiative – for their own sake, for the sake of those in whose name they’re arguing, for the sake of the larger community, and eventually for the sake of the political life of this country and for the sake of its particular aims and mission in the world – should consider how their words and actions are taken by those who are not already inclined to agree with them, and even by some who are or were.  They should consider how they themselves would like to be treated or would like to have their public representatives treated.  They should consider what their words and actions turn them into.

Peace be upon you.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Leaving aside some melodrama – “insane,” “looming horror,” “surrender” – that question sums up much conservative reaction to Cordoba House, a.k.a. “The Ground Zero Mosque,” a project of the the Cordoba Initiative (CI) that last week added the approval of Manhattan Community Board 1 to okays from New York City’s Mayor and Chief of Police. Left unstated is why it’s anybody else’s business, in the land of the free. Why not put up an Islamic cultural center with worship area among the many buildings, great ones existing and much greater ones already under construction, within a two- or three-block radius of hallowed ground?  More important, what would denying permission for the project, and what does seeking that denial, say about us?

It would say that we granted a victory, in America, to the un-American doctrine of collective guilt – a doctrine incompatible with the precepts of the American nation, according to which no one can be pre-judged on the basis of religion or other beliefs.  Rejection of the project would constitute such a victory because consistently, perhaps inescapably, calls to reject Cordoba House have sooner or later rested on the assignment of responsibility to Muslims, in general, for the 9/11 attacks. This pattern should be a cause of concern for conservatives whether the project goes forward or not.

This transference of guilt, from those directly involved onto a diverse and immense global population, and then to the actual sponsors of the project, is often accomplished by rhetorical misdirection, as facilitated by emotional distraction.

Alabama congressional candidate, Marine Corps veteran, and self-styled Tea Party activist Rick Barber begins the above statement (rough transcript here) with an indictment of “Islamic jihadists,” but immediately moves to the general level via the phrase “in the name of Islam.” This “in the name of” construction appears frequently in anti-Cordoba statements: It’s a conventional usage that anyone might employ non-controversially, but acknowledging the obvious – a connection or association between Islam and 9/11, even the implication of some traditional Islamic teachings – is different from establishing the responsibility and accountability of (all) Muslims.

Rather than maintain the distinction, however, Barber erases it.  Following the initial statement on Islamic Jihadists and a second invocation of the in-the-name-of construction, Barber says: “Now Muslims want to build a Mosque just two blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood.” Instantly, the enemy has become not radical Islamists, but “Muslims.” Barber then asks, “When is the grand opening of this Ground Zero Mosque?” His own answer:

September Eleventh, 2011. This is unacceptable.

Many listeners may inwardly respond, “Yes sir!” – and remain ignorant of the CI’s rationale. For the CI, opening on September 11th emphasizes their central message that Muslims, rather than being co-responsible for 9/11, can stand diametrically opposed to Bin Ladenism and its call, announced using scriptural language in the 1998 Al Qaeda declaration of total war, to “fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together.”  The 9/11 terrorists destroyed buildings, killed strangers, and preached and sought the clash of civilizations. The CI is constructing a building, welcoming strangers, and preaching interfaith cooperation and exchange.

Perhaps because Cordoba House itself, or the timing of its opening, is not and will not be citizen or even Congressman Rick Barber’s call, he closes with a demand for broader confrontation:

There is a difference between tolerance and surrender. The word Islam literally means surrender and if we don’t start electing leaders that are able to recognize the enemy, call them by name and stand up against them, then surrendering is exactly what we are doing.

Ironically, even while Barber promises to name “the enemy,” he encourages, or perhaps relies on, ambiguity about his specific meaning. He started with Islamic Jihad, but ends with a strong yet possibly deniable suggestion that “Islam,” and surrender even worse because it’s somehow Islamic, are the problems.

Barber’s blogger allies can be much more direct. Responding to the “super-mosque” “outrage,” Ace of Ace o’ Spades dances around the edge of declaring holy war, but finally loses his balance completey (emphasis added):

Someone truly interested in peace and moderation would not build a temple to the religion that killed 2,996, allowing jihdis [sic] to literally — literally — dance on the unmarked, uncollected remains of their victims.

HotAir Greenroom blogger MadisonConservative gets to collective responsibility more quickly – that is, immediately: His anti-Cordoba piece refers in its title to “Islam” giving a “tremendous middle finger to America.” While the “religion” that Ace refers to only kills, MadCon’s “Islam” is a collective entity capable of both destroying buildings and of constructing them – and of making vulgar hand gestures, too.

Though more polite than Ace, MadCon, and Barber, Rod Dreher works in much the same way.  Having given himself away completely in his title – “A Mosque at Ground Zero? Insane” – he marches through obvious but profoundly incommensurate analogies to Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust, but the core of his argument is a version of that same question we began with:

Of course it is wrong to blame all Muslims for 9/11. But why on earth rub salt in the wounds of the 9/11 dead by allowing a mosque to go in just two blocks from where jihadists incinerated or crushed over 2,700 innocent victims, in service of their faith?

The rambling syntax and nonsensical metaphor (salt in the wounds of the dead) may be symptomatic: In plain English, Dreher, said to have been a direct witness to the WTC collapse, is still angry – with Muslims. He starts out hedging with his concession on “all” Muslims, but in a way that leaves “most,” “practicing,” “authentic,” etc., in play. After that odd bit about the dead and their wounds (time to let them rest?), Dreher the “Beliefnet” blogger ends up close to Ace the South Park conservative by way of the phrase “in service of their faith.” “Faith” stands as an odd word for a fanatic’s belief system – unless you’re asserting an essential commonality between the “jihadists” and the average believer; unless, contrary to your promise, you are indicting the whole religion.

Dreher’s writing suggests a guilty conscience – justifiably, because the assignment of collective guilt is itself an injustice to fellow citizens, fellow human beings, who never harmed or would harm Rod Dreher, or Ace, or Rick Barber.  The tiresome emotional and other excesses of all the amateur anti-imams who gather in the virtual house of anti-Islam, flaunting their adherence to the fundamentalists’ interpretations of the same passages from the same sacred texts, expand the offense.  The symmetry with Bin Ladenism is perfect:  fight the Muslims all together as they fight us all together.

Along just these lines, we this week have Andy McCarthy’s latest anti-Islamist fatwa at The Corner, which begins with a reference to the Obama Administration’s plans to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Manhattan, then, in the familiar pattern, seamlessly connects the terrorist to “very mainstream” Muslims:

That dissent was enough to forestall the trial, but it will have to be even more energetic to stop the mosque — whose construction would be a classic instance of supremacist Islamists building their icons over those of the non-Muslims they mean to vanquish. As I explain in the book, this is not a case of me drawing an inference from the facts we can observe, although those facts are obvious enough. Leading Islamists — not just terrorists but Muslims who adhere to very mainstream Brotherhood ideology — insist that they will “conquer America” and turn it slowly into a shariah society.

That latest book McCarthy mentions has the alarming title The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, but the title of his previous book, Willful Blindness, may apply better:  In terms of conqueror’s icons, just try, for a moment, to imagine how an Islamist or anti-American leftist views the embassy we’ve constructed in Baghdad (“the size of Vatican City”) or Bagram Air Base (“size of a small town”) – as compared to a projected 15-story building in Lower Manhattan. 

In the meantime, if some group wants, deep down or right out front, to turn America “slowly into a Shariah society” – by organizing, by advocating, by building impressive or maybe-not-really-so-impressive cultural centers in some proximity to symbolically important places – or for that matter if they hope to re-create and extend the medieval Caliphate by peaceful, free, and democratic means, what in the American tradition, in the values to be represented in the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower, could deny them the right to give such an unlikely project the ol’ madrassa try?

“Looming horror,” “insane,” “surrender,” “the religion that killed,” “conquer America”:  Nearing ten years on, and we still act as though terrorized out of our moral presumptions and emotional bearings by Mohammed Atta – by the militant who pretends to have joined the West while remaining secretly beholden to his hatred of the West. Or maybe impatience makes it too difficult to imagine the awesome skyscrapers and massive and luxuriant memorial/museum in and around the WTC site that together should someday dwarf Cordoba House and most other structures in the vicinity.  Either way, it betrays a lack of self-confidence unbecoming to defenders of the American idea to fear the suicide killer, who dies with his irreconcilable contradictions, more than we trust our influence on the millions of his co-religionists who choose to reconcile their contradictions in their real, everyday lives – in private, in public, in American uniform and as allies, and maybe with a building currently set to open its doors on 9/11/11.

Finally, re-assigning collective guilt in the other direction by calling conservatives bigots or Islamophobes cannot be justified either.  If opposition to the Cordoba Initiative has been disproportionate and overly emotional, that would not make it wholly irrational.  There may be good reasons – suspicion regarding project supporters, disagreement with their objectives, concern for some 9/11 families – to oppose “this building, there.”  My position is that these concerns have been exaggerated and manipulated, and are vastly outweighed by other factors, potential harm to the conservative movement not the least of them.  In a real sense, there would be no American conservative movement under the doctrine of collective guilt:   There would only be a culturally defensive right wing, under whatever name, and that would represent a great collective loss to us all.

cross-adapted from Zombie Contentions – “In My Own Name  Only” and “Imam McCarthy’s Latest Fatwa“

The Constitution, our dear Constitution, did not give us our rights. Our rights came from God and they are inalienable rights. The Constitution created the government to protect our God-given and unalienable rights.

Thus Sarah Palin in her speech earlier this month in Missouri, at the “Win America Back Conference.”

Though Palin’s words received the usual uncomprehending and comically overwrought response from at least one leftwing critic, the statement hardly represents a novel departure for a conservative politician.  Even that little inalienable vs. unalienable problem goes all the way back to the Founding.  More important, in recent years acceptance of the premise that “our rights come from God, not the government” has been become almost definitional for American conservatism.  Search for the phrase and close variations on the internet, and you’ll find pointed, high-profile utterances, virtually word for word, from Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Newt Gingrich, Jim DeMint, Paul Ryan, and George W. Bush.  For Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Howard Dean, and Nancy Pelosi, the same searches will tend to turn up conservatives reacting to whatever latest leftwing heresy.  You may have to go all the way back to John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address to find a leading Democrat who could voice the idea clearly, and seem to mean it.

The concept is, of course, embodied in one of the most important single sentences in American history – arguably in all of human history:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In the speech that first brought Barack Obama to national attention in 2004 (the “no red states and blue states” speech), he did at least recite the sentence:  It didn’t boil his mouth away, but that may be because he sought to interpret it as a mere generalized endorsement of egalitarianism – as though, in writing the lines, Thomas Jefferson had been dimly prophesying the arrival of someone like… Barack Obama in our political life.  Most conservatives, especially those of a libertarian inclination, along with most historians, understand the statement very differently – but that does not mean that contemporary conservative politicians are using it more wisely.

Students of the Founding know that Jefferson was neither dreaming of politicians to come nor in any sense innovating.  The Sentence derives from earlier writings on natural rights philosophy, a comprehensive worldview whose precepts, as the intellectual historian Jerome Huyler has amply demonstrated, were widely shared at the time – not just by the writer and signatories of the Declaration of Independence, but by the revolutionary generation they represented, and to a great extent by Americans colonists even to the first settlements.  “Equal creation,” “unalienable Rights” as a gift of the “Creator,” and the specification of the most significant rights were familiar to educated Americans and especially to all “thinking revolutionaries” in Britain and the not-yet-united states long before July 4, 1776.

It is hardly surprising that the use and even the insistence on just this language remains common on the American right, where both the deity and the Founders are treated with reverence.  Nor is it surprising, or any less indicative, that the concept leaves many on the secular left dumbfounded.  When reacting to Fred Thompson’s invocation of divinely ordained natural rights in 2007, for instance, “university scholar” Jacques Berlinerblau, faith-blogging for the Washington Post, saw only a calculated pitch to social conservatives, with a gesture to libertarians “on the backstroke. ” Double doctorates notwithstanding, Berlinerblau, like the HuffPo’s Malia Litman reacting to Palin as linked above, betrayed no apparent awareness of just where the wacky righty got his quaint notion.

Yet the ill-founded condescension and kneejerk suspicion from the likes of Berlinerblau and Litman underline a deeper challenge to the conservative right, as brought home during Rand Paul’s recent travails as well as in the rather appalled reaction to Newt Gingrich’s comparisons, under the rubric of “secular socialism,” of Obamaist liberals to Nazis and Communists.  There may be an essential, not merely a contingent or politically useful, connection between libertarianism and Judeo-Christian moral philosophy, but in the America of 2010 the idea is far from consensual, or even widely held. It doesn’t even qualify as widely understood, and intimations of its rigorous implementation, theoretical or practical, are received as wholly unacceptable where not merely controversial.

Jefferson’s “we” ain’t us – not all of us anyway.  His truths, where taken to be true at all, will seem far from “self-evident.” Many Americans will hide, or not even bother to hide, a contemptuous snicker at the phrase “created equal,” unaware that it’s gone completely over their heads.  At best, since most like the idea of equality at least in the sense of fairness, they may decide to help the Dead White Male out, and, like senate-candidate Obama to fellow Democrats, adapt the phrase for present purposes (perhaps while reminding each other in superior tones that the DWM owned slaves).  And when the skeptics reach “endowed by their Creator,” the snickering may escalate to New Atheist-style catcalls, or possibly to more polite forms of stubborn dissent.  It’s only by the time that we get to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit,” with its hedonistic resonances, that much of the audience will be back on board at all.

When conservatives invoke the Founders’ formulation, asserting and demanding consensus, it therefore has the opposite implication and effect.  It points to a lack of political-social consensus, and to a large extent seems meant to – typically dividing an audience of sympathizers from a vast societal other.  Indeed, if the consensus were general, it wouldn’t need to be proclaimed at all, the minions of King George having long since been vanquished.

The strongest advocates of faith-based libertarianism will remind us all the same that the lack of consensus would not be an excuse for resisting the truth of their position, which they believe offers the one political ideology whose commitment to freedom and equality is fundamental and absolute.  They remain convinced that the failure to acknowledge the transcendental origins of our rights renders those rights vulnerable – turns them into mere matters of opinion rather than the unshakable foundations of our freedom.  Yet their argument for the divinely ordained inviolability of rights turns immediately into its opposite for anyone on the outs:  If our rights depend on God and God alone, then non- and less-than-ardent believers, it would seem, are left to conclude that our rights must be fully negotiable, or at any rate that conservatives lack a good argument to the contrary.  Even believers may be left uncomfortable by the sense that conservatives are promoting an inherently exclusionary and prejudicial worldview.

The rationale that often follows – “just between us smart people” – that it’s better for society if people accept religious belief, whether or not it withstands inquiry, sooner or later tends to confirm the skeptic’s suspicion of an elite in waiting whose members are as or more interested in temporal power than transcendent verities.  However we were created, and by whatever, and to whatever supposed effect and purpose, a corrosive and inherently vulnerable inequality, between the as-good-as-atheist illuminati and the masses manipulated for their own good, is put forward as a bargain whose terms must never be spelled out, for the sake of order.  The purveyors of self-evident, transcendent truth seem to reveal themselves as willing dissemblers and ends-justify-the-means materialists after all.

Until we have translated Jefferson’s words honestly, accurately, and accessibly into a contemporary and inclusive idiom – inclusive enough to be spoken by Allahpundit and by James Dobson, by John Derbyshire and by Sarah Palin, too – the opponents of constitutional conservatism will find justifications for ridicule and general resistance, alongside potentially critical divisions in the conservative coalition.  To expect religious conservatives to perform this translation may be unrealistic, however, not because they would be incapable of it, but because for many the soundest basis of all for political activity is in having their beliefs, in just the way they believe them, disseminated in the public square.  Many very much like hearing about the deity – as much or more than the atheists and agnostics may be repelled by it.  Many would interpret less of their preferred speech as a political demotion.

If there’s something in the natural rights philosophy of the Founders for us all, it may be up to fellow conservatives to provide the “more speech” that comprehends both the traditional, culture-bound phraseology as well as its alternatives – words for those who, however constrained by faith or faithlessness, can have no use or affection for “our rights come from God,” and retain their own natural right to ask, “What do your words really mean for the rest of us?”

cross-adapted from Zombie Contentions

I’m not going to attempt to compare Fiorina to DeVore:  That would have been a more worthwhile undertaking if Campbell, supposedly at the behest of gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, hadn’t switched to the senate race at the beginning of the year.  The real comparison should be between any-conservative and Campbell, who, in addition to being just the kind of bland establishment politician that Tea Party conservatives were invented to bring down, has an extremely dubious history of support for radical Islamist and anti-Israeli groups, ideologues, and activists that may give Barbara Boxer an opening she doesn’t deserve, and that in any event many conservatives will find difficult to forgive and forget.

California conservatives, who, to say the least, used to be a major positive factor in state and national politics, have a reputation gained since after Ronald Reagan’s time, and especially since the ’90s, of preferring ideological purity and self-defeating gestures over success and influence.  Chuck DeVore has a chance to show that they’re now capable of mature calculation and team play. The chance of running against and defeating Barbara Boxer with a candidate pursuing an authentically conservative agenda is too important to sacrifice to anyone’s personal feelings or ambitions, or understandable desire to prove to himself and his dedicated supporters that he’s a fighter to the end.

Currently, Campbell appears to have a solid but not insurmountable plurality lead over Fiorina, with DeVore’s  third-place vote more than making up the potential difference.  That’s been the pattern in all or almost all polls since Cambell’s entry into the race.  Often, the #3 candidacy in a struggle like this one collapses, as voters decide not to waste their votes.  If that happens, there’s not a bad chance that DeVore and his ardent supporters will get the worst outcome:  An embarrassing showing just strong enough to hand the race to the candidate with whom they have the least in common, while leaving division and recrimination behind among conservatives, reinforcing the perception that they’re too self-destructive to matter, at just the time that the state and the country need them.

Unless DeVore and his supporters can make a convincing case – based on real world numbers, including campaign cash on hand and credible polling – that he can win the primary, he should drop out, the sooner the better, offering an unqualified endorsement of Carly Fiorina, and looking forward to a bright future in state and national politics as a respected and significant player in a grown-up conservative movement – coming back, on the rise, unified, and ready to make a real difference in the Golden State  and beyond.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

The reason why it is both important and necessary for conservatives to tackle the progressive era is that that’s where the assumptions of 20th century liberalism begin… If Wilson isn’t the best poster boy for Progressivism, tactically or substantively,  I’m open to alternative nominations. But the notion that conservatives are wasting energy in assaulting the progressive era strikes me as exactly wrong. We’ve wasted time in not attacking until all too recently.

In the process of quite correctly characterizing my prior defense of Wilson as not “all that powerful” (I was seeking balance, not apotheosis), Mr. Goldberg also gives his own view on relevant context (emphasis in the original):

A big chunk of [MacLeod's] critique boils down to an argument I’ve heard many times: Wilson (or this or that progressive) merely reflected the prevailing ideas at the time. Well, that’s sort of my argument, you know? That these were the prevailing ideas at the time: Collectivism, eugenics, militarism (both as a mobilizing metaphor as well as the real thing), nationalism, statolatry, technocracy and – in America – a desire to “Europeanize,” often on Bismarckian lines,  political institutions and arrangements. And while these ideas were popular in all sorts of places, their champions were the Progressives.

As volunteer conservative left deviationist progressive apologist, I have previously composed my own lists of to me less obviously bad progressivisms, seeking to highlight those Progressive Era reforms that I judge as integrated with American life, but, even if we stick with Goldberg’s version, we’re still left with perhaps the largest question:  Why were the Progressives able not just to champion these things, but in championing them gain control of American politics, and set the country and the world on a course they’ve been on ever since?

Some might want to attribute the Progressives’ vast political success to the diabolical genius of charismatics, conspirators, and tricksters, but much more persuasive explanations are readily available.  They often start with statistics on American life from the middle of the 19th Century to the first decades of the 20th (Wilson’s lifespan, one point for posterization) regarding employment, urbanization, production, immigration, communication, transportation, fertility, income, and on and on.  For example:  Population:  More than quadrupled, 50% of the increase through immigration.  Proportion receiving wages and living in urban settings:  From small minority to vast majority.  Communication:  speed of horse to speed of light.

It was in relation to such changes that Goldberg’s favorite scholar, Ronald Pestritto, was questioned by his colleague Jean M. Yarbrough, in the conclusion of her review of Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism and Woodrow Wilson: The Essential Political Writings:

[O]ne wishes that Pestritto had extended his analysis to the presidential years to see how Wilson’s academic theories fared when confronted with political reality. Although [Roots...] touches briefly on the 1912 election and beyond in a concluding chapter, this question goes largely unexplored. Finally, one wishes that Pestritto had given his political imagination a bit more scope and had tried to envision what solutions to the novel problems of industrialization, urbanization, and mass immigration, as well as the old problems of racial injustice and growing economic inequality, the founders might have devised.

Yes, indeed, one surely might so finally wish – for these are exactly the problems that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, numerous lesser politicians, sundry intellectuals publishing relatively late in the Populist-Progressive Era, and, more important, millions upon millions of Americans not only set themselves to solving intellectually, but were confronting everywhere, everyday, without a century to ponder possible over-dependence on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and regardless of how much they might have preferred to live in a Jeffersonian agrarian republic, a Bellamyite super-commune, or, equally unreachable, the largely pre-industrial America of Wilson’s early childhood.

Once we accept that, for better or worse, the Progressives were responding to Something Real, then it’s clear that the task for conservatives isn’t to find good reasons to “condemn” Wilson or anyone else, but to develop alternative, additional, or ameliorative responses, if any, to that manifold Something Real – still with us, 100 years more real and manifold, and greater in extent by circumferences of the planet, at least, in multiple dimensions.  If, like a commenter at HotAir, you’re happy to dismiss the Federal Reserve System, Anti-Trust legislation, and the Federal Trade Commission as “junk, junk, junk,” then just how do you propose to distribute capital equitably and productively in a complex modern economy, and to preserve competitive and entrepreneurial opportunities for small and medium business? Before you answer:  Remember to achieve the same thing in relation to the globalization of raw economic and political power that Americans of the Progressive Era accomplished on the national level.  The same burden must be lifted or off-loaded for every other aspect of Progressivism and post-Progressivism that you, radical-constitutional anti-statist anti-prog to your toes, must be ready to dispose of instantly, as so much junk, junk, junk.

As the scope of our inquiry thus widens to encompass the present day, it naturally circumscribes the further past as well, but Goldberg demurs:  Responding to his friend US News writer Scott Galupo, Goldberg rejected the idea in a manner that resembles his rejection of that un-powerful mitigation defense of mine discussed above:

If you want to claim everything stemming from the Western Enlightenment tradition as “progressive” you’re free to do so. But analytically, where does that get you? By this logic we’re all progressives—and by all, I mean conservatives, libertarians, Bolsheviks, liberals, anarchists, and Maoists—because we’re not Medievalists.

Maybe it gets us this far: The Progressives were not an aberration.  They represent continuity, under radically transformed circumstances, in the same direction as the Founders’ historic statement to the ages, which has been succinctly translated into modern vernacular by historian Gordon Wood:

The illimitable progress of mankind promised by the Enlightenment could at last be made coincident with the history of a single nation.  For the Americans at least, and for others if they followed, the endless cycle of history could finally be broken.

It was much the same promise that Tommy W. Wilson, 24 years old, could embrace in 1881, when he associated himself with a “younger generation of Southern men… full of the progressive spirit.” It’s the same promise all Americans still have available to them more than a century later – among other things:  to progress beyond Progressivism, and to expose today’s nominal progressives as the regressive, reactionary anachronisms they too often are.

For the space of an extended epoch, men and women of the progressive spirit re-defined America because Americans increasingly voted for them to do so.  Compared to the socialists, communists, anarchists, and, later, the fascists, all representing varieties of panic in the face of industrialism and its discontents, the Progressives qualify as relatively and meaningfully conservative.  Whatever they perceived, thought, and did wrong, they conserved enough of the American possibility for us still to be arguing about it today – in their day no certain prospect.

No one sane has a way forward that won’t still leave us in their shadow for the foreseeable/imaginable future.  Their mere negation may have seemed a tenable political position at the dawn of the Age or Episode of Obama, but is less so under approaching responsibility, in perilous times.  I differ with Robert Laird/Instapunk on particulars, but I like how he frames the needed discussion in his own post on Wilson – away from “him” or “them,” toward “us” (original emphasis):

The potential destruction of America and its constitution is not a predestined outcome of a plot hatched by Woodrow Wilson and his racist, anti-semitic Princeton football cronies. It’s a possible outcome of our inattentiveness, our indifference, our poor decision making, our short-sighted thinking and convenient memories. It’s nice to know where dangerous and contemporarily destructive ideas originated. But it doesn’t absolve us of our responsibilities. Which are located in the here and now, with absolutely no room for evasion or delusion.

In other words: Forget Wilson. He doesn’t really matter.

Of much more concern: The deep improbability that the bromides of yesteryear – sung over a chorus of “NO!” – can do more than motivate a fickle segment of the electorate for a short while, or to any great purpose.  This assessment seems to haunt the hated, hunted pundits and office-holders who decline the path of least immediate resistance to the Tea Party and its hosts. Meanwhile, the hard right’s anger with the “traitors,” with the progressives, and with the Wilsonian Progressives – not the disagreement, the annihilating anger – derives first from their self-imposed isolation from the American project, but also from fearful uncertainty, no clear idea what the dog will do with the rambling wreck if he catches it; and from fearful certainty, of the compromises and betrayals to come, forced on imaginary purisms by consensual mass democracy.

Conservatives will, by definition, look to the past for inspiration and instruction.  The 18th Century British politician and essayist Edmund Burke, a man whom Jonah Goldberg likes to call the founding father of modern conservatism, had much sage advice, but his idioms will strike many Americans as obscure.  Fortunately, the United States produced at least one major interpreter of Burke’s conservatism for un-conservative times (my emphasis):

Questions of government are moral questions, and … questions of morals cannot always be squared with rules of logic, but run through as many ranges of variety as the circumstances of life itself. … The politics of the English-speaking peoples has never been speculative; it has always been profoundly practical and utilitarian. Speculative politics treats man and situations as they are supposed to be; practical politics treats them (upon no general plan, but in detail) as they are found to be at the moment of actual contact.

As for that Burkean – his name, what else he had to say – I think we just agreed to forget him, though I’m willing to re-consider.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Does anyone really think Wilson wouldn’t have been pretty sympathetic toward the Nazis? I think he would have considered Hitler’s dedication to eugenics an admirable goal.

[A]ny fair minded person of good moral standing would clearly see [Wilson] as an evil individual.

Woodrow Wilson was a slimy, racist, conspiratorial, arrogant rat bastard every day he drew breath….

I hate him. He was the biggest racist. He set this country back decades in race relations.

If you’re bound and determined to defend the most tyrannical fascistic president in history, go f**k yourself.

The above selection comes from threads at HotAir and Zombie Contentions, and also at a Baltimore Sun on-line column covering Glenn Beck at CPAC this year.  Beck has played a central role in popularizing such views, as his anti-progressive campaign frequently centers on Wilson, for whom Beck proudly declares his hatred – “with all [his] heart.”  In this cause Jonah Goldberg remains a stalwart ally, if a somewhat more restrained one – he merely calls Wilson a fascist.  Other well-known anti-Wilson conservatives include George Will and the American Conservative Union’s David Keene, the latter having revealed during his introduction of Beck’s CPAC speech that his own Wilson animus goes back decades – to a college essay describing Wilson as “one of the three most dangerous people of the 20th century,” the other two being Lenin and Hitler.

Main elements of this conservative attack on Wilson actually are familiar from the works of his leftwing critics, but that’s not the only reason I mistrust it.  Some of the anger, especially from the commenters, is probably by proxy: It’s more acceptable to declare one’s passionate hatred for long dead enemies than for living opponents (though the former often leads to the latter).  Yet even if I didn’t find the emotionalism of some of this stuff, 100 years after the facts, a little odd (though Will’s critique is odd in a different way), I would still find it difficult to reject Wilson or any other important American president so completely.  It’s the kind of stance that I would associate with revolutionaries and other pitiless radicals:  The full-throated rejection of a critical moment in American history as an excuse to reject America itself.

Not that the Wilson haters don’t have any point at all.  They simply lack any sense of balance or historical perspective. In contrast to the ideologues, Cooper can fault Wilson for his negligence on racial matters, for example, but is also able to conclude that “Wilson essentially resembled the great majority of white northerners of this time in ignoring racial problems and wishing they would go away.” Wilson didn’t impose uniquely noxious ideas on an American racial idyll.  He presided during the era of Plessy vs Ferguson (1896) – separate but equal.  As the historian Samuel P. Hays explains in his standard work on Wilson’s era, the times were typified by a “general notion that Americans, as part of the Anglo-Saxon peoples of northern Europe, were racially superior.”  Belief in the “Manifest Destiny of the White Race” informed attitudes across the cultural mainstream, and affected policy across a range of issues.

It should therefore be unsurprising to Wilson critics, on all sides, that the Wilson Administration’s widely condemned segregation of the federal workplace was initiated under prior presidents, and was expanded under Wilson’s successors.  Conservatives in particular should bear in mind that the search for a greatly different early 20th Century American racial sensibility won’t often lead them to Wilson’s right.

If some conservatives have adopted a familiarly leftwing attack on Wilson, many more seem to be depending on Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, the 2008 conservative bestseller that I have written on previously, focusing on the author’s provocative claim that Wilson’s wartime government was the world’s “first fascist regime.”  As I stated in the linked piece, I find it rather obscene for Goldberg to associate Wilson, a deeply reluctant warrior who quite literally nearly killed himself campaigning for a peace organization, with modern history’s worst warmongers.

But Goldberg’s case for the historical prosecution focuses less on the war as fought than on the war at home – domestic security policies that, as Cooper acknowledges, entailed “egregious violations” of civil liberties.  Goldberg’s charge of fascism is much stronger than Cooper’s charge of mere “violations,” however, and demands stronger support.  To that end Goldberg produces an impressive, frequently quoted figure of 175,000 Americans arrested “for insufficient patriotism.”  Yet this vague definition appears to be Goldberg’s alone, and he doesn’t reveal where his number comes from.  Other sources tally around 2,000 arrested, 1,000 convicted under the federal Espionage and Sedition Acts, so Goldberg’s figure, assuming it has a firm basis, must include offenses prosecuted under other laws, perhaps at the local level or even overseas within the military.

In sorting this all out, it might be helpful to work from some numbers that unlike Goldberg’s are very hard and very precise:  48-26 and 293-1 – the votes by which the Senate and the House passed the Sedition Act in 1918.  Vote totals on the earlier Espionage Act are unavailable – because it passed by acclamation, reflecting overwhelming support two months after the Declaration of War with Germany, which had passed 82-6, and 373-50.  In other words, Wilson rode – and in some respects was overcome by – a wave of patriotism and war fever.  Cooper and other historians also note that Wilson supported the acts to compromise with those demanding more aggressive measures, and to prevent and pre-empt much harsher “extra-judicial” treatment of dissenters and German-Americans.

As with racial matters, harshly judging Wilson and his contemporaries (i.e., our forefathers) for such actions requires us to impose present-day sensitivities on the past.  It’s also worth recalling that revolution really was in the air in those years.  One great nation had fully succumbed to revolution, and others were undergoing revolutionary turmoil.  In America, the assassination of President McKinley, by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901, was well within living memory.  In the period of 1917-1920, radical agitation led to wildcat and general strikes as well as acts of outright sabotage, especially in the western U.S.  Mail bombs were sent to various officials, including Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, known for the subsequent Palmer Raids and Red Scare.  On the narrow question of personal culpability, it should be noted that Wilson was the bedridden victim of a debilitating stroke and other serious illness at the time:  Cooper concludes that Wilson “knew nothing about the central role [Palmer] was playing in those events.”

One quick word on Eugenics, another feature of the age that some wish to lay at Wilson’s door: Cooper never notes much interest in the subject on Wilson’s part.  The case for hatred seems to rest on guilt by sympathetic association with certain Progressives; de-contextualized statements on race (see above) ominously linked to Hitlerism; and a bill that Wilson signed into law as governor of New Jersey, with provisions on the sterilization of the profoundly mentally ill – similar to laws in 30 other states at the time.

Against such weakly founded or heavily mitigated indictments, Wilson’s accomplishments stand among the most consequential of any American figure:  His books and essays, especially Congressional Government, were important in their own right, and are still read with profit today.  His “New Freedom” legislation established the Federal Reserve System, the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, and the Federal Trade Commission.  He was central to the negotiations that ended World War I, and, though the nation rejected his League of Nations proposal, he led the United States onto the world stage as a major power, with a unique mission – not to construct an empire, but to foster trade, development, and popular freedom and self-determination among nations.

From income taxes to Mother’s Day, from child labor restrictions to saving football (Wilson was a lifelong fan, and a defender of the new sport against attempts to ban it), we could expand our view of Wilson’s influence virtually at will – especially if, as the Wilsonhitlerists seem to prefer, we credit him with or blame him for the entirety of what Hays calls the Populist-Progressive Era.  At some point in this process, modern America would begin to look like an inheritance directly from Woodrow Wilson, passed down to us by those who followed in his footsteps – with the men who founded the country looking like distant ancestors on the family tree, necessary to our existence, but not very relevant to it.

Regardless of where that argument might lead, I wouldn’t want to be the one to make it:  I don’t see how it can ever be a conservative project to tear the nation or its history – the two ought to be inseparable – to pieces.  Isn’t that what radical constitutionalists accuse Wilson of attempting?

How, when, and where to reverse or re-conceive  elements of Wilson’s legacy, what he got wrong or what the rest of us helped make wrong, would be something very different – as would any attempt simply to assess Wilson fairly.  Those are tasks for people willing to grasp the whole story, and to proceed with care.

cross-adapted from Zombie Contentions

Supporters of Palin and fans of Beck – or would it be fans of Palin and supporters of Beck? – will be happy to see them “together,” and enemies of both will be happy, too, if for different reasons. Getting closer to Beck may help Palin and other politicians with a wing of the conservative movement (or Beck’s x-million viewers and listeners), but I don’t see it helping with anyone else – to put it charitably.

For those keeping score on what everyblogger thinks about anything, I won’t pretend neutrality on Beck. Though I felt he played a mostly positive role in 2009, I was dubious of him even then, and am less and less able to approve of his impact on national politics and the national political discussion. In my opinion he gets too much wrong, and gets it wrong in a divisive and offensive, not to mention paranoid and kitschy way. His Christian-themed Fairey-ized Founder posters, for example, are no credit to the subjects, and you would have to be a conservative who despises Barack Obama and all of the Obami already - or just insensitive – not to understand immediately what a cheap, bizarrely combative, and insular gesture it is to use the images as an everyday backdrop: The depictions aren’t innocent, positive celebrations of the Founders: They’re disses of Obama and all of those “cancerous” progressives who are progressing – everyone with me – progressing toward what? The gulags! Concentration camps! Che! VAN JONES IS A COMMUNIST!! Anita Dunn loves Mao! (Play tape excerpt thousandth time.)

Governor Palin describes Beck as “like the high school government teacher so many wish they’d had.” Well, maybe on the surface, on the level of style – you don’t make $30 million+/annum if a lot of people don’t find you congenial – but, if I had a kid at school, and his “government teacher” came on like Glenn Beck, rightwing or leftwing or just plain peculiar, I’d have a problem with that. I’d have a problem with a high school teacher who said, as I heard Beck saying the other day before I had a chance to switch him off after Cavuto, “don’t trust anyone, everything you hear is wrong,” with the inescapable subtext “except for and from me, Glenn Beck.” I think he might have been talking about the Puerto Rico statehood plebiscite bill, which he apparently has some number of his fan-supporters believing is part of the big cancerous progressive plot progressing toward what? The gulags! The concentration camps! Euthanasia! Woodrow Wilson was a RACIST! TIVO my next show!

America, Sarah Palin should not be pretending that Glenn Beck is normal. Maybe you’re a fan or supporter of Glenn Beck with a tolerance for criticism that has allowed you to read this long at least. Maybe, objective sort that you are, you can admit further that GB’s not precisely normal – middle of the road, mainstream – and that someone led to his show by Sarah Palin might begin to wonder about her, or, more likely, have whatever pre-existing doubts about her judgment and where she’s coming from confirmed.

It would be clear to such a someone within a short while that Glenn Beck does not, again quoting Palin, “desire to teach Americans about the history of the progressive movement.” That’s ridiculously bland, a phony whitewash. Glenn Beck wants, as he has said, to destroy the progressive cancer to the last cell, and he insists that politicians (like Paul Ryan) adopt his language.  Beck is not “doing to ‘progressive’ what Ronald Reagan did to ‘liberal’ – explaining that it’s a damaged brand.” Toyota is a damaged brand. No one is running around saying that Toyota is driving us, where?, to the Gulag! Buy Gold! Catch me and Bill O’Reilly live in your town! (For $160/seat.)

Ronald Reagan did “damage” the liberal brand, but he didn’t do it by treating liberalism as sub-human, a lethal disease. He declared the Soviet Union the “evil empire,” not the Democratic Party. Liberals were “our liberal friends,” “our friends on the other side” – and sometimes “our” golfing and drinking buddies, too. Aside from reflecting the fact that Reagan had liberal friends and even a few liberal/progressive notions from time to time, Reagan’s cordiality and openness gave him the political advantage over all those on the left calling him an “extremist” and using other brain-switched-off terms for him.

And those people who don’t bother to ring up Glenn Beck’s red phone? They’re not, as Palin puts it, “self-proclaimed powers that be.” They’re supposed to be the duly elected President of the United States and his administration. I’ve never heard them “proclaim” themselves “powers that be.” If they happen in fact to be the powers that are, they were proclaimed as such by Congress, after the tabulated votes of well over 100 million citizens in 50 states reached Electors, empowered as per Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, and the 12th and 23rd Amendments of the Constitution.

If and when someone replaces our current “powers,” it will, one may hope and expect, be by the same process, and it will very likely require many millions of those same citizens changing their minds. If polls and anecdotes are to be trusted – poll after poll and anecdote after anecdote – a lot of those citizens seem to have doubts about Sarah Palin, in part because they, perhaps wrongly perhaps rightly, consider her a captive and symbol of what Glenn Beck also represents to them.

I’m not arguing that conservatives need to denounce Glenn Beck and all his works – though, given his ratings decline from the commanding heights and his dependence on escalating political melodrama, we might anticipate some truly excessive excess, the hammer of nonsense finally exploding the anvil of desperation for a story, someday requiring one or more rightwing Sister Souljah moments from ambitious politicians, if only to make up for past conspicuous acts of self-interested ring-kissing.  On that day, those who’ve established some healthy separation, in an abundance of good conservative caution, would be less likely to be hit by burning debris, trapped in the flaming pyre, or tumbled over and trod upon by those rushing panickedly for the exits.

In the meantime, America, politicians interested in distinguishing themselves for their clarity of mind, seriousness of purpose, and honesty should be willing to call out Beck, or anyone else, as they really see him.  If they prefer to pander to his crowd and kneel before his mediatized eminence, or if they simply remain non-cognizant of everything that makes Beck Beck, then we’ll be forced to draw a different set of conclusions about their character, their capacities, and their aims.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Karl at HotAir did a fine job establishing the lack of any empirical basis for judging conservatives unaware of alternative viewpoints and information, but there is and was something else going on here, something not directly susceptible to survey data and a mapping of linking habits and reading lists. It was the scientifically oriented Jim Manzi at NRO/The Corner who drove the discussion furthest, not by either attacking or supporting Sanchez, but by conducting a demonstration, almost in the manner of an experiment. After analyzing a chapter from Mark Levin’s Liberty & Tyranny on global warming, Manzi summed up his verdict with a word that’s easier to process than “epistemically closed,” but that one suspects he wishes he hadn’t used:  “wingnuttery.”

You can see why Levin would feel sand-bagged.  But he might just as well have felt complimented that someone still takes his 2009 bestseller seriously enough to analyze and respond to it, while anyone who’s listened to more than a few minutes of his radio show would need a heart of stone not to laugh at anyone’s hurt feelings on his behalf.  Predictably, Levin’s response post is saturated with derision, just like his radio show, whose motto seems to be “That’s right!  I said it!” Rather than further escalate, Manzi wisely stepped back without giving in, inviting readers to compare the two posts  (Manzi’s, Levin’s) and reach their own conclusions.

Now, this all might seem like a pointless exercise – if fun in a kind of inside conservative baseball way – but such exchanges sometimes lead to unexpected places.  Eventually involving an expanded cast of regular Corner-ites, the proceedings finally inspired Manzi to lay out the basis for a truly conservative response to global warming – one that begins with the intellectual humility that those committed to denial or alarm conspicuously lack.  He eventually linked to an easy to miss post from earlier in the week that he self-deprecatingly referred to as “excruciating” in its detail.  Its conclusion happens to offer a succinct formulation of a potential “grand strategy” on ecological crisis:

We can be confident that humanity will face many difficulties in the upcoming century, as it has in every century. We just don’t know which ones they will be. This implies that the correct grand strategy for meeting them is to maximize total technical capabilities in the context of a market-oriented economy that can integrate highly unstructured information, and, most importantly, to maintain a democratic political culture that can face facts and respond to threats as they develop.

In addition to being constructive and refreshingly “open,” this “grand strategy” offers the key benefit of resilience in the face of tomorrow’s headlines, next year’s hurricane season, the scientific measurements and re-measurements of the next decade, and the considered opinions of eminent men and women who are relatively invulnerable to charges of self-dealing and self-interest.  It might even withstand the eventual resurgence of a global ecology movement that may appear today on the political defensive, but that still commands broad support, and may be revived much sooner and more powerfully than post-Climategate triumphalists on the far right want to believe.

A side-benefit of such a strategy might bear on some disturbing polling numbers that at least deserve a place in the great epistemological ruction of 2010.  For instance:

That’s from a Pew Poll of last July.  Or how about this less widely remarked synthesis of polling results, compiled by Charles Murray (a sometime contributor to the Corner), on ideological affinities among American population groups over time:

These numbers may also help explain the perceived vulnerability of the right to the charge of closed-mindedness.  The only positive thing about the situation for conservatives is that it suggests a growth opportunity: Corrective movement back to near equality would be a tremendous accomplishment, and a major blow to the liberal coalition. Otherwise, a choice before the public that comes down to “the highly intelligent, well-educated, and well-informed” vs. “conservatives” might at best work for an election or two, but you can’t like the looks of it over the longer term.

There may be explanations for such results that go beyond the obvious. Many scientists and intellectuals may be reacting self-interestedly to their own dependency on state support, for instance, and, especially in the wake of Climategate, they face an urgent need to to confront this issue squarely.  Yet it’s still sad to think that this sector of society, representing people whose commitments and ethos are in many ways at least as “conservative” as “liberal,” have been moving to the left for 40 years.  Is it too much to wonder whether continual and habitual assaults on the honesty, intentions, patriotism, and professionalism of scientists and intellectuals, a reflexive readiness to dispute the validity and usefulness of scientific and intellectual inquiry, in short the open adoption of anti-scientific and anti-intellectual attitudes and practices by some conservatives may also have played a role in such dramatic and long-standing trends?

Conservative efforts to alter this situation – American society with its head twisted ever further around at its neck – might begin with the understanding that belief or disbelief in the greenhouse effect, global warming, and other properly scientific matters cannot be a political issue in a free society:  Only how we go about addressing scientific questions can ever be.  There may also be times when no decision is more important to any society than one requiring scientific input.  At that point – at any moment, really – we may need skeptical but non-denialist scientists like Richard Lindzen, and people who can take them at their actual word like Jim Manzi, much more than many conservatives seem to believe – or, under conditions of ideological and emotional closed-mindedness, are capable of admitting or possibly even of conceiving.

And we’ll probably need excitable and entertaining, fiercely dedicated polemicists, too.  That’s right.  I said it.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Is BHO not already the most protested POTUS ever? Should he not hold that dubious honor, he shall by 2012.

McCain’s heart may be in the right place, at least if you share his estimations of the Tea Party Movement and of Barack Hussein Obama, but “most protested POTUS ever” strikes me as a reality-free historical observation (Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Milhous Nixon, a.o., are rolling over in their graves).  It’s not really up to the standard set by Kilgore when, in downgrading Mike Pence’s presidential prospects, he reaches for his political almanac and points out that no sitting House member has won a presidential nomination since 1896.

You don’t have to be the sponsor of the Pence12 Facebook page to recognize how utterly irrelevant such factoids are to whatever is really going to answer run/not-run and win/not-win for a prospective candidate, but merely declaring that Kilgore is flacking for the Dems doesn’t make McCain’s own conclusions any less self-servingly wishful:

Counter-analysis: the 2010 election buys We The People a chance, but only a chance, to set the country on a course for recovery. The Tea Parties et al. continue their pressure and whoever wins in 2012 comes in with a mandate to begin the process of unwinding a century of debt, centralization, and diminished liberty. And the efforts of the Founding Fathers shall not have been in vain.

From McCain’s blog to God’s monitor, we might say, but this isn’t really an “analysis.” It’s a hopeful projection.  Compare it to Kilgore’s final paragraph, dubbed by McCain a “watered down Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf outing”:

So let Republicans enjoy their 2010 comeback. It was all but foreordained by the last two cycles, and by the very demographics that threaten the GOP in the long run. Allow them to celebrate their “fresh faces”; they’ll have a lot of fine options for the vice-presidential nomination in 2012. But their 2012 prospects will go straight downhill starting on Nov. 3, 2010. That’s when Republicans will have to start to deal with the consequences of their recent bout of self-indulgent destructiveness, when they’ll begin choosing someone to take on Barack Obama not in press conferences or talking points or Tea Party protests, but in a presidential election.

Kilgore is summarizing here:  “self-indulgent destructiveness” refers to his argument that Republicans have “brand[-ed] themselves as the party of angry old white people” in a way that may maximize advantages in 2010, but hurt them in 2012 and beyond, when the electorate will tilt more to the Democrats’ favor, whether under an incumbent Barack Obama or, going forward, as demographic factors shift.

It’s possible, perhaps likely, that both McCain and Kilgore are doing a little whistling past their own partisan graveyards here, but, even if you share McCain’s faith in continued “pressure” from the Tea Party and a quasi-apocalyptic awakening to the supreme self-evident truths of constitutional conservatism, Kilgore’s argument stands.  It goes without saying that a perceived abject failure of the Obama Administration, and the aftereffects of any of several potential game-changers between now and November 2012, might make a hash of all conventional political calculations.  Yet 2012 was always likely to be a more difficult climb than 2010, and we should also understand that what Republican conservatives promise or promote with effect this Fall may serve them a lot less well, or even weigh them down,  when Obama is on the ballot again against a real opponent with his or her own campaign to run. If we reach for our own political almanacs, we can determine from polling history that even Jimmy Carter looked pretty good until Ronald Reagan finally closed the deal against him during 1980 campaign’s final days.  We don’t know yet that BHO = JEC.  As for the Republicans, if you can confidently declare one of the known suspects for a 2012 run to be another RWR, you may be a candidate – for de-programming (assuming you’re not receiving a check).

This isn’t the place to attempt a full-fledged comparison of 1980 to some imaginary 2012, or even to dial back to 1978 for a mid-term comparison, or to 1994/96 for an alternative set of potential parallels.  It’s even less the place to wonder whether we don’t focus too much on the presidency, too little on how policy is really effectuated in the U.S.A.  And unless we’re pushing a partisan or factional agenda, we have to begin and end by admitting that we don’t know what the future holds, and which rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem might draw the nation closer to the President and the stationary state he and his allies are preparing for us – an effort that Ross Douthat recently characterized as aiming “to get everybody inside the barrel before it goes over the falls.”

We might just as well look back to that election of 1896 that I was just dismissing up above:  That “last sitting congressman” nominee was William Jennings Bryan, who lost in 1896 and again in 1900 and 1908, but went on to become one of the most important and influential figures of that age in whose shadow McCain sees us still to be standing.  A conservatism that aims to change the course of history, to “begin the process of unwinding a century of debt, centralization, and diminished liberty,” could do a lot worse than lose with a new Bryan, but it may not even achieve a fruitful defeat if it stands still, expecting the assumptions of a convinced minority to carry the day simply for having been asserted, and without regard for what and whom those assumptions seem to exclude.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Who loves humankind, loves the pleasures of humankind, and there is no human pleasure at once so spectacular and intimate as new love aborning.  OK, maybe it got a little mushy, and, yes, premature professions – on the first date, a phone-date! – have been known to lead to embarrassment.  (Be careful, radio dude!  Remember, in every affair, sooner or later, one gives the lips, the other the cheek, and it’s not always the one you expected.)  Yet even and especially what’s wrong or terrifyingly un-graspable in new love tends to draw the lovers on, may be precisely what draws the lovers on…

…And yet, when you’ve endured
the first terrible glances, and the yearning at windows,
and the first walk together, just once, through the garden:
Lovers, are you the same? When you raise yourselves
one to another’s mouth, and hang there – sip against sip:
O, how strangely the drinker then escapes the deed.

–Rainer Maria Rilke
“Second Duino Elegy”

I won’t recount again, I’ll not even link, the messages Paul Ryan once vouchsafed to me… and to an audience of Oklahoma Republicans, to the blogosphere, and eventually to that itsy-bitsy radio audience of millions that I mentioned.  When the light of rapture from yonder window breaks, what lovestruck prince spares a thought to the letters he once wrote to the fair what’s-her-name?  And has there ever been a couple in the first blush of love who listened to a cynic?

May the union of needs and interests prove durable and fruitful, all the more so if and when the passion wanes.

Thank you, AP, for your kind and thoughtful words, but I’m done weeping… almost – and, really, what difference does it make at a time like this who’s “right”?  All’s fair, and it’s just as well.  Truth be told, I always thought the two belonged together.  They complete each other.  No one seemed to hear me saying so, and if anyone thought to thank me for making the match, what a small thing that would be anyway, compared to whatever course of love, true or other, may lie ahead for them.

Here’s looking at you, Congressman.  (We’ll always have Oklahoma City.)

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

And yet for an increasing number of Americans, tax season is like baseball season: It’s a spectator sport. According to the Tax Policy Center, for the year 2009, 47 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax. Obviously, many of them pay other kinds of taxes — state tax, property tax, cigarette tax. But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it’s national defense or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, but don’t ask me why). Half a decade back, it was just under 40 percent who paid no federal income tax; now it’s just under 50 percent.

Such observations recently led Doctor Zero to attempt a thought experiment about excluding “net tax-consumers” from the voting franchise. See, according to the Doctor and Mr. Steyn, or at least the line of thinking with which they’re publicly experimenting, everyone who isn’t (currently) paying any federal income tax is virtually a free rider, a mere spectator, and is no longer adequately invested in public affairs to be consulted – or, worse, is merely in the game to steal more and more from authentically productive citizens.

Tho if you really want to set my blood a-boilin’, and want to risk turning many a potential Tea Partier back into a Democrat, and want to conjure the image of conservatives as confoundingly out of touch, just try abbreviating the above argument – as I’ve heard assorted pundits, politicos, and sinecured think tankers do – to “soon a majority of Americans won’t be paying any taxes.” Even quickly amending that to “no federal taxes” or “no federal income taxes” will at best lower the ol’ blood temperature to “rapid” rather than “boiling off.”

On the face of it, on the level of the real world shorthand takeaway, the argument seems to put conservatives on the side of higher taxes for some number between 0 to 100% of the poorer half of the population, and according to some species of a “fairness” justification. You guys sure that’s where we want to be? At the same time, it ignores some of the primary causes of this creeping re-structuring of the income tax revenue base – e.g., an aging population, increasingly also an under- and unemployed population.

Most significantly to the average irresponsible free riding spectator and thief undeserving of the vote, the argument rather completely ignores, or flagrantly minimizes, all of the taxes and fees that lower income people pay, usually under an extremely regressive structure. Just so everyone’s clear on exactly what that means: the poorer you are, the more they hurt, to the point of hurting a lot.

I’m not just talking about the taxes and fees that Steyn concedes before he gets to his “but” sentence. In a time when the federal government has routinely raided entitlement revenue to fund ongoing expenditures, to the point of defunding the programs, how are Social Security and Medicare taxes anything other than a flat income tax (double-sized for the self-employed) that’s reverse means-tested – since, by virtue of the cut-off (ca. $100k these days), high income people don’t pay into the program at anywhere near the same overall rate that lower income people do?  (Atención! – AP -  maybe this can help explain those “mystifying” survey results.)

Here’s my thought hypothesis: The Dems opened themselves to means-testing when arguing for the Obama tax rebate, suggesting it would help people burdened by those FICA taxes. Oopsie! Only conservatives were supposed to be evil enough to question the premises of our sacrosanct “equal” “social insurance” contributions. How about dropping the whole insurance charade – it’s always been one – eliminating the cut-off, means-testing both contributions and benefits (including taxes on the latter), putting in a realistic retirement age and cost-of-living-adjustment, then getting back to me when you’ve calculated the impacts of various rates on unfunded obligations? (I’m really curious about this one – but I still have to do my own $&*^@! taxes.)

Now back on the rest of our mere spectator’s burden:  Residents of relatively high tax states will typically be paying a second, completely regressive tax in the form of sales taxes, usually pushing 10%, biting every day, sometimes several times a day. Most will pay a third set of usually highly regressive fees for government services on the municipal level and higher – often through utility fees that include within them additional charges from that federal government that we’re supposedly uninvolved with. And relatively low income people are of course the ones hardest hit by gasoline taxes, which will typically include both a federal and a state component. We poor people have also been paying ever higher, noticeably higher rates for everything from college tuition, to smokes, to postage – fed + state + local, directly and indirectly, you think we have the time to sort out which goes to which goes to which?  We can hardly stand even to look!

I’m also aware that, one way or another, even before the possible imposition of a new national sales tax (VAT) – for which Mr. Steyn and Doctor Zero seem to be providing a moral argument, regardless of whatever they believe about a VAT on its own terms – all levels of government and indeed the economy are interwoven, via unfunded mandates and regulatory burdens, and increasingly by the massive overhang of federal debt.

I’m guessing that people like me will be paying disproportionately for it all, for that last one especially – possibly through inflation/monetization, possibly by some other means.

Partly as a result of ’08-’09 fiscal crisis, my main business (collectibles sales over the internet) was devastated for a few months: A chart of my turnover would look a lot like the stock market, and the loss of business will be reflected in a lower income tax “contribution” than in prior years. Though I haven’t yet tallied up the results – I may not finish doing my $&*^@! tax return until around 4:50 PM PST, April 15, 2010 – I already know that that I’m feeling pretty darn overtaxed already, even before I calculate whatever small portion of my total tax burden is called “federal income taxes” by people like Mr. Steyn, whose argument (regardless of what Mr. Steyn himself thinks about the big picture) seems to say that I need to send even more money that I don’t have to the government, so that I can feel more invested in what it does.

Trust me, I feel quite adequately “invested” in government policy. I’ve got plenty of skin in the game. Shed more every day. Don’t have much extra skin left at all, matter of fact. Whatever conservatives have in mind with this argument, I cannot see why they think it will get them somewhere to seem to be whining for still more flesh.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Many people believe Democracy obsolete.
They are wrong.
Obsolete is the one thing
Democracy can never be.

R. Buckminster Fuller – “No More Secondhand God”

In responding to Rep. Paul Ryan’s speech to the Oklahoma Council on Public Affairs on March 31, even some of the constitutional conservatives on the HotAir headline thread and then again around the Quote of the Day gave both speech and speaker rave reviews. The general reaction to Ryan verges on “presidential boomlet,” and, really, why couldn’t this man be president, and as soon as we need him to be? He’s as qualified as… Woodrow Wilson was. He’s certainly as qualified as… Abraham Lincoln was. More qualified in many ways than various presidents any of us could bring up…

When people ask, as they often have over recent months, what I mean when I refer to “progressive conservatism,” I have often pointed to Paul Ryan. He’s not the only exemplar I could name, but he’s one of the best. Consider the entirety of his approach – and also consider passages in his speech like this one:

The Democratic leaders of Congress and in the White House hold a view they call “Progressivism.” Progressivism began in Wisconsin, where I come from. It came into our schools from European universities under the spell of intellectuals such as Hegel and Weber, and the German leader Bismarck. The best known Wisconsin Progressive was actually a Republican, Robert LaFollette.

Progressivism was a powerful strain in both political parties for many years. Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, and Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, both brought the Progressive movement to Washington.

Early Progressives wanted to empower and engage the people. They fought for populist reforms like initiative and referendum, recalls, judicial elections, the breakup of monopoly corporations, and the elimination of vote buying and urban patronage. But Progressivism turned away from popular control toward central government planning. It lost most Americans and consumed itself in paternalism, arrogance, and snobbish condescension. “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson would have scorned the self-proclaimed “Progressives” of our day for handing out bailout checks to giant corporations, corrupting the Congress to purchase votes for government controlled health care, and funneling billions in Jobs Stimulus money to local politicians to pay for make-work patronage. That’s not “Progressivism,” that’s what real Progressives fought against!

(Emphasis added.)

For all I know, Ryan’s been talking this way for years, and I’ll assume barring hard evidence to the contrary that he picked up on this theme on his own, not from posts at the HotAir Greenroom and Zombie Contentions. He probably just sees the same thing that, say, Newt Gingrich saw when he started speaking about “real progress and real change” sometime during the last decade. It’s a completely natural and congenial way, in my view one of the better ways, to approach our political moment both theoretically and practically – even if it seems to conflict with the tactic of all-out, all-conflating assault on and total condemnation of progressivism, an alternative but equally natural, if arguably less promising, response to our fundamental political disagreement with today’s nominal progressives.

The sections in Ryan’s speech that deal directly with “real progressives” vs “regressive” progressives represent only a small part of his manifesto, but the critique is interwoven throughout, and implicitly invoked whenever Ryan refers to “Progressivists” rather than to “progressives,” emphasizing the distinction between those who merely exploit a tradition or belief system, and those who represent its authentic spirit.

In short, Ryan wants to deny anyone the sole possession of this political turf. A proud Wisconsinite, he is understandably reluctant to reject his state’s political tradition – a brand of progressivism known as “the Wisconsin Idea.” And why shouldn’t Ryan be proud? As he points out, and as I have found myself repeatedly having to point out, many elements of progressivism are so deeply embedded in our political life, not just in progressive states but nationwide, that hardly anyone questions them at all. Instead, conservatives all across America have been and are making good use of them – including the primary campaign, the citizen initiative, the insistence on transparency and on the rights of an informed citizenry. Rather than asserting a fundamental contradiction between his “real” progressivism and constitutionalism, Ryan asserts and demonstrates their dynamic interdependence. And why shouldn’t Paul Ryan of WI seek to hold this ground, not just for his own sake, but for our sake in the effort to build a winning and, eventually, a governing coalition?

As for Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and their followers, they may not deserve association with the most evil tyrants in world history, but they really do have something in common with the worst traitors to real progressivism.  They have reversed the original progressive demand for citizen empowerment. In so doing they have, arguably, embraced what makes “liberal fascism” fascistic (and illiberal).  They have crossed – are crossing – the line between authentic political progress, real progressivism, and its opposite.

The spirit of the Progressive Era was much broader than the ideas and policies of any particular leader or intellectual, but the examples of TR and Wilson, whom Ryan describes as having “brought the Progressive movement to Washington,” remain instructive. Running for president on the Bull Moose/Progressive Party platform in 1912, Roosevelt and his allies called for national referenda and measures enabling the popular recall of federal officials. One of Wilson’s central criticisms of congress in the work that made his name was aimed at the customary secret deliberations of all-powerful committees.  First as governor of New Jersey and then as president, Wilson liked to call for “pitiless publicity” as the best means of exposing and ending corruption and misgovernment. In the battle to gain approval of the League of Nations, before being permanently sidelined by an incapacitating stroke, Wilson at one point proposed a national referendum on the issue, and had prepared to make the elections of 1920 into one. Earlier, the progressive opponents of Wilson – who included the Wisconsinite whom Ryan mentions, Robert LaFollette – had called for a national referendum on entering World War I. (They probably would have lost.)

Can anyone imagine Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, for all of their bluster about being on the side of the people, putting Obamacare to a popular vote?  Which side in the current fight is trying to make the 2010 elections into a referendum on a Obamaism?

Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to ask for the people’s direct OK on Obamacare. Maybe we should have been asked directly about TARP, about the bailouts, about raising the debt ceiling, about the Stimulus or Son of Stimulus. Maybe we should be consulted directly when the debt commission issues its recommendations. No value added taxation without referendum! I’d have a good feeling about a popular vote on some version of Ryan’s Road Map versus the Obama-Pelosi-Reid-style budget gimmickry.

I even find myself attracted sometimes to the ultra-progressive ideas of Buckminster Fuller, who, in his wonderfully excessive prose-poetic essay “No More Secondhand God,” written at the outset of World War II, proposed a system of direct mass democracy via a kind of proto-internet (“electrified democracy”), which he conceived of as the total repudiation and rejection of the barbarism then engulfing the world. He answered fears of “mob rule” with an idealistic faith in an educated citizenry, and with an engineer’s trust in the political design he drafted.

We don’t have to go that far, or even as far as TR wanted to go. This year’s mid-terms, which Ryan views as the last stop before the end of American exceptionalism and constitutional government, may be referendum enough if they put a congressional bloc in place sufficient to impair Obamacare’s implementation.

Still, I’d be happy to see the national question framed as follows, winner take all: Who are the real progressives in 2010, the real supporters of progress, the real spokespersons for a better future – the proponents or the opponents of Obamacare?

I know Paul Ryan’s answer. He makes it very clear. I agree with him, and I think that the American people, overall, agree with us.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

What makes 1938 unique on such a list is our own absence from the critical scenes.  The effect in Giles MacDonogh’s month by month, sometimes day by day and hour by hour, chronicle of the year is a portrait of American leadership traced out as though in a photographic negative.

The cloudy, black and gray surface reveals the following:  A world without American leadership is a world that can fall prey to the “gambles” of upstart second-raters and maniacs. A world without American leadership is a world in which secretive, shifting alliances, immoral deals, territorial larceny, and brute force lead, step by step, to chaos and conflagration. It’s a world in which everyone can choose to look the other way when a monster and his brood are appeased, and appeased again, at the expense of races, religions, and nations. It’s also a world in which anyone can get in on the action while the getting seems good, not daring to think that he might be next.

In other words, 1938 marks the last historical moment up to the present day during which other nations could pretend to solve matters of great importance without significant American involvement.  For nearly three more years, the U.S. avoided formal entry into the developing conflict, but the last pretense that the world could take care of itself on its own ended a few months into 1939.  Soon, the argument for acting “while dangers gather,” instead of waiting for whatever day of infamy, would have 60 – 100 million direct casualties and the rubble of nations weighing on its side.

That cataclysm is the other negative subject of this chronicle, which, like many histories focusing on Nazi Germany, makes for fascinating yet agonizing reading.  At the beginning of the year, Adolf Hitler was Chancellor in a rightwing coalition government.  The country and the National Socialist order spent the year on the verge of bankruptcy and economic chaos. German borders were still defined by the Versailles Treaty, and Germany’s range of action was constrained by, supposedly, firm commitments of France and Great Britain. The military establishment, still dominated by aristocrats and a special target of the Nazi power structure, spent much of the year planning and preparing a coup.  According to much evidence, and for good reason, the German masses were uncertain and fearful, and still capable of resistance.

By the end of the year, following a series of successful, highly improvisational acts of acrobatic brinksmanship on the world stage, Hitler was the unchallenged leader of an empire at dawn set for further expansion, the nation having already absorbed and to some extent exhausted its newly acquired financial, material, and human resources.  The internal opposition had been silenced and humiliated. The officers around General Ludwig Beck put plans for rebellion, which at times had been mere days from irrevocable execution, on indefinite hold (many of the same conspirators would be involved in the Valkyrie plot six years later).

In the meantime – and this story takes up a large portion of 1938 - the oppression of the Jews and the suppression of dissent escalated. For the first time, a policy that foisted second-class status on law-abiding citizens took on a literally mass murderous shape, and in a widening transnational orbit, thanks to the collaboration of allies and opportunists.  Someone should have been able to do the math: Millions of Jews to be forcibly dispossessed, under orders of expulsion from a continent increasingly under Nazi domination… minus thousands of spots grudgingly made available for immigration around the world. The final solution of this simple equation was something that either no one was willing to imagine or, a much darker thought, very many people, not just German-speaking people, were happy to write off on their own personal balance sheets.

Another piece of inexorable math might have been less obvious, but was critical to all that followed. The fascist economic system, contrary to the PR, was a total failure. Without larceny and enslavement on an international scale, it couldn’t survive. Combine economic compulsion with a culture of self-superiority and an ideology that celebrated the remorseless use of force, and war was inevitable.

These equations also expose certain schools of historical revisionism for the dreary obscenities they are.  By 1938 there was already ample moral and, certainly for the Versailles signatories, legal justification to act against Hitler’s Germany.  There was also opportunity:  The regime was vulnerable to the point of desperation – to the point of having to gamble everything.  Nothing succeeds like success, however, and the world, by cooperation and by omission, gave the Nazis one triumph and rescue after another. By the end of the year, the message sent and received was “barbarism works” and “no one can stop it” – as a new set of even greater wagers were readied.

For 70 years, we’ve been committed to sending the opposite messages, and have mostly succeeded, but are we still doing the math?

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

So, yeah, MC’s right – Palin endorsing McCain does “stink” – but only if you were hoping that she would lend her charisma exclusively to the cause of rigorously pure conservatism.

NOT MUCH DIFFERENCE ON POLICY

MC and I are not far apart on the most politically relevant points, even though this agreement leads us to different conclusions. Before anyone reads the wrong things into these differences, however, there are some policy questions that need to be cleared up.

MC concedes that there’s little daylight between McCain and Palin on foreign policy, and he’s happy to set aside possible post-Campaign ’08 hard feelings (“her business”). It’s on domestic policy that differences seem to arise, but I think MC partly mischaracterizes them, and otherwise exaggerates their importance:

1. Immigration: MC links to a recent FoxNews interview in which Palin unambiguously states her support for McCain’s current “position on immigration.” Though inveterate McCain skeptics may be unwilling to credit a shift in his approach that’s as old as the ’08 campaign, we should be clear that what Palin is supporting is a “border security first” approach. MC calls determining what Palin really means a “tough call.” I disagree: She says she supports McCain’s position. If he diverges, he’ll presumably have to “answer to Sarah,” and, if she fails to call him out, it will harm her credibility. That’s implied in any endorsement.
2. Global warming/Energy: I believe MC misstates the differences between Palin and McCain on GW issues. When MC claims that “McCain and Obama get along swimmingly” on Cap and Trade, he ignores the fact that McCain has been a fierce critic of Obama’s program from the day it was introduced. McCain may, for instance, have been the first to dub it “Cap and Tax.” MC also forgets the softer/squishier pre-ClimateGate remarks that Palin made over the course of years on Global Warming-based policy, clearly intended to make it easier for AGW believers to support her. Post-ClimateGate, she’s become much more vocal in her skepticism. As for ANWR, differences on the subject are very old news. They didn’t prevent Palin from running with McCain, and haven’t prevented her from recycling lines like “all of the above approach” and “drill, baby, drill” from her and McCain’s joint Campaign ’08 platform.
3. Gay marriage: McCain and Palin are both opponents. They may differ on the wisdom of passing a “Defense of Marriage” amendment now, but even McCain, who opposed a constitutional amendment in 2004, has for years been saying that he would support it if the Defense of Marriage Act were overturned. Does anyone see this secondary/tactical difference as likely to determine many elections this year – even a primary election on the GOP side?
4. Evolution: In what election anywhere in America other than for school board are the particulars of beliefs on this issue of importance? McCain apparently believes in evolution + God. Palin seems to believe in God + evolution. MC: “Some may say it’s a minor issue, but it’s seemed important to Sarah Palin.” She’s responded when others have brought the topic up, and she discussed her beliefs in her book. Has anyone heard her bring it up on her own in any political context?

…and that’s about it from MC on policy, though at other points both he and other commenters have brought up other issues, especially (5) Campaign Finance Reform (CFR). I don’t recall and couldn’t find a detailed statement of Palin’s on McCain-Feingold, though I believe that, like Fred Thompson (who co-sponsored it in the Senate), she expressed support for the good intention of cleaning up politics (since the 19th Century a typical progressive focus, incidentally). Palin had her own personal experience of campaigning for and helping to implement progressive-style political reforms – the Alaska ethics laws – that, despite good intentions, seemed to backfire on her.  So she may sympathize with McCain. Anyway, with the Supreme Court having gutted McCain-Feingold legally, and with the Obama ’08 campaign having blown apart many of its presumptions, it’s hard to imagine a deader letter, or any reason why it should influence Palin’s decision-making on McCain vs Hayworth.

In sum, Palin and McCain are very close in one major area – foreign policy – and easily close enough for government work on the other issues MC points to. Most important, they’re together on the major unifying conservative issues the 2010 campaigns – debt, deficits, ObamaCare, DC elitism/corruption – issues on which McCain has been and remains a leading spokesperson.  On the Conflict Formerly Known as the War on Terror, any potential differences – over, say, closing Gitmo – have been buried by joint opposition to elements of the Obama approach.

Moreover, like Mitt Romney and others who have endorsed McCain, Palin wouldn’t need a personal bond, debt of gratitude, or perfect agreement to conclude that putting the Arizona Senate seat at risk, losing a” lion of the Senate,” creating or widening rifts within the party, and opening the Republicans to a “they’ve gone crazy with ideology” narrative would interfere with job #1: Defeating Obamacrats.

Some have focused on JD Hayworth’s flaws as a candidate, but, in trying to justify Palin’s endorsement, you don’t need to destroy Hayworth unless you despise McCain. Palin focused almost entirely on McCain’s positives in her endorsement statement, with only a glancing, implicit reference to Hayworth in her conclusion::

In 2008, I firmly believed that John McCain was the right man for America. Today, I know he’s the right man for Arizona. Your state deserves more than rhetoric; you deserve a leader with a real record of accomplishment. That’s why, on behalf of Sen. McCain, I’m asking for your vote. For the good of our entire country and the future of your state, please send John McCain back to the United States Senate.

The only reason not to take her at her word is to deny the evidence that she actually is closer to McCain than anti-McCain conservatives want to acknowledge.

PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATISM vs PURE CONSERVATISM

I therefore both disagree and agree with MC’s conclusions. I don’t think he’s justified his description of McCain and Palin as “at odds all over the place,” but I think he’s right to question whether Sarah Palin is a “strong conservative,” if by that he means a committed ideologue. She clearly possesses many strongly conservative impulses and core beliefs, but her approach to politics is at least as pragmatic as it is ideological. In that way, she’s an authentic conservative in an American mode, putting concrete results above any idle search for absolute political right and wrong. Since I consider the combination of the two political impulses, under whatever names, to be both desirable and inevitable, I applaud SP’s having offered support and encouragement across the conservative spectrum, from Scott Brown to Doug Hoffman and maybe even Rand Paul. It’s good for her and good for us.

In disagreeing with me strongly on this analysis, MadisonConservative is far from alone on the right. He’s probably closer to the majority view at HotAir (at least among those highly interested in immigration policy). I welcome the continuing debate with him and those who agree with him. As for those who don’t welcome the discussion, I wonder what they think HotAir is for – endless recitation of “true conservative” principles, all dissenters shamed and silenced?

Far as I can tell, it ain’t that kind of place, never has been, from the top down and the bottom up, and I’m happy with that, too.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

I’m splitting my rebuttal into two parts, rather than put up one long post, because certain claims and accusations were made that had very little to do with the main political topics.  This post will address those claims and accusations.  The next post will address the endorsement question and why I think it’s worth continuing to discuss.)

DEBATES AT HOTAIR

Unlike several volunteer HotAir etiquette monitors who complained about the “dead horse” “point/counterpoint” between MadisonConservative (MC) and myself yesterday, I think such debate is good for HotAir, and I look forward to more of it – whether on the main page, in the Greenroom, or the comment threads, or all three at once.

Many of my posts are inspired by disagreement, often by disagreement with someone I like and respect.  Liking and respecting someone can make disagreements with them a lot more interesting and often more useful as well, though, as in real life, it may also sometimes test a relationship.  (That’s life!)  A very partial list of bloggers with whom I’ve disagreed in Greenroom posts includes JE Dyer, Doctor Zero, Max Boot, Jonathan Tobin, John Podhoretz, the Other McCain, Insta-Punk… and Ed Morrissey and Allahpundit – great conservative bloggers all.  Lest I be accused of only attacking my (supposed) allies, I’ve also based posts on disagreements with such as Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald, David Neiwert, John Amato, David Frum, and David Brooks.  MadisonConservative now joins this ecumenical roster, and I’m looking forward to adding others to the growing list, which also includes many HA and Zombie Contentions commenters with whom I mix it up on a regular basis.

Those who find the resultant discussions uninteresting or disturbing are free… to look or go away.  At any time.  Like now, for instance.  Leave a critical comment or don’t.  More likely than not, no one will care what someone who claimed not to be interested felt it necessary to say.

QUOTING COMMENTERS

A few commenters on the two threads also objected to my use of remarks by fellow HotAir-users.  In the opening remarks of his response post, MadisonConservative addressed an aspect of this issue directly:  “I think comments should be responded to with more comments, not with the bullhorn of the Greenroom posting privilege.”

So here’s something for us to disagree about.  Excellent!

Let me be Nixon/Obama perfectly and crystal clear: I don’t think you should be commenting in the threads at a high traffic public political forum like HotAir without the expectation that what you say might be used by someone to make a point – for, against, for the fun of it, whatever. In my opinion the only valid complaints about being referenced would be “I have been misquoted” (or misleadingly quoted) and, in some instances, “I haven’t been properly credited!”

Rather than complain about being noticed, why shouldn’t commenters welcome being taken seriously – treated as though their ideas and opinions may actually be significant and worthy of respect, consideration, and response – not just “tears in rain” lost forever to the great internet flood?

As for the two commenters I referred to in my post, some users apparently gained the mistaken impression that I had grouped them with the haters to whom I had earlier referred.  That’s neither what I wrote nor what I think.

The paragraph in which they’re mentioned begins with an observation about “many” who seem to hate John McCain so much that they see Palin’s endorsement of him over JD Hayworth as unforgivable simply on that basis.  In the next sentence, I describe a second group – “[o]thers” whose feelings and opinions aren’t as strong, but who tend to view the endorsement negatively, possibly on balance in Palin’s interests, or at at worst excusable.  It’s in that group that I put the two HotAir commenters.  I went on to associate their opinions with those of the Fox News All Stars.  Unless you’re a Fox-hater, that’s a compliment.

I happen to think that both of the commenters are stand-up guys.  I happened to disagree with them on a political point.  That’s it.  There is no other responsible and reasonable way to read what I wrote, and I resent on the commenters’ behalf as well as my own the attempts to put a different gloss on the matter.  I’m pro-commenter.  I was nothing but a commenter at HA, occasionally getting a kick out of it when a big boy blogger noticed my lowly comments, and then when I was eventually invited to become a Greenroomer.  My home blog was founded as a refuge for commenters who had been suddenly shut out en masse at another site.  I am a man of the commenters!

HATRED vs CRITICISM

Finally, regarding that first group I mentioned above, the haters, I stand by my remarks. We can disagree on the definition of “many,” I suppose, but I think it’s beyond obvious that some people who regularly comment at HotAir dislike John McCain passionately, intensely, and irrepressibly enough for their verbal conduct to qualify under dictionary or common sense definitions of hateful – as in, “So-and-so sure does hate Johnny Mac!”  There were a few commenters under my or MadisonConservative’s posts who admitted as much, explicitly, but insisted on their right to hate (because McCain “deserves it so”).  Others ignored the argument, and, as usual, exploited the subject of McCain to indulge in the familiar excesses (“idiot backstabbing liar,” “McStain,” etc., etc.).

As hatred goes, this stuff appears more to be of the impotent rage and venting variety than the dangerous and murderous variety, but neither type contributes much to political discussion, in my opinion, or does much credit to the commenter or to HotAir.  If people want to go on that way, that’s their concern, within TOS limits.  I have as much right to call it what I think it is as those who are into the richly satisfying hateful hatred have to express themselves.

In the meantime, the claim, using MadisonConservative’s words, that I “designat[ed]” all “critics of McCain” as haters is false – and was correctly identified by several commenters as a “straw man” evasion.  If you commented to some other effect, then you need to read posts more carefully before commenting on them, or are engaging in the kind of chip-on-shoulder mind-reading extrapolation that’s supposed to characterize the PC left.  I fully accept that John McCain can be criticized, that he may even deserve severe criticism.  John McCain thinks so, too, I’m pretty sure.

Now, on to the next disagreements.

Some McCain-haters – and there’s really no better word than “hate” for the attitude of many HotAirians regarding McCain – think Palin’s made a “mistake.” Others who like and support Palin, but who remain hostile and suspicious toward McCain and what they believe he represents, believe she’s just “doing what she has to” in demonstrating loyalty to the man who “made her” a multi-millionaire and national political player, and are willing to give her “a mulligan.” Here’s one typical exchange:

I don’t know how many endorsements like these Palin can survive.

DFCtomm on March 29, 2010 at 1:29 PM

HondaV65 on March 29, 2010 at 1:30 PM

ONE. And only ONE.

Many such observers have persuaded themselves that Palin is trying to improve her political prospects and expand her power base. At some unspecified later date, they expect, she’ll be able to call in the chit.  It squares with the view of your average Fox News All-Star always happy to attribute any conduct by any politician to cynicism.

What a load of, ahem, bullcrap!  No one has yet explained why this straight-talking, “if I die, I die” conservative heroine has suddenly turned crafty pol or hypocrite, and yet still could remain a worthy Tea Party leader.

How about this explanation:

Palin supports McCain!

I hope no one finds that too complicated.

In the race with JD Hayworth, I doubt it’s even a close call for her.

Gov Palin agrees with Senator McCain close to 100% on foreign policy. She respects and likes him personally. She doesn’t blame him for the actions of some of his operatives during and after Campaign ’08, and never believed it was his responsibility to play the roll of political Dad and discipline the other kids for her. She was and is quite capable of defending herself and charting her own course, and would have found it condescending and presumptuous for him to play protector.

She has no problem with the main thrust of his domestic views or his overall approach to politics. If she cares much about immigration politics – I’ve seen little evidence of it, though it’s clearly still a big deal to many grassroots conservatives – she’s happy with McCain’s post-”Shamnesty” positioning.  I suspect that she cares enough about the Republican Party’s long-term prospects to want to see the issue handled soberly and positively.

Though post-’08 she’s been driven into a conservative cul-de-sac – in part by political circumstances in the US of A ca. 2010, in part by a learning experience that has included attacks on her from the left and from Brooks-Frum moderate/elitist conservatives – her political profile and her actual political conduct when in office, was moderate, bi- and non-partisan, and altogether maverick-y.

It was classically progressive: reform-oriented, anti-machine politics, woman-empowering, etc. – including not just a willingness but a determination to use government in aid of “social justice” – as in care for the vulnerable (special needs children, indigenous peoples), fair and equitable stewardship and profit-sharing in the exploitation of natural resources, safeguards against self-dealing by powerful economic and political players.

No one is in a position to take an objective measurement, but Palin looks to me to be about as much a McCain conservative as a Tea Party conservative. With the help of, as the governor likes to say, “people of both parties and of no party at all,” that overall political direction represents a potential governing majority.

I personally have no trouble taking the governor at her word on this and most other issues. It’s one of the things I like best about her. My advice is that you stop looking for secret calculations and obscure motives, and stop insulting Palin with the notion that she’s acting on some other basis than her best political and moral judgment. She prefers McCain to Hayworth, probably by a lot. Deal with it.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

[T]his bill’s purported goal of providing affordable health insurance to every American is seen by Obama and his backers as not only just but also inevitable, much the same way they think of the “New Deal” legislation passed by Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” They are convinced that [...]ObamaCare will soon be seen not as a massive expansion of government power but as yet another chapter in America’s inexorable journey to social justice…

Tobin goes on to argue that the real job for conservatives must go beyond a critique of ObamaCare, to an “attack on the liberal narrative.”  In the process he employs a bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu:

Rather than a progressive innovation, ObamaCare is a retrograde move that seeks to drag American politics and the economy back to the mistaken emphasis on government power of the mid-20th century. Like so much of the welfare economics and failed liberal policies of that era, ObamaCare has the potential to do far more harm than good.

This mode of analysis, which should be familiar to some readers here, defines our political moment as progressivism in self-eclipse, the moment when further progress along the path of leftwing statism requires retreat on every other, and when everything else that political progressivism originally stood for – cleaner politics, responsiveness to the popular will, efficient and up-to-date public administration, simple fairness – must be sought elsewhere.  It could be a moment of profound opportunity to re-shape American politics, but only if conservatives are prepared to seize it.

Today, Republicans are proposing to make “repeal and reform” – repeal of ObamaCare, reform of health care insurance – a centerpiece of their political and electoral strategy, but the former aim is something that some vocal conservatives have been declaring impossible for months.  Without accepting that claim, which will now mostly be advanced by Democrats, we can recognize that repeal will be far from easy.

As for the second aim, in addition to being desirable on its own merits, reform/replace reduces the political burden in one respect – providing a “give” to go with the “take” of repeal – but conservative credibility on reform remains suspect.  When Democrats claimed throughout the Obamacare debate that their opponents had no alternatives, Republicans reacted as though unfairly attacked, the victims of a political-media conspiracy, but in concrete terms they were more guilty than innocent.  The Republicans had had two presidential terms and an extended period of control of Congress without ever making health care overhaul a priority, even in the form of an incremental process of major reform.  In 2008, John McCain did offer an excellent set of proposals, but it was offered defensively, at best, never in a concerted effort to lead on the issue.  Merely pointing to some number of hopeless bills and invisible amendments, as in the recent congressional debate, is not the same thing as having proved your commitment, and this applies to other issues as well.  As the first President Bush learned when campaigning unsuccessfully for re-election in 1992, if you have to plead with people to believe you’re engaged – reading “Message:  I care” off a cue card – then it’s too late.

The ever ready conservative fallbacks – “Don’t spend so much money!” and “Don’t make a bad situation worse!” – may be wise words, but they’re not motivational ones.  Some recent comments by Ross Douthat on Bart Stupak, the pro-life “Blue Dog” who may have put Obamacare over the top, discussed this problem with a view to socially conservative swing voters – potentially the most critical swing constituency in any national election:

[T]here are still pro-life Democrats for a reason: Because many abortion opponents can’t reconcile their views on social justice with the harder-edged, “any redistribution equals socialism” tendencies in the Republican Party. Some of these pro-lifers are older Catholic Democrats like Stupak; some of them are younger Americans who are hostile to abortion but don’t vote on the issue because they can’t imagine themselves being represented by the party of Limbaugh and Beck. A successful pro-life politics desperately needs these constituencies to find representation — and if there’s no place for anti-abortion sentiment among the Democrats, then pro-lifers need the Republican Party to feel hospitable to voters whose impulses on social policy tend in a more communitarian direction.

Douthat might have added certain non-white and immigrant constituencies to the groups that ought to be in play, and he might have noted parallel “impulses” animating many less religious voters.  For our purposes, however, the key point may be the following:

There are conservative and market-oriented proposals on health care reform that are consonant, I think, with Catholic teaching on a just society. But the Republican Party’s leadership wasn’t interested in talking about them, and conservative pro-lifers didn’t seem particularly concerned about this lacuna in the debate.

That these observations will remain difficult for some conservatives to absorb tends to support Douthat’s point, though if you think about someone whom you know, someone who ought to fit within the religious right – Catholic, evangelical, Jewish, or other – but who voted for Obama in 2008, it may be easier for you to understand.  Attacking “social justice” – “Message:  We don’t care” – is as likely to repel these voters as to shake sense into them.  They feel commanded by faith to care for the unborn, but they also feel commanded to care for the poor and vulnerable, to build a community whose commitments reflect their values.  At a time when there are “conservative and market-oriented proposals” that promise better results especially from the perspective of social justice than anything in the discredited “New Deal”/”Great Society”/”New Foundation” playbook, to act afraid of a moral reckoning is self-destructive.

As on other issues historically identified with the left, a reflexive rejection of progressive premises tends to impair any simultaneous argument for alternative solutions.  This contradiction underlies tension between “Reformlicans” and “Repealicans” that will likely worsen over time. Most of us realize that “Repeal + Reform” is a much larger coalition than Repeal or Reform separately, but concessions that seem obviously rational to some, as validating aspects of the just-passed bill initially seemed to Senator John Cornyn, may leave others nonplussed.  Conversely, forms of direct opposition – such as unstinting criticism of Stupak, support for constitutional challenges, disputing the concept of health care as a “right” – carry some risk of re-casting Republicans as “enemies of health care.”  Even the persuasive argument that ObamaCare will overwhelm the system with new demand implies that millions of Americans are presently under-served on a matter of life and death, and calls into question the critic’s commitment to their welfare.

The logic goes like this:  “Enemies of health care insurance reform” -> “Enemies of health care insurance” -> “Enemies of health care” -> “Enemies of health” -> “Enemies.”  Any attack on O-care that overemphasizes “repeal,” and under-emphasizes “replace,” will therefore reinforce counterattacks like this one, from the President on Thursday in Iowa City:

If these Congressmen in Washington want to come here to Iowa and tell small business owners that they plan to take away their tax credits and essentially raise their taxes, be my guest. If they want to look Lauren Gallagher in the eye and tell her they plan to take away her father’s health insurance, that’s their right. If they want to make Darlyne Neff pay more money for her check-ups and her mammograms, they can run on that platform. If they want to have that fight, I welcome that fight.

If it seems these days that all eyes are turning to Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, it’s in part because he is one Republican whose interest in and commitment to matters that affect Lauren, Darlyne, and the other cast members in the moving Democrat reality show, are undoubted, but Ryanism will also be attacked as hostile to programs and commitments beloved by potential new members of the Republican coalition. Consolidating the latter group’s support amidst a Democrat onslaught will require more than a link to a web-site and Ryan’s personal appearances in the mass media:  It will take an earnest, collective labor of years.

Even under today’s unhappy but politically promising circumstances, a conservatism that aims for more than a temporary right-center electoral coalition must demand, and seek, full accountability.  In this regard, a successful assault on the liberal narrative may not be the primary task after all.  Conservatives believe that Obama-Pelosi-Reid-care is as abominably ill-conceived as it was oversold (Yuval Levin’s cover story in the current Weekly Standard provides a comprehensive critical framework).  As external fiscal pressures and internal irrationality pull the contraption apart, the counter-narrative should write itself in broken promises, spiraling costs, bureaucratic chaos, and general economic underperformance – or worse.

The resultant spectacle may virtually by itself lead to electoral victories that in turn restore some balance to national policy-making, but formally or effectively repealing ObamaCare would be something much more ambitious.  “Repeal and reform” recognizes that a sensible, coherent, and conservative replacement program will be critical in that effort, and provides for another major task.  Finally, embracing both objectives implies – indeed, it presumes – the establishment of a new narrative that can withstand fierce opposition and broad skepticism, answer the people’s expectations and demands, and re-align American politics.  Nothing else will do.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

The program’s highlights include two name-taking essays, the book’s title piece and another (“Has Darwin Met His Match?”) from seven years later, presented along with full replies from most of the named and regiments of their supporters, and extensive rebuttals from the author. Giving the impression of deep familiarity with the professional and popular literature, and advancing his critique in a richly literary style, Berlinski argues that the Darwinists remain very far from demonstrating and evidencing how evolution via random mutation and natural selection could explain what the evolutionists claim it explains – that is, everything.

Berlinski’s ideas have been taken up by some Intelligent Design and Creationist writers and activists – including the sponsors of the Discovery Institute Press, which published this book – and that fact leads the Darwinists to accuse him, in brief, of the thought-crime of religious faith. The maneuver conveniently relieves them from confronting his argument on its own terms, particularly his denial that the only logical alternatives to Darwinian evolution are Biblical literalism and its cousins. The most you can say about Berlinski’s argument on this score – the argument he actually makes as opposed to the one he’s frequently assumed to be making – is that it points, insistently, to obviously “design-like” aspects of the natural world that no biologist has been able to explain except by childlike inferences, circular reasoning, and “just-so” stories – how this, that, or the other biological peculiarity might/must have served a survival purpose – and by scandalously oversold pseudo-experiments.

It’s true that one expression for the goal-seeking-ness, design-like-ness of life and everything else might be “God,” but “God” is a word, and in some ways we know as little about words as we know about… most stuff. A great lover of language once informed the world that the closer we look at a word, the further it recedes from view, and his wisdom seems to apply to biological processes, the origin of the universe, the human mind, and the divine, too.

For the non-scientist – as for some number of scientists, too – reaching a confident judgment on the underlying issues and disputes is impossible, but the responses of the Darwinists and other keepers of the faithless faiths tend to reinforce Berlinski’s argument: I’m happy to side provisionally with the debater who doesn’t rely on repetitious, ideologically rigid, churlishly defensive, and at times blatantly dishonest polemics. (Berlinski never touches on Climate Change, but the parallels with that debate are striking.) Maybe that’s a judgment from personal taste or political prejudice. Yet if we can’t really explain how the incredible yet inescapably fundamental complexity of a single functioning living cell arises and elaborates itself, armies of just-in-time enzymes translating intricately arranged protein instructions into vitality, then in the broad sense whatever else we know, or think we know, about the origins of higher organisms and ecosystems remains at root a narrative, a matter of taste or contingency, not a full-fledged theory in the same way that relativity and quantum mechanics are theories – good and tested to n decimals, as Berlinski likes to remind his readers.

If there are definitive answers or sets of answers to these questions that are both accessible to and discoverable by human beings, we don’t have them yet. We’re not really even close. By taking us step by step through our answerlessness, Berlinski restores wonder, mystery, and humility to the discussion – while pointing to whole continents of thought and knowledge hardly even visited, much less mapped and settled.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Generated by the Memeorandum Web Aggregator (Clipped as Found)

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

That tradition includes some things that have become accepted, largely uncontroversial features of American politics and culture – such as voting rights for women, the direct popular election of senators, and popular primary voting for party nominees. The tradition includes other things that most progressives would rather we all forget was their work – national income taxes, say, or prohibition of alcohol sale and consumption. And the tradition also includes immense political and economic commitments – like Medicare, Social Security, and the vast regulatory bodies of the state – that are a constant source of dispute and disagreement even among those who support their aims unreservedly.

But it’s not just or even mainly such measures – measure after measure after measure, good, bad, and indifferent, the vast majority expanding government at the expense of private initiative and investment – that progressives want to recall.  They also want to associate themselves, ahead of anyone else, with the good old very popular, very American idea of progress.

They want us to believe that they stand for progress, because they know that their fellow Americans believe in progress.  The know that America is the true home of progress, and America has welcomed and has given birth to more social, technological, economic, and political progress than any other country.

That, I believe, is what the great progressive Ronald Wilson Reagan had in mind whenever he spoke with his inimitable optimism about the American future.  It’s what made him able, in his last major political address, to respond to the Democrats’ empty calls for “change” by declaring to his fellow Republicans, “We are the change!“

I heard a gasp or two when I described the Gipper as a great progressive.  I’m not referring to President Reagan’s early years as a Democrat and a union leader, or to his admiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for whose importance most progressives wouldn’t consider a new face on Mount Rushmore grand enough – if they could, they’d carve up his own mountain for him.

Nor am I referring to President Reagan’s occasional dalliances with impure conservatism.

I’m referring to what Ronald Reagan recognized long before most people of his day, and what he meant when he told the nation 30 years ago, upon being inaugurated for his first term, “Government is the problem.”

Actually what he said was this, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Ronald Reagan didn’t pretend that there was no crisis in his day, or that he didn’t see any evidence of crisis, or that government is never the solution to problems.  His words rely on the opposite assumption, though we can leave it to scholars and historians to explain which crises Reagan believed government could solve.

Reagan also didn’t pretend that his political opponents lacked good intentions, that they didn’t want to solve the crisis.  What he realized, and in fact had long understood, and what he explained to the nation upon assuming the presidency, was that to progress - to venture unshackled into the future by “the problem,” which was actually a great complex of problems – we needed more than anything else for government to get out of the way.

Today, one decade into the 21st Century, more than 100 years since politicians in both parties and new parties first started marching under the banner of Progress,  we have every right, we need perhaps even more than Reagan did, to ask this question:  Where and what is the real source of progress?  Who, today, deserves to be considered “progressive”? Who really is ready, who really has the courage, imagination, and foresight, to embrace the future?  Who are the real progressives?

NEXT: On the Constitutionalist Response

cross-posted from Zombie Contentions

In politics, left-wing, leftist and the Left are generally used to describe support for social change with a view towards creating a more egalitarian society.[1][2] The terms Left and Right were coined during the French Revolution, referring to the seating arrangement in parliament; those who sat on the left generally supported the radical changes of the revolution, including the creation of a republic and secularization.[3] The concept of a political Left became more prominent after the June Days Uprising of 1848.

The term was applied to a number of revolutionary movements in Europe, especially socialism, anarchism[4] and communism. The term is also used to describe social democracy.[5] Roderick Long, an anarcho-capitalist professor, summarises left-wing politics as “concerns for worker empowerment, worry about plutocracy, concerns about feminism and various kinds of social equality”.[6]

Left-wing politics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So there you have it – born in revolution and radicalism, behind the great political alternatives, cooling into mere social democracy, and finally, in the words of something called an “anarcho-capitalist professor” (NTTAWWT) devolving into a set of “concerns” and an element of “worry” associated with a special interest issue agenda.  It’s like the scene in Casablanca, when the assorted freedom-lovers sing their hearts out against the Nazis, except it’s “La Marseillaise” vs. the Spongebob Squarepants theme song, and Spongebob wins.

How far the lowly have fallen…

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Pretty picture with arrows and blobs

Seems the world’s coming to an end, again. Seems we’re all doomed, again. It’s your fault, again. Don’t know how you can live with yourself, this time.

The Warmists are perspiring, as they do, over a report from University of Fairbanks researcher Natalia Shakhova indicating that methane has been leaking in some rather unimaginable way from certain unimaginable structures known as clathrates, located in the unimaginable seabed in the unimaginable super-Siberian arctic.

Having read a science fiction novel several years ago in which these clathrates were accidentally disturbed (an errant missile barrage, as I recall), causing a total destabilization of world weather patterns and an incidence of civilization-wrecking super-hurricanes (superduper mama hurricanes giving birth to baby super-hurricanes) and other stuff, I feel qualified to report that this isn’t that quite yet.

Some amount, possibly large, of something, but a small amount compared to other amounts of other things, is entering the atmosphere by some unimaginable process, in unimaginable quantities that may or may not lead to temperature change of some uncertain but possibly significant significance. It could very well have been caused by the action of global warming – heating the oceans, melting things that God or Darwin meant to stay frozen.

This possibly resultant possible release of methane may be something new and catastrophically catastrophic, more worrisome than worry itself, and it therefore deserves, in Dr. Shakhova’s opinion, urgent monitoring. Whether Dr. Shakhova’s department would be involved intimately with this monitoring activity, for years if not decades, is not stated in the reporting.

On the other hand, this release of methane may not be anything new, it seems, reports a skeptical German scientist. It may have been going on for a very long time. Very long. Not a long time if considered in relation to measures of time on greater scales, but quite long compared to lesser-scaled ones.

Young leftwing experts on everything and committed climate alarmists are up in arms about it – or would be, if they weren’t generally anti-”arms” – and their commenters are downright fortumulous, where not beschnaggered.

No one else cares or believes, or likely will care or believe, until and unless bears give birth to hares, oxes give birth to foxes, and the faces on Mt. Rushmore weep tears of human blood. That is the state of things post-Climategate, post-Glacier-gate, post-IPCC-horndog-gate, etc. That may not be a good state of things, compared to some other states of things, or then again, that may have been the way things always were, or at least for a very long time. Very long. Not a long time compared to measures of time on greater scales, but quite long compared to lesser-scaled ones.

Intellectual humility leads me to note that this one may be THE ONE, the problem, the overturning, the singular bad thing. I don’t know. I don’t claim to know. A choir of angels could sing the truth to me, and I still wouldn’t know. And neither would you.

However, if THIS is IT, the Mother of Storms, then all of the other stuff – the incredibly convenient INCONVENIENT TRUTH, IPCC reports, 2020 targets, cap’n'crunch, and all the rest – has been even more a super-colossal waste of time than even the most committed climate skeptic would have said, because the effect will have been a gross crying of wolf on a global scale. If this one, or the next one, is the real climate wolf – there’s a likelihood of that somewhere between zero and certain, inclusive, is my assumption – a lot of sheep are going to get eaten – and then the real fun will start, and it won’t have much to do with the IPCC, 2020 targets, or cap’n'crunch.

cross posted at Zombie Contentions

How is it dehumanizing invective to refer to progressivist political ideology as a cancer on the American polity? It would be one thing to say the metaphor is inapt. I don’t think it is, but one could argue the case dispassionately. Another criticism that wouldn’t necessarily be a reach would be that it’s hyperbolic. Again, I don’t think it is. I am convinced that progressivism is antithetical to limited, constitutional government. I think Beck is correct that progressivism and limited, constitutional government can’t coexist. One of them has to recede, be defeated, dissolve over time. They can’t occupy the same space.

[...]

I really don’t see what’s out-of-bounds about putting this in metaphorical terms as the operation of a “cancer.” Is it the metaphor, or the basic proposition, that you find so offensive…?

Well – both – except that I never expected anyone to care whether I personally was offended by GB and the to me unfortunate resonances of his rhetoric. My concerns initially were that Beck’s approach might be politically counterproductive and potentially dangerous, and that it would be rightly taken as offensive and extreme, or just plain nuts, by others. I see no gain in making Frank Rich and David Neiwert look relatively reasonable, however briefly. I am equally concerned, however, about how “the basic proposition” may be taken and acted upon by us – by conservatives.

Liberty - Under Construction

Setting aside some important differences between J.E. and Beck, I fundamentally disagree with their characterization of the struggle before us – as a matter of theory, because I do not believe that progressivism, so broadly defined, could ever be completely eradicated; and, as a matter of practical politics, because I believe that total war with progressivism is neither practical nor desirable. I believe that such a war would fail, and, in failing, be highly destructive to those who fought it. Furthermore, as a missed opportunity, it would be tragic.

Contrary to Beck and J.E., I see little difficulty in “co-existing” with a conservative progressivism. J.E. defines progressivism as “antithetical” to constitutional conservatism, but even that definition suggests a relationship of mutual dependency, not a fight to the death – a dialectical yin and yang of the sort that the American system and the Constitution itself were designed to synthesize and re-synthesize, not to settle perfectly and forever. The Founders were not utopian fantasists.

Those who have lately been using the word “progressive” as a curse word, or who have been using “progressive,” “statist,” and “liberal” interconnectedly and even interchangeably, may refuse to believe that an authentically conservative progressivism could even exist except as some demon sheep in wolf’s clothing. Others may identify progressivism with the tedious nostrums of Barack Obama, the legislative misbirths of Reid and Pelosi, the musty interest group agenda of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, or the pretty vicious rants of sundry nutroots bloggers. Yet as I’ve participated in discussions inspired by the “War on Progressivism” – to use my co-blogger adam k’s term – I’ve increasingly seen a conservative progressivism, a radical reform conservatism, traced out as the course conservatives have been, will be, and in my opinion should be following in response to the challenges of our times.

McCain-Palin '08 - "Alaska Maverick"

A lifelong independent, I voted with enthusiasm, if in the end not much hope, for the conservative progressivism represented by the McCain-Palin ticket of ’08 – the “original mavericks” dynamic duo that briefly held the national polling lead before being overwhelmed by the politics of the financial crisis. Since that election, the Republican center has moved further to the right, allowing us to reverse the order of the two terms (just as many would have been happy to invert the ticket): I will therefore say that I was cheered by the recent progressive conservative victories of Bob McDonnell, Chris Christie, and Scott Brown, just as, earlier in 2009, I was cheered by the use that California voters made, in one of the first practical political expressions of Tea Party sentiment, of the ballot initiative process to reject tax proposals and instead require budget cuts.

Those who are unfamiliar with, or who have been too distracted to recall, the positive narrative of progressivism may not recognize that citizen referenda were a centerpiece of genuine Progressive Era reform. They may not realize that, when they support ballot initiatives to pass tax reform, restrict public services to illegal immigrants, defend traditional marriage, recall out-of-control liberal officials, and so on, they are walking down a path marked out by the original progressives – the real ones, from back when progressivism was progressive, before it was melded with statism in the cauldron of megalomania, world war, and global depression.

Rising figures in the national Republican Party, the leading New Republicans, fit neatly within this progressive conservative framework. Representative Paul Ryan comes from the ancestral home of progressivism, Wisconsin. His Roadmap is, among other things, a courageously ambitious yet pragmatic blueprint for reform, intended to bring government, including a longstanding societal commitment to care for the elderly and vulnerable, closer to the people, for the sake of greater efficiency and effectiveness, alongside the destruction of undemocratic and corrupting concentrations of power – all foundationally, capital-”P” Progressive goals.

The difference between Ryan’s progressivism and Obama-Pelosi-Reid’s is that it leads to less state, not more; greater individual freedom, not less. The Democrats, Progressives in Name Only, remain committed, as they have been since Professor-President Woodrow Wilson, to the latest and greatest intellectual fashions of the year 1900 – from the eugenics and “scientific” racism that live on in Planned Parenthood and obsessive race consciousness, to the illusory advantages of administrative giantism. Republicans like Ryan have assumed the liberating, decentralizing spirits of our age, understanding in a way that the first progressives couldn’t how choice and markets on the human scale organize themselves more efficiently, productively, creatively, and equitably than centralized bureaucratic structures can.

Not too long ago, a guy talking about major reform of entitlements along the Roadmap’s lines would have been laughed out of “serious” politics as a dreamer. That he’s instead the Republican people are listening to is, for lack of a better word, progress.

There are many other New Republicans who might deserve mention in this context, but it’s worth returning to Governor Palin, the focus of so much unhinged wrath from the progressive pretenders. The story of Palin’s rise reads like a classic fable of first wave progressivism, only more so, in that she represents in her person a dream that the Progressive Era Suffragettes could only dimly envision. To her credit, she has openly and gratefully acknowledged her debt to them – as in her speech at Dayton, accepting the VP nomination, “88 years almost to the day after the women of America first gained the right to vote.”   She had earlier assumed the governorship as the tribune of a mass democratic demand for ethical reform and the defeat of deeply entrenched and just as deeply corrupt political forces – the “old boys network” and its very old-fashioned, very 19th Century patronage machine. One of her favorite words – though her coaches may yet get her to drop it – is “progress,” which, uniquely, she uses as a transitive verb.

It was in this mode that Governor Palin was introduced to the nation – the “Alaska Maverick” who bucked the system. Unlike any of her current rivals within the Republican Party, and very few outside of it, that Sarah Palin commanded majority support in national polls from an electorate desperate for change.

As governor and vice-presidential candidate (before the squalls hit), Palin embodied authentic, classic progressive politics at its revitalized best. Like Ryan, she shows that progressivism does not belong to one side. At its inception, progressivism was neither rightwing nor leftwing, neither elite nor popular, neither religious nor secular, neither statist nor libertarian. It was all of those things and more – and it has never been a single, coherent, fully self-contained political philosophy that could be isolated and safely extracted from the American body politic.

Progressivism simply stood for the determination on the part of countless people, most of whose names have been forgotten, to address the great ills of the age – conditions of life, work, and political affairs that few reading this essay can realistically imagine. It was propelled among other things by crusading journalists – some of them a bit reminiscent of certain contemporary talk-jocks and TV hosts exposing the gross inequities and hypocrisies of our times. It was spread by deeply patriotic citizen activists, many of them involved in politics and insisting on their right to be counted for the first time, ignoring ridicule from the elites of their day: I can’t help but be reminded of the Tea Partiers.

As noted in regard to ballot initiatives, the original progressives believed in direct democracy. Some, like T.R. in his failed third party bid to re-take the presidency, even called for national referenda and recall of federal officials as a check on misgovernment. Today’s self-styled progressives, by contrast, call upon a partisan congressional delegation to ignore popular sentiment and pass a massive Health Care Bill negotiated with a raft of special interests. It’s fallen to conservatives to respond with a cry of “Here, the People rule!”

Freedom - Under Repair

Modern American liberalism can be defined as “statist progressivism,” “elitist progressivism.” Its end point isn’t the freely expressed popular will, but the ossified bureaucratic state – or worse. This line of development now having run its course into profound exhaustion, liberalism has turned its version of progressivism into its own opposite, a contradiction in terms: reactionary progressivism, progressive stasis – Obamaism.

Radical reform conservatism on the rise – as in 1994, as in 1980 – drives leftwing reactionaries out of their minds. It doesn’t depend on enemy conspiracies and caricatured scapegoats, but instead unites people from the center to the right around a pragmatic and desperately necessary, yet innovative and even visionary, agenda – rescuing the progressive spirit from those who have turned it into a mere statist prop. It could triumph in 2010 and beyond. We can know that, because we can see it already winning.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

But I think her question deserves an answer.

It was, of course, William Bennett, writing over the weekend at NRO, who first spoke up loudly and incisively in reaction to Beck’s performance at CPAC. He focused on one of Beck’s customary themes:

To say the GOP and the Democrats are no different, to say the GOP needs to hit a recovery-program-type bottom and hang its head in remorse, is to delay our own country’s recovery from the problems the Democratic left is inflicting. The stakes are too important to go through that kind of exercise, which will ultimately go nowhere anyway…

Jonah Goldberg replied at NRO along somewhat the same lines as J.E., stressing that, if Beck may have overdone things, it was to motivate the troops and scare the wayward straight. Soon, however, Peter Wehner was joining his colleague Jennifer Rubin to second Bennett, and in addition was raising the ante: “If Glenn Beck were the future of conservatism,” he wrote, “it would become a discredited movement.”

Wehner went on to disclaim much concern about either part of that proposition, but, by the beginning of the week, both Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin were each worried enough to devote significant attention both on- and off-air to Beck and his arguments. Levin’s Facebook entry was particularly cutting, concluding with this stark assessment of Beck’s “third way” politics: “These are perilous times and this kind of approach will keep the statists in power for decades.” Some have suggested that Levin’s dislike for Beck is personal, or based on professional jealousy, and similar attacks have been made on his other critics, but these are serious and substantive arguments, and they go well beyond mere annoyance.

So the answer to the amplified question might be this: The point of expressing dismay with Glenn Beck is to get him to re-think his approach, or, failing that, to separate conservatism, at a crucial political moment, from his excesses.

You can be a fan of Glenn Beck’s – you might even be Glenn Beck himself – and acknowledge that his rhetoric is sometimes irresponsible. You can be thankful to Glenn Beck for his contributions to American conservatism – for helping to keep the political flame alive, even build it, during a bleakly dark time – and yet still wonder whether, going forward, his pet themes, favorite arguments, and customary stances aren’t counterproductive and divisive, where not embarrassing. In short, you can agree with everything J.E. wrote, yet still be concerned about the way that Glenn Beck habitually brings vindictive hatred and a self-destructive and dangerous extremism into conservative discourse.

As someone who at least halfway listens to Beck’s TV show almost every weekday, I well recognize that he and his fans are more used to getting this kind of thing from the likes of Arianna Huffington or Media Matters robots than from conservative bloggers. But please check the transcript of his CPAC speech (or cue the video to 5:20): Nearly the first words out of his mouth were “I have to tell you, I hate Woodrow Wilson with everything in me…” (emphasis added). Defenders of Beck’s will be quick to point out that the words were obviously offered in self-consciously exaggerated good humor, as you will see if you view the video, and note the smile on Beck’s face. Furthermore, he was jokingly responding to a specific statement from David Keene’s introduction, in which, while congratulating Beck for conduction a national political seminar, Keene referred to having written an article in college naming Wilson, along with Hitler and Lenin, as one of “the three most dangerous people of the 20th Century.”

Now, jesting about one’s hatred for a relatively remote historical figure, even a duly elected president, wouldn’t amount to much on its own – who cares how anyone feels about Millard Fillmore? – but any Beck viewer or listener knows that, hard as it may be for the uninitiated to believe, Beck is joking on the square here. Indeed, he has seemed obsessed with exposing a purported clear and very present danger of progressivism, which he identifies both with historical figures like Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Margaret Sanger, and with modern day progressives like the Republican 2008 presidential candidate or our current Secretary of State. (If you happened to watch Beck’s hour-long New York harborscape interview with Sarah Palin, then you might recall her reluctance to respond to his anti-progressive spiel, especially when applied to her former running mate. Beck later described her demeanor as remarkably “guarded” – as against criticism from her legion of detractors. My personal opinion is that, though she likes Beck and wishes to appeal to his fans, her political antennae, and perhaps her common sense and personal decency, were functioning efficiently.)

When Beck inveighs hatefully against Woodrow Wilson, he’s also inveighing against John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and many millions of other people, in both parties, and I would question the honesty of any regular Beck viewer who denied the evident fierceness of Beck’s feelings on this subject. If you think I’m exaggerating, then how do you explain away statements like the following, also from the CPAC keynote?

Progressivism is the cancer in America and it is eating our Constitution. And it was designed to eat the Constitution. To progress past the Constitution.

…and, again on cancer, while reacting to a statement of Theodore Roosevelt’s on income inequality:

[T]his is not our founders’ idea of America. And this is the cancer that’s eating at America.

(applause)

It is big government – it’s a socialist utopia. And we need to address it as if it is a cancer. It must be cut out of the system because they cannot co-exist. And you don’t cure cancer by – well, I’m just going to give you a little bit of cancer. You must eradicate it. It cannot co-exist. And we need big thinkers, and brave people with spines who can make the case – that can actually say to Americans: look it’s going to be hard – it’s going to be hard but it’s going to be okay. We’re going to make it.

This kind of language is not just exaggerated (and cliché): It’s pure demagogy, and it’s dehumanizing. Beck’s delivery and self-deprecation take the edge off… and I’ll now refrain from making the kind of historical reference that I tend to doubt Beck himself, in my place, would resist – much. I’ll just ask you to imagine the above with a few exclamation points, hand gestures, and a throbbing throng of the newly educated – live and in person, not across a warm TV screen.

Even before we look at progressivism and decide which features we can and should do without, and which not, at least anytime soon, short of Apocalypse or Harmonic Convergence; before we consider realistic prospects and priorities; before we look up Burke or Kirk or Goldwater or Reagan or whichever gospels in search of first principles; before we even know whether we’re attacking 100 years of policy or 100 years of thinking, or perhaps, in fact, an outlook exactly as old as human civilization and integral to it; before we ask ourselves whether the Founders, or Lincoln, or the Greatest Generation, or Reagan, weren’t in critical regards the progressive revolutionaries or evolutionaries of their day; before we ask whether Glenn Beck himself isn’t advocating a totalized utopian crusade against a social ill he calls progressivism; before we ask whether the absolute eradication and uncompromising, social-political surgical extirpation of a creed or ideology can ever be an American, a democratic and republican, project – we can say one thing with certainty about a perspective that defines the enemies among our fellow citizens and the terms of the struggle as Beck’s (often) does:

It’s not conservative.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Look, anything for the team and, up against Obama, for a win. Petraeus is said to be registered R, but of the nearly extinct Northeastern genus Rockefellerus (i.e., David Frum, only more so), but ticket-balancing has a long tradition behind it. Ronald Wilson Reagan himself gave us VP and President George Herbert Walker Voodoo Economics Read My Lips (Fooled Ya!) Bush, and had thought it was a bright idea in ’76 to bring liberal Senator Richard Schweiker onto his proposed presidential ticket.

But some observations, based on watching the General on Meet the Press this morning:

• He thinks Iran is “a ways” away from a nuclear weapon, and favors our continuing the “pressure track” that we’re now on. Not the slightest hint of impatience with the current administration’s engagement policy – instead, words that in effect approve of it, as laying the pretext to unspecified future action.
• He clearly opposes detainee interrogation methods that go beyond the Army Field Manual, believing they eventually end up “biting us on the backside,” and also aren’t necessary. And he explicitly favors closing Guantanamo, though isn’t “seized” with the notion that it must be closed by any certain date.
• He likes to deflect difficult or potentially controversial questions – such as the ones above, also on “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and on Mullah Baradar’s capture and interrogation – by referring to orderly, methodical processes, or by methodically explaining why it would be out of order for him to answer.
• He doesn’t say “Pock-ee-stan,” but he does say “Pah-ki-stan” – not “Pack-i-stan” like all red-blooded American conservatives…

It’s not completely inconceivable that such a man – such an intelligent, orderly, methodical, possibly a great man – could win a presidential election, if he cared to run or was drafted, but the character of the race and the circumstances surrounding it would have to be different than any we’ve seen in a very long time. Think total breakdown of law and order or so.

Leaving aside the fact that his views, if any, on fiscal policy, the size of government, taxes, and other key issues including social issues remain unknown, purely considering his main area of expertise, if he weren’t a successful, competent, and famous general, I don’t think the Republican Party of our times, or certainly the conservative wing, would want him anywhere near a presidential ticket, at the top or the bottom. When you pair him with a solid conservative candidate, even speculatively, even just for fun, you’re mainly highlighting the perceived deficiencies of that candidate – a lack of confidence in his or her appeal or credibility.

I will say this for the General: If he placed himself foursquare behind a major political objective – say, restoring the fundamentals of the American economy beginning with a real reduction in the size of government and a rationalization and re-conception of taxation and regulatory schemes, an objective that has largely eluded national conservatives despite generations of argument and campaigning – I’d trust him more than almost any other major American public figure to approach it methodically and in an orderly manner, and maybe even achieve it when no one else could.

But I also believe him when he says he’s not interested in running for office.

cross-adapted from Zombie Contentions

Beinart takes a long look in the column at the Obama campaign, which around that time was finishing Hillary Clinton off, then moves to the argument that became familiar to all close observers of the presidential race:

It is this remarkable hybrid campaign, far more than Obama’s thin legislative résumé, that should reassure voters that he can run the government.

Beinart proceeds without transition to a sentence that, with Obamamania a distant memory, today reads as a non sequitur:

As president, he’ll need to keep his supporters mobilized: It will take a grass-roots movement, breathing down Congress’s neck, to pass universal health care.

If Beinart ever believed this sentence, then he should have been among the first people to declare ObamaCare dead.  In part because the President himself never pursued the kind of strategy likely to engage the leftwing grass-roots, but more because a fad and a fervor are not the same thing as a political movement, and just as much because the political terrain had rather radically shifted between April 2008 and January 2009, there was no prospect of sustained neck-downbreathing  of the sort Beinart was imagining – except, as we have seen, coming from people a lot more agitated about the economy and fiscal madness.

But in dealing with those very supporters, he’ll also have to be ruthless so as not to get caught up in the kind of side skirmishes, such as gays in the military…

…or maybe detainee treatment and interrogation?

…that weakened Bill Clinton early on. Obama’s experience whipping up support on MySpace while simultaneously tamping it down is exactly the kind he’ll need in the Oval Office.

Uh… yeah.  Persuading overenthusiastic sympathizers to shut down a web page… truly a profile in courage, vision, and executive decision-making that George Washington himself could have learned from.

Approaching the finale:

…if Obama can come across as idealistic without being moralistic, if he can keep his supporters’ spirits high and their expectations in check, if he can fuse exuberance and discipline, he might just run the government pretty well.

Instead, Obama has come across as cynical and hypocritical, built up his supporters’ expectations while leaving the hard work to everyone else and agitating the opposition, fused overexposure and underperformance, and set all-time records for loss of popularity in a first year, leaving his party in disarray.

That won’t be easy, but then, neither is running for president. Just ask Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

Looks like figuring out the difference between running a campaign and leading a nation may not be very easy either… if you’re mesmerized by your own wishful thinking.  Just ask Peter Beinart.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

I also wonder just how pissed off Hunter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic as well as one of our best genre writers, is about what Mark Wahlberg and company did to his work when they turned the first Bob Lee Swagger novel, Point of Impact, into the only slightly better than barely watchable movie Shooter. Yet Hunter’s audacity – from an opening series of fictional assassinations of characters obviously based on well-known leftwing celebrities, to a climax built around the exposure and destruction of yet another such figure – makes up in large part for a lack of genre-level seriousness, and longtime fans will find more than enough Swaggering good-guy-ism propelled by mind-boggling detail work to read the story with apolitical satisfaction.

Anyway, most of Hunter’s readers, I suspect, will feel more like standing up and cheering than giving up on the book when they encounter speeches like the one about the “all-powerful… narrative [that] rules us… rules Washington… rules everything”:

“The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide ‘These are the lies we tell today.’ No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they’ve chosen to live their lives. It’s a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was [expletive] up, torture never works, and mad Vietnam sniper Carl Hitchcock killed the saintly peace demonstrators. Cheney’s a devil, Biden’s a genius. Soft power good, hard power bad. Forgiveness excellent, punishment counterproductive, capital punishment a sin.”

Could have been ripped from a rightroots blog.

excerpted/adapted from Zombie Contentions

The by-word is “unsustainable,” though even those who use it most frequently, from the President to Senator Judd Gregg, seem to have a hard time explaining what it means in concrete terms. Maybe it’s because no one really knows. Maybe that should make it scarier.

Left unspoken but strongly implied in Samuelson’s response is that political paralysis is making that worst case scenario seem more and more like the most likely scenario. It’s hard to interpret his harsh critique of the Democrats’ reaction to Ryan in any other way:

Ryan is trying to start a conversation on the desirable role and limits of government. He’s trying to make it possible to talk about sensitive issues — mainly Social Security and Medicare — without being vilified. President Obama recognized that when he called Ryan’s plan a “serious proposal.” But since then, Democrats have resorted to ritualistic denunciations of him as pillaging Social Security and Medicare. Legitimate debate becomes impossible. If Democrats don’t like Ryan’s vision, the proper response is to design and defend their own plan. The fact that they don’t have one is a national embarrassment.

Samuelson doesn’t spell things out, but the implications of that paragraph are stark.  Since the Democrats remain in power, if not exactly in “control,” an inability to engage in a “legitimate debate” seems rather worse than embarrassing.  It would suggest that no coherent and meaningful response to looming national bankruptcy will be possible anytime soon.  It further suggests that, at best, we’ll continue to get posturing, positioning, empty talk, and tinkering around the edges – until the day (the weeks, the months, the years) that financial chaos forces us to act in desperation.

Kim Strassel is even more critical of the Democrats for how they’ve responded to Ryan, but she stresses that other Republicans can’t afford to stand aside, figuratively holding his coat:

Should Republicans take back the House this year, or the White House in 2012, they will own giant deficits and runaway entitlements. Reality will force choices. They will either have to embrace politically tough ideas like those included in Mr. Ryan’s plan, or flail through, doing nothing or succumbing to bigger government.

The longer the GOP hides or runs from those reforms, the harder it will be to embrace them later. Instead of spending so much time telling the press that Mr. Ryan’s road map is not the “official” GOP plan, the party would be better off asking themselves why it isn’t. If Mr. Obama is so eager for a debate about who is more serious about the country’s future, they should give it to him.

If only they were ready to do so.

Samuelson believes that the solution will eventually require both sides to give on the positions that have defined them for a generation or more.  “Any sound proposal,” he asserts, “would include greater tax increases than conservatives like and greater spending cuts than liberals like.”  It’s of course no coincidence that the two positions also define the dysfunctional consensus that many believe has brought us to this point:  More services and ever-rising disbursements, but relatively low taxes, hence structural deficits, alongside a hope that economic growth or clever financing (or clever financing made to look like economic growth) can make up the difference – ’til kingdom come.

If Samuelson, Strassel, and all of the other unsustainable-ists are right, then kingdom’s just about here.  Yet conservatives seem set to resist any “taxes for cuts” compromise.  As long as they perceive themselves already on the way back to power, they have little political reason to accept the Samuelson alternative.  Even Ryan’s audacity – not just touching the famous “Third Rail” of American politics but hopping up and down on it – doesn’t extend to any open embrace of revenue enhancements except very quietly through the backdoor – via a radically simpler and presumably less loophole-ridden tax code.

Many conservatives will continue to insist that there is a classic “supply side” exit ramp from fiscal crisis (lower taxes and restored high growth quickly leading to higher revenues). I’m not here to declare that position wrong, but perhaps we can acknowledge that Samuelson might still be right about the politically easiest and, on current terms, most likely path: A typical high level, bipartisan, commission-adjudicated compromise that merely requires cooperation from the left, rather than total victory.  This path of least resistance is probably what waiting for a worsening crisis or banking on business-as-usual implies (which isn’t to say that it will work very well). On the other hand, if conservatives reject this middle way, yet also expect to re-gain and hold credibility on debt and deficits – or, if worse comes to worst, cope with ahead-of-schedule financial collapse – then the alternatives to Ryan’s Roadmap generally consist of even more radical measures, leaving even less excuse to be afraid of the discussion.

If the rise of the Tea Party – whose key national advocate Sarah Palin has been unrestrained in her praise of Ryan – is any indication, the people may be a lot readier to think and act anew than most of our politicians, in either party. The perceived failure of the Democrats to lead may be handing the Republicans an epochal opportunity not just to win elections, but to change the terms of our national discussion. In that sense, making it possible to look at Ryan’s Roadmap in the political light of day, to face its implications squarely and even think beyond them, might be a greater and more important accomplishment than taking back congress and even the White House.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Your post-Tea Party Nation publicity wave is still cresting, carrying your most ardent supporters and even some of your most determined enemies to new heights of exaggeration – hype piling high to the skies, it often seems. Apparently, you’re a genius who scrawled those notes on your hand knowing they’d be picked up, kerfuffled, and widely propagated. You may even be the embodiment of the Kabalistic Shekhinah, the human dwelling-place of divine joy (or something…):

Between right and left

the Bride approaches,

in holy jewels

and festive garments…

In this context, an ABC/WaPo poll putting your negatives very high, belief in your qualifications very low, is also a gift – pulling expectations back toward ground level, and preserving your underdog status even while David Broder urges us to take you seriously, or while Joe Klein for once puts the praise, however briefly and deceptively, above the usual fear-mongering and derision.

Chris Cillizza is also riding the “Palin surge,” but by arguing that it’s “overblown.” He points to that same poll and to the strengths of potential competitors, yet he may just be making the same mistake as leftwing data-cruncher and fellow Palinmania surfer Nate Silver – from the other direction. Both are asking and answering a question that no one in his or her right mind should be asking about a primary race two years away: What’s Palin’s “primary math” and best strategy to gain the GOP nomination in 2012? This question isn’t just premature: That anyone is even asking it makes for another birthday acclamation, but, all the same, it’s intrinsically malformed, since it attempts to envision a conventional race for the most unconventional major political figure of our time, one of the most unconventional we’ve seen.

Whether or not you think Cillizza, Silver, Broder, my Kabbalah-inspired colleague, or any other wave-rider including me is over- or underestimating Palin’s current and potential strengths, there’s something wrong with any analysis of Palin’s prospects that overlooks her main chance, her main justification for running, and quite possibly her main hope of accomplishing very much if somehow elected: The prospect of a “sweep the pieces off the board” election, not the traditional chess match. Even Broder’s comparison to past “outsider” candidates looks like faint praise indeed when you consider how little was accomplished by most of them. Even the outsider above all outsiders, Ronald Wilson Reagan, arguably achieved less in the realms of economics and domestic policy than Palin’s Tea Party revolutionaries – the Tea Party is first and foremost a revolutionary symbol – are demanding.

In anything short of a second American civil war, Silver’s analysis may still be somewhat useful, and Cillizza’s informed counter-insights suggestive, but, assuming continued or accelerated development roughly along current lines – Obama failing and flailing, Palin and the Tea Party on the rise, the center shifted decisively right and political energies even more decisively anti-business-as-usual – Palin’s path may look a lot different.  It would likely be pushed – by positive and, considering the likely reaction, negative influences and feedback – well away from any track marked out by ’08 exit polls, ’09 fundraising figures, and 2010 guesstimates.

Call this the “Perot Squared” scenario, or maybe “Twilight of the Liberal-Progressive Gods.” It’s understandable that a circle of mainstream and leftwing, and mainstream-leftwing observers would discount the likelihood of such a turn of events. There’s no way to tease it from the numbers or frame it in familiar terms (though they’ll try, and try, and try…). It would represent the extension, possibly the culmination, of a broad historical process, not a familiar repetition of the usual four-year cycle. Any arguably similar events taken from American or world history will be, to say the least, resistant to direct statistical or theoretical conversion.

In addition to seeming the safer bet, it’s got to be comforting to many to imagine that by 2012 American politics will have reverted to the recent historical norm, and such a presumption may also lend comfort to those Republicans who might prefer a more traditional candidate than the thrilla from Wasilla – though for the latter group it probably shouldn’t. Among other things, it tends to imply the likely re-election of the incumbent president.

In the meantime, the same factors that are forcing observers suddenly to take Palin seriously have to throw all of their calculations, their very modes of calculation, into doubt. She (or what she represents, not necessarily Palin herself as future contender) rises as they fall, and she doesn’t have to reach orbit to move a lot here on Earth.

cross-adapted from Zombie Contentions

Glancing at the title of an Andrew Sullivan post – “One Last Word” – linked at Memeorandum Saturday night, I knew it had to be about Sarah Palin’s Tea Party Nation keynote speech.

My guess was that he’d gotten busy yesterday, summoning his personal Palin demons and holding a tea party of his own with them. Considering the infernal depths of his Palin obsession, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was his 10th post of the day on her. Nor would I have been surprised if it had been even more foully offensive, deluded, and craven than the most recent previous piece of his I happened to see excerpted, one in which he went on as usual about things he doesn’t understand and that only he and said demons take seriously regarding Palin and her infant son Trig.

I confess, however, that the title made me hope, just a little, that Sullivan had finally done the right thing: Take an extended, indefinite leave of absence, possibly involving intensive psychotherapy and spiritual counseling – leaving “One Last Word” as his farewell – but, no, as expected, the post turned out to be about Palin. Oddly enough, however, it was something that a Palin supporter might actually enjoy – assuming an ability to read between the lines of Sullivan’s obscene melodrama and paranoid bigotry.

Promising to assess Palin as a potential presidential candidate, Sullivan first stretches for familiar “conservatives = Nazis” tropes of the sort that the invocation of “Godwin’s Law” was once meant to banish from web conversation, among other things equating Palin’s criticism of Obama as commander-in-chief with the Hitlerian “stab in the back” attack on the post-World War I German left: Hitler accusing the German left of treason and losing the Great War = raising questions about Obama Administration detainee treatment policy. Put simply: In the Sulliverse, any criticism of the great and wonderful Ø’s war leadership = Nazism.

Sullivan then turns to the good stuff: an at least somewhat grounded analysis of Palin as potential presidential candidate:

…there is a huge constituency out there (rightly) outraged by Washington corruption and she now has the critical mantle of the rogue outsider; she can channel Christianism and fuse it with the slogans of phony “fiscal conservatism”; she will blame every lost job on Obama; and she will accuse him of betraying the troops and befriending America’s enemies. Behind her are the Cheneyites.

Above all, she is capable of generating a personality cult – much, much more so than Obama, because she can harness Christianism to her divine destiny. The power of this kind of appeal – of a charismatic, beautiful woman, an icon of the pro-life cause, persecuted by the evil elites, demonized by libruls, and commanding the biggest military on earth – should not in my view be under-estimated.

Know fear.

It might almost be worth translating the above paragraphs into sane, but I suspect that anyone who has read this far can play that game at home. Conservatives, and sufficiently numerous members of the American electorate for conservatives to win elections, have become rather adept at exegesis of this type. This ain’t complicated. These aren’t the historico-political allegories embedded in The Lord of the Rings or Revelation, and conservatives can fall back on nearly 50 years of practice, since “libruls” have been reflexively painting conservatives as “extremists,” and shouting “The end is near!” at least since the anti-Goldwater campaign of 1964 – when a single famous line of Goldwater’s, and the liberals’ own epochal political success, helped to fuse the terms “conservative” and “extremist” together in the liberal mind and Democrat playbook.

Sullivan’s fear-mongering, literal fear-mongering, itself seems a bit frightening in the larger context of politicized Palin hatred – it only takes a Sullivan with a gun to make this psychosis real – but too little he says in general makes enough sense for anything he says in particular to be taken very seriously. For the same reason, it may be too much to attribute balanced judgment to Sullivan regarding Palin’s political potential. Still, I think he’s right that Palinism has immense potential. But anyone can see that now.

We’re left to pray, perhaps to our “Christianist” God – why not? – that Sullivan and his followers keep to themselves with their pathetic emotionalism. It would be a shame if they hurt anyone, even themselves. Otherwise, people so wounded in spirit and intellect have little to offer and are not themselves much to be afraid of.

They don’t count for much, but their collective fear does smell a bit like victory for the taking…

* * *

One last note: “One Last Word” wasn’t a last word, at all, naturally. Today, Sullivan is “talking to the hand,” along with a circle of like-minded bloggers (if “minded” can ever be the right word with these people) about notes that Palin may have inked into her palm for the Q&A session at Tea Party Nation last night. I hope that the nutroots continue to push this absurdly and indicatively trivial line of attack, since it makes Palin look like just what she is – refreshingly human and informal, determined to get the job done – and incidentally reminds everyone about which leading politician (if “leading” can be used in this context) is truly reliant on external devices to express himself, word by wearisome word.

Furthermore, you can’t bring up this event without bringing up those three main points, on all of which Palin, the Tea Party, and conservatives have much more popular positions than the HuffPo and ThinkProgress and Daily Dish left. It’s free publicity for the Palin program every virtual second it’s discussed and re-transmitted.

If the pseudo-scandal becomes widely enough known, we may someday see crowds of everyday Americans inking such useful reminders – “energy,” “taxes,” “lift America’s spirits” – into their hands, and proudly waving them at Palin rallies, or photographing and t-shirting them. The first example I’ve seen of such spin-offs was linked at HotAir by commenter Emperor Norton, and is shown at the top of this post.

Like Sullivan’s frightwig of a commentary, what this micro-controversy says to me is that she’s got them in the palm of her hand, she’s crushing them, and there’s not much they seem able to do about it. They can’t help it. The more they struggle, the worse it is for them. You almost have to wonder if they like it that way…

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

The Lambinator

Jim Geraghty, one of the first to react to Carlyfornia’s instant classic “Demon Sheep” web ad, calling it “genius” and possibly “the Greatest Campaign Web Video of All Time,” has expanded on his thinking, which, like the ad itself, left many observers scratching their heads.

Geraghty provides a short review of the ad – stressing its strikingly bizarre juxtapositions of terminator werewolves in sheep’s clothing alongside conventional political messages, but if anything he under-plays the mini-movie’s aesthetic and narrative dislocations (an effect which he originally termed “psychedelic”). “Demon Sheep,” aka “FCINO: Fiscal Conservative in Name Only,” aka “#demonsheep: OMG – have you seen this ad?” is the El Topo, the Putney Swope, the Andalusian Dog, the Videodrome of campaign ads, at once so hilarious and yet mind-bending that I can’t bring myself to watch it a second time – not for fear of the lambinator, but because my brain is still stuck in a regressive thought-loop in which a manically chomping sheep is intercut with images of Tom Campbell while a seethingly hostile narrator addresses the latter like the Saw -killer or maybe Hannibal Lecter probing for soul-searing represssed memories, buried crimes, and moral terror.

Addressing the political tactical rationale for the ad, Geraghty stresses that it “instantly broke through a very noisy and crowded political environment, and got almost everyone who watched it to drop what they were doing and call their political junkie friends and say, ‘You have got to watch this.’” He believes that Fiorina had a purpose for the ad as rational as the ad itself is surreal:

Fiorina is behind, and she needs to shake up the race. After another day or two of mocking, it’s possible that this ad and the brouhaha will spur California media to look at Campbell’s record and see whether her criticisms are justified. And if that happens, then maybe he’ll lose some ground, and she’ll close the gap some. (On the other hand, the Chuck DeVore team has a DemonSheep.org site up already.)

This is a Hail Mary of an ad, which means there’s a very good chance that it won’t work. But a lot of the “traditional” advertised approaches wouldn’t have worked either, and would have just blended in with all the other ads in a busy election cycle. By comparison, ten years from now, if you hear the word, “demonsheep,” you will probably start giggling and know exactly what it was.

Since Geraghty has likely undergone numerous Demon Sheep viewings, some aberrations in judgment on his part are more than forgivable. Whatever the explanation, though his analysis makes some sense, it’s overdrawn.

With the California primaries still five months away, this isn’t the time for a “Hail Mary,” unless it’s one of those time-running-out in the first half/might as well go for it/nothing on the line kind of things. The polls taken since Tom Campbell jumped into the race show him with a 5- to 11-point lead over Fiorina, with Chuck DeVore’s numbers dropping into single digits, and with up to 40 -50% undecided. In short, the race is still up for grabs, and Campbell’s entry appears to have put DeVore in a lot more trouble than Fiorina. Incidentally, all three continue to poll close to “Senator Ma’am” Barbara Boxer, with Fiorina having come within 3 points in Rasmussen’s mid-January poll of likely voters. In a post-Brown political universe, it’s long past time for Senate handicappers to start mentioning California as one of the “in-play” states.

Prior to Campbell’s entry into the race, Fiorina had been maintaining a steady but not overwhelming lead over DeVore, a favorite of grassroots hard right conservatives, and had been directing her fire almost exclusively at Boxer.  In such a volatile political environment and with the decision points still months away, it’s easy to over-interpret poll data, but Fiorina and her team may see the former DeVore vote as having rested on a free-floating ant-Carly or not-sold-on-Carly segment of the politically oriented electorate (no one else is paying attention yet).  Why else would the numbers shift so heavily to Campbell, a vanilla Republican whom committed DeVoreiacs would be unlikely ever to support?

To re-gain her lead, Fiorina may not need to win all of those voters back:  She just needs to push them away from Campbell.  Say whatever you want about “Demon Sheep” – Ace (of Ace of Spades) called it “over-the-top,” which is a bit like being called tall by Manute Bol – but it hammers home the messages that Campbell is not a fiscal conservative, and that he’s the furthest thing imaginable from an anti-establishment politician, even if it leaves everyone a little confused about other matters (like who the sheep are supposed to be, what the whole purity test intro was about, whom Sarah Connor would endorse…).  It strongly supports Fiorina’s credentials on the same two issues:  The only “mention” of her name in the body of the ad is visual, via rendering of her signed “no tax” pledge, and the ad itself is obviously anything but “establishment” even before you get to its verbal content. These messages should sink in both for direct viewers of the ad and for those who see it excerpted on news shows and elsewhere.

From Fiorina’s perspective, if the fiscal conservative message is critical to Kali Republicans, then they can be herded away from Tom Campbell.  Even if many move to DeVore in the short-term, she still stands to benefit in the 3-way calculus. The risk might be that she utterly collapses, as a laughingstock, but she has a large personal fortune and a long history to put against that threat – including the cancer-survivor status that made another recent Fiorina video also something of a hit (and as aesthetically minimal as FCINO is polymorphously perverse).

Love her or, along with many voluble conservatives, hate her, there’s something about Carly Fiorina that sticks in your mind – she’s unpredictable, striking, and formidable. You almost feel sorry for whomever she was up against on her way to the top of Hewlett-Packard all those years ago.

As for DeVore, he’ s put up a funny, but rather cheap-looking web response in which his campaign attempts to piggyback on Demon Sheep (a difficult maneuver one might think). In his straightforward talking-to-the-camera style, he decries “Hollywood glitz and meaningless slogans,” strangely taking aim at two of California’s most economically significant surviving industries.

I think he should have gone 3-D, or, if that’ s too expensive, blue – especially since Meg Whitman’s got normal totally covered for now:

Makes sense when you consider she’s looking like a shoo-in on the R side, and will be facing Governor Moonbeam himself. Then again, the morning after Demon Sheep… everything else seems completely sensible.

Long live the new flesh!

cross-posted from Zombie Contentions

Fox News will broadcast Sarah Palin’s keynote address to the National Tea Party Convention live on Saturday night, allowing millions of viewers to see the main attraction of a gathering that was once criticized for barring the press.

The network, which pays Palin as a political analyst and is considered the favored network of conservatives, will carry Palin’s speech during Geraldo at Large in the 9 p.m. hour, a network spokeswoman told POLITICO.

Palin will also be making her first “Sunday show” appearance the next morning, also on Fox. As a separate media moment, the interview should be interesting on its own terms, just to see how Chris Wallace and company treat her on what amounts to her home turf, but the appearance is conditioned by and in effect part of the Tea Party foray, which Matthew Continetti at The Weekly Standard sees as part of Palin’s attempt to turn herself into the movement’s de facto leader:

Sarah Palin is clearly mounting a bid to lead the Tea Party. Last year, she endorsed Bill Hoffman’s Tea Party campaign against liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava and Democrat Bill Owens. This week, she endorsed Tea Party favorite Rand Paul in the Republican Senate primary in Kentucky. She will address a Tea Party convention in Nashville on Saturday; Fox News Channel will broadcast her speech live. In a USA Today column, Palin announces she will also appear at Tea Party functions in Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, Nevada (March), and Boston (April).

Continetti has been highly sympathetic to Palin – not least as the author of The Persecution of Sarah Palin - but he goes on to argue that this move “carries dangers,” and he questions whether a too fervent embrace of the Tea Partiers will increase Palin’s chances of combining the “pro-life, anti-big-government vote” with the “moderate suburbanites who voted Democratic in 2006 and 2008 but began to return to the GOP in 2009.”

Continetti leaves out the possibility that the project he thinks Palin is pursuing could fail or be seen to fail, and he also leaves out the upside of having a solid base of motivated supporters, whether for winning presidential primaries or for exercising critical influence.  It’s also worth noting that Palin’s other recent moves – accepting her regular Fox gig, promising to campaign for John McCain – show her risking some movement “cred” in favor of establishing a more familiar, one might say normalized presence:  less of a lightning rod, less easily painted as an extremist.  We can still acknowledge that future coalition-building may remain a concern, especially since Palin still has a long way to go if she hopes to recover the voters who seemed to welcome her in September of 2008, yet who had deserted the McCain-Palin ticket by November, but this seems like a worry for a normal year and a normal candidacy.  Any safe and traditional path to the presidency was ended for Palin soon after she accepted McCain’s offer.

Palin might not make sense as a GOP 2012 nominee except in the context of an abnormal election year – on the order of 1980, but even more so.  Because, however, there’s a more than negligible chance that 2012 will be such a year, it would be a mistake to count Palin out, at all, or for that matter to presume that the Tea Party movement or some successor won’t be seen as fairly mainstream by 2012, a classic and timely radicalism of the center.  If that’s the case, then, just as Democrats and others in 1980 didn’t finally turn to Reagan because they temporarily confused him with Rockefeller, those suburbanites won’t presumably be voting on whims and fleeting sentiments, or for a merely “moderate” change of course.

cross-adapted from Zombie Contentions

Xie’s side-observations are sometimes as interesting as his main themes.  I didn’t know, for instance, that both Russia and India were experiencing double-digit inflation well in excess of nominal growth rates.  His next-decade economic forecast for the U.S. and the Eurozone is summed up in one word:  “terrible.”  Yet the most eye-catching takeaway from his first two pieces at Caing.com – “Trapped Inside a Property Bubble” and “Pumped with Cash – And Ready to Crash?” – is his designation of 2012 as a target year for the Chinese bubble to burst amidst another global financial crisis:

2012 is building up to be another crisis year. Governments and central banks did not handle the last crisis well. They did not reform a global financial system plagued by incentive misalignment and wild speculation. All the money governments and central banks released is turning into global inflation. And they resorted to bailing out speculators, laying the foundation for another crisis.

The focus of the Chinese problem, in Xie’s view, is property speculation, the same property bubble that has made for those striking videos of empty, never-occupied skyscrapers and never-alive ghost towns, but which, more important, is also pricing China’s large, but proportionally small middle class out of the housing market, and spreading inflationary pressures on wages while also turning potentially productive citizens into compulsive speculators.

It’s mere coincidence if Xie seems to be reading from a Mayan calendar.  He bases his prediction on rough but reasonable calculations derived from historical precedents and real-time observations, not on ancient prophecy.  As Xie explains, the conditions that made China’s decade-long growth spurt possible have disappeared, and are unlikely to return.  Even as China has lost its status as “lowest of the low-cost producers,” the country remains heavily export-dependent, yet prospects for a worldwide resurgence in export markets are dim at best.  Like other economists, Xie expects near-zero growth in the Eurozone and Japan, at best, and low growth in the U.S., with no prospect for other countries to take up the slack, especially since many of them are almost as export-dependent as China, if not more so.

China seems, however, to be far from having adjusted psychologically or politically to this new reality.  Rather than undertake a re-adjustment of expectations, and face attendant political strains, China has been taking a path of least social and political resistance, in a manner that will strike some familiar chords for Americans:

The biggest risk to China’s economy is the desire to maintain past economic growth rates by maximizing investments in property – an unproductive asset. It supports short-term growth by sacrificing long-term growth as capital’s average productivity declines over time.

Local government performance in China is measured according to GDP and fiscal revenue. Property development can achieve high numbers for both quickly. This is why property’s share in China’s capital allocation is rapidly rising as prices appreciate and volumes increase. This is a politically driven bubble — and it’s already massive. Unless the trend is reversed by reforming incentives for local governments, China’s property bubble could mushroom in two years from what’s now a dangerous level.

Xie is building on his own past work here – he is one of the world’s proven experts on economic bubbles, especially of the Asian variety – but you don’t need to be an economist or China expert to follow him:  The inflation of the Chinese property bubble amounts to “mal-investment” on as gigantic a scale as you would expect from the non-transparent, un-free, deeply corrupt public administration of an economy encompassing the lives and fortunes of over 1 billion people.  The supposed advantages of authoritariansm, so impressive to New York Times columnists and some American presidents, can come at an unimaginably steep price.

Observers of the world scene – including JE Dyer in recent posts at the Optimistic Conservative Blog and elsewhere, or people like the international diplomats cited in Sunday’s Washington Post – have good reason to view China as a great power on the rise, a potential peer competitor to the U.S.  It’s tempting to look at the financial crisis that Xie sketches, or at China’s well-documented and widely discussed demographic and resource issues, and assume that the challenge to American status is taking care of itself, but it would be imprudent to assume that a bad decade for China will permanently simplify our strategic lives.  Indeed, the prospect of China’s weakness may turn out to be more dangerous than the prospect of Chinese ascendancy – even before we begin to consider the direct effects of a Chinese implosion on our own immediate interests.

The stridency of Chinese diplomats reacting to U.S.-Taiwan arms deals may reflect new self-confidence – or it may foreshadow a more bellicose, even desperate reaction to increasing pressures at home, amidst historically new, decisively frustrated expectations.  Countries quietly confident that their hour is coming can afford to be patient.  Countries sensing that their hour is passing – Germany 1914, Japan 1941, to note two of the more famous examples – often become more aggressive.

cross-posted from Zombie Contentions

Hollywood has given our anti-nonsense reflexes a lot of exercise in recent years, but I had still expected greater enthusiasm for this movie, or at worst neutrality, from my fellow conservatives.  Regardless of how some people feel about Cameron personally, or about any statements he may have made about Avatar‘s intended messages, he remains the same director who gave us  Terminator, Terminator 2, Aliens, and True Lies.  By the day that the Avatar trailer played to a national NFL TV audience and on the gigantic new video screen at Cowboys Stadium, it was clear to millions that an audacious effort was under way to re-vitalize the great American movie spectacle – a $400 million gamble by one of our leading auteur-entrepreneurs, in the shape of an advertisement for democratic capitalism at its most innovative, and for the creativity and vitality of American culture during a time when American declinism and every other brand of pessimism about our future have been spreading to an extent not seen since the 1970s.

Those on the right who have been impotently and priggishly attacking the movie, their small-spirited wishes for its failure decisively dashed by a quick $1 Billion in worldwide ticket sales, have not just been embarrassing themselves and their political-cultural allies.  They may even have been doing harm to the conservative movement, at least as much as the movie itself may do with its incidental Gore- and Obamaisms.

No one is obligated to like any film, of course.  One blogger’s eye candy is another blogger’s eye strain, but the first reviews from the right didn’t just seek some distance from off-putting aspects of Avatar, they full-throatedly assaulted the entire effort.  “Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ Is a Big, Dull, America-Hating, PC Revenge Fantasy,” was the headline over Big Hollywood‘s review, which included a bizarre attempt to charge Cameron with politically exploiting 9/11.  Other rightwing bloggers seemed to compete with each other over who could write the best put-downs:  “cinema for the hate America crowd,” “Production: $183,000,000. Script: $14.25,” Dances with Smurfs – drink more vodka and 3-D headache goes away,”"a suicide fantasy, the Hollywood blockbuster equivalent of a troubled teenager’s notebook sketches, scribbled by someone who hates himself only marginally less than he hates the rest of the world.”  Gregg Easterbrook, not on the right but here writing from a right-ish perspective, even got espn.com in on the action, explaining at length why soldiers and I guess mining engineers, too, ought to feel deeply “insulted” by the film.

John Podhoretz’s review at The Weekly Standard bought its ticket for the put-down sweepstakes with the title “Avatarocious.”  In the review itself, Podhoretz writes of astonishment, not headaches, at the film’s technical achievement, but compensates with the critic’s equivalent of a cuss-out:  “blitheringly stupid… among the dumbest movies I’ve ever seen… an undigested mass of clichés… unbelievably banal and idiotic” and so forth.  Unfortunately for his credibility as a reviewer, however, he repeatedly refers to the film as humorless, at one point asserting that “it doesn’t have a single joke in it.”  Anyone who has actually seen the film, or merely viewed the TV ads and trailers, is left to wonder whether Podhoretz was too busy re-combining derogatory phrases in his head to be paying minimal attention to the movie – which, to be clear, offers a Cameron-typical assortment of one-liners and visual gags.  As for Avatar‘s themes, Podhoretz declines to take them seriously except to argue that Cameron’s presumed marketing calculations may demonstrate how “deeply rooted… anti-American, anti-human politics” have become.

Like other reviewers, Podhoretz also indulges in the predictable and familiar charge that the movie’s narrative elements are predictable and familiar.  Since Avatar stands in other ways as novelty itself – right before your eyes, in glorious 3-D – to focus overly much on derivative aspects of its storyline would seem an ungracious gesture, even if its selections from among finite narrative alternatives (boy meets female humanoid, boy loses female humanoid, etc.) were poorly justified or badly executed.  I don’t concede the last, but, either way, audiences would likely have been disappointed if Cameron had denied them certain expected narrative beats – the step by step development of the love interest, the hero’s education to the ways of the alien tribe.  A significant part of the pleasure of a movie like this one is seeing traditional story elements transformed in a new setting, while otherwise the narrative chiefly serves to organize, elaborate, and extend the sensual experience.

Same for the dialogue, another common attack point:  Whether you respect the craft on display or decry its lack of expressive power and wit, the dialogue is not the movie’s main, secondary, or even tertiary reason for existence.  Anyway, as someone who in a previous life read and critiqued thousands of screenplays, I feel professionally qualified, very likely much better qualified than any of the critics I’ve quoted, to declare Avatar‘s dialogue better than movie-competent – maybe a little broader than necessary even for an all-ages global audience, but at the same time demonstrative of Cameron’s unrivaled skill at inserting new phrases into popular discussion:  “I see you!” may be a bit too peek-a-boo to achieve the same status as “I’ll be back,” but it’s already an understood punch-line on the Daily Show and RedEye.

The charges of being anti-American and anti-military might seem more significant, but they’re harder to take seriously in relation to a film that includes exactly as many references to the United States of America as Podhoretz says it has jokes:  Zero.

The movie is set in the year 2154, a multi-lightyear interstellar void away from planet Earth.  We never learn whether the U.S. of A even exists 140+ years from now.  The soldiers do seem American, some Australian accents notwithstanding, but, even so, our main character informs us early on that they are the tools of corporate interests, not the armed forces of a nation:  “Back home, we fight for freedom.  Out here, we’re hired guns.”  It’s possible that corporatist liberals in the Vietnam Era LBJ mode may have come to power in the elections of 2148 or so, assuming there were elections, but we don’t really know the precise extent to which the soldiers are mercenaries, and, if not, whether they’re misused conscripts or volunteers or something wholly other and 22nd Century.

At most, the force represents a military or paramilitary force with some apparent American roots or resonances, on a mission gone wrong, its bad ends defeated by… a typically exceptional, highly sympathetic, and more than equally American, underdog-supporting Marine and his friends.  To call the resultant developments “anti-military” or “anti-American” would be like calling “Dirty” Harry Callahan, Die Hard‘s John McClane, and Robocop‘s Officer Murphy anti-police figures; or calling John Rambo an anti-American and anti-war icon.  Following this paranoid logic, the same logic that has led some conservatives to mis-identify Jason Bourne as anti-American, 300‘s Leonidas would become an icon of kneejerk leftwing anti-imperialism.  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington becomes an attack on constitutional government.  Mr. Incredible becomes an animated Ché Guevara.  All of them, even Leonidas (and even Ché as fictional construct, come to think of it), are typical and very American heroes, loners whose personal characters, experiences, and moral courage lead them to fight against enemies who have corrupted and distorted whatever powerful forces or institutions they have come to control.

Such hero figures are legion in American popular art, with a lineage stretching back to America’s origins as a revolutionary and Judeo-Christian enterprise, and to our first breakaway action blockbuster, James Fenimoore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, featuring Hawkeye, the ultimate “gone-native” American warrior.  Our Hawkeyes are almost always isolated, and are frequently reviled – on the way to eventual, audience-pleasing redemptions, when “everyone” realizes how right they always were.  In Avatar “everyone” is represented on screen by the defeated soldiers and corporate lackeys sent bedraggledly back to from where they came, secondarily by those who will greet them – Terrans or Americans who, we are repeatedly given to believe, would also disapprove of what the depraved Colonel Quaritch orders his soldiers to do.

Conservatives should have little difficulty envisioning Avatar‘s bad guys as futuristic neo-liberals and their lackeys, unrestrained by authentic republican democracy, indulging in ill-conceived and gradually escalated measures that inevitably lurch to overkill and self-defeat, but many of us have forgotten both our real history and our movie history – the truths of Vietnam and Somalia, for example, and also the truths underlying the final scenes of a bygone conservative fave like Rambo, a glorious rampage against military bean counters and their machines.  Bad or misled American soldiers have done bad things on bad American orders, and it’s not un-American or anti-military or un-conservative to admit as much, to try to understand why, to hope for and believe in something better, or to dramatize it all for broad consumption.

The conservative Avatar-haters know this all as well as anyone, a fact that makes me think that what they’re really unhappy about has little to do with Avatar, and much more to with Hollywood’s near complete refusal to celebrate America’s contemporary military heroes.  I share that disappointment:  There are by now several Summers’ worth of un-made blockbusters that should have portrayed the brilliant feats of arms and moral courage of American soldiers in places that for most of us might as well be alien planets.

On the happy Wednesdays and Fridays of at least one possible future in which those movies are finally released, blowing and bloodying up theaters in vivid 3D, Avatar may indeed be revealed as a relic of an abbreviated Age of Obama.  Yet most of those stories, if treated honestly and interestingly, will likely depict the dynamic tension between, on the one side, bad ideas, bad leadership, and tragic costs in blood and treasure, and, on the other side, the valiance of our real-life Rambos:  Jake Sully Petraeus opposing an array of institutional forces… accused of going native… gathering a few allies… learning to fight, think, and work with insurgents… on the way to a glorious synthesis of high tech Americanism and indigenous culture.

I predict that few conservatives will be complaining at that time, if it ever comes, about predictable story beats.

As for the other criticisms of Avatar, I find it odd that anyone is significantly concerned with the conjectural practicalities of “unobtanium” mining, or the next-century economics of spinal medicine.  I don’t see a conservative problem with a good-hearted red-blooded tech-enabled American guy fighting for truth, justice, and the 10-foot-tall blue humanoid  he very monogamously loves.  I’m not willing to give the theme of spiritual re-birth – “one life ends, another begins” – to the left or leave it for New Age hippies only, partly because I don’t see Christianity as merely a “suicide fantasy.”  And it strikes me that something may have gone wrong in American conservatism if any hint of the “noble savage,” of intimate and mysterious connections to nature as God’s creation,  has become off-limits according to the same people who, at a different time of the day or night, or a different blog post, will be celebrating the authentic frontier virtues, character, and elitist-mystifying spirituality of Sarah Palin.

Finally, the idea that the film (or, in theory, any film) could be “anti-human” may be the most interesting criticism, partly for its relation to extreme environmentalism, but mainly because it’s confronted directly within Avatar‘s own central themes – the parallel pscyhological, technical, and emotional challenges before the hero, the film maker, and the audience:  to recognize the “Na’vi” as human; to see refusal of their humanity as wrong, primordially inhumane.   It’s a dynamic similar to the one at the center of Blade Runner – Deckard and his “replicant” beloved Rachel, and us, on one side; “skin-job”-hating cops on the other (Roy Batty flying above everyone).

Cameron’s ability to exploit such “true lies” in his story concepts and on the level of form goes back to the Terminator, a character whose outward humanity was precisely the condition of his threat to humanity.  Since that time, Cameron’s science fiction has crossed back and forth across the question “what is human?” – as in Aliens‘ species-traitor Burke, less human than an acid-blooded monster; as in the machine from T2 who fully attains humanity in a paradoxical final act of self-sacrifice.  Along the way, in exquisitely multi-leveled film-authorial gestures, the supposed neo-Luddite Cameron has also explored the ability of special effects technology to erase the difference between “natural” and “manufactured” realities in the universe of cinema.  The objective testimony of box office receipts proves he has done so with fantastic success.  The lack of interest by supposedly conservative critics in such matters, and their unconsciousness of where they’re aligning themselves, will prompt a fan of the film to wonder who in the end the real skowns are.

Do American conservatives now believe that the left owns nature, spirituality, communitarian values, bold trips where no one has gone before, and all willingness to defy mealy-mouthed corporate squishes and sociopaths in or out of uniform?  Of course not.  But some are acting that way.  Playing up and then decrying these messages, in this context, implicitly defining them as wholly owned property of the left, is to cede invaluable cultural and therefore political ground for no good reason.  At a certain point, it becomes something worse than “blithering stupidity”:  It becomes an unforced, hard to repair political error, reinforcing the stereotype of the conservative as aggressively defensive moralizer, living in a world of his own anger and prejudice.  It’s a much less attractive and interesting place than James Cameron’s Pandora.

cross-posted from Zombie Contentions

The most charitable intellectual assumption about the attack is that Daily Kos, Media Matters, and other usual suspects on the left are seeing their political numbers worsen, and, fearing the other side’s momentum, have been feigning ignorance about the differences between Rasmussen’s likely voter-based, sample-controlled models and the models used by other pollsters. Given those differences, it would truly be remarkable if Rasmussen polls didn’t yield consistently different results. Perhaps aware of this fact, and having in the past spoken favorably of Rasmussen’s work, respected leftwing poll-analyst Nate Silver declines to join the frontal assault, and instead argues for a subtle distinction (bold face and italics in the original):

If you’re running a news organization and you tend to cite Rasmussen’s polls disproportionately, it probably means that you are biased — it does not necessarily mean that Rasmussen is biased.

Silver may be closer to a useful truth on this otherwise rather trivial topic, but his use of the word “bias,” it seems to me, either misses the point or simply reflects his own predispositions.

To criticize Rasmussen’s polls as somehow unrepresentative is senseless. They represent what they purport to represent, nothing more and nothing less. Likewise, neither Rasmussen’s nor other respectable pollsters’ approaches are intrinsically ideological – polling results are statistics, not arguments. They do, however, correspond to ideological positions. In this sense, what the leftists are really taking issue with isn’t Rasmussen or even his influence, but rather a mode of self-governance – contemporary American electoral democracy – that his polls successfully reflect in concept, and therefore in their results.

If there is any meaning left in the names we give our two political parties, it may be in the way each embraces one of two broadly complementary perspectives – egalitarian democracy and civic republicanism. In this sense, Rasmussen does do “conservative republican” polls – polls whose design very roughly approximates a conservative view of small-r republican governance – while Gallup and many of the media-sponsored polls of “all adults” or “all registered voters” or “whoever happens to pick up the phone” roughly qualify as “liberal democratic.”

Expansion of the franchise has, after all, long been a liberal and progressive cause. Those on the liberal left who haven’t yet gotten around to seeking the vote for non-citizen residents, felons, and other excluded groups – with longer term designs on representation for animals, plants, artificial intelligences, and the dead (where not already effectively enfranchised) – often believe that a lack of interest or knowledge among voters generally coincides with lack of privilege, and that the only way that underprivileged or alienated sectors of society can gain “fair” representation is to increase their relative turnout. It’s hardly an accident in our own day that the main voter registration and encouragement organizations like ACORN and Rock the Vote are left-liberal through and through, and sooner or later drop all pretenses of non-partisanship.

A further underlying assumption on the liberal left (at least among those who for ideal or tactical reasons haven’t rejected “bourgeois democracy”) is that, if low interest voters were more motivated, they would vote like higher interest representatives of their demographic blocs. In theory, it’s the evil of our current system that these voters don’t recognize a greater stake in elections. Once they did so, they would inform themselves adequately – and naturally recognize their greater affinity to the political left. Indeed, from this perspective, those voters don’t really need to be informed at all except as to the left’s endorsements, since leading leftist intellectuals are always happy to do all of the necessary thinking on any matter. Furthermore, even and especially between elections, a typical leftist view of the American polity is that, regardless of who actually shows up to vote, the opinions of all Americans, regardless of level of engagement or interest, should be taken into account equally.

The underlying conservative view, on the other hand, is that, as any parent knows, handing something precious to someone who doesn’t care about or understand it is often a good way to lose or destroy it. Many conservatives have been and would remain open to stricter voter standards and controls – stronger proofs of identity and residency, demonstrated understanding of the American system of government, fluency in English, respect for the laws, etc. – without going back to property requirements or taking up more radical, conservative utopian proposals.

Our friends on the left will call this perspective paternalistic, with some justification, but conservatives don’t recognize any obligation to reject a position merely because it doesn’t suit a leftist preconception. Conservatives will also point out that truly paternalistic governments have often presided over near-100% turnouts in elections that merely demonstrate and ratify state power alongside the complete absence of political freedom. Even more fundamentally, the conservative view on our national life does not equate it with whoever happens to be in government or what the government does or doesn’t do – but that’s another subject.

For now, conservatives remain more comfortable with a self-selecting electorate, already a fairly “liberal” position in historical terms. The respondents to Rasmussen’s polls of identified likely voters are effectively self-selecting, just like actual voters – that’s the idea. Until and unless the country chooses a way to run its affairs that is more progressive in the way that Daily Kos and Media Matters and possibly Nate Silver typically use the term – by embracing mandated mass participation, for instance – we can say that Rasmussen’s methodological bias is conservative in relation to real existing republican democracy in America. And more power to him, conservatives will add. As to the left: Rasmussen is not your problem; Americanism is.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

I’ll add that I believe, if a campaign of attacks actually occurs, that percentage would quickly hit the 80% level or higher, even and especially if you worded the question to include techniques to the “right” of waterboarding.

UPDATE:

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

I very much doubt that the outmanned troops trapped and facing capture or death at Dunkirk winked at each other [and] said, “Those Nazis have really stepped in it this time. We’ve got’em right where we want’em.”

Thus Robert F Laird of the blog Instapunk, replying to my “in defense of rightwing Leninism” post (under the title “Don’t despair about Obamacare” at HotAir). Mr. Laird views my position as advocating that we “accept our inevitable strategic defeat on the bill itself and buoy our spirits with dreams of the vengeance to come…” – as against his emphasis on the fight at hand: “If any of those dreams cause us to fight a scintilla less hard against the imminent disaster of passage, I am opposed.”

In my view, a strategic defeat would imply a definitive political re-alignment in favor of the left. I cannot agree that a defeat on this health care bill would in itself rise to that level. I acknowledge, however, that what the Obamacrats seem to be change-and-hoping for is that a major tactical victory on this single front could take on strategic consequences. As Kimberly Strassel argued Friday in the Wall Street Journal, echoing the views of conservatives like Mark Steyn, Andy McCarthy, and Mark Levin, liberals may indeed be “think[ing] big”:

The liberal wing of the party—the Barney Franks, the David Obeys—are focused beyond November 2010, to the long-term political prize. They want a health-care program that inevitably leads to a value-added tax and a permanent welfare state. Big government then becomes fact, and another Ronald Reagan becomes impossible. See Continental Europe.

It’s heady stuff for the pages of the WSJ – Obamacare as Cthulhucare – all the stronger coming in the middle of an article devoted to the by now familiar theme of “Democrats’ political suicide” – the raft of polls indicating public rejection of their hyper-partisan, self-aggrandizing and self-dealing, dishonest and tone-deaf approach.

Though many Democrats may believe that the public will come to like their work or at worst put it in perspective by the next and after-the-next elections, and though others may believe they’re simply doing what they were sent to Washington to do, the notion of a long-term strategic view does at least offer a rational explanation for their conduct. In another sense it’s just an uncomplimentary, some might say paranoid, translation of the Democrats’ own self-serving descriptions of their “historic” accomplishment (or near-accomplishment). Where I disagree with Laird and Strassel is that, even if the liberal brain-trust really is thinking along those lines, that doesn’t make their strategic concept right, and it doesn’t mean that this bill (or set of approximations of a bill) will serve their larger strategic purpose effectively.

Health care may be a critical struggle, and a final resolution on the Obamacare-defined front might carry strategic implications, but, for now and for the foreseeable future, it is still only one front in a larger war. As I’ve found myself repeating lately, health care may represent up to 1/5th of the economy, but 5/5ths are at stake. Put simply, we could win this particular battle on health care, and still lose the country. Conversely, we can cede ground on health care legislatively, but, under a stratagem as old as warfare – and fist fights – we may someday gain it back by exploiting the vulnerabilities that the other side’s unsupportable advance has created. Such a tactical reversal could also be of potential strategic significance, but in our favor: These are high-risk maneuvers for both sides, and the signs of over-extension, including but hardly limited to unconstitutional overreaching, in the O-crat salient already go well beyond the poll readings.

In the meantime, openly proclaiming an objective to be essential to the entire effort may persuade our own forces to fight harder today, but it puts us in an even worse position if tomorrow Healthcare Hill is still in the Obamacrats’ possession. After declaring the battle essential and seeing it lost, what would we say to our surviving troops? In this light, it shouldn’t surprise us if, wherever this discussion is playing out under the prospect of final passage, voices not just of outrage but of total surrender, or, what amounts to the same thing, of sedition and rebellion, are already sounding out. And why should the soldiers trust us the next time we say, “We really mean it this time – this is THE battle”? On the other hand, if a late access of public outrage and Democratic fratricide collapses the project at the 11th legislative hour, or if other forces intervene, are we to de-mobilize, thinking the war is won, leaving the GOP professionals to do the mopping up?

Just after I read Instapunk’s reply yesterday, I was amused to see that Dick Morris had also taken up the Dunkirk theme, re-casting the close of Churchill’s immortal speech following the British army’s rescue, looking to the struggle ahead:

If they beat us in the Senate, we will fight them in conference. If they beat us in conference, we will fight them in the House. If they beat us in the House over healthcare, we will fight them over cap and trade. We will fight them over immigration and amnesty. We will fight them over the deficit. We will fight them over the debt. And we will fight them in 2010. We will fight them in the House. We will fight them for Senate seats in Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, and Arkansas. We will fight them in Colorado and North Dakota and California and Washington State. We will fight them in Illinois and in New Jersey. We will never, never, never, never give up! Our country is at stake!

I’d much rather have American patriots responding with such defiance and determination than have had Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor, or any other senator or party chair or pundit or blogger or commenter, sorrowfully describing what this bill “will” do to health care, to our seniors, to the states, to the economy, to our national future and to the most intimate decisions of our personal lives. Until the day the bill is enacted, fully implemented (sometime around 2016, apparently), and really paid for not just once or for few years but sustainably, there is no “will,” there is only what it “would do” (or would have done).

McConnell’s more recent comments to the National Review – looking forward to the cavalry’s arrival come 2010, promising that health care would be a “multi-cycle” issue – were much better. I was also glad to hear Republican Chairman Michael Steele take up the repeal theme, and to watch Karl Rove receiving an “amen” from conservative über-pessmist Mark Steyn on the idea that the Democrats may have unintentionally done wonders for the cause of individual freedom, by setting themselves up for an amplified version of the revolt that killed the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage act of 1988 one year after passage. Jay Cost’s recent post on the historical precedents for a populist ballot box revolution against the Obamacrats is also well worth reading.

Though the despairing cry of “once passed, it’s forever” will still be heard from the mouths of those who’ve been told as much over and over by well-meaning rightwing seers, it is not supported by the full historical record – nor can anything be proven (too few data points, no inertial frame) by reference to the relatively short political history of major American entitlement programs. However things turn out on this bill, I reject “nothing you can do about it” as an American answer to any inequity, any form of tyranny, or any governmental excess. Asserting the impossibility of correcting legislative error may sound wisely cynical, but it presumes the end of American democracy, the falsification of the very theory of America. If we can’t take our fate into our own hands, and trust ourselves to do whatever we finally need to do, whether others including ourselves have ever done it before or not, then, with or without Obamacare, we’ve already seceded from America, from any idea of republican democracy, whatever we decide to call our new, shrunken state of existence.

Let the Democrats take ownership of divisive, anti-constitutional, anti-democratic policy and politics. American conservatives are the ones who are supposed to believe in and stand ready to protect constitutional government, and on a fundamental level that means we must believe there is nothing that an American government can do wrong that Americans cannot fix. Assuming as much doesn’t weaken us for the present struggle: It’s the basis of the struggle, and why we fight.

cross posted at Zombie Contentions

I referred to this idea in passing as “‘the worse, the better’ rightwing Leninism.” Instapunk calls it “absolutely dead wrong… no ifs, ands, or buts about it”:

It’s sheer giddiness to think that it’s somehow better for conservatives if the Democrats succeed in passing this truly horrendous healthcare bill. Madness, in fact.  Yes, the Dems will experience huge losses at the polls in 2010, but even the rosiest of all possible electoral scenarios is nowhere near rosy enough to undo the damage the bill would cause. The Republicans could retake the House, but not by the majority the Democrats presently hold. It’s less likely, though remotely possible, that Republicans could retake the Senate.

Psychological diagnosis notwithstanding, Instapunk comes fairly close here to conceding my initial point – that (quoting myself and adding emphasis) “purely from a political standpoint, this should be a time for celebration.”

To be clear, we don’t differ much at all, as far as I can see, on the policy question.  I readily concede that Obamacare if enacted and implemented would be a disaster for conservatives, for Americans, and by extension for the world.  On this note, Instapunk rightly emphasizes that policy is in the end more important than politics, then adds a gloomy forecast regarding the latter ever turning sufficiently to overcome the former:

However, there’s no way on earth the Republicans could command the 60-40 majority that has made possible the currently imminent hijacking of one-sixth of the U.S. economy. Which means that there’s no way to get to the magic number that would be required for repeal.

To me, this logic suggests a fundamental misreading both of what we’ve seen transpire and of how American democracy works.

The history of Western democracy includes some truly stunning partisan wipe-outs, but we don’t need to dwell on what today seems a remote political possibility (as remote as, say, a ca. 60-Democrat Senate seemed in 2002).  Dismantling, impeding, nullifying, and, in the end, fully repealing this bill does not require 60 Republicans or 60 conservatives:  Greater legal, legislative, and historical minds than mine must already be studying the precedents and gaming the scenarios, but we can observe here that, if passing popular legislation in the Senate always required partisan super-majorities, we wouldn’t have had a major piece of legislation signed since 1979.  We don’t know yet how the final votes in the Senate or for final passage after a House-Senate conference may go, but reversing them down the road would merely require a popularly backed majority joined by a passel of fence-sitters, perhaps including Democratic senators who in the current session vote for cloture but against final passage, perhaps including a few changes of heart.  It could be as simple as that.

Looking further ahead, speculatively, the President himself would likely remain a roadblock to formal repeal, but, even prior to the election of 2012, the “damage control” that Instapunk describes, involving excision of particularly obnoxious elements of the bill, might effectively impede its implementation.  Moreover, it’s well worth keeping in mind that removing the budgetary heart of the bill can be  achieved via the Senate reconciliation process on a simple, unfilibusterable 51-vote majority (especially easy to justify if Obamacare finally passes on party line votes as narrow as Pelosicare’s in the House).  If virtual repeal on this basis looks achievable as early as, say, 2011, the President might veto an O-care-destroying budget, while hoping for a re-play of the Clinton-Gingrich government shutdown confrontation of 1995, but such a battle could unfold in many different ways.  After Obama is gone, a conservative president and conservative majority, at the crest of a continuing or revived conservative wave, could much more easily achieve effective or formal repeal.

The only reason to consider such outcomes impossible would be belief that the public will change its mind, that we do not face a looming fiscal and economic crunch, and that entitlement programs, once enacted, cannot ever be rescinded.

The first two propositions are at minimum debatable, and the tides of opinion and economic projection currently seem in conservatives’ political favor – a very well-evidenced observation that provided the basis for my “Make Our Decade” post and to varying degrees for the positions of my fellow Polyannist-Leninists.  As for the third point, on the supernatural immortality of entitlement programs, we hear and read variations on it frequently – sometimes offered with a knowing laugh, lately from conservatives who have been attempting to gin up opposition to O-care – but, if and when the bill passes and is signed, the embrace of this perspective would be defeatism pure and simple.

It would also remain an exaggeration, because entitlements or their equivalent have repeatedly been cut or eliminated around the world and throughout history – though frequently, it must be admitted, only as a result of economic or political breakdown. The modern European welfare state has indeed been extremely difficult to unravel, but it hasn’t been around for very long.  For most of the time that it has been in existence, progressivism, socialism, and their variants were historically new and on the rise, and were further supported by economic and political contingencies (including military and economic support from the US of A) that cannot last forever.

As for this specific entitlement, what makes anyone believe that any guarantee it entails or calculation it depends on will be sustainable for very long, much less become “permanent”?  We will soon have to make some difficult fiscal choices on an almost incomprehensible scale, or have them made for us via national bankruptcy – under which latter situation all such entitlements would merely entitle the citizen to go searching with devalued dollars or theoretical guarantees for scarce to non-existent goods and services. The crisis of debt-supported, obligation-deferred, risk-displaced welfare state capitalism that exploded last year is not over.  It’s hardly even in abeyance, and Obamacare promises to deepen and accelerate it.

Before the next reckoning is reached, a coherent political force can achieve things that previously seemed politically impossible. That sort of change, believed in or not, has happened before in history, several times in our own history, and sometimes far ahead of the schedule set by the change agents themselves.  Furthermore, as has been pointed out by many observers ever since the polls turned decisively against Obamacare, no legislation this sweeping, partisan, and unpopular has ever before been passed.  To use one of the Obama Administration’s favorite words, enactment of Obamacare would be truly unprecedented.  We should therefore consider that unprecedented events tend to imply unprecedented responses, and unprecedented political events require and ensure unprecedented political responses:  The only real question is how long the equal and opposite reaction can be denied and suppressed.

If Obamacare, on its own terms or as implicated in approaching fiscal catastrophe, remains anywhere near as unpopular over the coming years as it is now, there is no fundamental reason why it can’t be rescinded – piece by piece or all at once.  I therefore remain convinced that the proper response by conservatives to its passage cannot and must not be despair – certainly not yet, certainly not while a popular wave against the prime perpetrators is rising, and not while the tools of democratic self-government are still within reach.

I can see why Instapunk and others might feel justified in calling me or anyone else out for unwarranted optimism as we stand on the Obamic “precipice,” but in my opinion defeatism and pessimism are far worse responses.  This is a moment for sober judgment, and for confidence in one’s own beliefs and analysis, whichever best keeps you in the fight.  It’s a moment to decide whether our message to the Obamaist progressives is going to be:  “You win – we give up” or “We’re coming after you, and getting rid of your laughable, embarrassing, and repugnant health care bill (presuming you ever get around to passing it) will just be the beginning.”

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Each deadly scenario puts the American military and national command authority in disastrously untenable situations just a few to several years from now, and each would be world-historical (not in a good way):

• collapse in Pakistan involving the U.S. in a nuclearized and Islamicized regional war
• politically and economically de-stabilizing pandemic plague
• a series of nuclear attacks in the American homeland brought off by an effectively unidentifiable (and therefore un-targetable) sponsor
• a 1914-like Middle East outbreak of war, centered on Israel
• Chinese moves on Taiwan forcing a choice between global war and the loss of the Pacific Rim (and more)
• systematic Islamist assault on global resource and supply chains leading to economic catastrophe
• civil war in an abandoned Iraq leading to a re-alignment in the Gulf:  the U.S. on the outside; China, Russia, and Iran on the inside

In short, 7 American catastrophes – and each entailing blows not just to our abstract “interests,” but to the very concrete counterparts of those interests:   our lives and our way of life.

Now consider further that there’s nothing preventing two or more of these or similar scenarios arising concurrently.  Indeed, there’s good reason to suspect that each such crisis may increase the likelihood of others, leading to and in turn being accelerated by the simultaneous exhaustion of American resources, will, and credibility.

If, for instance, the Chinese have an itch for Taiwan, how much more likely are they to make a move when we’re already stretched to our limits with war and nuclear terror well off to the left on the map, and when we’re already devastated by global economic sabotage?  Or if China moves first on Taiwan, wouldn’t that be a perfect time for Islamists to escalate subversion in Iraq and Pakistan, confront Israel, and assault off- and inshore oil facilities and container mega-ships?  And it must be said that there are other potential major and minor threats – some of them more purely economic, some of them merely familiar and therefore addressed if not truly mastered by current military doctrine and deployments – that may also feed or be fed by the slew of cyber-subversions, area denials, global double-crosses, terrorist depredations, and acts of sabotage that pop up repeatedly and all across Krepinevich’s narratives.

We could spin up chain reactions and “mother of storms” scenarios all day:  As Neil Young once sang, “It’s a wonder tall trees ain’t laying down.”

Krepinevich himself might consider such speculation a gross misuse of his work.  He’d like to see a modernized, permanent version of Eisenhower’s Planning Board integrated into the contemporary military and fully resourced.  He’d probably like to see much larger investments in a range of anti-missile, special forces, deep strike, cyberwarfare, and other capacities.  And I think he’d like to see our real world Defense Secretary, who receives a couple of uncomplimentary mentions, get his head on completely straight about what he’s publicly dismissed as “next war-itis.”

In short, Krepinevich advocates prudent investments, not apocalyptic proclamations.  In his forward, he presents a scenario composed in the late 1990s, describing a war and counterinsurgency difficulties in Iran, in order to make a key point:  A useful scenario neither needs nor attempts to foretell the future.  Having addressed the limitations in planning, equipment, and doctrine that eventually come to plague his fictional warriors on the eastern side of the Gulf ca. 2016 would likely have helped a decade earlier when real world warriors were fighting just one country over in either direction.

Well, sure, but the thing is:  His Iran scenario still mostly makes sense – so make that Eight Deadly scenarios.  Or take a step back and you’re facing One Great Big Deadly Scenario made up of major and minor sub-scenarios – and you may be feeling like fictional Defense Secretary Summers, reacting to President Reynolds’ temporizing response to terrorist nukes going off in American cities:

The country is now at war, [Summers] says, against a group of states and nonstate entities that are practicing a form of ambiguous aggression against the United States.  The United States can attempt to sue for some kind of peace, although with whom he hasn’t a clue; or it can accept the fact that it is at war – a war that has already caused more damage to the American homeland in a few weeks than all of World War II – and mobilize its full resources to defeat its enemies.  Summers declares that he has no interest in negotiation; he is interested only in the total cooperation of these rogue states, and their capitulation to American demands for unfettered access, so that they may avoid “their complete and utter destruction.”  It is time for the nation to mobilize its resources to fight the war that has been waged against it ever since radical Islamists seized the first American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran over thirty years ago.

To state the obvious, there are more than a few Americans who not too long ago were already on board with the above – well before the destruction of downtown San Antonio, Chicago, San Diego, and Boston.

As for Krepinevich, if he’s not ready to call for anything remotely resembling full mobilization for global war, it’s less clear whether, in his heart, he believes a complete strategic re-orientation, implying a very different national leadership style than the American political system has been producing, is necessary.  Still, whatever he himself believes, the one factor that ties his scenarios together is that Presidents Reynolds, Simmons, Dickson, Collingwood and so on all tend to resemble President Merkin Muffley (now there was a scenario), flailing with outmoded sanities against realized insanity.

Under a Muffley Administration, it probably wouldn’t matter much whether the Pentagon had three times as many SpecForces operatives to call upon, five times as many anti-missile systems, a 6000-ship blue and green water navy, and a $50 Billion Planning Board budget:  Our committed adversaries – and the larger circles of spoilers, opportunists, and passive supporters – would with good reason fear us too little, and know the world is far too small for us to remain insulated, yet always too big to be fully defended.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions
other books reviewed and discussed

Now that the public option and Medicare buy-in provisions seem to have been permanently struck from the Senate health bill, the final obstacles to passage of something-anything have been reduced – though not eliminated, whatever the latest handicapping via the Fox News All-Stars. With no Gang of N senators having appeared demanding a different something-anything, just somewhat slightly sane, with the Republicans finally resorting to delay and obstruction tactics of the sort they had previously been holding in reserve, it will be tempting to give in to despair.

Wrong – the hard thing for a conservative should be maintaining appropriate levels of outrage while restraining the urge to laugh one’s conservative head off.

Purely from a political standpoint, this should be a time for celebration – watching the worst political leadership combine in modern, perhaps in all American history joining hands and leaping off the President’s “precipice.” If ever there was a time for “the worse, the better” rightwing Leninism, this may be it. Or, for those who prefer their references more pop culture-y, there’s always Dirty Harry (if it was good enough for Ronald Reagan, it’s good enough for me):

Allahpundit ties together several strands, then sums things up succinctly in a message to the Dems (if not quite as succinctly as Massachusetts Dem Michael Capuano): “Good luck in those midterms, champ.” William Kristol, whose idea inspired the earlier post on politically sane alternatives, provides a political play call – noting that Obamacare’s three main beneficiaries are Big Pharma, Big Government, and Big Insurance, while urging the Republicans to argue “1,000 times no”:

…if the legislation passes, the GOP should immediately begin trying to repeal key parts of it. The moment it passes, Mitch McConnell might introduce free-standing legislation repealing the Medicare cuts. Republicans could highlight their opposition to Big Pharma and Big Insurance by trying to force votes–in 2010–on drug re-importation and more insurance competition, measures that could go into effect right away so as to be of immediate benefit to the American people. And of course they should promise to relieve the American people of the prospect of living under the Democrats’ health bureaucracy regime by promising repeal of the whole thing in 2011.

Jay Cost, an observer not usually given to any form of melodrama, puts things more emotively:

When the people catch wind of the full scope of this bill, and they will, there will be hell to pay. The public has been known to vote against big business and big government. Somehow, this compromised bill manages to deliver both – big government and big business, joined together, with the little guy forced to participate.

If the Democrats pass this bill, the Republicans will pound them relentlessly and mercilessly in next year’s midterm campaign. All across the country right now, would-be Republican candidates can sense that this is their chance finally to get into Congress. They’re already starting to toss their hats into the ring. Many more will follow because they know what the public thinks of this. They know that they’ll find plenty of donors to bankroll those ads talking about the individual mandate, the insurance company giveaways funded by Medicare cuts, the victory for special interests, and how it all happened behind closed doors. And they know what kind of effect these ads are going to have.

Democrats were bound to lose seats next year because it is a midterm and they’re in charge. They were bound to lose extra seats because it’s a recession. But if they pass this bill, God help them. The people sure as hell won’t.

Peter Wehner thinks it will stick:

[T]his process has been so bad, the products it has produced so defective, and the potential ramifications so destructive that, if the president signs health-care legislation into law, he will — with the stroke of his pen — provide Republicans with a golden opportunity to return to power. He is, in fact, in the process of setting the stage for a realignment of some significance. Repealing and replacing the monstrosity that Democrats call health-care reform will, absent some totally unforeseen events, become the dominant issue for the 2010 elections. And Democrats will, I think, pay a huge political price for what they are championing.

Barack Obama is turning out to be a very significant political figure, but not quite in the way he imagined. Ronald Reagan gave rise to a rebirth of conservatism and the GOP. So might Barack Obama.

If these gentlemen are right, we can stop calling it Obamacare, Pelosicare, Reidcare, Idon’tcare, Whatevercare:  The day it passes it will be Zombiecare.

The fiscal and perhaps other reckonings to come will likely require much more from us and our political system than merely avoiding the Obamacrats’ mistakes, but they have provided the negative blueprint for how to proceed to that hard business, and much of the material for construction – even if the Dems do themselves a favor and scrap this bill at the 11th hour. Do the systematic opposite of what they’ve been doing. That template may serve conservatives for a generation.

Okay – now feel free to go back to your wailing and gnashing – and try not to let anyone catch you winking at your friends.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions