Category Archive

Rod and I were exchanging messages with a colleague earlier today with the recent remarks by Limbaugh over self-reliance as the starting point.  At the conclusion of my message, I wrote:

Self-reliance is an excellent thing to instill and to follow, and that is and should be the ultimate answer, but almost everything about the current regime works against self-reliance and creates disincentives for practicing self-reliance.

By that I mean that we have a dependency problem that has been fostered to a significant degree by what some people like to call “economic dynamism” or “creative destruction.”  Knocking out the old mechanisms of social support, scattering communities with the draw of “better opportunities” elsewhere (and thereby helping to kill whichever small towns weren’t already ravaged by the highway system) and encouraging consumption and the mandate of “growht” with cheap credit all work to make Americans less economically independent and make sure that they have few, if any, private institutions they can fall back on that are capable of bearing the load.  Having creatively destroyed support networks that were fulfilling the functions that must be assumed more and more by the state, the “greatest force for change” is the greatest force for facilitating the growth of intrusive government to clean up the wreckage of all that destructive creativity.  Further, having become so dependent on either government or employer (or both), Americans are at the mercy of policy decisions over which they routinely have little influence, except at election time when the people who have fashioned the system that puts them in the present predicament of dependency promise them…more government assistance!  This reminds me of Caleb Stegall’s op-ed from 2006:

One of the primary conditions of freedom is a widespread distribution of capital, both economic and cultural. This accounts for conservatives’ long-standing skepticism and mistrust of centralized and concentrated enclaves of money and power with their tendencies toward societal management at every level. The oppressive effect of the management elites is essentially the same whether those elites sit in the board room, the judicial chamber, the legislative halls or the Oval Office.   

Or as I said during the debates over Wal-Mart and similar corporations back in 2006:

I don’t know if it is “counterfeit Americanism” to find troubling or objectionable the considerable dependence of the well-being of a town on the unaccountable decisions of one corporation that has no stake and no real attachment to the place, but I would suggest that there is nothing terribly consistent with the listed American “core values” in this development.  We do well to be wary of the road to state serfdom and advocate going in the other direction, but we make a great error if we think that road to corporate serfdom does not lead in the same direction and does not eventually meet up with the other road.  The masters of both use fear of the other to aggrandise their power.  The state tells you, “I will protect you from exploitation, give me power (and money)!”  And so you do.  Then the corporation says, “I provide you services and represent your freedom from government interference, so give me money (and power)!”  And so you do.  At no point are you concerned that the corporation generally supports what the state is doing and vice versa, or that some of the money you give to each one goes towards empowering and influencing the other.  

Fundamentally, all of this comes back to the question of whether dependent people can be the governors of those upon whom they depend, and the answer is no.  Without that, there can be no real self-government, and as Caleb said no real freedom.  To the extent that he has no intent on breaking this chain of dependency, Huckabee is not any kind of populist that Caleb or I would recognise.  He uses the opposition between “Main Street” and “Wall Street” rhetorically, but one has to wonder if he thinks that their interests are really all that divergent, or if he thinks that there has just been some misunderstanding in allocating the benefits.  He acknowledges that something is awry, but he apparently thinks the answer is to elect him so that working Americans will feel better about their President (he will remind them of their co-workers!), as if that will alleviate their real ills.   

This ties into the debate that has been going on over Romney’s “I’ll fight for every job” routine that he is now reprising in South Carolina.  I sympathise with calls to self-reliance generally, but these are being made as much in a vacuum as Romney’s false promises.  How do I know Romney’s promises are false?  It isn’t just that I think he’s untrustworthy (though if his recent display in Michigan hasn’t persuaded you of that, nothing I say here will), but that he is not going to make the auto industry in Michigan competitive with production facilities in other countries simply through deregulation and research subsidies.  For one thing, Washington only has so much control over the cost of doing business in Michigan, and the one area where Washington does have control over relevant policy (i.e., trade) is the area where Romney isn’t going to do anything to shore up domestic manufacturing.  Not only is he not going to do anything, but he has all but vowed to make sure thhat the same process that has been hollowing out Michigan factory towns will keep happening elsewhere–that is what his “Reagan Zone” offers American manufacturing. 

Not to beat the point to death, but I did a little digging and found this news item from last year:

During a speech delivered in the heart of the financial district, where compensation packages routinely reach into the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, Mr. Bush announced that he would ask corporations to curb excessive executive pay.

When it comes from Bush, Republicans may not be happy with it, but they aren’t exactly declaring him the second coming of Huey Long.  What shocking socialist rhetoric has been pouring forth from Huckabee’s mouth?  One news story reported late last year:

He calls himself the candidate who isn’t a “wholly owned subsidiary” of investment banks, decries large executive-pay packages and says the party needs to shift its focus from Wall Street to Main Street.

The logic of the backlash against Huckabee seems to be this: if you have a net worth of $20 million-plus, you can call for curbing executive pay packages, and if you don’t have that much your similar calls to do this are proof that you are a wild-eyed left-winger.  Or something like that.  It does make sense that an establishment embarrrassed by or tired of Bush would be unwilling to rally around Huckabee, but that would confirm the point that they see the two men as being markedly similar and it would likely mean that they are quite similar.

Let us all cast our minds back to those early days of the 2000 campaign when Bush unveiled the “compassion” agenda (in 1999) and see what he said:

The purpose of prosperity is to make sure the American dream touches every willing heart. The purpose of prosperity is to leave no one out–to leave no one behind.

In Michigan the other day, Huckabee said:

My goal is not to make rich people poor, it’s to give poor people a shot at the American dream.

Now I don’t like Huckabee or Bush, but can someone explain to me what the substantive differences are between the two of them?

Huckabee has every incentive to distance himself from the GOP coalition; his nomination rests on its demise. ~Dick Armey

If that doesn’t seem to make any sense, that’s because it doesn’t.  Arguably, Huckabee’s election as President would lead to the splintering and demise of “the GOP coalition,” but for Huckabee to win the nomination he does have to alleviate the doubts of other members of the coalition who are not yet convinced that he is tolerable.  Now Armey is a primarily economic conservative with some libertarian inclinations, and he has long been engaged in a running battle with prominent religious conservatives over domestic policy priorities, so we understand why Armey is hardly thrilled to see Huckabee succeeding.  Even so, what Rollins said about the disappearing Reagan coalition is not all that remarkable.  It is a statement of recognition that the current GOP coalition is not what it was fifteen years ago, much less almost thirty years ago.  The makeup of the GOP has changed over just the past ten years, as many noted last year with the release of the latest Fabrizio polling.  Trying to organise an electoral strategy that rallies a coalition that no longer exists would seem misguided and a classic example of fighting the political equivalent of the last war.  Listening to Romney rail against the welfare state, as if it were 1980 all over again, you get the impression that he is trying to run for Reagan’s fourth term.  There are significant elements of the GOP opposed to Huckabee, even though they may be relatively few in numbers, but the same might fairly be said of every major contender.  When it comes to talking about all of the others, even Giuliani, most establishment Republicans do not make overblown claims that this or that nomination would entail the “demise” of the GOP coalition. 

With respect to Huckabee, this accusation has become a bit of conventional wisdom so commonplace that people assert it without even going through the motions of demonstrating whether it is true or not.  Whatever else you can say about Huckabee’s fiscal record, it is extremely odd for economic conservatives to attack him when he proposes to do more tax-cutting than every other Republican candidate save Ron Paul.  Never mind for a moment that his plan is poorly conceived, would probably be impossible to pass and induces laughter in most conservative economists–he claims that he wants to wipe out corporate, capital gains, income and payroll taxes and yet the corporate wing of the party is actually angry at him?  What more does the man have to promise these people?  A consumption tax would actually function as a burden on small businesses, making every small firm and store around the nation into the middlemen for revenue collection–a task that would still be handled by some part of the federal bureaucracy.  Forget for the moment that it would hit middle and lower-middle households more directly, since they spend a larger percentage of their income on consumption, and consider how unfriendly the program is to small business and how actually very pro-corporate it is.  While a consumption tax would have a certain kind of benefit, in that it would, like all taxes, discourage the activity being taxed, the impact this would have on consumer spending would be fairly severe.  Americans might become less consumerist, at least temporarily, and might be less inclined to go into ever-greater debt to buy trifles that will have become simply too expensive, but that probably means the service economy would suffer.  Once again, this would hit small firms hardest and would have deleterious effects on the general economy.  The biggest joke of the Huckabacklash is that he claims to represent Main Street Republican interests and somehow corporate Republicans believe it, even though his main domestic proposal is far more to their advantage than it is to Main Street.  There is nothing especially desirable about reorganising how Leviathan is fed if we continue to insist on feeding it ever-increasing amounts. 

All of us have been buying into the idea that Huckabee is actually an anti-establishment candidate, and I am particularly guilty of advancing this argument.  Huckabee has been milking this for all it’s worth, but he really isn’t any such thing.  In any oligarchic arrangement, you will have some who portray themselves as friends of “the people” and who will use the crowd as leverage against their rival oligarchs, but at no point do any of the rivals intend to change the fundamental mechanisms of power or overthrow or dismantle the establishment.  They will use and take advantage of citizens who may very well want to do just that, and their support for this or that oligarch is then used by the oligarch’s enemies as proof of the threat he poses to them, but the oligarch is simply using those people as a springboard for his ambition.  The oligarch’s enemies have mistaken the use of their own methods of manipulation for an actual revolt, or more accurately they are trying to protect their own fiefdoms within the establishment against a rival claimant and so portray the interloper as a radical departure from everything that has come before.  Huckabee wants to throw out certain members of the GOP establishment, but does not actually propose to do much of anything very differently on key policies.  Huckabee represents, in fact, a continuation and endorsement of the Bushian status quo.  Fleeing from the sinking ship of the current administration, conservative elites are not thrilled at the prospect of boarding another of similar design.

On countless levels, however, 2008 is aeons away from 1996, let alone 1992. In each of his races, Buchanan was trying to topple a genuine, formidable front-runner: a sitting president, a Senate majority leader. But today it’s evident that, after a year of frantic campaigning, no such creature exists; indeed, Huckabee’s leap into the top tier is itself vivid proof of the point. The GOP too is a very different beast from what it was in the nineties: no longer the majority party in Congress, its foundations crumbling, its leadership dazed, confused, and helpless. When I recently asked a senior party operative if the Republican Establishment could block Huckabee from the nomination, he replied, with a tiny chuckle, “What Republican Establishment?”

More to the point, the conditions on the ground are arguably more conducive to populism now than in Pitchfork Pat’s heyday. In 1996, after all, the economy was in the midst of a historic boom, one that was on the verge of kicking into overdrive. Today, the situation is the reverse: Recession looms, the Dow sags, the housing and credit markets buckle. The economy has elbowed aside Iraq as the central locus of voter anxiety. ~John Heilemann

Globalization is the closest thing the money-cons have to a religion. In addition to thinking that it’s good for them, they genuinely believe that it’s good for the world. Huckabee, by contrast, seriously believes that the U.S. should be economically autarchic, with high trade barriers. That’s what really sticks in the money-cons’ craw; the outpouring of abuse directed at Huckabee’s social background (he’s “Huckleberry” to some of them) and his religiosity is largely secondary to the fear of Huckabee’s Peronist economic tendencies. ~Mark Kleiman

Peronist?  That’s a bit of an exaggeration.  He’s more like a “Perot-nist” in some respects, and you would be hard-pressed to find him arguing for autarchy.  In his careless moments, I have heard him speak well of NAFTA (he said so in his interview with Ross in GQ, for example), so his corporation-bashing and rhetorical nods towards protectionism may not be as indicative of his policy views as we may think.  I agree that it is his trade and economic views (or at least what they think his trade and economic views are) that make him unusually unpopular with conservative elites:

What I think really bothers the mainstream about Huckabee, to the extent that they are bothered (and if he wins Iowa, you can expect them to come after him with guns blazing), is his view on trade.  Along with Hunter, he is really the only other protectionist in the GOP field.  Like Hunter, he has not had much luck raising very much cash, because his position on trade alienates wealthy donors and establishment figures.  The main orthodoxy Huckabee is running up against is not over the size of government, but rather the free trade orthodoxy that has almost completely captured the GOP (and which is, incidentally, killing them in the Midwest and elsewhere).  In practice, this is a much more important “orthodoxy” and politicians who go against it have a much harder time getting support.  What I think frightens the mainstream about Huckabee is that he may be able to smuggle in his protectionism under the cover of the big-government conservatism that the GOP has been practicing for years.  What is also frightening to them about Huckabee is that his views on trade are much closer to a strong plurality view within the GOP (his views on immigration, not so much), which gives him a decent shot at appealing to the voters in the primaries and the general election.  If he advances very far, Huckabee’s appeal will throw free traders into a bit of a panic, since it will mean that major candidates on both sides are openly talking skeptically about the benefits of free trade.         

This still seems right, but the other factors are still very important.  I think you also have the desire to marginalise or keep down social conservatives, subordinate their goals to those of economic and “national security” conservatives (as usual) and resist the takeover of the party leadership by someone who embarrasses urban sophisticates with his rusticity and creationism.

The calculation that a Huckabee nomination leads to epic electoral disaster for the GOP is naturally one that his opponents within the party would promote, but it is curious to see how readily it is being accepted on the other side.  Here’s Yglesias:

A Huckabee-led Republican Party would, even if it got its act together and started offering a well-briefed candidate with cutting-edge policies out of the conservative think tax universe, be very very very Southern and not even in a particularly “New South” kind of way. You could pull this off, perhaps, under generally favorable political circumstances, but given the bad overall climate it’d be a recipe for disaster.

Unless the nominee is Obama, I’m not sure I see how Huckabee’s Southern-ness becomes that salient, and if the nominee is Obama the Democrats are going to have their own electability problems.  How does his being from the South really impact a Clinton-Huckabee or Edwards-Huckabee race?  In any case, I don’t see the disaster happening.  I should qualify that: I don’t see a GOP electoral disaster happening because of a Huckabee nomination.  If the GOP are going to be blown out or at least defeated next year, it will be because of changes in the electorate brought on by disillusionment with this administration and its actions.  The Republicans are either unwilling or, in some cases, unable to fix that, so they have to find a nominee who gives them the most competitive chance.  According to the conventional (and wrong) wisdom that social conservatism wrecked the GOP and the Republicans needed to cut back on it to be competitive, Giuliani or McCain seemed the logical choices for making the GOP as competitive as possible.  Appealing to social moderates by nominating a social moderate made a certain amount of superficial sense.  However, as the economy became one of the main issues in the campaign and the leading issue of concern to voters, these two were never going to be particularly well-positioned to win over an electorate that will likely be in a much more populist mood.  Likewise, Romney and Thompson would also make poor standard-bearers, their other personal flaws and liabilities aside, given their rosy and positive assessments of the economy.       

What many observers seem to be missing about Huckabee is that he is very New South, which is what has informed his heretofore gushy “compassionate” views on immigration policy.  Unlike Bush, who has no more real claim to being a Southerner than I do (west Texas is not the South), Huckabee is someone born and raised in the South who has embraced much of the New South image, particularly as it pertains to race relations.  Like Bush, he has made appealing to minority voters something of a priority, but unlike Bush he has actually been successful in getting black voters to vote for him (this is itself partly a function of his heterodox policy views).  According to exit polls in his ‘98 re-election, he supposedly won 48% of the black vote, which is almost certainly too high, but he probably did get at least 20%.  His populism will be helpful in the Midwest, which the GOP has to hold to win the election, and his views on teaching creationism in schools are actually in agreement with the majority of the public.  He is in some ways the only candidate the GOP has on hand to appeal to “downscale” voters, and while the champions of Sam’s Club Republicanism don’t want to identify their cause too closely with him (understandably, given the current backlash and the man’s real flaws) he is nonetheless the most plausible candidate for what they are promoting.  

For all the people who are constantly chattering about how the GOP has to expand its coalition or go into decline, Huckabee is in some ways the obvious choice…except that he frightens off the money and the elites back East.  The hostility to Huckabee derives finally, I think, from the fear of a Huckabee victory and not fear of an electoral blowout by the Democrats.  As I have suggested before, this would mean GOP fratricide for four years.  This might then pave the way to a Democratic landslide, or it might not, but it would probably leave the GOP changed beyond recognition.       

Well, so much for that:

Lou Dobbs of CNN swatted away rumors today that he might run for president.

“I don’t know where this is coming from,” he said in a quick phone interview. “I have no interest in running, and I’ve said that throughout.”

He doesn’t know where it’s coming from?  Perhaps the “friends of Lou Dobbs” who were floating this idea hadn’t bothered to mention their speculations to the man himself.

The Democratic and Republican Parties have become merely opposite wings of the same bird, and it’s the American people who are getting the bird as our elected officials serve their corporate masters and the special interest groups that dominate both parties. ~Lou Dobbs

Can Pat Buchanan sue for copyright infringement over this “wings of the same bird” rip-off?  In the original, it was “two wings the same bird of prey,” which was a much better way of putting it.  It seems, as virtually everyone has already noted, that Dobbs is floating the idea of an independent presidential bid when he says:

I believe the person elected a year from now will be an Independent populist, a man or woman who understands the genius of this country lies in the hearts and minds of its people and not in the prerogatives and power of its elites.

And again:

I believe next November’s surprise will be the election of a man or woman of great character, vision and accomplishment, a candidate who has not yet entered the race.

Okay, I guess he really believes it (and he really believes that he has a book that you’d like to buy), but it’s still not clear to me why he believes it.  Yes, foreign policy is a mess, the price of oil is staggering, the dollar is depreciating, people keep making unpleasant comparisons between the current state of the market and the autumn of 1987, and the economy may well be on the verge of recession.  But why should we expect there to be another Ross Perot-like figure leaping into the mix?  I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be a welcome development–it would be.  But I expect that the candidate would have to be quite wealthy and capable of self-financing the entire campaign, and you just don’t have that many billionaires who get worked up about the evils of corporate influence and mass immigration.  There is real support for strong restrictionist and “protectionist” policies out in the country (ground that the Democrats are already partly beginning to occupy on trade), but an independent who made his campaign primarily an anti-corporate, pro-sovereignty and anti-immigration one could not realistically expect a flood of large donations.  Only a Giuliani or McCain nomination on the GOP side could trigger the kind of mass exodus of restrictionist Republican voters that the Independent Populist of Great Character would need to make his candidacy competitive.  He would draw dissatisfied Democratic voters as well, but the core of this kind of independent bid would be Republican and independent restrictionists.  And what would the Independent Populist of Great Character’s foreign policy look like?  If it is deemed too “isolationist” by the great and the good (i.e., if it is sane on Iraq and Iran), he probably loses many of his nationalist, “Jacksonian” voters to the Republican, and if he is too jingoistic he will be even less popular than the Republicans.

P.S.  The scenario imagined by Dobbs’ friends, in which he enters the race after a Bloomberg candidacy starts, is also highly implausible, not least since Bloomberg will almost certainly not be running.  It also makes no sense–why would Dobbs wait until the man with virtually endless financial resources enters the race?  Dobbs would not only be letting Bloomberg steal his thunder, but guarantee that his campaign would be outmatched in resources by not just two established party candidates but by a billionaire as well.    The billionaire meanwhile frames his campaign around pragmatism and problem-solving and pulls away some significant portion of Dobbs’ protest vote (which is what some part of his support would be).     

Ross follows up on the debate over his latest Atlantic piece on future Democratic electoral prospects, and he explains quite clearly what he means by populism and how his reform ideas relate to it.  I think Ross’ analysis of electoral trends makes sense, which is why I wrote in defense of it.  However, I am actually sympathetic to those, such as Will Wilkinson, who do not like the substance of the policy proposals endorsed by economic populists, as I do not care for many of them myself.  I disagree with some libertarian critics of this populism, to the extent that they even allow that it actually exists, concerning some specific areas of policy and more general assumptions about the legitimacy of the claims of national sovereignty and national interest.  While I have some right-populist inclinations in matters of trade and immigration and I have a very old-fashioned Bolingbrokean-Jeffersonian hostility to concetrated wealth and power, which makes for some common anti-corporate ground with more conventional left-populists, in practice I am not that much of a populist.  You will not see me voting for Edwards-style populism or “compassionate” conservatism or “Sam’s Club Republicanism” now or ever.  For that matter, I neither shop at Sam’s Club, nor am I a Republican, so that makes me a pretty unlikely supporter of this sort of politics, since I rather rather regard the former as a symptom of moral and economic disorder and regard the latter as, well, not my favourite organisation.  Yet I still do recognise that there are people who might just go for such reformism, and these really are the sorts of people the GOP needs to win over and keep if it wants to remain competitive going forward.   

As I have made abundantly clear over the years, I am a small-government constitutionalist and a Ron Paul man, which puts me in a fairly small group.  (I am also very sympathetic to corporatist ideas of solidarity and a conservationist ethic, which may put me in an even smaller subset of this group.)  Despite an appreciation for some of the aspects of corporatism, the kind of economic intervention by the state on offer these days leaves me completely cold.  (Non-intervention is very often the wise course, in foreign policy as in domestic affairs.)  However, my preferences do not really give me the luxury to pretend that people in this country are not looking for some sort of intervention by the state in the field of health care, because they plainly are.  You hear this anecdotally from friends and colleagues, and you see it backed up in polling.  The desire is there, and the main dispute seems to be over whether you have a mostly state-run or a more state capitalist-run program.  Mike Huckabee talks vaguely about having a solution that involves none of the above, but he is typically blissfully free of specifics when he says this.  (Based on anecdotal impressions, I would say that young, educated professionals might be even more worried about health care than many other groups, but I wouldn’t press that too far.)  These people are acting on the assumption that the U.S. government is “their” government (if only!) and that it exists to provide them with certain things they need, or at the very least to provide them with the “opportunity” to acquire what they need. 

At this point, someone usually says something saccharine about empowerment, which is usually where they finally lose me, since it is never the government’s role to empower its citizens.  This idea of government empowering people is the root of all swindles.  Indeed, citizens’ power stands in an inverse relationship with that of the government,and the government never “gives back” the power it has taken.  The more “empowerment” we have, the more servility we have.  This is naturally not a popular view (for confirmation, see the political history of the 20th century or just the 1964 presidential election), and it is not one that is normally associated with populism, though I think a case could be made that it is the ultimate populist view, insofar as it is one that places the best interests of the people ahead of popular enthusiasms.  It is the view most consonant with a decentralist understanding of political liberty, and such an arrangement would ultimately be far better for the common good, a humane, sane way of life and the flourishing of more self-supporting communities. 

As George Grant observed forty years ago, though, political decentralisation without economic decentralisation is simply submission to corporate oligarchy, which I think he regarded as worse than a living Hell (in which case, he would have been too generous).  Consequently, he was known as the “Red Tory” for his harsh criticism of the dissolving acid that capitalism and technology poured on social bonds.  Also, the Loyalist and Anglo-Canadian Conservative tradition never knew the reflexive hostility to state action that our political tradition initially did, and strangely enough Canada now enjoys more effective decentralisation in certain respects than we do (even though it also has more in the way of government services).

All of this got me to thinking about how strange it is that the Democrats have become the party of the economic populists, since they have historically been the less nationalist of the two parties and appear to be in no danger of changing, yet this kind of populism almost always goes with a strong dose of nationalism.  Most economic populist complaints today focus on a few general areas: free trade, the effects of globalisation (e.g., outsourcing, etc.), related government favouritism for corporate interests and immigration.  The Washington-New York political elite is largely in agreement that free trade, globalisation, state capitalism and mass immigration are fundamentally desirable.  There may be disagreements about how to manage them, but there is only minority support for rejecting or opposing any of them on a large scale.  (This is still true in the current presidential fields.)  You would expect the historic party of labour to be more concerned about immigration, but as chance would have it, they are also the historic party of immigrants.  You would expect the more nationalist party to be more skeptical of free trade and globalisation, but they are also the party of corporations.  On each issue where populists might gain traction, the party leadership has tended to reject the populist position and endorse the globalist one, because their true corporate masters desire it.  This remains true.  What is striking today is the extent to which Democratic candidates are willing to buck corporate America at least a little when it comes to free trade, which suggests that the populist critique of free trade and globalisation, which was smothered during the incredibly boring, issue-free 2000 election, might break through this time and cause a change in the political landscape.       

Fascinating what-ifs all, but mostly irrelevant. Immigration reform was defeated by a conservative revolt that spread to the wider public. Senate opponents, gloating over their success in killing the bill, were essentially correct in insisting the American people had rejected immigration reform. ~Fred Barnes, “Things Fall Apart”

You can hear the sound of Barnes’ disappointment.  What we saw this past week was what occurs when representative government basically functions properly.  It is a strange and marvelous thing, rarely seen anymore.  We can be sure that the establishment has suffered only a temporary loss of control here.  Barnes does not quite go to Broderian or Gersonian depths in lamenting the failure of “centrism,” but he shows thinly veiled contempt for Senators who helped kill the bill because they are running for re-election or another office.  Imagine that–elected representatives responding to their constituents! 

In other words, the people have already rejected the bill now and most of the Senators in evenly divided states were afraid that they, too, would be rejected if they supported the bill.  They were all probably right.  Domenici is our senior Senator and has never had much difficulty winning re-election, and even he was evidently feeling the heat.  Bingaman, our Democratic junior Senator, isn’t even up for re-election next year and he voted nay on cloture, raising the number of Democrats who helped junk the bill to 16 (including the Independent Sanders).  People who don’t understand New Mexican politics may be confused by this, but they should remember that we have one of the poorest states that is also most adversely impacted by the ineffective security at the border and one which can hardly afford the extra strains on state services that illegal immigration already imposes.  Plus, opposition to illegal immigration in central and southern New Mexico among Republican voters is quite strong, despite the perpetual minority status of Republicans in New Mexico that would theoretically put pressure on Republicans to move towards the “center” (i.e., towards the left).  Anyone running for statewide office back home would be inciting some strong opposition if he supported this bill, and both Senators apparently got that message. 

Almost one-third of the Democratic caucus turned against the bill, and they have some common characteristics: they come entirely from purple states (Webb, McCaskill) and red states (Landrieu, Tester), which is predictable but significant.  Many were elected on economic populist platforms, and some evidently saw elements of the bill that conflicted with their populism.  The awful guest-worker provisions were likely what turned them against the bill, as well they should have.  Sherrod Brown was among those voting no.  Had the Democrats tried to whip the bill and force their members at least to vote for cloture, the tactic might not have worked, but there were enough Republicans siding with the Majority Leader that it would have passed easily had the Democrats not been so significantly divided.  For the record, 12 Republicans voted with Harry Reid on cloture, including the unexpected names of Judd Gregg and Richard Lugar.  Lugar just handily won re-election and apparently thinks he can tell his constituents to take a hike, but Gregg is up for re-election next year in 2010.  Perhaps Gregg thinks the massive blue wave swallowing New Hampshire last year was a sign that he needed to go with the majority’s leadership, but my guess is that he will eventually suffer on account of this vote.  New Hampshire voters may have thrown out the Republican bums in ‘06, but that does not necessarily mean that they wanted their Senators voting in support of this bill–Sununu seems to have understood this.    

I have to say that this is a better initial outcome than I could have anticipated after the outcome of the midterms.  There had been the disturbing thought that holding Bush and the GOP accountable would simply lead to the empowerment of the worst policies and instincts of this administration in domestic policy.  Admittedly, the gain on a change in Iraq policy has been minimal, but the cost in immigration legislation has fortunately been negligible so far.  The presence of 15 Democratic Senators who opposed the progress of this bill is somewhat reassuring, in that it suggests that there may be a cloture-proof bloc in the Senate opposed to any such omnibus bills in the next Congress as well.  On immigration, there appears to be a solid group of moderate-cum-populist Democrats who were significantly opposed to so-called “comprehensive reform” (Webb, Tester, Dorgan, McCaskill, Brown).  Four of these are newly elected Senators, and it is not at all certain that all of the Republicans they defeated (Allen, Burns, Talent, and DeWine respectively) would have been as reliable in opposing the bill as they proved to be.  Some might have been, but DeWine would likely have been a yea vote.  Surprisingly, the results of the ’06 Senate elections seem to have made amnesty slightly less likely, at least for the moment.    

The “Idiot” species, we suggested, bore responsibility for Latin America’s underdevelopment. Its beliefs—revolution, economic nationalism, hatred of the United States, faith in the government as an agent of social justice, a passion for strongman rule over the rule of law—derived, in our opinion, from an inferiority complex. In the late 1990s, it seemed as if the Idiot were finally retreating. But the retreat was short lived. Today, the species is back in force in the form of populist heads of state who are reenacting the failed policies of the past, opinion leaders from around the world who are lending new credence to them, and supporters who are giving new life to ideas that seemed extinct. ~Alvaro Vargas Llosa

Far be it from me to defend the wisdom of crowds and the virtues of democracy.  If Mr. Vargas Llosa wants to say that the policy preferences of mass democratic electorates are often foolish and unsound, I will not contradict him.  However, I tend to find the anti-populism of the liberal democrat a little hard to take, since it is so transparently inconsistent with his own confidence in democratic government.  There is often nothing obviously more purely rational and less self-interested about the preferences of the liberal democrat that puts him in the position to laugh at the populist and socialist as an “idiot.”  Carl Schorske’s cultural history of fin-de-siecle Vienna was one work that revealed to me this contempt of the 19th century liberal and his sympathisers for the conservative Catholic, the nationalist and the socialist: in this telling, liberals conceived of themselves as embattled heroes of rationality, and their foes were foolish crowds stupidly pursuing “magical” answers that could not be explained by anything other than irrationality.  In fact, the backlash against classical liberalism across all of Europe and, to some extent, also here in America was the result of the failure of liberal policies to address the interests and needs of huge numbers of people.  There is good reason why Christian democracy and social democracy became the dominant forces in European politics in virtually every country: most constituencies did not benefit from and did not want the liberal order.  The story of modern Europe is the story of how liberty and democracy are frequently mutually exclusive, but it also offers an important reminder that there are social and political goods that most people will privilege ahead of fairly abstract notions of liberty. 

Liberal economic policies were geared for the benefit of liberal middle-class voters and promised, eventually, benefits for others as well, but in the short term the rural and labour interests were quite rationally and sensibly opposed to policies that privileged the interests of buergerlich city-dwellers and the interests of capital and finance.  Liberals are always caught in the paradox that they endorse all of the contractual and egalitarian theories that must lead inexorably to universal suffrage and mass democracy, knowing at the same time that their definition of good government and freedom is not shared by the overwhelming majority of people in the world and will likely be repudiated once everyone has a vote.  Nowadays they possess a charmingly naive faith in the virtues of democracy, but reserve the right to declare the exercise of the franchise in ways they dislike to be the workings of idiocy.  This role today is taken up by the inheritors of the American Freisinnigen, the Republicans, who are quite happy to extol the glories of democracy and “people power” at every turn when it seems to vindicate their policy preferences until the demos turns against them, whereupon they rediscover that America is supposed to be a republic and the madness of crowds is a dangerous and worrisome phenomenon.  It is as some of them are Jacobins who are willing to pose as Federalists when the occasion requires; the centralising tendencies of both Jacobin and Federalist make this contradictory stance less absurd than it might otherwise be.  But that is another story.         

Back to Latin American idiocy.  What is striking about this analysis is not its rude dismissal of the recurring preferences of large numbers of Latin Americans, but the treatment of the resurgence of “the Idiot” as if nothing in the 1990s happened that might have caused many Latin American nations to question the neoliberalism that was being promoted as the answer to “the Idiot.”  Latin American electorates did not turn on neoliberalism out of a fit of pique or whimsy–like its original, neoliberalism introduced any number of strains and upheavals into the societies where neoliberal policies were implemented and austerity budgets alienated those who depended on government largesse.  Like classical liberalism, neoliberalism has proved to be wildly unpopular.  The disasters of neoliberalism in Argentina in particular seemed to vindicate increased hostility to such policies.  Even though the Argentinian government could be fairly blamed for the overspending that pushed their country into the debt crisis that led to the meltdown that impoverished many Argentines, the association of the ruling party and the government with neoliberal policies tainted the entire theory with the failures of their mismanagement. 

If “the Idiot” has returned with a vengeance, it is because neoliberal politicians also acted pretty idiotically in their own right and discredited the alternative to old-fashioned populism.  To the extent that neoliberalism was associated with pro-American attitudes, its failure made hostility to U.S. policy fashionable once again.  Rather than face up to any of these political realities, Vargas Llosa goes so far as to declare outside sympathisers with this backlash to be guilty of “intellectual treason” (whatever that means). 

The author takes the easy road of bashing Hugo Chavez, who is so ridiculous that criticising him is a bit like calling in an airstrike on a barrel of fish.  He cites Chavez’s admiration for Chomsky and Chomsky’s admiration for Chavez.  That is a surprise–two radical leftists admire each other!  In other news, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair get along, and Christopher Hitchens does not believe in God.  Somehow Foreign Policy thought it worth publishing an article that tells us that (contrary to all of those numerous Western claims of success) Venezuelan social and economic policies are not working very well.  Plus, did you realise that some sociology professor from Binghampton University (where?) has defended the Cuban government?  How could you not know–he is apparently an “American opinion leader.”  Continuing to show the vast influence of ”idiot” sympathisers in the industrialised West, Mr. Vargas Llosa has dug up a lecture by Harold Pinter (he’s still alive?) in which Pinter rallies to the side of the old Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas (because it’s never too late to justify communist atrocities).  Of course, it’s dreadful to have people still defending the Sandinistas, but in an age when Trotsky admirers appear in the pages of National Review it might just be that old leftists rehashing debates of the 1980s are not the most pressing concern of our time.

But did you know that there are occasionally news stories written about Chavez that do not roundly condemn him and all his works?  Clearly, there are terrible and sinister forces at work!  That is not all.  He goes on:

Populists share basic characteristics: the voluntarism of the caudillo as a substitute for the law; the impugning of the oligarchy and its replacement with another type of oligarchy; the denunciation of imperialism (with the enemy always being the United States); the projection of the class struggle between the rich and the poor onto the stage of international relations; the idolatry of the state as a redeeming force for the poor; authoritarianism under the guise of state security; and “clientelismo,” a form of patronage by which government jobs—as opposed to wealth creation—are the conduit of social mobility and the way to maintain a “captive vote” in the elections.     

This is all perfectly true, and it is also a pretty good definition of every welfarist, progressive and social democratic political movement that has come to power in North America and Europe for the last seventy years.  Give or take a point, it could be a very good description of FDR and the New Deal.  These movements are routinely very wrong about the efficacy of the policies they promote, they are often quite stupid about economics and they often end up worsening the conditions of the people they set out allegedly to help, and they are, of course, vehicles for ambitious men to acquire power for themselves, but they came into being in response to the inadequate representation and inadequate response of governments dominated by other forces.  It may be the case that Latin American governments working on behalf of the interests of the wealthy oligarchs pursue policies that are better for the economic development of their respective countries, and it may often be the case that populist backlashes harm these countries, but it is entirely understandable and predictable that marginalised, dispossessed and poor people who see relatively few obvious benefits from this order are going to seek some kind of change.  There is not even a hint that there might be some explicable cause for the resurgence of populism–it can only be idiocy. 

Now, obviously Western sympathy with Chavismo is fairly idiotic, but it is also highly unrepresentative of most Western opinion, just as Chavismo itself is largely unrepresentative of most Latin American left-populism.  Most Latin American nations have turned left without indulging in the more absurd excesses of Venezuela and Bolivia, and they will benefit from their moderation.  The “threat” described in this article is not really that threatening, since it refers to the political sympathies of mostly marginal and far-left Western figures who have limited influence, if they have any at all, on policy.  The regimes for which they have sympathies are themselves relatively weak and have already begun to suffer the economic consequences of their flawed policies.     

Via Ross at his shiny new Atlantic blog comes this Noam Scheiber piece on phony “populism” and Fred Thompson.  Mr. Scheiber is right that the Americans who are drawn to Fred Thompson’s pickup truck act want ”their rich people” to act as they do.  It isn’t as if voters are entirely unaware that they are rallying around millionaires and dynastic heirs.  On the one hand, the rich Republican politicians serve as a kind of goal for aspirational voters who want to make their own fortune; the rich Democratic politicians tend to operate more according to a rather distorted notion of noblesse oblige (hence, Edwards, son of a mill worker, now claims to feel obliged to “help” others succeed as he has–by using the state to compel others to do the helping).  (This, in addition to the nature of the institutions where they are working, may help to explain why privileged upper-middle kids who have enjoyed the best education tend to go overwhelmingly for left-liberal politics and politicians–their politics is at least partly an expression of the debt they feel they owe.)  

Mr. Bush’s brush-clearing doesn’t necessarily endear him to anyone on an egalitarian basis, especially when he is clearing his brush on a gigantic ranch.  It seems to me that these things, even if they were completely fake and done for public consumption, don’t work because they show the rich politician to be “just an ordinary guy” (which he obviously isn’t for one reason or another) but because they show the rich politician as someone who doesn’t have to do his own brush-clearing but who does it anyway.  It elides inequality, which in turn helps the voter forget the vast disparity in power between himself and the politician whom he is about to invest with still more power.  Phony “populism” makes it easier to entrust a politician with great power, because the phony “populism” seems to suggest (though it can often deceive) that the new power will not distance the pol too much from voters.

But let’s clear something else up.  What these pols do with their homey performances is not really populism, phony or otherwise.  Any attempt of a slick Eastern or Californian transplant (such as the Georges Bush and Allen respectively) to play as the down-home country boy has nothing to do with populism, though it may be classed as a kind of symbolic demagoguery.  (The pioneer of Eastern transplantation to the West, T.R. was a progressive and extremely hostile to the trusts, yes, but no one could reasonably confuse him with a populist like Bryan.)  Populism has to have some theoretical connection to empowering or serving the popular interest, which has typically meant the breaking up of concentrated wealth and concentrated power and distributing power more evenly throughout the body politic.  Obviously, the GOP has never really wanted to attack the former and historically has only rarely attacked the latter and has since ceased to attack it at all.  The original party of consolidation makes for a poor vehicle for any kind of populism.  The symbolic demagoguery of pretending to be just like Middle Americans (or enough like them to assuage their doubts) has had to make up the distance between the nature of the party and the desires of its constituents.  On the national level, I think this bridge is finally beginning to strain and break from having to stretch so far and bear so much weight. 

What typically drives liberals crazy about this phony “populism” is the example of men belonging to the historic party of corporations and the moneyed interest hamming it up as one of the common people, when they actually serve entirely different interests.  (This doesn’t mean that Democrats serve substantially different interests these days–it is the success of “third way” politics that the Democracy is equally in hock to corporations.)  What I think many liberals still don’t quite understand is just how powerful and visceral Middle American resentment of overbearing and unaccountable government (especially in its more culturally radical forms) really is.  Republicans have been able to tap into that populist resentment of government intrusiveness for a time, but this was only possible so long as the GOP retained some credibility as being at least a marginally more small-government party.  Once that has vanished, as it assuredly has over the past few years, the GOP finds itself exposed for what it is–a party that purports to represent Middle America despite the reality that its every major policy priority seems almost designed to ruin or harm Middle Americans, the Party of Immigration, Imperialism and Insolvency. 

Not even a funny actor, a red pickup truck and a Southern accent can repair the damage done to the GOP brand.  I think I begin to understand more why many people think Fred Thompson will save the Republicans, but they are still operating according to the culture war rules of the late 20th century.  According to what I am guessing will be the new rules, at least for a little while, the GOP will be forced to defend the expanded warfare-welfare state they have created and embraced, creating temporarily the space for Democrats to position themselves not only as economic populist foes of corporations (which will, of course, simply be an act for most of them) but as the party opposing expansive and intrusive government.  The cultural issues will continue to motivate and influence elections and the GOP will continue to win considerable support for advancing cultural conservatism, at least rhetorically, but without the responsible/limited government leg of the GOP stool cultural conservatism alone cannot keep the GOP standing.  It strikes me that a Giuliani campaign, which can plausibly draw on neither the cultural issues nor the symbolic demagoguery nor a responsible/limited government message, would bring about electoral disaster for Republicans.  Fred Thompson would not do a lot better, but he does at least have that red pickup truck. 

I can imagine a few explanations. One is that most conservative pundits have allowed that portion of the brain that one uses to analyze a substantive question of national policy to atrophy to the extent that they don’t understand why this is something that conservatives should like. Another is corruption; this proposal would be bad interest group politics and the energy companies are major financiers of the right. A third is hackishness; this proposal would put you in disagreement with George W. Bush and other Republican Party politicians. Last is the politics of resentment; conservative pundits just hate environmentalists too much to see the forest for the trees. [sic] ~Matt Yglesias

Yglesias proposes here some possible explanations why there aren’t many conservative pundits who advocate a carbon tax despite its purportedly great political advantages.  While listing those who do support such a proposal, Ross also offers an explanation for why pundits, whose job description rarely involves introducing interesting or new policy proposals, aren’t pushing this or any other potentially controversial proposal.  Ross’ explanation makes sense of pundit indifference, but Yglesias’ answers sum up fairly well most of the actual political reasons why a carbon tax proposal would go nowhere today on the right.  A proposal that goes against corporate interests, the administration and offends mainstream conservative knee-jerk anti-environmentalism all at the same time is obviously doomed from the start as far as most conservatives today are concerned.  As for the pundits themselves, they have no incentive to swim against the tide of anti-environmentalist, pro-administration sentiment that remains widespread in their regular readership.  A carbon tax is the sort of thing Mike Huckabee would probably propose, and that is exactly why conservatives will want nothing to do with it (much as they already want nothing to do with the rest of Huckabee’s tax policy).

There are at least three additional reasons why you will not see a lot of enthusiasm for the carbon tax on the right once the policy ideas begin to filter down from the wonks to everyone else.  There is the die-hard small-government response that lower taxes in one area shouldn’t be replaced by another tax.  “Starve the beast” isn’t a big vote-winner, I agree, but among the true believing anti-statists, who are actually disproportionately represented in the middle and lower echelons of movement conservatism, it remains one of their hoped-for goals.  Regardless of what a carbon tax is supposed to achieve, these are the people who will oppose it because it is a tax and the overall government take will not significantly diminish; the stated purpose of reducing consumption in something, regardless of what that something is, will offend another batch of economic conservatives who seem to think that consumption is man’s purpose here on earth.   There would also be a pretty intense reaction among voters against a tax that would obviously raise the cost of living for everyone, since this puts another financial strain on working and middle-class families that will feel as if they cannot afford it (and in many cases, whether for reasons of indebtedness or not, they actually cannot).  Direct taxes are no better for these people, but the voters who want lower taxes do not simply want to see their money extracted in a different way.  The middle-of-the-road, less obsessively anti-tax voters who might even be sympathetic to the goal of the policy (i.e., reducing carbon emissions) are not so sympathetic to the goal that they want to see higher energy costs.  

During a time in which economic populism is becoming more popular, because job security is worsening and outsourcing has become an ever-greater problem, it seems to me that the party of the carbon tax is the party that will implode all across the Midwest.  If conservative pundits are as reflexively pro-corporate, pro-administration and anti-environmentalist as Yglesias makes them out to be, they would just need to sit back and wait to reap the benefits of a backlash against a Democratic candidate proposing a carbon tax. 

The party of the carbon tax will probably not do very well elsewhere, but those areas hardest hit by the glories of free trade will probably not be eager to add yet another cost to doing business in the United States that will encourage still more industry to relocate in foreign climes.  Add to this the visceral, nay, reptilian response of the average suburbanite to the suggestion that their ability to consume ought to be challenged and questioned, all for the sake of the alleged benefits stemming from the reduction of carbon emissions, and you have the next great “populist” anti-tax movement just waiting to be directed by a savvy pol.  This last point may be the most important for explaining why this is an idea fit only for policy wonks: the powerful consumerist hatred of any conservationist appeal that says that consumption of anything ought to be reduced vastly outmatches in intensity any feeling of approval for something like the carbon tax.       

Perhaps if the policy were sold as a step towards energy independence, it might manage to win the support of non-interventionist conservatives who already think we should extract ourselves militarily as much as possible from the Near East.  However, if we were to pursue the nuclear route and oil fields ceased to be strategically important for America, what rationale would the empire have left?  Has Krauthammer really thought this one through all the way?  

France is only the latest example of Europe’s left-right spectrum decomposing from below, as the lower-middle (heirs to the Poujadists and the Trotskyists) revolts against the orthodoxies of the upper-middle.  The mostly shallow fusionism of Ségo and Sarko marks a clumsy attempt to reconcile with the new political reality.  European politicians, at least, “Are All Pim Fortuyns Now.” I think it’s only a matter of time before a similar political landscape emerges here in the United States. We have the considerable advantage of a large and growing economy, and yet we also have a sky-high rate of incarceration that might soon become for us what tension over assimilation and immigration has been for Europe — and then some. ~Reihan Salam

Although the presidential election is 19 months away, the Republican Party has a real and growing problem in Ohio that could cost it the White House in 2008.

Simply put, the GOP brand is in trouble in Ohio, more so than it is nationally. That matters because in 2004 Ohio was the key to an Electoral College majority, and could well be the same in 2008. ~Peter Brown

Wasn’t Ohio the purplish-blue state where Sherrod Brown won the Senate race on an explicitly economic populist platform?  That might make some people think that some sort of political appeal aimed at middle class voters (some might even call it “lower-middle reformism”) would be in order for the Republicans if they want to have a chance in competing in a crucial swing state and so have a fighting chance at winning the next presidential election.  You might even say that if they didn’t develop this sort of appeal, their defeat would be basically guaranteed, since they would otherwise be fairly sure to lose Ohio, and they cannot afford to lose Ohio.  What would Goldberg say to all that?

And since Ross and Reihan are finding a Strange New Respect for Buchananism (or whatever passes for “paleoconservatism” these days) I should say that I’m reminded of a point Ramesh made years ago in his article on Buchanan. “Conservatives tend to place a lot of emphasis, maybe too much, on the idea that ideas have consequences,” Ponnuru wrote. “They hoist their ideas up the flagpole and then see who salutes. Buchananism puts its idealized social base first, and lets it drive everything else.” This sounds quite a bit like what’s going on with Lower-Middle-Reformism.

The late Sam Francis must be smiling from wherever he is (I have my hunches on where that might be) knowing that his Middle American Radicalism is getting a fresh coat of paint. ~Jonah Goldberg

Tom Piatak joins in the enfilading fire aimed at Goldberg’s obnoxious post.  Reihan responds in a fashion that is far more good natured and generous than the post deserves.  I have every intention of drawing out just how many things are wrong with Goldberg’s post (I suspect I will have some help in this department), but for now a few simple points.  No one does more flagpole-raising and salute-demanding than people at NR, whose last remaining productive function (besides flacking for the warfare state) seems to be the enforcement of ideological purity whenever it is challenged by a crunchy con, an anti-imperialist, neopopulist or, well, anyone resembling a traditional conservative.  Right around this same time last year Goldberg bestirred himself to write off, if not write out, Rod Dreher and anything remotely resembling a conservatism of place and virtue.  Idiotically, this champion of rootless, Wal-Mart America has decided that the advocates for “Sam’s Club Republicans” are the latest batch of dissidents to beat down and skewer with not-so-subtle efforts to associate them (however implausibly) with the ideas of Dr. Francis.  He did the same to another young blogger from the other side of the spectrum, Matt Yglesias, who had the temerity to state certain obvious truths about the influence of hawkish pro-Israel people on the political process and the politics of foreign policy.  Goldberg replied by noting the similarity between the views of Yglesias and Lindbergh, as if this were an innocent observation intended to further debate. 

From my perspective, there is actually nothing wrong with being associated with Dr. Francis or Col. Lindbergh, since both were honourable, patriotic and admirable men, and if modern observers come to similar conclusions or express similar views as they did it is probably because these gentlemen were substantially in the right in their own time.  However, the intent of someone at NR invoking their names is clear: it is to demonise, discredit and defame those being so compared, because their names have been (unjustly) tainted with the vicious smears of earlier ideological enforcers.  Why make these comparisons?  Because the one engaged in the demonisation knows he cannot actually take on his adversaries in legitimate debate, but must always resort to the cheap, heavy-handed tactics of a commissar. 

To the end of exerting control over the collapsing movement they have helped to ruin, the ideological enforcers will be perfectly happy to appear otherwise very flexible, pragmatic, empirical and politically savvy, and they will be champions of a supposed mild reasonableness that happens to coincide perfectly with agreement with their own positions.  In this view, other people “idealise” and “romanticise” things, whereas they are supposedly the epitome of cautious, grounded common sense.  It would be a clever rhetorical move, were it not so utterly transparent and weak.

Some might have ”hunches” about the fate of Goldberg’s soul, but then charitable and decent people do not speculate about the eternal damnation of their political opponents as Goldberg was clearly trying to do.   

I’m less sure that the backward-looking focus on the decisions of 2003 made much sense, or that the anti-Wall Street rhetoric plays well. Let me put it this way: This is not the speech that Rahm Emanuel or Chuck Schumer would have written. And while Webb is a more compelling figure than they are, they’re the better political strategists. ~Ramesh Ponnuru

On the contrary, the focus on 2003, to the extent that there was one, was a smart move.  The list of national security and military figures Sen. Webb rattled off, while familiar to pundits and bloggers, reintroduced the viewing public (if there was much of one) to the serious and credible arguments and predictions made–and ignored by the administration and its supporters–prior to the war.  The list summed up fairly quickly the most damning assessment that can be made about the GOP and Bush.  Webb was saying, “Iraq shows that the Republicans are not the party of responsible, intelligent foreign policy, and here are the witnesses.”  Important parts of the Webb response were aimed at saying, “The Republicans are reckless in foreign affairs, whereas we Democrats have better judgement.”  Speaking of the party as a whole, this is absurd, but that is why Webb being the one to give the response was a very wise move.  Had someone like an Emanuel or a Schumer given the response, the appeal would have been a harder sell, since Schumer voted for the authorisation of force (as did most ambitious, “national” Democrats) and Emanuel is a reliable DLC man when it comes to interventionist foreign policy.  Emanuel and Schumer are better political strategists, but mainly in the context of running election campaigns–their judgement on the politics of how to handle policy questions seems questionable at best.  Emanuel and Schumer represent the half-hearted defense approach: they concede the substance of a policy, such as the Iraq war, but quibble about the details.  Webb obviously represents a more stern, confrontational approach, and it is to have more vigorous opposition and confrontation with Mr. Bush when Congress believes him to be in the wrong that the public voted out the GOP majority.    

Webb makes the message of responsible Democratic foreign policy sound remotely plausible, because he actually did have better judgement than the administration in assessing the pitfalls of an invasion and was on record saying so in 2002.  But he notes his opposition almost in passing, emphasising the numerous credible critics of the then-proposed invasion.  The nods to his family’s tradition of military service was a straightforward way of saying: “My people have been fighting your wars because of our patriotism, but you keep misleading and mistreating us and now we’re mighty angry.”  It was a blunt way to do away with the standard “weak” Democrat image, but it will probably resonate with a lot of tired and frustrated military families.  It will definitely resonate with other tired and frustrated citizens who, as the Senator rightly noted, have patiently endured four years of mismanagement in this war.  It was also another way of saying, I think, “My Democratic Party is not the party of the wine-and-cheesers and the cultural radicals–it is a party for the patriotic, put-upon Middle American.”  

One might think that Webb’s knocks on Wall Street and the old Wall Street/Main Street dichotomy wouldn’t go over well, but then one would need to forget election results in places such as Ohio and Pennsylvania where record high Dow closes mean very little for a great many people.  The nods to Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt and the remarks about wages all tap into instinctive distrust of the moneyed interest in Democratic constituencies.  They also probably appeal to the American sense of fair play.  Perhaps some will say Webb is dressing up as a question of “fairness” things that have nothing to do with what is actually fair or right, but it seems almost certain that appealing to that sense of fair play will have a receptive audience.  As the passage of numerous minimum wage referenda around the nation shows, that element of Webb’s response will likely go over very well.   

Webb’s response was a solid performance for his first nationwide address.  It was hardly the rapture-inducing event that some Democrats seem to have made it out to be, but neither was it the awkward, anxious bumbling Republicans have portrayed it as being.  Obviously, he was following the teleprompter closely, which seems to be the natural hang-up for those starting out in making televised speeches of this kind, but compared to his less-than-enthralling stump performances last year it was a clear improvement and a success in laying out the basic Democratic theme, which seems to be, “We’re on your side.” 

Of course, I don’t think the Democrats, a few individuals like Webb excepted perhaps, are on “our” side at all, but that is the message they need to convey to continue to capitalise on the disenchantment and disgust with the GOP.

Update: Reihan has a short post on the “tribune” of the “new populists.”  I can think of someone who is probably very pleased by last night’s performance.

Populism has gotten a bad odor, and not just among plutocrats—for most of the political chattering class, it is at least faintly pejorative. But I think that’s about to change: When economic hope shrivels and the rich become cartoons of swinish privilege, why shouldn’t the middle class become populists? What Professor Hacker calls “office-park populism” will be a main engine of any new cyclical progressive renaissance. The question is whether we’ll elect steady, visionary FDR-like national leaders—Bloomberg? Obama?—who can manage to keep populism’s nativist, Luddite tendencies in check. ~Kurt Andersen, New York Magazine

Via Reihan

Reihan pointed out this column as an example of the astonishingly boring and unimaginative writing Mr. Andersen produces when he turns to columns.  He’s right–it is a terribly boring and unimaginative column.  Leave it to a New Yorker to take something as elemental and interesting as popular protest and social unrest and turn it into just another banging of the New Deal coalition drum.  The quote above is representative of the good liberal Northeasterner who sees the opportunity to exploit popular discontent with what he calls the “casino economy” but who refuses to give any indication that the the hordes of so-called “nativist Luddites” whom he so plainly loathes are the very people any populist candidate will need to win over.  It is strange how quickly he turns to references to the super-aristocratic FDR, a man who simply oozes upper class condescension, to make an argument for the “we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore” approach to politics.  There is nothing necessarily amiss in having aristocrats of one kind or another take up popular and populist causes, but the fawning admiration for FDR tends to confirm that there is nothing very populist about this kind of politics.  It may be in some sense a progressive kind of politics, but that is a very different strain in American political history.  The Dobbsian appeal to those whom Brooks called the populist-nationalists is quite distinct and, on some things, starkly opposed to anything FDR-like, whether we are speaking of trade, immigration or foreign policy.

There was one hint of something interesting in Andersen’s column that has gone unmentioned so far.  He writes:

We can afford to make life a little more fair and a lot less scary for most people. It’s not only a matter of virtue and national self-image. Because the future that frightens me isn’t so much a too-Hispanic U.S. caused by unchecked Mexican immigration, but a Latin Americanized society with a high-living, blithely callous oligarchy gated off from a growing mass of screwed-over peons.

That’s all well and good, except that the likelihood of creating the Latin Americanised, highly stratified society of the rich few and the poor many is greatly increased if America continues to import the political values (which are rather “Luddite” in their own left-populist way), poverty and people of Latin America.  That is something that I have been arguing for quite a few months now.

Schumacher’s greatest achievement was the fusion of ancient wisdom and modern economics in a language that encapsulated contemporary doubts and fears about the industrialized world. The wisdom of the ages, the perennial truths that have guided humanity throughout its history, serves as a constant reminder to each new generation of the limits to human ambition. But if this wisdom is a warning, it is also a battle cry. Schumacher saw that we needed to relearn the beauty of smallness, of human-scale technology and environments. It was no coincidence that his book was subtitled Economics as if People Mattered.

Joseph Pearce revisits Schumacher’s arguments and examines the multifarious ways in which Schumacher’s ideas themselves still matter. Faced though we are with fearful new technological possibilities and the continued centralization of power in large governmental and economic structures, there is still the possibility of pursuing a saner and more sustainable vision for humanity. Bigger is not always best, Pearce reminds us, and small is still beautiful. ~Description of Joseph Pearce’s Small Is Still Beautiful.

Clark Stooksbury, Jeremy Beer and (I suspect) many others familiar to us all from our Crunchy Cons and Look Homeward, America adventures earlier in the year will be assembling next month for the group blog about Mr. Pearce’s new book, whose name it bears: Small Is Still Beautiful.

Hart has always held certain views outside of the conservative mainstream. An advocate for stem-cell research, Hart debated another National Review editor on the subject in 2004. Early in 2005, Hart wrote a long editorial for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called “The Evangelical Effect.” Finding fault in Bush’s evangelicalism—in 2000, Bush declared that Jesus Christ was his most influential political philosopher—Hart wrote: “The Bush Presidency often is called conservative. This is a mistake. It is populist and radical, and its principal energies have roots in American history, and these roots are not conservative.” ~James Panero (via Supreme Fiction)

Mr. Hart has done fine work eviscerating the follies of the Bush administration, and his denunciations of the ideological turn of the administration, the GOP and the conservative movement have been very much on the mark.  There was a great deal of chest-beating at NR over Mr. Hart’s Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he both criticised pro-life enthusiasts and ridiculed the Iraq war as Wilsonian madness.  (There was far more to the op-ed than these two things, but these were the points that seem to have received the most comment.) 

I have always assumed that the thing that most offended them was not his attack on pro-lifers but his hostility to the war in Iraq.  Under the “new fusionist” dispensation, there are important ”issues” and then there are fundamental, unquestionable truths: among the latter is the truth that the Iraq war is necessary and good and proper.  To use the word Wilsonian in a disparaging way in the context of discussing the war in Iraq is to have placed oneself among those dissident conservatives who still remember what conservatism is and what they believed before 2001.  It is the sort of thing that irritates war supporters on “the right” to no end, because it reveals how deeply indebted they are to the foolishness of liberal internationalism for their foreign policy views, and I take it as almost certain that it was this that brought down the intense criticism of Hart’s op-ed rather than anything he might have said one way or the other about abortion. 

Hart’s op-ed did also elicit strong reaction over his somewhat cavalier treatment of opposition to abortion (in which he rather unimpressively cited vague irrrepressible “social forces” on a matter of fundamental moral principle), and in his disdain for evangelicals one often gets the sense not so much of a High Church man whose mind boggles at the shallowness of Enthusiasm but of a Northeasterner who finds people from much of the rest of the country rather drab and miserable yokels whom we should ignore as often as we can.  But he did make one excellent observation in his remarks on abortion that deserves to be quoted here: “Simply to pull an abstract “right to life” out of the Declaration of Independence is not conservative but Jacobinical.”  This is quite right.  I would extend that to much of the “rights” talk that pervades the American right today.  However, since large numbers of people who consider themselves conservative routinely pull abstract rights out of the Declaration of Independence (and who denounce as relativist or historicist those who object to this idiocy), it is a protest that will most likely confuse or annoy its target audience. 

In any case, it has been the war that has separated him most sharply from the crowd at NR and the ideology that now infests the movement more broadly.  If there is one sentence that might sum up the modern Republican Party and the conservative movement, it is that they would sooner prefer causing death abroad than protecting life at home.  If someone like a McCain or a Giuliani should somehow miraculously win the nomination in ‘08, my impression of the priorities of conservatives will have been confirmed absolutely. 

But where Mr. Hart has been devastating in his critiques of the administration and modern conservatism, he makes some remarks, such as the one quoted above, that seem to me to make no sense.  What can it mean, for example, to call Mr. Bush’s politics populist?  Radical of a sort they certainly are, but to call someone radical may or may not be an indictment of him–it is the quality and nature of the roots to which one returns that determines whether his radicalism is wisdom or insanity. 

But in what sense is Mr. Bush is a populist, and how does he advance any kind of populism?  Whether we are speaking of a kind of rightist populism that focuses on national identity, relative economic self-sufficiency, defense of the American worker and a foreign policy of non-entanglement and neutrality or the old American (conservative) populism of agrarian protest in the 19th century or the aristocratic brand of populism of the Opposition in Britain in the 18th century or the leftist populism of redistribution and socialism re-emerging in Latin America, there is no kind of populism that matches Mr. Bush’s politics (except insofar as the word populism is used rather the way some people use fascist by people from the coasts to disparage the politics of someone else with no regard to content or meaning).  Mr. Bush is a liberal patrician who actually favours the interests of the Northeastern elite and who embraces a heady mix of hegemonic nationalism that expresses itself in terms of a universalist ideology.  His politics are radical in the pursuit of ideological clarity, and they are also autocratic and imperialist.  He has nothing but contempt for actual populist opposition to mass immigration, free trade and activist foreign policy, to name a few examples where what benefits the people and what the people desire are equally uninteresting to him. 

He is a Brahmin with a twang, and for some reason a great many people have bought into the twang and the folksy spiel while ignoring what the man says and does.  This is a serious mistake, and it reinforces Mr. Hart’s assumption that all populism is contrary to his kind of conservatism, which is probably why he says his kind of conservatism is anti-populist.  Certainly, if I thought Mr. Bush was a populist of some kind I would want to be an ardent anti-populist, but he isn’t one and no fair definition of a rightist populism could confuse it with the sort of ideologically-driven and flatly unpatriotic policies pursued by the present administration.  To call Mr. Bush populist is to bring discredit on actual populists, which mainly benefits precisely those few whom Mr. Bush actually serves and represents.

Chait asserts that “any new libertarian voters the Democrats attracted … would cost them support,” but here he is clearly wrong. According to data analyzed by David Boaz and David Kirby, Democratic House and Senate candidates in 2006 did 24 percentage points better with libertarian-leaning voters than they did in the midterm elections of 2002. These findings are corroborated by the strong Democratic gains in New Hampshire and the interior West–areas of the country where small-government leanings are prevalent. Yet, even as Democrats improved their standing with the “economically conservative, socially liberal” crowd, they increased their overall national vote share as well. So much for the idea that gaining ground with libertarians is doomed to be a net vote loser. ~Brink Lindsey

Proponents of the “libertarian swing vote” theory (Boaz and Kirby) and proponents of a liberal-libertarian alliance are awfully crafty in the way they use evidence.  They ignore the intervening election of 2004, which would show that 2006 represented a stabilising and hardening of “libertarian” support for the GOP.  There are those classed as libertarians by these Cato studies who tend to drift towards the Democrats, but their numbers are limited and they form a clear minority of the voters classified as libertarians. 

Advocates for the “swing vote” or the alliance then make vague references to New Hampshire and “the interior West” without ever explaining why a party’s success in these places equals support for libertarian social or economic policies.    There is an assumption that libertarian voters helped make Democratic success here possible, but I feel fairly sure without having looked terribly closely at any state-by-state vote tallies that the people voting for the new Democratic House and state legislature representatives in New Hampshire were not those Cato might define as libertarians but were instead “centrist”/”independent” voters whose mass defection from the GOP fits the national trend.  In “the interior West,” it is difficult to believe that there really are as many libertarians (very broadly defined) as some seem to think.     Did AZ-05 and AZ-08, for example, flip because of a great defection of libertarians, or for other reasons entirely?  I suspect that the more you dig into the specifics of each Democratic victory in “the interior West” you will find very few libertarian-themed campaign pitches that brought them the win.  

Going from ’04 to ‘06, did libertarians defect in greater or smaller numbers from the GOP than other blocs of voters?  Clearly, they defected in smaller numbers.  In part, this was because no one was trying to persuade them to defect.  On the other hand, no one was trying to persuade them because their policies are actually unpopular across the country (hey, everybody, let’s have mass immigration and free trade!) and the voters Democrats could most easily poach are conservative populists.  The vague outline of a liberal-populist alliance at least has a slight plausibility to it when it comes to some aspects of economic policy, and if Dobbsian Democrats could drop the fetishes of cultural liberalism and cease antagonising these same voters they would win far more support than if they joined hands with libertarians in, say, selling out the country with amnesty.   

This brings us back to the biggest swindle of them all: the equation of libertarian with “economically conservative and socially liberal.”  This is a definition fit for the DLC or the Concord Coalition, not the Cato Institute.  It is an attempt to claim the broad middle as the natural libertarian constituency.  This is a clever PR move, but it has no connection to reality.  Using this definition makes appealing to libertarians seem politically desirable for both parties, but this is to treat libertarian voters as some sort of floating centrist vote that, according to Cato’s own studies of their voting behaviour (even accepting Cato’s over-generous enumeration of how many “libertarian-leaning” voters there are), they simply are not.   

Mr. Lindsey’s claim that populism is a loser on the national stage is a tried and true spiel favoured by the two party establishment and those who support the consensus politics on trade, immigration and foreign policy.  (Note that foreign policy, the main area where a liberal-libertarian alliance is most natural and most obvious, is the one Lindsey avoids like the plague because, when it comes to the Iraq war, he is as libertarian as I am Buddhist.)  Populism has been a loser on the national stage when prosperity was widespread, economic insecurity was minimal and wages were not stagnant.  When economic insecurity and anxiety rise and wages do not, populism often succeeds.  When government seems to be failing and out of control, populism succeeds.  In 2006, minimum wage hikes succeeded in referendum after referendum–obviously, some populist measures are quite popular.  Ross Perot, one of the most ridiculous presidential candidates ever, got 19% of the vote nationally.  That was the fruit of sheer populist frustration, much of which he frittered away with his general battiness and poorly run campaign.  If one party or the other could reliably count on those Perot voters or people like them in every cycle, it would become the virtually permanent majority party.  “Libertarian-leaning” voters possess this kind of power only in their wildest dreams. 

The Reagan coalition was built by very intelligently exploiting the patriotic and socially conservative impulses of the famous Reagan Democrats–the Jim Webbs of yesteryear–and diverting their economic populist frustrations into hostility against a hostile cultural liberalism that was seen (by these voters at least) to be sapping national resolve in foreign affairs and dissolving the nation’s moral integrity.  Now that the GOP has gone insane on foreign policy, these people no longer feel that they belong in that party and they are remembering that they have little love for the long-time ally of the corporations.  While it may discomfort some of our friends, such as Dan McCarthy, Jim Webb’s victory announcement that he had also always been concerned with ”economic fairness and social justice” as well as deeply outraged by the Iraq war was a sharp reminder that a competent, patriotic foreign policy combined with some degree of economic populism together make for a tremendously powerful appeal to people like Webb.  Reagan and his allies even managed to make fundamentally libertarian economic policies feel populist by casting tax reductions in terms of giving people their own money back (which also had the virtue of being true), and it is largely so long as libertarian economic policy seems to be working to the benefit of the middle class (and not principally to corporations) that its unpleasant side-effects are tolerated.  Libertarians take the side of free trade and mass immigration, to name two prominent examples of egregiously pro-corporate and unpopular policies, at the cost of their own political marginalisation.  The party or political coalition that can mobilise populist sentiment on both trade and immigration will frequently come out ahead.   

I interviewed [Bruce] Frohnen on my radio show recently and found it more appealing still. He lamented what he called “Wal-Mart conservatives,” by which he meant people who worship at the alter [sic] of the “cheapest price,” and the utilitarian values of the market right generally. He expressed dismay with the Bush Administration on everything from foreign adventures to his imposition of federal standards on local schools and the diminution of local control.

His dismay was akin to that of many on the decentralist left when the Clinton Administration stumped for corporate globalism; and when his “liberal” appointees to the Supreme Court voted to affirm the power of local governments to use eminent domain to kick people from their homes and give the land to Wal-Mart.  (That’s “public purpose”?)   There is congruity here, if not outright convergence.  It would be a stretch to call a Russell Kirk a commoner, or a father of them.  He had too much of a patrician quality, too much distrust of the rabble.

Still, someone who is a friend of Wendell Berry and Ralph Borsodi, and hangs with the thinking of Jane Jacobs and E.F. Schumacher, is sniffing around the right tree.  When was the last time we heard a Democrat in Washington invoke such people?  Those of us who are concerned about reviving communities and rebuilding their social wealth [bold mine-DL], have got to stop heeding ideological stereotypes.  There are allies out there. ~Jonathan Rowe

Mark Shea pointed out Mr. Rowe’s smart discussion of the important agrarian and conservationist figures who appear in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (ISI, 2006) and the possible points of contact between what I take to be his green/decentralist left view and an authentic conservative (which includes the decentralist right) one.  Mr. Rowe also refers to his surprising discoveries at Crunchy Con, so he would probably also have an interest in the figures lauded in Bill Kauffman’s book Look Homeward, America and the related blog Reactionary Radicals.  Better still, he would find a treasure trove of conservative thought on all of these important themes of local community, conservation, agrarianism and more at Chronicles, which is a superb magazine regardless of whether you agree with its politics or not.  The gentlemen