Matt Yglesias

Richard Posner Throwing In the Towel on the Conservative Movement

I actually don’t know that much about Richard Posner’s political views, being primarily familiar with his (quite good, in my opinion) more abstract and philosophical work. But he’s definitely a political conservative, a Reagan appointee, and an important product of the conservative legal movement. He also seems about done with the whole thing:

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

And then came the financial crash last September and the ensuing depression. These unanticipated and shocking events have exposed significant analytical weaknesses in core beliefs of conservative economists concerning the business cycle and the macroeconomy generally. Friedmanite monetarism and the efficient-market theory of finance have taken some sharp hits, and there is renewed respect for the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Kenyes, a conservatives’ bête noire.

I don’t agree with this in every detail. I don’t see a lot of evidence, for example, that the GOP’s opposition to abortion rights suddenly became a huge political loser starting in 2006. But Posner is unusual, even among the dissident camp in the conservative movement, in his willingness to acknowledge that (a) conservatism is as conservatism does and you can’t just wash your hands of George W. Bush, and (b) that the failures of conservatism-in-practice were really comprehensive across a whole swathe of different policy domains.

Conservative Magazines Not For Liberty

Via Tyler Cowen, Daniel Klein offers up a study that proves the obvious:

Conservatives say they are for small government and individual liberty, but a content analysis of leading conservative magazines shows that most have preponderantly failed to take pro-liberty positions on sex, gambling, and drugs. Besides many anti-liberty commissions, the magazines may be criticized for anti-liberty omission—that is, failing to oppose anti-liberty policies. Magazines investigated include National Review, The Weekly Standard, The American Enterprise, and The American Spectator. We find that National Review has had the strongest record on liberty on the issues treated, while the others have preponderantly failed to be pro-liberty or have even been anti-liberty.

I sort of doubt that anyone was genuinely confused about this, but now we have a real study to prove it. On the other hand, conservative do take the freedom of business enterprises to have a negative impact on the quality of the air you breath, the quality of the water you drink, and the stability of the climate you live in very seriously. They’re also pretty keen on the freedom of employers to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. These are important freedoms to many Americans.

National Review’s Best Conservative Movies

When you learn that National Review is going to list the 25 best conservative movies of the past 25 years, you know you’re in for a good time:

For example, as Isaac Chotiner observes, Andrew Breitbart doesn’t seem to have actually seen the end of Gran Torino. Isaac, meanwhile, likes any list that encourages people to go see The Lives of Others. And I agree, but we’re really defining conservatism down if we take “the pervasive intelligence state of Communist East Germany” to be a distinctly conservative notion. Perhaps more truly typical of the conservative worldview is that after Lives of Others comes in at the number one slot, The Dark Knight takes position number twelve specifically because of its alleged advocacy of pervasive surveillance. Many movies on the list, (Pursuit of Happyness e.g.), aren’t even remotely good.

The “Magic Negro” Party

Back during the Republican presidential primaries, there was a lot of sentiment that sure Rudy Giuliani was a baby-killer and didn’t hate gays, and sure he lacked relevant qualifications for the presidency, and sure he seemed to be involved in a bit of corruption and cronyism, but, hey, he pissed off a lot of liberals so he must be doing something right. I think that’s the spirit in which you have to understand the boost being given to RNC Chair candidate Chip Saltsman by the fact that he’s a bit racist:

The controversy surrounding a comedy CD distributed by Republican National Committee chair candidate Chip Saltsman has not torpedoed his bid and might have inadvertently helped it.

Four days after news broke that the former Tennessee GOP chairman had sent a CD that included a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” to the RNC members he is courting, some of those officials are rallying around the embattled Saltsman, with a few questioning whether the national media and his opponents are piling on.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of modern American conservatism is that it believes in a curious concept of “color blindness.” In this view, racism is bad. But absent truly egregious behavior, it’s not something you’d really get all that upset about nor is it something you should be really attuned do. But so-called “political correctness” — meaning something like anti-racism that’s gone too far — is a really serious problem. Any hint of political correctness is worth getting upset about. And the views of actual members of racial minorities as to what is and isn’t racist should be completely discounted. Rather than saying that the prudent and decent white person will steer a mile clear of racist activity — sending out “Barack the Magic Negro” CDs, for example — the best course of action is to deliberately drive straight at the line and then get really upset at anyone who says you’ve crossed it.

Why Neo-Hooverism Now?

As I documented, the right initially tended toward a neo-Hooverite line on the economic crisis. Then came a seeming shift and the emergence of a broad consensus in favor of strong action. Recently, though, there’s been a tilt back in the neo-Hooverite direction even as the crisis has grown more severe and along with it, increased blogospheric interest in what motivates neo-Hooverism. Steve Benen offered a five-fold categorization of motives:

1. The Moral Explanation: Ed Kilgore explains that some on the right thing America is too fate and happy. This is a bit like David Frum’s nineties vintage Donner Party conservatism.
2. The Benefactor Explanation: Matt Stoller says the right is more interested in entrenching inequality than worrying about the economy.
3. The Illiterate Explanation: Maybe they’re just dumb.
4. The Strategic Explanation: TPM Reader JF observes that a long depression serves the GOP’s political interests.

The obvious thing to say about this is that these explanations are mutually re-enforcing. In particular, the fact that a prolonged economic downturn serves the GOP’s political interests massively increases the grasp of the other factors. It’s one thing for a political party to buck the desires of its interest-group base or the ideological biases of its core supporters when doing so is necessary for the party’s political fortunes. But to buck those desires when doing so would be bad for the party’s electoral prospects is really asking a lot.

Beyond that, the emergence of age polarization in the electorate may play a role here. Elderly people, and especially the more prosperous group of elderly people, are actually reasonable well-positioned to weather a deflationary storm. By contrast, young people pay a huge lifelong economic price for graduating into a weak labor market or getting laid off after only a few years in the workforce.

“Bush’s Greatness”

Part of the effort to pull the wagon of conservatism out of the ditch into which Bush piloted the country is going to be an effort to deny that George W. Bush was a real conservative. In reality, Bushism should be understood as the highest form of conservatism. In particular, the High Bushist years of 2001-2006 represent the only time that the post-war conservative movement has had total control over the federal government. If the practical consequences of pre-Bush conservatism were less disastrous, that’s largely because conservative political power was more constrained in those earlier eras.

Meanwhile, it’s worth recalling that at the peak of his political power, when Bush was making his most disastrous decisions, conservatives not only thought he was a good president, but a great one. There was practically a line around the block to write paens to his genius. Here’s David Gelertner’s “Bush’s Greatness” from the September 13, 2004 Weekly Standard:

It’s obvious not only that George W. Bush has already earned his Great President badge (which might even outrank the Silver Star) but that much of the opposition to Bush has a remarkable and very special quality; one might be tempted to call it “lunacy.” But that’s too easy. The “special quality” of anti-Bush opposition tells a more significant, stranger story than that.

Bush’s greatness is often misunderstood. He is great not because he showed America how to react to 9/11 but because he showed us how to deal with a still bigger event–the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 left us facing two related problems, one moral and one practical. Neither President Clinton nor the first Bush found solutions–but it’s not surprising that the right answers took time to discover, and an event like 9/11 to bring them into focus.

I hope to keep on revisiting some writings in this vein over the next few weeks, so if there’s any special pieces you recall or dig up, please get in touch (the form in the sidebar works) and give me a tip.

Bushism: The Highest Form of Conservatism

Only the Leninist cool kids will get the title, but it’s still true. At any rate, here’s Ryan Avent on the leader of the free world:

[Bush] very easily could have asked Congress to send him a stimulus bill, even a modest one, amid an intensification of what will likely be the worst recession in thirty years, if not longer. It would have made a difference. It would have made the season a little more bearable for the growing numbers of unemployed, and it would have made Obama’s task a little less daunting.

Instead, he’s spending his waning days weakening environmental rules, helping his cronies get jobs in the professional bureacracy, and preparing his pardons. What a stupid, despicable man. History can’t judge him too cruelly.

It’s true and it’s important and it’s also true and important to note that while Bush has deviated from conservative thought in some respects, he’s been despicable precisely insofar as he’s tended to represent the apogee of contemporary conservatism. There being no further point to running a sham policy operation for political purposes, Bush has just stopped even bothering to run a sham policy operation. There’s basically just nothing doing in the movement-controlled elements of the administration and the congress except a continuing effort — one that, I might add, may well prove successful over the long run — to put the survival of the human race at risk in order to advance the short-term financial interests of polluters. No effort to help shelter the poor from the worst consequences of the recession. No nothing.

And no complaints about it from the right! His indifference to the well-being of the vulnerable is their indifference.

Bartlett: Bush Appointees Suck Really Hard

Bruce Bartlett’s view of the Obama economic team:

So far, I am very impressed. Larry Summers at the NEC is brilliant. Tim Geithner at Treasury inspires confidence. Peter Orszag at OMB tells me that we will get honest numbers on which to base policy for a change. And Christina Romer at the CEA puts one of the nation’s top experts on the Great Depression at close hand.

This group has made me realize just how poor Bush’s appointments in recent years have been in the economic area. When slavish political loyalty is apparently the only requirement for a Bush Administration job, and demonstrable competence barely counts at all, it doesn’t tend to attract the best and the brightest. When on those rare occasions, Bush managed to get someone who is competent, there is no evidence that he paid the slightest attention to them, preferring instead the counsel of “Mayberry Machiavellis,” as former White House adviser John DiIulio called them. No wonder we are in the mess we are in.

Indeed. Does anyone even know that the Bush National Economic Council is run by a guy named Keith Hennessey? And if ever there was a time for an administration’s key economic advisers to become known by the general public, you’d think this would be it. But instead, he’s an unknown. And he’s an unknown in part because he’s a nobody. Before he ran the NEC, he was the deputy. Before that, he was on Trent Lott’s staff. He has a master’s degree and it’s not in economics. The stature gap with a Lawrence Summers is enormous.

Conservative Transportation Policy

Politico reports on conservatives trying to think of some ideas:

Kimberley Strassel, an editorialist for the Wall Street Journal, argued that Republicans would have to expand the electoral playing field by pioneering new initiatives in suburban policy.

“Conservatives have had a tendency to dismiss any quality of life issues that could be characterized as ‘green,’ like sprawl,” Strassel said. “It does affect people’s daily lives, and if conservatives can come up with ideas for making transportation, movement, communication work better, I think that would be a good thing.”

I’m not sure exactly what Strassel has in mind, but to my way of thinking an enormous amount of good could be done if conservatives were more interested in applying really basic free market principles to transportation policy. For example, why not allow developers to build as much or as little parking as they want to build when they launch a new development? Why not charge market rates for curbside parking on public streets? How about fewer restrictions on the permitted density of development? Why not reduce congestion on the most-trafficked roads through market pricing of access? It happens to be the case that most of the people who are interested in these issues have liberal views on unrelated political issues, but the specific set of views at hand don’t draw on any deep ideological principles, it’s just application of basic economic thinking to the issues and, as such, is something that should be completely accessible to conservative politicians looking to show that conservative ideas can be relevant to the concerns (environmental concerns, quality of life concerns, economic growth concerns) of a set of people who are disinclined to think of themselves as conservatives.

Begun, These Pundit Wars Have Not

I think Ross Douthat is right about this and the much-hyped conservative infighting has actually been extremely tame. I think he’s further correct to say that this is probably a bad thing for the movement. Sometimes it’s helpful to have a good intra-party fight. It doesn’t need to be a fight to the death, but I think something like the Iraq hawk/dove fights of the past several years had a useful impact on progressive politics. The issue was never “resolved” as such and people on both sides of the divide are still in the coalition. But the balance of power was renegotiated, some key players switched sides, and ultimately a standard-bearer with a different kind of record rose to the fore.

I was about to type that those kind of disputes are a sign of strength rather than weakness, but I’m not sure that’s quite right. Rather, the point is just that it’s a helpful exercise that ultimate serves to clarify things and give different elements a chance to rise in prominence rather than just endlessly being stuck with the same old thing. Indeed, I think one problem with Ross’s Grand New Party is that it seemed to lack the vividly drawn intra-party villains that a good intra-party fight requires.

The Bush Spending Myth

Of course I can’t prove that conservatives are wrong to think that George W. Bush became such a huge failure because Americans disapproved of him spending so much money. But it seems like a very dubious theory. Jon Chait explains:

But to these critics Bush’s primary ideological apostasy is that he supposedly presided over vast new spending increases. Both Democrats and Republicans have gleefully taken up the charge–the former in order to discredit Bush, the latter to shield conservatism from the stench of his failure. It’s a trumped-up indictment. Bush did spend generously on defense and homeland security, with conservative approval, but domestic discretionary spending actually declined from 3.1 percent of GDP to 2.8 percent. It is true that Bush approved a vast new prescription drug benefit. But 89 percent of Americans believed in 2000 that Medicare should have such a benefit. Bush’s critics on the right have no explanation for how he could have gotten elected in 2000 without promising one or reelected in 2004 without following through. Still, the critique has taken hold. The Democracy Corps poll found that, by a 17-point margin, Republicans attribute their party’s failures in 2006 and 2008 to its insufficient conservatism. (Voters as a whole attributed it to excessive conservatism.)

Of course arguably it makes sense to respond to defeat by doubling down anyway. The Democratic Party has moved left since its defeats in 2002 and 2004, and done much better in 2006 and 2008. I think some aspects of that leftward shift have been politically helpful, but others have probably been politically damaging, and all things considered I think it would be odd to argue that the party got more successful because its leader started espousing a more progressive platform. But they won anyway. And it’s a good thing that party leaders now embrace strategic redeployment from Iraq and serious action on the climate crisis not so much because embracing those ideas was or is key to electoral victory, but because those are sound views on key issues and espousing them is consistent with winning elections so politicians should be pressed to do so.

False Choices

Ross Douthat and David Frum argue about whether the GOP needs to do better at targeting relatively prosperous educated professionals (Frum) or economically struggling cultural conservatives (Douthat). Ross frames the dispute:

But for the national party, Frum is right that there are real choices to be made. If you follow the Douthat-Salam model, which Reihan has dubbed “lower-middle reformism,” you’re going to be crafting a message aimed at the place where the non-college educated and college-educated categories bleed into one another – one pitched to the exurb-living college graduate who picked up a degree from a regional public university (or jumped from school to school and didn’t finish in four years, like Sarah Palin), and who probably has more in common, culturally and economically, with a lot of grads of community colleges and technical schools than he does with someone who went to, say, Swarthmore. This approach requires talking a lot about the famous “kitchen table” issues – public education and transportation, crime and health care costs – and trying to expand the definition of what it means to be “pro-family” without abandoning the GOP’s core pro-life convictions. If you follow the model Frum recommends in his column, on the other hand – call it “upper-middle reformism” – and pitch your message to the Obama-voting, ex-Rockefeller Republicans making $150,000 a year, then you’re talking to a “post-material” group of people who worry less about day-to-day economic concerns and more about causes like global warming – making Frum’s vision of a pro-choice, pro-carbon tax GOP a more plausible fit.

On the environment, I think there’s a heavy dose of false choice here. Say the Republican Party did whatever it is Ross thinks it ought to do on economic issues. That would require the government to raise some level of revenue. And if there were a carbon pricing scheme adequate to avoid the worst consequences of catastrophic climate change, that would bring in some level of revenue. The level of revenue would be high, but it would also be lower than whatever quantity of revenue is necessary to run government à la Douthat. So carbon pricing could cover some portion of the costs, with other taxes being lower than they otherwise would have been. It would be win-win — a Republican Party that has a reality-based view of climate change to appeal to upscale postmaterialists and also one that does more on kitchen table issues.

The point is that while I think there are serious arguments on both sides of the question of to what extent should carbon pricing be revenue neutral (i.e., offset by corresponding reductions in other taxes, or else rebated to the population somehow) or instead used to finance green investments, there’s no serious argument that failing to price carbon is preferable to pricing it.

In a political debate undistorted by the influence of special interest money, the left-right ideological dispute would take place along that dimension with people on the right arguing that the revenue should be used to cut taxes and the left arguing that the revenue should be used to hike spending. Indeed, note that even if environmentalists are massively overstating the risks of climate change, a revenue neutral carbon price would still make us no worse off economically than we currently are, and would probably have substantial public health benefits. But instead, there are various politicians (from both parties, I hasten to ad) in the pocket of energy or auto interests and plenty of funds going from oil and coal firms to think tanks that hire people to pooh pooh the problems of climate change and so forth. And that, in turn, creates this false sense of a need to choose between an agenda to appeal to the working class and an agenda to appeal to the sort of upscale types who are more likely to care about the environment.

The Right’s Inequality Challenge

In politics, there are lots of ways to win an election. The best thing is to just be lucky. If your opponent screws up enough, you’ll win. But it’s one thing to win an election and another thing to implement a successful governing agenda. To succeed at governance, you need, I think, some policy ideas that both strongly appeal to your political base and also appeal to something like the “center” of the electorate. But for different coalitions at different times, this can simply be too tall an order for objective reasons.

Consider Jimmy Carter presiding over stagflation:

In the late 1970s, it just so happened to be the case that the structure of Great Society programs and of then-widespread union contracts meant that the objective interests of union members with automatic Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) provisions, African-Americans, and public assistance recipients were quite a bit different from the objective interests of other Americans. By contrast, it was relatively easy for Ronald Reagan to assemble a coalition built around lower taxes and inflation that started with the well-off but expanded deep into the middle class. It was actually Carter who began the effort to fight inflation and deregulate certain key sectors of the economy, but that wasn’t a politically sustainable agenda for a Democrat (as witnessed by Ted Kennedy’s very strong primary challenge).

Since then, things have changed. I heard Ross Douthat on NPR this morning talking about how the conservative movement needs to return not to the policies of Ronald Reagan but to the spirit of Reaganism defined, as any successful American politics would have to be, as an effort to serious think about ways of improving middle class living standards. But one of the things that’s changed since the 1980s is a substantial growth in inequality.

Here’s a CAPAF chart showing the ratio of the top 10 percent’s income to the bottom 90 percent returning to the pre-FDR historical peak:

Normally talk about the growth in inequality begins and ends with a discussion of whether or not it’s a problem and should we try to “spread the wealth around” or just not worry. But completely aside from whether or not it’s substantively a problem, it’s a political problem for conservatives. That top ten percent is, in an important way, the base of the conservative coalition — providing loyal votes, campaign and institutional funding, etc. And as the economic circumstances of the top ten percent become more and more different from the economic circumstances of the rest of the country, it becomes harder and harder to articulate a policy agenda that speaks to the concerns of both the top ten and also the broad middle. Or, rather, it becomes harder and harder to articulate an economic policy agenda that does that. You can still put a winning coalition together under the right circumstances because people care about other things (abortion, national security, White House sex scandals, etc.) but it’s difficult to govern in a way that keeps the coalition together. Thus, you get a movement that spends an extraordinary amount of time and energy on trying to dream up problems to which capital gains tax cuts — essentially a parochial concern of the well-to-do — are the solution.

By contrast, these same historical trends combined with things like welfare reform have all combined to make it much easier than it once was for a progressive coalition to come up with ideas that unite the interests of the economically struggling with those of the middle class.

Annals of Conservative Paranoia

Via Belle Waring, at last a conservative blogger asks the question, is Barack Obama driven by hate to establish a totalitarian dictatorship?

The inevitability of Barack Obama has rendered the sane lycanthropic, the skeptical bemused, the disputatious fearful. It is no coincidence that formerly reliable conservative pundits are jumping the McCain ship like bilge rats in a galley fire. Most people attribute this craven capitulation to elitism. Noonan, Frum, Chris Buckley, that dithering Converse finishing school twit Kathleen Parker, they’re elitists! No, they’re not. Or that’s not what is compelling them. They are fucking afraid. Afraid to be the last dissenting voice in the face of the Hope and Change juggernaut. The Chinese kid versus the tanks in Tiannamen they are not. They are elitists, but they are cowards first and foremost. We don’t need them. And, unfortunately for them, Obama doesn’t need them. Therefore I will speak their names no more….

Did I mention this man hates me? You and me? Yes he does. Why? Because he can. Yes He Can. Beneath that cool persona is a megalomaniac. Cool? Like Stalin after a purge, emotionally and sexually spent. Like Saddam after a torture session, dozing in his chair with someone’s genitals curled in his fist. Like Pol Pot after a petit mal seizure, mumbling a litany of the dead. Cool that way.

This blog doesn’t comment on candidates’ character, qualifications, or fitness for office but surely we can all agree that the press ought to be pursuing these questions.

The Party of Race

John Judis writes:

I mention the Bradley effect because I think, too, that McCain and Sarah Palin’s attack against Obama for advocating “spreading the wealth” and for “socialism” and for pronouncing the civil rights revolution a “tragedy” because it didn’t deal with the distribution of wealth is aimed ultimately at white working class undecided voters who would construe “spreading the wealth” as giving their money to blacks. It’s the latest version of Reagan’s “welfare queen” argument from 1980. It if it works, it won’t be because most white Americans actually oppose a progressive income tax, but because they fear that Obama will inordinately favor blacks over them. I don’t doubt that this argument will have some effect, but I suspect it’s too late and that worries about McCain and Republican handling of the economy will overshadow these concerns.

Ross Douthat replies:

I’m sure I’m displaying my immense naivete about the sinister machinations of Steve Schmidt and company here, but if I had John McCain’s disposable income I’d happily put up tens of thousands of dollars betting that the “don’t let Obama spread your wealth to shiftless blacks” ploy that Judis is describing has not once been a topic of conversation in any McCain strategy session throughout the whole “Joe the Plumber” phase of the campaign. (Though maybe it’s such a subtle strategy that even the strategists themselves don’t realize they’re employing it!)

Moreover, under the standard Judis is using, it seems as though any attack a conservative could possibly launch on a black Democrat’s liberalism is racially-charged by definition. Seriously – is there any attack McCain could launch against Obama at this point, whether policy-driven or personal, that couldn‘t be read, in some tortured fashion, as a racist appeal?

Well, obviously you could read just about anything as a coded racist appeal. And I think a case could be made that you’d be right to. The simple fact of the matter is that the politics of economic conservatism in the United States have a lot to do with the politics of race. I always think it’s worth recalling the practical constituency for libertarian economic policies as seen in the 1964 elections:

Now that’s not to say that the politics of American conservatism are exclusively about race. Lots and lots of people in places like Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Maine, etc. where there were no racial tensions in 1964 (no black people in those states) voted for Barry Goldwater. It just wasn’t a majority. And next week lots of people are going to vote for John McCain because they believe his opponent favors the murder of innocent unborn children, whereas a President McCain could plausibly appoint Supreme Court justices who would dramatically curtail said slaughter. There are lots of things in play. But voting behavior is very tied up with race and with attitudes about race even when it’s two white candidates facing off against each other.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a black candidate. And the crucial phrase in Judis’ argument is “if it works.” If McCain’s strategy works, he’s saying, it’ll be not because Americans are opposed to progressive income taxation or because Americans think refundable tax credits are welfare. It’ll be — if it works! — because Americans fear that Obama will take their money and give it to black people. But most likely it won’t work.

Better Rightwingers Needed

In the course of shilling for coal and oil industry types against those who believe that the negative externalities associated with carbon dioxide emissions should be curtailed via pricing, Heritage’s Nick Loris explains:

Second, the only thing a green ‘New Deal’ will do is lead us down a Green Road to Serfdom. (Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is a telling portrayal of what collectivism in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany can lead to: impoverishment and oppression of freedom.)

You’d think conservatives would at least have a better grasp of what their own books are about. But The Road to Serfdom is not primarily a portrayal of oppression in the totalitarian states. It is, rather, an argument that Western Europe’s postwar mixed-economy democracies were on a slippery slope (i.e., “road”) to Soviet-style totalitarianism (i.e., “to serfdom”). And I suppose it’s true that by the same logic that says the creation of the National Health Service in the UK would lead inevitably to the Gulag, you might as well say the same about a cap and trade program. But that logic is wrong.

Wehner: Let’s Get Cocoonier

Peter Wehner used to be the White House’s designated in-house intellectual, his job being to flatter the idiot President’s vanity and impress Washington Post reporters:

Pete Wehner has the rarest of White House jobs. He is paid to read, to think, to prod, to brainstorm — all without accountability. He recalls the words of White House senior adviser Karl Rove when he interviewed for the job: “He said my job is to bug him.”

Wehner runs the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives (or the Office of Strategery, as it is known inside the building after a “Saturday Night Live” skit spoofing the president’s mangling of the English language). The OSI was Rove’s idea, created shortly after President Bush was elected in 2000. It is the smallest unit in the Rove empire, with six employees, and represents the closest thing the White House has to an in-house think tank. [...] A current folder on Wehner’s desk is labeled: “2d Term/Analysis.” It is a compendium of how other presidents often went wrong in their second terms, history Bush hopes not to repeat. [...]

Wehner said: “I think he’s on the right side of history and is on the right side of the important debates of our time, and he’s comfortable in that.”

Now he seems to have given himself the task of explaining, implausibly, why massive electoral repudiation of conservative politicians would somehow not represent a repudiation of conservatism:

But it is a mistake to assume that significant GOP losses, should they occur, are a referendum on conservatism. In part, the GOP’s problems stem from being seen as having become less conservative and less principled (think “Bridge to Nowhere”).

This was a widespread conservative talking point in the wake of the party’s large losses in 2006, repeatedly endlessly by the leaders of conservative institutions and the GOP’s congressional leadership. There was, at the time, zero evidence for this view. Nonetheless, it became the animating principle of the next two years worth of conservatism up to and including the Republican Party nominating the country’s best-known pork-buster as its 2008 standard-bearer. At the moment, it seems overwhelmingly likely to lead to further losses in the House of Representatives, further losses in the Senate, and the loss of the White House. Wehner response to this additional information is to . . . repeat the conclusion! No wonder Bush asking him to study how to avoid a second-term collapse led to the most spectacular second-term collapse ever.

Feminists and Sarah Palin

Part of the idea behind picking Sarah Palin was to help broaden the GOP’s appeal to women. Instead, Palin is even less popular among women than John McCain. And if this exchange between Rick Davis and Bill Bennett is any guide, conservatives aren’t looking very seriously at addressing their problems (emphasis added):

BENNETT: I don’t know which drives them more crazy. Let me give you three things that I think drives them crazy, and you don’t have to comment. That’s she’s very attractive. That she’s very competent or that she’s very happy. You know, as a human being.

DAVIS: Yeah, all of the above.

Rachel Maddow did a segment on this last night:

That’s via Jessica Valenti. The idea that feminists, like politically conscious people of all genders and ideological inclinations, might have substantive views on the issues that contradict Palin’s doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. But in general, women are more liberal than men. And John McCain is more conservative than most politicians and Palin’s record is considerably more conservative than McCains. There’s no great mystery here. And yet Davis and Bennett can’t help but compound their problems by suggesting that women are somehow incapable of reaching conclusions about politicians for any kind of real reasons — instead feminists just hate attractive women.

The Synthetic States of America

The interesting thing about sundry rightwingers branding increasing swathes of the United States as either “unreal” or “un-American” is that I think there’s a real honesty about this. Progressives are prone to becoming upset about things that happen in our country, with people sometimes letting this boil over into hysteria and firm vows to flee to Canada. But to conservatives, it’s actually integral to their conception of the United States that it be governed by conservatives. A period of progressive political power would mean not that America had erred, but that America had somehow ceased to be America.

Mark Steyn wrote the other day that “With a few exceptions (such as Vermont), ‘blue states’ mostly turn out to be red states with a couple of big blue cities (Pennsylvania, for example, or even California).” But what does this mean? Illinois isn’t a blue state if you don’t count Chicago? New York’s not a blue state if you don’t count New York? But of course Illinois isn’t Illinois without Chicago nor is New York, New York without New York. And mutadis mutandis for the entire United States of America. The country would not be the same country without its great cities and their suburbs. To say that this hypothetical US of Ruralia constitutes the “real” country makes no more sense than to pretend that the country is “really” a small island city-state that happens to be connected to some great wild beyond.

Alec Poitevint

Marc Ambinder reports:

Republican party insiders say that operatives close to Sen. John McCain’s campaign are pushing Alec Poitevint, the former state party chairman of Georgia and a member of the Republican National Committee, to run for the RNC chairman’s position.

But if McCain loses, is anyone going to care what operatives close to McCain’s campaign think? McCain wasn’t exactly a hugely popular figure among conservative activists twelve months ago, and political figures rarely make themselves look better by losing.

It’s All Connected, Man

Stanley Kurtz is reasonably young, so he’s going to be an extremely strong competitor for some kind of lifetime achievement award in wingnuttery one of these days. I really enjoyed this debate analysis:

Bill Ayers? As McCain noted, Ayers and Obama together gave hundreds of thousands of foundation dollars to ACORN. That needs to be unpacked, but McCain’s point begins to get at the real issue. This is not about what happened when Obama was eight years old. Ayers and Obama both believe in a redistributionist economic policies. Together Ayers and Obama backed radical community organizers like ACORN, a key player in the mortgage crisis. ACORN’s assault on credit-standards was driven by its redistributionist philosophy. So Obama’s radical associations reveal the truth of his economic policies. It’s all of a piece. But this critical point has not been made.

People still speak as though the “associations” issue and the economic issue are two different things. They’re not. ACORN wants to spread Joe’s wealth around. So does Bill Ayers. That’s why Obama worked with both ACORN and Ayers. Someone needs to explain all this to Joe.

Inadvertently, Kurtz is revealing here how hollow all these accusations of radicalism are against Barack Obama. He wants to tax Joe the Plumber in order to finance broadly beneficial programs. He wants to spread the wealth around. So does Hillary Clinton and Chris Dodd and Jim Webb and Debbie Stabenow and all kinds of other unremarkable Democratic Party figures. Some people don’t like this whole progressive taxation thing, but it’s a pretty banal opinion. The idea that Obama is a “radical” has to be, if it means anything, something other than “Obama’s a normal progressive and I don’t approve of normal progressives.” If I were to say “Norm Coleman is a member of the far right with ties to fringe extremists” and it turns out I mean that he’s a conventional Republican with ties to the Chamber of Commerce, then nobody would take that very seriously.

The Coverup

Stanley Kurtz unleashes a self-described “October surprise”:

It took me a while to put the pieces together, but I think I’ve figured out what’s had the Obama camp so worried about the Chicago Annenberg Challenge records. It goes way beyond Bill Ayers. In fact, it connects the dots between Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and Obama’s own early radicalism. I lay out the details today in my new piece, “Wright 101.” The gist of what I found is that, from his position as board chair at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama was funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to education programs built around the same extremist anti-American ideology preached by Jeremiah Wright. As I argue in today’s piece, this puts the Wright issue back in play in this campaign.”

Specifically, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge on whose board Obama served gave a grant to an outfit called the Coalition for Improved Education in [Chicago’s] South Shore (CIESS). CIESS was “linked to a network of schools within the Chicago public system” called the “South Shore African Village Collaborative.” According to Kurtz, this network which was linked to an organization which got a grant from a group on whose board Obama served, “was very much a part of the Afrocentric ‘rites of passage movement’” and also at time did events featuring guys named Jacob Carruthers and Asa Hilliard. These two, in turn, seem to have held fringy opinions somewhat similar to some of Jeremiah Wright’s fringy opinions. Ergo, according to Kurtz, Wright is back on the table.

I’d say McCain’s in luck with this one! Obama’s doomed!

Seriously, though, is there anyone who could withstand this kind of guilt-by-association. Obama was on the board of an outfit that gave a grant to an outfit that was linked to another outfit that organized an event where some dude spoke, and thus Obama is responsible for the dude? Really? I spoke at the Heritage Foundation once. Does that make Heritage’s board members responsible for stuff on my blog? It doesn’t make any sense.

UPDATE: I should make clear that I don’t know anything about Jacob Carruthers or Asa Hilliard other than that, according to Kurtz (who’s not a reliable source), they had fringey ideas. I’m told by a colleague that Hilliard, at least, was no fringe figure at all.

The Pegler Factor

I wrote about this once before, but Frank Rich has good points and additional details on Sarah Palin’s bizarre decision to quote Westbrook Pegler during her convention speech:

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

All true enough.

The Great Debate

Jonathan Adler tries to inject some skepticism into the emerging rightosphere narrative that Bill Ayers secretly ghostwrote Obama’s book. Adler’s not against evidence-free speculation that Obama had a secret ghostwriter, you see, but to him the evidence-free speculation that the true author is Ayers goes a bit too far. Andy McCarthy, slaps Adler down with some of the old sarcasm.

Quote of the Day

Jack Cashill at The American Thinker observes:

In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama’s career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama’s belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.

Yes, that’s right, it’s an article whose thesis is that Bill Ayers is the real author of Dreams From My Father. I found it via an enthusiastic Andrew McCarthy whose recent posts at The Corner seem to have been designed to make K-Lo look like the picture of intellectual rigor.

Of course the speculations gets really interesting when we consider the possibility that Ayers was the assassin Hillary Clinton hired to kill Vince Foster.