Too Soon To Tell

I've written before about Jonathan Haidt's view that our moral impulses can be grouped into five categories, two "liberal" (harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity) and three "conservative" (ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity) - and I've argued before with Will Wilkinson about whether it's possible to envision a successful society in which the liberal impulses dominate completely, and the conservative impulses are stigmatized and/or essentially disappear. Haidt, for his part, thinks that it probably isn't; here's Will arguing with him:

Frankly, I find this extremely unconvincing, and I daresay even pernicious ... What Jon needs to show is that there is a threshold on the conservative channels of the moral equalizer below which social stability is threatened. In the talk, he barely gestures toward evidence to this effect ... Indeed, my sense is that the societies in which the space between high liberal settings and low conservative settings is the greatest-that is, the most imbalanced-are by and large the best places for human beings to live. 

My own view is that there is a distinctive form of liberal order achieved by extended market societies. As Hayek noted, the decisive shift in human history was the shift (in some places) between personal to impersonal exchange. And part of this is a shift from personal to impersonal mechanisms for achieving order. If the conservative dimensions are so important, Jon needs to explain why the people of the advanced market democracies are so much more liberal than they used to be, so much less conservative, and yet so much less disordered (i.e., less violence, less war, etc.) 

I think the answer is that in Hayek's "extended order," the conservative sentiments play a relatively small and decreasing role. A more thoroughly liberal moral culture evidently not only sustains order, but sustains an order that leaves us healthier, happier, and orders of magnitude wealthier. If cranked-up conservative sentiments were necessary to sustain that order, then their decline would indeed endanger us, and could not constitute moral progress. But insofar as they have become superfluous, the failure to further suppress them is a failure of further moral progress. This is not a story of liberal/conservative Yin and Yang. This is a story of Yin devouring Yang. 

I admire Jon's anthropologist's impulse to take the variety of moral cultures seriously, and to take our own society's mostly intra-liberal moral pluralism seriously. But I think he's making a mistake if he think his work points toward the importance of the conservative sentiments. It's pointing me toward a clearer grasp of the ecological conditions under which those sentiments are functional and adaptive. And we aren't in them. When we recognize that, in the advanced world, those conditions have largely vanished-when we recognize that is partly what makes it the advanced world "advanced"-the question cannot be "Why do we need to respect tribalism, subordination, and moralized disgust?" The question is what to do with impulses that now hurt more than help, but are written into us anyway. 

I have a Fukuyaman streak that thinks Will might be be proven right about this in the long run - that the levels of wealth generated by market capitalism will rise and rise, cushioning away the impact of any negative externalities that the "conservative" moral instincts may be evolved/designed to guard against. But I also think that it's way too soon for the partisans of a purely liberal order to get cocky. The liberal impulses have been gaining ground against the conservatives ones ever since Christianity came on the scene, but they started from a pretty weak position: It took them the better part of two thousand years to reach parity, and only in the twentieth century did they really gain the upper hand, making it possible for Will and others to fantasize about a world in which the non-liberal sentiments can be ignored and/or discarded. Today, the world's most liberal societies are still only a couple generations deep into a massive experiment in the kind of social organization that Will favors, and I'm not sure that results to date are a guarantor of future returns.

Take the Sexual Revolution in the United States, for instance - which represented a massive ratcheting down of the "purity/sanctity" index, to borrow Haidt's terms, and a ratcheting up of a more "liberal" approach to sexuality. If you'd freeze-framed America in 1991 or so, a generation into this particular experiment in a more liberalized morality, it wouldn't have been hard to make the case that the costs were exceeding the benefits: Alongside the increase in sexual freedom, you had skyrocketing divorce, teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock birth rates, rising rates of STDs alongside the then-uncontainable plague of AIDS, a thirty-year crime wave that many social scientists believed would be compounded by a new generation of "super-predators," and various other stark indicators of social decline. Flash forward fifteen years, of course, and things look much better on many of these fronts, which has prompted various people to argue that we've passed through what Francis Fukuyama terms a "Great Disruption" (and then through what Tom Wolfe famously called a "Great Relearning") and reached a stable post-Sixties equilibrium. But there are still reasons - some of which are detailed in Grand New Party - to be pessimistic, or at least not completely optimistic, about the long-term consequences of the Sexual Revolution. Yes, there's much more reason for optimism today than there was in 1991. But I don't think the trends that produced a great deal of early-1990s declinism are quite far enough in the rearview mirror to be dismissed as just a temporary pit stop on the road to the broad sunlit uplands of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the European version of the liberal experiment currently involves the intersection of a post-Sexual Revolution birth dearth with immigration policies seemingly designed without much input from Haidt's "conservative" moral impulses - particularly the whole "ingroup/loyalty" business. Now maybe this experiment, despite some hiccups along the way, will work out to the long-term benefit of the all the peoples involved. I know that Will assumes it will, and it's quite possible he's right. But there, I think, it's definitely too soon to tell for sure. The indicators point in a lot of directions at once, and it's by no means absurd to suspect that we'll look back from the vantage point of 2100 or so and say that Europe would have been better off if the conservative moral impulses hadn't ceded the floor quite so completely to the liberal ones in the latter part of the twentieth century.

It's also worth pointing out that we don't really have any idea how Will's "distinctive form of liberal order achieved by extended market societies" would handle a severe and extended economic shock of the sort that (God willing) we've just narrowly avoided. The last time the liberal West endured such a shock, the results were extremely ugly, and it was touch-and-go for a while whether democracy would survive at all, or whether the Wilkinsons and Douthats of the future would be competing for blogging licenses in a world divvied up between competing totalitarianisms.

Of course, maybe the totalitarian moment was only made possible because the liberal weltanschauung hadn't advanced far enough, and there was still enough conservative atavism left for fascists and communists to batten on. Maybe we've advanced past all that: Maybe we won't have to find out how Will's Yang-less order bears up under severe stress; maybe we will, and it'll bear up fine.

But I tend to think that the liberal as well as the conservative moral impulses off Haidt's list went into the forging of totalitarianism, and that conservative as well as liberal impulses served as bulwarks against the worst crimes and excesses of that era. And with that in mind, the fact that rising liberal sentiments and declining conservative ones have correlated, to date with greater human flourishing overall seems somewhat short of dispositive proof that we can do without the latter entirely.   

Annals of Alternative History

Musing on what might have been if Al Gore had won Florida in 2000 - namely, a Democratic Party rallying around a presidential nominee named Joe Lieberman in 2008 - Yglesias throws in this curveball:

And of course there's also a universe in which John McCain accepted John Kerry's offer of the VP slot, and the two of them ran and won a bipartisan ticket committed to ending the incompetence of the Bush administration and prosecuting the war in Iraq the right way. That world would likely have involved a "troop surge" and reliance on the sort of counterinsurgency theories associated with David Petraeus (who, at the time, was a favorite of Bush-critical journalists).

The obvious Kerry foreign-policy counterfactual, to my mind, involves some half-hearted attempts at counterinsurgency followed by a Baker-Hamilton style exit strategy for Iraq starting in mid-2006 or so. But of course it's easy to forget about the bizarre but real possibility of a Kerry Administration with John McCain as its foreign-policy czar, which might well have produced a turn to a surge-style strategy much, much sooner than the surge we actually got. With Bush out of the picture, the GOP would have held on to Congress in 2006, and thanks to security gains in Iraq, Kerry would have been cruising to re-election in his all-Massachusetts matchup against Mitt Romney this year -  until the economic crash (what, you think a President Kerry would have prevented it?) suddenly produced a massive tightening in the polls, as the Democratic ticket's foreign policy edge (a vote for Kerry-McCain is a vote for victory!) was undercut by Romney's sudden lead on economic issues, built on extremely effective ads tying Kerry to Barney Frank's Fanny Mae shenanigans. And down the stretch they come!

Obama and the Race Card

On the "'spreading the wealth' as racial appeal" question, Yglesias writes: "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." Then he links to a map showing Barry Goldwater winning the most segregationist states and losing everywhere else.

That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that here we are forty-four years later, in a country that's at least somewhat different from the America where Barry Goldwater ran as the candidate of libertarianism, states' right and segregation (and lost miserably, of course), and we're nearing the end of an election in which the fact that almost any conservative pitch can theoretically be read as a coded racial appeal seems to have benefited the savvy liberal African-American candidate as much it has the old white male conservative he's running against.

Think about it this way: Maybe the "Joe the Plumber" line is a super-coded attempt to play the race-and-welfare card. Hell, maybe all of the race cards McCain has supposedly played - linking Obama to Paris Hilton; cutting an ad with too many white women in it; cutting an ad with too many black men in it; disrespecting community organizing; calling Obama "disrespectful"; bringing up Obama's ties to a (white) domestic terrorist; describing Obama as "that one"; and so on - have been completely cynical attempts to tap into the white electorate's latent or not-so-latent racist sentiments. If this is your take on the election, though, you should acknowledge that if these were all attempts to play the race card, they've been pathetic attempts - weak, bank-shotting, detached from the major issues of the campaign, and so sub-sub-subliminal (Obama is a celebrity ... Paris Hilton is a celebrity ... Paris Hilton is a slut ... Paris Hilton is a slutty white woman ... sex ... Obama is a black man ... black men are randy ... Obama wants to have sex with Paris Hilton ... Obama wants to rape white womanhood!) as to be more or less pointless.
  
Consider, for a moment, that here we are, five days away from the election, and a Republican nominee for President has run a campaign against an African-American opponent that has barely touched any of the traditional racially-charged domestic-policy issues. Affirmative action has been off the table, of course. Obama's liberal record on crime has been raised, I believe, in a couple of Rudy Giuliani robocalls and that's about it. The "welfare" ad I just linked to is pretty much the first time the McCain campaign has mentioned the word all year: Obama opposed the mid-1990s welfare reform (albeit in a characteristically bets-hedging way), but you'd never know it from listening to his opponent's campaign. Nor have they touched immigration, where the Obama camp takes the prize for the most demagogic, racially-charged attack ad. And of course Obama's most politically-poisonous personal association has been more or less off the table throughout.

Now there are various reasons why none of these issues have played a role in the campaign:  Attacking on some of these fronts would have required flip-flops on McCain's part; attacking on others (crime, especially) would have reaped vastly diminished returns compared to GOP campaigns of yore; etc. But it's also the case that the Obama campaign (and its surrogates and allies) have done a masterful job of boxing the GOP in on race-related fronts, playing off the media's biases, McCain's sense of honor, and the Republican Party's unpleasant history to create a climate of hair-trigger sensitivity around terrains and topic that usually hurt Democratic candidates. I'm not asking anyone to shed any tears for the McCain camp on this front: African-Americans have been on the losing end of hardball politics in this country since the first slave ship docked in Virginia, and there's more than a little rough justice in the fact that Barack Obama's campaign has found ways to turn his race to its advantage during this campaign. But given the race issue have played out, I think the appropriate liberal sentiment on the eve of this election should be a lot closer to Ta-Nehisi Coates' confident brio to the "race is still gonna doom Obama, isn't it?" paranoia that I'm hearing from a lot of my liberal friends.

Fixing the Postseason

Peter Gammons, before last night's demi-game:

When this World Series finally ends, there will be a great deal of discussion about how to avoid this sort of misery. The first will be to figure a way to shorten the schedule. Say the schedule was reduced from 162 to 148 games (records or no records; the Steroids Era made too many baseball records meaningless), then the division series and League Championship Series could be played between Sept. 20 and Oct. 6, with the World Series theoretically completed by mid-October. Granted, the loss of the seven home dates would hit teams' revenue streams, but they'll just have to adjust player salaries; CC Sabathia and Manny Ramirez might have to make ends meet on measly $20M salaries.

In the mid-'90s, several owners went to a Miami Super Bowl and discussed the notion of having a 10-day World Series at a neutral site. They'd have to get local fans to buy into destination and vacation packages. There wouldn't be the feel in Anaheim, San Diego or Los Angeles that there is in New York, Chicago, St. Louis or Boston. But then the Cardinals are the only team since the 2002 Angels to win in front of their home fans. It would be a hard sell, but the notion of a World Series week has some advantages.

I say no to the second option - October baseball in a neutral, warm-weather site? heresy! - but yes to the first. Though I don't see why you'd need to drop all the way to 148: Why not go back to the original 154, thus re-establishing continuity with the pre-Sixties game? They'd save about nine days, which would give MLB the flexibility to start the postseason a week earlier and, perhaps, to make the first round best of seven instead of best of five. And while they're at it, they could start a few more playoff games before 8 PM, and even schedule a few for the weekend afternoons. I know, I know, the TV networks would never allow it - but some day soon, we're going to reach a point where the World Series ratings have nowhere to go but up.

In Fairness ...

... I should note that the design of this last-ditch McCain ad - which actually uses the word "welfare," as opposed to just talking about "spreading the wealth," a distinction that makes a difference - makes John Judis's "race and Joe the Plumber" argument seem at least slightly more tethered to plausibility:

Congratulations, Philadelphia

That was a pretty exciting three and a half inning victory. (Seriously! And it ended before midnight! Maybe the postseason needs more rain-suspended games.) I was especially happy for Brad Lidge, after the great post-Pujols flameout in Houston ... and yes, I was still rooting for Tampa Bay fans to learn the meaning of postseason suffering. So sue me.

Incidentally, if you're Joe Maddon, with a runner at third and one out for the Phillies in the bottom of the seventh and the game tied, I really think you have to bring in David Price and go for the strikeout, instead of leaving Chad Bradford in to give up what turned out to be the Series-winning hit and saving Price for three inconsequential outs the following inning. Just something to mull over during the months till pitchers and catchers report ...

Heads, You're a Racist. Tails, You're a Racist!

As I've said before, I'm been somewhat baffled by the McCain campaign's decision to spend its final weeks accusing Barack Obama of being a "spread the wealth" liberal, given that this is more or less how Obama has been campaigning all year long: Taxing the rich to pay for health care and and middle-class tax cuts isn't his domestic agenda's dirty little secret; it is his domestic agenda! But now, thanks to John Judis, the McCain strategy becomes crystal clear:

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.

Noam Scheiber agrees, adding: "Worse, though I have no evidence for this (nothing new there), I worry that these insinuations are reinforced in the minds of working-class whites by the millions of African-Americans lining up early to vote for Obama."

Maybe if you have "no evidence" for worrying about a McCain victory on the basis of a racist backlash, you shouldn't speculate publicly about it! Look - I know that liberals are panicky about blowing the election, and I understand that some weird bad race-related mojo is the only way that they can imagine Obama blowing it. And I know that Judis has written before about research into the kind of effect he's positing here. But really. 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?

Jindal, Race, and the Right

Dave Weigel weighs in on the subject here; Daniel Larison here. I think that liberals trying to understand the conservative mind, circa 2008, should take this passage from Larison to heart:

 ... never underestimate the Republican desire to get on the high horse of anti-racism and egalitarianism, to say nothing of the even greater desire to demonstrate that they are in no way racist ... The small cottage industry out there cataloguing the "real racism" of liberals represents a genuine conviction in the modern GOP that they are the only true defenders of color-blind equality. The Republican obsession with Jeremiah Wright cannot be understood apart from this "fight the real racists!" mentality. The enthusiastic reception of Palin and the sudden willingness to label any criticism of her as sexism and elitism reflects a similar impulse to out-egalitarian the egalitarians. This is opportunistic insofar as it is aimed at confusing conventional definitions and throwing the opponent off guard ("we're the real feminists, so there!"), but it is quite serious in that reflects a widely-held Republican belief that their agenda and their party represent "empowerment" for women and minorities.

Now this is not to say that there aren't plenty of Republican operatives out there who have a different and rather more cynical view of their party's relationship to race and racism; nor is it to say that there aren't plenty of racist Republicans. But as a rule, the more ideological a given conservative (and thus, one might add, the more likely to vote in a GOP primary), the more likely he is to take the view of American politics that Larison describes above - of the GOP as the party of colorblindness, and the Democrats as the party of racialism if not racism. And the more eager, in turn, he will be to cast a vote for someone like Bobby Jindal, the better to vindicate his conception of the party he supports.

Meanwhile, in a follow-up to his original argument, Chris Orr takes issue with my suggestion that the "Otherization" of Obama - the portrait of the Democratic nominee as a dangerous radical, un-American, etc. - has much at all to do with the radical connections from his Chicago past, as opposed to just being an outgrowth of his race, name, foreign relatives, etc:

This seems to me not only convenient but largely wrong: Liberation theology has barely entered into the presidential season, and all the Muslim, terrorist pal, falsified birth certificate, not "the American president Americans are looking for" garbage of the cycle seems far more closely connected to Obama's "name, ancestry and skin color" than to his "academic-lefty and urban-machine milieu." ("Socialist" probably fits Douthat's explanation a bit better.) As a coverted Hindu whose legal name is still Piyush, whose parents arrived in the states not long before his birth and who attended an Ivy League university, Jindal would be open to many of the same kind of idiot smears directed at Obama, should any of his GOP opponents for the nomination care to make them.

I guess I'm a little uncertain about what we're talking about here. If we're only talking about the "Obama is a Muslim" fever-swamp stuff - which played a big role in the Democratic primary without any push from the GOP, one might note - then yeah, that would have been percolating around in chain emails and the blogosphere rumor mill independent of the Ayers-Wright-Chicago tangle, and I suppose that there might be similar stuff floating around about Jindal in the future. (Though it'll help that his middle name isn't Hussein, and that his dad isn't a Muslim.) But if we're talking about the broader "he's an anti-American with terrorist pals" narrative that's emerged in the right-wing mediasphere over the last few months - and that was given perhaps its most vivid and ridiculous expression, of course, by Michelle Bachmann - then I think we're talking about a narrative that has everything to do with the fact that Obama emerged from a political milieu that's considerably more tolerant of what I think it's fair to describe as anti-Americanism than the environment that produced a John Kerry or an Al Gore or a Bill Clinton.

Does this narrative bleed into unhinged fever-swampage, and vice versa? Sure. But would it exist in anything like it's current form if Barack Obama hadn't built his career in a political environment where unrepentant left-wing terrorists can become pillars of the community, and practiced his faith in (and lavished money on) a church where Amerika-bashing and far-left conspiracy theorizing seem to have been just part of the scenery? I think not. And I think it's fair to assume that as long as Bobby Jindal doesn't have anything like Obama's relationship to Jeremiah Wright - which remains the most troubling thing we've learned about our probable next President, I think, over the course of the last year - rattling around in his closet, he isn't going to need to worry all that much about being tarred as an anti-American because of his funny last name.

Again, this doesn't mean that Jindal's race would be an absolute non-factor in any Presidential campaign he might run. Later in the follow-up post, Chris narrows the thrust of his original argument slightly, suggesting that in a hard-fought GOP primary, one of Jindal's rivals could gain ground by "quietly cultivating" racism and/or xenophobic rumors about the Louisiana governor. That's plausible: As several emailers have noted, Jindal's narrow loss in his first campaign for governor probably had something to do with the Democrats' exploitation of northern Louisiana racism, and similar on-the-margin effects could come into play in a primary campaign as well. But that would have been the case with or without the "Otherization" of Barack Obama - and I remain convinced that there are more than enough conservatives smarting from being accused of racism in the context of the '08 race and eager to pull the lever for a dark-skinned right-winger to make his ancestry an net advantage for him overall in a future GOP primary, even if it's also a disadvantage in certain hard-fought states or districts.

Is Slate Conservative? (Revisited)

Question asked ... and question answered.

And yeah, I understand that when Yglesias suggested that Slate leaned rightward, he was probably thinking of the tendency of some liberal-run media outlets to challenge/provoke their liberal-leaning readership by publishing lots of counterintuitive arguments and writers, to the point where you can see why hardened left-wing partisans would accuse them of being operationally conservative. (It's worth noting that Matt's remarks were prompted by the appearance of LibertyWire - now Culture11 - which in its brief existence has published more than a few pieces challenging the assumptions of its conservative readers ... and, naturally, has been tagged as operationally left-wing by the hardened partisans of the Right as a result.)

But still. Still.

The Iraq War and the GOP's Fortunes

Yesterday, Culture11 hosted an interesting back-and-forth between John Schwenkler and James Poulos on the question of where the Iraq War (remember that?) fits into the Republican Party's current woes. I think there are strong points in both pieces. Schwenkler is clearly right, I think, that the Iraq War is the dark matter of GOP decline - even now that almost nobody's focusing on it, it's still exerting a downward pull on the Republican brand. The absence of WMDs and Iraq's post-invasion decline into chaos are two of the defining debacles in what's widely viewed as the broader debacle of recent Republican governance - and more than that, they're debacles that combine to undercut what's long been considered the central reason to vote for conservatives, namely their national-security chops. As such, I expect the way the war played out to to be a drag on Republican fortunes not only in this election cycle, but in many to come.

Yet even so, I think Poulos is right that Iraq is only one part of a broader pantomime - and right, as well, to be skeptical that the Republicans would have gained very much at all by engaging in some sort of breast-beating repudiation of the Iraq invasion during this election cycle. Maybe - maybe - if Dick Cheney had been a primary-season candidate, and some white knight (like, say, a very different Mitt Romney) had been looking to slay the dragon of Bushism and emphatically separate the GOP of 2008 from the GOP of the Bush Era, then having an extended argument about pre-emptive war and the "freedom agenda" would have been good for the party. But given the slate of candidates and, more importantly, the state of the conflict during the primary campaign - which took place, you'll recall, during a period when a (Republican-promoted) strategy was opening the possibility of salvaging something from the wreckage of the '04-'06 period in Iraq - I don't think that an agonized debate over the decisions made in 2003 would have made very much sense, either for the Republicans or for the country. Post-surge, post-2008, and post-2008, this is a debate the Right needs to have: I line up alongside Schwenkler in believing the Iraq War to have been misconceived, and in believing that conservatives need to learn from the Bush Administration's strategic mistakes as well as tactical ones. But in this particular election cycle, I actually think the McCain camp's broad approach to the issue - emphasize the successes of the Surge, criticize Obama for opposing it, promise to leave Iraq with honor, and downplay the question of whether we should have invaded in the first place - has been pretty much the best possible tack a GOP candidate could take.

Jindal, Obama and the GOP

I think Chris Orr is completely wrong about this:

... while there are plenty of 2012 GOP presidential aspirants who have reason to be unhappy with the McCain campaign's decisions over the last couple months (and, in particular, the Palin choice), a case could be made that no one's nearish-term prospects have been hurt more than Bobby Jindal's.

Though rarely explicit (and certainly not exclusive) a large portion of the GOP's closing argument this cycle has been to stoke white, working class fear and suspicion of the Other. The dark-skinned man with the foreign-sounding name may be a Muslim, or a socialist, or a friend of terrorists, or a racial huckster, or a fake U.S. citizen, or some other vague kind of "radical." You may never be sure which he is (maybe all of the above), but in your gut you simply don't "know" him the way you know the other candidates. This is not, to put it mildly, a message likely to benefit Bobby Jindal.

Now, yes, four years is a longer time in politics than it used to be. But I still don't see these toxins leaching out that quickly, particularly from a GOP that will, in all likelihood, continue trying to raise subliminal doubts about Obama's Americanness. Add to this the blunt fact that the GOP probably can't afford to lose racist white voters, especially in the South (you think a Jindal - Obama race wouldn't invite a conservative, white, third-party candidacy?), and I think Jindal's chance of being the nominee in 2012 is, despite his obvious talents, pretty close to nil. The GOP isn't going to be looking for its own Obama; it's going to be looking for an anti-Obama.

I think this vastly, vastly overestimates the extent to which the attempt to "Otherize" Obama has been about race qua race (and racism qua racism), and vastly underestimates the extent to which it's been about the way Obama's name, ancestry and skin color have dovetailed with other aspects of his background - from his liberation-theology church to the academic-lefty and urban-machine milieu in which he spent much of his early political career - that the GOP would have tried to play up against any Democratic candidate (and especially in a year when the party didn't have much else going for it). If anything, I think the way the McCain campaign has finished up - and the way the media has covered it - works to Jindal's advantage in 2012: Conservatives are going to be extremely eager to prove that they only hate Obama because he's a radical, not because they're racist, and what better way to demonstrate that than to nominate a dark-skinned conservative with a funny-sounding name? Indeed, much of the current affection for Jindal among movement conservatives - and especially in talk-radio land - can be traced to precisely such a yearning for a conservative Obama: A multicultural prince who channels Ronald Reagan, and whose nomination would at least reduce the taint of racism that clings to the American Right.

Likewise, the idea that Jindal, if nominated, would invite a right-wing third party challenge aimed at peeling off racist Southern whites strikes me as fanciful in the extreme. Maybe the usual sad-sack Libertarian nominee would do slightly better in a Jindal-Obama race than in, say, a Pawlenty-Obama race because of some sort of racist peel-off ... but I'm pretty doubtful on that score as well. If Bobby Jindal can win the Republican nomination and then the governorship in Louisiana, he isn't going to have any race-based trouble as a GOP candidate on the national stage. 

The End of Conservatism?

For some reason, The New Republic has decided to embarrass the talented and perceptive John Judis by digging out of its archives a piece that he wrote announcing the death of conservatism ... in, er, 1992. The piece "holds up remarkably well," Max Fisher writes by way of introduction, which I suppose is one way of descriping an essay that sounds an awful lot like the epitaphs for conservatism being penned amid the current Republican crisis - but that has the disadvantage of having been written some sixteen years ago, amid a brief false dawn for liberalism, and just before the Republican Revolution of 1994. Since we're talking about Bill Weld in other contexts, I thought I'd highlight this passage:

While some older conservatives like Kristol have increasingly identified with the fundamentalist critique of modern society -- last year Kristol published an extended polemic in Commentary against "secular humanism" -- younger conservatives on campus and on congressional staffs tend to be far more cosmopolitan in their attitudes. According to one estimate, about 50 percent of the members of Ivy League conservative organizations and about 75 percent of the Washington Bush-Quayle staff are pro-choice. And many Washington conservatives such as Policy Review editor Adam Meyerson see Massachusetts's pro-choice, pro-gay rights Governor Weld as a promising presidential choice.

Alas, for the lost Weld Presidency!

Seriously, there are all sorts of reasons to think the current conservative crisis is rather more dire than the post-Reagan blues that gripped the Right when Judis was penning his premature obituary. But the fact that a "conservatism is dead!" piece from sixteen years ago seems to offer such an apt description of our own era should offer conservatives at least a small measure of encouragement as they prepare to take their lumps next Tuesday.

Liberal or Conservative?

McClatchy has a piece on the Bush Administration's successes curtailing homelessness - a subject I've written about before. Because spending has risen even as homelessness numbers have fallen, the reporter describes the policy shift as "radical" and "liberal." Ed Morrissey basically concurs:

Was this one of Bush's more liberal policies?  I'd say yes. By providing a housing solution free of charge, federal and state governments had to cough up a lot of money.  As McClatchy notes, though, that saved money that would have gone to acute-rescue efforts like shelters and crisis treatment centers. Housing gave the previously homeless an opportunity to seek employment, creating a net revenue gain rather than a funding drain. Whether or not anyone wants to call it liberal, it certainly proved more cost effective than the other liberal plans in place during the previous generation.

The trouble is that this logic takes you halfway to describing welfare reform - probably the biggest conservative domestic-policy success of the post-Reagan era - as a "liberal policy" as well. After all, it merely replaced AFDC with a more "cost effective" program, TANF - one oriented, like the Bush Administration's homelessnes policies, around moving people from straight-up welfare into the paid workforce - rather than doing away with the welfare system entirely. It's true that at the national level, welfare reform reduced spending along the way (though Tommy Thompson's reforms in Wisconsin, the model for the national reform, boosted funding during the transition to workfare), whereas the Bush anti-homelessness push has required an infusion of roughly $500 million (less, I believe, if you adjust for inflation) over what HUD provided for homelessness policy in 2002. But the payoff in terms of conservative goals - reducing dependency, increasing workforce participation - has been pretty impressive. And responding intelligently to homelessness seems like exactly the kind of thing that a more minimalist, means-tested welfare state ought to be doing.

Morrissey goes on to wonder why the rest of the media isn't reporting on the Bush Administration's success. It's an excellent question - but it would be an even better question if conservatives were willing to take credit for the success, instead of disowning it.

Moderate Republicans, Reformist Conservatives, and Other Animals

A reader writes:

I read your posting on Limbaugh's monologue. There is one point I do not understand. You seem to claim that a bad campaign by McCain justifies moderate Republicans jumping ship. I do not understand why that in anyway justifies the actions of moderate Republicans in endorsing Obama after the Republican party nominated their candidate John McCain over the objections of conservatives. Even if the dubious claim that McCain ran a "substance-free campaign" is true, it should not cause anyone who seriously follows politics into believing that somehow Obama is more in tune with moderate/ centrist/"reformist" Republicans than John McCain. This is simply style over substance at its worst. The fact that a number of "reformist conservatives" have so endorsed Obama suggests a dangerous level of opportunism on the part of these people. It is reasonable for more tradiutional conservatives to conclude on the basis of this action that at least these Obama-endorsing reformist are not to be trusted by any type of conservatives when rebuilding the movement post-McCain. (I am curious. Would you agree with Limbaugh on this at least?)

I would agree that some of the once-Republican figures who have endorsed Obama have done so out of opportunism and/or a desire for attention, yes: In this category I would place figures like Scott McClellan (whose photo appears next to the word "opportunism" in the dictionary, I believe) and Ken Adelman (last seen disavowing any responsibility for the nasty consequences of a war that he loudly supported), among others. Others have endorsed him  for somewhat more principled reasons: If you have the politics of, say, a Colin Powell or a William Weld or a Christopher Hitchens, there's a case to be made that you basically belong in today's Democratic Party anyway. And others still have endorsed him for reasons too tangled, I think, to be applicable to anyone who wasn't born and raised a Buckley.

And no, I wouldn't trust the rebuilding of conservatism to any of these people. But nobody was going to entrust it to them anyway: Scott McClellan, Bill Weld and Christopher Hitchens were not going to be the architects of a new Republican majority in any world you care to imagine. Indeed, you could even flat-out say "good riddance" to them, as Limbaugh wants to do ... if you had a plan for finding converts to conservatism somewhere else. But Limbaugh doesn't have a plan, and what he and others are doing is using the McClellans of the world to pre-emptively discredit anyone else who thinks the GOP needs to reform, rather than retrench. You moderate Republicans, he says: You wanted John McCain, you got him, and now you're all jumping ship! But everybody who disagrees with Limbaugh isn't jumping ship, and going forward the Right doesn't just face a binary choice between Limbaugh's conservatism and McCain's "moderate Republicanism," let alone between Limbaugh and Bill Weld.

One alternative path forward - and only one, out of many - is a reformist conservatism that tries to craft a new right-of-center domestic-policy agenda, one better attuned than the current Republican agenda to the set of challenges facing middle and working-class America. This sort of reformism is associated with a group of writers that would include people like Ramesh Ponnuru, David Frum, Yuval Levin, David Brooks, Reihan and myself - and, if you cast a wider net, perhaps figures ranging from Jim Manzi to Rod Dreher to Michael Gerson and Pete Wehner. As the list suggests, it's not an ideologically coherent group by any means, with divergent views on issues ranging from abortion (Ramesh and I are pro-life, Frum and Brooks are pro-choice) to foreign policy (where I'm an outlier, being more in the realist than the neoconservative camp) to the wisdom of choosing Sarah Palin as John McCain's veep. And even on the basic domestic-policy questions there's considerable disagreement. Frum, Ramesh and I are more restrictionist on immigration than, say, Brooks and Gerson. Frum favors a carbon tax, Manzi opposes it. Ramesh is to my right on size-of-government questions, while David Brooks is probably well to my left. Ramesh had some unkind things to say about David Frum's book. I had some unkind things to say about Michael Gerson's. Etc.

But with the possible exception of David Brooks - who's the most centrist, as opposed to rightist, person on the list - I'm pretty sure that nobody in this group is going to be voting for Barack Obama. And I'm quite sure that none of the strategies and policy proposals that we've batted around, individually or collectively, have been discredited by the McCain campaign's various struggles - and especially not by McCain's failure to keep Scott McClellan and Bill Weld, of all people, in the Republican fold. Our ideas may, in fact, be terrible, un-conservative, political poison, or all of the above. But they haven't been tried and found wanting; to date, they've been largely left untried.

The bigger point (and I know I'm a broken record here) is this. Whatever direction you think conservatism should be going in from here on out, the absolute worst thing the members of a losing political movement can do - if they ever want to win again, at least - is attempt to pre-emptively close off debate about the movement's future. Conservatives need to have arguments, not promise excommunications, or else pretty soon there won't be very much worth arguing over.

Rush Limbaugh Explains It all

This Rush Limbaugh monologue is a fascinating document, and should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand one of the most powerful conservative narratives emerging around the looming GOP debacle. For Rush, there are only two kinds of people in Republican Party: True conservatives like him, and "moderate Republicans." The latter is an ideologically-inclusive category: You can be pro-choice or pro-life, David Frum or Colin Powell, a Rockefeller Republican or a Sam's Club conservative; indeed, the only real requirement for moderate-Republican status is the belief that the Republican Party needs to reach out to voters who don't agree with, well, Rush Limbaugh on every jot and tittle of what conservatism is and ought to be. And this inclusive definition allows Limbaugh to shape a narrative of the '08 election in which "moderate Republicans" can shoulder more or less all the blame for what's gone wrong:

I wish to reach around and pat myself on the back. Way back during the Republican primaries ... we were told Ty the Republican Party hierarchy that the only chance the Republican Party had (by the way, we were told this also by some of the intellectualoids in our own conservative media) to win was to attract Democrats and moderates; and that the era of Reagan was over, and we had to somehow find a way to become stewards of a Big Government but smarter that gives money away to the Wal-Mart middle class so that they, too, will feel comfortable with us and like us and vote for us.

In that sense, it was said the only opportunity this party has to regain power is John McCain. Only John McCain can get moderates and independents and Democrats to join the Republican Party, "and we can't win," these intellectualoids said, "if that didn't happen." Well, the latest moderate Republican to abandon his party is William Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts who today endorsed the Most Merciful Lord Barack Obama. He joins moderate Republican Colin Powell. He joins former Bush press spokesman Scott McClellan.  He joins a number of Republicans like Chuck Hagel, Senator from Nebraska ...

Now, I wish to ask all of you influential pseudointellectual conservative media types who have also abandoned McCain and want to go vote for Obama (and you know who you are without my having to mention your name) what happened to your precious theory?  What the hell happened to your theory that only John McCain could enlarge this party, that we had to get moderates and independents? How the hell is it that moderate Republicans are fleeing their own party and we are not attracting other moderates and independents?

... When I saw the Weld thing today I smiled and I fired off a note to all my buddies and I said, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! How can this be? How can this be?  This is the kind of guy that our candidate was supposed to be attracting, and we were supposed to be getting all these moderates from the Democrat Party," and we will, by the way. We're going to get some rank and file, average American Democrats that are going to vote for McCain.  But these hoity-toity bourgeoisie... Well, they're not the bourgeoisie, but... Well, they are in a sense. They're following their own self-interests, so I say fine. They have just admitted that Republican Party "big tent" philosophy didn't work. It was their philosophy; it was their idea. These are the people, once they steered the party to where it is, they are the ones that abandoned it.

The logic is so airtight it's suffocating. John McCain is a moderate Republican. Some people - the party establishment and the "intellectualoids" - said that only someone like McCain would stand a chance of winning the Presidency in 2008, given the state of the GOP brand. But here we are in October, and John McCain is losing - and worse, some of his fellow moderate Republicans are defecting to Obama. Therefore, not only are all the people who urged the GOP to nominate McCain discredited, but so is anybody else who disagrees with Rush Limbaugh about the future direction of the GOP. Moderate Republicanism had its chance this year, and it failed. The big-tent approach was tried and found wanting. Next time, they'll listen to Rush if they want to win. And so forth.

Take a step back, of course, and the whole argument collapses. (McCain's substance-free campaign discredits more reformist visions of conservatism how, exactly? The defection of Bill Weld, blueblood extraordinaire, is supposed to undercut the idea that the GOP should be trying to appeal to middle-class Wal-Mart shoppers? McCain is still going to win the "rank and file, average American Democrats" - it's only the "hoity-toity" types who are jumping ship? etc.) But read quickly (or delivered with Rush's customary brio), it has a certain surface plausibility - just enough, I suspect, to be persuasive to the many, many conservatives eager to be convinced that the '08 outcome had everything to do with John McCain's heresies and the treason of the Beltway elites, and nothing whatsoever to do with them.

The Absence of Policy

One of the many fascinating things about Robert Draper's Times Magazine story on the McCain campaign is what isn't included in its account of the attempts to brand (and rebrand, and rebrand) John McCain's candidacy: Namely, any real discussion of policy. From Draper's account, the McCain campaign staff has gone around and around trying to figure out how to sell their candidate - as a fighter! as an experienced leader! as a maverick! etc. - but hardly ever seemed to have spent much time thinking about how these narratives would mesh with or be reinforced by the actual policy agenda the campaign was advancing.

Now, obviously Draper's piece isn't the whole story of the campaign, and obviously he was focusing on the strategy apparatus, rather than the policy apparatus. (Douglas Holtz-Eakin doesn't make an appearance in the piece.) And yes, of course, those of us with wonkish inclinations tend to dramatically overestimate the impact that actual policy choices, as opposed to narratives and symbolism, have on the outcome of presidential elections. But I don't think it's a coincidence that McCain's successful sales pitch to GOP primary voters was built around a specific policy - namely, his support for the surge. And I suspect that his unsuccessful general-election sales pitches have suffered badly from being untethered to specific popular policy proposals that the candidate himself was interested in defending. Think about 2000: George W. Bush's brand identity, if you will, as a "compassionate conservative" dovetailed perfectly with his near-obsessive focus on education policy and his promise to work across the aisle on a prescription drugs bill. Whereas the McCain camp's stabs at crafting a brand identity only beg the question: He's a maverick ... who'll do what? He's a bipartisan reformer ... but what reforms will he deliver? Etc.

To the extent McCain's policy agenda has been branded in the public mind, Obama has done it for him - with a series of health-care ads that are among the most dishonest of this cycle, but among the most ubiquitous and effective as well. Meanwhile, Obama has aggressively branded himself as the guy who'll cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans. Would the Democratic nominee be winning without these successful policy-related gambits? Probably. But they certainly haven't hurt.

Rewatching The Sopranos

Like any good movie geek, I've got David Thomson's "Have You Seen ...?" - the companion volume to his epically awesome Biographical Dictionary of Film - high on my Christmas list this year. And as with the Dictionary, a big part of what I'm looking forward to is the chance to disagree, vehemently, with Thomson's assessments. Here's Ben Schwarz's review in the latest Atlantic, and here, via Schwarz, is an example of what I mean:

Thomson is most penetrating when he develops and enlarges his ideas and arguments over multiple entries, and when he's neither praising nor slamming but simultaneously giving and taking away: see his ambivalent analyses of Do the Right Thing; Tinker, Tailor; the often magnificent Heaven's Gate, the photography of which is exactly "heartbreaking"; and The Sopranos--expertly done, but "The Godfather plays every year; The Sopranos in reruns will bore you."

Well! The Godfather does play every year, but it's also only three hours long, and thus a completely different artistic animal than The Sopranos, which clocks in roughly eighty hours when all is said and done. There's no perfect analogy here, obviously, but on length alone it's a little like comparing James Joyce's "The Dead" to David Copperfield. Yes, Coppola's masterpiece has a self-contained perfection to which a long-running television show simply can't hope to aspire - and yes, as a result, there are episodes and even long swathes of David Chase's show that bore upon reacquaintance, just as there are sections of Copperfield or War and Peace that I wouldn't care to read and re-read every year. But trust me: I'm watching The Sopranos in re-runs right now, and as a cumulative experience - allowing for bumps and blind alleys and boredom along the way - it's no less impressive than the first time or two I watched it.

Palin in 2012, Revisited

Basically, I agree with the Ambinder-Cillizza take on the question - namely, that Sarah Palin might well be a formidable contender for the GOP nomination in 2012 even if she's massively unpopular with the sixty-five percent of America that doesn't vote in Republican primaries. In an Obama-era GOP, where the various factions and candidates are competing for control of a increasingly purist rump, isn't hard to see a scenario in which Palin unites evangelical voters and talk-radio conservatives - constituencies that split between Huckabee and either Romney or Fred Thompson, respectively, in 2008 - and rides that bloc to victory against a field that's just as divided as it was in '08.

What's very, very hard, though, is to see how a primary campaign fought and won along those lines would put Palin in a position to actually win the White House - assuming, that is, that Barack Obama doesn't completely fall on his face in the next four years. Not because Obama won't be beatable in 2012 even if his Presidency isn't a disaster, mind you, but because the Sarah Palin whom the base loves at the moment just isn't a candidate who could beat him. Given the way she's presented herself on the campaign trail and/or been used by the McCain campaign, and given the media narrative surrounding her candidacy at the moment, for Palin to be elected President of the United States would require an image makeover even more substantial than the one Hillary Clinton underwent between the late 1990s and this year. (That was the substance of my argument in this post from three weeks ago, and I think it holds true in spades right now.) Such a makeover is by no means impossible - this is America! nothing's impossible! - but running as the candidate of Rush and James Dobson in 2012 isn't going to get her there.

(And speaking of Palin and the GOP, this exchange between Patrick Ruffini and Jon Henke is worth a read.)

A Boy's Life

It occurs to me that in this campaign season, some of my readers may be spending so much time leaping from Atlantic blog to Atlantic blog ("these are the saddest of possible words: McArdle to Douthat to Coates ...") that they're neglecting the (snazzily redesigned) magazine that's responsible for the existence of all these blogs in the first place. If you're one of those people, I recommend taking a couple hours off from the Presidential race this afternoon to dig into Hanna Rosin's phenomenal piece on Brandon/Bridget Simms and the debate over sex changes for children. I don't have any gloss on the story, except to say that it's magazine journalism at it's finest - it's always fascinating, often deeply sad, sometimes infuriating, and you should definitely read the whole thing.

Biden's Epic Gaffe, Cont.

People keep emailing me to say that Biden's gaffe wasn't a gaffe at all, that he was just talking about how Barack Obama will be tested like any new President will be tested, etc. Daniel Larison makes a similar point, calling Biden's remarks "wholly unremarkable." But folks, God love you, it's just not so. Per Ben Smith, here's what Biden said:

It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

Biden didn't say: "Every President gets tested in his first six months in office, and Barack Obama won't be any different." He specifically highlighted Obama's youth as a reason to expect a "generated crisis to test the mettle of this guy," and specifically compared him to John F. Kennedy - whose perceived inexperience (and poor initial impression on the world stage) was supposedly one of the contributing factors in the Russian decision to send missiles to Cuba. It's true that all Presidents should expect to get their mettle tested in their first year in office, and it's true that John McCain's years working on foreign-policy issues in Washington won't exempt him from that rule. And maybe that's what Biden meant to say. But the words he actually uttered seemed intended to cite his running mate's youth and relative inexperience as a reason why Obama, in particular, would be likely to face an international crisis in his first six months. And in an election where John McCain has been trying (and trying, and trying) to emphasize the risks associated with Obama's inexperience, that seems like a remarkably foolish thing for a vice-presidential candidate to say about his running mate and foreign policy. If Biden's remarks are "wholly unremarkable," then, it's only because we've reached a point in the race where Joe Biden could be photographed doing the foxtrot with Jeremiah Wright at a "Free Mumia" rally and it wouldn't affect the outcome of the election.

Larison's follow-up comment, though, is worth pondering:

What is remarkable about what Biden was saying as he addressed a crowd of Seattle Obama fans is that he was telling a progressive crowd bluntly that a President Obama is probably going to use military force in the early months in response to a crisis or foreign conflict. Biden was telling them that it is going to seem completely unnecessary and contrary to everything Obama voters think they are getting when they elect him.  What could he have meant when he says that the administration is going to need the help of these Seattle progressives (and others like them) "in the community"? My guess is that he was saying that all of the antiwar progressives who have flocked to Obama are going to be deeply disillusioned by Obama's response to said crisis and there is a danger that the administration will become politically isolated as Obama's core supporters lose confidence in him at a supposedly critical juncture.

Biden's Epic Gaffe

Ambinder, on the Dem veep's comments about Obama being greeted by "an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy":

In the 2008 election we were participating in circa August, Sen. Joe Biden's musings would have traversed the river separating gaffe from Gaffe. If the economy weren't collapsing, if Barack Obama's national security credentials were still suspect, if the conflict in Russia and South Osettia had yet to be resolved, then one can envision a scenario where Biden's comments would be given a gloss a la Gerald Ford's freeing Eastern Europe.

Yes. Biden's bizarrely honest remarks are an almost too-perfect exemplar of the Kinsleyan definition of a "gaffe" as an accidental statement of the truth - and in a different, closer election, one untouched by a global economic crisis (and, yes, the ongoing Sarah Palin story), they might have been the game-changing flub that conservatives keep looking for. (At the very least, I think they summon up a much more compelling argument against the Democratic ticket than Obama's comments to Joe the Plumber.)

Spreading the Wealth (III)

Jonah has a thoughtful response to my last post on the subject.