Understanding "socialism"

Ambinder makes this amusing point, re McPalin's ridiculous new attack on "socialism":

Palin is going on about Obama and wealth redistribution.

Palin taxed oil company profits and cut $1200 checks for every Alaskans.

That's spreading the wealth. Redistributing some money.

The McCain campaign talks about Palin's executive experience.

So Obama might have socialistic inclinations... Palin's gotten it done.

Of course conservatives have never had a problem handing out public money by the fistful. It's only when you want to give significant amounts of it to poor people that they get upset.

The Paulson "bailout" and right-wing ideology

I'd been debating writing about the financial crisis and the Paulson Plan, these last couple days, because while I have strong opinions about it (executive summary: "BLEARRRGH") I don't have anything to add to the debate that Krugman and Dean Baker and Barry Ritholtz haven't already said.

But then I saw this, via MyDD, and holy crap (emphasis mine):

U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman said the massive government bailout of failing financial institutions is not only necessary but could make money for the federal government.

“The government could make 10 or 20 times what it pays on this, possibly,” Coleman said during a campaign stop at Christy’s Cafe in North Mankato Saturday morning.

Let's leave aside for now the point that Coleman is insanely wrong on the facts and clearly doesn't know what he's talking about. (In brief: it's basically unimaginable that the gov't will make ANY money on these assets, considering that to achieve his goals Paulson will have to buy them at ludicrously inflated prices, and these things are basically worthless to begin with. [Calculated
Risk explains this well.] Even breaking even is an optimistic estimate; Coleman's comes from La-La Land.) Let's look instead at what this line of thinking says about the conservative mind.

Liberals and those further left, like yours truly, have seen a silver lining to this crisis in that it seems to conclusively discredit free-market-ism. "Aha!," the argument goes, "as soon as Wall Street's in trouble all these so-called capitalists go crying to the government for help. Hypocrites!" This is true as far it goes, and it's great fun for us skeptics (my favorite comment is still Atrios' pithy note "Capitalism! Fuck yeah!"), but it's not the whole picture. Other, more restrained observers see the bailout as a panicked flight to pragmatism, in which crisis demands that Paulson and Bernanke set their ideologies aside and try anything that might work. (This argument naturally reaches back to 9/11, another case of seemingly-pragmatic government rapid response that turned out to be way more ideological than we thought. But that's for another post.) This also makes sense to us; but neither of these frameworks, I think, would resonate with the conservative mind.

Pretend you're Norm Coleman -- a roughly average conservative legislator, no intellectual but bright enough that you at least understand the GOP talking points. You love markets, and you think that private enterprise almost always knows better than the government. So when you see this situation, you assume that something fluky has happened, and there's an imbalance in the markets. Well, that's not a crisis -- that's an investment opportunity! Just like a business, the government should buy low and sell high; pick up these assets at fire-sale prices, get the market rolling again, and you'll get returns of 1000-2000% once everything is back to normal. What better use of public money could there possibly be?

That's the logic -- it is still, even now, market fundamentalism. So when Chris Dodd comes to your office and says the government should get contingent shares in these companies it's buying junk assets from, you'd just blink at him; why put that burden on them when they're already doing us a favor? Plus it sounds like creeping socialism, and that scares you. Then when David Sirota's outside your window with a megaphone, shouting about a massive transfer of public money into private hands -- i.e. taking from the many and giving to the few -- you'd just get confused and blink even more, because isn't investing in a healthy economy the best thing we can do with the people's money? After all, it'll trickle back down to everybody again!

It's old-fashioned, unvarnished, trickle-down economics. Right-wing lunacy from beginning to end. They still believe this stuff, even in the face of market meltdown; the conservative capacity for rationalization is unmatched. And though they're not vocal about it these days, this ideology is exactly what motivates Republicans in Congress. I know this because it's the only way you can possibly justify Paulson's plan as vs. Dodd's (which, in addition to contingent shares, also adds independent oversight, executive pay caps, profit-sharing to the HOPE program, and court-administered homeowner mortgage restructuring, all eminently practical things which make conservative ideologues nervous); you just have to be a wingnut, and then it makes sense.

So we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking the Paulson plan is "pragmatic" or acceptable in any way, and we should pray that Dodd and Barney Frank are smart in their negotiations -- or else, the Democratic Congress will wind up passing by far the biggest piece of right-wing corporate welfare in American history. That would make me sad.

And meanwhile we should work on getting these nutcases out of our government; defeating Norm Coleman would be a good start. You can contribute to the Franken campaign here.

Struggling with Republican "Electability"

(The following message has been cleared for publication by the Canadian Ministry of Internet Decency; God Save the Queen and her glorious Dominion. 20070904-TRG-WELLINGTON-56-approved)

Looking forward to seeing everyone back at school in the next couple weeks. Meanwhile, from my frozen Canadian exile, I want to point towards this interesting post by MyDD's Todd Beeton. He notes that Mike Huckabee (about whom I wrote at length recently) is making an unusual electability argument, precisely the inverse of what Democratic progressives were saying in 04 and 06 -- calling for a clearly ideological run against the opposition, a "contrast where there's contrast" in his words, as opposed to the more moderate and blue-state-friendly campaign presented by Giuliani and to an extent Romney. Basically he's attacking "Democrat-lite", much like Howard Dean attacked "Republican-lite" in 2004.

While I'm sympathetic to Huckabee's attitude, having spent quite a while agitating for a Democratic move to the ideological base (which paid dividends in 2006), in this case what's good for the goose may not be good for the gander. Here's why:

Huckabee points to "the issues that rally our base". But there are no such things. The Republican base, such as it is, has nothing whatsoever to do with issues -- they are in fact remarkably divided on many key ideological points. Read that invaluable Fabrizio poll from June and you'll see what I mean; for instance, did you know that half of Republicans favour universal health care? It's true. "Conservatism", my ass, about the only things this party really has in common issue-wise are lukewarm support for their "war on terror" and a number of meaningless nostrums left over from the Reagan era ("smaller government," "fiscal responsibility," etc); when it comes down to details, they're hopelessly torn. Left to its own devices this party couldn't agree on how to decorate the White House, let alone run it. (Of course it's hardly news that conservatism is intellectually bankrupt and the Republican Party's being held together with scotch tape, but for those of us who still quake at the spectre of Newt Gingrich it's a difficult idea to actualize. Reminders are helpful.)

Point is, Huckabee's grasping at straws when he tries to leverage issues, because for Republicans issues are ultimately irrelevant. Their ideology is a joke. What really controls the core GOP electorate is a mindset, an old-fashioned lizard-brain us vs. them attitude located way in the back of the skull. It's a psychological thing; they want Republicans Good, Everyone Else Evil, and then they want Good to beat Evil senseless. That's it. So if Rudy Giuliani, GOP Warrior-Demigod, gives them that, he's made; and the issues have absolutely nothing to do with it. Dude could declare July 4th to be National Gay Marriage Day, he'd still win the Republican nomination; what they want is a fighter.

This is what they do not find in the grinning, healthy-food-touting Huckabee. He could have won easily 30 or 40 years ago, and he does have a chance today. But his consituency, the socially responsible Main Street Republicans, has been bleeding away from the GOP for some time; they're independents or Jon Tester Democrats now. And RINO leaders like Huckabee himself are being rapidly exincted by the Club for Growth. No, the party is firmly in the hands of the fundamentalist tribe, egged on by business interests and the religious fringe, and in the process they're handing the rest of us control of government for a generation. If this Republican cannibalism wasn't so ultimately healthy for the country, it's be sad to watch.

So follow the shifting rhetoric as the Republican campaign heats up. Maybe Huckabee will strike a chord, in which case he'd have an opportunity to fundamentally reshape the party and we'll have a whole new ballgame. But more likely, between Giuliani, ubermensch Fred Thompson, and Mitt "Double Guantanamo" Romney, Republicans will once again opt for the brainless aggression that defines the totality of their politics, and which in the 08 general will win them a whole 30% of the vote. Best of luck, guys!

...I hope everyone has a safe trip to Cambridge and I'll see you all soon.

The Topeka Catch-22

This story should probably be Sam's turf, but I can't resist. Apparently the Kansas Republican Party, which is in tremendous electoral pain (not only is Kathleen Sebelius one of the best Democratic governors in the country, but they unexpectedly lost Jim Ryun in the '06 landslide and their moderates are jumping like rats from a sinking ship), has gone Soviet:

The state Republican Party is forming a loyalty committee so that it can punish officers who endorse or contribute to Democrats.

The GOP's conservative-dominated state committee also is accusing a prominent moderate of trying to undermine the party's fundraising. It has adopted a resolution criticizing Steve Cloud, a Lenexa businessman and former legislator who represents Kansas on the Republican National Committee. [...]

"It gives me pause for thought anytime someone requires a loyalty oath of anyone from any organization," said Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh. "I'm somewhat uncomfortable with a group sitting in judgment of other members."

[political scientist Bob] Beatty said forming such a committee could be seen as an attempt to purge moderates from the party -- something Kobach said isn't true.

But Andy Wollen, president of the Kansas Traditional Republican Majority, a moderate group, mused about the GOP creating a "grand high inquisitor."

Now, leaving aside the hilarious image of the Kansas Republican Party having a "grand high inquisitor", there's a lesson here on the position of today's conservative politics. From the left, Kos laughs at how obviously they're shooting themselves in the foot:

I won't pretend to be distressed at the Kansas GOP's abandonment of the moderate center. I think it's fantastic -- their rightward tilt has had an objectively negative impact on their electoral viability (unlike our own efforts to create a strong, proud, and unified Democratic Party).

One word of advice, though -- skip the creepy loyalty oaths and stick to the democratic process -- elections. It makes for much better optics and really, it's the right thing to do.

And then keep ousting your moderates until you deliver to us Democrats your state on a platter.

But over on the right wing, at RedState, diarist MartinAKnights points out quite rightly that having moderates doesn't really seem to help them either:

"Moderate" and/or Rockefeller Republicans (I exclude proper Republicans like Rudy Guiliani and William Weld) may win elections here and there, but at the end of the day, they are basically slow acting poison...

It is extremely rare to find a Rockefeller Republican as either an elected or party official who leaves office with the party in his district or state stronger than when he/she met it. It is far more common to find the exact opposite, e.g. Bob Taft in OH, George Pataki in NY, Christie Whitman in NJ. I have looked for instances where it is proven otherwise but those instances are very few and far between. In fact, in recent times, the immediate after-effect of electing a "moderate" Republican into any public office is an increase in Democratic strength in the area affected.

Witness Kansas - a state which has long had a traditional strong preference to the Republican Party; the state GOP long ago decided to cater to "moderates", in the process essentially violating post-Watergate Reagan's admonition that a party must have certain principles and beliefs that must remain inviolate. Worse is that after having crippled the GOP by basically cutting it free of its philosophical moorings and rendering it without purpose or direction, these "moderates" are switching over to the Democrats i.e. the Kansas Republican Party State Chairman from 1999 to 2003 switched parties (to Democrat) last year.

Let's be honest; how often do "moderate" Republicans have coat-tails? How many actually hand over to another Republican after their terms are over? Usually they hand over to a Democrat (often they do so more gladly than they would have to another Republican) because during their terms they would have conceded so much of the basic premises that define what it means to be a Republican that they basically render the average Republican unelectable for being "extreme." i.e. does anybody honestly believe that any Republican would be able to win a statewide race in CA for a long while after Arnold steps down?

This is one of the reasons why I have become convinced that allowing Republican "moderates" to achieve high positions in the GOP is basically slitting our own throats, trading in short-term gain (if any) for very long-term pain. To be blunt, I personally consider Christie Todd Whitman's (who ironically won her first Governor's race in New Jersey by running as a strong fiscal, law and order conservative) particular off-shoot of Republicanism to be akin to streptococcus on the body of the GOP. It's basically guaranteeing sabotage from within until the Jeffords' moment when they switch.

(Frontpager Erick concurs with a post wonderfully titled "Snakes in the Kansas Grass".) This is all, frankly, true; while of course I despise everything the RedStaters believe, I quite agree that their party (like ours) requires a clear and vigorous message in order to win. It's political common sense.

Problem being, that message sucks. These days, with resentment of Republicans and conservatism at all-time highs, you have to have a hell of a song-and-dance routine in order to make these ridiculous ideas look palatable, and right now that means showing your moderate side. So the Kansas GOP, like its compatriots across the country, is in what I propose to call the Topeka Catch-22: either they stick to their beliefs and look psycho, or they compromise their beliefs and look weak and gutless. Neither of these situations, one might add, is particularly conducive to winning elections.

...This problem is going to break national as the GOP primaries heat up; we're already seeing cries of "Real Conservative!" behind pretty much everyone that isn't Rudy Giuliani, and if the right can coalesce around someone to focus their rage on him, LOOK OUT. For decades, and especially post-Gingrich, this festering rage between far-right fundies and pragmatic Republican "moderates" has been more or less hidden because their coalition worked politically; but apparently it doesn't play in Peoria anymore, and from there it's only a couple steps to outright GOP cannibalism. (Which, considering how conservative the party is anyway, amounts to a snake eating its own tail, but whatever.)

This can only mean good things for Democrats; plus, intellectually it'll be interesting to watch this paradox play out. As they often say in the pages of RedState when our party is infighting: folks, get the popcorn.

The More Things Change...

Between the bazillions of debates about the state of liberalism and conservatism (which, if the blogosphere is to be believed, undergo Revolution or at least Crises of Confidence about every thirty-five seconds) it's comforting to read somebody like Ross Douthat pointing out that our political alignments are still basically the same as they were in 1965--

I think [conservative writers Poulous and Dreher] are misreading the contemporary American left, though, if they think there's any kind of significant fusionism waiting to happen between disillusioned lefties and the anti-Bush Right. ...Most of the smart young lefties I know aren't interested in some grand convergence with disillusioned populist-conservatives; they're interested in harnessing the kind of "office-park populism" that gave us Jim Webb and Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester in order to dramatically expand social democracy in the United States. For some, this means a return the old-time religion (a higher minimum wage, strong unions, government jobs programs, etc.); for others, it means a smarter, more growth-friendly form of social democracy (think Denmark, rather than France); for most, it means some combination thereof. But the overall model is still bigger government plus cultural permissiveness, not some kind of "small is beautiful" left-conservatism out to defend the permanent things against the ravages of modernity.

The left's vision of an expanded welfare state as both the answer to populist anxieties and the guardian of social liberalism is a perfectly coherent worldview, and it's one that I think has a good chance of accomplishing many of its objectives over the next few decades. (When I say that things are going well for liberals right now, that's what I mean - not just the Dems might trounce the GOP in '08, but that the overall political climate is as favorable to social democracy as it's been in thirty years.) But it's not the kind of worldview that's likely to want, or need, an alliance with the partisans of crunchy conservatism and putting Kansas First.

Douthat is right. Liberalism neither wants nor needs an influx of weepy self-hating post-Bush Republicans who think we can offer them political salvation. George Bush was a bad president but he was not a hydrogen-bomb on the political scene; our principles remain the principles we have held basically since FDR, and conservative thought remains totally anathema to them. Considering the strength of the political coalition liberalism has built today, it would only be to our detriment if we bothered to open the tent to these destructive right-wing freaks, however nonconformist they may be. (And yes, this also applies to "liberaltarianism", one of the most unholy combinations of stupid and unnecessary to ever appear in political thought.)

As far as I'm concerned as many conservatives as possible should go down with George Bush's ship. These people, it has been consistently demonstrated since Warren Harding, destroy everything they touch; they are menaces to society, plain and simple. And for us, as liberals and Democrats we are not obligated to give their ideas any quarter, no matter how many puppy-dog eyes the Reason kids make at us; the social-democratic plan we operated on under FDR and LBJ seems to be working again just fine. We progressives, and whatever government we end up with in 2008 -- and if you're a betting man you're betting it's Democratic -- would be stupid to listen to Rod Dreher or anyone else who suggests we should build some funky postmodern left-right coalition. Remember the old rule: don't fix what ain't broke.

Any Future for Academe?

There are a couple of great accounts by Harvard bloggers of their graduations: Ryan and Pablog deserve a read. These images are haunting me today -- the weirdly forced ceremony, the sense of total detachment -- (the thought that in two years I'll be dealing with this) -- and they got me thinking about the value of academia & formal education in today's political climate. Are we wasting our time at Harvard?

With that in mind I present this fascinating essay by Henry Farrell (of Crooked Timber, also an assistant prof at GWU), using Michael Bérubé's argument with David Horowitz to explore "different kinds of procedural liberalism" in academic environments as vs. politics. It's lengthy, but worth reading at length. The bits that got me:

Bérubé’s ideal academy is one that has a place for conservatives, and for people whom he disagrees with radically. Indeed, this is key to the “pragmatic anti-foundationalism” that underpins his specific form of procedural liberalism. Substantive liberals – those who believe in the importance of equality etc – don’t have a monopoly on the truth. Therefore, we need procedural liberalism too, where “any reasonable proposition can and should be debated from any reasonable angle.” This is a pretty uncontroversial claim in itself...

When one is acting as a scholar, one has a clear duty to be faithful to one’s vocation, to acknowledge uncomfortable facts, and to give due respect to viewpoints that are not one’s own. The duty of the professor to the student is not to impart the professor’s values to the student, but rather to help the student to understand his or her own values more clearly... The duty of the politician, in contrast, is precisely to use argument to express one’s own beliefs and, where possible, to sway others towards them so that one’s political goals can be achieved.

The academic can of course act as a politician, but only outside of the classroom. Not only are his roles as educator, and as a citizen engaged in politics distinct from each other, but they are profoundly different; as Weber describes it, they serve different gods. The political realm is one of unending struggle between different and antithetical ethical standpoints, each of which has adherents who want it to win. Here, it is incumbent on the politician to ensure that her point of view prevails, and to use whatever means are available in the electoral system to do so. While the truly responsible politician recognizes the tensions between lofty aims and the morally compromised tools that she must employ, and even that her own point of view is not unassailable, she fails in her responsibility as a politician unless she participates actively and wholeheartedly in the political struggle. The scholarly realm (within the social sciences) is one of debate where one starts from the premises that no point of view is foundationally right. Thus, the teacher imparts two important kinds of moral lesson to her student – lessons that allow the student to clearly articulate his own views to himself, and lessons that allow the student to recognize in principle that no point of view provides an account of the world that is complete and foundationally grounded.

So. Basically, what Farrell says here is that academic liberalism is incompatible with argumentative political liberalism (or any political ideology). In theory. But Farrell goes on to take case studies of people who don't adhere to these norms:

In practice, however, even within small-l liberalism, I suspect that there are limits to the accommodation that should be granted to specific individual students... Students who persistently and belligerently refuse to recognize in principle that other points of view may potentially hold some truth prevent seminars from becoming genuine intellectual exchanges, and need to be discouraged, if necessary in very strong terms, from so doing. They’re acting to stop the university from doing what it should be doing, from providing a proper environment for people to pursue the academic vocation.

Farrell then differentiates -- and this is where I depart from him -- between bomb-throwing types like David Horowitz, who deserve only scorn, and students/academics with legitimate intellectual cases for conservative/extreme positions. He writes:

a liberal (in the broadest sense of the word) academic should deal with Horowitz in a very different way than she would deal with John, or with a conservative scholar within the academy who was arguing in a reasoned and honest way that conservatives should get more of a voice. She should deal with him as a political actor, using the tools of political debate. She should under no circumstances take him seriously, where taking him seriously would give him political traction. She should, however, take the aforementioned conservative scholar very seriously indeed, and do her best to push students like John [a loud, aggressive, conservative] to adhere to the basic rules of academic argument, without at the same time asking them to change their substantive values.

Thus the need to distinguish between different kinds of procedural liberalism, which should work in different spheres of activity. As Weber argues, different spheres of social life are governed by different principles; the vocation of the academic is not that of the politician. While a small-l liberal should recognize that it’s healthy that both politics and the academy are populated by a wide range of viewpoints, including some that she is violently opposed to, she should recognize that these viewpoints interact in very different ways in the two spheres, and that the proper standards for vary dramatically from the one to the other.

I find this contention, that more "serious" conservatives deserve greater respect in academia than their political-activist counterparts, rather silly and more than a little depressing. Because the point that Farrell doesn't grasp here is how contested this "procedural liberalism" really is.

Procedural liberalism, the idea that you cannot grasp absolute truth -- which Farrell isolates as the root of academic discourse -- is now a partisan position, and a characteristically liberal/progressive one at that. In this day and age, to make any statement that involves subjectivity, context, or hints at relativism immediately identifies the speaker as a liberal, and places them within this political fight. It thus cannot function as the overarching modus operandi that it is intended to.

After all, the whole conservative ethic, Republican Party and all, is predicated on pure value judgments and an understanding of the world that operates with absolute confidence; this is why it encloses religious fundamentalism, militarism, and economic orthodoxy so well. It's not by coincidence that conservatives are so often derided as thinking of things in "black and white" -- they do.

And this kind of conservatism stands, at its most basic logical structures, in active opposition to procedural liberalism. It rejects context (hence, constitutional orginalism) and change (hence, the same-sex marriage fight). It cannot abide any suggestion that gods are fallible or principles imperfect; it cannot conceive of its opponents as anything other than traitors or lunatics. (George Lakoff explains both these mindsets, and shows how they operate, very well in Moral Politics.) It is sworn to destroy the entire field of academic discourse. An intellectual scorched-earth policy.

Understandably, this places academic procedural liberalism in a pretty bad situation. It claims to neutrality, and to containing within itself a healthy intellectual debate, even while it is being attacked at the roots by this toxic, destructive absolutist conservatism that has zero interest in "reasoned argument," whihc is in fact quite seriously opposed to it.

I keep picturing the opening scene from Cold Mountain, where the Confederate soldiers stand vigilant guard in their trench, helplessly unaware that the Union is tunneling underneath them planting explosives.

FURTHERMORE, academic liberalism is totally incapable of engaging this strain of conservatism, since all the Weberian principles that underly liberalism -- and this is Farrell's mindset -- insist on friendly coexistence and healthy disagreement. If you permit this kind of conservatism to continue, it disrupts and discredits procedural liberalism, but if academics oppose it they abandon their own core principles. To actively defend liberalism, then, becomes anathema to liberalism. And as a result we get Henry Farrell, who even as he recognizes the threat from a showman like Horowitz remains unable to address the threat from conservatism itself, making limp, tepid prescriptions like the one I quoted above:

A liberal should...take the conservative scholar very seriously indeed, and do her best to push John to adhere to the basic rules of academic argument, without at the same time asking them to change their substantive values.

Unfortunately, if you do not change the substantive values of these people, they will destroy academia and liberal thought as we know it. That has been their stated goal from the beginning. But out of loyalty to his increasingly frayed intellectual system Farrell cannot argue for their destruction. Nor should he be expected to; he'd be a traitor to his ideas.

As a result the academic establishment stands entirely undefended against conservatism, waiting to be destroyed.

--

This will sound bleak, but I don't see a way out of this paradox. Academics are damned if they do and damned if they don't. An institution like Harvard, which will undoubtedly defend its claim to anti-foundational neutrality, will at best become marginalized and increasingly irrelevant as intellectual/political production is left wholly to the activist spheres and people who are more willing to stick up for their ideational systems. We are already seeing that marginalization of the elite universities ("bastions of liberalism," "Kremlin on the Charles" etc.), and it's not a short leap from that to the marginalization of academia as a whole.

As a result, and this will sound apocalyptic, I have to question whether -- for us -- it's worth spending our time on academic pursuits. What (aside from a leg up in the job market) is a B.A. from Harvard going to get us? What about an M.A.? It doesn't look like it's going to prepare us very well to engage our nation's critical issues, that's for sure. If anything I suspect it might saddle us with some totally unhelpful intellectual baggage.

(Speaking personally, I know I'm deathly afraid of getting caught in academia, winding up 30 years from now bearded in an ivory tower writing silly articles about 19th century art and refusing to ever leave Cambridge because my faithful cat would get lonely. This is a realistic scenario for me.)

So what do the rest of you think? Can we wring value from our Harvard experiences, and can we fend off the conservative threat while maintaining the integrity of procedural liberalism? And if not, what is the alternative?

The Reid Disconnect

Many people seem concerned about Harry Reid's recent observation that the war in Iraq is lost -- from Tom DeLay, who's carping about "treason", all the way over to my good friend Jess Coggins, who is "not sure this is a good political strategy". David Broder (a man whose judgment we all respect so very much) called Reid an "embarrassment", Joe Lieberman said exactly what you expect, and BLAH BLAH BLAH into that familiar media steam cycle that happens whenever anybody says anything provocative -- Drudge headlines it, Rush and O'Reilly blow some gaskets, within a day Wolf Blitzer and the rest of the mainstream media dutifully report on the "controversy," and so on into infinity until we meet our next patsy (Sean Penn?). We know the drill. It's a GAFFE, gentlemen! Put on your GAFFE MASKS!

(Note for clarity: this cycle applies when conservatives say dumb things too. Just replace "Drudge" with "Media Matters," "Rush and O'Reilly" with "Daily Kos diarists," and "the mainstream media" with "nobody.")

But the noteworthy thing in this case is how the left responded. The normal procedure says that "respectable" Democrats go on a talk show and politely distance themselves, while embarrassed liberal bloggers sit in stony silence as they wait for the stupidity to clear, or at most point out that Sean Penn does not actually speak for us. (Surprise!) This case: totally different.

The blogs have been lit up, especially Daily Kos, with passionate defenses of Reid -- many of them coming from soldiers through groups like VoteVets. Diarists (always a better gauge of general sentiment than the front-pagers) have called it "speaking truth to power", "clear and consistent", and "stating the obvious". And while Reid's Senate colleagues have been more careful, we haven't seen the usual volume of condemnation; save one article shit out by the Politico and dutifully linked by Drudge, there's been basically none of the "flustered Democrats reject comments" stories you normally see. Jon Stewart described it well last night as Democrats' "creepy, creepy solidarity".

My God, if Reid or Daschle or Dick Durbin or anybody had said this two or three years ago, they'd have been lynched. Boom. Career over. Yet this time around, in progressive politics there's a tacit acceptance of the remarks (by the insane political-kabuki standards of the Beltway press corps, at least). Why is the left so unconcerned about Reid's admittedly inflammatory contention that the war is lost? Could it be because... no, I can't say it... stop yourself, Kolic...

BECAUSE IT'S TRUE.

Holy hell, people, think about it! We clearly have not won, and will not win, this war. Any ounce of military or geopolitical common sense tells you that; at this point it's a walking definition of "unwinnable." Ergo -- and follow me closely here, I'm using Harvard-caliber logic -- if we cannot win, we lose. Sucks to be us.

This explains the reaction I'm talking about. Progressives like truth. We like science, and logic, and the reality-based community. We have a very hard time letting go of it, and we naturally want to stick up for it, even if that truth hurts sometimes (see: global warming). I certainly think this way; when Reid first made his remark, my reaction was "what else is new?". It's just common sense.

Whereas conservatives have never been friends with truth. They see it as an enemy and prefer to defeat it. Lying, misdirection, total cuckoo-bananas denial: all of these things are perfectly acceptable so long as they serve the right goals. (See: everything the Bush administration has ever done. Seriously, think about it.) It's a perfectly understandable consequence of their ideology, which holds that ideas supersede context, and thus that belief supersedes reality.

And that's the fundamental disconnect. The right wing and its enablers are upset because Democrats are being honest. Damn liberals are letting reality win! For our part, progressives seem to be sick and tired of playing the game on conservative terms, and we're gonna stick up for the truth when Harry Reid says it, no matter how bluntly. This is a positive trend and should be encouraged.

Because after all, the war in Iraq may be lost, but the conservative war on reality is still going strong. And that's one conflict in which we should all be firmly defeatist.

Retro Is In This Year

I've already written about how Barack Obama's candidacy -- through no fault of his own, mind you -- is basically out of a time warp from 1974. Well, turns out Barack's not the only candidate who hasn't caught up with the times, and in this case the candidate's entirely to blame: one look at Rudy Giuliani's platform and you get a whole different kind of retro. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN I GIVE YOU: the 1980s.

Take away 9/11 and examine Giuliani as a conservative - and he is a kind of conservative. How does this kind of conservatism translate to the America of 2008? It's an older model - a sort of reactionary tough love, a pastiche that thrived in an urban environment of racial tension, crime, and economic crisis. It appeals to a certain frustration with bureaucratic fecklessness, and it unmistakeably draws from white resentment of blacks stereotyped as welfare queens and criminals.

[...] Giuliani's conservatism is the product of a particular ecosystem - it's a reaction to the New York of the 1970s and 80s. As even some conservative analysts have noted, it is based on themes - welfare, crime, taxes - that simply don't resonate very much on the national level anymore. Giulianism was a late flowering of America's post-1960s reactionary phase; it's hard to imagine it translating to a presidential campaign in the current context.

[...] What he has emphasized is supply-side economics. There was the flat tax flip-flop to pick up the Forbes endorsement. Larry Kudlow loves him. And he seems to be trying to channel the force of his personality into, of all things, ending welfare as we know it... As a presidential campaign strategy, this is a very good one for 1980.

Per usual Paul from Alien & Sedition is right on the money. It's like Ronald Reagan if he'd missed out on the Cold War. Supply-side economics, for Chrissake, and cranky rants about the bleeding-heart liberals and their love of handouts. At this rate I half expect Margaret Thatcher to show up someplace and start bombing the Falkland Islands.

Of course this stuff resonates with many Republicans, a group hardly known for their progressive forward-thinking attitudes. They do venerate Reagan -- if for reasons that rarely correspond with reality -- and many elites are still drawn to that sense of tax-cutting fervor. (The Onion once pointed out that Bush's cabinet is pretty darn retro. And that was pre- Robert Gates, who was an Iran-contra conspirator for crying out loud.) But for the most part, the Morning in America message has lost its luster, as more salient issues have replaced the sort of hardheaded fiscal quasi-conservatism Giuliani still espouses. "Welfare queens" no longer scare people, after all, and Ronald Reagan is dead.

Paul cites the Pew poll, which shows a tremendous recent increase in public support for activist "big" government. (To which the natural response is, "about time.") Today's political environment is pretty much the worst in which Giuliani could possibly hope to articulate his already-outdated message. Which makes it all the more interesting that he's somehow become the prohibitive frontrunner; well, hell. If Republicans want to commit suicide by anachronism, I'm the last to suggest we stop them.

Roundup -- Coming Up For Air

GodDAMN, there's nothing more frustrating than spending days finding nuggets of promising blogmaterial, but having to let them slide because you feel guilty about not writing your fifteen-page gov paper--
         (Question for anyone taking sophomore gov tutorial: WTF?!?)
--which you naturally put off until the last minute anyway, instead spending a solid 30 minutes playing WWE SmackDown! Vs. Raw 2006 on your roommate's Xbox, and wind up incoherently flailing at your keyboard about "revolutionary assessments of power vacuums" at 4 AM on a Tuesday while plotting transfer to the U of Western Ontario where you won't have to deal with this shit.

Point being, I'm still a little loopy, but here's a random collection of links to entertain you anyway...

--Scooter Libby: fall guy. Fitzgerald: finished. FOX News: still fair and balanced.

--Crimson Blues, the HLS Dems blog, continues to impress: writer Ehren J. Brav gives a great examination of whether the government's accounting of the budget deficit may be misleading. Check it out.

--The Washington Post has an important story, this from the CCES study of election returns:

The visual representation of the nation's voters isn't a nicely shaped bell, with most voters in the moderate middle. It's a sharp V.

The nation is polarized, and the hallowed "middle ground" is largely nonexistent. Where's your "triangulation" now?

--Congrats to Justin, Jarret, and all of LegCom, who got their op-ed published in the Crimson. It's top-notch. Also, Jess Coggins (why does that name sound familiar?) responds at Cambridge Common.

--Beyond the Ann Coulter unpleasantness, CPAC might contain some lessons for us about the state of modern conservatism. The best summaries have come from alien & sedition, an obscure but fantastic blog dedicated to analyzing the conservative movement. This one deserves to be on your must-read list. (Also, Stephen discusses his CPAC experiences at RedIvy.)

--Breaking from politics for a moment: Uleaileuleaileaeuleaileae!

--Speaking of incoherent babble, Joe Klein's decision to list the characteristics of a "left-wing strawmanextremist" got a lot of attention all over the blogosphere; the best response I've seen came from BooMan, who gave it a thorough demolition. (My only note is that Klein's mentality seems to operate in absolutes, which strikes me as awfully inappropriate for someone whose job it is to seek nuance and realism. Then again, it's Joe Klein.)

--There was always something about the Republican Congress (R.I.P.) that vaguely reminded me of Galaxy Quest; it doesn't help that Tom DeLay has a book coming out titled -- I swear to God -- "No Retreat, No Surrender".

And that's all I got. Consider this an open thread.

Oh, also, I want opinions on this:
The Mather House open list exploded with argument the other day (archives here, for masochists only) over our Freshman Housing Day T-shirt, after some members of the house alleged that it was sexist/tasteless/offensive. The shirt's design is: on the front, a picture of King Kong--

--climbing the Mather tower, holding a tiny blonde woman who shouts "Ahhhh! Mather!" The bone of contention: on the back of the shirt reads the phrase "That's what she said." I think it's hilarious, but I'm not sure it's appropriate or tasteful... Thoughts?

Popped-Collar Conservatism

Garrett may well be right that Granite State Republicans seem to be going the way of the dodo. What's more, the Republicans they do have up there are of a curious variety. Consider the following words from former Dartmouth professor and National Review editor Jeffrey Hart:

"My conservatism is aristocratic in spirit, anti-populist and rooted in the Northeast. It is Burke brought up to date. A ‘social conservative’ in my view is not a moral authoritarian Evangelical who wants to push people around, but an American gentleman, conservative in a social sense. He has gone to a good school, maybe shops at J. Press, maybe plays tennis or golf, and drinks either Bombay or Beefeater martinis, or maybe Dewar's on the rocks, or both."

Of course I knew that there were still some country-club northeastern Republicans who hadn't crossed over to our side of the aisle yet, but it's still a little strange to see someone be so candid about it. This quotation is so easy to make fun of that I'm not even going to try. What's even more interesting, though, is the rest of the article from which that quotation is taken. Hart says some things that could very well have come from the pen of Atrios or our very own Markus Kolic:

"Never to be out-extremed, Ponnuru declared editorially in NR that a single embryo (e.g., fertilized egg) 'must not be destroyed no matter how noble the cause.' No matter how noble the cause. In other words, the single cell is to be absolutized over every other consideration. WHHHHeeeeeeee! Even curing bubonic plague. Even end of the world! It is a very peculiar kind of conservatism that values life only in utero."

"I certainly was not aboard that Ship of Fools, so-called 'conservatives' as well as 'neo-conservatives' – more correctly neo-trotskyites – who sailed with Bush right over Niagra Falls and smashed to pieces on the rocks of reality below."

"[Bush] is a right-wing ideologue whose abstract imperatives across the board are characteristically disconnected from actuality. That is precisely the reason why he is a failed president."

So what you have here is a dyed-in-the-wool fusionist conservative who absolutely despises Bush. Must be something in the water up there, Garrett.

Indeed, as a final aside, I suspect that Hart's political views are in most respects not all that different from mine. I probably favor a little bit more in the way of social spending than he does, but as far as I can tell we're both essentially pragmatists with a libertarian bent. And yet it's only a slight exaggeration to say that I despise everything he stands for. That, in the end, is why I'm a Democrat. I may have won the Dem Apples "Republican Lite" award (of which I'm immensely proud, by the way, and no, Alex Burns, you can't have it, even if you have taken over my magazine), but I still happily associate myself with these timeless words from Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, quoted in a piece by the Weekly Standard's Matt Labash:

"After hours of listening to Mudcat talk about how he hates foreign interventions but supports a robust military, about how he detests high taxes and profligate spending, about how he can't stand demonizing all rich people as greedheads, and how he's fervently pro-Second Amendment, I tell him he sounds an awful lot like an old-school Republican. Why not save some time and just become one? 'Because since the beginning of time, the big sonofabitch has kicked the little sonofabitch's ass,' he says. 'Republicans are the big sonsofbitches. And I happen to like the little sonsofbitches. They're my people.'"

It's Jesus' Fault?

"The Editors" at Poor Man raises a question I haven't seen before -- can/should the impending Republican collapse be blamed on the fundamentalist wing of the GOP? Riffing on Ross Douthat, "Editors" says no:

It’s not just that the “smart set” of non-theo Republicanism have been responsible for unpopular politics - they’ve been bad policies, bad ideas poorly executed, and they’ve seriously damaged the country in a way that, say, anti-gay marriage initiatives, the Terri Schiavo circus, and all the stem cell baloney have not and could not. [...]

The Crazy Jesus People have a problem with science and liberalism and modernity, but that problem is basically psychological - the modern world makes it hard to hold on to comforting beliefs about this omnipotent fellow named “God” - who looks a lot like you, incidentally - waking up 6,000 years ago and creating the world from nothing and helpfully recording it all for posterity. You can fix the psychological problem with a gesture, some display of authority and power and relevence that makes the CJPs feel respectable - force kids to pretend to beg favors of this “God” person before class, for example - and that’s pretty much all they want out of politics. Other Republicans have different kinds of problems with science and liberalism and modernity - financial concerns, political concerns, foreign policy concerns - and these problems are real world problems, and fixing them requires taking control of the day-to-day workings of the government. And, when this stuff doesn’t work as planned, and it turns out that you are a half-educated dipshit with a head full of Ayn Rand and hairplugs, it requires a scapegoat. Blaming liberals and scientists and Teh Gay has a broad-based appeal; but, should old alliances no longer be benificial, you can blame the Crazy Jesus People, too.

Quite right. Just as we cannot let the commentariat and the Republican intellectuals save their credibility by pegging Bush as a liberal (Digby's favorite topic), we also cannot let them slough their problems off onto the religious wingnuts. It is conservatism itself that has failed America, and liberals like us have to remember that.