The American Conservative

Hotline reports a Penn, Schoen & Berland poll taken yesterday in a one-day poll of (only) 404 LVs with a margin of error +/- 4.9% that puts Scott Kleeb, the Boy Rancher from the River Platte, ahead by six (46-40) in Nebraska’s Fightin’ Third (as Colbert would call it).  It seems impossible that this could actually be happening, and the nature of the poll suggests that the result may not be terribly reliable.  But, even though I have noted the Kleeb-Smith race as a potentially huge upset that could represent the extent of the anti-GOP backlash, I have not really believed that it was possible until I saw this poll.  The Republicans have seen it and, as suggested in an earlier post, they have begun to pour money into NE-3.  Kleeb can win.  Kleeb very well might win.  You heard it here first. 

1958 has been in some of the election commentary comparisons–Niall Ferguson’s most notably.  The last time the Third District of Nebraska elected a Democrat?  1958.

Did you know that Venezuela is the leading buyer of arms and military equipment in the world today? Did you know that Chavez is building an army of more than a million soldiers and the most potent air force in South America-the largest Spanish-speaking armed force in history?

Did you know that Venezuela will shortly spend thirty billion dollars to build twenty military bases in neighboring Bolivia, which will dominate the borders with Chile, Peru, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil? The bases will be commanded by Venezuelan and Cuban officers. ~Rick Santorum

Sen. Santorum, did you know that Hugo Chavez is probably building up his air force as a countermeasure against the threat of a coup because his position is so weak and fragile?  Not exactly a Master of the Universe, is he?  Did you know that there has never been a less frightening prospect than a Venezuela-Cuba power axis (unless it is perhaps the old threat of the Belize-Argentina coalition)?  Did you know that demagogic blowhards say all kinds of outrageous and overly ambitious things to compensate for their own impressive weakness and international insecurity?  Did you know that Bolivia does not border on Venezuela and cannot be said to be a “neighbouring” country when it is 600 miles away and separated by the Amazon Basin?

I have been ridiculed by the media and my opponents for defining the enemy Islamic fascism – they say words don’t matter. But words do matter because words are what define the enemy we confront.  Words are needed for Americans to comprehend what motivates the deeds that the enemy is planning, so we can effectively defeat them. ~Rick Santorum

Which is why you don’t use the words “Islamic fascism”!  Obviously, no one I know of has objected to this phrase by claiming that words don’t matter.  It is because they are the wrong words, misleading words, confusing words, that deemphasise the religious fanaticism of the jihadi and pretend that we are, once again, fighting Arab and Pashtun versions of hypernationalists from Italy in a conventional war against modern nation-states full of Axis-like enemies.  Words are very important, which is why Santorum’s insistence on using words that do not reflect reality is so troubling and so frustrating.

Rather, this election has ignored almost all ideology and become a narrative about issues of scandal and incompetence. Most of all, it is about an Iraq invasion that almost everyone voted for (from both parties), but no one in the Administration bothered to think through in advance. ~David Freddoso

I am starting to develop a bad habit of disagreeing with Mr. Freddoso.  I have read on several occasions the claims that the election will not be a mandate for liberalism or against conservatism, and I think these claims are right.  That it is a non-ideological election or an election in which there is not a repudiation of some kind of ideology is something I find harder to believe.  If the invasion of Iraq is the chief reason for the GOP’s woes today, and there is every reason to think so, repudiating the administration on Iraq has as much to do with repudiating the ideologues who sold the war as necessary and just and claimed that it was the beginning of the political transformation of the Near East for the better.  There was a deeply flawed, anti-conservative theory about the nature of man and society that informed much of the intellectual support for the war, and we know it by the name of neoconservatism. 

It may suit a lot of people to let the responsibility of these ideologues slip by amid the cacophony of recriminations against the criminally negligent administration, but they should not be allowed to escape accountability for what they urged the government to do and what they worked overtime to make happen.  If Iraq had been a glorious success, they would have reaped the glory, as I suppose would be fair, but since it has been the catastrophe that certain other people always said it would probably be that ought to bring shame upon them and disrepute upon their ideology.  So if the electorate repudiates the GOP this year, they will be in no small part repudiating the theory that led to such an abominably bungled war. 

As for the neocon exculpatory claims that they have been in favour of increasing troop levels in Iraq (this is the old, “blame the actors, not the writer” excuse), this is a very nice way for them to cover over the reality that they provided the preposterous assumptions about Iraqi civil society, the universality of freedom and the universal applicability of democracy that served as the working post-war plan: show up, hand over power to the free, flower-throwing Jeffersonian Shi’ites (Woolsey, from whom we do not hear much anymore, once wrote an op-ed in the WSJ in the months before the invasion making the astonishing argument that because of their religious narrative of persecution and marginalisation that the Shi’ites were naturally inclined to democratic ideas!) and be on our way.  A thousand little platoons would bloom in the desert, and they would not be hung up by loyalties to “tribe or religion or whatever.”  Only a condescending racist could think so “poorly” of Iraqis.  Yeah, well “tribe or religion or whatever” proved a little more resilient than their condescending attitudes allowed for, and now Iraq and our soldiers pay the price.  So if there is one ideology directly implicated in the failure of Iraq, and thus in GOP failure November 7, it must be neoconservatism.  They can try to shuffle out of view and blame the administration for failure to execute the brilliant idea correctly, but their failures as public intellectuals, so called, are a matter of record and are at least partly responsible for the travails of the GOP.

That brings me to the other problem about this claim on Iraq.  I don’t know what it can mean that “almost everyone voted for (from both parties)” the Iraq war or, more technically, the resolution giving the President authorisation to resolve the Iraq situation as he deemed appropriate.  Almost everyone in the GOP voted for it.  There was one antiwar GOP Senator, Lincoln Chafee, and six House members were also opposed (their names shall be remembered with honour: Paul, Leach, Hostettler, Duncan, Barrett, Houghton).  As a percentage of the entire GOP caucus in either chamber, their dissent was barely noticeable (though I applaud them for it).  On the Democratic side, far more than half of House Democrats (126) voted against the Iraq war resolution, and 21 Democratic Senators, just under half of their Senate membership, voted against it.  If a minority of Democrats in the House and a bare majority in the Senate counts as “almost everybody,” the phrase doesn’t really mean very much.  If 30% of the House and almost a quarter of the Senate voted nay, it is simply untrue that “almost everybody” supported the war.  This is a fairy tale that war supporters tell their children so that they can all take comfort in this nonexistent national consensus (just as people who bought into the WMD stories take comfort in the nonexistent universal consensus that Iraq possessed such weapons programs after 1998) and pretend that it was an “intelligence-gathering failure” rather than a failure of their own discernment. 

The bitter reality for war supporters on the right is that the Dennis Kuciniches, Sherrod Browns and, yes, even the Barack Obamas of the world were right on Iraq and almost every Republican on record was wrong.  That’s a sobering thought, isn’t it?  Even if these Democrats were just “lucky” and are actually reflexively opposed to the projection of U.S. power under any circumstances (thus invoking the “even a broken clock is right twice a day” riposte), their caution and reluctance to support the invasion have been vindicated.  The near-unanimity on the other side now appears deeply misguided.  We can all tell ourselves stories about what this election means, but one thing we cannot allow ourselves to believe is that “almost everybody” from both parties supported this war.  Say whatever else you like about them and their reasons for opposing it, some of which may not have been the right reasons or even good reasons, but if invading Iraq was a mistake–as a majority now (rightly) believes–the party that almost unanimously backed that war ends up looking a lot worse than the party that had a majority of its elected members in Congress oppose it. 

In the context of an election season, it is therefore not surprising that those who favour the former party whose members of Congress supported the war in overwhelming numbers would make claims that try to obscure the contrast between its national elected members when they got a fundamental question so profoundly wrong and the opposition that resisted the drive for war in significant numbers.  Among voters, there was even less agreement about the importance or necessity of the invasion across the spectrum.  Many conservative voters went along with it because their blood was still hot from 9/11, they believed Mr. Bush’s claims about a threat and they were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt in wartime, but they were never the ones pushing for it or demanding it.  A lot of the conservative apathy or defections you see this year are a product of the disquiet of a lot of people who never really wanted to invade Iraq turning into furious resentment as they come to find their trust in Mr. Bush was, shall we say, misplaced. 

If “almost everybody” from both parties had voted for the war, neither party would have much of a real advantage, even though the administration’s party would still probably bear the brunt of the voters’ outrage, but this is not the way things actually are.  I don’t say this out of any particular enthusiasm for the Democrats themselves, but out of a desire to hold accountable those actually responsible for this debacle and to keep their supporters from obscuring the predominantly Republican origins of this war.  When the war was still fairly popular and not going as terribly, the GOP benefited from this very characteristic of the war and they profited politically from the reality that it was their war.  They had shown the gumption and vision to take the fight to the enemy, and so on, and voters responded well to what they thought was a basically successful, albeit difficult, campaign.  They rolled to victory in their Khaki Elections as a result.  Now it’s come time to pay the piper, and all of a sudden Iraq is a war “almost everybody” from both sides supported.  Nope, sorry, not buying that one.  They do not get to rewrite the story and tell us how “almost everybody” from both sides of the aisle supported the project now that things are starting to go, as Sen. Warner put it, sideways.

Ross Douthat makes a lot of sense in his post where he argues that Santorum is first-rate on many important social policy questions but seems to be frustratingly stubborn in acknowledging foreign policy failure when he sees it.  In his own words:

Unlike David Brooks, I like Santorum for his willingness to make actual anti-poverty proposals and his culture-war positions; if we were starting our political parties from scratch, I’d want a lot of people with Santorum’s cluster of views on domestic policy in my camp. Yet he makes himself awfully hard to root for even so. Not only because his tendency toward slashing, tone-deaf rhetoric (that “man-on-dog” business being only the most obvious example) plays into every stereotype of social conservatives as sanctimonious prigs, but because he’s decided to make his re-election campaign be all about speeches like this one and this one, in which Hugo Chavez’s air force and Ahmadinejad’s new Caliphate and the Cuba-China axis of oil-drilling are all out “to conquer the world,” and the only solution is a Ledeenian-style campaign of “political and economic warfare” to take down Iran and Syria and Venezuela and Cuba from within. As Daniel Larison puts it, “Santorum has decided that he is going to pretend to be Churchill in his latter years, politically rejected but supposedly far-seeing and wise on matters of foreign policy.” I suppose it’s possible that he’ll be vindicated a decade or a century hence, when historians will look back and say, yes, “our survival as a free people” was indeed at stake in the Pennsylvania Senate campaign of 2006. But it seems more likely that his “gathering storm” speeches will ensure that he’s remembered not as a principled social conservative who lost his swing-state seat in a bad year for Republicans, but as exhibit A (well, okay, more like P or W) in the depressing tendency of conservatives, faced with the Bush Administration’s manifest failure in Iraq, to duck that issue by pretending that the way to solve it is to start some variant on World War III, or IV, or whatever numeral the “faster, please” folks think we’re on these days.

One of the commenters on Ross’ post made an interesting remark that caught my attention:

Maybe its because they agree with Santorum. The idea that only hacks or shills believe everything Santorum is saying is true is nonsense. We admire a man who will not trim his sails.

This makes a certain amount of sense.  Of course there are people who agree with Santorum’s wild-eyed predictions of Iranian world-mastery–the question for Santorum and these people always has to be: why would you, evidently smart and sophisticated people, fall for an idea so manifestly absurd?  It is perhaps for this reason that some people have a hard time maintaining respect for Santorum boosters as both intellectually savvy and intellectually honest–you can agree with Santorum’s diagnosis of Middle Eastern political problems, but you can hardly do so while retaining a reputation for a close acquaintance with reality.  Thus the (false) conclusion that Santorum boosters must be hacks of some sort.  No, not hacks, but just deeply and profoundly mistaken about foreign policy, as Santorum is, and as they have been for several years. 

But the commenter got me to thinking about the metaphor of the political trimmer who adjusts to favourable winds.  There is an obvious sense in which we do not want political trimmers who are absolutely unprincipled and who chart their political course according to the latest, trendy thing.  That way lies Blairism, triangulation and all of the absurdities and failures these bring with them.  But there is another sense, if we take the sailing metaphor seriously, in which someone who never trims his sails and who never strikes his sails (say, for example, in a violent, raging storm) is a very, very bad sailor.  He may be brave, clear-eyed and deeply convinced that maintaining full sails in a treacherous windstorm is the right thing to do, but he is an incompetent sailor on whose boat no sane person would want to be.  It is one thing to take matters of high principle very seriously and refuse to compromise on those.  There are some things connected to first principles that a man should be willing to sacrifice himself for, politically or even unto the point of giving his life, and then there is the option of grandstanding on a massively unpopular cause that it is unpopular because it is rather mad and declaring that you are being heroic for taking up such a cause.  It is one thing to want to go down with the ship of pro-life advocacy, but Santorum is not losing because of his virtues but clearly because of his flaws, starting with his combative and exaggerated style.  Going down with the ship if you must can be noble, but it is something else all together to lash yourself to the deck of the sinking ship of a bungled war (all the while talking belligerently about how subverting other governments is brilliant) and declare everyone who refuses to drown alongside you to be cowards and abettors of terrorism.  Don’t be surprised if the “crew” believes you to be as mad as Ahab and as undesirable a captain as Queeg.

Who are these Democrats who are insufficiently zealous in their religious outreach? Can anybody name even one? The plain fact is that every single Democrat in Congress claims to be religious, and none of them ever shows the slightest disrespect toward either Christianity or any other faith. ~Kevin Drum

Rasmussen reports precipitous weakening in Allen’s position over the past five days: he has supposedly lost seven points in the last week and now trails by five.  RealClearPolitics’ poll average now shows Webb with the tiniest of leads.  Here’s the RCP commentary:

Rasmussen has just released what is a little bit of a shocker poll showing George Allen dropping seven points in 5 days. If the direction of this poll, not necessarily the magnitude of the move, but the direction is confirmed by other major polling — George Allen is in big, big trouble. This race had already crept up to #7 on RCP’s most vulnerable Senate seats and Allen had real risks heading into election day just by his inability to shake off Webb when he was leading in the RCP Average. Now with Webb moving out to a lead in the latest RCP Average, the Allen campaign better hope this poll is a weekend produced outlier.

I guess the tawdry, pathetic “dirty books” attack didn’t work very well.

Grover Norquist, the conservative Washington operative, has a compelling theory about declining Republican prospects in the blowout belt. Those states have been dominated by “Lincoln Republicans,” he says. The party created in Northern states by Abraham Lincoln believed in fighting slavery and preserving the Union. Once those goals were achieved, it had no ideology, no set of firm beliefs. It became an establishment party, thriving on power and patronage. In a bad Republican year like 2006, such a party has little pull with average voters, Norquist says.

He contrasts Lincoln Republicans with Reagan Republicans in southern, prairie, and western states. The Republican party that grew up in those states in recent decades was based on conservative beliefs. And this ideology holds Reagan Republicans together in good years and bad, Norquist says. Indeed, Democrats have mounted few serious challenges this year in the South, where Reagan Republicans are strongest. ~Fred Barnes, The Weekly Standard

Chait at The Plank has fun with this one, and points out the oddity of modern Republicans–Barnes and Norquist, not exactly neo-Confederates themselves–using Lincoln’s name in a disparaging way.  Serious conservatives of old (and some still around today) frequently disparaged Father Abraham and rejected the politics that he represented; to the extent that the GOP really was always the Party of Lincoln, conservatives are hard-pressed to ever find a real place in it, since our tradition via the Agrarians and Bradford ties us to the Antifederalists, Jeffersonian Republicans, Southern Democrats and Populists.  At each stage of our history, the revolutionary forces of consolidation wanted to transform and do violence to the settled order of American life and sought to damage the constitutional order as well.  At each stage serious conservatives opposed them and their works, whether it was the Bank, the American System, internal improvements, Yankee imperialism or post-War overseas empire and the corrupt rule of the moneyed interest. 

There were, of course, decent Federalists who took their commitments to the Constitution seriously when Democratic-Republicans began abusing their power (John Adams was generally a model of restraint and good government; my distant cousin William Plumer stood up to Jefferson’s illegal land grab of 1803 and tried to get New England to secede, unfortunately to no avail for all concerned), and some decent Whigs were unwilling to pursue the politics of consolidation as far as others, but if “Lincoln Republican” means anything it refers to the post-1865 Republican stranglehold imposed on the country by the post-War arrangements of power, Radical Republicanism and a century of relative dominance in places like Ohio, the land of Garfield, Harding and the ultimately ill-fated Taft dynasty.  The Red Republicans of today could only dream of the sort of dominance the real ”Lincoln Republicans” had after the War of Secession.  To say that those people had no “ideology” or ideas is untrue–their idea was an energetic central government working in tandem with corporations towards a nationalist goal of consolidated, quasi-democratic, quasi-oligarchic government in a united, integrated nation-state.  Which is, more or less, what modern Republicans seem to want even to this day (the main change being that corporations now embrace “free trade” rather than the tariff and so the corporate party has likewise embraced it).  In the 19th century, corruption was the inevitable product of massive centralisation of power, military occupation of an entire section of the country and the influence of the moneyed interest on the ruling party (the concentration of power and wealth always breeds corruption of both a generic and a Walpolean kind), but it flowed from the ruling party’s ideas of how to govern–it did not just accidentally happen because the party suffered from ideological drift.  Bob Ney’s corruption was not just some isolated accident–it was part and parcel of the means by which the GOP sought to consolidate their hold on power.         

It was only ten years ago that Bob Dole lectured us about how the GOP was the Party of Lincoln and anybody who didn’t like it could get out right now.  I got the hint when I was still just 17 and never joined the Party of Corporations, Corruption and Consolidation.  Weaver’s argument from definition notwithstanding, Lincoln was certainly no conservative or, if he was a conservative, I would not want to have anything to do with such a conservatism. 

But now Norquist would have us believe that the name Lincoln in connection with the GOP summons up the image of bloated corruption and lack of vision–who knew?  (Surely the trouble with the real “Lincoln Republicans” was that they always had a little too much vision!)  But it is a little weird to find leading GOP types blame failure across the Midwest on the “Lincoln Republicans” who allegedly have no conservative beliefs.  Tell it to John Hostettler and Ken Blackwell, among others, who are probably more conservative on a bad day than Grover Norquist will ever be, but who face electoral doom in some part because the modern-day Lincoln in the White House has stirred up a lot of resentment against the party through his failed and reckless policies.  Compare the two for a moment and see why quite a lot of folks across the Midwest are disillusioned with the ruling party.  War of aggression?  Check.  Violations of the Constitution?  Check.  Sending Americans to die in an unjust war?  Check and check. 

The problem the GOP is having in the Midwest is not that its members there lack conservative convictions (which could be a liability in some parts of the Midwest, depending on where we’re talking about) or at least some guiding philosophy, but that it is the GOP.  Those areas in the South and West dominated by more conservative, “Reagan Republicans” are more likely to remain loyal to the GOP because these people remain convinced that there is some basic harmony between the party and conservatism, when the party’s history and its interests tell a very different story.  Regardless, many people in the Midwest are becoming reacquainted with the opposition between Republican rule and good government.  It is that, and not any lack of strong conviction or ideas, that has badly injured the GOP in the Midwest and the North generally.

As the Byzantine Studies Conference at the University of Missouri-St. Louis approaches in a couple weeks, I am encouraged to know that those of us attending from here will be leaving South Side Chicago for a city that is even more dangerous and one that is, as Dan McCarthy relates, now the #1 most dangerous in the nation.  It should be fun.

Bob Casey has invested Pennsylvania pension funds in companies with ties to terrorist-sponsoring states and states that engage in genocide,” Santorum said. “Bob Casey is aiding and abetting terrorism and genocide.”

Casey has called on investment managers to assess whether any companies in their holdings have business in terrorist-sponsoring countries, Smar said. The issue is one facing treasurers across the country. ~The York Dispatch

Via Andrew Sullivan (who somehow manages to make this the result of “Christianism”)

This is a move that even George Allen, in all his pathetic desperation, would not make.  Remember that Santorum is supposed to be the serious and intelligent candidate in Pennsylvania.  May God help Pennsylvania!