The American Conservative

Iraq, Katrina, and the economic crisis have cost Republicans far more seats than the Club. ~Jim Antle

Having made a similar observation in the past on another question, I take Jim’s point, and I will grant that the Club for Growth is something of an easy target and it and the politicians associated with it may receive more abuse than it deserves. It is an easy target because it comes across as an unusually unsympathetic organization, which insists on an exacting standard of purity on fiscal and economic matters. With its war on Huckabee, it seemed to fit the stereotype of the fiscal conservatives who couldn’t care less that the bulk of the Republican electorate is motivated by social issues and is not nearly so concerned about the capital gains tax. To the extent that their objections about Huckabee focused on his pseudo-populist appeals to working-class voters, they gave the impression that they were more interested in the corporate bottom line than the interests of core Republican constituencies.

One of the reasons I cut the Club so little slack is that they, like so many others on the right, want to insist that spending was the GOP’s bane, and therefore that adopting their recommendations will be the cure. Jim knows better, and he reminds us of the real causes of Republican collapse in order to defend the Club and Toomey against their detractors, but it doesn’t change the reality that the Club has promoted several primary challenges againt incumbents in purple states because of the incumbents’ lack of fiscal and economic purity and that this has worked to the detriment of Republican numbers in Congress. If Iraq, Katrina and the economic crisis were the things that destroyed the GOP nationally, and I would agree that they were the major factors, I have to question the narrative, which the Club must and does embrace, that claims that fiscal discipline and tax cutting will save the day as a matter of politics and policy. If Iraq, Katrina and the economic crisis were the ruin of the GOP, what does Pat Toomey or the Club for Growth offer that would remedy past failures?

More to the point, it seems to me that politicians and activists are accountable for what they decide to do. It is perfectly fair to damn Specter as opportunistic, unprincipled and untrustworthy after he has flipped to the other side, and he is getting plenty of that abuse (and not just from the right), but isn’t his primary challenger somewhat responsible when his challenge forces the hand of the incumbent and convinces him that the only way to remain in office is to jump ship? It’s not as if the GOP’s repeated routs were unknown to him at the time that he declared for the primary. The Club for Growth didn’t drive all those voters out of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, but likewise no one put a gun to Toomey’s head and demanded that he run against Specter again. Whatever other medium and long-term causes of Republican weakness, the proximate cause of Specter’s decision was Toomey’s challenge and his popularity with the shrunken GOP primary electorate. Barring some miraculous Toomey win next year, he really does have to answer for turning a likely Republican hold in the Senate into a safe Democratic seat one way or the other.

For that matter, shouldn’t Toomey’s fans be crediting him with forcing Specter out instead of coming up with ways to guard Toomey and the Club against criticism? One assumes that Toomey is contesting this race not just to make a point about discontent with Specter, but because he thinks he would be a better candidate in the fall of 2010. Isn’t any pre-emptive move to defend Toomey against charges of costing the GOP a likely hold in 2010 proof that what Toomey’s critics have been right that he cannot be competitive next year? After all, the criticism of the Club, as overwrought as it can sometimes become, comes from the conviction that they are simply terrible when it comes to electoral strategy. The states where their candidates prevail are reliably Republican ones in any case. It is in the purple states where their judgment is most on the line, and it is where they have been found wanting on many occasions in recent years.

All of this reminds me of something from last fall. At the time of the vote on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, the bill that created the TARP, I halfway defended the House GOP against the “charge” that they were responsible for voting down the bill, because it seemed obvious that Pelosi had the votes if she had wanted to force people to vote yea. Someone in the comments reasonably pointed out that they were instrumental in defeating the bill and should be praised for this, assuming that the bill was a bad one. On reflection, the commenter was right and I was mistaken. I think it follows, then, that if you are a Pat Toomey backer and a fan of the Club for Growth’s agenda, you shouldn’t be coming up with excuses for what has happened and what is likely to happen in this Senate race, but should be celebrating Specter’s flight from the GOP and bear the consequences of what that means in the real world. If you choose to do that, though, you have to explain why punishing Specter was worth the risk of significantly increasing the chances of passage of a health care entitlement.

As many of you know already, Specter is switching parties. The Democrats will have their filibuster-proof majority. Cunning Club for Growth tactics and the urge to purge have won another famous victory. The upshot is that the now-Democratic incumbent will sail to re-election (Democrats and independents in Pennsylvania actually like Arlen Specter), Republican prospects of shrinking the Democratic majority in the Senate have grown dimmer and Obama’s domestic agenda is that much more likely to pass without effective opposition. It is significant that Specter explained his decision by referring to the backlash against his vote for the stimulus bill:

He said he has experienced a change of heart since the response to his vote for the stimulus legislation.

“Since then, I have traveled the State, talked to Republican leaders and office-holders and my supporters and I have carefully examined public opinion,” his statement said. “It has become clear to me that the stimulus vote caused a schism which makes our differences irreconcilable. On this state of the record, I am unwilling to have my twenty-nine year Senate record judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate.”

No doubt, the early polling showing him twenty-odd points behind Toomey in the Republican primary prompted him to make the decision now. However, it does seem worth noting that this is the second major political event since the passage of the stimulus bill over unanimous House Republican opposition and near-unanimous Senate Republican opposition, and it marks the second setback for the GOP (the other being the blown race in NY-20). Of course, this exact turn of events was not foreseen by anyone and has taken everyone by surprise, but if you consider the changes in Pennsylvania’s electorate and the pattern that has developed in statewide races in the last few years Specter’s party switch is not so surprising. In the end, as in NY-20, the candidate who embraced Obama’s legislation will be going to Washington, and the unfounded claim that the GOP was repudiated because of its spending excesses becomes even less credible (if that is possible). The strategy of focusing opposition on that bill now appears to have been more misguided than I ever imagined, as it has now indirectly and unexpectedly added the final piece to a Democratic juggernaut in Congress that will push through legislation far worse and more permanent than anything contained in the stimulus bill. The GOP made their stand at the wrong time on the wrong legislation based on faulty assumptions about the electorate and their own electoral defeats, and they are already paying for it.

Specter’s switch pretty well clears the way for Toomey to win the GOP nomination without much difficulty, so Toomey will have the chance to test his proposition that Pennsylvanians don’t want Arlen Specter’s brand of politics on a grand scale in the general election. The result of that contest will confirm what some of us have been saying for a while: of all the places to try to vindicate support for Club for Growth economic policy and the Iraq war, Pennsylvania is one of the worst places imaginable. If one had wanted to hasten the day when Club for Growth-style economic conservatism appeared to be nothing but a liability for the GOP, one could not have put together a better scenario than this one.

Ross’ first New York Times column has appeared, and there are several interesting observations in it that I want to discuss over the course of the next day or two, but I thought I would start with this statement:

In the wake of two straight drubbings at the polls, much of the American right has comforted itself with the idea that conservatives lost the country primarily because the Bush-era Republican Party spent too much money on social programs. And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise.

As a description of the post-election rationalizations of “much of the American right,” I think this is exactly right, and this succinctly explains why “much of the American right” is utterly, hopelessly confused about how they came to be in their current political predicament. Think about this for a moment. It is undeniably true that most conservatives have blamed the political defeats of Republican candidates in ’06 and ’08 on excessive and “wasteful” spending, and they have obsessed over earmarks, and yet McCain, arch-enemy of earmarks and a Republican Senator who voted against the Medicare prescription drug program, was made part of the official pantheon of moderate squishes and someone whose nomination was regarded as a disaster and his defeat was taken as proof that fiscal austerity is a winning message. Clearly, this is incoherent on its own terms, to say nothing of the unfounded assumption that the elections in ’06 and ’08 turned on questions of spending.

There were issues on which McCain genuinely was a squish, so to speak, and chief among these were immigration and, to the extent that it alienated him from the bulk of rank-and-file Republicans, the torture regime. There is something quite bizarre about a party and movement that have crafted a self-serving narrative about their downfall because of spending that nonetheless try to use McCain’s alleged moderation as a scapegoat, when it was McCain, more than most of his major rivals, who was the most vehement, if not necessarily intelligent, critic and opponent of spending increases. Comparing McCain and Cheney and noting the very different responses to them from movement activists and rank-and-file partisans are useful for understanding the state of the mainstream right today, and this is one of the valuable things about Ross’ column.

In what way would Cheney, who necessarily backed (or at least did not publicly oppose) Medicare Part D, have been seen as substantively more “really conservative”? Indeed, according to the post-election rationalizations, Cheney would have to be regarded by default, because of his identification with the administration, as being to the “left” of McCain on spending and identical to McCain on immigration.

In other words, on the issue that most conservatives now use as their explanation for both election defeats, Cheney was worse on account of his identification with Bush, but it also seems hard to contest that most conservatives would have been happier with Cheney as the nominee than they were with McCain. Part of this would have been because they could concoct stories about what Cheney “really” believed but had not been allowed to say publicly (we saw this time and again with all those Palin defenders who hated McCain), which is the sort of storytelling that people often engage in about the would-be political heir apparent, who naturally agrees with them but must keep the “real” views under wraps. Had Cheney been the nominee and then lost by an even larger margin, we can also reasonably assume that the official explanation on the right would have remained the same as it had been in ’06 (too much spending!), and torture and war would not be blamed for the GOP’s political woes, even though the contrast on both issues would have been even more stark in a Cheney vs. Obama race.

On immigration, Cheney would have been identified with Bush’s “comprehensive” reform, and he obviously made no public statements that would have created a different impression about his views on this subject. Somehow I feel confident in saying that had Cheney run his connections to Bush’s immigration policy would not have been made into much of an issue. Unlike McCain, who was the media darling, Cheney was almost universally despised by the media, which would have instantly made Cheney the much-preferred candidate according to the tribal rules that govern who counts as a “real conservative” in practice. Cheney also quite actively backed the bailouts and berated the House Republicans who resisted the creation of the TARP, which the tea party activists have denounced so vociferously. We can also be fairly sure that many of the same people who rallied around Palin’s pseudo-populist rhetoric while backing a candidate who embraced establishment policies, including all the bailouts, would have rallied to Cheney’s large doses of red-meat rhetoric and ignored the substance of the policies that he had endorsed. A Cheney nomination would have driven home how much of the “real conservatism” to which Ross refers is not anything substantive, but is instead a series of poses and gestures that validate the audience’s preferences and way of life.

The only issue on which Cheney was conceivably to McCain’s “right” was torture*. This is an important part of Ross’ argument, which I think Ross was not able to flesh out as much as he could have done if he had more space:

“Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation.

As I was suggesting yesterday, torture and war seem to be the non-negotiable policies for the mainstream right, and Cheney serves as the symbol and champion of this position.

* Of course, I don’t think one becomes more pro-torture the more one goes to “the right,” but as a shorthand this will have to do for now.

Naturally, Jamie Kirchick offers us an example of just how to do this. The most important thing in writing horrible op-eds on Obama’s foreign policy is to misrepresent absolutely everything that he has said and done over the last three months, deliberately ignore any information that would allow a fair and intelligent assessment of his statements (e.g., when Obama referred to European anti-Americanism as “insidious”), and then to use a series of words–feckless, embolden, decline–in almost any way you like to show that you have no understanding of diplomacy or international affairs. If at all possible, in order to write one of the worst pieces one can, one should frequently complain about criticisms of the previous administration’s foreign policy that Obama has never made while in office. It is also useful to take every acknowledgment of the concerns and perceptions of Obama’s audience (e.g., the fear that America is at war with Islam) as character assassination directed against Bush, as if Bush’s own statements to this effect were some sort of coy attack on his predecessor. Above all, it helps to be extremely dense and ideologically-motivated.

Or more precisely, why is the belief that the torture of captured combatants is wrong compatible with anything other than some form of pacifism? I mean this an actual question, not as a passive-aggressive assertion. ~Jim Manzi

One of the things that has kept me from saying much over the last week or so is my sheer amazement that there are people who seriously pose such questions and expect to be answered with something other than expressions of bafflement and moral horror. Something else that has kept me from writing much on this recently is the profoundly dispiriting realization (really, it is just a reminder) that it is torture and aggressive war that today’s mainstream right will go to the wall to defend, while any and every other view can be negotiated, debated, compromised or abandoned. I have started doubting whether people who are openly pro-torture or engaged in the sophistry of Manzi’s post are part of the same moral universe as I am, and I have wondered whether there is even a point in contesting such torture apologia as if they were reasonable arguments deserving of real consideration. Such fundamental assumptions at the core of our civilization should not have to be re-stated or justified anew, and the fact that they have to be is evidence of how deeply corrupted our political life has become, but if such basic norms are not reinforced it seems clear that they will be leeched away over time.

Manzi’s mention of pacifism is instructive insofar as it suggests that he cannot imagine a rationale for limited, just or defensive wars compatible with protections for captured combatants. It’s all or nothing, total war or pacifism. Once captured, combatants at that point become non-combatants, and one has to assume that Manzi can see why non-combatants are to be treated differently and are to be protected against reprisals, beatings, torture and execution. One certainly hopes that he would defend such protections for American non-combatants, which, incidentally, every apologist for the torture regime is daily undermining with their consistent, public defense of illegal and immoral treatment of detainees.

Implicit in Manzi’s entire post is the rejection of any distinction between combatant and non-combatant, which tells me that he either doesn’t understand or doesn’t accept the concept of limited war. For him, unless one is a pacifist, one must endorse total war. In such a view, there would be nothing immoral about the summary execution or cruel and inhumane treatment of POWs, since the latter would have been targeted for death while they were still combatants. After all, if torturing such prisoners is not immoral, as Manzi seems to say it is not, what could possibly be wrong with killing them? That is where one must ultimately end up once the distinctions between combatant and non-combatant are erased or blurred, and it is the barbaric conclusion one will eventually reach if one does not start from the assumption that war itself is a sometimes-necessary evil and that it is morally justifiable only under specific circumstances and within certain limits. One of those limits is that captured combatants are to be treated humanely, and when we go down the road towards easing those restrictions we taint not only the institutions responsible for national security with crimes but we also abandon any real claim to moral integrity.

Alex Massie and Michael Crowley are less impressed with Obama’s statement on the Armenian genocide than I was. Ben Smith records the official lobby reactions, which I think are mistaken on both sides. Contrary to the Turkish Coalition’s awful statement, Obama did not “defer” to historians (by which they mean embrace whitewashing of the record), but he made quite clear that he regarded it as one of the great atrocities of the last century and used an Armenian phrase, Meds Yeghern, to describe it that conveys the message that these were criminal acts. Not unfortunate incidents or unavoidable wartime excesses, as the hacks and paid-off spokesmen would have it, but crimes and atrocities. That implies willful mass murder directed against an entire people, which in the end is quite close to what people understand when someone refers to genocide. In my modern Eastern Armenian dictionary, yeghern means “slaughter, carnage, genocide” or a “crime” or “evil deed,” and the word yeghern has been and can be used in the context of referring to the genocide.

The one thing lacking from the statement, which we know is lacking not for any good historical reason but obviously because of sheer politicking and interest group lobbying, is the word itself and the attribution of responsibility to the elements of the Ottoman government that organized and carried out the genocide. The statement is therefore incomplete, and it does fall short of what Obama promised he would do, but there is little cause for the pro-Turkish side to be particularly pleased about the result. It is understandable that advocates of recognition are disappointed, but one need only compare statements of the last two Presidents to appreciate how much of an improvement this statement is over what we have been offered before. In his last statement in 2000, the same year he scuppered a House resolution acknowledging the genocide, Clinton referred to the genocide as a “great tragedy,” which is rather less strong than referring to it as a great atrocity. Bush’s 2001 statement was relatively stronger, inasmuch as he described it as “forced exile and annihilation,” but did not go so far as to call it an atrocity, and by 2008 the word annihilation had dropped out all together to be replaced by “mass killings.” By comparison, Obama’s statement is a significant improvement, especially when he says:

I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view of that history has not changed. My interest remains the achievement of a full, frank and just acknowledgment of the facts.

In every way short of using the word, he is saying that it was a genocide, and I think he reasonably refrains from using the word, which might badly damaged U.S.-Turkish and Turkish-Armenian relations*, while all but conveying the same meaning.

* It is worth noting that Reagan publicly referred to “the genocide of the Armenians” almost thirty years ago, and somehow our alliance with Turkey endured. I am still inclined to think that waiting until relations are somewhat better is the wiser thing to do, but a President has already acknowledged the truth and our relationship with Turkey survived intact because of shared interests. My guess is that the Turkish Coalition’s boast that “his administration will not sacrifice long-term strategic allies for short-term political gains” will be thrown back in their faces in the event it becomes clear that neither Washington nor Ankara is willing to end our long-term strategic alliance over this question. Indeed, my guess is that over the next few years we will find out that Ankara has been engaged in an extraordinary bluff that multiple administrations have never had the courage to call.

Andrew Bacevich reminds us that Obama has not made any moves to change or challenge the consensus on national security:

What the president is doing and saying matters less than what he has not done. The sins of omission are telling: There is no indication that Obama will pose basic questions about the purpose of the US military; on the contrary, he has implicitly endorsed the proposition that keeping America safe is best accomplished by maintaining in instant readiness forces geared up to punish distant adversaries or invade distant countries. Nor is there any indication that Obama intends to shrink the military’s global footprint or curb the appetite for intervention that has become a signature of US policy. Despite lip service to the wonders of soft power, Pentagon spending, which exploded during the Bush era, continues to increase.

The recent back-and-forth over Obama’s actions in Trinidad has caused many observers to mistake the shift in tone, important as that can be, for something more significant. Prof. Bacevich reminds us that on many of the most important questions Obama is largely indistinguishable from many of his current critics. I might go so far as to say that the summit in Trinidad, like many of the earlier summit meetings this year, was almost entirely unremarkable, except that Obama’s opponents on the mainstream right showed how ready they are to lash out at any gesture or move, however meaningless and harmless in itself, and declare it proof of Obama’s naivete, weakness, folly, etc.

Even though Obama does not question “global power projection, global military presence, and global activism,” and probably could never have won election had he done so, it is imperative for these critics to use any perceived blunder to claim that America is somehow “losing ground.” It doesn’t matter whether these criticisms make sense (for the most part, they don’t), and it doesn’t matter that no one can actually point to any “ground” being lost. What does matter is that Obama’s shift in tone be made far more important in the public’s mind than his support for continuity in overall U.S. foreign policy. This way, should anything go awry during Obama’s tenure, any failures will be pinned on the relatively trivial stylistic changes rather than on the misguided hegemonism that Obama’s critics champion even more than he does.

It is interesting that the mainstream right has “rediscovered” their opposition to excessive spending and exploding deficits, and quite a few have once again learned to fear and loathe expansive executive power, at least when it comes to economic policy, and suddenly talking about the inviolability of the Constitution is very much in vogue again, but on national security matters the script remains the same and there is no hint of any opportunistic “rediscoveries” of principle. One might have thought that the brief blip of realism and skepticism of U.S. hegemony that appeared on much of the right in the ’90s would reappear now, if only for partisan purposes, but what we have been seeing instead is something like the Republican shift in foreign policy from a mostly neutralist stance in the ’30s to the predominantly global anticommunist “rollback” position of the ’50s and ’60s.

Of course, if we took this comparison too seriously, it would greatly exaggerate how non-interventionist the right was in the ’90s, but the movement is in the same direction towards support of “global power projection, global military presence, and global activism” since the end of the Cold War and obviously this accelerated in the last eight or ten years. For some reason, most of the mainstream right keeps falling into the habit of embracing “global power projection, global military presence, and global activism” and movement conservatives have been, for the most part, among the most zealous advocates of all three. This has been the pattern for so long that it is almost as if they no longer know how to respond to the heirs of the Old Right, much less would they know how to adopt their arguments to criticize an activist foreign policy directed by left-liberals. This helps to make clear that post-Cold War administrations may come and go, other economic and political principles may be compromised as needed, but misguided, excessive hawkishness and nationalistic bluster are constants on the mainstream right through the decades.

I failed to mention the commemoration of the Armenian genocide yesterday. After seeing Obama’s remarks, I thought I would make a couple of observations. Obviously, Obama refrained from referring to it directly as genocide in English, and the Armenian phrase he used to describe it, Mets Yeghern (or, in the Western dialect transliteration being used in the official remarks, Meds Yeghern), primarily means slaughter or crime, but it can be and has been used to refer to genocide. The official name for the genocide in Armenian is a calque, tseghaspanut’yun, which refers specifically to the killing of a race or people, so it is not quite full recognition, but it is also as close to full recognition as possible under present circumstances. This provides a face-saving way to acknowledge the reality of what happened without unduly irritating Turkey, and I think it shows enough respect to Armenian history without jeopardizing the improving relations between Turkey and Armenia.

On the main blog, some commenters have pointed out the disagreement between my column for The Week and Mr. Buchanan’s recent columns concerning Obama’s latest trip overseas. Because we are coming at this from more or less the same perspective as far as political and policy views are concerned, I think it is worthwhile to explain why I have responded to Obama’s appearance at the Summit of the Americas as I have. Long-time readers will know that it is not because of any particular fondness for Obama on my part. Neither is it because I have any great confidence that Obama is likely to change U.S. foreign policy in significant, fundamental ways that I think are needed. Indeed, I find that I am often compelled to defend Obama in spite of his own policy views because of the errors of his critics and the awful nature of the alternatives they propose.

One reason I take a different view is that I have found myself drawn to Kennan’s view of how foreign policy should be conducted, which included his wariness of the influence popular passions and domestic politics can have on foreign policy, and I am also increasingly sympathetic with the estrangement from his own contemporary America that he felt. After reviewing John Lukacs’ biography of Kennan, I obtained a clear picture of a man who was perhaps as viscerally patriotic as any and thoroughly Midwestern in his attachments, but who also felt estranged from his country and what it was becoming. As Lukacs put it:

He would, because he must, remain loyal to his country. “But it would be a loyalty despite, not a loyalty because, a loyalty of principle, not of identification.”

As a Foreign Service officer and diplomat who lived abroad or served in Washington for many years, Kennan might be superficially grouped with “rootless” people, but I rather tend to think of Kennan’s experience as one of an exile in his own country–an unchosen dislocation that resembles unchosen obligations in its effects. This was because the country was transformed around him, which did not lessen his attachment to it, but it also made him more aware of the dangers of American self-congratulation because he did not share in any of its triumphalist moods.

Lukacs writes elsewhere in the biography:

Early in his life he found that he agreed with the admonition of another former midwesterner, Reinhold Niebhur: “The Gospel cannot be preached with truth and power if it does not challenge the pretensions and pride, not only of intellectuals, but of nations, cultures, civilizations, economic and political systems. The good fortune of America and its power place it under the most grievous temptations to self-adulation.”

It may simply be coincidence that one of the wisest foreign policy thinkers of the last half century and one of the best today, Andrew Bacevich, are influenced by Niebuhr, particularly as his work relates to restraining power and pride. I would not try to make any far-reaching claims that Obama’s own reported interests in Niebhur necessarily have anything to do with how he has conducted himself in office, but to the extent that he has learned to be wary of too much American self-congratulation (in which he still indulges on occasion) it may be reasonable to assume that he picked up some of this caution from Niebuhr.

What I have noticed about most of the statements Obama made that have come in for criticism is that they are acknowledgments of things that pretty much everyone accepts as fact. For example, whether or not one thinks that Obama’s call for nuclear disarmament is serious or feasible, his remark that the U.S. has been the only state to use nuclear weapons in war is obviously true. It does not necessarily follow from his statement that he thinks the nuclear strikes on Japan were unjustified, but that he apparently thinks America has an exceptional responsibility to lead in nonproliferation and disarmament because of this reality, which is actually an expression of a sort of American exceptionalism. However, it is an exceptionalism that seems to be tempered by some aversion to self-congratulation or self-adulation, which I have come to regard as something very different from, if not actually diametrically opposed to, patriotism.

As I have quoted or paraphrased so many times from Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill, “Above all, he knew the supreme psychological fact about patriotism, as certain in connection with it as that a fine shame comes to all lovers, the fact that the patriot never under any circumstances boasts of the largeness of his country, but always, and of necessity, boasts of the smallness of it.” If one’s patriotism is instinctive and visceral, I think this is the patriotism one feels and practices. As Chesterton went on to say, “All this he knew, not because he was a philosopher or a genius, but because he was a child.”

Returning to the specific point, to the extent that foreign leaders attack past or present U.S. policies, they are not necessarily directing their attacks against the country. They are attacking specific acts of the government, some of which may be deserving of criticism and some of which many Americans likely also opposed or oppose now. One of the crucial distinctions that patriots need to make is between country and government. Even if it were advisable as a matter of policy to push back against Ortega’s tirade, doing this would not be a testament to anyone’s patriotism but to his willingness to serve as a defender of any and all past government actions. I submit that not rebutting charges against past administrations is not necessarily a sign of detachment from Middle America, whether or not Obama is otherwise estranged from Middle Americans, but instead might be proof of an unusual unwillingness to show solidarity with Washington.

My new column for The Week on Obama’s appearance at the Summit of the Americas is now available online.