The American Conservative

Erica Grieder objects to Bob Vander Plaats’ reported request that Bachmann drop out and throw her support behind Santorum:

Ms Bachmann and Mr Santorum have worked doggedly during this year, and their supporters have put millions of dollars and thousands of hours into their campaigns. Regardless of whether you like their candidacies, they both have the right to be there, and as undemocratic as the Iowa caucus may be, it’s the voters who have the right to decide the winner, not the pastors.

It doesn’t matter to me whether Bachmann stays in or not, but Grieder seems to have misunderstood who Vander Plaats is. So far as I know, Vander Plaats is not a pastor of any kind. He is an unsuccessful Iowa Republican gubernatorial candidate, and since his last unsuccessful campaign he has become a social conservative activist. More recently, he has been a public supporter of Santorum, and his appeal to Bachmann to drop out fits his role as an activist and Santorum booster. Presumably, Vander Plaats has observed that Bachmann’s campaign is in full meltdown in the final days before the caucuses. Since he wants to promote a social conservative agenda through a strong showing from his preferred candidate, he doesn’t want Bachmann and Santorum to split the vote, and he probably wanted Bachmann to believe that it would be better for the issues she cares about if Santorum wins more social conservatives with her endorsement. As a would-be politician and political activist, Vander Plaats wanted to make a political deal between two politicians. That may not be fair to Bachmann’s supporters, but it has nothing to do with interference from religious leaders.

It’s easy to understand Vander Plaats’ predicament. The 2012 field is underwhelming for social conservatives. The candidates that social conservatives find appealing have no broader appeal or ability to compete with the others, and the candidate they would have naturally rallied around in Mike Huckabee is unavailable. Santorum is benefiting at the last minute because he is the last candidate not already tried and found wanting this year, but he appears to be in no position to repeat Huckabee’s surprise win. The activist wants to be able to claim that he was the kingmaker responsible for propelling Santorum to victory, but it isn’t happening. Vander Plaats’ attempt to strike a deal with Bachmann to drop out is a sign of how desperate some social conservatives in Iowa have become. Iowa is likely to produce a victory for either Ron Paul or Mitt Romney, and neither of these is satisfactory to Vander Plaats and his activists. More to the point, if a candidate pushing his agenda cannot win in the Iowa caucuses, which tend to over-represent social conservatives, that doesn’t help advance the agenda or build up his organization.

Mark Lilla reviews Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. He objects as I did to Corey’s lumping together of many diverse political strains, but when he turns to discussion of reactionaries Lilla gets a couple things wrong:

There have always been two kinds of reactionaries, though, with different attitudes toward historical change. One type dreams of a return to some real or imaginary state of perfection that existed before a revolution. This can be any sort of revolution—political, religious, economic, or even aesthetic. French aristocrats who hoped to restore the Bourbon dynasty, Russian Old Believers who wanted to recover early Orthodox Christian rites [bold mine-DL], Pre-Raphaelite painters who rejected the conventions of Mannerism, Morrisites and Ruskinites who raged against the machine, all these were what you might call restorative reactionaries.

A second type—call them redemptive reactionaries—take for granted that the revolution is a fait accompli and that there is no going back. But they are not historical pessimists, or not entirely. They believe that the only sane response to an apocalypse is to provoke another, in hopes of starting over. Ever since the French Revolution reactionaries have seen themselves working toward counterrevolutions that would destroy the present state of affairs and transport the nation, or the faith, or the entire human race to some new Golden Age that would redeem aspects of the past without returning there.

If there is one thing that unites “restorative reactionaries” and “redemptive reactionaries,” it is their refusal to believe that it is possible to create a Golden Age. There is much less difference between the two types than Lilla suggests. All counter-revolutionaries desire restoration, and all reactionaries perceive usurpation as a perversion of the right order of things that requires redeeming what was lost.

The example of the Old Believers is a questionable one. They didn’t believe in provoking an apocalypse, but they did share a belief that they were living through apocalyptic tribulations. For the most part, their response was quietism and tending their own gardens. The Nikonian reforms weren’t really a “revolution.” In fact, the liturgical changes were relatively modest in comparison with the changes in religious practice in western Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. In most respects, the early Old Believers were very much customary religious conservatives objecting to alterations in their liturgical practices for fear that they were repudiating Orthodox tradition and the practices of their ancestors. They weren’t trying to recover “early” rites that they had never known, but were simply interested in preserving the rites that they and centuries of Russian Orthodox before them had practiced.

As for supposed contemporary Republican apocalypticism, Lilla needs to do better than to dust off the controversy over that First Things symposium. What Lilla fails to mention is that the editorial’s suggestion that it might be time stop giving “moral assent to the existing regime” resulted in a horrified backlash from many of the journal’s neoconservative friends, including Gertrude Himmelfarb, at which point First Things immediately abandoned this line of argument. As usual, the radicalism of so-called theoconservatives has been grossly exaggerated.

Andrew notices a new Gallup survey of public perceptions of presidential candidates’ ideology:

So most Americans seem to disagree with the Beltway that Ron Paul is somehow an impermissible candidate for president.

According to the survey, many respondents view Paul as either “very liberal/liberal” (15%) or “moderate” (20%), which ends up giving him an average score that is very close to the overall mean. Only 41% correctly perceive him as very conservative or conservative, and another 25% have no opinion. What is odd about this is that Paul’s score on Gallup’s 1-5 scale (1 being very liberal, 5 being very conservative) is the same regardless of party affiliation: his score is always 3.5, which should put him slightly to the right of center. As almost everyone with even passing familiarity with Paul’s views understands, this perception is wildly wrong. The funny thing is that this wrong perception is partly the product of the constant drumbeat from Republican pundits that Paul is some sort of crazed left-winger. It is also partly because most of Paul’s dissents from the official GOP line are anti-statist when it comes to national security, foreign policy, and drug prohibition, and movement conservatives have used these dissents to prove that Paul is not “one of them,” which is true enough. Because many ostensibly “conservative” people loathe him, he acquires a reputation as a moderate or liberal, and because he breaks with his party on matters of war and civil liberties the “conservatism” of his critics becomes even more closely identified with militarism and the security/surveillance state.

Here is Jennifer Rubin today listing errors in primary coverage by “the media”:

Romneycare fixation. The media, especially in the conservative blogosphere where Romneycare is seen as a nearly unforgivable transgression, didn’t listen to what voters (oh, them) were saying matters most: the economy and beating President Obama. It led the media to understate Mitt Romney’s advantages, thereby lowering expectations and in an odd way helping him weather the rise and fall of not-Romney candidates.

It seems that Rubin is not including herself in this indictment of “the media” and “conservative media outlets,” but she should. Here is Rubin on February 14, 2011 in the wake of CPAC (via William Jacobson):

However, if there is one point of consensus among plugged-in Republicans on the 2012 field, it is that Romney can’t win unless he does a mea culpa on RomneyCare. Since he didn’t and he won’t do that, he’s not going to be the nominee. Other than Romney admirers (and even some of them!) it’s hard to find serious Republican players who disagree with that.

And so when Romney ignored the topic at CPAC, he hardly did “no harm.” To the contrary, he simply reinforced the notion that he has an insuperable problem. Not only did his “ignore the elephant in the room” tactic not go over well with Republican pols, activists and insiders, but the competition showed up.

So ten months ago, Massachusetts health care was Romney’s “insuperable problem,” and today the “fixation” on it counts as one of the most glaring errors of primary coverage for the entire year. It’s not news to me that Romney’s health care liability has been greatly exaggerated. I do find it a bit rich to see Rubin lecturing the nameless “many in the media” for their shoddy coverage when she was one of the leading pundits arguing that health care was an enormous liability for Romney.

This exchange between Hugh Hewitt and Kevin Williamson on the relationship between conservatives and Wall Street is worth reading to get an idea of how detached from reality Hewitt is:

KW: Well, I don’t know that they’re necessarily all that anti-Romney, although they’re certainly more pro-Obama. The thing is that there is a great misconception that Wall Street is politically conservative, or even that big business, high finance in general is politically conservative. It’s not. If you look at the kinds of issues that most American conservatives really care about, where they are culturally, where they are morally, where they are religiously, these guys aren’t there. And not only are they not there, they’re actively opposed to it. I mean, these are guys making five, six, seven hundred thousand dollars a year who live in Manhattan and getting manicures and sending their kids to Choate and places like that. They’re not showing up at parent’s day in a Sarah Palin T-shirt. That’s just not who they are, not what they believe. But the one thing that they really are good at is using the rhetoric of being pro-business and being pro-free enterprise to kind of buffalo us conservatives, and get us to agree to all sorts of favors and subsidies and handouts for them.

HH: I’m just not going to buy that. I do think they might show up in a Sarah Palin T-shirt, and I do think that they are generally often quite conservative, very Evangelical. Some are deeply Roman Catholic, traditionalist, generous, high-minded people.

What’s striking here is that Williamson is describing the reality of the political preferences of people working on Wall Street that any reasonably informed person understands, and all Hewitt can do is recycle fusionist stereotypes that were always more myth than reality anyway. It’s blindingly obvious that most people working in the financial sector have no strong attachment to social conservatism or small government political principles. For one thing, neither of them is particularly relevant to them or their interests, and they correctly see both of them as obstacles or distractions from what they believe government should be doing. One story that comes to mind is a report earlier this year on the problems that Perry was having making connections with the financial industry. They weren’t all that interested in the fact that Perry was perfectly happy to give them whatever they wanted in terms of regulation and legislation, because they thought he was too conservative to be electable. He was a bad fit with the crowd of financial executives because he was too conservative:

Last week, Mr. Perry went to New York for three fund-raising events, including a dinner hosted by former American International Group Inc. chief Hank Greenberg. That was a first step toward winning over financial-services executives, many of whom mix conservative views on economics and taxes with more-liberal positions on social issues such as gun control, same-sex marriage and abortion rights. Wall Street largely backed President Barack Obama in the 2008 election before souring on his anti-banker rhetoric and financial-services regulations [bold mine-DL].

Given the choice between Messrs. Perry and Romney, the primary’s current front-runners, many are opting for the latter. While both candidates voice similar views on social issues on the campaign trail, Mr. Romney’s track record governing a liberal state and background in finance make him a more comfortable fit for many Wall Streeters.

What bothered some of the people interviewed for the story was that he was a socially conservative evangelical:

Hedge-fund manger Leon Cooperman said he is “negative” on Mr. Perry because he thinks the Texan is too conservative on social issues. “I’m a great believer in separation of church and state,” Mr. Cooperman said. “Any guy that has a meeting to pray for rain—that’s a guy I’m not voting for.”

Huckabee encountered a lot of the same hostility, but at least he used rhetoric that made him sound like an economic populist. Perry has no interest in economic populism of any kind, but insofar as he really is socially conservative and religious he puts off people in the financial sector because they cannot identify with him and they are alienated from him because he does not share their values. Hewitt has long been a reliable backer of Romney, but he seems not to know anything about the world in which Romney flourished and made his career for most of his adult life.

Update: The original Williamson essay on financial institutions that started all of this is here.

Philip Klein considers the role of foreign policy in the 2012 election:

At the same time, criticisms of Obama’s handling of international affairs have generally not gained much traction outside of the conservative media or foreign policy establishment.

The lack of a massive, pressing, national security crisis has kept America’s attention on pocketbook issues, and Obama’s image got a boost from his ordering the raid that killed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

It’s true that Obama’s hostile stance toward Israel likely cost Democrats a congressional seat in New York in a special election this year, but he generally hasn’t suffered politically for any foreign policy decisions.

Even when his approval rating was at its lowest, Obama polled relatively well on foreign policy and national security questions.

Notice that Klein doesn’t mention the wildly unrepresentative nature of the New York seat that was lost in the special election. His description of Obama’s position as “hostile” is also completely false. Klein’s description of some other foreign policy issues is similarly misleading or tendentious. The “mismanaged pullout” from Iraq was fairly well managed as far as U.S. forces were concerned, and Iraq’s deteriorating stability is a testament to the disastrous consequences of the decision to invade Iraq and use it as the subject of a political experiment. Short of keeping a large American presence in Iraq indefinitely (and against the wishes of most Iraqis), it is unclear what this or any other administration could have done that would address these problems. Iran isn’t moving towards a nuclear a weapon, because its government hasn’t decided to build one, so the clock on an Israeli strike isn’t ticking, and the open dissent of leading Israeli security officials on the wisdom of attacking Iran suggests that there won’t be any strike.

There is no effort in the piece to account for why Obama’s handling of foreign policy and national security might poll well. Perhaps the public is aware of the broad outlines of Obama’s foreign policy record and agrees with most of the decisions Obama has made? There is likewise no attempt to explain why “criticisms of Obama’s handling of international affairs” have not gained much traction with the public. Perhaps because most of these criticisms have been as inaccurate and reflexive as Klein’s? One possible vulnerability for Obama is Libya, but it isn’t significant enough to have much impact on the election and Romney won’t be able to attack him for intervening there when Romney was a supporter of the war. Obama’s Libyan war had very little public support, but there were also no American casualties, the fiscal cost was relatively small, and post-war Libya matters as little to most Americans as Libya before the war. Because the U.S. had nothing at stake in Libya, it is difficult to imagine how a post-war Libya will matter very much to the U.S. under its new government.

On the main foreign policy issue with which Obama is identified, which is bringing the Iraq war to a formal end and taking U.S. forces out of Iraq, he has the support of the vast majority of the public. He is likely going to be able to campaign on achieving the same result in Afghanistan in his second term, and Romney will be firmly opposed to any scheduled withdrawal, which will put Obama closer to what the majority of the public desires than his opponent. To the extent that foreign policy does matter in the 2012 election, it is unlikely to work in favor of the Republican nominee, so Republicans should hope that foreign policy is irrelevant next year.

Rod noticed Bill Kristol’s latest pitiful plea:

And it is a moment, as you prepare to cast your vote, for others to reflect on whether they don’t owe it to their country to step forward. As this is no time for voters to choose fecklessly, it is no time for leaders to duck responsibility. Those who have stood aside—and who now may have concluded, as they may not have when they announced their original decision, that the current field is lacking—will surely hear the words of Thomas Paine echoing down the centuries: “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” Now is not a time for leaders to engage in clever calculations of the odds of success, or to succumb to concerns about how they will look if they enter the fray and fall short. Now is a time to come to the aid of our country.

In other words, Kristol wants a number of ambitious, rising politicians to stop thinking and acting like politicians, go against all of their instincts and better judgment, indulge in a pointless exercise in public humiliation, and then pretend that they are doing all of this for love of country. The pretense that it has something to do with the public good is by far the most irritating thing about these pointless calls for more candidates. Consider what Kristol is implying about all of the potential Republican candidates that might enter the race but have chosen to remain on the sidelines. He isn’t just saying that they are letting down their party or making a mere political misjudgment. According to Kristol, any rising national Republican leader who doesn’t take it upon himself to jump into the fray at this point has shirked his patriotic duty in a time of crisis. Does Kristol believe this rubbish, or is he just bored?

Rod thinks that Kristol is urging Palin to come to the rescue, but I rather doubt that. Ever since Palin stopped serving as a mouthpiece for the delusional views of Randy Scheunemann and Michael Goldfarb, she does not receive the same adoring treatment from Kristol and his circle that she once did. This is presumably the latest in the endless series of appeals for Paul Ryan or Marco Rubio to deliver the GOP from disaster. If they are as smart as their admirers think they are, they will keep ignoring him.

Update: Jonathan Bernstein thinks Kristol is overlooking the obvious alternative in Rick Santorum:

Kristol has been calling nonstop for a new presidential candidate who he can trust to carry out neocon foreign policy but who is more reliable than, say, Mitt Romney. Definitely not Romney. Santorum is basically an orthodox neocon, probably the most reliable in the field.

If I had to guess, I would say that the reason Kristol doesn’t try to build up Santorum is that he has no interest in backing someone with a massive electoral defeat in his past. Drawing attention to Santorum would also remind everyone that it was Santorum’s advocacy for neoconservative foreign policy during his disastrous 2006 campaign that contributed to his landslide loss*. More important than either of these may be the recognition that the vast majority of Republicans sees Santorum as one of the least acceptable possible nominees available. According to Gallup, 62% say that Santorum is unacceptable, and he actually has the lowest “acceptable” numbers of all the candidates in the field (27%). Santorum may be a reliable advocate for neoconservative foreign policy, but he is not an effective advocate for it, and it is possible that he is unacceptable to many Republicans because of this advocacy.

* 2006 was a bad year for incumbent Republicans, and Santorum was always going to have difficulty winning re-election in Pennsylvania, but he made things far worse for himself by using his re-election campaign as a vehicle for promoting a foreign policy vision even more aggressive than that of the Bush administration.

Victor Davis Hanson writes some more revisionist history:

Nearly ten years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld provoked outrage by referring to “Old Europe.” How dare he, snapped the French and Germans, call us “old” when the utopian European Union was all the rage, the new euro was soaring in value, and the United States was increasingly isolated under the Bush administration.

The outrage that Rumsfeld’s dismissive remark caused really had nothing to do with any of these things. It’s impressive that Hanson starts his column with this episode without providing any real historical context for it. The “old Europe” jibe was intended as an insult to the French and Germans because they had not signed on in one way or another to support the invasion of Iraq. A report from January 2003 recorded Rumsfeld’s exact remarks:

“Germany has been a problem and France has been a problem,” Mr Rumsfeld told Washington’s foreign press corps on Wednesday.

“But you look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe, they’re not with France and Germany… they’re with the US.”

“You’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t,” he said. “I think that’s old Europe.”

This was one of the more foolish things Rumsfeld said when he was Secretary of Defense. The two “problem” countries not only had the strong backing of their respective publics, but represented the view of most Europeans, including the people of so-called “new” Europe whose governments aligned themselves with the Iraq war for reasons of misguided solidarity and desire to please their patron. The French and German governments had their own reasons for doing so, but they were attempting to prevent a major U.S. blunder. The U.S. would have been better advised to heed the warnings of the “problem” countries that were trying to block the invasion. In short, “old Europe” did represent Europe in 2003, and it was right in its opposition to the Iraq war. It didn’t bother the French and Germans much that they were being described as “old.” What rankled them was that they were being treated as “problems” when they were trying to stop the U.S. from plunging into an unwise and unnecessary war. Almost nine years later, the Iraq war has formally been brought to a close after enormous costs in lives and wealth, Rumsfeld’s “old Europe” crack looks even worse and more foolish than it did at the time. It is fitting that Hanson should use it to launch into a series of banal or misleading generalizations about European history.

Rick Santorum has been rising in the polls in Iowa, which prompted this protest from Eric Erickson:

Rick Santorum will not be the nominee. That’s the reality. But his rise hurts Bachmann, Gingrich, and Perry in Iowa — all of whom have better organizations and better shots beyond Iowa.

How can Santorum really be hurting three campaigns that have already been imploding in recent weeks and months? Santorum’s rise isn’t what damaged Gingrich’s chances in Iowa. Santorum’s limited rise is one result of Gingrich’s earlier implosion. As likely Iowa caucus-goers have become more familiar with Gingrich’s record, many have understandably turned away in disgust. As they survey the remaining candidates, they find that Santorum is the only one who has been regularly campaigning in Iowa, and he happens to be the one that former Bachmann/Perry/Cain/Gingrich supporters find acceptable. Most of Erickson’s complaints about Santorum are valid, and I’ve made a few of them myself, but many of them apply just as well to Perry and Gingrich. Of course, theirs are the “better organizations” that could not manage to get their candidates on the Virginia ballot, and that had nothing to do with Santorum’s polling surge.

The reality is that Santorum is just now starting to get more attention because all of the other supposedly more competitive candidates have flopped, and in a fit of desperation some Iowa caucus-goers are turning to the candidate who has been living in their state for the better part of the last year. The bad news for Santorum is that he has centered his entire campaign on Iowa, and at best he might finish third in a contest that is remarkable for the weak organizations of many of the other candidates. Erickson is upset that some social conservatives are rallying behind Santorum because it will make it easier for Romney to win the nomination, but Santorum’s supporters can’t be blamed for the failings of the other candidates that have made Santorum the only other remotely credible anti-Romney candidate in Iowa not named Ron Paul.

Read this line from Kori Schake, and reflect on how completely NATO’s purpose has been perverted:

The big risk is not whether the alliance can win whatever wars it chooses to fight. It can. The risk is that NATO will choose not to fight, that its members will withdraw into their own narrowly defined interests, close to home.

Yes, the worst thing that a defensive security alliance can do is to be focused on narrowly defined interests too close to home! It went without saying that Libya had nothing to do with NATO, but America, Britain, and France chose to fight there anyway, and NATO was dragged along for the ride so that the alliance did not have to split over the issue. NATO should obviously never be waging wars of choice. Its sole reason for being is to provide for collective defense against attack. If any alliance member starts a war, the others are in no way obliged by treaty to support them. Unfortunately, members of the alliance uninterested in starting unnecessary wars do feel political pressure to provide cover for the more aggressive members, so wars of choice that do not involve any allied security interests still receive the backing of the entire alliance. What Schake is describing is the “risk” that NATO will operate according to its original purpose as a defensive alliance. Unless one believes that NATO should be used as a platform for starting new wars, this is something to be hoped for rather than avoided.