Freddie is once again on Mickey Kaus’ case. He writes:

What percentage of his posts contain anything at all that you would call sympathetic to the liberal cause? That bother to demonstrate an attitude of anything other than contempt and derision for the party and the ideology he claims to be a part of? Yes, people should broadly be permitted to define their own political identity. But if Kaus wants me to call him a liberal, I can say that he is an incredible [sic] ineffective, counterproductive and useless one.

If you were to replace the word liberal with conservative and make this criticism about me, I think a movement or party loyalist could make the same argument, and I think the argument would still be misleading. The strange thing is that Freddie does not normally attack people for their lack of fidelity to “the cause” or the party. Surely he has not forgotten the debates he had during the Gaza conflict when he contested the conventional definition of what it meant to be pro-Israel and argued that being critical of the side with which one sympathized was an important kind of service and support.

When conservatives have gone after their own for alleged disloyalty, Freddie has tended to be sympathetic to the dissenters and supportive of those interested in critical thinking over singing with the choir. My guess is that Freddie doesn’t care for Kaus’ preoccupation with card check, teachers’ unions, welfare reform (or immigration, for that matter) because Freddie is coming at all of these questions from a much more liberal position and moreover probably thinks that neoliberals such as Kaus serve no purpose in an era of more assertive and successful liberal Democrats. This is roughly the same attitude that conservatives and Republicans cultivated about Pat Buchanan, Rep. Paul and their supporters during the mid-to-late ’90s and throughout the Bush Era, which was when they most needed to heed the warnings of traditional conservatives and libertarians if they were going to make sound policy and perhaps also avoid electoral disaster. As it happened, this was the era when traditionalists and libertarians were most ignored in recent history, and the results speak for themselves.

Kaus is preoccupied with his neoliberal reform agenda in the same way that I am preoccupied with the dangers of interventionist foreign policy. These are the subjects that interest him, and they are the ones he follows most closely, so it is also possible that these are subjects where he might have some useful insight. Kaus is a veteran of a time when liberalism and the Democratic Party seemed almost as badly beaten then as conservatism and the GOP appear today, and I imagine he also remembers that the only Democratic President to win re-election in the last thirty years was someone who signed welfare reform and governed generally more like a neoliberal. That might be a practical political reason for continuing to focus on neoliberal themes even after the collapse of Republican ascendancy. The complaint that Kaus was not more anti-Bush during the last eight years is one that I assume others on the right will make in the coming years about some of the conservatives who were fervently anti-Bush–why aren’t we more enraged by this or that about the Obama administration?

It all depends on what the administration does, and in my case it will probably depend on the area of policy involved. Kaus’ interest in immigration policy is evidence that he was capable of being extremely critical of the administration when the administration pursued what he considered bad policy in one of the areas that he follows closely. Likewise, I am already far more critical of Obama’s Afghanistan/Pakistan policy, or lack thereof, than most of the hawks who once pretended to believe that he was the second coming of Jimmy Carter. I will be very critical of the ways that this administration perpetuates the abusive practices of the last, such as its apparent perpetuation of the abusive interpretation of the state secrets privilege. On the other hand, I am almost certainly not going to ridicule Obama if he actually brings all of our forces out of Iraq, even though this is what the “team” or “tribe” mentality will dictate and even though you can all but guarantee that the standard attack will be that Obama is endangering us all.

There will be plenty of partisans and ready-made hacks to do all of that, and I will not be a “fraud” of a conservative if I point out the flaws in their arguments and continue to resist the pro-war sentiment that continues to prevail among a majority of conservatives. The reason why any of this matters at all is that we have seen the distorting and limiting effects that uncritical solidarity with one’s own party or “cause” can have on our political discourse, and our policy debates are always in danger of being reduced to nothing more than the establishment consensus view. We need more eccentric, dissenting and idiosyncratic voices on both sides, not fewer, just as we generally need more diversity of ideas in our political debates and not less.