The American Conservative

Cory Robin has some curious ideas about conservatism — apparently it’s a straight line of exploiters and insiders with persecution complexes from Burke and Maistre to Barry Goldwater — but his Nation review of several recent books about conservatism is worth reading for his exposure of Jacob Heilbrunn’s quote borrowing (some might say “plagiarism”), if nothing else.

Amit K. Singh, the foreign-policy realist and limited-government conservative I’d been covering for TAC, lost his primary race against one-time “compassionate conservative” Mark Ellmore for the Republican congressional nomination in Virginia’s 8th district yesterday. Dave Weigel, Richard Spencer, and I attended the Singh victory party, which unfortunately wasn’t a victory — technically, anyway. Singh performed reasonably well, getting 44 percent of the vote against Ellmore’s 56 percent. Ellmore had been running for two years, since losing a primary bid in ’06, and he capped off his campaign in the final weekend with some spectacularly negative (and false) advertising. Weigel has an excellent write-up on the night at Reason, he quotes one Republican activist saying of Ellmore’s tactics, “Stuff like that can hurt the whole ticket.”

I had a feeling of deja vu: the outcome reminded me all too much of the Ron Paul campaign, where youthful energy and principle, and strong fundraising (Singh didn’t raise millions, but he did outraise Ellmore handily) did not translate into winning vote totals. Weigel notes the youthfulness of the victory party crowd — the candidate himself, at 33, may have been the oldest person in the room. I noticed the same thing at a Singh fundraiser two weeks ago. There’s a silver lining in that: although young people don’t vote in very large numbers, youthful activists who cut their teeth on campaigns like Paul’s and Singh’s will be around for a long time to come and will only become more skilled and effective. And the GOP right now needs new blood. For all the attention that’s been paid to the turmoil in the Democratic presidential primaries this year, the Republicans have a quieter but perhaps even bigger problem: the middle-aged and elderly Republican die-hards who vote in presidential and congressional primaries are out of phase with the rest of the country. They’re still selecting candidates in the mold of George W. Bush and Old Man McCain. Ellmore beat Singh by painting Singh as a disloyal Republican and himself as a McCain stalwart. That can win a Republican primary, but how is it going to play up against Jim Moran in November? Moran won’t even have to notice Ellmore. It would take a miracle for Ellmore to perform better than Moran’s last Republican challenger, Tom O’Donoghue, who garnered only 30 percent against him in ’06.

Singh wouldn’t have beaten Moran, but he would brought some new voters into the Republican fold and he would have thrown Moran for a curve — after all, Moran would actually have been philosophically closer to Bush than Singh would have been, and the Singh team were prepared to make that an issue. But it’s not to be, at least not this year. Singh is in a strong position to run again in 2010, if he’s so inclined. The 44 percent that supported him this year will, I think, continue to back him, and now he’s a seasoned candidate and a more familiar name to the kingmakers in the district. (Some of whom, from what I hear, supported Ellmore just because they thought it was his turn — and some of whom, I also hear, came to regret their pre-emptive support for him once Singh got into the race.)

The Ron Paul revolution has produced impressive results in Republican congressional primaries in Maryland and North Carolina. Murray Sabrin’s defeat in New Jersey and now Singh’s loss in Virginia are of course disappointing. But what seems most important to me, considering that none of these candidates would have been likely to beat their Democratic rivals in November, is that Ron Paul Republicans and traditional conservatives keep building their forces steadily, gaining political experience, perfecting the areas in which they’re already strong (fundraising and youth outreach) and cutting into the party-loyalist base. The Christian Right didn’t throw in the towel after Pat Robertson’s failed campaign in ’88, they kept organizing and provided shock troops for the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. They also seized control of Republican parties in several states. (The national Christian Coalition has long since lost its bite, but state-level Christian Coalition groups and other religious Right organs still carry a lot of weight.) It took six years for the Christian Coalition to come into its own. It’ll take a few years for the Ron Paul revolution to get up to speed as well. Singh’s campaign, even though it didn’t get the nomination, was a good start. It’s a foundation on which to build for the future.

Good guests on the Colbert Report this week.

It’s Friday, a good day for less text, more video:

The lefty magazine continues to give the Ron Paul movement better coverage than the neocon press, which can only splutter in outrage at the thought of an antiwar, pro-market Republican. The Nation is none too good on market economics itself, and puts in a few nasty digs in its coverage of the rising class of Ron Paul Republicans and activists, but this piece is still worth reading. A bite:

As a sign that the “liberty” message, aided by web-savvy grassroots supporters, can compete with the establishment Republican platform, the Paulites’ Internet presence now rivals the GOP online outpost, Red State, which once kicked them off of its site. “We want to infiltrate the GOP and take it over,” says Nathan. To Jeff Frazee, an official Paul organizer, Estey’s Cat Herder is the type of project that will be essential after the Paul campaign officially ends. If the “revolution” is going to influence the GOP to the degree that Paulites hope for, it will be by using tools like this one as well as communication on blogs and forums. These strategies may be catching on because of, not despite, the freewheeling, anti-authoritarian attitude that distinguishes Libertarians from other conservative groups, who have not yet taken to netroots type organizing.

The piece is titled “Is Ron Paul’s Revolution Just Beginning?“

Some libertarians (and Libertarians) have had doubts about Bob Barr’s antiwar credentials. Lately he’s been sounding the right notes — calling for a prompt withdrawal from Iraq and no U.S. bases in the country, for example — but suspicions linger in certain quarters. Since won’t be president, the question is more or less moot, but there is good reason to trust Barr’s bona fides, however recently he may have come by them: he’s chosen as his issues coordinator the firmly antiwar libertarian Doug Bandow. Doug has written extensively about bringing the troops home from more than just Iraq, too — he’s for coming home from Korea and drawing down the forces in Europe as well.

Doug is solid on domestic policy as well, but it’s his presence as a foreign-policy adviser to Barr that’s most reassuring.

Jacob Sullum takes exception to my post the other day on Jim Webb and the drug war. “It’s sad that politicians are deemed praiseworthy simply for acknowledging the plain truth,” Sullum writes about Webb’s views on interdiction, and further notes that “Nowadays, it is not true that the government is ‘locking up people for mere possession and use of marijuana,’” though it is is still arresting them. If Webb is simply against literally locking people up, he’s not in favor of anything other than what we already have: “If Webb had said ‘the time has come to stop arresting people for mere possession and use of marijuana,’ that would represent progress.”

I’ll only go so far in defending Webb, since as I said in my original post, his views in this regard are not so different from those of the typical liberal of 30 or years ago, which falls well short of the policy I’d like to see: an end to the drug war tout court. Sullum is right to point out that Webb is not explicitly advocating decriminalization of marijuana — and, when dealing with a slippery-tongued politician (even Webb) one has to be careful of tricky turns of phrase. Nevertheless, let me point out that the passages I quoted from A Time to Fight come in the context of an entire chapter directed against the prison-industrial complex. I think Sullum would appreciate Webb’s acknowledgment of the key role that mandatory minimums have played in creating that industry:

Twenty years ago, lawmakers frustrated with what they viewed as too much discretion beinn allowed judges decided to institute mandatory sentencing and harsher parole standards. By legislative decree, the mandatory minimum penalty for possessing five grams of crack cocaine, roughly equal to two packets of sugar, became a five-year prison sentence. Since 1986, approximately 100,000 people have been imprisoned as a result of these mandatory sentences, most of them nonviolent drug users and small-time dealers, with very few drug kingpins affected. Similarly, parole revocations are now estimated to account for one-third of all admissions to prison, twice the rate of the early 1980s.

This too counts as “acknowledging a plain truth,” but it’s praiseworthy nonetheless. Everyone knows full well that this is not a vote-getting: Americans do not typically reward politicians who say they will turn more crack possessors out on the streets. The public is into building prisons and filling them up, not asking questions about what the heck is wrong with a country that has a larger per-capita prison population than semi-Communist China. What makes all of this is doubly praiseworthy coming from Webb is that, to me at least, it’s unexpected: I knew that he was solid on second-amendment rights, but I had no idea where the ex-Marine had sensible views on the drug war.

Just how sensible is hard to say. Webb is short on concrete proposals — he likes the Japanese prison system and he rhapsodizes about the ability of “Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children’s” to take “some of the most headstrong, aggressive, antiauthoritarian members of our society and chang[e] the direction of their lives.” Does he want to send drug offenders to boot camp? I don’t think so, but he doesn’t say what exactly he does have in mind. “We cannot advertise to the world that we live in a fair system if we are preventing large numbers of our citizens from participating in this process [i.e., having a chance succeed] owing to early mistakes that involve stupidity, peer pressure, or nonviolent conduct.” Great. But what follows?

The chapter as a whole leaves the clear impression that Webb wants fewer prisoners and fewer nonviolent offenders going to jail. If he’s throwing up a smokescreen, it’s hard to see what he stands to gain: the public doesn’t like this kind of “soft on crime” talk. The worst that I suspect — and Sullum gives reason to fear it — is that Webb may simply not understand the problem, let alone be capable of figuring out the right answer. But I find it to be an encouraging sign that he’s at least broaching the subject.

I’m leaning towards voting for Barr come November. But if Obama picks Virginia Sen. Jim Webb as his running mate, I might have to vote Democratic. Browsing through Webb’s new book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America, I see that Webb has a reasonably sound view on the drug war. After listing many of the war’s evils — the overflowing prisons, the counter-productive and region-destabilizing interdiction efforts in Afghanistan and Latin American — Webb writes:

The time has come to stop locking up people for mere possession and use of marijuana. It makes far more sense to take the money that would be saved by such a policy and use it for enforcement [against] gang-related activities. We should also fully fund the increasingly popular concept of drug courts, where drug offenders are allowed to enter treatment instead of prison and have their drug offense expunged from their records if they successfully complete treatment. …

Drug addiction is not in and of itself a criminal act. It is a medical condition, indeed a disease, just as alcoholism is, and we don’t lock people up for being alcoholics. Most Americans understand this distinction, even though the political process seems paralyzed when it comes to finding remedies to address it. Our country urgently needs more funding and more treatment centers for treating this disease, not more prison cells for punishing people who have fallen into conduct that, at bottom, is more harmful to themselves than it is to our society.

This is, or used be, pre-DLC, a fairly standard liberal line, and there’s much about it I don’t like. I’m enough of a Szaszian to think that drug abuse (and alcoholism) is more often a personal-responsibility issue than a medical one, and more funding for government-run treatment programs doesn’t seem too promising to me. All that notwithstanding, this is still a better, more humane policy than what the Clintonites and Republicans are offering, and it’s about as good as what Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr has been saying lately. Barr now takes a federalist line against the drug war — and federal rehabilitation programs too, I presume — but he’s shaky on interdiction. By contrast, Webb writes:

the reality is that the opium production in Afghanistan is an example of basic market economics at work. The Afghanis grow opium, sometimes in fields so vast that they resemble the rice paddies of Vietnam, because there is a foreign market for their crops, a market that they could not duplicate with any other known product.

If you want to reduce the opium cop, you’ll have to find a way to reduce the demand for heroin at its destination point.

Webb also objects to giving “the Mexican government a pile of money to buy fancy equipment, which it may or may not use to try and chase down drug runners in a never-ending game of cat and mouse.” Webb’s suggestion that we use the anti-drug aid given to Mexico to fight gangs here in the U.S. is not necessarily a great improvement: fighting drug gangs over here instead of over there. But the direction of Webb’s thought on the drug war in general is encouraging. He sees it as an injustice to lock up nonviolent offenders, and he knows interdiction efforts are worse than futile.

I’ve lately been reading another senator’s thoughts on prohibition — of alcohol rather than narcotics — the late “senatorial immortal” Jim Reed’s The Rape of Temperance, published in 1931, two years after Reed had left the Senate. Webb and Barr could both profit from consulting Reed’s book, especially on the topic of the essential folly of the prohibitionist project:

Basically these regulatory statutes are mistaken or vicious beause they invade the realm of morals.

We seek to do by legislative enactment that which belongs to the school, the church, the home. We fail because a constable, a prohibition spy, or a jailer cannot take the place of a minister … Like it or not, the cold fact is that no people will obey a law they do not respect. And no law can be enforced by officers of the law which is not in the in the vast majority of instances voluntarily obeyed and enforced.