Great piece, just one teeny tiny point:

“TR is a great inspiration to neocons today: there’ s a reason the summer books issue of the Weekly Standard bears a cover image of Teddy in an inner tube.”

I went to look this up and apparently it’s Chesterton on the cover. Just thought I’d let you know.

Bruce Ackerman gets around this problem with his proposal to give every voting age citizen a yearly voucher which they could donate to any candidate or party of their choice.

http://www.amazon.com/Voting-Dollars-Paradigm-Campaign-Finance/dp/030010149X

D’oh

If all a Tanenhaus wants is a Right that is a.) a little abashed about how Iraq turned out, but not really repentant, and b.) in favor of a “pro-family” welfare state, then he already has much of what he wants, since Ramesh Ponnuru, David Frum, Ross Douthat, David Brooks, and a host of neoconservatives already affirm a program exactly like that. Hell, Karl Rove belongs in that category, too. These are the most prominent names in “conservative” print media, and fairly influential voices within the Beltway. They would all complain that the grassroots aren’t on board with their “moderate” military welfarism — the grassroots are too brusque, too bumptious, too worked up about Obama’s birth certificate and illegal immigration. But the grassroots Right is in the state it’s in thanks in no small part to the likes of Ponnuru, Frum, Douthat, and Brooks. Since their program of welfare for families doesn’t inspire anyone, their political allies wind up having to whip up enthusiasm for the military side of the program, and have to throw in some red meat about gays, immigrants, and abortion. But the NY-DC axis have no cause to complain, since that’s the only way to sell the public on their insipid welfare-warfare program. He who wills the end must will the means. The only means toward getting the Right to embrace the welfare state is to get the Right hopped up about real wars or culture wars. But that’s precisely what has cost the Right political power over the last four years.

In short, the moderates created the extremists. And now they’re just proposing more of the same. Mencken may have said that no one ever went bankrupt underestimating the intelligence of the American people, but in this case I think the people have a lot more sense than media mod-cons. If they want welfarism, they’ll get it from the experts — the liberals.

I’d have to think carefully about what requirements Congress can place upon candidates for federal office, but putting aside that question, I favor less regulation of elections, not more. Let Ross Perot or Steve Forbes (or George Soros) give a few million dollars to a serious candidate rather than putting themselves forward. Campaign finance reform actually backfired on the post-Watergate Democrats, since the Republicans quickly became a lot better at raising small donations through direct mail and making the most of independent expenditures and soft money. The unalterable political reality is that money can be converted into power, which means the wealthy will always have means to affect things, and power can be converted into money, since the state has power to expropriate and regulate. I have a little more faith in the plurality of interest among the wealthy, however, than within the government.

Take the Ron Paul effort as an example of what the present campaign-finance laws have done. Paul refused to do what most candidates do when they need money — take out loans. He’s against campaign debt on principle. You might think that Paul received as much money as he could have needed from his huge base of small donors. But in fact the money didn’t necessarily come in on the timetable that he needed — the December money bomb was already too late for ad buys in New Hampshire, for example. Hillary Clinton and John McCain had no problem going into debt to finance their campaigns at the critical time, and Romney of course could tap his own money. Without the contribution limits, Ron Paul could have raised a lot more money a lot more quickly. Even though the absence of limits would also have helped other candidates, there’s a diminishing marginal utility to more campaign dollars beyond a certain point — for that reason, another few million for smaller candidates actually means a lot more to them than another few million for the debt-financed and self-financed candidates.

The best conservative and libertarian thinking that I’ve read on the subject of the 14th Amendment and corporate personhood comes down against giving corporations national personhood. Felix Morley has an excellent chapter on this, “Commerce and Nationalization,” in Freedom and Federalism. 14th amendment personhood subverted constitutionally legitimate state regulations of commercial activity, but also established the groundwork for all kinds of other expansions of central power. Both “property rights” and “human rights” were nationalized in the process. The federal executive branch and judicial branch profited, to the detriment of Congress and the state legislatures.