But none of that changes the fact that there is something typically psychologistic and so ultimately very superficial about Brooks’s analysis: a more sophisticated and urbane Republican Party would certainly do better among the “educated class”, as would one that approached matters with a great deal more intellectual seriousness. ~John Schwenkler

Brooks’ analysis is an applied form of the Dougherty Doctrine: the GOP would be better off if it were more like me; it’s failing because it’s like you.  Brooks’ reference to the “urbane” candidates in the primaries (i.e., Giuliani, Romney and McCain) was instructive for its lack of realism and its terrible judgement.  The Terrible Trio, as I once dubbed this awful threesome, represented everything that was wrong with the modern Republican Party: nasty authoritarianism, shilling for corporate interests and endless jingoism.  Each one combined some measure of these things: Romney called for “doubling” Gitmo–whatever that meant–and Giuliani embraced any and every new conflict on the horizon, while McCain was glad to accept new government surveillance powers and pro-corporate trade and economic policies.   Think of everything that went wrong with the Bush administration, and then consider these three candidates–it becomes clear that any one of them promised to perpetuate at least some part of the abuses of the Bush Era: Giuliani was going to spy on you or lock you up without charges; Romney was going to shortchange and defraud you; McCain was likely to start another war.  Leave aside for the moment their problems with social conservatives and their personal flaws–these were, are, horrible representatives of the right.  That at least two of the three had a plausible path to the nomination makes a mockery of complaints that “urbane” candidates cannot flourish in the modern GOP.  One might fairly ask why any party would want to be “urbane” if it includes accepting the policy priorities of such people, but it is undeniable that the party tolerates, promotes and rewards them at the highest levels.  For the most part, conservatives go along with this, sometimes enthusiastically and sometimes not. 

When presented with a candidate who actually represented the core constituencies of the party in terms of geographic origin, socioeconomic background and level of education (i.e., Huckabee), there was an unparalleled collective freakout among conservative activists and elites.  So it is not entirely credible when I see complaints from “urbane” conservatives that they are somehow underrepresented or neglected in modern Republican politics–were it not for their entirely outsized, overbearing influence, Giuliani and Romney would have been dismissed almost as soon as they announced their candidacies.  It is worth bearing in mind how much worse a Giuliani or Romney would have done had he been the nominee; it is worth considering that someone like Huckabee might have actually done much, much better than McCain is doing, and not only because he is a more naturally talented politician.  It may have been inevitable that the GOP was doomed to lose this election, and lose it badly, and there is some justice in that, but it is not at all obvious that the GOP is going to fail because it was insufficiently “urbane.”         

As John reminds us, and as I suggested earlier this week, the GOP has come to its current straits to a large extent because it heeded Brooks’ advice–or the advice of those who shared Brooks’ views–on what its priorities and policies should be.  The deeper problem that the GOP and conservatives alike have is that even if the Bush administration had been a paragon of excellence and competence (ha!), educated professionals and working-class Americans would have been drifting away from them in any case.  Cultural and demographic changes have also been working to undermine Republican political strength, and the response to these trends have been schizophrenic at best because there is basic disagreement inside the coalition about the identity of the party and the direction of conservatism.  Meanwhile, having defined many academic and professional fields as bastions of liberalism, conservatives have ceded an entire generation almost uncontested.  Conservatives are now paying the price for more or less writing off an entire generation by eschewing the work of education and building up the culture they want in favor of political activism. 

Obviously, a badly managed war and a general culture of cronyism and incompetence have persuaded managers and professionals that the supposed party of grown-ups has lost its way, but even without these things members of the New Class were never going to feel immediately at home in a party that relied heavily on social conservative votes and religious rhetoric.  When confronted with secular conservative complaints about the undue influence of religious conservatives, I have often been inclined to ridicule or belittle their concerns, because I am a religious conservative who sees no such influence and would be glad to see much more genuine religious conservatism guiding the right, but as I step back I begin to understand that their complaints were veiled pleas for acceptance.  As I have watched Palinites enthuse about their Joan of Arc, it has occurred to me that they want nothing more than validation for their way of life; criticism of Palin wounds them because they think it is a judgement on how they live.  Likewise, secular conservatives wish to be accepted and validated by their religious confreres.  Even Andrew’s often overwrought and ultimately misguided complaints about so-called “Christianism” are at bottom arguments in favor of the proposition that is is possible to be conservative but critical of religion in politics.  These complaints then morph and mutate into absolute affirmations (in Palin’s case) or negations (in the secular conservatives’ case) that try to force people to make false choices: either you uncritically endorse everything about Palin, or you hate small-town, religious people; either you reject religious conservatism in politics, or you endorse the reign of “fundamentalist” loonies.  Palinites feed off of secular conservatives’ disdain as proof that their stark opposition between true believers and godless elites is correct, and the secular conservatives find the Palinite mania to be proof that their fear of the role of religion in politics was entirely justified. 

We may be faced with another false choice between embracing conservatives’ cultural populism and having respect for ideas, and it is vital that we find some way of holding the two in tension.

Stunned by this report that Shadegg could lose his AZ-03 seat, I was momentarily tempted to agree with Ross when he wrote:

And while it would be nice, as Daniel suggests, to decouple the fortunes of the House and Senate GOP from the fortunes of the McCain campaign, I don’t think that’s going to happen: This is a national election, and I suspect that House and Senate candidates will only rise in the polls if the national ticket is rising in the polls.

On the face of it, a Shadegg loss in deepest “red” Arizona would suggest a kind of annihilation of the Republican Party that no one has been imagining, and it would seem to confirm Ross’ observation that Republicans will all sink or swim together, but I have a slightly off-the-wall interpretation that might make the “decoupling” position look more credible.  Shadegg’s difficulties are almost certainly related to his flip on the bailout, which he voted against the first time and then backed on the second vote.  We may end up seeing a number of otherwise safe-seat Republican members who are going to face an unusually difficult race for re-election because they went along with the leadership in backing the bailout either the first or the second time.  If voters are going to punish them for the bailout, there is not much that can be done for them now.  Nonetheless, that suggests that the House GOP’s best chance to escape being pulled down by McCain’s defeat is to run away from him, their own leadership and everything remotely connected to the national party.  Bizarrely, the NRCC has been trying to nationalize races all year long by talking about Obama and Pelosi when the path to surviving the profound anti-GOP mood in the country is to make every contested race as localized as possible.  Tying the fortunes of the Congressional GOP and McCain together does just the opposite. 

Anti-bailout Republicans are best positioned to pull this off, as they already demonstrated their opposition to the administration, McCain and Boehner, but it may still be possible for many House members to put distance between themselves and the increasingly ridiculous McCain campaign.  The Senate candidates are in a more difficult position if they are about to be swamped by another Democratic wave.  In any case, I think we are seeing the possibility of a slight change in the dynamic that has prevailed all year: instead of McCain running better than the Congressional Republicans because of his alleged “maverick” status, they may have a chance of running ahead of McCain by running from him and his irrelevant campaign focused on Ayers and the like.  They could say, “Unlike that clueless McCain, we’re here to work for you and address your economic concerns.”  Better yet, they will just pretend that McCain doesn’t exist.  So my original argument remains the same: the emphasis ought to be on limiting Democratic gains rather than wasting time backing a McCain campaign that is already going down to defeat.  The alternative, it seems to me, is to exacerbate what were already going to be bad House and Senate losses and watch McCain lose by almost two hundred electoral votes.

Those who have seen excerpts from David Brooks’ Atlantic remarks will be familiar with the main outlines of his column today.  First, Brooks’ column and his “fatal cancer” remarks from earlier in the month have to be understood in terms of his long-standing crusade against populism, which he despises as both a style and as a matter of policy.  These are the “nihilists” he denounced earlier this month for opposing an absolutely indefensible bailout (which now appears all the more indefensible for its inadequacy and its outrageous nature).  It should go without saying that after the last few years of technocrats and experts getting so many things so magnificently wrong that this is an unusually poor time to declare the return of a technocratic establishment and the bankruptcy of populism, but this gets at the main problem of populism that is defined as little more than a style or a reflex rather than a more or less coherent set of policies.  The basic truth behind the populist skepticism of experts, or at least self-declared, well-placed experts, is that there is no accountability for most of them, which consequently results in the sort of long-term poor performance that a lack of accountability will create.  To the degree that failed or compromised oversight was responsible for much of this calamity–in Congress, at the SEC and elsewhere in government–the basic populist demand for oversight and accountability seems more important than ever.  The glorification of Palin’s lack of policy knowledge in some quarters should not excuse the failures of all those people in positions of authority and power who should have understood the situation and did not.  Here’s the thing–it helps the establishment remain unaccountable if it can label as populist any politician that uses lifestyle and cultural cues as a substitute for policy arguments.  As I hope to explain, Palin’s lack of policy knowledge is clear evidence that she is not just a bad populist, but rather not a populist in any meaningful sense at all.       

Even in his digs against Mr. Bush’s visceral decisionmaking, his prizing of instincts over intellect, Brooks feels compelled to attack such “populist excesses” as “the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism.”  The latter would come as news to those of us who are usually branded as “isolationist,” since it has never been clear when this “excess” was threatening to dominate anything.  Certainly no one looking back on the Republican Party of the last eight or ten years could have perceived an excess of isolationism.  Indeed, I think most people would be hard-pressed today to understand why a rather more “isolationist,” or rather America First, foreign policy would be either dangerous or excessive.  Certainly a foreign policy that recognizes the limits of American power and does not try to overreach with ludicrous security pledges and declarations of Sakartvelian solidarity seems much more appropriate to our present predicament.  

It is also remarkable that Brooks complains in the same column that the GOP does nothing for working-class Americans and nonetheless attacks the “populist excess” of opposition to mass immigration, when the failure of immigration enforcement and border security and the travesty of immigration “reform” championed by the Bush administration and columnists such as Brooks are directly antithetical to the interests of working-class Americans.  The alienation of the GOP leadership from its constituents over immigration demonstrates how empty and meaningless Mr. Bush’s quasi-populist poses have always been.  Palin does represent a continuation down the path charted by Mr. Bush, which is the substitution of symbolic lifestyle politics for policies that will serve the constituencies that support the party.  In our debased political discourse, what Palin does on the stump is defined as populism.  Meanwhile, she serves as the running mate for an establishment fixture who has opposed every so-called “populist excess” that would have served his constituents and the national interest.  Everyone criticizes or praises Palin’s “populism” in terms that stress the absolute absence of policy substance, but this is rather like saying that you can have religion without worship or science without knowledge. 

Populism without policy substance is almost entirely worthless; it is not really populism.  To reduce populism to a style or a reflex, one in which intellect and knowledge are derided, is the most vicious anti-populist trick, because it associates advocating policies that benefit the commonwealth and the broad mass of the people with ignorance and visceral reactions.  It leaves the people exposed to whatever abusive policies members of the political class see fit to impose.  It allows progressive globalists of both parties to flatter themselves that the policies they prefer, those that happen to serve a few entrenched interests at the expense of the many, are also the best informed and held by the best educated.  The derision heaped on populism, which Palin makes so easy when she is identified wrongly as a populist, is another way of evading accountability for the misguided policies favored by all those who seem to regard representative government itself as a kind of populist excess.  Naturally, these are also the same people who seem to be most serious about duplicating the “successes” of our managerial democracy around the world.

Rod also has a long post on the question of class warfare and anti-intellectualism on the right that is worth reading.

Helen Rittelmeyer has offered an answer to thecriticisms of her earlier argument with an interesting post.  The most important part of the post seemed to be this:

The moral here is that some people think that keeping any and all disagreement on the table deepens friendship; I think that’s true for most kinds of disagreement (my friends are the ones I trust to slap me in the face when I need it, for instance), but in cases like my friend’s hypothetical, it cheapens it. Friendship, like loyalty, entails responsibilities, and you need to know what you’re getting into when you start calling yourself a friend. Or a conservative. 

While I might join with James in saying that political alliances are no more like friendships than they are like familial relations, I think that kind of reply would not do justice to Ms. Rittelmeyer’s view.  Let us take the comparison to friendship as the appropriate one for the sake of argument, and consider what that might mean.  The emphasis on loyalty is also very important, but if anything I think Ms. Rittelmeyer does not emphasize the importance of loyalty nearly enough.  That is, she seems to apply it only to one side, as if the voters were vassals who owed service to their lieges but expected–and received–nothing in return.  Loyalty is supposed to be reciprocal, which I think includes an important distinction from the merely contractual arrangement that she has imagined that Conor, Andrew and I endorse.  As I said about party loyalty in a different context:

Something that the defenders of party loyalty seem never to be able to grasp is that loyalty is a mutual obligation.  It is not only something that supporters are supposed to give to their party, but it is something that party leaders owe to the people who put them and keep them in their positions. 

Thinking of this relationship in terms of friendship, wouldn’t we agree that a friend who deceives you, abuses your trust, betrays you, cheats you or in some other way defrauds you for his own advantage is not much of a friend?  I don’t know whether the others would put it this way, but I would.  There is room in a friendship for disagreements and even blunders–there would have to be–but there are limits that friends do not cross.  Forgiveness is possible in friendship, but even among friends it is not infinite.  If I took party leaders as my friends, that would be a mistake, but worse still would be the error of continuing to reward them with my friendship after they had already shown that their purpose in cultivating the relationship was essentially exploitative and self-interested. 

That said, suppose that I continued to offer these politicians my loyalty by supporting them every step of the way no matter what.  If they were in error, would it not be more important to challenge them over their errors in an attempt to help them correct their mistakes?  If you judge that someone to whom you owe loyalty has made a grave error (as Conor has determined concerning the Palin selection), do you not then owe it to him to say so with whatever means you have available to you?  There does seem to be an assumption here that the critic and the dissenter are the ones acting disloyally by speaking out, when there is a powerful case that those who remain silent and enable self-destructive behavior are the ones not fulfilling their obligations.  Even as they are not living up to their responsibilities, the enablers are assuming responsibility for the calamities that befall the people they neglected to warn.

Ross:

Out-of-power parties often benefit dramatically from bad times in America: The GOP did in the late 1970s, and the Democrats have over the last four years. But the pattern of American history suggests that bad times are the exception rather than rule – and unless James Howard Kunstler’s prophecies come true, a party that goes deep into the wilderness and waits for a crisis to bring it back to power stands a good chance of waiting for a long time.  (And yes, that’s a case for disaffected conservatives of all stripes – those who still have a stake in the GOP, that is; not the Larisonians of the world – swallowing hard and voting for McCain.)

After the last few electoral cycles, and in the face of depleted American power and a remarkable financial shock that remind us how transitory worldly glory is, I turn more and more to the basic lesson of Geoffrey Parker’s Success Is Never Final.  Parker is an historian of seventeenth-century Europe, and he has written on the history of the Thirty Years’ War and the Spanish Monarchy’s futile decades-long efforts to crush the Dutch.  The cover of Success Is Never Final is a copy of Velazquez’s striking portrayal of the Dutch surrender at Breda in 1625, which represented something of the zenith of Spanish power in the Low Countries after decades of desultory warring against the United Provinces.  The point of using Breda as the symbol of Spanish success is that Breda fell to the Dutch again twelve years later: Breda is emblematic of a more general failure of Spanish arms in the middle of the century and the gradual decline of the Spanish Monarchy as a continental power.  The lesson of the book, as the title suggests, is that victories are ephemeral and the seeds of later defeat are being sown in the midst of what everyone regards as progress and success.   

In one sense, this is common sense and perfectly obvious, but this basic lesson seems to get away from people, especially in election years.  As November approaches, memories seem to get very short.  Where just a few years before there was loose talk of thirty-year dominance of the Presidency on the model of the early 20th century GOP, there is now the fear of a long sojourn out of power.  To avoid this, disaffected conservatives are supposed to “come home,” but in November just as in 2006 it will not matter whether McCain succeeds in retaining the GOP core.  Every tactic McCain has employed has been part of a strategy to retain and mobilize that core, and it will not succeed, because this reflects a complete lack of comprehension about why the GOP is in its current predicament.  Republicans and conservatives generally rallied to the flag with almost the same reflexive loyalty in 2006 as they had done in previous elections, and the GOP was still routed because previously GOP-leaning independents fled the party in droves and the left was better mobilized and organized.  The Palin selection and the enthusiastic reaction to it have been disheartening because they suggest that conservatives will continue to bind themselves closely to the GOP and its obsession with short-term objectives. 

There may be a few more defections from the GOP on the right this year, but not that many.  What seems certain is that, except for a shrinking, irreducible core of right-leaning independents, everyone who is not a registered Republican will be backing any candidate that is not McCain.  What conservatives who want to remain politically engaged with the party that has failed them time after time (the non-Larisonians, if you like) need to do is make whatever efforts they can to limit losses in Congressional elections this year.  Strategists need to assume a McCain defeat, which seems increasingly likely, and get into a position that will make the 2010 midterms somewhat competitive.  Objective economic conditions seem likely to worsen in the coming year, and there is every reason to think that unified Democratic government will overreach as unified governments tend to do.  If McCain were somehow to prevail on 4 November, the calamity that would befall the Congressional GOP in 2010 would great and would help to erase all political gains of the previous sixteen years.  Those conservatives who do not want to be consigned to the wilderness for the next decade or two need to think about the long-term consequences of a McCain victory, which would be disastrous for conservatives both in policy and political terms in the next several electoral cycles.  If his insane mortgage-bailout-in-every-pot plan doesn’t persuade people of that, perhaps the prospect of being the minority party for the next twenty years will.

Daniel Nichanian describes the candidates’ positions on Armenian genocide recognition and relations with Armenia, which are remarkable for how genuinely different they are.  McCain has been a consistent foe of recognition and has tended, like the Bush administration, to tilt towards Azerbaijan.  In contrast, Obama has been a supporter of recognition and better relations with Yerevan.  To some extent this is a function of the much weaker sympathies on the right for the Armenian Diaspora and their concerns, and this is then complicated by traditional pro-Turkish and anti-Russian attitudes, both of which McCain has in abundance.  The Turkish-Israeli alliance provides an additional source of political pressure on politicians in Washington.  Less remarked on during the war in Georgia was the fact that Armenia, partly by inclination and party out of necessity, is Russia’s closest ally in the Caucasus and also heavily dependent on Russia for its trade and energy supplies.  “Pro-Israel” supporters of the Turkish alliance and those with obsessive hostility for Russia are not likely to be good friends of Armenia, and so it has been ever since Armenian independence.  For all of the exaggerated talk about how influential Armenian-American lobbying groups are supposed to be, they are regularly outmatched by even more powerful and entrenched interests. 

The reason that the recognition resolution was not successful last year will be the same reason why Obama will unfortunately end up capitulating to Ankara’s threats.  Until all or nearly all American forces are out of Iraq, Ankara will be able to continue using its bases and supply routes as leverage to force the next administration to kill the resolution yet again, and once again many supporters of recognition will change their positions rather than be portrayed as having cast a vote that allegedly jeopardizes a military mission.  Whether or not Obama genuinely believes recognition is appropriate and necessary, I’m sorry to say that I don’t see how it is politically possible for him to be able to maintain some reduced force in Iraq and also dare the Turks to cut off the northern supply routes. 

Because he will be coming into office with the (undeserved) reputation of being too dovish, and because of his truly short time in office at the federal level, it would be incredible and entirely out of character for a new President Obama to risk starting off his administration with a move that will alienate Turkey.  I find the idea of being blackmailed by an “ally” in such a fashion to be disgusting, as I said earlier this year on this blog and in my column, and I would support Obama if he pressed ahead with genocide recognition, but for all the reasons I laid out earlier this week about how Obama operates I think we all know that this is not going to happen.  It would be genuinely impressive if he proved me wrong on this point.

For the record, I wouldn’t go as far as David Brooks did in calling Sarah Palin a “fatal cancer to the Republican Party.”  Besides being unfair to her, that seems a bit rich from someone who cheered on almost every single misguided and terrible policy of the Bush administration, which has been the metastasizing cancer in the Republican body for years.   However, I do not understand the idea that there has been no conservative critique of her record.  I have said on more than one occasion that I assumed conservatives did not approve of windfall profits taxes, net increases in spending or leaving behind enormous amounts of debt.  If that has changed for the sake of this one campaign and candidate, I did not get the memo from the Central Committee that so many others seem to have received. 

Palin supported tax increases on oil companies, which ultimately impose costs on consumers, so that she can give away more money in Alaska and buy her extraordinarily high levels of support.  While I do not consider earmarks to be the grave evil that the McCain/Palin ticket claim them to be, Alaska under Palin remains the leading recipient of per capita federal earmark funding.  She embraced the bridge boondoggle until it became politically radioactive, and now she pretends that she was its mortal foe.  She left Wasilla under a mountain of debt, and also bungled the management of purchasing the land where the athletic facility was to be built so badly that it has imposed additional costs on Wasilla.  Spending has skyrocketed under her administration.  Now for good measure she has demonstrated a woeful lack of understanding of many major national and international issues, which drives home how unprepared she is, but would anyone on the right honestly look at her record as an executive before this and say, “Yes, this is the sort of thing I want to see at the federal level”?  If conservatives don’t care about this, I suppose that’s their business, but can we stop pretending that this critique is based purely on whether or not she has done well in a couple of interviews?  Whether judged “superficially” or on substance, there is not much there that conservatives can find that is very encouraging. 

Her critics have been studying the details of her record for over a month.  Have her supporters made anything like the same kind of effort, or are they, like Obama fans, simply caught up in the enthusiasm?

I did not watch the debate live, and I’m glad that I didn’t bother liveblogging it.  It wouldn’t have been hard to rearrange the text from my post on the first debate and pretend that I had covered the second one, so mind-numbingly similar were they.  Everyone seems to agree that Obama prevailed, or at best McCain did not and so changed nothing about the overall direction of the race.  Some of McCain’s supporters lamented that their candidate did not hit Obama on his associations, while more of his critics noticed that McCain was remarkably gutless to “raise questions” about Obama’s character and his associations on the trail over the weekend and then avoid talking about them on national television in front of Obama.  Instead of demonstrating some kind of admirable restraint, refusing to talk about these associations at the debate just drives home how little stock McCain actually puts in their importance.  As pure political calculation, this was probably right (Obama is viewed favorably, and persuadable voters don’t like personal attacks on the candidates they like), which is important in what it says about the McCain campaign’s idiotic preoccupation with obviously ineffective tactics.  I’ll come back to that in a moment. 

First a few words about the bizarre debate over what happened to the “real” McCain, which becomes more relevant as McCain has started asking, “Who is the real Barack Obama?”  Even among McCain critics, there are some who still insist on coming up with excuses for the former media darling, and they echo the excuses journalists have made for McCain for years: sure, he’s lying about this or that, but he’s clearly uncomfortable doing it, which proves that he’s actually a good guy.  More recently, McCain has seemed angrier and grumpier than usual, prompting the same excuses: he doesn’t enjoy doing this kind of campaigning, and it shows, which somehow makes it better.  This has been the strange ethical standard applied to McCain for as long as I can remember.  According to this odd view, if someone is not very proficient at lying and smearing his opponents and gives the impression that even he knows what he’s saying is nonsense, that somehow proves that he is honest and decent at heart.  The correct view is exactly the opposite–if McCain knows the truth, doesn’t really believe what he’s saying and tells lies unconvincingly, that is evidence of the far deeper corruption of the man.  Instead of being badly misguided or misinformed, he willfully says things that he knows have no merit or that he knows are unworthy of anyone in his position.  In short, being a bad smear artist does not make someone ethical or honorable; it makes him unethical and incompetent.       

The reason why McCain was smart, if gutless, to avoid talking about Obama’s associations last night is that he and his advisors seem finally to have recognized that invoking Ayers is not an effective tactic.  This is remarkable because this tactic is incredibly popular among people on the right who think that talking endlessly about the “surge” is a good idea, and McCain still doesn’t understand that the “surge,” like his obsession with earmarks, means little to most voters who want out of Iraq anyway.  Even though there is little or no evidence that his obsession with the “surge” works with the general electorate at all, McCain has continued to invoke it every chance he gets.  Just as he does not understand that the “surge” represented a change in tactics (it is not a strategy!), he has never grasped that the tactic of hitting Obama on his opposition to the “surge” was achieving nothing.  Until last night, it seemed as if his campaign was going to make the same mistake in making Ayers a centerpiece of the last few weeks, when Ayers, like the “surge,” is something that excites and mobilizies only core supporters and no one else. 

Naturally, many of those core supporters are upset that he did not launch the attacks that they think are so powerful, but what they might consider is that the fact that McCain deliberately avoided using them should tell you something about how truly weak they are.  After all, McCain has shown he has no compunctions about smearing Obama and lying about the records of his opponents; McCain wants to win, and he clearly despises Obama.  So if attacking Obama on his associations was an effective tactic, McCain would have done it with the same gusto he showed when belittling Obama’s alleged lack of understanding of foreign affairs.  That does not seem to be the lesson that many of his supporters are going to take away from last night.  Instead, they are going to adopt something like Vietnam revisionism in which they express certainty that their candidate could have won if he’d just been willing to do whatever was necessary.

As many authoritative economists are desperately trying to explain amid all the confusion, the culprit was a system geared toward loaning money to people who were not in a position to pay it back. Two policies underpinned that system: easy money by the Federal Reserve and the government-induced lowering of standards for approving loan requests.

—–

The fact that, as Sebastian Mallaby pointed out in a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, “lightly regulated hedge funds resisted buying toxic waste for the most part” also belies the notion that deregulation was the culprit. The real purchasers were U.S. investment banks regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S. commercial banks regulated by the Fed, and European banks that are among the most regulated in the world. ~Alvaro Vargas Llosa

It is therefore all the more depressing that Obama has chosen to denounce generic deregulation as the main culprit, while McCain has opted, as usual, for uninformed moralizing against private sector corruption.  Of course, if I were the nominee of the party that championed the mortgage lenders or the nominee who loved Greenspan so much that he wanted to keep him as Chairman even after he died (notice that McCain doesn’t tell that joke anymore), I would probably try to find something else to talk about. 

The trouble arose because of the effective collusion between government agencies and investment banks on the one hand (allowing the latter to become horribly overleveraged), and because of large-scale government involvement in the housing market through the government-backed mortgage lenders and loose monetary policy on the other.  The latter made possible the creation of the housing bubble, while the extraordinary risk-taking that the government backing of the lenders permitted helped make the bubble larger than it would have otherwise been and ensured that it would collapse more violently.  The past two administrations and both parties share in the responsibility for this, and the bipartisan cult of Greenspan has much to answer for as well, but it is also perfectly fair to place the bulk of responsibility on the people who were in the majority and in control of the White House as the problems were growing and being exacerbated by many of the policies that they supported.  Now to solve the problems created by past intervention and collusion, they offer more intervention and collusion.