Responding to McArdle, Andrew Stuttaford says:

As for the notion that there’s merit to be found in stepping out of the arena to think great thoughts, I don’t get it. The most useful ideas emerge from engagement with the world, not withdrawal from it.

It is tempting to say, “Of course you don’t get it–you think the criterion for measuring the worth of ideas is their utility,” but that would not be sufficient.  As Stuttaford presumably knows, it was during their time in “the wilderness” that the Tories did some of their best policy thinking and laid the groundwork for what followed in the 1980s, and the same could be said, perhaps to a lesser extent, about conservatives here during the same period.  There is also something very strange in thinking that going into the political wilderness has something to do with living the life of an anchorite, as if the entirety of “the world” was the government and the political process.  Is it unimaginable that one could “engage” the world without being bogged down in the minutiae of party politics for a few years? 

P.S.  This line of criticism is very similar to the sort of thing you hear from people who belittle liberal arts students: “What are you going to do with that?”  Oh, I don’t know, perhaps understand something of lasting value?

Update: Stuttaford has responded, and from his second post I see that I read too much into his original comment about “engagement with the world”:

Unfortunately he seems to overlook the fact (or I didn’t make it sufficiently clear) that what I was writing about was politics, nothing more, nothing less.

Fair enough.  I also take his point that the policy work that prepared the way for Thatcher’s government had been going on before the Tories had been in the political wilderness.  It seems to me that he and McArdle are basically in agreement, and when McArdle talks about “going into the wilderness for a little while, where they can get their heads together without having to worry about the intellectual compromises of actual politics,” this is not an abandonment of “the business of shaping policy and winning elections.”  I would say that it is instead a necessary precondition to that business, and that a period of time in opposition may make your arguments sharper and better attuned to changing circumstances.

George Packer’s big “fall of conservatism” article surveys the state of both the movement and the GOP, and the early criticisms have been right to point out that political viability and intellectual vitality are not necessarily related and may have very different causes.  What is striking about the state of conservatism and the Republican Party alike is that both have gone into their respective tailspins pretty much simultaneously, which is in large part a result of hitching movement conservatism to the GOP and making its institutions into the party’s policy shops and, more often than not, the party’s policy apologists at a time when the GOP for the most part pursued unusually bad policies.  Over certain things, such as immigration, you could see glimmers of independence and proof that there were some things that movement conservatives were not going to abandon or minimise because it satisfied the administration and its allies, but these episodes are noteworthy because they have been relatively so very rare. 

Movement conservatism has become stale, uncreative and in a lot of ways uninteresting because it no longer seems to take account of the real world.  What do I mean by that?  I mean that in the political sphere movement conservatism, on the whole, seems to have forgotten its basic lessons about the corrupting influence of power, the dangers of concentrating power in too few hands, the limits of what government can accomplish and the bedrock principles of constitutional republicanism.  It wants credit for being sober, prudent and responsible, but does not want the discipline or the vigilance that these things require.  At home it has been and, unfortunately, continues to be all to ready to serve as a defender for executive usurpation and misrule, and it has tied itself so closely to Iraq that it will have to spend several decades rebuilding credibility on national security with the public beyond the true believers.  In foreign affairs, it has more often than not taken complete leave of its senses, whether or not this is an entirely new thing, and has grown accustomed to seeing a  global counterinsurgency as an apocalyptic battle for the fate of the world, as if to acknowledge that most U.S. deployments around the world make no sense unless we can exaggerate our enemies into some “existential threat” that threatens to destroy us all.  It remains true what Prof. Lukacs said of conservatives over twenty years ago: “American conservatives welcomed (at worst) or were indifferent (at best) to the dangers of excessive American commitments to all kinds of foreign governments…,” except that today there is a great deal more welcoming.  Not having learned that one of the principal mistakes about Iraq was the hyping of what would have been a minimal threat had the government’s claims been right into a grave danger, the same alarmism has been applied to other smaller, relatively weak states that pose no significant threat to us.  Conservatism builds its reputation through counseling caution, restraint, responsibility and a sober and realistic assessment of the way things are; when it becomes caught up in ideological fantasies and alarmist overreactions it not only loses reputation but also intellectual coherence and rigour.  The fantasists, who paint dark pictures of Venezuelan empire and the restored caliphate setting up outposts in Rome, then have the gall to lecture the rest of us that we “don’t get it” or “don’t understand” the world around us. 

This is not, however, another Gerson/Brooks complaint that there are too many conservatives attached to the “dogma of limited government”–where were all these “dogmatic” government-shrinkers for the last 10 years?  Arguably, in practice, movement conservatives effectively gave up the fight for limited government over ten years ago and have really never looked back.  Now they are reduced to muttering about earmarks, because they seem not to have the arguments for reforming or reducing entitlements.  They still trot out the phrase “limited government” to mobilise voters, but one reason the “purists” have grown disenchanted with the party is that this abandonment of small government ideas became perfectly clear during the Bush Era, even though the abandonment had started earlier.  Why were they abandoned?  In short, because they were deemed to be unpopular, and thevalue of any conservative idea in those days was based on whether it could win Republicans elections.  The era of big government was over, yet it had only just begun anew. 

The “reformists” are typically more creative, but by and large have accommodated themselves to both the welfare and warfare states.  They deserve more attention than I can give them at the moment, but I will try to return to this question in the next few days.

Moving to a very serious matter, let me say a few words about why you should never watch the new Indiana Jones movie and that for your own sake you should, as much as possible, pretend that it does not exist.  This is not because I have seen it, which I haven’t and ideally never will, but because no one should reward George Lucas for trashing his other successful and enjoyable film franchise with a belated, lame sequel.  How do I know that it will be so awful?  It isn’t because of reviews that describe its weaknesses, but because it is the fourth Indiana Jones movie.  There should not be a fourth, and its very existence is a deeply, perhaps unforgiveably wrong effort to squeeze as much cash out of an old idea as possible.  The Last Crusade ended the franchise as successfully and brilliantly as anyone could hope to conclude such a story and had the protagonists at the end actually riding into the sunset!  That should have been the finale, but there is nothing in Lucas’ filmography that he cannot try to rehash and thereby taint.

Commenting on my ACLU post, James writes:

This is a perfect illustration of the failure to recognize why torture’s problematic in the way I claim. I oppose torture. (Though I conceptualize torture relatively narrowly, I do opposite it fully.) Yet I do think that winning wars very very often requires cruelty and savagery. The erroneous notion here belongs to Barnett and Co., who falsely think that winning this war requires cruelty and savagery far away from the battlefield in space and time.

What Barnett referred to as “cruelty and savagery” were, in fact, war crimes.  He invoked the mass bombing of civilian centers as his “proof” that such things are “necessary,” and then applied this to the use of torture.  I suppose cruelty in warfare is unavoidable, if we think of war itself as cruel, but savagery is exactly what is avoidable.  The possibility of discriminating between combatant and non-combatant and also between enemy and captive rests on the assumption that there will be acknowledged limits imposed by a civilised code of conduct on how non-combatants and captives are treated.  There will be what might be described dramatically as “savage fighting,” but savagery itself is not something that we can or should accept as inevitable.  I take James’ point that the defenders of the torture regime deliberately confuse war zones with captivity far away from the battlefield to reduce every situation to the equivalent of combat, which they think allows for a wider range of permissible action, but I think we run the risk of blurring the difference between warfare and war crimes when we allow that savagery is required.

Relations have been strained ever since Barack Obama endorsed Ned Lamont over Lieberman when the latter challenged the former in 2006. ~Marc Ambinder

That’s a bit surprising, since Obama endorsed Lieberman during the Democratic primary race itself long before most of his colleagues did.  (Obviously Obama wasn’t going to go against his party’s nominee to support a certain sore loser after the primary.)  It’s a strange sense of loyalty that demands that a colleague keep supporting your campaign after you lose a primary and decide to break with your party. 

This is from the AP story on Obama’s backing of Lieberman at the time:

“The fact of the matter is, I know some in the party have differences with Joe. I’m going to go ahead and say it,” Obama told the 1,700-plus party members who gathered in a ballroom at the Connecticut Convention Center for the $175-per-head fundraiser.

“I am absolutely certain Connecticut is going to have the good sense to send Joe Lieberman back to the U.S. Senate so he can continue to serve on our behalf,” he said.

Obama received widespread attention for his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, delivered while he was still a state senator.

Lieberman became Obama’s mentor when Obama was sworn into the Senate in 2005 [bold mine-DL]. They stayed close at Thursday night’s event, too, entering the room together and working the crowd in tandem.

Frankly, this is the mentor-pupil relationship that Obama’s critics ought to spend time focusing on.

If the latest SUSA poll from North Carolina is to be believed, Clinton has an outside chance of winning there, leading McCain by six, while Obama trails by eight.  Along with Missouri, in addition to the rest of the “Casey belt,” this would be yet another state where Clinton appears to be more competitive.  Her North Carolina advantage seems to come almost primarily from white women Democratic voters.  While Obama hemorrhages 28% of Democrats, she cuts down that crossover to just 17%, and she improves among women by 10 points over Obama; she also wins independents, while Obama loses them by 9.  This suggests that North Carolina can be had, but not necessarily by Obama, which is a bit ironic considering that it has been the Obama campaign that has talked the most about being more competitive in the South.

This ties in to the Electoral College mathdiscussion that has beengoing on.  Rasmussen shows Obama running much better in Colorado, to be sure, but in the trade-off between the states he can win and those he is likely to lose he ends up with far fewer electoral votes.  Interestingly, North Dakota and Nebraska seem to be more competitive than I had thought, but if the rationale for an Obama nomination becomes, “He might flip Virginia, North Dakota and Nebraska!” it doesn’t seem very compelling because it still seems so far-fetched. 

What is really remarkable about all of this is how closely contested the presidential race seems to be despite the immense structural advantages that the Democrats undoubtedly have.  Then again, the first post-Watergate presidential election was extremely close and the badly damaged incumbent party’s candidate made up an enormous deficit over the summer and fall and almost pulled off a comeback.  Arguably, the GOP’s reputation was not as badly damaged in 1976 as it is today, and the close result in 1976 might owe a lot to having an incumbent President on the ticket, but ’76 is a good example of a Democratic victory that almost wasn’t.  For the longest time I assumed that structural advantages, the war and anti-incumbency would doom the GOP nominee, and I pushed that view for months in 2007.  It made sense, and it still makes a certain amount of sense, but the public is not cooperating with this scenario when it comes to the presidential race.  Given how close the race is in this extraordinarily pro-Democratic year, you have to wonder how much worse Clinton and Obama would be polling in a more normal presidential election.

James has some interesting thoughts on Austin Bramwell’s TAC review of Heads In The Sand (not online yet, sorry) and his definition of conservatism, which Bramwell has defined in terms of defending the legitimacy of institutions.  I may say something about the review at another time, but I want to address the other item first. 

If we applied the label institution widely enough to include social and religious institutions, that might take account of part of what conservatism is, but to ground it in a defense of legitimacy without reference to authority or legal or religious tradition seems potentially more “vacuous” than to say that conservatives respect tradition.  Dwelling on the obvious limits of this basic statement about tradition, Bramwell is correct when he writes:

A “tradition” is no more than something which is handed down.  That which is handed down, however, can be wise or unwise, uplifting or debasing, liberating or constraining.

Yet an institution’s legitimacy is always grounded in some political and legal or, quite often, in a religious tradition.  The legitimacy of institutions depends on a tradition, which, as Bramwell says, may be wise or unwise, uplifting or debasing.  The Supreme Soviet had de facto legitimacy in its own state and the Soviet government’s institutions were regarded as legitimate, but does that then mean that the men who sought to defend and preserve it were conservatives?  In what way does this defense-of-legitimacy definition differ from the utterly unsatisfying “conservatives resist change” thesis, which is another way of saying that conservatives defend the status quo?  What is more, if that is what the defense-of-legitimacy thesis means, why would anyone embrace it unless he believes that the status quo is acceptable?  In other words, if this is the essence of conservatism, why would anyone find conservatism even remotely worthwhile?  Defending the legitimacy of institutions that have none, or have lost it, is not terribly edifying, either, and such a defense seems to take no account of whether such institutions’ legitimacy deserves defending.  Are the members of ZANU-PF conservatives?  Of course they are not, but under this definition they could readily be considered as such. 

We are reluctant to recognise legitimacy in barbaric and totalitarian states on the assumption that they base their rule in a rude appeal to power, rather than authority, and indeed they displace the idea of authority all together.  Historically, communist regimes tend to strip away legitimising myths (“power comes from the barrel of a gun”) at the same time that they promote the biggest fantasy of them all, which is that they were, are, workers’ governments.  So, properly speaking, such regimes cannot have legitimate institutions that rightfully possess authority, but the legitimacy of those institutions is still defended by those who would maintain the status quo, and particularly those who would maintain the conditions that permit these defenders to hold some considerable power and status.  So to speak of legitimacy without discussing authority and usurpation does not get us very far.  There is something that must precede any discussion of legitimacy, and this is respect for rightful authority, which implies that authority can be wrongfully claimed and thus illegitimately possessed by a usurper.  That, in turn, implies that this legitimate authority has grounding in something other than accident or widespread deference.

Someone who respects a certain tradition will want to defend the legitimacy of the institutions that derive from that tradition in part because the tradition is bound up with this matter of legitimacy.  Furthermore, in respecting the tradition it is possible to recognise departures from it or attacks upon it from usurpers.  Remarkably, Bramwell’s entire discussion of legitimacy does not consider the problem of usurpation and what the appropriate conservative response to it would be.  Usurpers will frame their actions as legitimate and appropriate.  Caesar was supposedly a protector of the Republic, and William III was not an invading foreigner aided by traitors, but was the liberating, rightful ruler!  Those who believe these fictions and follow the usurpers are not, as far as I can tell, conservative in any sense of the word.  They may be very pragmatic, and they will find a place for themselves in the new order, but allies of usurpation cannot be conservatives.  If conservatives are concerned with the legitimacy of institutions, there must be some standard against which they can measure whether those institutions have been taken over by those who do not have a legitimate claim to them.  One can very easily imagine how this defense-of-legitimacy conservatism could rally around an abusive executive in the name of defending the legitimacy of the Presidency; indeed, this slavish attitude towards the Presidency has been present among a great many self-styled conservatives for a long time.  If “respecting tradition” is too vague or vacuous, Bramwell’s alternative seems to me to be potentially quite pernicious. 

While Bramwell puts too much weight on a defense of legitimacy as the defining element of conservatism, he similarly undervalues the importance of legitimism within any particular political tradition.  For example, he can say about an arch-usurper that he “preserved legitimate government in North America in the only way possible,” which is to say, “he preserved legitimate government in North America” (the poor Canadians don’t count, I suppose) simply by coercion and power and not by any appeal to rightful authority.  Curiously, legitimate government was not threatened with extinction–certainly no more so than when the colonies rebelled–so how was Lincoln’s course of action “the only way possible”?  Did the Crown lose its legitimacy in the eyes of all its other subjects when it failed to suppress the colonial rebellion?  It did not.  Then again, if avoidance of war on this continent was the goal, our ancestors certainly should not have rebelled against British rule.  Further, it would seem to follow that the Loyalists (and our Canadian neighbours) were, are, the last defenders of legitimate government on this continent, and they managed this without having to kill hundreds of thousands of people.  If that was the case, this suggests that legitimate government is more durable and is less in need of mass slaughter to preserve itself than the example of Lincoln would have us believe.  Indeed, one might make the limited need for coercion and the lack of violent resistance the proof that a government continues to be accepted, or at least endured, as the legitimate government.  Arguably, once it must suppress those it considers to be its people with bloodshed it has not only “lost” legitimacy because of the violence used to suppress its people, but had already lost that legitimacy, which is why there was the need to resort to force to shore up its deteriorating position.     

Bramwell also neglects religion or religious authority in sanctioning certain institutions as legitimate.  Most states throughout history have claimed that their legitimate authority on earth derives from some divine authority or heavenly mandate, and certainly Christians believe that they are obliged to obey the lawful government, which receives its power from God, and even some modern states still rely on employing religion to bolster their legitimacy.  While there are and have been secular conservatives, it is curious that Bramwell makes no mention of the preservation of religious tradition or religious institutions in providing his definition of conservatism.  Perhaps he means to include religious institutions in his more general discussion of institutions, but when discussing legitimacy the failure to mention religion in any way seems to be an important oversight.

The meme we have been seeing for some time hasreappeared: Oregon “cancels out” Kentucky or is “almost a mirror image.”  Yes, 16 point margins are almost exactly like 35 point margins, especially when you double them.  Clinton is likely to come out of the evening with 150,000 more votes and over a dozen more delegates than her opponent, but those have evidently been “cancelled out,” too.    

This is an interesting position for Obama supporters to take, given their candidate’s claim to the majority of pledged delegates.  It turns out that his majority must actually be “cancelled out” by Hillary’s minority.

On his way to a 35-point loss in Kentucky, Obama did manage to win two counties.  Mind you, those were apparently two out of the three counties in which he managed to get more than 40% of the vote.  Some of the lowlights included Magoffin County in the eastern part of the state, where he picked up 5% of the vote to Clinton’s 93.  She has netted something like 240,000 votes.  Needless to say, Clinton has never suffered two primary defeats of such magnitude in consecutive weeks, or indeed at any time during the last five months, and it will be pretty much unprecedented to nominate the candidate who has lost two consecutive primaries this badly.  Oregon can soften the blow later tonight, but it won’t undo the damage.