It took a leader of the Decider’s uncommon gifts to kill the philosophy he worships. ~Eugene Robinson

Perhaps Mr. Robinson has been cribbing from Michael Gerson’s notes about the modern Republican Party, but the idea that Bush or any major Republican leader has acted as if “government is useless, if not inherently evil” is silly.  Ours has been the era of bleeding-heart conservatism, epitomised by Gerson’s weepy manifestoes of world revolution speeches, and Republican do-gooding, which, like pretty much all government do-gooding, has brought about very, very bad results.  Mr. Bush and his enablers (including Gerson!) have argued for the virtue of government activism more than any one of his predecessors since perhaps LBJ.  It is also silly to suggest that the last eight years have seen the apotheosis of anything that could reasonably be called free market policies.  Setting up collaboration with pharmaceutical corporations to create a new government entitlement has nothing to do with the “cruel genius of free markets,” nor does feeding military contractor companies with rich deals in the midst of one of the largest armed social engineering projects in our history.  It could be argued that a full-throated pro-market, small government, constitutionalist platform could not have won any of the presidential elections of the last forty years and that such a platform was rejected by a huge majority of the public 44 years ago, and you could make various arguments about what that might mean for a small government conservative politics, but to take the legacy of one of the most statist, government-expanding, government-trusting, government-ennobling administrations in recent history and make its failure into a story of how this discredited a philosophy to which it did not adhere is preposterous.  

Arguably, Mr. Bush pushed the contradictions between a fundamentally pro-corporate, government-expanding party and a rhetoric of small government to “absurd extremes,” such that the relatively few remaining supporters of the “paradigm” that allegedly dominated politics for my entire lifetime (and yet operationally never commanded more than minimal influence) grew disgusted with that party.  It might be that the legacy of Mr. Bush’s tenure has been to support the claim that “government is useless, if not inherently evil.”  However, conservatives have never claimed and do not believe that government is useless, though we might describe it as a necessary evil in some circumstances.  On the contrary, conservatives assume that government can be rightly ordered and limited so that it does not become abusive or destructive of the common good.  More likely, Mr. Bush’s legacy will be that he killed the electoral chances of the Republican Party for at least a decade and helped ensure that the rising generation will react to the GOP with contempt for the rest of their lives.

Since I’ve been talking about Obama’s problems in some eastern states, it’s only fair that I acknowledge that he is now polling considerably better in my home state.  There he leads 50-41, which marks a six-point improvement for him and a three-point drop for McCain since February.  Most of the movement in the last three months has come from uncommitted Democrats and a few McCain-supporting Democrats coming back to Obama.  McCain used to receive the backing of 25% of Democrats, and now has just 21%, and he has seen his advantage among married voters shrink from 10 points to a one-point deficit.  McCain has made some inroads with unmarried voters, but not enough to offset his other losses.  McCain can’t be counted out here, thanks to the large military and defense industry presence (I doubt there is much of a benefit to coming from Arizona) that tends to bolster Republican candidates, and Obama may lose a larger share of the Hispanic vote to McCain.  New Mexico is one of the essential swing states where Obama has to do well, and right now he is, probably aided by the general disarray of local Republicans and a strong Democratic Senate candidate in Tom Udall, who leads both his potential GOP opponents by embarrassingly wide margins.  These margins may narrow after the June 3 primary, but not enough to overcome Udall’s almost 20-point lead.  Barring some disaster, we can assume New Mexico is all but in the bag for the Democrats.  We could be looking at a Democratic sweep of the Congressional delegation.  Instead of coattails aiding Democrats in House and Senate races, Democratic strength in the Congressional races may be boosting the presidential ticket.

Here is the poll showing Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens trailing his challenger by two points, 47-45, and here is what I imagine would be Sen. Stevens’ response to that news.  The interesting thing is that just a little over two-thirds of McCain supporters said they would vote for Stevens.  That is a pattern I expect we will be seeing in many of the competitive races this year.

The state of the union is angry. Citizens are furious about gas prices and health-care costs, broken schools and property taxes. These are the leaky hydrants, the constant reminders that government hasn’t done much for them lately.  Their fury has bubbled as they’ve watched Washington obsess over itself –dealing out earmarks [bold mine-DL], paying off constituencies, launching probes into political enemies. Accomplishing zip. ~Kimberley Strassel

That’s odd.  I thought all this anger was the product of agitated bloggers and cranks.  Why, it’s almost as if there might be legitimate reasons to be angry with Washington’s misrule and the administration’s incompetence.  Naturally, even in diagnosing the national mood correctly Strassel still comes back to the old saw of complaining about earmarks and “paying off constituencies,” as if those were the things that really angered Americans.  Constituencies are made up of voters and those who employ them–paying off voters is usually popular, whether or not it is a good idea.  The few meager instances we have of the federal government serving its constituents can be found among those earmarks and pay-offs.  Earmarks may or may not be wasteful, and the things they are funding are almost always not the business of the federal government, but they are about as far from Washington obsessing over itself as you can get.  It may be bribing voters with their own money, but at the very least it is some small, pathetic sign that the government works for them.  It is the impressive failure of government on major policy after major policy that infuriates people, and more importantly it is the total lack of accountability at the top for repeated failures in judgement and leadership that angers them.

In the litany of Republican failures, Strassel offers a list that is almost as ridiculous as the Republican non-agenda she criticises:

Today’s GOP spends so much time fretting about how to relive the Reagan heyday, it has failed to do him credit by laying out its own plans for today’s unique challenges. It remains in hock to interest groups, running ads about sanctuary cities as Americans curse over gas prices. In a repeat of 2006, it spends more time trying to scare voters about Democrats than defining itself. It refuses to give up the earmarks that are a symbol of its worn-out reign [bold mine-DL].

Notice how she manages to make the open borders point in the midst of what seems to be a complaint about voter frustration, some significant part of which is frustration with the inability to enforce immigration laws and control the border?  Very deft.  If you are against sanctuary cities, you belong to an “interest group” (ooh, scary!).  Never mind that sanctuary cities might be something that the government could do something about, while Strassel and every other minimally educated person knows that it can do very little about gas prices.  That won’t stop Congress from boosting them with subsidies for the ethanol boondoggle that helps drive gas prices in the Midwest to their $4.00+/gal levels.  And yet again, there is the dreaded earmark. 

War in Iraq?  Possible recession?  Central bank-fueled bubbles that have collapsed?  New entitlements?  Deficit spending?  Effects of the weakening dollar?  No, no, it is the mighty earmark that explains the problem with the GOP! 

Granted, I don’t travel the country talking to voters, but I would bet you a sizeable amount of money that if you asked people what concerned them earmarks would never make the list.  Earmarks are the sort of thing that good government types and political junkies talk about, which leaves the other 95% of America talking about something else.  Republicans in Washington and their backers are so out of touchthat they seem to think quite seriously that earmarks and the failure to reform earmarks are among the chief complaints of the American voter.  

But Strassel seems to be absolutely fixated:

This redefinition should’ve come earlier. And it would mean more if House incumbents who swear they’ve learned a lesson would demonstrate it in office. Say, with an earmark ban [bold mine-DL].   

That might end up saving something on the order of $15-30 billion dollars in a $3 trillion dollar budget in any given year, while ensuring that the federal government does even less for its constituents than it already does.  People seem to focus on earmarks because they are such a small, irrelevant part of the overall budget process on the assumption that they can be handled easily, but there is no incentive for members of Congress to give up a tool that can be used to the advantage of them and their constituents.  Tackling the source of our long-term budget problems, entitlements, would require the kind of political risk and heavy lifting that no one in either party wants to do, and so you have the absurdity of a party pushing something as trivial as earmark reform, for which it will receive no credit anyway, and ignoring the sort of imaginative and necessary reform that might be part of an agenda worth mentioning.

Rod has a couple of posts related to pessimism, declinism and gloominess.  Commenting on my post on conservative Democrats, he asks rhetorically, “Who says Daniel Larison is a pessimist?”  He titled the post “The case for conservative optimism.”  I know what he means, but this is exactly what it isn’t.  Finding some good in an otherwise dark picture is what pessimists are more skilled at doing, because for the pessimist every picture in this world is dimmed by the recognition that all things end, everything is finite and our time is limited.  It is the people who tend to see the dark clouds who are also most keenly aware of the silver lining; those who skip about merrily in the fantastical world in which there is only sunshine become terribly disconsolate when a stom moves in, because they mistake normal changes for an approaching doom. 

Roger Kimball is right that disappointed utopians (i.e., optimists) tend to be very gloomy.  Everyone who believes in some myth of progress will become very gloomy when the myth is broken on the rocks of reality.  This is why conservatives should typically be philosophical pessimists, indeed normally will be philosophical pessimists, which has nothing to do with a mood or temperament (pessimists are not gloomy, just sober), but has to do with an acknowledgement of our mortality, finitude and (in a Christian pessimist view) our createdness and sinfulness.  Our nature has limits, and if we seek to go beyond them we invite a disastrous reckoning.  Optimism is the mental illness of the hubristic; pessimism is the beginning of humility.  The problem that many modern conservatives have had in recent years is that they have been taught to be optimistic, and so they have fallen into many of the old traps of optimists–trying to remake the world, force-feeding “progress” to other societies and always, always ignoring the likely consequences of their actions because they have learned the false lesson that things will always get better.  Pessimists know that things will tend to get worse insofar as they know that all things in this world eventually decline, fall apart and die.  To have framed the distinction between them in terms of “better” and “worse” is to bias us against pessimism already, as if there were something wrong with acknowledging the reality of entropy and the significance of death.  Christians have the least cause for optimism of the sort offered by modern ideologies, because they have the best and most sure hope of all.  Nothing is more misleading or confusing than to abuse the word hope by linking it to an optimistic mentality.

Declinism can be gloomy, but only if it becomes alarmist and excessive.  Usually, when it is done properly and wisely, it does not need to raise an alarm, because it takes the process of decline to be part of the way of things.  Think of it this way: the alarmist shouts, “We’re all going to die!!!” and the sober declinist says, “We are all going to die.”  They are saying the same thing, and yet they are obviously making two very different kinds of statements.  Sober declinism is descriptive, perhaps combined with a natural human lament for what is passing away, but it does not become hysterical.  Those who raise an alarm still share an optimistic expectation that things that are rooted in the structures of our nature are “problems” that can still be solved, when the pessimist assumes that there are no enduring solutions to the fundamental limitations of our existence.   

Barack Obama issued a statement in response. He called on “all those who have influence with Hezbollah” to “press them to stand down.” Then he declared, “It’s time to engage in diplomatic efforts to help build a new Lebanese consensus that focuses on electoral reform, an end to the current corrupt patronage system, and the development of the economy that provides for a fair distribution of services, opportunities and employment.”

That sentence has the whiff of what President Bush described yesterday as appeasement. Is Obama naïve enough to think that an extremist ideological organization like Hezbollah can be mollified with a less corrupt patronage system and some electoral reform? Does he really believe that Hezbollah is a normal social welfare agency seeking more government services for its followers? Does Obama believe that even the most intractable enemies can be pacified with diplomacy? What “Lebanese consensus” can Hezbollah possibly be a part of? ~David Brooks

Brooks goes on to explain that he spoke to Obama, who dispelled Brooks’ concerns, but the problem here seems to me to be that Brooks had these concerns in the first place.  Who could have read or heard the lines given above and thought, “Oh, that’s some appeasement right there”?  Where did Obama say that any of the reforms he was describing were aimed at including Hizbullah?  You have to assume that anyone who is interested in combating the power and influence of Hizbullah through something other than a dead-end air war (which Obama also supported two years ago, much to his antiwar supporters’ lasting chagrin) wants to “mollify” Hizbullah, rather than subvert them, because the only alternative to the unavailable option of crushing Hizbullah militarily is apparently to cut a deal with them.  Isn’t Brooks’ initial reaction precisely the reflexive disdain for procedural reform and diplomatic engagement as tools that Obama routinely criticises, and which this administration shows with embarrassing frequency?  Isn’t this precisely the identification of any and all diplomacy with “appeasement” that Obama has been railing against this week?  Brooks was smart enough to think better of using the “appeaser” label, but what does it say about the folly of an ideology that frames foreign affairs in terms of resolve vs. appeasement that Brooks even had to ask Obama those questions?

Republicans are shellshocked over losing a third House seat in a special election this year. Much as a series of special-election defeats by Democrats in 1994 augured that the first midterm election of the Clinton years would be bad for the party, the GOP now worries it could lose up to 20 House seats this fall. That would place Republican numbers in the House in the range of their pre-1994 levels – and make the party a hopelessly outnumbered minority. ~John Fund 

“This was a real wakeup call for us,” someone named Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times. This was after Mississippi. “We can’t let the Democrats take our issues.” And those issues would be? “We can’t let them pretend to be conservatives,” he continued. Why not? Republicans pretend to be conservative every day. ~Peggy Noonan

“There comes a time when you can’t hide from the things that you’ve done anymore.” ~Battlestar Galactica

One thing about the Mississippi election that has puzzled me is why so many conservatives have expressed some form of despair or anxiety about what it portends.  Suppose for a moment that this means the decimation of the Republicans in the House and Senate as many more conservative Democrats are elected.  Conservatives have some reason to take solace from this, since it means at once the repudiation of a party that abandoned restraint, prudence and wisdom and the opening up of something like a real competition for the votes of cultural conservatives.  Republicans betrayed their promises, and so another people shall inherit what they were given. 

Conservatives have suffered from the effects of living with a political monopoly, since they have felt compelled time and again to swallow their disagreements with the GOP and continue backing it for fear of the alternative.  The lack of a tolerable alternative made this seem unavoidable.  But what if the alternative begins to include ever-larger numbers of blue dog Democrats and the like?  They may take cultural issues no more seriously than the GOP, but their mere existence creates more competition for conservative support and so might potentially give conservatives some minimal leverage and might lead to the GOP serving their interests more faithfully than they have done.  No one should invest too much into this idea, since we have cheered Webb and then found him in practice to be pretty much the conventional Democrat that he had become.  On the other hand, the Heath Shulers in Congress have proven to be reasonably good on immigration.  Perhaps the prospect not just of losing in the fall, but also of seeing its entire coalition evaporate before its eyes will stir the GOP to abandon its embrace of the war and its attachment to centralised power.  Of course, that would still leave them in search of a positive agenda, which they haven’t had for years and years.  Remember how Republicans used to trumpet that they were the party of ideas?  No one says that anymore, or at least not with a straight face.

Shouldn’t that be Neuropean Buddhist, James?

I didn’t realise that noticing the weird resemblance between Roger Allam and Christopher Hitchens was a new thing.  When I watched V for Vendetta years ago, and I saw Allam playing a sleazy, fascist, corrupt talk-show host I briefly assumed that Hitchens had volunteered to do a cameo.  Then I discovered that it was a different person, but you can see why I was confused.  The style of argument, the mannerisms, and the personality were all as you would expect.