Ross offers this depressing, but accurate, statement on the pathetic state of our government:

But in a sense, to ask the question is to answer it: If you’re young and charismatic and interested in politics, the rewards to staying within the mainstream political consensus are so high, and so readily apparent, as to be near-irresistible. If Ron Paul looked and sounded like Bill Clinton, he probably never would have become a constitutionalist in the first place.

Whether Ross intended to or not, he has just stated in a single paragraph the principal reasons why mass democracy is the enemy of both good and lawful government.  It creates a kind of politics that makes austere constitutional republicanism seem absurd, because such a view assumes that the welfare of the commonwealth and the preservation of liberty are sufficiently admirable and worth supporting that they do not need a demagogic spokesman (and I mean to use demagogic here in the least pejorative way).  But most voters really like demagogic spokesmen, and in the modern age they much prefer the telegenic and oleaginous to the severe, earnest, if sometimes eccentric, people who have infinitely more in common with most Americans. 

The reason why principled constitutionalism gains so little electoral traction is that it proposes to curtail and distribute power.  Few rising stars in the political firmament want to ally themselves with a cause that, if successful, will actually decrease their power in the future.  Curtailing and dispersing power displease any number of factions that much prefer jockeying for influence over a consolidated, concentrated center of power.  Constitutionalism offers citizens no spoils, except a liberty and independence they typically would rather abandon if it meant greater convenience or benefits.  It is a sorry statement about Americans that strict adherence to our fundamental law has become popularly identified as a “fringe” and “eccentric” position.

Alex Massie has a coupleof posts on Ron Paul.  One of them reproduces one of Paul’s speeches on the House floor about patriotism.  Michael Crowley also has a post on Ron Paul’s incredible fundraising achievement.

George Ajjan writes about his panel (which included my Scenecolleague and polymath Reihan Salam) at the Arab-American Institute conference, complete with video of his remarks and notes on the other presidential candidates’ appearances.

It’s hard not to get a bit excited about Ron Paul’s fundraising success today.  In five weeks, he has raised more money ($7.1 million at last count) than he did during the last quarter, which puts him on pace to exceed the stated quarterly goal of $12 million.  Over half of that money (over $4 million as of 10:50 CST) has come from a one-day online fundraising drive.  

Dave Weigel commented earlier today:

Even if you don’t like Paul, you have to gasp at what’s happening in the GOP race. There are three phenomenons running in tandem: Paul’s fundraising, Huckabee’s cash-strapped poll surge, and McCain’s running-on-fumes poll comeback. Anybody working for the Rudy-Fred-Mitt power trio has to wonder why the Republican base is so hungry for these other choices.    

The Trail (a Post blog) writes:

Today, Nov. 5, marks not only Paul’s best fundraising haul in a single day — more than $3.5 million by 9 p.m. EST — but online observers say it’s also the most money raised by a candidate on the Web in a single day [bold mine-DL]. And the day’s not over yet. “Damn. Wow. Um, that’s pretty awesome,” said a stunned Jerome Armstrong who served as Howard Dean’s online strategist. Armstrong, the founder of the popular blog MyDD, said Dean raised as much as $700,000 in one day toward the end of the primary race. “But not a million,” Armstrong added. “What Paul is doing — or what his supporters are doing — is really impressive.”

The Fix notes that Tom Udall (NM-03) is reconsidering his previous decision to run for Senate and has started preparing for a Senate campaign.  Meanwhile, incredibly enough, Pearce and Wilson are both running for the GOP nomination to try to succeed Domenici.  The Pearce-Wilson bloodletting will be a disaster for the New Mexico Republicans, while a Udall candidacy saves the Democrats from the misfortune of having to nominate Marty Chavez.  Cilizza explains that Udall is the Beltway favourite.  Part of the reason he is the favourite (besides being a long-time Beltway insider) is that he has a much better chance of defeating whichever Republican emerges as the nominee, as our New Mexican correspondent told you some time ago.  It seems that Heather Wilson’s many bad positions have finally caught up with her and have provoked a conservative backlash.  It’s long overdue (about 10 years overdue), but it would have been better for the state party had more people voted against her in the midterms last year rather than setting up the state party for implosion. 

The House fallout of the GOP’s impending civil war could be significant.  NM-03 is solidly Democratic, and that isn’t going to change.  NM-01 is very closely divided now and could go to a Democrat in an open race.  However, it has never not elected a Republican since it was created almost three decades ago.  NM-02 is pretty reliably Republican, but after the last redistricting it includes a lot more Democratic voters than it used to.  It is a long-shot for a Democratic candidate to pick up, but it isn’t inconceivable.  The last open election in NM-02 was in 2002, a banner year for Republicans, where Pearce managed to get 56%.  With the right candidate, Democrats could divert extremely limited NRCC resources to southern New Mexico and make it that much harder for the Republicans to hold on to other contested seats.  A one-seat loss in New Mexico for the GOP would be damaging, and losing two seats would be catastrophic: in the space of a year, a majority Republican delegation could conceivably become all Democrats.

And while saying that Bush and the Republicans have failed for eight years may have some impact, we won’t be running against Bush, Instead, my hunch is there’s room for an argument saying that the modern GOP won’t ever get serious about staunching illegal immigration because their main supporters, large corporations, like the supply of cheap labor. ~Ezra Klein

This unfortunately seems right.  Were any Democrats willing to try to steal the “enforcement-first” ground from the GOP, they would find a lot of success and would neutralise the Republican advantage on immigration that I discussed before.  The trouble for the Republicans is that their leadership is possibly even more terrified of appearing too “tough” on immigration than Rahm Emanuel et al. are afraid of appearing weak.  It is oddly the one issue where the Republican leadership is unwilling to use voter anxiety and the appearance of Democratic “weakness” to its advantage.  Klein has succinctly explained why this is.  I called them the Party of Immigration for a reason.

On certain social issues, black voters (and Hispanics, for that matter) are more conservative than their white, liberal allies. But that really doesn’t matter, since they don’t vote on those issues. ~Stuart Rothenburg

This is the most concise summary of the problem I have seen in a long time, and it is the obvious answer to arguments about the GOP trying to appeal to “natural” conservative constituencies.

Paul Weyrich has apparently endorsed Mitt Romney.  Romney has positioned himself to be the social conservatives’ candidate, and I guess some have decided that he is going to be the anti-Giuliani.  In shoring up Romney’s position with this constituency, his social conservative supporters may believe that they are building up credit that they can exchange for concessions in the event of a Romney victory, but the symbolism of this is that some social conservative leaders are willing to embrace the most obviously opportunistic candidate because he says the right things during the campaign.  Should the impossible occur and Romney is elected, social conservatives will receive lip service and then otherwise be discarded and ignored.  I have said it many times before, but I’ll say it one more time: Romney cannot be trusted.  His family life is to his credit, and certainly sets him apart from several of the other leading candidates, but his policy positions are notoriously fluid and determined by the advantage they give him.  By placing trust in him social conservatives will eventually find that they have been taken in yet again.

Ross has a little fun at Weyrich’s expense because of this, but what this endorsement tells me is that the TAC article’s call for a “new conservative agenda” is not the standard by which the candidates were being judged.  “The Next Conservatism” said:

From this it follows that the next conservatism’s foremost task is defending and restoring Western, Judeo-Christian culture.

I have noted this before, but it strikes me as particularly strange symbolism for someone interested in “defending and restoring Western, Judeo-Christian culture” to endorse a candidate who does not really represent the main religious tradition at the heart of that culture.

“The Next Conservatism” said:

Its agenda should include the abandonment of a Wilsonian foreign policy, which is promoted by neoconservatives and neoliberals alike, and a return to a policy based on America’s concrete interests.  Following the disaster of the war in Iraq, the American people may again be open to a non-interventionist foreign policy, as advocated more than half a century ago by Sen. Robert A. Taft….The next conservatism prefers liberty to the trappings of empire. 

Judging from his rhetoric at debates, Mitt “It’s About Shia And Sunni” Romney seems to have no intention of abandoning the current approach to foreign policy.  His belligerence towards Iran is a matter of record.  He appears to have absolutely no interest in a non-interventionist approach, and he has given no hint of dissatisfaction with “the trappings of empire.”

I might point out that endorsing a Northeastern venture capitalist is not exactly striking a blow on behalf of the “dormant conservative agrarian tradition.”  It is also rather strange to endorse Romney when you have signed on to this statement:

Similarly, the next conservatism should include the issue of scale of enterprise. Conservatives have long recognized the danger big government poses to free markets. Is there not a similar threat from big business enterprises, especially when those enterprises are international corporations with no concern for the homeland? Is the market truly free when vast corporations can manipulate prices and politicians to destroy local businesses, both manufacturers and retailers, that are anchored in the local community and contribute to it in ways big companies do not? When everything for sale is labeled “Made in China,” Heaven decrees fair trade instead of free trade. 

Romney is very keen to talk about the “challenge” of China and India, which he thinks can be met through increased “innovation and transformation,” but if there was any candidate who embodied the system of “vast corporations” and large-scale multinational capitalism it would have to be Romney.  You won’t be hearing Romney talking about “fair trade” anytime soon–that’s Huckabee’s spiel, and we know what economic conservatives think about him.   

The irony of the endorsement in light of this section is just too great:

Relatedly, the next conservatism should promote the return of trains and streetcars as alternatives to dependence on automobiles.

So you can see why endorsing Romney, whose campaign announcement stage at the Ford Museum was filled with automobiles, is the natural move.

Given Romney’s constant talk about “innovation and transformation,” this section also stands out:

Conservatism has always been cautious about innovations, and the next conservatism’s caution should lead it to think hard about where technology is taking us.

Who better to lead us into this new era of prudent caution than a man who seems to have never encountered a technological innovation he didn’t love?

Surely, some will object, you can’t realistically have a perfect candidate, and politics is the art of the possible.  Isn’t this just another episode of the crackpot Larison insisting on a purist standard while the pragmatists are actually getting something done?  I can already hear the complaint: “You’re making the perfect the enemy of the good (again)!  If we’re not careful, Giuliani will take the nomination and then what will you do?”  Well, that might be a more powerful criticism if “The Next Conservatism” hadn’t also said:

The next conservative movement will not be credible if it is led by people and institutions that sold out to today’s equivalent of Rockefeller Republicanism. Nor can support for policies such as Wilsonianism and reverse mercantilism be reconciled with the next conservative agenda.

So the “next conservative agenda” is irreconcilable with many of the things Romney (who, until about 2005, was a Rockefeller Republican himself) espouses, but somehow there has been reconciliation anyway.  My purpose here is not to insist that everyone sympathetic to the ideas in “The Next Conservatism,” including its authors, support the same candidate I do.  That is a prudential judgement about which there can and will be plenty of disagreement.  Certainly, being realistic about the electoral prospects of a candidate is a reasonable thing to do (though why you would then back the one candidate who has the most built-in opposition among your own constituency, I’m not sure).  What I do find puzzling is why, given the current choices in the presidential field, someone who supports these ideas would endorse a candidate whose positions appear to be largely incompatible.

Regardless of whether conservatives find “The Next Conservatism” appealing in all its particulars, it was still always going to be a mistake to endorse Romney, who does not even belong to the “previous” conservatism.

Update: Matt Continetti also notes that past recipients of the “Weyrich bump,” so to speak, have not turned out to be the eventual nominee.  Considering who some of the nominees, that isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world.  Still, for Romney that can’t be an encouraging pattern.

Matt Lewis continues with the “Romney is the social conservative alternative” theme.

There has been a good deal of discussion of my rather angry rebuke to this City Journal piece, which made me wonder whether I had misread what the author was saying.  So I went back to the original piece to find that it said things like this:

In 1861, the faith that all men have a right to life, liberty, and the fruits of their industry was invoked as readily on the Rhine and the Neva as on the Potomac and the Thames.

Really?  As readily on the Neva as on the Potomac?  That must be why the history of Russian liberalism is so long and robust.  Oh, that’s right, this is absurd.  But it is the heart of Beran’s entire thesis: in 1861, America, Germany and Russia were all heading in a liberalising direction, but then something supposedly happened that contradicted or interrupted this. 

Beran wrote:

But in the decade that followed, a reaction gathered momentum. Around the world, privilege rose up to defend its prerogatives. In Russia, in Germany, and in America, grandees with their backs against the wall met the challenge of liberty with a new philosophy of coercion.

The “philosophy of coercion” was based, he says, in paternalism and “militant nationalism,” which, of course, Abraham Lincoln, German liberals and Russian Tsars did not espouse.  No, wait, that’s also untrue.  All of them espoused both to one degree or another.  (Militant nationalism was not the monopoly of 19th century liberals, but they promoted it very actively.)  If the liberals and reformers Beran champions likewise espoused paternalist and militant nationalist doctrines, what does that do to his entire bizarre reading of history?  I think it demolishes it entirely. 

First of all, many of his claims are simply wrong or so one-sided that they cannot be taken seriously.  Privilege did not “rise up” in Russia.  As for paternalism, German and Austrian liberals were very keen on rationalising and organising society according to their principles.  Once in power, they represented a small political elite that sought to institute universal reforms and were hostile to the particular and local institutions of different regions of their states.  Their paternalism was often anticlerical in nature, which hardly makes it less coercive or elitist.  These liberals were strongly nationalistic and became more so as they came to identify the German national cause with their own political doctrine, while they associated other nations (especially Slavic nations) with forces of reaction.  Hence their alliance with Bismarck.  If there were Southerners who wanted to expand into the Caribbean, it wasn’t out of a belief in the equality of nations or a lack of nationalism that kept Northerners from supporting those goals.  Indeed, once the “threat” of expanding slavery had been eliminated, it would be Northerners, particularly Northeasterners, who would become very keen on expanding political and economic power in the Caribbean and Latin America and beyond.  Our colonies in the Pacific and Caribbean were not “slave colonies,” but they were still subjugated against the will of the inhabitants and our rule over them justified in terms of racial and cultural supremacy. 

The likelihood of slavery taking hold in the free states was extremely remote, and the spectre of this takeover was a kind of “it’s them or us” propaganda.  While acknowledging that the claims appear vastly exaggerated in retrospect, Beran takes Lincoln’s rhetoric about “returning despotism” at face value, yet the same language of opposing tyranny and despotism being employed against Lincoln by Southerners naturally receives no attention.  It spoils the myth of noble champions of freedom fighting sinister forces of paternalism.  As Beran tells it, you might be forgiven for thinking that the South was filled with Metternich clones instead of Jeffersonians who  spoke of “the consent of the governed” and invoked the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions.  The point is not to swap the roles in the myth around, but to challenge the sort of awful thinking that tries to reduce historical complexity into a simple morality play or ideological object lesson. 

Beran writes:

The coercive party in America, unbroken in spirit, might have realized its dream of a Caribbean slave empire. Cuba and the Philippines, after their conquest by the United States, might have become permanent slave colonies. Such a nation would have had little reason to resist Bismarck’s Second Reich, Hitler’s third one, or Russia’s Bolshevik empire.

That is the real point of this awful article.  The South had to be beaten so that we could fight the Nazis and become an anticommunist superpower.  In reality, the United States had no reason to “resist” Bismarck’s Second Reich, since we properly had no quarrel with Germany great enough to justify our entry into WWI, and regardless of how the war propaganda portrayed it we did not become involved primarily for ideological reasons.  The actual reason for fighting Hitler’s Germany was a desire to intervene on behalf of Britain and the German declaration of war against America–it was not really that liberalism compelled us to intervene.  His entire interpretation relies on the assumption that it was only the triumph of a liberal philosophy over a “coercive” one that made it possible to “resist” the Germans and Soviets, as if fighting against other major powers required liberal ideology.

Furthermore, Beran believes that it would not have been enough to allow the South to go its own way, since they would have sided with the “bad guys”:

The historical probabilities would have been no less grim had Lincoln, after initiating his revolution, failed to preserve the U.S. as a unitary free state. The Southern Republic, having gained its independence, would almost certainly have formed alliances with regimes grounded in its own coercive philosophy; the successors of Jefferson Davis would have had every incentive to link arms with the successors of Otto von Bismarck.

As I have already said, this is not simply silly but it is also a terrible counterfactual.  The South had strong economic ties with Britain and France, and was broadly sympathetic to Jeffersonian political philosophy.  They had no strong cultural or ideological affinities with Wilhelmine Germany.  Besides being uninterested in intervening in European conflicts, as most Americans were through WWI and the interwar period, independent Southerners would have had little reason to ally with Wilhelmine Germany.  Beran shows here that he fundamentally doesn’t understand the pre-WWI American mind, and doesn’t understand American foreign policy before WWI.  Neither does he understand that alliances were not made in this period (or, for that matter, in most periods) on the basis of ideological similarity or solidarity (the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894 ought to be proof enough), but are based in the strategic interests of the states involved. 

Incidentally, in my view, it would have been an equally grave error for an independent Southern republic to become entangled in European conflicts just as it was an error for the U.S. to become so entangled, but there would have been nothing uniquely undesirable or sinister in allying with the Germans rather than with the Entente.  If there had been such an alliance, it would not have been on the basis of ideological affinity in any case, but on the basis of shared interests.