Meanwhile, Republican officeholders who want to explain why they acted to prevent the collapse of the U.S. banking system can get no hearing from voters seized with certainty that a bank collapse would have done no harm to ordinary people. Support for TARP has become a career-ender for Republican incumbents, and we shall see what it does to Mitt Romney, the one national Republican figure who still defends TARP.

——————

Whatever the reason, the intellectual right accords a deference to the wants and wishes of the financial industry that is seldom accorded to agriculture, manufacturing, transport or retailing.

But it’s not always true that what’s good for Goldman Sachs is good for the economy, or vice versa. Nor is what “the markets” want the same as what free-market economics require. Finance plays with other people’s money: financial disasters damage people and businesses who never participated in the fatal transaction. For that reason, financial firms are justly regulated in ways that other firms are not. And yet nearly 80 years after the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, influential conservatives — including The Wall Street Journal editorial board — argued that trillions of dollars of derivatives trading should be exempt from regulation. ~David Frum

In other words, deferring to the interests of the financial sector is an intellectual disgrace and a compromise of free market principles, but shamelessly throwing public money at financial institutions as part of an unaccountable, outrageous power-grab by the executive was an important and necessary thing to do. I’m glad we sorted that out.

Many influential conservatives, including The Wall Street Journal editorial board, also argued for appropriating hundreds of billions of dollars to purchase toxic assets that were never purchased to prevent the collapse of the banking system that wasn’t actually in danger of collapse. This has since been hailed as a great victory and a triumph of wise policymaking, when it was even more true in September and October 2008 that “what “the markets” want the same as what free-market economics require.” There was broad Republican support in Congress for the TARP partly because “the intellectual right accords a deference to the wants and wishes of the financial industry that is seldom accorded to agriculture, manufacturing, transport or retailing.” Granted, it isn’t just the intellectual right that accords deference to these wishes. Republican leaders have made a point for the last two years to defer to those wishes as much as they possibly can. The problem in this case is not a failure to learn lessons, but the corruption that follows from actively supporting collusion between government and financial interests.

French Ambassador Pierre Vimont said recently that after diplomats cabled home that the treaty could run into problems, “People ask us, ‘Have you been drinking?’ ” ~The Washington Post, August 3, 2010

Via Steve Benen

One of the things that that has not received very much attention in connection with New START is the probable reaction to the treaty’s failure in Europe. European governments support U.S. and Russian arms reduction, and as the quote from August indicates it did not seem possible to them that the treaty might not succeed. The treaty was particularly important to non-nuclear European states that want to remove remaining U.S. nuclear weapons from their countries. As Bruno Lete’s report for the German Marshall Fund explained:

Any U.S.-Russian arms control agreement brings new opportunities to denuclearize the European continent. The strongest advocates of this idea are the European “non-nuclear weapon states” who are hosting U.S. warheads under a NATO flag. These countries—Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey—together host an estimated total of 150 to 220 U.S. tactical nuclear weapons. In 2006, the Belgian Senate passed a bill to remove U.S. weapons from Kleine Brogel Air Force Base. Last year, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle singled out the issue of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Germany during his first visits to NATO and the United States. Parliamentarians of all host countries have urged Obama to withdraw U.S. warheads from Europe, and foreign ministers have written to NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen asking for the issue to be placed higher on the alliance’s agenda. These European “abolitionists” fear that, without New START, Russia will be more reluctant to negotiate further arms limitations, giving fewer reasons for Washington to remove its weapons from Europe.

The news that U.S. tactical nuclear weapons will remain in Europe means that relations these governments are about to become more difficult. The leaked document ahead of the Lisbon summit means that the Europeans that had hoped New START would lead to the withdrawal of these weapons would have been disappointed no matter what happened in the Senate here.

On the treaty, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle told The Financial Times in an interview published today: “We are counting on its being ratified by the US and Russia.” European governments are going to be unpleasantly surprised that this may not happen after all. The failure of New START will ensure that there will be no discussion of tactical nuclear weapons with the Russians, who will have no reason to negotiate new arms reduction agreements if the U.S. cannot ratify this agreement. U.S.-Russian relations are going to take a hit because of Republican opposition to the arms reduction treaty, and our relations with Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey are also going to suffer.

Has the New START been lurking in the shadows? Kurt Volker seems to think so, since he wants the Senate to take it up in “full daylight,” which apparently doesn’t begin until 2011. I understand that treaty opponents are arguing that the Senate shouldn’t “rush” the treaty through because they want to see the treaty fail, but what I can’t quite understand is someone who thinks the treaty is important and that it should wait until it can’t possibly be ratified.

Volker’s proposals are also a bit maddening:

Congress and the administration should:

• agree on a program for modernization of US nuclear forces to ensure maximum safety, effectiveness, and reliability;

• reach a clear understanding that nothing in the treaty limits US missile defense efforts, and agree on a program of continued development of missile defenses, including in Europe to cover the territory of all NATO allies; and

• agree that there will be no unilateral US withdrawal of the small number of remaining US nuclear weapons from Europe, and that there will be no further nuclear treaties submitted to the Senate for ratification, until we have addressed the problem of the thousands of Russian tactical nuclear weapons based on the borders of Europe.

The first part is what the administration has been trying to do all year. Treaty supporters already have a “clear understanding” that the treaty doesn’t limit missile defense, and the administration has already committed to the continued development of missile defense in Europe. Our NATO ambassador, Ivo Daalder, was just promoting a NATO missile defense program just yesterday! This is the missile defense program that Russia and NATO will be discussing at Lisbon for the next NATO summit. Republicans have had several opportunities to acknowledge that Obama supports missile defense programs, but they have chosen instead to pretend that he does not. Nothing in the new year is going to change that. The tactical nuke issue is the greatest red herring of them all. There is no way to address the tactical nuclear weapons in Russia’s arsenal until this treaty is ratified. Delaying ratification of New START puts off addressing that issue even longer.

Volker becomes more myopic as he turns to the “reset” itself. Claiming that the “reset” has yielded nothing that wouldn’t have been achieved anyway, he goes on to say:

Second, the argument that failure to ratify would endanger the reset policy is essentially an argument that Russia is blackmailing the United States: that it is poised to resume destructive behavior unless the US does what it wishes and ratifies the treaty. I doubt that this is true, but regardless of merit, it is certainly no argument to make to a United States senator.

Well, no, this isn’t what the argument means. The treaty should be ratified solely on its merits, but there certainly is a political argument in favor of ratification as well. One has to assume that the “reset” was necessitated by “destructive behavior” on the part of Russia rather than repeated, endless provocations by the U.S. Not only is this not true, but it is obviously not the way the Russians see things. As the Russian government looks at it, the “reset” has provided absolutely nothing for Russia, and Russia has scrapped defensive missile sales to Iran while it is being berated for “occupying” South Ossetia. Ratifying New START is the only thing that the administration has pledged to do that actually serves Russian interests as well as American interests. The point isn’t that Russia is going to engage in “destructive behavior” if the treaty isn’t ratified, but that Russia has no incentive to sacrifice its own interests for the sake of good relations with the U.S. if the U.S. cannot even do something as simple as ratify a modest arms reduction treaty that is clearly in the American interest.

All of this is academic, since delaying the vote virtually ensures the treaty’s defeat. There aren’t fourteen Republican votes for this treaty, especially not when several incumbent Republicans who may face primary challenges from the right are up for re-election in 2012. The treaty has been awaiting ratification all year, and it was voted out of committee two months ago. There has been more than enough time to determine whether the treaty merits ratification. The lame-duck session exists to conclude important business that could not be or was not addressed earlier. To argue that the treaty vote should be delayed until next year is another way of saying that it isn’t very important or shouldn’t be ratified at all. Volker can’t actually bring himself to say it, but in effect he is making an argument that the treaty ought to be shelved. With supporters like this, the treaty hardly needs opponents.

President Obama’s hopes of ratifying a new arms control treaty with Russia this year appeared to unravel on Tuesday as a Senate Republican leader moved to block a vote in what could be a devastating blow to the president’s most tangible foreign policy achievement.

Mr. Obama had declared ratification of the New Start treaty his “top priority” in foreign affairs for the lame-duck session of Congress that opened this week. But the chances of winning the two-thirds vote required for passage of the treaty appeared to collapse with the announcement by Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate and the party’s point man on the issue, that the Senate should not vote on it this year. ~Peter Baker

One of the things ratification optimists kept coming back to was that Kyl was the key to success. As long as the administration could buy him off with enough money for nuclear modernization, Kyl would back the treaty and the party would follow his lead. I hardly discussed Kyl in my previous posts about the treaty because I assumed that he was not going to provide the administration with the needed support to put the treaty to a vote and pass it this year. My guess is that his idea of what counts as sufficient funding for nuclear modernization is much greater than the administration is willing to pay, but we will find out next year.

There was a significant problem with placing hopes for ratification in Kyl. First, the negotiations have had the dynamic of a hostage-taking: Obama will pay what Kyl wants, or the treaty dies. Obama went along with this. I’m not sure that there was anything else he could do at this point, but there it is. Kyl may have realized that a lame-duck vote won’t get him as much as he can get if he delays the vote. If the administration has been desperately trying to win Kyl over for the lame-duck session, they will be even more accommodating in the new year. Of course, once the treaty vote is delayed, the entire process has to start over. That increases Kyl’s leverage, which becomes even more crucial in the next Congress because of reduced Democratic numbers.

Another part of this is that Republican opposition to the treaty definitely hardened after the midterms, and it became even more intense after Obama made a point of declaring ratification in the lame-duck session a “top priority.” This was the equivalent of telling hostage-takers which hostage was most valuable to him, and so they made a point of delaying and thereby effectively sinking the treaty.

My fear is that the impulse to deal Obama a significant defeat on a treaty that conservative activists already hate will be stronger than any quid pro quo the administration can make with Kyl. For his part, Obama must feel as if he has been played for a fool, which may make him unwilling to offer Kyl anything more. Leaving aside the politics for a moment, it is a rather depressing thought that one of the least substantively controversial treaties of the last two decades is most likely not going to pass and may never even be voted on. More depressing is the realization that the treaty was already having a demonstrable effect on improving relations with the other major nuclear power in the world, and once ratified it would have enhanced American security and served as the basis for future negotiations on other arms control issues not addressed by this treaty. So much for that.

P.S. Though it was written before Kyl’s announcement, Stephen Blank’s anti-START, anti-Russian article in World Affairs Journal is practically a victory celebration for the fundamentally dishonest arguments that have contributed to the treaty’s delay and probable defeat.

Update: For those who would like to understand what prompted Kyl’s call for a delay, Dr. Jeffrey Lewis had the explanation last week:

Senator Kyl, prompted by sources inside NNSA [National Nuclear Security Administration], is now mulling over whether to demand another delay in ratification, followed by a multiyear design/construction appropriation next year to guarantee that the money will be available in future years. Did you know Congress could do that? Yes, they can! (Here is a nice primer on the topic.) But Congressional appropriators almost never do, since the annual appropriations process is an essential element of Congressional oversight.

The House and Senate Appropriators are going to refuse such an obvious usurpation of their prerogatives. That means that the little birds at NNSA probably can’t win the battle over multiyear appropriations, but it can blow up the entire deal.

This doesn’t make what Kyl is doing any better, but it helps explain why this is happening.

Under these circumstances, Obama has the opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national interests ahead of personal or political ones.

To that end, we believe Obama should announce immediately that he will not be a candidate for reelection in 2012. ~Doug Schoen and Patrick Caddell

This is extremely bad advice for all the reasons James Joyner lays out here. Common sense tells us that an incumbent President making such an announcement has already resigned himself to irrelevance and failure. Schoen and Caddell take for granted that the public has already judged Obama such a failure that they have supposedly passed a vote of no-confidence in his leadership in the midterm election. Like most other things Doug Schoen says about politics in America, this is not true, but he and Caddell are claiming that accepting the no-confidence vote is Obama’s key to success. Of course, just the opposite would occur.

Instead of being liberated to govern “effectively,” Obama would see whatever political capital he still has drain away. The public would not be galvanized for decisions of any kind. On the contrary, whatever residual respect Obama’s supporters may have had for him would largely evaporate, and he would become a near-universal target for mockery. Everywhere he went, Obama would have his own rhetoric thrown back in his face even more often than he does now. The Democrats would be consumed by the battle for the succession, which would in turn be a poisoned chalice for the politician emerging as the next nominee, and he would all but guarantee the election of a Republican and secure his reputation as a political disaster for the Democrats. In Congress, the leadership of both parties would bide their time and wait out the remaining years of Obama’s term.

The most comical part of the op-ed comes when the discussion turns to foreign policy:

On foreign policy, Obama could better make hard decisions about Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan based on what is reasonable and responsible for the United States, without the political constraints of a looming election. He would be able to deal with a Democratic constituency that wants to get out of Afghanistan immediately and a Republican constituency that is committed to the war, forging a course that responds not to the electoral calendar but to the facts on the ground.

If Obama doesn’t have to face the voters again, maybe he would decide to give antiwar activists what they want, order the rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and leave the consequences to his Republican successor. It is possible that the “political constraints of a looming election” have made Obama’s policies more hawkish than they might have otherwise been.

One assumes that “what is reasonable and responsible for the United States” is whatever Schoen and Caddell believe should be done. Let me just say that I very much hope Obama still has the “political constraints of a looming election” when it comes to making decisions on these questions. Bush needlessly prolonged and intensified large-scale American involvement in Iraq once he was freed of such “political constraints.” His lame-duck status was certainly liberating. It allowed him to ignore the midterm election results in 2006 and continue a war that the overwhelming majority of Americans wanted brought to an end. What appear to Beltway creatures as hindrances on the government’s “effectiveness” are what the rest of us call mechanisms of accountability and self-government. We don’t have very many of them, and the last thing we need right now is to have a President who is not bound by them.

The print edition of The American Conservative is returning in December. You may have already read some of the articles from the December issue that are available online, but if you haven’t I recommend Dr. Leon Hadar’s article on the Tea Party and foreign policy, Dr. Paul Gottfried’s article debunking Glenn Becks’ oversimplified portrait of early 20th century progressives, Jim Antle’s article on fiscal conservatism and military spending, and Michael Brendan Dougherty’s article on the Fed and Ben Bernanke. Don’t overlook Daniel Flynn’s review of Proud to Be Right. I found the review enjoyable, but I would also recommend taking a look at the book, especially Michael’s contribution. Michael has written a very sharp essay on how opposition to the Iraq war crystallized and shaped his conservatism.

The cover article by Justin Raimondo is also worth reading. On the whole, Raimondo is correct that Obama alienated many of his progressive supporters by escalating the war in Afghanistan. For their part, they were badly mistaken and misled if they ever expected him to do otherwise. After all, he specifically campaigned on the pledge to make the war in Afghanistan a priority of his administration. Even though there were numerous warning signs that Obama was a conventional liberal internationalist and a supporter of virtually every military intervention in American history, which many antiwar activists and writers tried to downplay and ignore as much as they could during the election campaign, it is certainly true that Obama was the only candidate in 2008 who could have ever been plausibly described as antiwar. Antiwar voters settled for the best major party candidate they could get. As it turned out, the best they could get wasn’t much.

I have made my objections several times to the Pew poll Raimondo uses at the start of his article, but before I come back to them I wanted to address a different point. There was one other line that didn’t seem quite right. Raimondo writes:

Just as Obama demoralized his base and mobilized his enemies by pushing the wrong mix of foreign-policy hawkishness and domestic statism, Republicans like Mitt Romney are itching to pull another bait-and-switch on the Right by putting militarism ahead of domestic conservatism.

I agree that Romney wants to put militarism ahead of domestic conservatism, or at least he is giving every indication that this is what he wants, but it’s not clear that this is really a bait-and-switch. To the extent that the inane Republican foreign policy criticism of the last two years is well-received among rank-and-file conservatives, and to the extent that the rhetoric of American exceptionalism-as-hegemonism is popular on the right, Republican leaders are making their aggressive and confrontational foreign policy a central element of their opposition to Obama, and it is not driving their supporters away. If Republican voters are not positively endorsing militarism, neither are they recoiling from it.

That brings us back to the Pew survey. 49% did say that the U.S. should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.” In the same poll, 57% of the public favored keeping America as the only superpower, 53% viewed China as a major threat, and almost two-thirds favored (63%) military strikes against Iran in the event that it acquired a nuclear weapon. In all three cases, respondents who belonged to the Council on Foreign Relations gave answers that were markedly less supportive of unipolarity, perceiving China as a major threat, and war with Iran. There was a stark contrast between elite and popular views on these questions, and the popular views were the ones more aligned with foreign policy hawkishness. Obviously, those popular views didn’t come out of nowhere. They had to be encouraged and fueled by misinformation and demagoguery, which is what Republican leaders have been providing on a daily basis for years.

The point is not that the public isn’t war-weary. It is. It is that we can’t assume that a poll result that shows 49% support for minding our own business translates into support for a more modest, restrained, sane foreign policy. Among Republicans, just 43% support “minding our own business.” Alongside the peak in “isolationist” sentiment was this finding:

Fully 44% say that because the United States “is the most powerful nation in the world, we should go our own way in international matters, not worrying about whether other countries agree with us or not.” That is by far the highest percentage agreeing since the question was first asked by Gallup in 1964.

As the report goes on to say:

While still a minority view, 44% agree with this statement today, up 16 points from 28% in 2006 and far exceeding the previous peak of 34% in 1993 and 1995.

Republicans were disproportionately likely to agree with this statement (50%), compared with 45% of Democrats and 37% of independents. They were also more likely (78%) than the other two groups to say that Iran’s nuclear program is a “major threat” to the U.S., and far more likely to support military action against Iran (79%) if Iran acquired a nuclear weapon. That brings us to Pew’s findings on the public’s views on “pre-emptive” (aggressive) warfare:

As expected, there are substantial partisan differences over whether it is justified to use force against countries that threaten the U.S., but have not attacked: 65% of Republicans say it is at least sometimes justified, compared with 44% of Democrats and 50% of independents. Similarly, 54% of CFR members who identify or lean Republican say the use of force is at least sometimes justified compared with 24% of those who identify or lean Democratic.

In other words, Republican CFR elites are generally more inclined to militarism than their Democratic counterparts, but they are relatively less inclined to militarism than Republican members of the general public. Despite the debacle of Iraq, fully two-thirds of Republicans continued to believe that “pre-emptive” (aggressive) war is sometimes justified, and three-quarters of them supported war against Iran when this survey was taken last year. If Republican leaders put militarism ahead of domestic conservatism in the future, they will in many respects be giving their constituents exactly what they claim to want.

According to other surveys, a majority of the public may be more resistant to hegemonism now than it used to be, but that resistance is not principally located on the right.

Jonathan Last has discovered that Obama is a vain and ambitious man. This is hard-nosed investigative reporting at its best. Ahem. The article is not much more than a compilation of very familiar episodes for anyone who has spent much time following Obama’s career. One part of the article jumped out at me. For some reason, Last insisted on padding this redundant article with an entirely unnecessary lie. Last writes:

Obama’s vanity is even more jarring when paraded in the foreign arena. In April, Poland suffered a national tragedy when its president, first lady, and a good portion of the government were killed in a plane crash. Obama decided not to go to the funeral. He played golf instead.

Leave aside the small matter that this does not actually show Obama’s vanity. In any case, Last is being deliberately misleading by making it seem as if Obama had chosen to play golf over paying his respects in Poland. Let’s recall that President Kaczynski’s tragic death on his way to commemorate the Katyn massacre occurred at a time when most commercial air traffic in western Europe and across the Atlantic had been shut down because of the eruption of that Icelandic volcano. As it turned out, the shutdown of commercial traffic was probably an overreaction, and the risk to jet engines from the volcanic ash may not have been as great as originally feared, but at the time no one was going to be flying through the ash cloud from the U.S. to get to Europe. Angela Merkel was not able to reach Poland in time because of the delay in her return from her visit here, and many other heads of government and heads of state who might have wanted to be there were unable to attend. All of this was quite memorable, and it is also something that is very easily checked. Last must assume his audience has very short memories, or perhaps he is more interested in scoring another cheap point than in reporting things straightforwardly.

Perhaps more striking is Last’s decision to follow up this bit of deception with a complaint that Obama did not attend the 20th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Obama’s non-participation at this event undermines the vanity charge in at least one way. By not attending and by refusing to pretend that the collapse of communism was primarily or solely an American accomplishment, and by honoring the peoples of eastern Europe and the USSR for freeing themselves (which is what actually happened), he kept the occasion from becoming another exercise in self-congratulation for the U.S. and for himself as the current President. Presumably a man defined so strongly by his vanity, as Last claims Obama is, would have been there in a flash to soak up the applause and fanfare.

It seems to me that there’s no question that Obama is vain. I don’t know how anyone who campaigns for office and has the presumption to consider himself worthy of being entrusted with so much power could be anything other than vain. It seems to me that it is inherently unhealthy and dangerous for any one man to be entrusted with that much power, but this is the gargantuan executive that Last and his colleagues adore. If they would have more humble, self-effacing chief executives, perhaps they should call for a significant reduction in the powers of the office.

It seems to count against the overall argument that Last’s two chief examples of Obama’s vanity overseas are misrepresentations or misunderstandings on on the part of Last, and it hardly helps Last’s credibility that he felt the need to misrepresent one of the episodes to invent evidence for his thesis.

I’m optimistic because while our political system is a mess, the economic and social values of the country remain sound.

——–

Like the civil rights movement, this movement will ask Americans to live up to their best selves. But it will do other things besides.

It will have to restore the social norms that prevailed through much of American history: when narcissism and hyperpartisanship was mitigated by loyalties larger than tribe and self; when competition between the parties was limited and constructive, not total and fratricidal. ~David Brooks

So Brooks assumes that America’s social values are sound, but our social norms are in dire need of restoration. That doesn’t bode well for Brooks’ enterprise. What Brooks means when he talks about larger loyalties is greater conformity to a shared American nationalism.

What is it that Brooks wants? He would like a movement that rallies around his particular brand of Hamiltonian nationalism and “energetic” government, which he called “national greatness conservatism” once upon a time, and which he has often enough identified with the political career of John McCain. It was a truly terrible idea when he proposed it 13 years ago, and it hasn’t improved with age.

Perhaps what troubles me the most about Brooks’ proposal is the conceit that he speaks for many of the Americans who are not represented by our current political system, when on every major policy decision and initiative of at least the last decade the government has hardly ever done anything of which Brooks disapproved. As a good Hamiltonian nationalist and meliorist, Brooks has never seen a large federal initiative that he didn’t like or couldn’t support. We have had at least a decade in the which the government has been dominated by something that strongly resembles significant parts of the “national greatness agenda,” and it has been steadily ruining and bankrupting the country. This is all the more remarkable when the main goal of this agenda is “preserving American pre-eminence.”

It’s worth revisiting the original proposal to remember just what it is that Brooks means when he talks about “national greatness” and “preserving American pre-eminence.” The great problem that Brooks saw back in 1997 was that Americans were entirely too small in their ambitions:

American politicians show little evidence of the great national vigor that animates this building [the Library of Congress]. They don’t dare to make great plans or issue large challenges to themselves and their country. At a moment of world supremacy unlike any other, Americans are not asking big questions about their civilization, nor are they being asked anything but the sorts of things pollsters and marketers want to know. And so our politics has become degrading and boring. Political conflict appears trivial, vicious for no good reason.

Essentially, Americans needed to have larger goals and pursue grander projects that would be sufficiently ennobling and impressive to match American supremacy. Brooks’ idea was that the federal government existed to facilitate this. “The national-greatness ideal assigns the federal government another role: It should accomplish national missions.” What missions did he think it should be taking on? It could be anything. “It almost doesn’t matter what great task government sets for itself, as long as it does some tangible thing with energy and effectiveness.” That sums up Brooks’ view of the role of government fairly well: I don’t care what it does, so long as it does it well.

Thirteen years later, Brooks’ chief goal is to maintain American world supremacy. While his latest version of the “national greatness” argument is an appeal to create a “broad revitalization agenda” and to overcome entrenched resistance to necessary debt reduction, it is important to emphasize that Brooks does all this to make sure that the U.S. retains global supremacy. That leads him to write things like this:

It will take a revived patriotism to get people to look beyond their short-term financial interest to see the long-term national threat. Do you really love your tax deduction more than America’s future greatness [bold mine-DL]? Are you really unwilling to sacrifice your Social Security cost-of-living adjustment at a time when soldiers and Marines are sacrificing their lives for their country in Afghanistan?

It seems to me that the last thing our political culture needs is another round of hectoring people for being insufficiently patriotic on the basis of their disagreements over fiscal policy. “If you don’t agree to this proposal, you want America to collapse!” A good way to encourage resentment among a great many Americans is to try to guilt them into supporting a proposal through cynical invocations of the sacrifice of soldiers. Brooks’ column today is a good example of the pernicious effect of making fiscal and economic policy debates the subject of a new culture war.

It would be one thing to call on Americans to give up benefits for the sake of their children and grandchildren, who will otherwise be burdened with the costs of our indulgence. That might be something that could inspire people to change their minds. For that matter, the goal of “preserving American pre-eminence” isn’t going to inspire people who aren’t already ideological conservatives or committed liberal internationalists. In other words, the people for whom Brooks’ goal is most meaningful are the people he’s trying to oppose.

13 years ago, Brooks’ “national greatness” argument was to use American supremacy to pursue “some larger national goal,” and by now the larger national goal to which Brooks calls Americans is simply to sustain American supremacy. Hegemony has become its own reward, and it is taken for granted that sustaining it is what is actually best for the United States.

P.S. Greg Scoblete reviewed the history of “national greatness” conservatism during the 2008 campaign. Greg hit the mark when he described “national greatness conservatism” as “one of the late 1990s silliest intellectual fads.”

Update: It also doesn’t help Brooks’ argument that voters don’t care about debt.

He [Obama] reacted to the election’s outcome in a way that suggested he’s still in his own world, still seeing a reality no one else is seeing. The problem wasn’t his policies, but that he didn’t explain them well.

——-

To hold the center you have to respect your own case enough to argue for it, and respect the people enough to explain it. ~Peggy Noonan

Yes, these quotes are from the same column. In the first part, Obama is a delusional, snakebit cretin because he thinks his mistake was failing to argue for his policies and explain them. In the second part, Republicans are in danger of losing the center if they don’t argue for their policies and “respect the people enough” to explain them. In other words, if the Republicans go on to lose the center it will be because they failed to persuade and explain, but Obama lost the center because of the innate horribleness of his agenda. I tend to doubt that voters in “the center” make such substantive policy judgments. If they did, they would not swing from from one party to another in just a few years and then back again. If they do, it must apply to both parties more or less equally.

For that matter, I’m not sure that poor messaging or lack of persuasion explains voter backlash against the majority party or incumbent. The “poor messaging” argument relies on an assumption that voters are judging a party based on the legislation it has produced. If messaging were better, the public would endorse the party’s agenda, but because the messaging was poor the public turned against it because of a misunderstanding. Suppose instead that the public, especially those swing voters, object to government pursuing the “wrong” priorities, and suppose that they also object to the appearance and reality of gross incompetence.

Voters seem to identify the “wrong” priorities according to whether they are “relevant” to them, and the more irrelevant the government’s activities seem to be the more frustrated these voters become at the sight of the government’s “neglect” of the voters’ top priorities. They are not frustrated because they know or care about the substance of the rest of the agenda. What they do know is that the rest of the agenda seems to have no bearing on what concerns them. If that’s right, Obama might have done anything, or nothing, and it would have seemed as if he was wasting time or not spending enough time on the “relevant” priorities. It’s not clear to me that voters in such a mood can be satisfied.

Perceived neglect is then counted as a form of incompetence: the government is supposedly ignoring the “real,” urgent problems while attending to problems that can wait. If the overwhelming issue during this cycle has been the economy, public frustration with the administration is best understood as discontent with what the public perceives as neglect of the country’s economic woes. That means that the content of Obama’s agenda and his messaging were both largely beside the point. That also suggests that there is no urgent demand for repeal of much of that agenda. On the contrary, starting with attempts to undo Obama’s agenda will be perceived as another exercise in neglect. Of course, if both parties never did anything that might frighten the horses swing voters, the concerns of the vast majority of the electorate would be neglected for the sake of placating a group of independents that doesn’t seem to have constant, discernible views on much of anything.