Second, while the parties inhabit opposite wings of the political spectrum, they have a surprising amount in common. On civil liberties, tax reform, education reform and decentralizing the political system — the keystones of the Tories’ “Big Society” package — they share a philosophical commitment that puts the individual before the state and a political belief in the value of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”: families, neighborhood associations, charities, churches and the like. ~Alex Massie

Massie has been confident all along that Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have this common ground, and I am inclined to agree with him, which is why I think Prof. Fox exaggerates the Liberal resistance to a Red Toryish agenda. There are policy differences that could blow up the coalition, and there are issues where the two parties are diametrically opposed, but the things Massie mentions possibly represent the glue that could keep the coalition from fracturing. My agreement with Massie is also why I find expressions of sympathy for Cameron and Blond among “reformist” conservatives here in the U.S. a bit puzzling.

On the whole, “refomist conservatives” are interested in re-directing the welfare state to what they argue are conservative ends. Decentralization as such holds relatively little interest for them, and to the extent that it impedes the implementation of national domestic policy proposals decentralization is unwelcome. This may be too sweeping of a generalization, but on the whole my impression is that “reformist” conservatives may or may not have Tocquevillian instincts but almost all of them prefer Hamiltonian means. Much of “reformist” conservatism is concerned with providing an alternative agenda for an increasingly centralized system, rather than with the broad distribution of power that Blond is proposing. “Reformist” conservatism for the most part means more of the bureaucratic, managerial state apparatus that Blond strongly criticizes and opposes. As creative as some “reformists” can be, they are ultimately tinkering around the edges of a neoliberal consensus that Blond flatly rejects.

In his inaugural speech launching the think tank ResPublica last November, Blond made this statement:

So, as a radical pro-market thinker, I would like to see genuinely rather than putatively free markets and systems of economic exchange. But to achieve free markets we must overcome their neo-liberal construal. Why? Because markets conceived on a neo-liberal model require the bureaucratic and authoritarian state. Why? Because if the economic actor is conceived as purely self-interested, as obeying no external codes, as living only by the internal dictate of his/her will and volition, then this actor needs regulation and tight external control. Otherwise, they will violate the rights of others who, also conceived on a similar aggressive model, will seek to do the same. Something external to this model is required in order to police this model, something with absolute power and authority: the state. Thus, neo-liberalism or market fundamentalism requires all the bureaucracy and external management of the state in order to function and trade. Hence there is nothing efficient about neo-liberal efficiency and nothing free about its freedom.

To the extent that “Cameronism” reflects Blond’s thinking on these questions and can actually put them into practice, that could keep the coalition from cracking up. It would also be well worth contemplating how American conservatives could borrow and learn from it. Then again, to the extent that Cameronism reflects Blond’s thinking, American conservatives are most likely going to turn against it and oppose anything that remotely resembles it.

The lesson for American Democrats is obvious. Heavy government spending is not a political winner when the private sector economy is ailing [bold mine-DL]. Britain voted Conservative in the 1930s, even more so than last week, and Americans seem poised to vote Republican in November.

The results were also disappointing for the Liberal Democrats. Their leader Nick Clegg gave a shining performance in Britain’s first party leaders’ debate April 15, and Lib Dems soared in the polls. But they sank when voters learned more about their platform, which included legalizing illegal immigrants and ditching the pound for the euro, and the party ended up winning fewer seats than in 2005.

Lesson: Flashy political newcomers better have some substance.

British Conservatives must also be disappointed that they failed to get a parliamentary majority. David Cameron worked hard to rebrand his party as modern, tolerant and concerned about the environment. But Conservatives failed to make themselves more attractive than Labor or Lib Dems in many targeted upscale seats.

In contrast, they did capture many Labor seats in modest-income areas. And they might have captured more: 3 percent of Britons voted for the UK Independence Party — votes that if they had gone Conservative would have given the party a solid majority in Parliament.

For American Republicans, there may be a lesson here, that seeking the approval of what David Brooks calls “the educated class” reduces your appeal to what is, in America at least, a larger number of ordinary middle-class people who are worried about government spending and increasingly skeptical of global warming alarmism. These are not people Washington insiders run across very much, but they cast lots of votes. ~Michael Barone

Barone’s misreading of what happened in the British election is undoubtedly superficially satisfying for American conservatives, which is what makes it that much more misleading and potentially dangerous for conservatives and Republicans if they take it seriously. There were several things happening during the final week of the election. In the closing week, Conservatives consolidated their support and increased their lead over both competitors, and it is reasonable to think that many late-deciding Conservative voters came out of the Liberal Democrats’ camp. The bursting of Clegg’s bubble and the increase of the Conservative polling lead are tied together.

The Conservatives picked up more seats this year than they did in 1979, and won 2 millions more votes than they did five years ago. Only those who expected an overwhelming landslide triumph, as Barone seems to expect for Republicans this year, could be truly disappointed in such improvement. The Liberal Democrats improved their percentage of the vote in an election with higher turnout. This did not represent a significant expansion of their voting coalition, but it was nonetheless an expansion that occurred alongside the Conservative surge. Their increased share of the vote was concentrated even more than before, which drives home their argument for electoral reform as much as it points to their weaknesses with the electorate on immigration and Europe.

Barone’s critique of the Liberal Democrats also contradicts itself: the flashy newcomer did have some substance, which Barone acknowledges in the previous sentence. He thinks that substance was a liability, but the substance was obviously there. The Liberals are on the verge of receiving four posts in Cameron’s Cabinet, which is their party’s first presence in government since WWII. Only the excessive expectations that they might finish second in the voting made their later success seem lacking. The lesson here for Republicans and their allies is to stop hyping their chances in the midterms and to begin setting realistic expectations for the fall, or the GOP will see their gains in November ridiculed as disappointing and lackluster.

On spending, Barone has somehow missed that none of the three leaders came clean with the public on the full extent and nature of the spending cuts that would have to be made by the next government. They did not dare risk a backlash from voters that aggressive government-cutting campaign pledges would have caused. It’s as if Barone never saw the widely-reported remarks of the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, saying that the party that implemented the severe austerity measures that would be needed would be out of power for a generation. That doesn’t mean that these austerity measures shouldn’t happen, but that what is good for Britain will not necessarily be good for the governing party (or, in this case, parties). Saying that the British voted for Conservatives in the 1930s is like saying that Americans voted for Democrats in the 1930s: both were the parties out of power at the beginning of the Depression, and both were swept into power for the next decade and a half. Despite an explosion in government spending under New Labour, 52% of British voters supported the two main center-left parties. That does not suggest deep hostility to “heavy government spending.”

Barone floats the possibility that Conservatives could have won over enough of the over 900,000 UKIP voters to put them into a majority on their own. How would Cameron have managed the balancing act of appealing to hard-core Euroskeptics without appearing obsessed with Europe as his three predecessors were perceived as being? Barone and others who have made this argument never say. As it was, Cameron had already dropped out of the EPP alliance in the European Parliament to satisfy his party’s Euroskeptics, a move for which he was constantly and excessively hammered in the press, and he had made clear that he would never support adoption of the euro and would seek a number of opt-outs for Britain from the Lisbon Treaty. Short of pledging to withdraw from the EU, what could Cameron have realistically done to win over UKIP voters?

Appealing to the “educated class,” as Barone puts it, is just one part of the story. There were nineteen marginal Labour constituencies the Conservatives very nearly won, including no less than Ed Balls’ constituency in Yorkshire of all places, and it is unlikely that they could have peeled away that many more Labour voters by returning to the themes that Cameron’s critics on the right insist are obvious winners. Arguably, Cameron made the Conservatives palatable enough in many Labour constituencies that the gains that they made became possible and might not have been possible otherwise.

The mistake that Barone keeps making is that he seems absolutely convinced that most voters are scandalized by large amounts of new government spending when this does not seem to be true at all. It is true among a highly-motivated, energized sub-group of one of the major parties here in the U.S., but most voters and most Americans do not share their intensity or many of their concerns. Having come up with a faulty explanation for what is motivating voter discontent, the rest of Barone’s analysis is marred throughout by the original mistaken assumption. Barone also seems to think that proposing the necessary and right policies for a government deep in debt and achieving electoral success somehow go hand in hand, as if democracies rewarded parties based on merit (as defined by center-right pundits) rather than according to the ups and downs of the economy.

If there is one lesson we have learned from the British election it is that all parties assume that serious fiscal responsibility is a losing proposition and they were all trying to delay the final reckoning that the electorate will deliver on any austerity government. Instinctively, the Republican leadership knows that principle and good policy have essentially no relationship to electoral success, which is why they have treated Paul Ryan’s budget proposal as if it were radioactive waste. As perverse as it seems, kicking out Labour may be the biggest favor British voters have ever done for the party, as they will now have the luxury of opposition to engage in constant rejectionism and demagoguery over the spending cuts that their excesses while in government have made necessary. It will probably work and they might be back in government in five years after they win by default, which is what Republican leaders have been hoping to do for the last year and a half.

Fresh off of organizing the signing of the unimaginative, meaninglessMount Vernon statement, Ed Meese has a national security manifesto (via Philip Klein) that he wants candidates, elected officials and “others who share these principles” to sign. At first glance, there is practically nothing on this list that anyone in the GOP would find objectionable, so this manifesto would appear to be almost as redundant and useless as the Mount Vernon statement, but the assumptions that seem to be behind several of the points make it simply ridiculous. One would be hard-pressed to find any candidate from either major party who would disagree with the importance of military readiness, an effective nuclear deterrent, preserving U.S. sovereignty, and a “foreign policy that supports our allies and opposes our adversaries.” Even if energy independence is more of a slogan than a realistic policy goal, the references to border security and “energy security” would be widely accepted by people across the spectrum. The potentially most controversial item is the opposition to amnesty for illegal immigrants, which is not really a national security matter and doesn’t belong on a national security manifesto.

Who wouldn’t agree that America should be a “nation free of Shariah”? Apparently the manifesto’s authors think this is a disputed point, as if there were a large contingent of “pro-Shariah” candidates running for office. Considering that one of the co-authors is Frank Gaffney, a grade-A loon who seems to hallucinate Islamic crescents in every symbol he sees, we can understand why this bold, courageous “anti-Shariah” position was included.

Likewise, the call for a “foreign policy that supports our allies and opposes our adversaries” is one that no one would seriously oppose, but what makes this point seem crazy is the assumption behind it that there are people in the government and the country who support the opposite. Affirming support for allies and opposition to enemies is so obvious that it is meaningless as a policy statement. It is the foreign policy equivalent of saying that one is opposed to crime and in favor of law and order, or that one supports education and opposes ignorance. The authors say that it should be “clearly preferable to be a friend of the United States,” and again no one is going to disagree, but they would have to be delusional if they thought that it was not clearly preferable to be a friend of the United States right now.

The one item that will stir some controversy, though perhaps not inside the Republican Party, is the opposition to civilian trials for those classified as enemy combatants and the implicit support for their indefinite detention at Guantanamo or elsewhere. Unfortunately, this means that the distinctive features of this manifesto are its alarmism over supposedly encroaching shari’a and its commitment to indefinitely imprisoning detainees in continued legal limbo. There is also the random call at the end to provide for “accurate portrayals of American history, including the necessity of defending freedom,” which is either an ideologically-loaded demand for triumphalist historical narratives or an utterly unremarkable request for historical accuracy.

What is most remarkable about this manifesto is that it addresses almost none of the major international and national security issues of the day, and aside from the two items I just mentioned there is nothing in the manifesto that could not have been written thirty years ago. I suppose that is to be expected since it is a self-conscious revival of Reagan-era themes, but it makes the manifesto that much more irrelevant. There is no mention of issues of proliferation one way or the other, no reference to arms reduction, and not a word about the two wars our forces are currently fighting. The administration may have renamed the “war on terror,” but as far as this manifesto is concerned it scarcely exists at all.

I’m coming to this a bit late, but I did have a few comments. One of the things about the attacks on Goldstone that has not made a lot of sense is that his attackers would want to emphasize his role in upholding apartheid-era laws as a judge in South Africa. After all, why would they want to point out that Goldstone was part of a government that Israel aligned itself with for decades? His enemies seem to think that this should make everyone dismiss whatever he and the U.N. Mission have had to say about Gaza, but even if we attached the worst possible interpretation to Goldstone’s record as a judge all that this would tell us is that “even an apartheid-era judge” can recognize the excesses and crimes committed in Gaza. That doesn’t muddy the waters at all, but instead makes the judgment against Israel that much more damning. That probably isn’t what his enemies had in mind when they launched this campaign against him.

It is supposed to be some sort of contradiction that Goldstone upheld harsh laws as a judge then and now is trying to hold another government accountable for its military excesses against a civilian population, but at worst this shows a habit of judging actions according to the law that exists. It could just as easily show a desire to hold even powerful states accountable for their violations of international law. Goldstone has been criticized as a “man of double standards,” but if his record shows us anything it is that this is precisely what he is not. Indeed, the reason why he has been subjected to these attacks is that he is not applying one standard for one group and another for a different group. What drives his attackers crazy is that he has applied the law to both sides of the conflict. His attackers might insist that Israel be given on a pass on any excesses and crimes it commits because Israel is on “our side” or is “like us” or “shares our values,” or more basically because Israel has a “right to defend itself” (which some of them take to mean a license to do whatever it wants). If the judgment seems biased against the vastly more powerful side, that is mostly a function of the disparity of power between the two sides. That “bias” could only be avoided if the jurist were constantly compensating for the disparity in power rather than looking at the actions committed.

Ross:

Wyden-Bennett was not my preferred health care reform either, but was it really no better than Obamacare from a conservative perspective? It scored as deficit neutral with many fewer spending cuts and tax increases than the legislation we actually got. It did away with Medicaid and S-CHIP entirely. And it severed the link between employment and insurance with one swift stroke. Yes, its mix of mandates and regulations mirrored some of the major features of Obamacare, but one could level a similar critique about the provisions of the alternative health care legislation that Paul Ryan and Tom Coburn co-sponsored, and I trust that NR would not welcome a primary challenge against either of those legislators.

No, they wouldn’t, which is part of what puzzles me about the Bennett episode. The more that one tries to discern what Bennett did that made him especially deserving of defeat, the more one realizes that his mistake was to have been a conventional Republican of the Bush Era. Unlike Ross, I don’t really have any sympathy for conventional Republicans of the Bush Era, and I have none at all for supporters of the TARP, but I can acknowledge that Bennett has not tried to make himself into a latter-day anti-bailout zealot as most of the embarrassing Congressional Republican leadership has done. He has not tried to morph into being something other than what he was.

Ross mentions NR’s Romney endorsement in 2008 in his post, so it is worth adding here that the Romney of 2007-08 during and after the primaries was basically indistinguishable from Bob Bennett on policy. As recently as last summer Mitt Romney went on Meet the Press and said this:

We [Republicans] have a healthcare plan. You, you look at Wyden-Bennett, that’s a healthcare plan that a number of Republicans think is a very good healthcare plan, one that we support. Take a look at that one.

Romney has said things like this, he endorsed Bennett for the Senate, and yet he remains a favorite candidate of National Review and continues to be the de facto front-runner for the next presidential contest. It’s as if there is always one standard for other office-holders, and a very different standard for Romney. At least Bennett has stood by his controversial votes and his record, unpopular as they were, and hasn’t spent the last five or six years running from his own words and deeds as Romney has. Bennett has not lamely tried to distinguish between the “good” TARP under Paulson and the “bad” TARP under Geithner, as Romney has tried to do, and as far as I know he has never insulted the intelligence of his audience by claiming that an individual mandate is an embodiment of the principle of personal responsibility.

Romney deserves at least as much scorn as Bennett does, and actually he deserves more, but he will not receive it from movement and party leaders and activists. Unless someone emerges with the political network, funding and charisma to stop him, it is hard to see how Romney does not prevail in the GOP’s winner-take-all primary system. In Utah, where a majority of the state electorate claimed to be against Bennett’s re-election, Romney is the most popular political figure despite being identified with a worse universal health care bill in Massachusetts and despite being an outspoken defender of the TARP in late 2008. Bennett is out for being no worse and actually a little better than Romney.

Bennett proposed a flawed bill that has never been (and never will be) voted on, but Romney signed a worse bill into law in Massachusetts, and his state is now paying the price for it. Bennett erred when he voted for the TARP along with most of his Senate colleagues, but he did not turn on a dime to claim that the abuses of the TARP had nothing to do with him. Bennett has stared political oblivion in the face and said that he would have done the same things if he had known what the price would be, while Romney seems to “evolve” new positions every few months depending on the circumstances. In my view, Bennett was wrong on certain issues, but he has demonstrated more basic integrity in this process than his supporter Mitt Romney has shown in his political career. If Bennett’s critics were consistent and honest, they would repudiate Romney even more forcefully.

P.S. I should add that both Paul Ryan and Tom Coburn, whose health care legislation Ross mentions here, also voted forthe TARP.

It is telling that Republicans and conservatives seem uninterested in mounting any strong resistance to Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court. A year ago, many on the right were furiously attacking the relatively unobjectionable Sotomayor, but now that Obama has nominated Kagan, who is apparentlyfar worse on civil liberties and executive power than the justice she will be replacing (or Sotomayor for that matter), there is a strange resignation to the inevitable. To hear their leaders and activists tell it, the GOP is rapidly gaining political strength, and they are obviously in a stronger position today than they were a year ago, but their response has so far been quite tepid.

Perhaps they are all too tired out from combating Sotomayor’s non-existent racism that they don’t have the energy to resist a nominee who appears to be a willing enabler of the worst excesses of the national security state. In reality, we all know that most Republicans have no interest in checking those excesses, and many of them have become so attached to defending such excesses that it has become part of their political identity. To the extent that most Republicans are content with or not overly concerned about Kagan, because she seems to line up with them on some of the issues on which the GOP has been appallingly bad, progressives, libertarians and small-government conservatives have reason to be worried.

Obviously, Kagan has enough votes to be confirmed regardless of what Republicans do, but it is a timely reminder how unimportant constitutional limits are to so many of the people who cannot cease talking about freedom here and abroad and how much many of them value a virtually unchecked executive. It appears that Obama has made a terrible choice, which is just one more in a long list of egregious decisions on civil liberties and the expansion/preservation of executive power. He should be excoriated for that, but unfortunately his opposition seems to have no interest in doing this. In an instance when Republicans’ reflexive, hysterical resistance to everything Obama says or does might actually serve the best interests of the Court and the country, they become indifferent or enthusiastic in response to one of his decisions. It would be a pleasant surprise if all the people who have been raging against the oppression of the health care bill could muster one-tenth of the intensity to challenge a nomination that could do significantly more permanent damage to constitutional liberty in the future than bad, unaffordable social legislation.

This confirmation process poses a real danger for progressive Democratic Senators, especially those up for re-election this year. When many of their core constituencies are already disaffected and unenthusiastic about voting in the fall and Democratic turnout is down generally, they will probably be alienating even more of their base by confirming Kagan. I fully expect all but a handful of Democrats in the Senate to roll over for the sake of a swift confirmation, and I tend to doubt that even someone as good on these issues as Feingold will put up much resistance. It is hard to see what will motivate their supporters to turn out this year if it leads to nothing but “centrist” compromises in Congress and the nomination of national security “centrists” to the Supreme Court.

Especially after the last decade, we need no more “fans of presidential power” on the Court. It would be ideal if we could have some serious critics or even foes of presidential power there, but at the very least we need justices who do not cheer executive power. Even from what little we think we know about Kagan’s views on these issues so far, she should not be confirmed.

Michael Desch argues in the new issue that boycott, divestment and sanction efforts aimed at Israel are unlikely to succeed. Indeed, these efforts strike me as a misguided and counterproductive in a few ways. These mechanisms are very rarely effective, and they also punish the population for decisions and policies that many or most of them may not actually support. Even if a majority voted for the government perpetuating the policies, it is hard to argue that they therefore “brought it on themselves” (never mind that this is what many “pro-Israel” commentators said in defense of the bombardment of Gaza). These measures represent a form of collective punishment that is both likely to backfire and wrong, and this is all the more clear when the reason for the boycotts and sanctions is to protest the target government’s collective mistreatment of an entire people. To the extent that these measures succeed in isolating a government, they allow that government to use international hostility as a bludgeon against its domestic critics and they make it easier to rally the population in support of the very policies that the boycotts and sanctions are targeting. Of course, this applies just as well and perhaps better to authoritarian governments that are less responsive and less accountable to their populations.

To the extent that boycotts, divestment and sanctions successfully cut off the people imposing them from the country they are targeting, all that this does is open the field to other investors and competitors. It deprives the boycott and divestment participants of whatever influence they might have had, and it will tend to make the target government even less responsive to the demands of the supporters of the boycott. BDS movements might work if the country being targeted were entirely dependent on one or a few other countries, but every remotely modern economy is diversified enough and connected to so many other so others that any company or institution’s decision to divest from a targeted state simply becomes a buying opportunity for its competitors overseas. Even if a large number of American and European firms could be pressured into supporting such a movement, which I very much doubt they could, there would be Indian, Chinese and other firms lining up to take advantage of Western withdrawals from the Israeli market. The same would hold true at the state level. As unlikely as U.S. and EU sanctions are, other major and rising powers would readily take advantage of them if they ever happened. If Western governments are going to be able to change Israeli policies in the territories, which seems less likely all the time, it would have to be through using what leverage they have rather than depriving themselves of influence through imposing morally-satisfying, useless sanctions.

It has become more common and acceptable to make comparisons between Israel and South Africa, but the more one thinks about this comparison the more misleading it is. As Desch points out, the demographic balance between the rulers and the ruled is significantly different. Should the Palestinian population grow to be two or three times the size of the Israeli Jewish population, the perpetuation of the occupation may become as untenable for Israel as the Nationalist government ultimately realized apartheid was for them. Another important difference that I don’t see mentioned very much in any of these discussions is that South Africa’s extensive system of segregation was a system imposed inside its own internationally-recognized borders. The maintenance of apartheid was hardly peaceful, but that system did not involve a prolonged military occupation of land outside the country’s borders punctuated by the occasional air strike or bombardment of civilian centers. The political objectives of resistance groups are also significantly different: most Palestinians want statehood and independence, not majority rule in a binational state. This should theoretically be easier to grant, but which is evidently no less difficult politically to realize because of the presence of settlers in the West Bank and disagreement over dividing Jerusalem.

At the same time, it’s interesting to see the “you’re not conservative enough” argument coming down to fiscal issues rather than social ones. Bennett and Crist, at least, lost favor because of their support of the stimulus package and other spending issues rather than, say, abortion. ~James Joyner

James is repeating a claim about Bennett I have seen made in a few places, but one that simply isn’t correct. The only Republicans who supported the stimulus last year were Specter, Collins and Snowe. When opposition to the stimulus became a test of party-line discipline, everyone on the GOP side fell in line except for these three. So actually it was Specter and Crist who faced rebellions because of their support for the stimulus. As a matter of partisanship and ideology, rebelling against Specter for voting with the Obama administration is understandable. Likewise, rebelling against Crist for embracing an Obama administration policy is understandable. What Bennett did was to go along with a Bush administration proposal that three-quarters of his Republican colleagues and three-quarters of the Senate supported. He wasn’t some lone turncoat joining an initiative identified entirely with the other party. I agree that it was a terrible proposal and Bennett was wrong to support it, but he was just one of a great many in the wrong. He also co-sponsored a health care bill that I think small-government conservatives are right to oppose, but which at least two of his incumbent colleagues up for re-election this year (Grassley and Crapo) have also supported at one time or another, and apparently they have done this without any negative political consequences. Pushing Specter and Crist out may not be the smartest electoral strategy, but at least there is more of an explanation for why these two specifically faced so much ire from the rank-and-file.

Bennett’s defeat is ultimately a bit flukey, since he was trying to be re-nominated through a process that was bound to magnify enormously whatever conservative discontent there was with him. The format of a convention filled with incensed activists was also going to make his incumbent status into a huge liability instead of the tremendous advantage it normally is. One way to interpret Bennett’s defeat is as a sign of Tea Party-type activist clout, and that’s partly true, but another would be to observe that in a contest with a much more broadly representative group of voters Bennett’s challengers would have had enormous difficulty defeating him. Something else to bear in mind is that there are relatively few states in the country where this strategy of replacing mostly conservative incumbents with very conservative challengers will lead to success in the fall. It will work in Utah, so that’s fair enough, but what happened to Bennett is not a model that can be successfully imitated in most places.

On the other point, it is not all that remarkable that Republican officeholders are being punished entirely for their fiscal errors. It is difficult to think of incumbent Republicans abandoning their party because of a backlash against their social liberalism, but it is fairly easy in recent years to find examples of fiscal moderates and liberals in the party that the rank-and-file have turned against or liberal Republican incumbents who switched parties at least partly because of disagreements over fiscal policy (e.g., Jeffords). Indeed, we can look at Arlen Specter’s recent political career as proof that social conservative litmus tests frequently count for a lot less than fiscal conservative tests in the modern GOP. In 2004, the party establishment rallied around Specter on the grounds that the party supported incumbents against primary challengers. To his lasting embarrassment and discredit, Santorum endorsed Specter over Toomey. Pro-lifers’ objections to Specter’s position on abortion weren’t important enough to Santorum or to the administration to risk losing that seat to the Democrats, and in the end they weren’t quite important enough to the primary voters, either. Five years later, one vote Specter cast for the stimulus made him persona non grata in the Pennsylvania GOP. Had Specter not cast that vote, it is questionable whether Toomey’s challenge would have still driven Specter to switch parties.

In practice, fiscal issues tend to be more important to more Republican activists and primary voters than social issues in almost every contest, except perhaps presidential primaries, and even in these contests it depends. Huckabee translated his strong social conservative record and evangelical Christianity into a sizeable following by the end of the primaries, but he never won outside the South and he was widely loathed in the conservative movement for his fiscal record as governor. His combination of social conservatism and economic pseudo-populism went over very badly with party and movement leaders generally, even though there is some reason to think that socially conservative and economically populist candidates could tap into a much broader base of support nationally. For party and movement leaders, Romney had become sufficiently conservative on social issues to pass muster, despite having zero credibility on these issues, and what really mattered to them was his position on fiscal and economic issues. McCain took a lot of grief from activists and conservative voters for several reasons, but his opposition to Bush’s tax cuts earlier in the decade was always high on the list of McCain’s errors. Someone as far left on economic and fiscal policy as Giuliani was on social issues would never have been given a real hearing, much less taken seriously as a credible candidate for the nomination.

Caroline Glick columns aren’t usually sources of useful commentary, but there was one sentence in her new column that is worth noting:

Israel’s alleged nuclear arsenal, which it has reportedly fielded for four decades, has not led to a regional nuclear arms race.

This is true. It raises the awkward question of why Israel’s nuclear arsenal has never triggered the regional arms race that Glick automatically assumes Iran’s possible future nuclear arsenal would trigger. It is conceivable that all of the states that are considered likely to build their own arsenals in response to an Iranian bomb are U.S. allies and have been dissuaded by Washington from doing so until now. If that’s the case, why then would an Iranian arsenal immediately drive these states to acquire their own? If it is “universally recognized” that an Iranian nuke would trigger a regional arms race, perhaps this is another widely-held, unquestioned assumption that is simply wrong.

Glick adds that “it is clear that Iran’s nuclear project is aggressive rather than defensive,” but this is not clear at all. It isn’t even all that clear that Iran is actually trying that hard to build a nuclear weapon. This is another one of those highly questionable assumptions that almost everyone spouts and for which there is no evidence. After all, which state in the last half century has started and escalated large-scale conflicts with its neighbors, and which one has relied entirely on proxies abroad and otherwise fought only defensive wars? On what basis does anyone assume that Iran’s program is intended for aggressive purposes?

Via Race for Iran, Hooman Majd has a valuable report on his recent visit to Tehran, and he mentions what happened at last month’s Tehran summit on non-proliferation:

Tehran’s nuclear summit in mid-April, dubbed “Nuclear Energy for All; Nuclear Weapons for None” and timed to contrast with Obama’s own summit in Washington (to which Iran was not invited), was, despite a paucity of media coverage in the West, successful in laying out Iran’s stated nuclear agenda — non-proliferation as well as complete disarmament — for a domestic audience and sympathetic listeners in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the developing world. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s opening address to the conference, read by his top foreign-policy advisor Ali Akbar Velayati, in which he emphatically proclaimed weapons of mass destruction haram, strictly forbidden in Islam, went a long way in convincing at least the pious that Iran is not developing nuclear arms [bold mine-DL] (although it begged the question of whether nuclear and Muslim Pakistan, present at the conference, is a sinner state, a question the Japanese representative put to Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency and a moderator at one panel I observed).

It is always possible that the Iranian government could be engaging in an elaborate diversion for international consumption to satisfy its sympathizers in the developing world and at home while pushing ahead with a nuclear weapons program that directly contradicts all of their public statements on the possession of nuclear weapons. Especially on important security matters, governments lie to their own people and the world often enough. That said, why would Iranian authorities repeatedly insist in public not only that they are not pursuing such weapons, but also state that they are absolutely prohibited from doing so according to the religion on which the regime claims to base so much of its legitimacy? If most Iranians accept these statements, and the government then develops and tests a nuclear weapon, would they not be directly attacking the foundations of the legitimacy and credibility of their entire system? It seems to me that this is rather different from cracking down on protesters or tolerating electoral fraud.

Developing a weapon that their highest authorities have repudiated as immoral in the strongest possible terms might actually result in the mass de-legitimization of the regime that Western pro-Green enthusiasts thought happened over the course of the last year. Would it not make more sense for the Iranian authorities to be going out of their way to lay the groundwork for justifying Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon? Instead of stating that such weapons are prohibited, why not leave the door open to their future development? I don’t propose that other governments accept Iranian government statements at face value, but in the absence of compelling evidence that Iran is actually pursuing nuclear weapons why would we continue to assume that their government is doing something that they claim is forbidden for them to do?

Yes, it’s also possible that the Iranian authorities are using religious language selectively and cynically for domestic and international consumption, but then why is it that hawks regard Shi’te millennarian ideas as critical to understanding the Iranian regime and how it will use a nuclear arsenal in the event that they ever build one? Is it not more likely that the hawks are engaging in half-baked speculation based on a partial and misleading understanding of the thinking of members of Iran’s government? Is it not also more likely that when theocrats declare that something is forbidden they are not making such statements lightly?