Crist will reportedly run as an independent in the Florida Senate race, and he will make the announcement tomorrow. This is unfortunate for Floridians, who seemed to have a chance to be spared from the continuation of Crist’s candidacy had he followed through on the many public statements in which he explicitly rejected an independent run. Before any silly establishment pundits attempt to anoint him as the Nick Clegg of Pinellas County or as some sort of martyr to the glorious cause of “centrism,” what needs to be emphasized is how unusually unreliable and self-serving Crist is as a politician. As a March Salon article on Crist summed it up:

A series of interviews with Florida political observers and GOP insiders tells a different story — one in which Crist’s problems have less to do with his purported moderation than with an ardor for political expediency and opportunism.

“I don’t know whether Charlie is left-of-center or right-of-center,” says Brett Doster, an unaligned GOP strategist in the state. “Charlie is all about Charlie.”

No one has to agree with or even like Marco Rubio to appreciate the one service he has done for Florida, which is to expose how Crist’s desire for personal advancement trumps any and all other considerations. Whatever their reasons for the Republican rank-and-file’s rejection of Crist, there are few candidates more deserving of rejection than Crist because of the sheer opportunism that has marked his career and which he will continue to display this year.

This is significantly different from the somewhat surprising rebellion that threatens to deny Bob Bennett re-nomination in Utah. Republican leaders and activists decided that the stimulus was going to be a litmus test issue, and Crist failed the test. Compared with the admiration heaped on the far more liberal Scott Brown, the conservative activist loathing for Crist has always seemed fairly arbitrary, but even so this political episode is no more evidence of the “closing of the conservative mind” than Lieberman’s primary loss in 2006 represented some unreasonable extremism from the left. Both are cases of horrible, opportunistic politicians who desperately want to be in political office and have no respect for the views of their core constituents. Their respective parties legitimately rejected them and preferred a challenger candidate instead.

The difference between Connecticut in 2006 and Florida now is that there is a serious Democratic contender in the Florida race, so it is not likely that the state’s Democratic voters will be rallying around Crist to deny Rubio the win. It is possible that he will do enough to split the vote with Rubio that Meek ekes out a victory, or Crist might be able to win a three-way race, but either way his political ambitions will never go beyond the Senate now. If he prevents the new Republican folk hero Rubio from winning, he will probably be more hated on the right than Lieberman ever was on the left, and if he delivers a safe Republican seat to the Democrats he can probably forget about running for office in Florida again. Even if Crist pulls off a win this year, his pattern of looking for the next big political job will come to a screeching halt.

Jim Bovard reported on one Tea Party rally he attended (via Andrew and Balko), and he found that most of the activists and speakers held conventional Republican views on national security and war, including support for illegal surveillance and torture. The extent of this probably varies depending on the rally, but it doesn’t surprise me in the least.

If 57% of people who identify with the Tea Party movement have a favorable view of Bush, why are they going to be opposed to Bush’s illegal acts, disastrous policies and increases in the size of government? According to the surveys we have seen already, there are anti-Bush Tea Partiers, and there is a sizeable minority within the movement that really does oppose most or all expansions of government power on principle, but clearly they are being overwhelmed and drowned out by nationalists and hawks. In other words, the Tea Party movement suffers from the same problems as the conservative movement and the Republican Party in that the majority of the movement seems to support just about anything done by and for the national security and warfare state. As in the conservative movement and the GOP, there are principled dissenters who object to these things on small-government, constitutionalist, prudential, moral and religious grounds, but in the end they remain dissenters against the prevailing view.

The dispiriting part of all this is that hating liberals more than loving liberty is hardly a new phenomenon. Unfortunately, it has defined a large part of postwar conservative politics all along. As Prof. Lukacs wrote in his “The Problem of American Conservatism” 26 years ago: “Many American conservatives, alas, gave ample evidence that they were just conservative enough to hate liberals but not enough to love liberty.” What we have seen over the last ten years is a tendency to make loathing for liberals the thing that truly matters, and usually liberty becomes important to most conservatives only when it is useful to berate liberals. To the extent that liberals have defended constitutional liberties against anti-terrorist government intrusions, it is the latter that most conservatives have embraced. It is not just that loathing for liberals exceeds love of liberty, which might be true for members of all kinds of ideological movements, but that love of liberty becomes almost entirely contingent on whether or not it can be marshaled in opposition to liberals.

I might be setting myself for a healthy serving of crow on November 3rd, but I get a distinct feeling that the GOP may be headed toward to a seat gain in the House of epic proportions — somewhere over 50 seats and well above the historical high point for recent wave elections (the 50-55 seats we experienced in elections like 1946 and 1994).

All in all, I don’t think a 70 seat gain is out of the question. ~Patrick Ruffini

Via Andrew

In fairness to Ruffini, he acknowledges that most of what he is saying is “pure gut.” This becomes quite clear when we consider the reasons for his outlandish prediction. In short, he argues that there is an enthusiasm gap between the parties, he observes that there is powerful anti-incumbency sentiment, and he says that crazy things are happening (e.g., the election of Scott Brown). This allows him to double Cook and Rothenberg’s numbers of projected seat gains for no particular reason, and once you arbitrarily double the number why not hold out the prospect of tripling it?

If we look more carefully at some of the indicators, there is reason to doubt not only Ruffini’s far-fetched prediction of a gain of 50+ seats, but also the more basic assumption that Republicans will win control of the House. For instance, Ruffini cites the report that just 49% say that they would re-elect their representative against 40% who say they would vote out the incumbent. This is an interesting measure of how disgusted many people are with Congress, but as an indicator of voting behavior I doubt that it is very meaningful. In the last forty years, re-election rates for House members have dipped to 90% or below just five times, and in all the elections after 1994 re-election rates have not gone below 94%. Thanks partly to the gerrymandering of the last twenty years, fewer incumbents lose than in previous decades, and it is much harder for public discontent to translate into seat gains for the opposition party.

Four years ago, a presidential party in the sixth year of a deeply unpopular President’s administration lost just 30 seats. This year, the presidential party is coming off of two elections in which they won over 50% of the vote, and we are headed into the first midterm election during the administration of a President whose RCP average approval rating is currently 48%. It would be extremely odd for a presidential party to lose more than 30 seats with Presidential approval that high, especially when that average rating has never dipped below 46% since inauguration. Indeed, it has remained remarkably stable over the last five months. In 1993-94, Clinton’s Gallup approval rating dropped into the mid-30s on occasion before recovering to 46% by the time of the election, and Obama’s Gallup approval rating currently stands at 51% and has never dropped below 45%. If that 51% rating were to hold, the average loss for a presidential party with a presidential approval rating of 50-59% is 12 seats. Obviouly, economic weakness and political issues specific to this Congress are going to make things worse for the Democrats than that, but it is still something of a reach under these circumstances to project a 30-seat loss, to say nothing of 50 or the absurd 70.

My view is that a 30-seat prediction is at least reasonable, but Republican gains of more than 25 seats still seem unlikely. Depending on how toss-up seats fall, my guess is that Democrats will lose between 18-23 House seats and probably five seats in the Senate. It is difficult to find the actual districts where this 40-seat takeover is going to happen. Yes, things could change, we could continue to have a recovery without any decrease in unemployment, and the majority could foolishly pursue an immigration bill this year that could seriously harm them. It is also possible that enough voters will remember how the Republicans governed when they were in power and recoil from them as the year goes on much as people in Britain have started recoiling from Labour as polling day approaches.

Republican pundits and analysts who have been enthusing over the impending mega-victory they are going to win have already made sure that they will lose the expectations game. Not content with aggressive predictions of winning control of the House, which has already potentially set them up for the appearance of failure, some have been pushing the expectations of Republican gains beyond what any modern American political party can possibly deliver under present circumstances. Between Marco Rubio’s “single greatest pushback in American history” hype, increasingly unrealistic claims about Democratic weakness, and wild predictions of unprecedented postwar midterm gains, anything short of a resounding Republican triumph will be seen as a missed opportunity at best and a disaster at worst.

Something Ruffini does not address in his post is the extent to the which the public continues to blame Bush for both deficit and economic woes. That doesn’t mean that Democrats can rely on anti-Bush sentiment for a third straight election, but it has to weaken the appeal of the GOP when the party’s prominent figures continue to try to rehabilitate and praise Bush and effectively reinforce the identification between the current party and the Bush era. According to the new ABC/Post poll, the GOP itself continues to have very poor favorability ratings, its Congressional leadership loses in match-ups against Obama on most issues, and it continues to trail Democrats on being trusted to handle “the main problems” the country faces. Even in the generic ballot, respondents have been moving back to the Democrats (a three-point GOP lead has turned into a five-point deficit since February in the ABC poll), and the generic ballot average now gives Republicans just a 1-point advantage. Perhaps I am missing something, but this does not seem to have the makings of an unprecedentedly large Republican blowout win. Instead, it looks like things are shaping up for a modest and perhaps even below-average performance for the non-presidential party.

Glenn Greenwald’s response to Ross’ last column badly misunderstands what Ross is arguing and imputes views and motives to him for which there is no evidence. First of all, let’s make clear what Ross is not doing in this or any of his other columns. He is not trying “to pretend that threat-induced censorship is a uniquely Islamic practice.” What he is trying to say is that the response to Islamist “threat-induced censorship” from leading figures in our political and cultural institutions is noticeably different to the response to other kinds of threats and censorship. Perhaps Ross exaggerated some for rhetorical effect, and it is fair to say that Ross overlooks a wide array of political and policy taboos that are enforced all the time, but among most Western politicians, journalists and entertainers there is a greater impulse to self-censorship and a greater willingness to acquiesce in the face of potential or real threats when the subject matter concerns Islam.

Ross is not engaged in an “anti-Muslim crusade,” nor is he engaged in “sectarian religious promotion.” He does not write, and to the best of my knowledge has never written, “bitter tribalistic encyclicals.” There are American conservatives and Christians who would fit that description, but Ross is not one of them. This is an error that critics of Ross in particular and critics of Catholic conservatives like him frequently make. For whatever reason, these critics do not see that Ross has not been advancing an “anti-Muslim” agenda, but that he is actually defending fairly conventional assumptions about Western liberal society against a form of illiberalism and, as Ross puts it in this column, “totalitarianism.” Even by the standards of this kind of writing, Ross’ rebuke is mild.

At one point, Greenwald mentions the decision of the previous administration to refuse an entry visa to Tariq Ramadan. It might interest Greenwald to know that when Ramadan was the subject of that interminable, mind-numbing critique in The New Republic, Ross found the article significantly lacking. In his response, he wrote:

Such a piece would have been a valuable contribution to the debate over whether Western liberalism should seek dialogue with the more moderate elements within political Islam – with Ramadan a prime example – or pursue confrontation instead, along the lines suggested by Ali. I’m by no means certain which side of that debate I’m on, Buruma’s or Berman’s [bold mine-DL], but that’s all the more reason for TNR to run an essay that contributes substantially to the argument.

If Ross were embarked on an “anti-Muslim crusade,” do you suppose he would have been undecided about whether or not to engage in dialogue with Tariq Ramadan just three years ago? No, of course not.

What is also clear is that Ross is not writing about state-sanctioned violence and abuse. He is discussing the relationship between Islamists living in Europe and America and the societies in which they live. His column this week is addressing the effect of censorship on civil society and free expression. Greenwald is correct when he insists on remembering “the tens of thousands of Muslims whom the U.S. has imprisoned without charges for years, and the hundreds of thousands our wars and invasions and bombings have killed this decade alone, and the ones from around the world subjected to racial and ethnic profiling, and the ones we’ve tortured and shot up at checkpoints and are targeting for state-sponsored assassination.” It is absolutely right and fair to argue that there should be far more concern for the human costs of illegal, unwise and immoral anti-terrorist and foreign policies than there is for the creative freedom of cartoonists. I would agree completely that conventional anti-jihadism in this country has this entirely backwards and that it is far less credible as a result.

Where I believe Ross’ column ultimately does go wrong is in the final lines of the column:

Happily, today’s would-be totalitarians are probably too marginal to take full advantage. This isn’t Weimar Germany, and Islam’s radical fringe is still a fringe, rather than an existential enemy.

For that, we should be grateful. Because if a violent fringe is capable of inspiring so much cowardice and self-censorship, it suggests that there’s enough rot in our institutions that a stronger foe might be able to bring them crashing down.

While it is good that Ross acknowledges that a small group of fanatics scattered across half a continent on the other side of the planet is not an “existential enemy,” it cannot be stressed too much that these are still “would-be” totalitarians we’re talking about. The Islamists in question have little or no power, and it is at least partly because of this weakness that there is as much willingness to yield to their mainly symbolic demands as there is. Obviously, when even some Muslims are viewed as a remotely serious physical threat, the obsession with countering the threat is intense and the Western response has been marked largely by massive overreaction and quick abandonment of Christian, liberal and constitutional values by our political class. No, this isn’t anything like Weimar Germany, but if there has been an impulse to turn to authoritarian measures and international conflict as a cure for decadence it has come from our non-Muslim countrymen in positions of authority and influence.

One could call the easy and frequent recourse to the use of force and coercion as proof of Western decadence, but what we all should be able agree on is that it has been disastrous. The far greater problem we have today is not that we are too inclined to yield to Islamist demands in Western countries, but that we are far too ready to disregard the lives, property, dignity and political rights of Muslims in their own countries if we think it might marginally enhance our physical security. Perhaps if Westerners made fewer unreasonable and illegitimate demands of majority Muslim nations, we could defend our values at home with more confidence.

There is no question of a foreign foe bringing our institutions crashing down. The greatest danger all along has been that we would destroy or corrupt our institutions and our values out of an irrational exaggeration of the threat posed by jihadists, and that we would make this even worse through a widely shared blindness to the consequences of our national security and foreign policies. One reason anti-jihadist commentary has seemed less and less persuasive to me over the last decade is that anti-jihadists have done nothing to avoid these dangers and have done all that they could to make them worse. In all of this, Ross’ column on the illiberalism of certain Islamists is not the problem.

P.S. Later in his post, Greenwald links to a 2007 item from Ross and claims that he “previously cited with approval Goldberg’s explicit advocacy of right-wing censorship.” The post from 2007 Greenwald links to has nothing to do with censorship, and instead chides Goldberg for ignoring the utopianism of Bush’s Second Inaugural in Goldberg’s complaint against “crusading” forms of conservatism. For that matter, Goldberg’s original post mentioned censorship in one sentence practically as a throwaway remark. The thrust of Goldberg’s argument was a rejection of crusading politics, and it was this rejection of political crusading with which Ross was agreeing. In other words, the post Greenwald cites basically contradicts the claim that Ross is someone strongly interested in political or religious crusades. My original 2007 response to both posts is here.

The single most important feature of democracy is this: that voters regularly get a chance to turn the rascals out. Think for a moment about the countries that don’t enjoy representative government – Cuba, say, or Iran – and you’ll see why it matters.

Conversely, the chief argument against coalitions, and electoral reforms that give rise to coalitions, is this: that they tend to ensure that most parties are in power most of the time. ~Daniel Hannan

Granted, I haven’t had much interest in Hannan’s views since he declared his devotion to the cause of Oliver Cromwell. Pardon me if I tend not to take seriously lectures on democracy and representative government from an admirer of the Lord Protector, especially when he tries to cast the argument for coalition government as the beginning of the path to dictatorship!

Leave all that aside and just consider whether it makes sense to say that coalition governments are poor examples of representative government. In reality, coalition governments represent a broader cross-section of the electorate and include a greater variety of political perspectives than a majority government formed by one party. For that reason, they tend to be weaker and less effective governments, which makes them poor candidates for paving the way to despotism. The present British system rewards the major parties disproportionately because of the concentrated nature of their support and their established advantages as the two largest parties, even though at the present time the three largest parties apparently have almost equal levels of support from the electorate.

Hannan is attacking European PR systems for producing the result of the revolving-door of governments that are always headed by one of the two major parties, but this is actually the result he would very much like to see in Britain under a different system. As the second-largest party, the Tories are supposed to form the next government if the electorate has rejected Labour, and that’s all there is to it. Hannan is defending a fairly unrepresentative electoral system in the name of representative government, and he would like to see the wishes of millions of voters frustrated in the name of democracy.

Hannan mentions European protest parties, but fails to acknowledge that in Britain it is the Liberal Democrats who are filling the role of the protest parties in the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and elsewhere. The current enthusiasm for the upstarts is the result of profound disgust and weariness with the major parties, just as we have seen all over Europe in the last ten years. Hannan also stresses the importance of a clear division between government and opposition in order to have accountability and to keep the “state small and the citizen free.” He must think that his audience has been asleep for the last decade. On matters of opposing government policy on the trampling of civil liberties and recklessly committing their country to war, it has not been the Conservative leadership that has done very much to resist the excesses of the Blair-Brown years. Indeed, concerning the invasion of Iraq the supposed opposition party was even more supportive of government policy than many of the members of the governing party. How will the electorate be holding politicians accountable if the next government is filled entirely with Tory supporters of the Iraq war? Is it not a telling sign of Tory acquiescence in Labour’s encroachments on liberties that it is only now in a last-minute appeal to Lib Dem voters that the Tories have started taking a stronger stand on undoing some of those encroachments?

Many of the ills Hannan ascribes here to PR systems are already present in the Westminster system, and many of the things he claims that the Westminster system helps to protect have been trampled on with the support or acquiescence of his own party. As approximately a third of the electorate has found the major parties seriously wanting, Hannan would like to keep that third as underrepresented as possible to ensure that British political duopoly survives in spite of its manifest failures.

Upstart Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats on the other hand, has called for its cancellation, arguing that such a program is both inconsistent with President Obama’s calls to work toward eliminating nuclear weapons and is a colossal waste of money that could be better spent on equipping British ground forces – that are suffering severe equipment shortages after a decade of fighting two wars. ~Max Bergmann

This is one place where I have to admit that Clegg doesn’t make much sense by Clegg’s own standards. On the one hand, he is opposed to “default Atlanticism” and calls for what he calls the “repatriation” of foreign policy, but he would effectively want to make Britain more dependent on America’s nuclear arsenal in order to have more funding for conventional forces so that they could better assist the U.S. in wars in which Clegg believes Britain should not be involved.

The strange thing here is that replacing Trident seems far more consistent with the general tenor of Clegg’s foreign policy vision. It’s true that it would “nothing to bolster the ‘special relationship’,” as Bergmann says, but Clegg has already made clear how little he thinks that relationship as currently defined matters to Britain. If Britain’s “global importance and military significance to the United States” is to be found in “its possession of a highly capable conventional armed forces that can fight alongside American troops,” isn’t the refusal to replace Trident actually playing into the hands of all those who would prefer to keep Britain as Washington’s reliable yes-man?

Bergmann concludes by saying, “If the US was in charge in the UK defense budget, the Trident would be cut in a heart beat.” If that is right, how is it that Clegg supports a move that would signal such dependence?Just a month ago, Clegg was rightly railing against the major parties for having effectively ceded British sovereignty over matters of war, and yet he argues for a position that could very easily reinforce all of the worst habits of the British government in its relations with the United States concerning matters of war. If Clegg wants to repatriate British foreign policy, as he says he does, scrapping Britain’s nuclear deterrent does not make very much sense.

Can anyone deny that the most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama today comes not from the right but from the left? Rachel Maddow’s grilling of administration economic officials. Keith Olbermann’s hectoring of Democratic leaders on the public option. Glenn Greenwald’s criticisms of Elena Kagan. Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn’s keepin’-them-honest perspectives on health care. The civil libertarian left on detainees and Gitmo. The Huffington Post on derivatives.

I want to find Republicans to take seriously, but it is hard. Not because they don’t exist — serious Republicans — but because, as Sanchez and others seem to recognize, they are marginalized, even self-marginalizing, and the base itself seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking. ~Marc Ambinder

Via Balloon Juice

Ambinder’s observation is useful, but it is more important for other reasons. His observation reminds us that there is already far more resistance to and significant criticism of administration policies from the left than there was against Bush administration policies from the right at any point during the first Bush term and most of the second term. There were a couple exceptions when activists and rank-and-file supporters rose up and rejected Harriet Miers and when many conservatives joined the general backlash against the immigration bill in 2007, but they are notable for how rare they are and how late they came in the Bush years. It is also worth noting how much less politically risky it was to rebel against an extremely unpopular lame-duck President pushing a very unpopular piece of legislation.

Where movement conservatives enable their political leaders to do more or less as they please, progressives seem far more willing to challenge and question “their side.” The siege and persecution mentalities that movement conservatives have long cultivated as coping mechanisms for their long history of domestic policy defeats and losses in the culture wars tend to make them far less willing to break with “their side,” which is why there is such importance placed on conformity and “team” loyalty. That means that movement conservatives typically have had to stifle, mute or otherwise water down any objections they do have to Republican policies under Bush. Then, once Bush is gone, for the sake of “the team” they feel they have to exaggerate their objections to Democratic policies and politicians to the point of absurdity to create sharper contrasts with the dismal record of Republican governance they just spent the last decade making possible.

That brings us to the problem of mainstream conservative media. Having gone from an alternative source of information to becoming a parallel universe, mainstream conservative outlets have stopped (or never started) speaking “bilingually,” as Ross mentions. These outlets have taken another step by encouraging their audience to view anyone who tries to speak “bilingually” as unreliable and suspect.

Recently, Jonah Goldberg asked:

Would conservatism be in better shape if conservatives had to rely on the mainstream media? Isn’t the fact that Fox News and talk radio are so popular a sign of conservative success instead of conservative weakness?

Yes, it probably would be. These media are popular because they tell the audience what they want to hear, they reaffirm the audience’s prejudices and assumptions, and they serve as a crutch for a movement that seems mostly incapable of producing superior arguments. Their relative popularity on cable television and radio could just as easily indicate conservative weakness inasmuch as these outlets have become hideaways where a conservative audience can avoid unsettling realities that contradict their ideological commitments. Part of the problem is that these media allow movement conservatives to become “untethered” from reality by actively protecting their audience from unpalatable and unwelcome truths, so it is much harder to learn from past errors when those errors cannot even be acknowledged as having been made. In recent months, movement conservatives have been working hard to try to rehabilitate the Iraq war before it is even over. Even when faced with one of their most grave, terrible errors, most conservatives have responded by becoming what Millman called “minimizers, avoiders, and abandoners.”

More dangerously, being “untethered” means that producing actual evidence for an increasingly bizarre view of the world matters less and less. Assertion becomes more important than proof. We see this in the frequent, virtually unanimous insistence that Obama went on an “apology tour,” or the near-universal conservative assessment that he “betrayed” Poland and the Czech Republic over missile defense, or the common view on the right that Obama undermines allies and treats rivals gently. None of these things is true, but they have become true for a great many movement conservatives through constant repetition. The hysterical over-reaction to the Nuclear Posture Review that basically changed nothing is one of the most recent episodes when the desperate need to reclaim the national security mantle has forced movement conservatives to make the most laughable, unserious arguments. At best, relevant policy experts on the right will pay little attention to these arguments from activists and pundits, but they will hardly ever directly criticize or attack the latter. This permits the activists and pundits to continue on as if their arguments remained valid and had not already been dismissed as nonsense.

I was away at a friend’s wedding over the weekend, but while I was gone at least one new column went up. InoSMI has my column on the Black Sea Fleet agreement, which might interest readers of Russian.

If it is true that Putin is the most effective politician in the world, and it is by no means clear that it is, it seems to me that being the “best” among today’s major leaders is sort of like being the best baseball player in Volgograd or owning the best Indian restaurant in Tuscaloosa,: sure it must feel nice to have someone to look down on, but in the grand scheme of things you’re not particularly good at what you do and you know it. ~Mark Adomanis, very effectively ridiculing the preposterous Ralph Peters