Matt Steinglass at Democracy in America picks up on the debate about the “dimming of our age” and notes that the claim of European and East Asian military free-riding is basically wrong:

I’ve written on this before, but I’ll say it again: “the fact that much of metropolitan Europe and East Asia ‘free-rides’ on American military power”, as Mr Salam puts it, seems to me to be a non-fact. Which countries in East Asia does Mr Salam believe spend too little on their own defence? South Korea, with 600,000 men under arms, currently ramping spending up to 3% of GDP despite declining North Korean capabilities? Taiwan, which has also raised defence spending to 3% of GDP and just finished buying $6 billion worth of arms from America? How much need Thailand spend to ensure victory in its border dispute with Cambodia? What is the threat to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, or (apart from tussles with China over undersea mineral rights in the Yellow Sea) Japan? True, Vietnam is buying Russian submarines with a view to denying Chinese superiority in the South China Sea. And perhaps the Philippines could stand to beef up its military to put down insurgents in Mindanao. But what do either of these have to do with “free-riding on American military power”?

The claim fails for the same reasons with regard to Europe: 1. The major European powers spend a healthy 2%-plus of GDP on defence, and 2. No major European country faces any serious military threat [bold mine-DL]. In fact, I don’t believe the phrase “free-riding on American military power” describes any actual countries in the world in the year 2010.

It is the lack of serious threats that needs to be emphasized. Suppose that Russia becomes even more assertive in post-Soviet space. Is this going to trigger a significant European arms build-up? It seems unlikely. It is European governments that have been consistently trying to block moves that would appear provocative to Russia. The Germans in particular are far more interested in building a constructive trading relationship with Russia than they are interested in feuding over political influence on Russia’s periphery. In the last decade, Washington has not been providing protection against a growing Russian threat to Europe, but has instead been trying to goad Russia with continued NATO expansion that most other members of NATO didn’t want and refused to accept. On the whole, American hawks have made a habit of perceiving threats to Europe that most Europeans do not see. Then they congratulate the U.S. for shielding Europe from these threats, marvel at European weakness in the face of said threats, and demand European gratitude and deference to U.S. initiatives on account of the protection we provide. This tends to color hawks’ views of everything else.

We see this again with the fear of an Iranian bomb. Most of the other major and rising powers in the region do not regard Iran’s nuclear program as a problem, much less a threat, and even important U.S. allies such as Turkey and India are far more interested in trade with Iran than they are in isolating or punishing it for a program Iran is actually entitled to have. On the whole, Iran’s neighbors do not see why the region should be subjected to another destabilizing conflict that has no realistic chance of halting Iran’s nuclear program in any case.

From the American perspective, it would seem to make fiscal and strategic sense to encourage allies to assume additional responsibilities for regional security. Auslin exaggerated the extent to which America was “hollowing out” its military capabilities, but Americans should welcome the prospect of wealthy allies providing for even more of their own defense. How and when allied states choose to do this will largely be up to them, but it should not be regarded as a calamity for them or the U.S. when it happens. Greater allied burden-sharing will reduce or eliminate the need for American military presence in many parts of the world, and that could help to trim the budget and it could help to keep the U.S. out of long, expensive military campaigns.

P.S. This is the 7,000th post on Eunomia.

Earlier this month I was arguing that a post-hegemonic world would not be nearly as terrible as Michael Auslin claimed, and that many of the things that he warned would happen in such a world are already happening and are largely out of American control anyway. Reihan wrote an interesting response that I didn’t answer at the time, and I was reminded of it by The Economist’s article on the BRIC countries. First, Reihan:

But for those of us who believe that global trade flows, the free flow of capital, relatively free migration, and market-friendly governments are a good thing, Auslin raises an important question, namely whether the fact that much of metropolitan Europe and East Asia “free-rides” on American military power creates benefits that outweigh the costs. Perhaps the security competition that would result from a U.S. grand strategy that focused on offshore balancing rather than the more active and interventionist posture of the present would prove manageable. Military budgets would swell slightly, but new collective security arrangements would emerge to keep the peace at reasonable costs. Or perhaps the security competition would spark dangerous spirals of aggression and counter-aggression. It’s difficult to tell, though I tend to think that the former scenario is somewhat more likely.

Let’s assume a middle series projection in which military budgets do indeed increase, and, as Auslin suggests, states pursue more activist economic policies — including aggressive capital controls and migration controls — to finance this military expansion. Is this a friendlier world for classical liberals than one in which the benevolent global hegemony of the U.S. persists, or rather efforts to extend BGH persist?

Again, I’m not sure. I do think that such a world would prove somewhat less prosperous and more dangerous at the margin, though I can also imagine a comparatively freer United States flourishing in this environment.

Auslin had warned that Chinese military build-up, Russian influence in post-Soviet space and an Iranian bomb would lead to a situation in which “global trade flows will be stressed, the free flow of capital will be constrained, and foreign governments will expand their regulatory and confiscatory powers against their domestic economies in order to fund their own military expansions.”

One of the reasons I didn’t originally address these concerns is that I don’t find these to be the likely consequences of China’s continued rise, Russian resurgence in its own neighborhood and Iranian membership in the nuclear club. Why will global trade flows be stressed? China is heavily dependent on its export trade to sustain economic growth at home. It has no incentive to disrupt or “stress” trade flows or to embark on policies abroad that would lead to this. At present we see increasing economic integration of Taiwan with the mainland, and the Hatoyama government has held out the possibility, however remote it is at the moment, of forming an East Asian economic community modeled on the European Union. China is investing in (and exploiting) markets all over the world in states where Western companies typically do not go or where they are not allowed to go. So why will the free flow of capital be constrained if China continues to increase its military power? Are we not instead seeing increased trade carried out by and among the BRIC nations? Aren’t emerging-market countries, including China, engaging in noticeable economic innovation?

The article on BRIC countries brought this discussion to mind when I was reading this section:

But there are other reasons why the BRICs might damage the global economic system, rather than buttress it. They might, for example, undermine the role of the IMF and World Bank, abandon attempts to expand free trade or even just ride roughshod over aid conditions in poor countries. But Mr Hormats thinks they will not. “They understand,” he argues, “that the openness and smooth functioning of the system is vital to them and so far there has been very little evidence that they want to change it dramatically.” When world output was plummeting last year, the BRICs’ economic stimulus programmes did a lot to stabilise it [bold mine-DL]. And on the question of reforming the international financial institutions, America and the BRICs find themselves on the same side.

Hormats’ analysis seems right to me. We should also bear in mind something that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev wrote last week in The Times of India on the BRIC nations ahead of the Brasilia summit that concluded yesterday:

By strengthening the economic framework of the multipolar world, BRIC countries are objectively contributing to creating conditions for strengthening international security. We share an imperative that the international community should resolve conflicts through politico-diplomatic and legal means, rather than the use of military force. In our view, it is necessary to strengthen collective principles in international relations and to establish a just and democratic world order.

Some of this is just rhetoric and propaganda, of course, but it expresses the real interest that the BRIC nations have in stability and economic integration. We need not take that last sentence at face value to appreciate that all major emerging-market countries, including Russia and China, generally want international stability, economic expansion and non-interference in their internal affairs. We also don’t need to exaggerate the significance or cohesiveness of the BRIC group to recognize that the relative increase in the individual states’ influence and economic clout is not going to usher in the “dimming of our age” Auslin predicts.

Samuel Goldman at Postmodern Conservative responds to the previous post with a fair point:

Does that mean that they can’t also be populists? I’m not sure. On the one hand, populism can refer a particular tradition of redistributionist, anti-corporate, usually agrarian political ideas. Most Tea Partiers reject that tradition. On the other hand, populism can describe a conception of the appropriate relation between governors and governed in a representative democracy. On this view, policy should be much more closely tied to public opinion, or to direct popular decision, than to the judgment of legislative or bureaucratic elites.

Many of the Tea Partiers, it seems to me, are populists in the latter sense. If you prefer, call them plebiscitarians rather than populists.

Goldman could be right that plebiscitarian describes Tea Partiers better. Let’s think about this. 84% of the respondents said that they believe their views “reflect the views of most Americans,” so that as far as they are concerned they speak for the majority on policy. However, to the extent that Tea Partiers actually are strongly in favor of spending cuts and deficit reduction as top priorities, they do not reflect the views of most. On entitlement spending, for example, Tea Partiers’ views are more in line with the views of the general public, but this is because most Tea Partiers do not support reductions in entitlement spending. It seems likely that the Tea Partiers are speaking for an imaginary majority that would approve of shrinking government and cutting spending. My guess is that most Tea Partiers would be plebiscitarian only as long as they believed that they represent a majority.

The attention of Tea Party protests is pretty much entirely trained on the federal government and what it does. Congress remains an institution of representatives that is not constrained or guided by the sort of popular initiatives and referenda that progressive political reforms made possible in many states. The institution the protesters loathe and want to influence is one of the institutions least bound by “direct popular decision.” Originally, initiative and referendum mechanisms were designed to enable citizens to get around state legislatures dominated by wealthy and well-connected interests, but I don’t know of anyone on the right, Tea Partier or not, who would favor something like a national referendum to get around the “judgment of legislative or bureaucratic elites.” Failing something like a referendum, I’m not sure how federal policy would be “closely tied to public opinion” in this way, unless the idea is to craft legislation according to fluctuating poll numbers that are quite malleable and potentially misleading.

Conservatives actually know very well that they do not speak for a majority in this country, and they are also well aware that changes that would allow for more direct, plebiscitary democracy, whether in presidential elections or in passing legislation, would work to the detriment of their smaller states and their overall political interests. There is a Jeffersonian tradition available to conservatives that could make them more sympathetic to critiques of concentrated wealth and power and distributist and agrarian ideas for keeping such things in check, and this would not necessarily be at odds with the interests of smaller states and conservative interests, but as Goldman correctly observes most Tea Partiers and most conservatives generally reject that tradition. When they have married themselves to a centralist and corporatist party, how could they not?

Surprisingly, the survey reveals Tea Partiers to be slightly more economically secure than the general population. Combine those findings with the fact that Tea Partiers are a well-educated cohort, and the narrative that the Tea Partiers are a bunch of pitchfork populist rubes becomes harder to maintain. ~Steven Hayward

This isn’t really a surprise. For one thing, those who are more economically secure are probably paying more in taxes, and therefore are more likely to object to taxes more strongly, and they also probably have more time to engage in more intense political activism. It also makes sense that relatively economically secure people on the right are going to take a dimmer view of government spending than their more economically insecure fellow conservatives.

Indeed, the only people who seem to want to maintain the narrative of “pitchfork populism” are the activists and pundits who claim to be sympathetic to the movement. If the movement is a backlash from the conservative base and constitutes just 18% of the population, that makes it a bit harder to explain as the natural “pushback” of a “center-right” country against an unwelcome center-left agenda. Liberals are perfectly happy to point out that the movement does not have much populist credibility. Michael Lind states in the same symposium, “Pitchfork-wielding populists like William Jennings Bryan they are not.” Peter Beinart argues that the movement has nothing to do with populism, and as far as economic populism is concerned he is basically correct:

They’re not today’s version of the Nebraska dirt farmers who rose up against the railroads and the banks more than a century ago. They’re today’s version of the California suburbanites who rose up against their property tax bills in the late 1970s rather than pay for decent schools for the Golden State’s black and Hispanic kids. They’re the second coming of what Robert Kuttner called “the revolt of the haves.”

Again, this isn’t surprising. Self-identifying conservatives tend to look askance at economic populism, and the more ideological and activist they are the more intense their dislike of economic populists.

Hayward goes from making a poor observation to simply making a false claim:

The fact that so many Tea Partiers are new to political participation suggests that, like the Perot voters of 1992 who were said to represent the “angry middle,” a plurality of Tea Partiers are moderates who are simply shocked by Obama’s great leap forward in the size of government [bold mine-DL].

It is possible that there is some overlap between former Perot voters and Tea Partiers, but it is simply untrue to say that a plurality of them is moderate. As I said earlier today, 20% in the survey to which Hayward is responding identified as ideologically moderate, 34% identified as “somewhat” conservative, and 39% identified as “very conservative.” So, the truth is that a plurality of Tea Partiers self-identifies as very conservative, and they identify as “very conservative” at over three times the rate of the general public. That doesn’t make their complaints invalid, and it doesn’t make their preferred policies wrong, but couldn’t we at least acknowledge the real identity of the movement in question?

It’s true that 56% of Tea Party respondents said that they had never been active in a political campaign before, but that isn’t quite the same as saying that they are “new to political participation.” 97% of the Tea Party respondents said they are registered to vote. For that matter, the involvement of the vast majority of respondents who identified with the Tea Party has mostly been passive: only 20% say they have donated money or attended rallies, so most of the Tea Partiers who have never been active in political campaigns before now have also not become active in movement events.

The Winston Group found, in three national surveys conducted from December through February and published April 1, that the Tea Party movement is composed of a broad cross-section of the American people — 40 to 50 percent of its supporters are non-Republicans. Indeed, one-third of self-identified Democrats say they support the Tea Party movement [bold mine-DL]. ~Schoen & Caddell

I have seen some people claim things like this in recent weeks, and at least as far as the large number of Democratic Tea Party supporters is concerned I am quite confident it is almost completely false. What does it mean that a third of Democrats “support” the movement? I suspect that this is a lot like all those legions of 18-29 year olds intent on repeal of the health care bill, as Rasmussen would have it, which is to say that it is probably the product of poorly-designed questions or a misreading of the results. It seems in this case that it was the latter. In fact, if we look at the Winston Group results we see that just 13% of Tea Partiers identify as Democrats in their study.

The recent New York Times survey shows that 54% of Tea Partiers are Republicans and 36% are independents. Just 5% identified as Democrats. Ideologically, Tea Partiers are not representative of the nation as a whole, and until recently no one has been silly enough to claim anything like this. Tea Partiers are overwhelmingly self-described conservatives, which is what you would expect. 53% of the Tea Partiers in that survey reported being angry about what is happening in Washington. The things that they say have angered them are consistent with conservative objections to the administration and Congress: government spending (11%), health care reform (16%), “not representing the people” (14%), size of government (6%), deficit (5%), and taxes (2%) were the most significant reasons given. 73% describe themselves as “somewhat” or very conservative, and just 20% call themselves moderates. Tea Partiers are disproportionately drawn from older age groups, and 56% report income of $50,000 a year or more.

Tea Partiers are as disproportionately conservative and Republican as you would expect antiwar protesters to be disproportionately liberal. That is fairly normal for any intense political protest movement: such a movement is going to represent and attract relatively more ideological supporters with strongly-held views with which most other Americans are not going to agree entirely or at all. The Tea Partiers in the NYT survey claim to be much more concerned with deficit reduction than the general public, and they almost unanimously favor a “smaller government with fewer services” (92%). 73% even say that they would favor spending cuts “on domestic programs such as Social Security, Medicare, education, or defense” if necessary. As we see later in the survey, this is not quite as significant as it seems. Tea Partiers are less likely to say that entitlements such as Medicare are “worth it,” but a full 62% of them still say this. 66% say that they “always” or “usually” vote Republican, and just 5% report voting this way for Democratic candidates.

The reason I am going over these polls in some detail is that Schoen and Caddell are leaning very heavily on the idea that the Tea Party movement is broadly representative in both its make-up and its views, and they have made this central to their argument that the concerns of this movement can somehow be credibly addressed by the administration to “minimize Democratic losses in November.” It’s as if someone dusted off some 1996 Democratic talking points aimed at co-opting Ross Perot’s issues and tried to apply them to a dramatically different political context over a decade ago. Simply as a matter of electoral politics, it makes no sense how an administration and a majority party can expect to reduce whatever losses they might suffer by signing off on large parts of the agenda of the rank-and-file of the other party. The claim that the movement is broadly representative allows Schoen and Caddell to push their “centrist” incrementalism as the solution to Democratic electoral woes, but as we can see here there is no real truth to that claim.

That would be a shame, because tacitly backing Wall Street on this issue erodes the GOP brand as the People’s Party [bold mine-DL]. ~Matt Continetti

Via Andrew

Continetti does not appear to be joking when he refers to the Republican brand as that of the “People’s Party.” He cites Barone, who correctly notes that Wall Street firms favored the Democrats before the last election. It is true that Democrats received more donations from people working at Wall Street firms than Republicans in the last cycle. Part of this does have to do with changes in political leanings, but an equally important reason for this backing was that a Democratic victory was expected. Perhaps no less important is the reality that Wall Street donors reasonably expect most Republicans to support their interests almost automatically, while Democrats are not always natural supporters.

Regardless, some Republican leaders have been eagerly trying to cultivate Wall Street donors for at least the last several months, and Boehner has specifically cited Republican willingness to oppose regulatory reform as the reason why the donors should support the GOP. Any remote chance of being confused with a “People’s Party” is one that the House and Senate Republican leadership has done everything it possibly could to destroy at least since it backed the TARP in September 2008.

This is understandable, because when it comes to economic and financial matters the Republican Party is not and really has never been a “People’s Party.” It is a bit unfair to expect the leadership of a party that has traditionally defended corporate and financial interests to support anything that could be considered economic populism. This is hardly news at this point, but Republican anti-elitism is limited specifically to those areas where there are the fewest Republicans: Hollywood, academia, and the media. Whenever similar attitudes start to be directed at corporations or Wall Street, party leaders and activists become very hostile to populism. This certainly goes against the public mood right now, but Republican leaders have been oblivious to the public’s economic concerns, trade skepticism and anger at Wall Street for years. There wasn’t much reason to expect them to change now.

Ackerman reports that civilian casualties in Afghanistan have declined significantly since Gen. McChrystal took command.

Conor wants to know why Jonah Goldberg keeps trying to change the subject.

Matt Steinglass argues that environment and occupation significantly affect political inclinations.

Jim Antle profiles Rand Paul.

The TAC symposium in the new issue of the magazine that I mentioned last week is now available online. Markos Moulitsas asks and answers a fair question in his contribution:

So where exactly are these anti-interventionist conservatives, willing to partner with progressives on rolling back the most ridiculous tenets of the absurd war on terror? Unfortunately, they don’t exist in any appreciable numbers.

To come back to Justin Logan’s post from a few days ago, the trouble is not just that there is not that much political or intellectual leadership on the right that opposes the warfare state, but that there are so very few self-identified conservatives who will support non-interventionist and antiwar conservative leaders.

This has to be the most ridiculous thing I’ve read in my life. Apparently neither the offended parishioners nor Andrew knows that the iconography of the crucifix in question is an example of perfectly normal Byzantine-style depictions of the Crucifixion. The crucifix’s iconography appears to be quite traditional, decent and appropriate. I don’t have that much more to say about this. Sometimes I am simply amazed at how stunningly ignorant many Christians are of the most basic religious elements of their own tradition and history.

I suppose it’s a good thing that this parish doesn’t have an image of the Theotokos Galaktotrophousa, or else there might have been a riot!