As I suggested yesterday, Brown’s opposition to the current Senate health care bill is a product of “I’ve got mine” sentiment: Massachusetts has its own health care plan, so there’s no need to tamper with it at the federal level. Chait poses a reasonable question when he asks, “So why should the rest of the country feel bound to heed this decision?” The answer many Republicans prefer to give is that the voters have spoken and it has been “proven” that health care legislation is unpopular and politically toxic, but this claim doesn’t actually hold up very well. If Massachusetts voters’ disapproval of federal health care legislation is driven in large part by satisfaction with MassCare, which is what Brown’s win would suggest, this is obviously an argument in favor of passing a health care bill in order to win the kind of popularity that MassCare already has. The very “parochial” defense Brown has mounted drives home that most Massachusetts voters apparently like universal or near-universal health insurance coverage mandated by government, which is not really a “wake-up call” telling Democrats that the public will destroy them if they pass a health care bill. The experience of at least the last forty-five years tells us that the public tends to like specific government programs and never wants to reduce or eliminate them, and it doesn’t make much difference if the programs create huge, unaffordable liabilities.

Whether this federal health care legislation or MassCare is good public policy is a different question. Obviously, I think they aren’t because they are unsustainable and unaffordable, but that isn’t my point here. The core of the Republican argument right now is that most people don’t like the health care bill, Brown’s election shows this, and therefore Democrats should give up. This is pretty close to a pure appeal to the crowd. It is understandable why they would say this, because we all know that the measures instituted by federal health care legislation will rapidly become popular and politically untouchable.

Once the legislation passes, it will probably become the Democrats’ ace in the hole in every domestic policy debate hereafter. Democrats routinely have an edge on almost every domestic issue anyway, and this is likely to increase that edge. Brown can make opposition to federal health care the centerpiece of his campaign because he is operating in a state liberal enough to already have near-universal coverage. That means that the problem the federal bill is attempting to address has become something of an abstraction for Massachusetts voters, and the bill itself appears to threaten the system they already have. This is true in very few other states.

After all, how has Brown been able to rally opposition to the health care bill? By complaining that it would lead to Medicare cuts and interfere with Massachusetts’ system. In other words, he has based his candidacy around defending old entitlements against new ones. This is effective as a short-term tactic, as Brown has shown, but it should also tell the Democrats that establishing a new entitlement will be to their benefit as a matter of winning elections and popularity. In other words, Brown’s win actually proves that voters reward a candidate who voted for (statewide) universal health care and who is willing to defend it, which means that the electoral consequences of passing the federal bill should also be positive for the supporters of the bill.

Once the legislation has passed and the GOP makes repeal their slogan, the party advocating repeal will lose ground and will perform worse at the polls than they otherwise would. I don’t think this is a good or salutary outcome, and I see it as a disaster for the country’s long-term fiscal health, but it is what has happened every time one party has successfully expanded the size and scope of government and the other party proposes to overturn or repeal the programs in question. Republicans will not and perhaps cannot admit this, as they have become so wedded to the falsehood that the public rejected them because of spending, when this had little or nothing to do with their losses in ’06 and ’08.

After the off-year elections, Democrats could cling to Bill Owens’s victory in NY-23 as a shred of evidence that the Tea Party message could hurt Republicans. Scott Brown’s victory exposes NY-23 as a fluke. ~Matt Continetti

I had already been thinking about the three special elections for Congress we have seen in the last year before Continetti wrote this, but this reminded me of an important point that needs to be made. It is a simple observation, and so obvious that it might be considered unnecessary: candidates and campaigns matter. Hoffman showed no interest in the concerns of the district he wanted to represent, his allies belittled local interests as “parochial” and he served as little more than a mouthpiece of national party and movement activist slogans. NY-23 was lost in much the same way that Coakley lost in Massachusetts: a candidate who seemed indifferent to the people he wanted to represent proved to be a horrible fit with the electorate. Similarly, Jim Tedisco in NY-20 ran an atrocious campaign that was marred by poor messaging, confusion over his positions and the interference of the national party. Tedisco, Hoffman and Coakley have something important in common: all of them had every advantage in terms of party registration, funding and and voting patterns, and they squandered all of these. As a result, two solidly Republican districts are now represented by Democrats (Owens and Murphy) and one of the most politically liberal states in the country will have a Republican Senator. There is a pattern, but it is not one that fits self-congratulatory narratives from either party. Parties and candidates that exhibit feelings of entitlement and/or disdain for the voters, the places they live and the issues that actually matter to them will be voted down regardless of how those electorates voted in the past.

In NY-23 the problem was not so much that the “Tea Party message” hurt Republicans. It was that the message was simply not relevant to a majority of voters in the district, because it could not address concerns that were specific to the district. Does Brown’s victory demonstrate that “the Tea Party message” has caught on in the state of the original Tea Party? Let’s think about this a bit more. Yes, Brown has courted Tea Partiers, and Tea Partiers were important in raising funds and working on behalf of his campaign. He has come out against a health care bill they also oppose, and no doubt they favor the tax cut he has proposed, but it is hard to see how electing a moderate-to-liberal Republican, who is reportedly on the center-left of the Massachusetts GOP, proves the electoral viability of the full-on “Tea Party message” anywhere, much less in the Northeast. Tea Partiers’ support for Brown showed a willingness to back candidates and make alliances with politicians who would never pass rigorous ideological purity tests. That seems to be evidence of their ability to be flexible and compromise to build a political coalition.

We should be careful to distinguish the message that prevailed tonight from the message that pro-Brown activists have been advancing in the past. Having just spent the last several months insisting that Obama overreached and has badly misread the public mood, Republicans seem to be in an awful hurry to attach far too much significance to a remarkable, but so far unique, special election. There are important differences between this election and the special election two years ago in MA-05, but I would note that the response from mainstream conservatives is much the same as it was then. Jim Ogonowski’s surprisingly competitive, failed bid to win an open seat against Paul Tsongas’ widow had at least a couple things in common with Brown’s run against Coakley. Like Tsongas, Coakley was preferred by party establishment forces, and Brown was able to tap into populist discontent even more effectively than Ogonowski by running as the insurgent outsider. Despite the obvious differences between those races, the mainstream conservative readiness to declare unusual elections in Massachusetts to be bellwethers for the general elections in the fall remains the same. After the MA-05 result, we heard a lot of arguments similar to those we’ve heard in the last couple of weeks. Usually, conservatives emphasized how much better than expected Ogonowski had done and how this portended a shift back to the GOP in November. That shift never materialized. This year the GOP has the advantage that it is the out-party and is bound to make some gains, but my guess is that they continue to read too much into the outcomes of special elections in Massachusetts and will end up gaining far fewer seats than they expect.

Many Democrats, as always, are caught in their insular liberal information loop. They think the polls are bad simply because the economy is bad. They tell each other health care is unpopular because the people aren’t sophisticated enough to understand it. Some believe they can still pass health care even if their candidate, Martha Coakley, loses the Senate race in Massachusetts on Tuesday.

That, of course, would be political suicide. It would be the act of a party so arrogant, elitist and contemptuous of popular wisdom that it would not deserve to govern. ~David Brooks

Brooks may be right that liberals are consoling themselves with convenient, false narratives about what is happening, but if so they are certainly not alone in being caught up in “insular information loops.” It is very convenient for Republicans to believe that a Democratic push for health care legislation at this stage amounts to political suicide. Republicans tell themselves this because it tells them that their opposition will be vindicated in November, and they tell other people this because they very much want to goad the Democrats into doing just what they warn will be disastrous for their opponents.

Democrats have convinced themselves for years that the public overwhelmingly favors “health care reform,” which they pretty readily identify with their own ideas on what that reform should be, and now Republicans have convinced themselves that the public will not stand for passage of a health care bill. My guess is that both have been wrong in different ways, but the GOP is probably misreading the situation even worse than the Democrats. Republicans are betting heavily that a bill that is passed this year but which will not take effect for several more years is going to precipitate a massive public backlash in their favor. Democrats are assuming that the voters who handed them 14 Senate and 50+ House seats over the last two elections are not going to throw them out of power for doing more or less what they said they would do. Whose bet seems smarter?

It is strange to see Brooks advocating on behalf of popular wisdom and the public’s sense of equilibrium. When we have seen opposition from across the spectrum unite against the immigration bill in 2007 or the bank bailout in September 2008, Brooks has been on the side of the arrogant, elitist and contemptuous. As I mentioned a little earlier today, when the House heeded some of that popular wisdom and correctly voted down the TARP Brooks dubbed them nihilists. Somehow the nihilists of sixteen months ago have become the spokesmen of American common sense today.

Now it could be that enough constituencies oppose health care legislation as much as they opposed those other establishment-backed bills, and a good case could be made that opposition to health care legislation is being driven by the same distrust of concentrated power and wealth and the same dissatisfaction with an arrogant government that ignores the wishes of the people, and this could lead to the same kind of backlash. Of course, the TARP was rammed through later, which is one of the reasons why there is so much frustration and anger with that measure in particular. Even if we leave aside the flaws of the plan, the way in which it was imposed on the country and our representatives with no meaningful debate and no deliberation has generated tremendous resentment. In every other case involving major legislation that pitted entrenched economic interests and the political class against the public interest Brooks has dismissed the latter and aligned himself with the former, but suddenly he sees the virtue in heeding the voice of popular wisdom. Perhaps the majority should heed his warning, but Brooks is probably the worst conceivable messenger to make the case for trusting popular wisdom over elite consensus.

P.S. On an unrelated subject, this post is the 6,800th I have written and published since I began blogging over five years ago.

Andrew wrote yesterday that it was the “eve of the crippling of Obama’s presidency,” and today he complains of the victory of nihilism. It will annoy Obama’s foes to no end, but he is not going to be crippled by this. No President in the last thirty years has enjoyed Senate majorities as large as the one the Democrats will still have after tonight. After the anti-GOP cycles of ’74 and ’76 the Democrats had a majority of 61 under Carter, and this was reduced to 58 after the midterms. It still seems to me that those elections are the best parallels to what we have seen since 2006.

Neither has “nihilism” triumphed. It is a strange thing to say that Obama’s presidency has been crippled by a “nihilist” victory, since it is clear from Andrew’s own choice of words that he thinks the “nihilists” have nothing of value to contribute to political debate. If they are “nihilists,” how could they possibly cripple Obama? Nihilist is a word that has been thrown around a lot in the last couple of years, and it seems that people use this word whenever voters or their representatives do something that displeases or opposes political establishments. Populist was the preferred word for demonizing anti-establishment leaders in the 1990s, but now the populist label has acquired a little bit of respectability and greater currency after the last few elections. Nihilist seems to have become one of the replacements to serve the same function. When the House correctly rejected the TARP the first time as the egregious power grab by the executive branch and incredible swindle of the public that it was, David Brooks railed against the “nihilists” who had voted with the majority. Brooks trotted out the label again in early 2009, and I wrote this in response:

It can’t always be “nihilism” to oppose government power-grabs and enormous amounts of spending and borrowing, but then the charge of nihilism is an odd one to make in any case. If the problems Republicans have are inflexibility and reflexive adherence to an ideological tenet, the problem is not that they believe in nothing or wish to lay waste to things, which is what nihilism would actually mean, but that they have invested far, far too much in one position. They believe in something (getting rid of earmarks!), and the only thing they want to destroy is earmarks, but this is not nihilism. It is not nihilistic to be obsessed with earmarks and “wasteful spending,” just incredibly stupid and futile.

One could substitute preoccupation with tax cuts in this paragraph, and the point would remain valid. Nihilists wish to tear down existing structures. Turgenev’s literary archetype of a nihilist, Bazarov, had no political vision of any kind. The goal of a nihilist is destruction. Far from trying to tear down existing structures, the GOP has pursed stand-patism and a defense of whatever the status quo happened to be a year ago. There are many things to criticize here, not least of which is the party’s complete inability and unwillingness to acknowledge and recognize their grave errors when they were in power, but the GOP’s “nihilism” is not one of them.

Reihan:

There are many, many ironies in the Brownthusiam, but the most notable is the fact that this suburban father with a rather blandly centrist voting record has become the target of apocalyptic rhetoric from both sides. Really, the question is whether or not he has decent judgment. His record suggests that he’s good at making fine distinctions and voting in a pragmatic, constituency-focused manner [bold mine-DL]. I’d prefer a more cost-conscious legislator myself, but he certainly doesn’t come across as a nihilist bent on the destruction of government.

It seems to me that if Brown votes in a “pragmatic, constituency-focused manner,” that helps to explain the apparent contradiction in his position on health care. Brown’s resistance to a federal health care bill seems to come from his defense of the system Massachusetts already has. Ignoring the flaws in MassCare while railing against the same flaws in federal legislation appears cynical and opportunistic, and maybe it is, but it is opportunism that defends a state government measure that already exists against possible federal changes to it. I don’t think this counts as belief in “competitive federalism,” especially when Brown calls on other states to imitate Massachusetts’ example, but I do think it is a classic expression of an “I’ve got mine” sentiment. Were someone like Brown in a poorer state that did not already have some form of universal coverage, his positions would be reversed: he would want the wealthier states to pay for his state’s coverage, and he would eagerly support a federal bill. One could claim that this makes him a good representative of his state. One could just as easily say that it proves that he is a cipher and goes along with whatever happens to popular back home.

Brown’s opposition is also a little bit like the reflexive hostility to any health care legislation among elderly voters on Medicare. For those who already have coverage provided in one way or another through government mandates or subsidies, new federal health care legislation appears to be more of threat than a benefit. This leads me to conclude that Brown espouses conservatism that is simply a defense of the status quo. It is not a conservatism particularly concerned about federalism or decentralization of power, and for those who would like to keep things as they are federalism and decentralization might seem to be dangerous, frightening things. I suppose Brown does exhibit something of an attachment to the interests of his state, which people call narrow-minded provincialism when it gets in their way and which they call localism when it does not affect them.

Like Reihan, I find the rhetoric surrounding this election to be wildly out of proportion. It occurred to me this morning that all these articles prophesying possible doom for Obama and his agenda are probably Coakley’s last, best chance of salvaging a win from the ruins of her pathetic campaign. Massachusetts voters like Obama overwhelmingly, and at least a large plurality of them support his agenda. Obviously, many voters are also discontented with Boston and Washington establishments and looking to make a statement against both, but if enough voters believe that this special election is a do-or-die moment for Obama and his agenda that could generate a late surge of support for Coakley that the polls would never have been able to detect. Obama foes are eager to treat this election as tremendously significant, but by emphasizing how meaningful it is they may have woken up and provoked the other party’s voters in a state where the other party has a huge advantage in registration.

This election has made me think more about political mandates. It is commonplace to say that the victorious party always overreaches and that it is usually mistaken if it believes that it received a mandate for its entire agenda. This is true as far as it goes, but if there is hardly ever a mandate for any party’s agenda it is also difficult to see how there could be meaningful electoral repudiations of any party’s agenda. If voters were doing little more than responding to the financial crisis and recession in 2008, they are doing little more than reacting to high unemployment now.

If 2008 did not represent some meaningful approval and affirmation of what the Democrats proposed to do by a majority of voters, what substance do protest votes in 2010 elections have? It is a cliche to say that elections have consequences, but they do. Something that must be more than a little frustrating for Democrats right now is that Obama and the leadership in Congress are doing pretty much exactly what they said they would do. We are now being told in effect that the majority is about to be punished for keeping their election promises, and the punishment is supposed to be coming from one of their most reliable core areas. It is as if voters in Alabama or Wyoming turned against Bush’s marginal tax cuts after having elected him because he promised to cut taxes.

The easy analysis of what is happening is to say that “even in deep-blue Massachusetts people are rejecting Obama’s agenda,” but none of this makes any sense. I don’t say this because I have any sympathy for Obama’s domestic agenda, but because I don’t think there is any way to understand this response by voters in a heavily Democratic state except as an expression of pure anti-incumbency sentiment and a desire simply to shake things up. After years of mocking Obama’s signature campaign slogans, Republicans have found that their best path back to power is exploiting the desire to change for change’s sake.

Assuming that Brown will win today, the lesson has to be that no winning party should ever attempt to deliver on its promises, and under no circumstances should it follow through and actually deliver promised legislation. I say this as someone who would be happy to see the current health care legislation fail.

My new column for The Week is now online.

Erik Kain writes in his response:

Rather than promise to filibuster health reform, I wish Brown would bring some of the experience he has had with Massachusetts reform to the table and work to strengthen the bill. That he will not is my only sticking point against Brown, but it is a very substantial sticking point.

Let’s agree for the sake of discussion that Erik is correct that a strong mandate is imperative to cost containment. If that is so, how is it to Brown’s credit that he supported the Massachusetts legislation? If the federal bill has a weak mandate and if Erik is right that this will do a poor job of cost containment, the state legislation does not seem to have had a mandate that was any better. As I understand it, MassCare imposed an individual mandate and provided subsidies for those who could not afford insurance. According to reports I have read and by Brown’s own admission, there were no meaningful cost containment measures in the 2006 bill that he supported. Absent affordable coverage, achieving universal or near-universal coverage requires a subsidy, which Massachusetts has been providing, and it is this provision that has been eating up so much of the budget.

The bill has become a cause of serious fiscal problems in Massachusetts, the very same kind of fiscal problems Brown now claims as a reason for opposing the federal bill. Nonetheless, he continues to tout his support for the legislation, and he believes other states should “follow our example.” So they should follow the example of mandating expensive coverage and having taxpayers foot an ever-increasing bill? Naturally, Brown opposes the federal bill because he aspires to a federal Republican office and opposition to the administration’s agenda is a basic requirement of being accepted by the national party and conservative activists, so there was never any question of Brown bringing his experience with MassCare to change the federal bill. The point here is not that Brown shouldn’t oppose the Senate version of the bill. The point is that it strains credulity to listen to him reject the federal bill while urging other states to imitate a deeply flawed MassCare when it lacks the cost containment elements that make the federal bill similarly flawed and deserving of opposition.

Erik won’t like this comparison, but Brown’s attempt to have it both ways on this issue seems a lot like when Palin took credit for jacking up windfall profits taxes on oil corporations in one breath and then in the next played the part of champion of anti-tax activists and friend to Joe the Plumber. Back home, sticking it to oil corporations and spreading the wealth were all right by her, but on the national stage there was nothing more offensive to her than the redistribution of wealth. In Alaska, she was the populist sending out bigger checks to voters to buy support and popularity, and on the campaign trail she was the scourge of socialism. Arguably, this is a product of the national party’s ability to force rising politicians to conform and abandon whatever traits or ideas made them popular and electable at the local and state level, but Brown is no more immune to it than Palin was. Erik’s enthusiasm for Brown as a would-be refomist is likely to lead to disappointment.

When this blog began over five years ago, the disputed Ukrainian presidential election and the Orange “revolution” were among the first things I discussed. I was extremely skeptical of the significance of the “revolution,” I was very critical of the unthinking Western embrace of the criminal oligarch Viktor Yushchenko, and I was hostile to the proposed inclusion of Ukraine in NATO that Washington seemed so intent on pushing. Now a new presidential vote is taking place, and the incumbent Yushchenko has been eliminated in the first round after receiving record-low approval ratings. That is good news for Ukraine, but the damage of Yushchenko’s tenure has been done, and it is not much consolation to know that he will not have another term for even greater misrule. It is remotely possible that Yanukovych could manage to win the run-off, but it is much more likely that Tymoshenko will be the new president. As Douglas Birch writes today, both candidates recognize the reality that the relationship with Russia is crucial to Ukraine.

Late last year, a survey of post-communist countries showed that Ukrainians were one of two nations with abysmally low levels of support for democratic government and capitalism. Given the dire financial straits in which Ukraine finds itself and the disastrously dysfunctional government they have had over the last five years, it is not surprising that Ukrainians have soured on both. The absurdly high and unrealistic expectations for internal reform and charting a “pro-Western” course following Yushchenko’s victory have been dashed, and Ukrainians appear to be experiencing the acute disillusionment with Western models that Russians experienced during the 1990s. There is not much reason to expect that the regional and personal antagonisms that have done so much to cripple effective government in Ukraine will go away, but the good news is that tensions with Moscow are likely to be reduced and any disputes over gas pipelines, Crimea or the Black Sea Fleet are less likely to escalate into a crisis.

What this should teach us is that neighbors of a major power are going to be bound by their economic ties with and dependence on that power, and that the major power is naturally going to exercise political influence over its neighbors. Attempts to halt or reverse this lead to political paralysis or military confrontation, and the major power ends up retaining its influence anyway. It is the general population of the countries that Washington has been trying to “free” from Moscow’s orbit that suffers the consequences of these ill-advised, unnecessary and provocative attempts to pull Russia’s neighbors out of that orbit. The remarkable thing is that the attempt to take Ukraine and Georgia out of Moscow’s orbit has resulted in tying both even more closely to Russia, and it has made the neighboring states’ chances of charting independent courses in the near future far worse. Perhaps if Yushchenko and Saakashvili had not received such enthusiastic, blind and reckless support from the West, and perhaps if Westerners had not been so ready to encourage all their worst instincts by showering them with unthinking approval, the causes they claimed to represent might not be as politically moribund as they now are. What’s more, perhaps the countries Western sympathizers thought they were helping with their foolish enthusiasm might not be as badly wrecked as they are.

This is an interesting claim – that totalitarianism “inevitably” threatens American security. Looking at Freedom House’s own rankings in map-form here it sure doesn’t look like that. There’s unfree Africa, not posing much of a threat. And parts of Southeast Asia, not free and not particularly threatening. There’s the unfree Middle East, populated mostly with U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Jordan. All not free. There’s unfree China, which isn’t exactly an ally of the U.S., but it’s not an overt threat either. There’s unfree Russia, which is contesting American influence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but is pale shadow of the Cold War threat to American interests it once was.

Indeed, scan the list of unfree countries and quite a few of them pose no threat whatsoever to the United States. Far from being an inevitable threat, the existence of political repression appears to be just what it always was, an unfortunate expression of man’s inhumanity to man. ~Greg Scoblete

Scoblete has this right, which is why Kirchick’s claim about the inevitable threat from totalitarianism isn’t very interesting at all. This is a less developed version of the standard democratist claim that the nature of foreign regimes determines their foreign policy: unfree and authoritarian governments, which Kagan always insists on dubbing autocracies, should be expected to oppose democratic governments in international affairs because they are authoritarian. It is not enough for them to acknowledge that all states have divergent interests, and they seem not to realize that other major powers would resist U.S.-led policies regardless of their regime type. Democratists feel compelled to make the ideologically-loaded and false claim on top of this that unfree governments necessarily threaten free governments. This ultimately makes the other states’ liberalization and democratization into national security imperatives. Even though it is democratists who insist on aggressively subverting other governments, while the authoritarian states have opted to hide behind state sovereignty and preserving relative global stability, democratists seem to think that “we” have to undermine “their” system before “they” can undermine “ours.” It is an echo of the fear of Soviet-led global revolution, but, as Scoblete shows us, it no longer has even the slightest basis in reality.

Having wrongly assumed that unfree states “inevitably” threaten the U.S., democratists then make another completely baseless assumption. Democratists believe that if these states had liberal democratic governments, they would not be as “threatening.” In fact, there is good reason to think that as other states transition from authoritarian to democratic government the more difficult it becomes for Washington to reconcile divergent state interests. Obviously, I don’t think it is a problem that Turkey, Japan and Brazil, for example, have started pursuing more independent and even assertive foreign policies, nor do I view this new independence as a threat, but from a hegemonist perspective the empowerment of the majorities in these nations and the political weakening of “reliable” elites has been distressing at best. We have also seen more dramatic examples of democratization working against U.S. influence in Venezuela, Bolivia and, to a lesser extent, Ecuador. Democratization can make satellites rebellious or even hostile, and it makes once-“reliable” allies harder to bring into line. Democratization makes it much more difficult for regional allies to ignore that U.S. policies in their respective regions do not actually seem to serve the interests of many allies. When real democratization occurs and other nations elect governments that represent their interests, it does not result in the installation of reliable “pro-Western” lackeys, but quite often leads to the rise of politicians who are ready and willing to resist and criticize U.S. and European policies when these run counter to their national interests.

Most of the unfree states around the world have largely limited themselves to an authoritarian model. Some are populist authoritarian regimes led by nationalist strongmen and/or demagogues, others are organized around a central party and military leadership, and still others are built around personal dictatorship headed by a member of a particular family. Some of the latter in Arab countries have been our allies for many decades, and during the Cold War Washington frequently allied with anticommunist authoritarian governments. A number of anticommunist authoritarian regimes transitioned to democratic government, occasionally because Washington brought pressure to bear. These states had not been threats to American security earlier when they had illiberal and dictatorial regimes and then suddenly ceased posing a threat to American security when they had become democratic. On the contrary, they were bulwarks of American security policy in their regions. In some cases, they were reliable anticommunist allies because they were unfree regimes that served the interests of a minority of the population.

North Korea is probably the last state that can be correctly described as totalitarian. China, Cuba et al. are police states and undoubtedly repressive, but even these cannot be classed as totalitarian. North Korea is potentially dangerous to its neighbors because of its large standing army, but in terms of threatening American security it is pathetically weak. This is an important point. Totalitarian states wield considerable power, but this power is largely directed inwards at the control of their own populations. The development of any other institutions becomes a threat to the ability to concentrate all power in a relative few hands and endangers the regime’s control of society. Repression of all other institutions makes totalitarian states progressively weaker, both economically and politically, which also makes them much less threatening.

I have never quite understood why so many national security hawks and hegemonists like to wrap themselves in the mantle of democracy promotion. Of course, it is easy to imagine that it is just empty rhetoric or an attempt to make their aggressive and provocative policies appear as if they had some redeeming quality, but they keep coming back to the idea so frequently that it is difficult to dismiss as mere cynical posturing. Part of the explanation may be that they so completely misunderstand the effects of democratization that they genuinely believe it is a boon for U.S. hegemony, but support for democracy promotion remains strong despite all the evidence that it increasingly creates stronger opposition to U.S. policies.

One part of their problem must be that they seem to be always and forever analyzing every international conflict and crisis through the lens of the 1930s and ’40s, and they understand the dynamics of world politics according to their rather distorted, simplified memory of what happened before and during WWII. According to this memory, the interwar period was marked by the decline of democratic powers relative to authoritarian and totalitarian powers, the latter were unremittingly hostile to the former, and the inability of the democratic powers to counter and resist the rise of these other powers led to war. Even if this described that period of time correctly, these hawks seem to think this dynamic is the way things always work. They are weighed down by the constant comparisons they have frequently made between our present predicament and the great struggles of WWII and the Cold War, which gives them an inflated idea of how much power United States needs to project around the world, and many of them remain in thrall to a distorted memory of the end of the Cold War, according to which American containment somehow triggered the revolutions of 1989. Indeed, this distorted memory was strong that it shaped their misguided thinking of what would happen in Iraq after the invasion.

There is a tendency among these hawks and hegemonists to grossly overestimate the strength of other states and foreign threats. As real threats from other major powers have receded in the last twenty years, the need to emphasize inevitable conflict between ideologies has become that much greater. The hawks and hegemonists have the odd profile of paranoid triumphalists: they are certain that their ideology and vision will prevail, but they are also desperately frightened of anything that might possibly threaten a victory that they otherwise claim is inevitable. Hawks and hegemonists also tend to embrace a simplified progressive nationalist narrative of American history in which the forces of freedom and good prevail over unfreedom and evil, and according to the story these forces prevailed because Americans were willing to take up arms. It may be this last item that is most significant in explaining the weird preoccupation with democracy promotion. According to their selective interpretation of American history, projecting American power and promoting democracy and freedom have always gone together, and so apparently they must always go together. This ideological commitment seems unwavering, despite every indication that promoting democracy and maintaining U.S. hegemony conflict with one another more and more.

P.S. It’s also worth drawing attention to Kirchick’s weak attack against the so-called “neo-isolationism” that is supposed to be on the rise in the U.S. That misleading Pew result has been very useful to many different arguments. In this case, Kirchick is dusting off the tedious use of “isolationism” as a bogey to scare Americans into supporting an even more activist and ambitious foreign policy overseas. As I have said several times now, a large majority of the respondents to that survey didn’t really believe in “minding our own business,” and two-thirds of them were ready to attack Iran. The chimera of latent American “isolationism” is almost as useful to hawks and hegemonists as whipping up the public into a frenzy over small or non-existent threats.