On a more serious note, there are several good articles in the new TAC that deserve your attention. In the first article from the issue now online, Jim Antle argues for a conservative revival with a paleo-friendly agenda that does not define itself with paleo labeling:

An objection is likely to enter even the minds of sympathetic readers. This sounds a lot like paleoconservatism, whose adherents are too quirky, too cantankerous, and too small in number to put together an effective political movement. But we needn’t call it “paleo” anything. It’s the ideas that matter. Not so long ago a platform along these lines—limited government, decentralism, a national interest-based foreign policy, and resistance to multiculturalism—would have been considered conservatism without the prefix [bold mine-DL]. And is it really that outlandish compared to the leading alternatives? Right now, Republicans are arguing about whether they want to remain the party that is in the minority now or go back to being the party that was in the minority for decades after the New Deal.

Broadly speaking, this is somewhat similar to what I was calling for last year, and obviously I agree with the agenda Jim is describing. I do think a paleo-populist direction makes more sense, I don’t much care what label we apply to it, and it is far more likely to meet with the approval of most conservatives than the agenda offered by the “reformers.” Over the last few months, I have annoyed quite a few readers (and Jim Antle) with my criticism of the mainstream conservative response to Obama’s agenda, because I have conceded the one key electoral insight that the “reformers” have, which is that voters do not respond to an agenda of reducing the size and scope of government in practice, however much they may claim to embrace its rhetoric and accept its slogans. One question I keep raising is this: are conservatives looking for an agenda that is going to be popular in the short to medium-term, or are they satisfied to advocate for policies that have limited appeal in the conviction that these are the right and necessary policies for the country? Is it really the case that it is the ideas that matter, or are we supposed to be concerned with producing electoral victories?

More to the point, how would such ideas win over an American public that has become steadily more dependent on the very policies and structures of government and corporations? To be brutally frank, what appeal do we really think political decentralism will have in a country in which people are conditioned to want to flee their homes and to adapt themselves to the demands of our megalopoleis? Toward what communities are we proposing to decentralize, and what political weight do they actually have? If people do not, or in some cases cannot, reject consolidation and centralism in everyday life and in economic affairs, why are they going to prefer it in government? In other words, having already lost much of the culture and actively collaborated in the economic dislocation ravaging many of these communities, what political remedy do conservatives think they can offer to counter the effects of all this? I am not saying this to be contrarian or difficult–these are the questions we have to be able to answer if we expect anyone to take our arguments seriously.

The conservatism Jim describes ought to serve Middle American interests, as these are the people who are its natural constituents. However, the social base for the conservatism Jim advocates has been weakening under the pressures of many of the policies that mainstream conservatives have supported. The point is not simply to repeat that mainstream conservatism is not serving the interests of its natural constituents, but to acknowledge that this has contributed to harming the social base on which any conservative political success has to be founded. Jeremy Beer reflects on the causes of Middle American decline, and identifies one of the most important ones:

And that is that fly-over country, by and large, has been hemorrhaging intellectual capital for decades. The most talented young men and women, the most able, the most intelligent and creative, have been leaving to go off to college — or have been lured off to college — only to return in ever-diminishing numbers.

Of course, it is not possible to isolate this drain of intellectual and social capital from the loss of economic capital (yet another reason why the dislocations of globalization are ruinous for local cultures and communities) from these regions of the country: poor states remain so because the most talented leave (indeed they are encouraged to leave and their ability to leave is celebrated), but these people leave because there are so few opportunities, and once-prosperous states begin to enter the same downward economic-demographic spiral as their local and regional economies are gutted in the name of efficiency and growth. Rather than a conservatism of place and stability, we have had the conservatism of meritocracy and opportunity, and partly as a result of this the places that have tended to produce conservative voters are dying off and their children are assimilating to the norms and adjusting to the realities of the megalopoleis. When people experience the effects of income inequality and social and economic stratification, they tend to be drawn to left-liberal politics and government remedies, and the conservative and neoliberal cry of solving these structural problems with more education and opportunity not only does not appeal to the megalopolitans, who see them as woefully lacking, but also adds insult to injury for those adversely affected by the upheaveals of rapid economic, technological and cultural change. More important than undermining the political prospects of the right, this pattern of upheaval and stratification is fundamentally unhealthy for the country and will create profound political instability and civil strife over the long term.

Responding to one of my posts on empire, James Poulos reasonably observed that there are many urban centers that absorb and concentrate Middle America’s intellectual and social capital and it is not the political center, Washington, that does this. That is largely true, but it also makes it that much more clear that focusing conservative efforts on the political center, while making few or no efforts to counteract centralizing and consolidating tendencies in the rest of the country, is rather futile if the goal is anything other than contesting for control over the central state as it exists. At the same time, to the extent that Middle Americans are sending any of their remaining most-talented people to Washington I submit that their time would be more productively spent back home.

One of the constants of much paleoconservative criticism of the pursuit of electoral victory is that the political path has been tried for decades and has in almost every respect failed to conserve much of anything that traditional conservatives want to conserve. Even though I enjoy political talk and strategizing as much as anyone, I find it hard to disagree with this. Part of what I proposed last year involved a practical decentralism, in which building up or shoring up local institutions and creating constituencies that then have a vested interest in devolving power take precedence over getting candidates elected who make the right noises about decentralization. Jim mentions that the agenda he describes would have been considered generic conservatism not that long ago. However, what that amounted to in practice domestically was that all of the rhetoric praising federalism and states’ rights, the demands for local control and condemnations of unfunded mandates had little or no meaningful effect, and before very long the GOP majority was offering up its own unfunded mandates with their intrusion into local and state education and doing nothing except to concentrate more power in Washington.

Matt Steinglass raises a good question in response to my Star Trek post below:

Isn’t the Prime Directive’s doctrine of non-interference in the affairs of (particularly underdeveloped) alien civilizations a classically paleo-con non-interventionist position?

Indeed it is, which is why most Star Trek plotlines are so annoying. If the most important principle is non-interference, why is the moral of almost every Star Trek story that this or that Federation captain is right to violate the Prime Directive in order to “do something” whenever there is a crisis? Surely the stories should drive home why non-interference is the better, wiser course, but instead they routinely show the Prime Directive to be the invention of moral and political idiots. It is hard to think of another fictional world in which its heroes so regularly disrespect the core values that they are supposed to espouse. Anyone who watched very many of the original episodes with Kirk would come away with the impression that the Prime Directive was a rule mostly observed in the breach, and most TNG episodes and movies would tell you that non-interference is either misguided or actually morally corrupt. The entire ninth movie was one big celebration of so-called humanitarian intervention. The advocates of non-intervention–the people invoking the Prime Directive most often–were portrayed in that feature as corrupt collaborators with the worst of the worst. I have a lot of time for the Prime Directive, which is a lot more than most Star Trek writers ever had for it.

Jonah Goldberg has been getting a lot of grief for writing the following:

For starters, I think the ideal Republican candidate just might be Hispanic — and tough on immigration. The way our politics work, you need some kind of authenticity, some kind of membership, to go after sacred cows. Not just in the Nixon to China or Sista Souljah sense, but in the sense that only members of a “special group” can challenge the orthodoxies of the self-appointed (left-wing) leadership of that group. Blacks can challenge racial quotas in ways whites can’t. Women can attack feminism in ways men can’t. Jews can criticize Israel, Catholics can challenge the Church, gays can question gay marriage, and so on. Yes, they’ll still be attacked for their heresy. But the chief weapon — charges of bigotry — is severely blunted when “one of your own” leads the assault. I don’t like it, but it is what it is.

I’ll leave James to question Goldberg’s frequent use of the word sense in this post. For a change, I don’t think Goldberg is that far off here. Perhaps the choice of Ward Connerly as an example of what he means was not the best one he could have made, given the quite limited inroads Connerly has made among other blacks specifically on affirmative action initiatives, but the basic observation about how identity politics works is a fair one. All things being equal, it is easier for a member of a particular group to make criticisms without fear of being charged with prejudice and animus. There is still the possibility of being attacked as a sell-out or a self-hater, but that is a different kind of criticism rooted in the conviction that solidarity demands conformity on certain questions. Someone who belongs to a group possesses credibility and authority with the group that outsiders don’t possess. Even political groups, which are no less subject to the pressures of their own kind of identity politics, are more likely to listen to dissent from their own members than they are to heed the critiques of opponents. One might say that this observation is so straightforward that it is not all that remarkable, but it seems to be strangely controversial all the same. There is something to be said for the idea of a “tough” immigration policy being espoused by someone who could not be automatically tagged as a nativist–not that this would stop proponents of mass immigration from flinging the charge of nativism as irresponsibly as possible–and this sort of presentation could help drive home that the biggest losers from mass immigration are lower-class workers of all races and remind the public that middle-class and lower-middle class Hispanics are not favorably disposed towards illegal immigration at all.

Goldberg himself seems to grant that this is something of an ideal fantasy, and not something that is likely to happen. He acknowledges that such a candidate doesn’t exist, but he is essentially arguing that if such a candidate did exist he would be able to neutralize a number of typical attacks on enforcement and restrictionist arguments. The biggest flaw I can see with Goldberg’s ideal candidate is that it is even more unlikely that such a candidate is going to be otherwise pro-labor, which means that he will oppose unfair competition from one direction while enabling it elsewhere in the name of free trade. There is an additional problem that, regardless of views on immigration, minority voters have few reasons to vote Republican, and identity politics and immigration policy probably aren’t going to change that. In the end, the worst that can be said of Goldberg’s argument is that it is purely idle, because he hates identity politics and would regard engaging in such identity politics as a terrible mistake.

In those days, the most common boy’s game was Cowboys and Indians. Now I have nothing against Indians. Unfortunately they lost, despite putting up a brave fight, a fight that was a lot more ruthless than waterboarding. No Geneva Convention in those days [bold mine-DL]. Did they get a bad deal? Yes, but their bravery is remembered in the many school teams named after them. Were I of Indian heritage, I would be proud to be so honored. ~Gary Horne

As it happens, I have nothing against kids playing Cowboys and Indians, and I think objections to these mascots and team names are misguided. That said, perhaps one reason (though I grant it may not be the main reason) why there are fewer Westerns today is that there is some greater acknowledgment today that the forcible displacement and, in some cases, extermination of whole tribes as part of inexorable westward expansion involved quite a lot of tragedy and suffering, and that our countrymen were responsible for much of this. Therefore, it might not be the sort of thing we want to valorize and celebrate after patting ourselves on the back for being so good as to pay tribute to the virtues of people whom our ancestors either forced or wiped out. Imagine for a moment someone saying today, “Now I have nothing against Armenians. Unfortunately they lost, despite putting up a brave fight, a fight that was a lot more ruthless than waterboarding. No Geneva Convention in those days….” Aside from belittling the moral gravity of torture and minimizing the importance of providing protections for captured combatants, what is the purpose of such statements, except to wink and nod at the brutality of the past and implicitly to try to make light of modern injustices? If you find torture outrageous, how much more would you be troubled by a history filled with greater ruthlessness? If you prefer to ignore torture, is there any kind of brutality that you wouldn’t be willing to ignore? We don’t need runaway presentism and endless exercises in passing judgment on our ancestors according to modern standards, but the fact that non-combatants were massacred on both sides in our frontier wars isn’t something that should make us all indifferent to or supportive of modern wartime excesses.

One of the key elements of a traditional game of Cowboys and Indians was the conviction that one side obviously represented civilized norms and the other did not, and to the extent that the other side was given any credit it was in the role of the proverbial “noble savage”–the one who is now honored, so to speak, by being made into an athletic mascot. Of course, this is the conceit of apologists for war crimes in every generation: we are bringing light to those in darkness, even if we are doing so in brutal and unjust ways, or we are overcoming forces of darkness. That is, even when we are uncivilized and savage ourselves, we are never the savages–that is the role of the other side. If children absorb this lesson without qualification, I can actually see something harmful in it, and that can’t be dismissed as nothing but political correctness. (For what it’s worth, political correctness today, if majority opinion is any indication, would dictate that we approve of torture of suspected terrorists and that we embrace any other extraordinary measures used to fight terrorism–P.C. is not merely a multiculturalist or liberal phenomenon.)

Horne continues:

The boyhood game of Cowboys and Indians is not about violence or racism, it is an allegory about good and evil. To play the cowboy was to be brave and triumph over evil [bold mine-DL]. To me, this seems to be an essential lesson for a child to learn. I know of a mother in California who would not allow her son to play with any kind of toy weapon, much less a cowboy fighting Indians. I think her son will grow up to be a man incapable of standing up against evil, who will shrink at the approach of the next bully, and undoubtedly vote Democrat.

Leave aside the lame put-downs at the end. Ah, you see, it’s just an allegory–all is well. Horne doesn’t seem to see that he has just wrecked his own cause. As a harmless game among boys, who could really object to it? As an allegory of good and evil, in which the Indian is made quite clearly to fill the role of evil, it seems to me that Horne gives the game a grim significance that it never had for a lot of people. At the same time, his defense rings hollow. The game isn’t about violence? Of course, violence is at the core of the game, as Horne himself is insisting a moment later. Standing up to evil, resisting the bully–Horne means learning to be willing to fight and even to kill when necessary. The key value of the game, according to Horne himself, is to teach boys how they should be willing to inflict violence against evil men, who, of course, always happen to be identified as being on the other side.

If the game actually taught kids that “we” can do no wrong, that evil is always somewhere else and can be defeated through the use of violence, it would be time for that game to go. Fortunately, I don’t think it represents most of what Horne says it does. Of course, all of that was Horne’s introduction to a series of extremely tired remarks about relativism and diplomacy, which I can’t be bothered to answer.

Like so many successful comic-book movies, it’s about adolescent heroes coming to terms with themselves and their pasts, struggling with friends, rivals, and enemies while searching for power and place in the world. Where the original was poorly fashioned and outwardly focused, this one is gorgeously designed and self-obsessed. It’s personal rather than political, aesthetically pleasing at the expense of conceptual depth. Star Trek, then, is continuing its mission: boldly going where the franchise has never gone before, seeking out new fans and new pop culture relevance. But it may lead fans of the original into unfamiliar space, struggling to come to terms with a series that, for the first time in more than four decades, feels strangely alien. ~Peter Suderman

I have to confess to being a life-long watcher of Star Trek and something of a fan, at least during its better moments, so I have viewed the new prequel/remake with a certain dread. The last time a Star Trek film involved Romulans was not that long ago, and it was possibly one of the worst movies of the last decade. To call that one Clive Barker’s Star Trek would be an insult to Hellraiser fans (and it is debatable whether the ninth movie is more like a bad horror flick than the tenth), but that is what has always come to mind when I think about it. In other words, I am not sorry that there will be no more TNG-based movies.

Now J.J. Abrams promises/threatens to do to an old, admittedly creaky and tired franchise what he does in pretty much every movie he directs: blow up a lot of things, including any pretensions the franchise has ever had to being something more than a violent space opera. For most people, this will come as a relief, but I am not one of them. The insufferably cerebral and moralistic elements of Star Trek have been bad enough to make even devoted fans wince many, many times, and if the acting often seemed weak it might have been because so few actors can credibly recite some of the drivel generations of actors have been forced to say over the decades. However, stripping Star Trek of those things isn’t to create a new, reimagined Star Trek, but simply to slap the old names on something entirely different and pretend that annihilation is the same as renovation. Of course, I have found almost every assumption that undergirds the old Star Trek universe utterly ridiculous and unrealistic even by sci-fi standards. It is indeed the meliorist’s and progressive’s dream come true, which is another way of saying that it is impossible. There is almost nothing in the franchise’s politics that I find attractive, and the regular sermonizing was at times very unpleasant*. Yet I learned to like it not just in spite of its preachiness and precious political correctness, but also partly because those were constants one could rely on.

Even though these were the things from which the franchise had to keep redeeming itself, it would have been indistinguishable from every other action/adventure story set in space if it did not have them. I have heard it said that the new Bond films have created a Bond in many ways much closer to Ian Fleming’s conception of the character; I find it hard to imagine anyone saying the same thing about the new crew of the Enterprise and Roddenberry. Very few, aside from Dirk Benedict, really miss the old Battlestar Galactica that Ron Moore’s re-creation has completely surpassed and, despite its final missteps, almost obliterated from memory. Millions of people who grew up with the hokey, earnest and ridiculous Star Trek will miss it when it is permanently replaced by its “self-obsessed” namesake.

* This is balanced by the strange fact that the most absurdly political, preachy film of them all, The Voyage Home, was also by far the funniest.

So Tom Ridge is out (sorry, Reihan). However, before we move on, what are we to make of that early poll showing that Ridge would have prevailed over Toomey in the primary? What is going on in this Pennsylvania Republican electorate? Jay Cost makes some good observations in this post, and concludes:

If the west prefers Toomey over Specter, but Ridge over Toomey – it can’t be ideology driving the results.

That may be partly true. As Reihan noted in his post, in which he argued for the strengths of Ridge as a primary candidate, “Ridge is more personable and charismatic, he has a more appealing personal story, and he’s from Erie.” It’s this last detail that may count the most. All things being equal, western Pennsylvanian Republicans seem to prefer one of their own over someone from the east, but when there were two easterners running against each other the more conservative one prevailed in the west in 2004. So it seems plausible that what we’re calling ideology here may count for something in the absence of a strong local connection. The real question is what the substance of this ideology is. I submit that it has little or nothing to do with guns, abortion or any of the traditional hot-button issues that are more associated with the conservatism of the “T.”

Candidates’ origins may explain some of the results, but they don’t explain everything, and Cost’s discussion of the role of ideology here is pretty non-specific. There are a lot of fast and loose references in Cost’s post to Obama’s bitter gun-clingers, who were by and large the western Pennsylvanian folks in the counties where he was getting absolutely annihilated all along the Ohio and West Virginia borders. Up and down the Monongahela Valley, Obama’s share of the Democratic electorate was pitifully small. None of this tells us very much about the ideological preferences of the Pennsylvanian Republican electorate.

Specter’s success in 2004 among voters in the “T” of central and northern Pennsylvania may have depended on a couple of factors Cost hasn’t considered. If we grant that these Republicans in the center of the state tend to be the more socially conservative and religious members of the primary electorate, they may have also been more likely to follow the lead of a prominent social conservative Senator when he endorses the incumbent (i.e., they did what Santorum told them to do) and they may be more inclined to back a candidate supported by a still-popular President. While we’re trafficking in stereotypes, the Starbucks latte-drinking Pittsburgh suburbanites who tended to back Toomey might not be as interested in the social conservative agenda, so they are therefore also less likely to be influenced by Santorum’s endorsement and are more likely to judge the candidates on other matters. Therefore, it is possible that ideology was a significant factor drawing western Pennsylvanians to Toomey as one relatively preferable to Specter on fiscal issues. Let’s remember who Toomey was and is, and what his major themes were and are again likely to be. According to the Wikipedia article on Toomey:

Aided by $2 million of advertising from the Club for Growth, Toomey’s campaign theme [in 2004] was that Specter was too moderate, especially on fiscal issues. Toomey frequently denounced Specter as a liberal spendthrift.

One of the problems in expecting that the “T” ought to produce a pro-Toomey result if voters are taking ideology into account is the assumption that social conservatives in the “T” are attracted to a Club for Growth-style campaign. It is just a guess, but I would wager that, like social conservatives in many other parts of the country, the social conservatives in the “T” tend to be more downscale and less reflexively opposed to economic populism and government activism. If you looked at these same districts and how they voted in the 2008 GOP presidential primary, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if these were centers of strength for Mike Huckabee, who was made out to be an economic populist who deviated from the true Club path on tax and spending matters. This might be why an attack against Specter primarily on fiscal issues would have fallen flat despite Specter’s social liberalism.

Cost writes:

As you can see, Specter held his own in the center of the state. I don’t have the exact numbers in front of me, but I’d bet the spicy chicken sandwich I’m eating that he won PA-5 and PA-9, the two most conservative districts in the state. These places are mostly rural, uniformly white, low income, historically Republican – the exact kinds of places media pundits in Washington say are ruining the GOP. Yet they went for Specter in 2004.

Well, technically, media pundits aren’t saying that the places are “ruining the GOP,” but that excessive reliance on appeals geared toward such places to the apparent exclusion of others are “ruining the GOP.” No one would say that San Francisco Bay and Vermont are ruining the Democratic Party, but if the national party even appeared to be defining itself too much to satisfy people in their core areas you would hear (and undoubtedly have repeatedly heard in the past) pundits warn the Democrats against relying too heavily on their base. The more important points are not just that the “most conservative districts” voted for Specter, which raises questions about what makes them the “most conservative” and whether their views on economics and fiscal restraint are among the “most conservative” in Pennsylvania (and what we mean by conservative when we say this!), but that these districts are both low-income and historically Republican. The former will probably tend to favor the moderate Republican and the latter will probably favor the incumbent.

Cost is really making my argument for me when he goes on to say:

He [Specter] lost heavily Republican Butler county by about 20 points. Butler County is not part of what the pundits would identify as the GOP’s trouble [bold mine-DL]. It’s dominated by Cranberry Township, a far north suburb of Pittsburgh. The county as a whole grew by about 15% in the 1990s. In the last 10 years, growth has slowed to about 6%. Cranberry is dominated by younger families looking to buy a home without Allegheny County’s real estate taxes weighing them down [bold mine-DL]. There has been a big boom in development in the last 25 years, which means plenty of Starbucks around Cranberry [bold mine-DL], though it still voted for Toomey in 2004.

That final clause is unnecessary. Of course they voted for Toomey in 2004–rapidly developing suburbs filled with people looking for reduced tax burdens are perfectly suited for a Club for Growth candidate’s message. However, herein lies the difficulty for Toomey to make a statewide appeal: the north, center and east are all characterized by greater income inequality and probably somewhat less economic dynamism and upheaval, which make these regions very resistant to an anti-tax fiscal conservative. My guess is that, personality and biography aside, had Ridge run he would have found a similar pattern of support inside the GOP primary electorate that Specter did, but might have had more of a draw in the west because of personal connections to the region. However, it is probably because the GOP primary electorate has shrunk and become relatively more conservative that Ridge chose not to start a campaign. If it could be determined what parts of the state had the most party-switching former Republicans, it would probably show the greatest attrition in the regions where Specter had been, and where Ridge probably would have been, strongest. Ridge’s greater popularity in early polls over Toomey could be nothing more than high name recognition and fond memories of his time as governor when times were generally better for the respondents. At the same time, there are quite a few other reasons to doubt the viability of a moderate candidate inside the current Pennsylvania GOP.

Reihan:

Pretty soon, though, I believe conservatives will have to stop wallowing in delusion and self-pity. And there are excellent signs that this is already happening. The most promising Republican Senate candidates for 2010 are Mike Castle of Delaware, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Rob Simmons of Connecticut, and, assuming he actually has the guts, Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania. All of them are moderates with a proven record of winning the votes of suburban independents and even Democrats. This doesn’t represent any grand reinvention strategy, but it’s the way change starts happening. If these four candidates actually win their races, they will become a powerful bloc that can start moving the GOP closer to the American mainstream.

It may be that these candidates are promising (Castle has an early lead over Biden’s son, Kirk stands a decent chance against Burris and Simmons is running against the badly damaged Dodd), but what do they have to do with ending the conservative “wallowing in delusion and self-pity” that Reihan describes? Part of the “wallowing” in question, being delusional, involves ignoring political reality. Conservatives by and large have been missing that this attitude is distinctly counterproductive and clears the way for the moderates and “reform” types–the ones they cannot stand–to seize the moment and deliver electoral results at the very least. Should moderate Republicans succeed in delivering those results, likely in the teeth of conservative opposition, this isn’t going to shatter conservative delusions, but will instead convince them that all that is required is to shout louder. Reihan says that the kamikaze option is a canard, but tensions on the right have reached a point where you have people who have very different understandings of what a kamikaze option means. There are some conservatives who think that some kind of creative adaptation to the current predicament is essential, even though they may disagree wildly about what to do, and they view a kamikaze approach as the path of the modern, ultimately futile suicide attack. Most conservatives are convinced that if they change nothing and stand by what they call principle, all will be well. They seem to understand kamikaze in its original meaning based in the belief that divine intervention will destroy their enemies.

It seems to me that conservatives are going to try to mobilize against as many of these moderate candidates in primary campaigns as they can (this is already happening in Florida), and they are not going to want to accept the leadership of a new group of moderates even if they prevail next year. The “way change starts happening,” as Reihan puts it, is apparently for moderate Republicans to assert themselves as the new face of the party, which conservatives are going to resist fiercely. All of this is not going to end the “wallowing in delusion and self-pity,” but seems more likely to intensify it. It also seems to be a good way to deepen the divide between rank-and-file partisans and GOP leaders and to ensure that the national party faces an even more demoralized and rebellious base.

Then again, even the moderates Castle and Kirk went along with the unanimous opposition to the stimulus bill, which I assume is going to come back to haunt them next year if the recession does indeed end by late ’09.

Reihan concludes an otherwise good argument with this odd paragraph:

With Specter running in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary in 2010, Republicans have a perfect test case. There’s an excellent chance that a primary candidate from the Democratic left will give Specter a serious fight, opening him up to a vigorous challenge from a Republican reformer. That challenge will probably come from Pat Toomey, who, as head of the Club for Growth, has emphasized tax cuts above all else. But as a Senate candidate, Toomey will have to connect with voters in a state hard hit by industrial decline. To have even the remotest chance of winning the seat, he’ll need to offer effective solutions on health care, energy and transportation. This might not come naturally to Toomey. But if he can pull it off, and if he can claim Specter’s scalp, he’ll become the face of a revitalized GOP.

I understand why progressives would be eager to see a primary challenge against Specter, because there are several candidates, chief among them Joe Sestak, who could in all likelihood wipe the floor with Specter if they wanted. Specter has some advantages of incumbency, it’s true, but he doesn’t have the loyalty of the Democratic primary electorate, and a Sestak challenge would be difficult to overcome. (For starters, Sestak has good relations with organized labor, which Specter has lately been opposing on EFCA.) What I don’t understand is why Reihan, or anyone interested in Pat Toomey’s success, believes that Toomey has a better chance against a freshly-minted Democratic nominee such as Sestak than he would against the old, shabby, unprincipled Specter. Specter may still be broadly popular in the state, but his party-switching could be used effectively against him. Long-time Democratic pols have no such liabilities.

Running against Specter, Toomey could run a character campaign–the default option whenever a candidate knows his policies are not well-received by the electorate–and criticize Specter’s defection as proof that he is untrustworthy and unreliable. By contrast, he could then stress his blue-collar background and shared values, and set himself up as the new outsider trying to oust the time-serving establishment hack. “You may not always agree with me, but I’ll keep my promises and you’ll know where I stand”–that sort of thing. Against Sestak, who could probably topple Specter if he ran, Toomey has no chance, and there is no obvious line of attack against Sestak, except, I suppose, to try to make the election a referendum on Obama’s policies, which seems like an automatic loser in a state Obama carried by a wide margin.

Not only would Sestak have an advantage in enthusiasm and turnout, neither of which Specter could count on, but he would also head off any third party challenge from the left that might come about if the general election pitted two pro-war candidates in a heavily antiwar state, as it would if Specter were the Democratic nominee. Sestak has impeccable credentials on national security–he is a retired rear admiral who served as part of the operations in Afghanistan–and he opposed the Iraq war. Even though Pennsylvanians are likely to be much more concerned about domestic matters, a stark contrast between an antiwar former military officer and a pro-war political activist does not work to the Republicans’ advantage. A Sestak-Toomey match-up would be a possibly more lopsided replay of the 2006 results. This is why Toomey’s challenge never made much sense, even if Specter had not flipped to the other side, because in a general election that isn’t against Specter I don’t see how Toomey possibly wins*. His chances are considerably worse against a real Democrat. That being the case, perhaps forcing Specter to jump ship before the primary is all part of a cunning grand strategy to make the Democrats run a badly flawed candidate in a race they would otherwise almost be sure to win. If so, such a strategy would require the Democratic electorate to roll over and accept Specter without much protest, and this is apparently not going to happen.

* The desperate national Republican moves to recruit Tom Ridge or some other Specter-like replacement makes Toomey’s nomination all the more likely, as it was heavy-handed national Republican interference on behalf of Specter five years ago that thwarted Toomey’s run then and enraged conservative activists. Having lost Specter, they cannot now stop Toomey.

James responds to Ross’ column, and gets something important wrong:

Remember, we’ve seen this movie before: the much-needed Republican version of neoliberalism was called, uh, neoconservatism, an uber-intellectual movement that started out hoping to cure the culture though the sheer power of smart innovation and wound up freaking out over just how willing people were to let a sea change in sex mores radically revise the basic premises of society, culture, politics, and economics alike.

The first part is mistaken. Neoliberals and neoconservatives are fairly close to one another ideologically and hold similar views on many policies, but they emerged and have functioned in very different ways, and on the whole the first wave of neoconservatives were not “rooted in conservatism, but eager for innovation” in the same way that neoliberals critiqued liberalism while continuing to adhere to it. Rather, they were disillusioned by liberalism in its late ’60s and ’70s manifestations, and they were willing to offer their arguments to conservatives and soon enough to align with them politically. (In their relationship to their new political home and their former allies, first-wave neoconservatives have a lot more in common with party-switching moderate Republicans than with the neoliberals who emerged in the party most of them left behind.) One might say that neoliberalism was created by the liberals who came to some of the same conclusions neoconservatives did about the New Left, but who ultimately did not react politically in the same way. Perhaps I would go as far as saying that first-wave neoconservatives were basically neoliberals who voted for Reagan. The people they most resemble are the Obamacons of 2008. What Carter and McGovern had represented in their view, Bush was for the Obamacons: a cause of deep alienation from and disgust with the party they had previously supported. The neoliberals were those in the Democratic Party who saw the writing on the wall after ’80 and ’84 and were determined to make liberalism competitive again. The two may have been and may have even remained close intellectually in some ways, but one was joining in the movement of realignment that prompted the other’s critique of its own side.

Neoconservatives were rooted in liberalism, or even in more hard-left ideological backgrounds, and eager to preserve what they saw as the proper understanding of American liberalism against what they regarded as more recent distortions. Hence their continued veneration not only of the civil rights movement, with which many of them sympathized or worked, but also of FDR and past Cold War liberals who shared their anticommunism. That is the most generous description I can offer. Over time, neoconservatives remained open to domestic policy reform, and so in this way might be described as still being “eager for innovation” up to a point, but they have become the guardians of a foreign policy and national security status quo inside the party, in part because they were instrumental in creating that status quo. Initially, neoconservatives did not come into the Republican coalition to promote innovation on foreign policy and national security questions, though for a long time before 9/11 they were sharply critical of an establishment they saw as too dominated by realists and liberal internationalists, but they entered the coalition in order to join with those they regarded as the most aggressive anticommunists.

For the most part, the neoconservatives were among the ship-jumpers and party-switchers of their time. In other words, they were exactly what the neoliberals were not. If one expects modern-day neoconservatives to be the source of Republican self-renewal, I submit that this would be like expecting Jesse Jackson to lead the Democrats out of the wilderness in the 1980s. Effectively, they are now in the position in the GOP that the opponents of the neoliberals were in the Democratic Party almost thirty years ago.