Via Joshua Keating, this video is the sort of pseudo-Bollywood song that I would expect to see on South Park or perhaps as part of the continuing adventures of Borat. Of course, the video’s producers failed the basic test of Bollywood imitation by foreigners, which is to use either the word sanam or aaja at least ten times.

Revising my earlier remarks on Sanford’s chances in a future presidential primary contest, I think that Ross is onto something when he imagines the possibility of a 2012 Sanford-Huntsman competition as a fruitful clash of rival visions. The 2008 primary race was not all that interesting as a contest of alternative conservative views, but what was interesting about it was that the cardboard-cutout, politically correct candidate in Romney won fewer votes than either of the two leading candidates most actively opposed and hated by conservative activists. Indeed, if you put together the votes won by McCain, Huckabee and Paul, who drew from all across the GOP and independent spectrum, they would constitute around 70% of all Republican primary votes, which means that the vast majority of participants in primary voting selected candidates known to be unacceptable to mainstream activists.

Romney with his three-legged stool won approximately 22%, which might have been higher had he not dropped out so early, but then had he won more support he would not have needed to drop out. This candidate who could tell activists what they wanted to hear had remarkably poor showings with state electorates. The results of the 2008 primaries suggest that candidates that do not meet an artificial movement standard of “purity,” however labored and phony that “purity” was in Romney’s case, are not necessarily unsuccessful with actual voters. It seems that it is the most conventional sort of conservative candidate with all of the built-in advantages who may have the greatest difficulty winning primaries rather than caucuses, which in turn suggests a weakness of such candidates with broader electorates.

Ideally, this would mean that candidates with heterodox or unconventional views on any number of policies will have more room to maneuver in the next election. Unfortunately, in practice GOP primary debates seem to be exercises in futile box-checking as the main rivals do their best to suppress everything about themselves that is remotely interesing, leaving it to the protest and marginal candidates to make all of the noteworthy statements. For the most part, Huckabee’s candidacy took off thanks to the freedom that his relative obscurity and marginal status at the beginning provided and his natural ability in the debates. It remains to be seen whether Huckabee can retain the same appeal should he run again with an eye to satisfying activists and donors.

Michael Kinsley misses the point in Ross’ argument on stem-cell policy:

Let’s start with (c). Although it’s rarely put this way, coercion—especially financial coercion—is at the heart of any political system, including democracy. Almost the whole point of politics is to decide what money is spent communally, and how. Obviously the system can’t work if everyone gets to withhold tax dollars from projects they disapprove of. I and many others, for example, would have preferred to not to have our tax dollars go to finance the Iraq war. I’m sure Ross Douthat would have had no problem seeing why that wouldn’t work.

Well, I assume that people who opposed the war, as I did, wouldn’t have wanted their tax dollars supporting an invasion that they opposed, which is why they opposed the invasion. This is not difficult to understand. Ross argued in part that pro-lifers don’t want to pay for ESCR, because they find it morally objectionable, which is why they don’t want there to be any federal funding of ESCR. Unlike the war, which would not be funded only if there was no war, ESCR could go on without needing public support.

This is one reason why some pro-lifers found the Bush administration’s position, in which it permitted some funding of existing lines (i.e., cells derived from already-destroyed embryos), to be unacceptable. For one thing, it was, in effect, taking advantage of previous wrongdoing. This is also why his later veto of a bill on this subject wasn’t quite the great pro-life stand that many of his supporters pretended that it was. Indeed, in response to criticism of that veto (which I believe was the first veto of Mr. Bush’s Presidency), the White House insisted on reminding everyone that Mr. Bush had been the first President to authorize federal funding of this research. Something this controversial ought to be limited to private funding, or at the very least the administration could have retained Bush-era rules limiting funding to research into existing lines, even though pro-lifers also find the latter objectionable.

Tyler Cowen ponders why people with influence tend towards conventional views, and he offers some reasonable suggestions to explain why this happens. I think there are may be a few other plausible explanations, and only one of them contradicts part of his list. First, I should say that the phenomenon of “selling out” is not really all that common. The accusation may get thrown around a good bit, but usually those in a position to “sell out” never bought in to ideas that were all that marginal or unconventional. Selling out implies that you have exchanged some deeply-held view or loyalty in exchange for personal advantage, but this rarely happens. More often, the people who gain influence never staked out particularly unconventional views early on. They were already temperamentally inclined to accept prevailing wisdom, and as they moved into different contexts they adapted to whatever the prevailing wisdom was as easily as they had earlier. For that matter, people who are uninterested in accommodating prevailing wisdom tend not to go into political or media careers where that habit of accommodation is very useful, partly because they find the importance of this habit in such careers to be a reason to do something else.

It is not as if there are many current defenders of prevailing wisdom who were once hard-core radicals opposed to fundamental assumptions that supported the status quo and then somehow accommodated themselves to the status quo. For the most part, major changes in a person’s political views probably tend towards radicalization, and not towards conventionality. I don’t think I am simply imposing my own experience as a general rule. If influential people continue to hold conventional views, this is because they were by and large brought up with these views and conditioned by their educational institutions to accept and articulate these views. My guess is that most holders of unconventional or marginal views tend to come to these views as they age, and through personal experience or study come to find the conventional views they received when they were younger to be false or flawed in some way.

Disillusionment with conventional views seems to me to be a more common experience than falling under the spell of conventional ideas. Part of this is a function of a basic characteristic of conventionl views: even if they are largely right, they are not terribly interesting or engaging, and with distressing regularity they are not even right. Once established, a conventional view either endures or it doesn’t, but it doesn’t tend to make additional converts after it has caught on. Reading The World Is Flat probably doesn’t change the way you look at the world; reading Fooled By Randomness or Pessimism might.

The other two major factors are limited time and limited information. Most people, including most influential people, are not going to pay close attention to a wide range of subjects because they do not have the time to do so, so they will tend to rely on others. This puts them, like most of the rest of us, at the mercy of expert or insider consensus or some other form of groupthink that forms in reaction to the consensus. Most will not have the time to investigate a subject thoroughly enough to determine whether this consensus is correct or not, but will retreat to appeals to the authority of the experts or will settle for the prevailing wisdom that exists on their “side” of a given debate. Relying on expert consensus or some other form of groupthink for information on many issues, most people are going to accept the conclusions they receive. Even when the consensus is staggeringly wrong, or groupthink has led numerous influential people astray, the very fact of the consensus will be cited in their defense, as if to say, “You can’t expect me to have thought independently about this question–that’s someone else’s job!” There are other social pressures and incentives at work, no doubt, but I think a crucial part is that accepting conventional views is simply far more convenient and involves less work.

Via Andrew, Andrew Exum seems to think that actual policymaking is governed by some sort of rationality:

I think Hizballah is a lot more intimidated by Barack Hussein Obama than it ever was by the cartoon villain George W. Bush. It would be like if Iran voted in a moderate president and we still had to deal with the issue that the Iranian population still wants nuclear power and feels they have a right to it. It’s all well and good when some cartoonish clown like Ahmadinejad or Bush is in charge. When a conciliatory moderate is in charge but your interests still aren’t alligned [sic], that’s when you see the real differences — and you can’t blame all your disagreements on the other side.

That first sentence is odd, since as far as I have been able to tell Obama does not differ from Bush in the slightest in his views on Lebanon or Iran. His “conciliatory” generic rhetoric notwithstanding, Obama’s past support for the bombardment of Lebanon and his other views on Lebanon’s domestic politics and Iran are all conventional and in line with the former administration’s position over the last several years. I fail to see how Hizbullah would view Obama as a “conciliatory moderate,” when he is from their perspective no different from the man he has replaced as far as Lebanon and Iran are concerned. One of the most important misinterpretations of Obama is the tendency to assume that foreign actors view Obama as a majority of Americans views him. Perhaps the only worse misinterpretation is to assume that the world sees him as his critics on the mainstream American right see him, i.e., weak and naive, etc. That said, I doubt it would make any difference if Hizbullah believed that Obama really was a “conciliatory moderate,” just as it seems to have made no difference for most American policymakers when Iran had a less obnoxious head of government.

Iran already had a relatively moderate President in Khatami (who will not be running for election this year, as it turns out) and had resumed its pursuit of nuclear power during his tenure, but Khatami and Ahmadinejad are almost entirely irrelevant because, as I’m sure Exum knows, the Iranian President does not control the nuclear program. So the comparison between our President and theirs is inexact. However, the larger problem with this observation is that there is an assumption that rationality and self-awareness will take over in a state’s policymaking when a foreign government has a less provocative or obnoxious public face, as if political leaders anywhere take real responsibility for their role in worsening relations with other states or even with other parties in their own country.

In the Iranian case, what will happen in the event of an Ahmadinejad defeat this summer is that all of the domestic political forces that have been screaming about the mad Ahmadinejad will suddenly rediscover the irrelevance of the Iranian President regarding such national security matters. If Ahmadinejad should lose to the candidate Khatami will likely endorse, Mirhossein Mousavi, the election of a more moderate candidate will be declared meaningless in much the same way that hard-line elements in other countries will insist that the election of Obama changes nothing significant in U.S. policy.

As it happens, though, these cynical responses to changes in the public face of governments/groups are usually correct in gauging how much policy will change. Where they are typically wrong is in their use of this reality to argue for an even more uncompromising, counterproductive and stupid approach to the other state/group. Obama’s election changes more in U.S. policy than Mousavi’s would on the Iranian side, but it does not change much because for the most part Obama has never intended to change very much. Even if he were interested in implementing radical changes, he is constrained by prevailing national security ideology and entrenched interests that would limit what he could do, and as I have said repeatedly he is an adherent of national security ideology and does not like to challenge entrenched interests.

Understanding the permanence of another state’s (or group’s) interests does not normally prompt recognition of how one’s own government contributed to ongoing stand-offs or disputes with other states, but seems instead to deepen distrust of the other government/group. It creates the chance for one’s own hard-liners to say, “See, their moderates are just as bad as their fanatics–it makes no difference who is nominally in charge. Therefore, the only thing they will understand is force!” Instead of making clear that there are fundamental structural interests and domestic political constraints that compel each head of government (or head of a political movement, group, etc.) to pursue continuity in certain policies, evidence of continuity in a foreign government’s/political movement’s policies seems more often to convince people that their own hard-liners were right all along. Rather than trying to seek a modus vivendi that accommodates core interests on both sides, policy debate tends towards the absolutist, maximalist and, in certainly in our case, moralistic approaches.

Seeing continuity in policy tends to convince people that other states’ policies are not based in legitimate interests, but are part of a malevolent plot to harm their country. This is, of course, irrational, but it happens so often that it cannot be written off as a fluke or the product of unusual circumstances. This is one reason why, despite being routinely wrong about most important things, hard-line elements keep coming back and winning internal policy debates and elections again and again. Instead of causing a reconsideration of why one’s own conditions and demands are unacceptable to the other side, and entertaining the possibility of moving away from maximalist claims, the reverse happens: the other side is deemed simply irrational or captive to ideology, hard-line arguments that “we have no negotiating partner” gain traction and bizarrely one’s own side becomes even more resistant to acknowledging the legitimacy of the other side’s interests the more broadly the foreign public shares the government’s view of the matter.

The very enduring quality of divergent interests, rather than prompting new thinking about whether one’s own policies are remotely realistic and one’s own goals remotely achievable, seems to have the perverse effect of shutting down openings for diplomatic engagement and critical thinking about one’s own foreign policy. This is why the “only Nixon” rules in foreign policy persist, despite the fact that it means that the people most inclined to engage in constructive diplomacy are those least able politically to do so.

Less immediately apparent but also serious is the damage to objectivity and professionalism in the U.S. intelligence community. Intelligence officers can see through the smoke screens thrown up by Freeman’s attackers, involving Saudi donations or out-of-context comments about China, and perceive the affair as exactly what it is: the enforcement of political orthodoxy about U.S. policy toward Israel. (If any intelligence officers could not perceive this, they would be abysmally poor analysts [bold mine-DL].) The message to intelligence officers is clear: Their work will be acceptable only if it conforms to dominant policy views. This standard is exactly the opposite of what a professional and impartial intelligence service should provide. ~Paul Pillar

But remember, Freeman’s critics are just horrified by politicization of intelligence–stifling crtical thinking with ideological tests is the last thing they would want, right?

Pillar goes on to make the point that I kept trying to make for a couple of weeks:

The application of this or any other litmus test regarding policy views to the filling of an intelligence position is contrary to the very nature of intelligence, which does not make policy [bold mine-DL]. It is contrary to the concept that good intelligence officers are bright, perceptive, creative, and committed people — and thus are bound to have their own views on policy, including foreign policy — but do not let those personal views intrude into the performance of their jobs.

The application of such tests reminds me of the inane process of staffing the CPA in Iraq following the invasion. Completely irrelevant criteria, such as applicants’ views on abortion, past voting, and working for political campaigns, became part of the staffing process. Party hacks and “true believers” were preferred over professionals and regional experts who would have been able to do the job much better. The results speak for themselves. This is the same sort of “quality” that Freeman’s critics are helping to bring to intelligence-gathering.

The curious thing about this strain of American conservatism (to use the latter term very loosely) is that it seems to welcome American isolation. They don’t actually want friends and allies. These people enjoy their rage. It’s much more satisfying to complain about perfidious France and Germany for their failure to support the Iraq war than it would have been comforting to have had their support.

In other words, this is Sinn Fein America. Ourselves Alone. Besieged and enjoying it. ~Alex Massie

This reminds me of a conversation I had over four years ago. I was speaking to someone from Australia who taught here in the U.S. It was Election Day in 2004, so hopes on campus were high that Mr. Bush would soon be getting his comeuppance, and soon enough foreign policy came up in the conversation. The Australian referred to the “isolationism” of the administration, which I found odd, since this was one of Mr. Bush’s favorite pejorative labels for his critics (remember that old Gersonism, “proud tower of isolationism”?), but I soon understood his meaning. This is obviously not the so-called “isolation” of America First neutrality in which America seeks commerce and good relations with all states, which is much more like the opposite of “isolation,” but is instead the isolation cultivated by defenders of American exceptionalism and hegemony. It is the logical extension of the mentality that sees sieges, sanctions and refusal to engage “rogue” states as the essence of wisdom, and its track record is equally poor.

What Massie is describing is the “splendid isolation” school of imperial management, according to which all other powers should either acquiesce in imperial policy or else they are deemed as hostile to one degree or another. At least in Joseph Chamberlain’s time, Britain (briefly) pursued “splendid isolation” in the context of Great Power rivalry, so it was not entirely irrational. However, Britain then fairly quickly made the status quo-preserving deals that created the Entente, and would have been well-advised to make similar deals with rising powers. In the 2002-era anti-Europeanism or its more recent versions, the loyalty test has been applied to all states, both friend and foe, and failure to embrace every detail of the imperial project has been defined as an “increase in anti-Americanism” or as political regression and backsliding.

This brings me to Zakaria’s latest column, which he concludes with the following correct observation:

The problem with American foreign policy goes beyond George Bush. It includes a Washington establishment that has gotten comfortable with the exercise of American hegemony and treats compromise as treason and negotiations as appeasement. Other countries can have no legitimate interests of their own. The only way to deal with them is by issuing a series of maximalist demands. This is not foreign policy; it’s imperial policy [bold mine-DL]. And it isn’t likely to work in today’s world.

More than that, it is not only that compromise that has been treated as virtual treason, but that allied disagreement has been viewed in the same way. In this cracked view, allies are supposed to understand that alliance is not a mutual relationship, they are not really our equals and they are supposed to do what they are told. Having deliberately built up a military supremacy and discouraged every European effort to develop its own parallel defense force, Washington then complains about the lack of military contributions from Europe; Washington wants Europeans to be pacific wards under our protection and auxiliaries in our wars, but it cannot have both. The most annoying consequence of these contradictory expectations is that it provokes a feeling of outrage at European “ingratitude,” when the core of anti-Europeanism is its profound ingratitude toward the nations from whom we received almost our entire civilization. Here is something else to ponder: had Washington defined Cold War-era relations with NATO allies by their willingness to back us in Vietnam, this contradiction in the U.S.-Europe relationship would have been exposed a long time ago. At the end of the Cold War, I think many in Washington perceived western Europeans as something akin to our deputies in policing the world, and these people have been continuously disappointed to find that European states have their own interests that do not necessarily fit this role.

Allied interests do not interest the defenders of the splendid isolation approach. Pursuing their own interests, especially if it means cultivating good relations with large, powerful neighbors as Germany and Turkey have been doing with Russia, is seen as a move “away” from America and at some level basically corrupt and misguided. It is not enough that these allies toe the line on many of our policies toward their neighbors and throughout the world; they are expected to sabotage good relations with major trading partners to demonstrate their zeal for the cause, and if they fail to do so they are accused of acting out of venal interests (unlike, you know, the high-minded reasons for U.S. policy decisions). How many times did we hear whining about European “weakness” in response to the war in Georgia? As if Europeans should harm themselves to protest the consequences of an expansion policy that their most powerful governments opposed! Yet that is what Washington has tended to expect from our allies. In order to get the nuclear deal, for example, the Indians had to go a long way in harming their relationship with Iran, because it was not considered acceptable that India pursue its natural and logical strategic interests in building a partnership with Tehran to offset Pakistan.

If this loyalty test applies to our allies, how much more does it apply to other major powers and pariah states! Of course, there is a practical problem in possessing hegemony but acting as if it were direct empire: the disparity in power breeds the arrogance and condescension of a full-fledged imperial ruler, which is necessarily alienating to sovereign allies, and encourages Washington to expect the deference accorded to such a ruler, but all of this actually causes a net loss in Washington’s ability to project power and successfully carry out its policies.

There was a time when I would have treated this sort of post half-seriously, as if it were making arguments that needed to be answered. Frankly, life is too short to waste more than a few minutes on such things. In the post, Donald Douglas makes all the usual moves impugning my patriotism because I do not sign off on illegal and immoral wars and do not indulge in displays of nationalistic self-congratulation, and he offers rehashed “new fusionism” as the true path. Following his guidance, pro-lifers can waste their political energies defending aggressive warfare and the national security state just as they have for the last few years. There is something sad and rather pathetic about a so-called “core values conservatism” that is so completely hollow. There is also something a bit amusing about a self-styled neoconservative rejecting Frum, Brooks and Perle (!) because they are clearly uninterested in going through the social conservative motions that the “new fusionist” scam requires.

Scott Murphy, the Democratic candidate in the special election for New York’s 20th District, has received a television ad endorsement from Sen. Gillibrand, whose seat he is trying to fill. As Weigel reports, Gillibrand has become an overwhelmingly popular figure in the district since she was first elected in 2006, and Tedisco’s move to take over campaign advertising reminds Weigel of Norm Coleman’s last-minute repudiation of negative advertising:

This isn’t the kind of thing you do unless you’re desperate.

Meanwhile, the NRCC isn’t playing ball:

The NRCC has rebuffed their candidate, saying it won’t change anything about the way it’s approaching the race.

The special election is on March 31, and all of the momentum seems to be on Murphy’s side.