One of the difficulties conservatives will have in assessing where they have gone wrong is the sometimes bizarre ideas they have of what conservatism means. For example, here is Rick Moran in an otherwise spmewhat sensible post decrying ideology and calling for self-criticism:

Classic conservative principles are timeless; immutable tenets that have inspired great changes in government over the last 400 years and spoken passionately and plainly to the needs and hopes of ordinary people. Since the end of World War II, those classical principles have informed a devastating critique of the welfare state, presenting a reasoned and logical alternative to statism and dependency. Conservatism has stood for human liberty based on the fundamental idea of natural law; that from his first breath, man is born free.

But conservatism has gone off the rails, becoming in some respects a parody of itself.

The notion that man is born free is an idea that is well-suited for parody, because it is plainly not true. I’m not sure how repeating a false idea as one’s core principle is going to do any good. Moran’s passage is as concise a statement of the view that conservatism=classical liberalism as I have seen in a while, and if this is what movement conservatives are trying to get back to I am not sure why they are bothering.

400 years? With respect to cultural and religious patrimony, that is far too recent, and with respect to political philosophy it is entirely anachronistic to speak of conservatism 400 years ago. Liberty is an artifact of civilization, as even one famous non-conservative of the right knew, and it is not something that comes naturally. Men were not born with liberty, but had to earn it, work for it and struggle to retain it. It can be lost or diminished, and it is so far from the natural state of man that it is difficult to state strongly enough how wrong it is to say that “man is born free.”

It’s gratifying to be considered relevant, but Rod is correct that it is the marginal and basically politically irrelevant status of almost all dissident and heterodox conservatives that permits us a greater degree of freedom to criticize and propose alternatives as we see fit. As Ross has observed, some of us are not necessarily aspiring to conventional political relevance or influence after already having seen the apparent futility of that path in the absence of cultural revival, which makes it even harder to insist that we are relevant. Discussing the right problems and getting at many of the right answers, yes, I think so, but to be blunt that is exactly why we are not relevant to the debate going on inside the movement, much less inside the GOP, to the extent that there is actually a debate and not just a marketing brainstorming meeting or a collective therapy session.

I happen to think the two main creative forces on the right at the moment are paleos/populists and reformists, and obviously I prefer the answers of the former, and I also think that the reformists have done the most work articulating an alternative domestic policy agenda, but neither “group” (a word that attributes more unity and cohesion to them than is the case) is in much of a position as a matter of institutional or political strength to prevail on movement conservatives to follow their suggestions. There are also structural barriers inside the GOP to many of the reforms proposed by both camps in the form of interest groups and donors, and there is admittedly limited electoral support for candidates representing either one.

There is some reason to think that non-interventionist arguments may gain ground with more people on the right during the Obama years as there will no longer be the same temptation to defend Bush’s policies, but as I have said before I worry that there will be a tendency to default to maximal hawkishness as a way to attack Obama as “soft” and “weak.” Most reported remarks by CPAC speakers that I have seen indicate that this is the sort of thing that movement activists crave and will reward.

Dave Weigel reminds us that delusional Palinites are still around:

Conference attendees were far kinder to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, represented at CPAC by the pro-life group Team Sarah (founded by the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List after Palin was nominated as McCain’s running mate) and Draft Sarah Palin 2012. “I think that if she had been the candidate, if John McCain had stepped aside, she would have clearly won the election,” said Paul Streitz, the national chairman of the Palin draft group. “She did not have the weaknesses on the immigration issue and the free trade issue that McCain did. She was stronger against the bailout than McCain was. She’s shown leadership. People are willing to follow her. People believe what she says. [bold mine-DL]”

No wonder so many conservatives like Palin. It makes no difference what positions she actually took during the election, and it makes no difference what is in her record, and they “believe what she says” by pretending that she has said things that she never said. As we know from her statements during the campaign, she has exactly the same weaknesses on immigration McCain did, she has to my knowledge never made a public statement about free trade agreements one way or the other, and just like McCain she was entirely on board with the bailout. There is no way of knowing whether she would have taken different positions had she not been McCain’s running mate, but there is also no reason to think that she would have. She has never taken a distinctive or noteworthy position on any national issue, nor has she accomplished much of anything on any comparable state issue. That is the opposite of leadership. But apparently some people will still follow her.

For the infighting to really become significant in a policy sense, you’d need some members of the House and Senate to try to put what Crist and Huntsman are talking about into practice. ~Yglesias

Yes and no. This brings us back to Huntsman’s point in his Washington Times interview, which is that the Congressional GOP is so completely irrelevant to developing and/or advancing a new policy agenda that it will be left to Republican governors to lead the party away from the abyss. If Huntsman intends to enter a future presidential race as a moderate reforming Western governor (where have we heard this before?), the Congressional GOP’s embrace of McCain’s losing campaign themes is ideal, because it keeps Congressional leaders from getting credit for ideas he has been working on and makes his agenda seem much newer and possibly more interesting than it would otherwise be. He could try to repeat Bush’s 2000 triangulation against the Congressional GOP.

Of course, this is all a moot point, because the combination of policy reformer/relative social moderate/Mormon is probably a triple loser in any future primary competition, which distinctly limits the reach of Huntsman’s reform agenda unless one of the other relatively moderate governors takes up his arguments.

My new Week column on the U.S., Russia and Kyrgyzstan is up here.

What on earth is this? Well, it is an interview between Michael Steele and ABC Radio’s Curtis Sliwa, but beyond that I don’t know how else to describe it:

SLIWA: Now, using a little bit of that street terminology, are you giving him [Jindal] any Slum love, Michael?

STEELE: (laughter)

SLIWA: Because he is — when guys look at him and young women look at him — they say oh, that’s the slumdog millionaire, governor. So, give me some slum love.

STEELE: I love it. (inaudible) … some slum love out to my buddy. Gov. Bobby Jindal is doing a friggin’ awesome job in his state. He’s really turned around on some core principles — like hey, government ought not be corrupt. The good stuff … the easy stuff.

Steele elaborates elsewhere on his efforts to make the GOP more hip-hop-friendly:

Curtis Sliwa: When you used the hip-hop vernacular, man, Barack Obama has bling bling in this stimulus package, you got people’s attention.

Michael Steele: Absolutely. There’s a lot of bling bling — the bling bling’s got bling bling in this package. That’s how bad it is.

There are no words sufficient to express my bewilderment.

In case you think Steele is just kidding around, here is more:

Curtis Sliwa: You ain’t ever gonna get Mitt Romney in a room with Ludacris high fiving over the RNC.

Michael Steele: Watch him, watch me. Look, I’ll never forget when I got Russell Simmons and former chairman Ed Gillespie in the same room in 2004. It can happen and it will happen. This party has got to take it’s head out of it’s you know what and recognize that America doesn’t look like America in 1952. That America now is something very different, very beautiful — that has a lot of strips and strains to it. But, it’s real and we’ve got to get in the real.

Of course, that calls to mind Romney’s, um, memorable moment when he asked a crowd of black kids in his well-meaning, ridiculous way, “Who let the dogs out?”

Update: Ta-Nehisi Coates asks Michael Steele to stop the madness. This brings up something else that I should have mentioned in the original post: what is Steele’s target audience when he talks like this? It can’t be American desis, that much is certain. I mean, Jindal’s mother is a Punjabi nuclear physicist, and he was a Rhodes scholar who studied at Oxford. No one would confuse him for someone who grew up in the slums of Mumbai. The success of Jindal’s parents and Jindal’s own success have nothing to do with the sort of random luck of Slumdog Millionaire‘s main character, but when presented with a chance to say that Steele opts to endorse this “slum love” nonsense. It’s bad enough when Republicans practice the phony populism of pretending to be a down-home country boy when they are, in fact, well-heeled lawyers and lobbyists who live at the Watergate, or when they valorize politicians for knowing less than they should, but are they so out of it that one of their leaders talks about one of their smartest, best-educated elected officials like this?

Second Update: More predictably, here is Coulter:

Wasn’t Bobby great in “Slumdog Millionaire”?

Kya bakwas!

Dave Weigel makes the point I have beentrying to get across for at least the last month:

The problem is that spending austerity is not — as it was in the early months of 1993, for example — very high on voters’ minds, or even high on the list of reasons why voters remain cool on Republicans. In his response to the president’s State of the Union speech, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) argued that voters had “rightly” rejected the GOP because the party “got away from its principles” and “went along with earmarks and big government spending in Washington,” repeating an argument that Sen. John McCain made during the presidential campaign.

There is little polling to bolster this argument. Voters did not list government spending, or earmarks, or deficits, in their top concerns in the 2006 or 2008 national exit polls.

Indeed, the idea that the GOP lost these elections because of “wasteful spending” is most popular among activists and radio hosts, and for the last two years it has gained ground among the politicians who mistake these newly-satisfied activists and radio hosts for representatives of public opinion. The reduced numbers of the GOP in the House make it harder to recognize that their position as a losing one, because in the remaining safe Republican districts, where almost all of the anti-spending sentiment is concentrated, there probably is some strong, vocal opposition to these measures. It is the predicament of the GOP, which they brought upon themselves, that they have acquired a new responsiveness to constituents of these safe districts in response to their defeats on the one issue–spending–that is not even that important to these constituents, much less to the rest of the country.

I’m sorry, but people who say that they want small government yet refuse entitlement reform and a shrinking military budget are not to be taken seriously. ~Freddie deBoer

So that would leave maybe 30% of Republican voters and maybe three-quarters of the conservative movement. I’m trying to be as generous as I can, so I am counting those who are in favor of either entitlement reform or shrinking the military budget. The numbers would go down dramatically if we are requiring support for both. Freddie has much the same problem with Ruffini’s post that I did. He cannot accept the idea that “the standard conservative economic message is deeply popular with the American people and a political winner,” and this is not surprising–this message is not deeply popular and is not a political winner. It wasn’t even popular when times were good, and it is particularly not popular now. Someone could try to argue that it is nonetheless superior and right, but most voters do not agree. Republicans have prevailed in the past in spite of what is called “economic conservatism,” and not because of it. It has been cultural and social issues along with a (now destroyed) reputation for foreign policy competence that kept the GOP competitive and made Middle Americans into reliable supporters, and it was decidedly not the party’s economic policy that kept these voters from drifting away. Incidentally, this is what makes the push to embrace amnesty and and the call to abandon social conservatism so much more foolish than many other reformist proposals, because these are arguably the only things that hold the majority of the coalition together any longer.

I would add that the “standard conservative economic message” these days is not much of a message at all. Telling voters who pay more in payroll tax that their income tax rates won’t go up (which is all that McCain promised last year) and that someone somewhere is going to get a capital gains tax cut is not compelling to anyone, regardless of their real views on the size and role of government. Calling subsidies and tax credits for people who do pay payroll taxes “welfare” is not going to win anyone’s vote. This is one of the most crucial problems with the Plumberization of the right: the basic complaint about tax policy at the core of the Myth of the Plumber is inaccurate at best. It isn’t just that conservatives rally around symbolic folk heroes, but that they do so in defense of a policy critique that isn’t really valid. In the end, the elevation of the Plumber is what happens when a party and movement are reduced to ridiculing the agenda of their opponents because they have no particularly compelling message of their own.

Bolton, echoing Joe Biden, said that Obama would be challenged internationally by foreign powers who seek to test the young administration. He said that Obama’s weak reaction to Georgia during the campaign coupled with his skepticism regarding missile defense has emboldened a resurgent Russia [bold mine-DL]. ~Philip Klein

It’s no surprise that John Bolton is saying this, and it’s not exactly shocking that Bolton is completely wrong about something relating to international affairs, but what is remarkable about this is that anyone could make such a statement now and expect to be taken seriously. Oil prices have gone into a nosedive, Russian currency and gold reserves have been vanishing rapidly and Russia’s resurgence in terms of real power has been put on hold. All of this had already happened before Obama was elected and well before he came into office. How he has emboldened a state that is more preoccupied with protests over imported cars is unclear, and it is even less clear what difference it would make if a weakened Russia were actually emboldened at the present time. What exactly would they do? So far, the administration has not done anything particularly provocative or insulting, which for the Boltons of the world is the same thing as surrender and retreat. Obama’s skepticism regarding the missile defense installations in central Europe is appropriate, and after a brief flirtation with sanity Obama stuck to the establishment line on Georgia and “Russian aggression.” Incredibly, he and Biden are still advocates for Georgian membership in NATO. If anything, Obama’s Russia advisor McFaul is too inclined to support the same kind of misguided Russia policy that we have had in the past, and the administration remains too wedded to positively harmful policies, including NATO expansion and this missile defense plan. Bolton is bound to frame such provocative policies as “weak,” because that is what he does, but I don’t know why anyone else should be listening to him.