Patrick Ruffini keeps dancing around the edges of what he needed to say in this post, but he has a strong conclusion:

We need to be confident, like the left is, that we are the natural governing party because our ideas are in alignment with basic American principles, and quit treating middle class, working class, or rural Americans like an interest group to be mollified by symbolic, substance-free BS.

The trouble with this is that I think Ruffini is only half right when he identifies Joe the Plumber gimmickry as a function of defensiveness and weakness. The rest of the problem is unwittingly demonstrated by Ruffini’s own assertion that “we are the natural governing party” and his complaint about treating different groups of voters as an “interest group.” Would that the GOP actually treated these people like interest groups by paying attention to their interests!

It seems to me that conservatives and Republicans have assumed the GOP is the natural governing party, at least regarding the Presidency and to some extent as it relates to Congress since ’94, which is why so many have continued to insist that America is a “center-right nation” in face of mounting evidence that it is not and hasn’t been for a while. Symbolic gimmickry does stem in part from a lack of confidence, but it is more the product of a movement and party that have ceased to understand, much less address, most of the pressing concerns of working- and middle-class Americans. The party assumes that all it needs to do is show up, push the right pseudo-populist buttons and reap the rewards, and for the most part the movement cheers. See Palin, Sarah.

The GOP settles for offering “symbolic, substance-free BS” because enough conservatives are already persuaded that Republican policies obviously benefit the middle class, so there is no pressure to make Republican policy actually serve the interests of Republican constituents. It is taken for granted that this is already happening, but voters have been showing for several cycles that many of them do not believe this. Politically Democrats have been gaining ground in such unlikely places as Ohio and Indiana, which would be inexplicable if the GOP obviously and reliably represented working- and middle-class Americans. Of course, lately these voters don’t see it that way, but instead see the right’s pseudo-populists denounce workers for being overpaid, reject measures that would direct some spending to American industries that their free trade zeal has helped gut and even talk about a spending freeze in the middle of a severe recession.

That brings us again to the stimulus debate. There are good arguments to be made against building up a glut of additional debt, which will be the result of this legislation, namely that it will delay recovery and fuel rising interest rates and inflation (in combination with all of the money that has been poured into the system over the last several months). That isn’t what Ruffini says. Instead he effectively makes the pro-stimulus argument for the other side:

This sense of frugality, orderliness, and personal responsibility is something everything [sic] aspires to in difficult times. This is why Obama’s pitch is fundamentally off-key if framed correctly. People’s first instincts in a recession are not to overspend, but to tighten their belts.

This is a hanging curve ball for some progressive blogger, and for all I know one of them has already hit it out. A supporter of the plan would say, “Yes, and it is because this is the first instinct for private households that government has to pick up the slack.” Then again, if frugality had been the order of the day, private household debt would not be as staggeringly great as it is, and if household debt were lower or if more people had significant savings tax cuts would be more likely to be stimulative. The irony is that an economy and a whole host of policies oriented around facilitating consumption, which most conservatives thought (still think?)* were wonderful, create a situation where money regained through tax cuts goes into paying down debt–because the first instinct of most people in a recession is not to overspend. In other words, the habits of consumerism (e.g., overspending) have reduced the efficacy of tax cuts as an instrument of economic policy, which is one more reason why you might think conservatives would come to recognize and oppose those habits.

However, it is important to bear in mind that some significant part of this build-up of debt was not simply profligacy, but seemed to be necessary for many households to make up for stagnating incomes that were becoming increasingly inadequate during the housing bubble. That bubble was fueled by the absurdly low rates that the Fed kept so artificially low, but I have yet to see very many movement conservatives questioning their traditional adoration for Greenspan and his works. Of course, there have always been principled exceptions to the cult. As we all know, income stagnation is something that most conservatives and Republicans have spent years pretending was not happening, because it did not fit in with the assumption that working- and middle-class Americans were thriving as part of the “greatest story never told.” It is the failure to acknowledge and address all of these things along with the preference for using symbolic gimmickry that begin to account for the lamentable states of conservatism and the GOP. There is also the war, but movement and party have become so invested in it that I have my doubts whether they can ever recognize its role in discrediting both with the public.

Update: Here is an additional CPAC myopia connection: At CPAC, John Bolton repeated the claim that this is a “center-right country.”

* Rod points to a particularly silly quote from Michael “Consumption Is A Moral Duty” Gerson. This is one of those cases where Gerson’s bleeding-heart do-gooder personality fits perfectly with his preference for policies that usher in “creative” destruction: we’re being self-indulgent for the good of the world!

Second Update: Several of the reactions to this post have been something along the lines of, “Wow, a conservative who admits income stagnation is real–I thought they were like unicorns!” In fact, one reason I know anything about this is the work of several other conservative writers who were paying attention to this subject long before I did. Specifically, Ross and Reihan discuss this subject in Grand New Party, and I’m sure that there have been a few others who have written about it. Take this as another bit of proof that “reformist” conservatives are the only game in town at the moment when it comes to developing an agenda on most domestic policy questions. Other conservatives who are not interested in that agenda need to start putting together an alternative if they don’t want the “reformists” to win internal policy debates by default.

Via John Cole comes this bit of Limbaugh insight:

[T]he people on our side are really making a mistake if they go after Bobby Jindal on the basis of style. Because if you think — people on our side I’m talking to you — those of you who think Jindal was horrible, you think — in fact, I don’t ever want to hear from you ever again. … I’ve spoken to him numerous times, he’s brilliant. He’s the real deal.

Limbaugh said elsewhere in the broadcast:

We cannot shun politicians who speak for our beliefs just because we don’t like the way he says it.

Of course, no one is talking about shunning Jindal, much less doing so because of how he gives a speech. That would be a bizarre reaction for someone to have. It’s almost as bizarre as people who wanted to shut down all substantive criticism of Sarah Palin because she could give a good stemwinder. Limbaugh is saying that he will shun people who have a different interpretation of one speech by a politician he likes. Perhaps because this is not how he operates, Limbaugh cannot quite grasp the difference between shunning someone and judging and criticizing a speech on both substance and performance.

There is such a thing as constructive or at least healthy criticism, and there is such a thing as lamenting a bankruptcy of ideas, especially when it is a case of someone as genuinely talented and smart as Jindal reciting the no-earmarks-plus-more-tax-cuts catechism. It is all the more frustrating and painful to listen to the boilerplate when it is coming from someone we know could offer so much more that would be worthy of serious debate. Limbaugh is also more out of it than usual if he thinks that most critics on the right objected only to his delivery and style. It was the substance of what Jindal said, or rather all of the things he could have said as a policy expert but failed to say, that is driving us to distraction.

We could not have asked for a more compelling confirmation of the thesis of John Derbyshire’s cover story for the current issue on the debilitating effects of talk radio on the American right than this latest Limbaugh outburst. Perhaps the most relevant passage from the article was this one:

In place of the permanent things, we get Happy Meal conservatism: cheap, childish, familiar. Gone are the internal tensions, the thought-provoking paradoxes, the ideological uneasiness that marked the early Right.

Whatever else one might say in support of any of the positions Jindal took last night, not one of them could be described as being in any way thought-provoking, unless we mean that one was often provoked to think, “Why is he saying this?”

After wandering around in the thick heat, where flies hovered lazily, as if from invisible strings, I needed to cool off. I ducked into Tushar Arts, one of the few shops here that offers some protection from the dust and heat of the street. Dushar sells a Technicolor array of religious items. Crucifixes hang beside busts of Krishna, and images of the Buddha gaze peacefully at Koranic verse. The shopkeeper, Kruna, who had seen Slumdog two days before, thought the film lacked that essential element of Bollywood cinema—escapism. “It seemed too real, too dirty. When I went I didn’t think that I was just going to see a movie about life here. That’s not very exciting to us.” ~Jarrett Wrisley

Exactly. This is one reason why I think most of the harshest critiques of Slumdog have no effect, because the critics seem to have been expecting Slumdog to remain the gritty story of hardship and exploitation of the flashback sequences throughout the entire film. Its escapist side and conclusion were inevitable, and it is telling that the thing that at least some Indian viewers didn’t like about it was that what little escapism there was did not come soon enough and did not make up enough of the story.

In one of the links I included below, there is a video of David Brooks in which he complains about the GOP’s “nihilism” reflected in Jindal’s response. This is the same charge he leveled against opponents of the bill that created the TARP, so we should approach this assessment very skeptically, as it is far from clear that the cheerleaders for the scam rescue plan have been right on the merits of that particular program. Not only were there serious, principled critiques of the TARP from across the spectrum, but, just as many of the critics claimed at the time the bill was being hastily debated, the new Treasury Secretary had to acknowledge that the plan to buy toxic assets was basically unworkable and the former Secretary gave up even attempting to follow through on that part of the plan within weeks of passage of the bill.

While I am inclined in this instance to agree with Brooks’ criticism of the GOP’s utterly intellectually bankrupt and unimaginative agenda, there has to be a distinction between valid criticism of deeply flawed policies, which several members of the House GOP correctly made about the TARP, and the vacuous, feckless sloganeering that the GOP leadership wishes to substitute for policy argument in response to the new administration’s plans. 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.

This touches on something Jim Antle was saying earlier in an unrelated post on Brooks:

This is just mindless babble, centrism without substance, “responsibility” as a pose.

That is largely what most of the pro-TARP arguments in the fall were. If the instincts of the “nihilists” drive them to say no to almost every proposal, Brooks’ instincts lead him to embrace almost everything that the government says needs to be done in a crisis. There is not necessarily any more critical thinking going on among “responsible” people than among the “nihilists,” and perhaps there is much less, because the label “nihilist” has been broadened to include anyone who dissents from the “centrist” consensus regardless of what they are saying and have thereby defined themselves as “irresponsible.”

P.S. This reminds me that one of the refrains we heard again and again from “responsible” pro-TARP people in the fall was, “We just need to pass this, and we’ll work out the details later.” Well, it passed, and so have five months, and there are still no details forthcoming because of the fundamental flaws with the original “plan.” It’s almost as if careful deliberation and critical thinking might be useful in crafting extremely important legislation.

Not having seen Obama’s speech yet, I can’t say much about it aside from the reactions I’ve been reading, but it gives me a slightly different perspective on how poor Jindal’s response was. I viewed his response by itself without having seen any clips from the President’s address to Congress, and it was simply awful. This seems to be thegrowingconsensus. I grant that no one who gives the response to these addresses comes out looking very good. Sebelius was mind-numbingly boring with all of her bromides about the joys of bipartisanship, and who can even remember anything Gary Locke said in a response before that? Go back just a few years, and you can’t even remember who gave most of the responses.* That is the good news for Jindal. Now for the bad news.

Now that I think about it, Jindal’s response was structured like a party convention speech, and all that was missing was the endorsement of the party’s presidential candidate. There is the introductory personal story, repeated efforts to play to the crowd’s old-time favorites, deliberate insertions of talking points that match the presidential candidate’s slogans (I can’t be the only one who groaned when Jindal talked about cutting out such-and-such a number of earmarks from the state budget) and the inevitable catchphrase that links an otherwise jumbled speech together with a theme. In this case, apparently it was that “Americans can do anything,” which is something most Americans may like hearing, but which hit my ears as painfully as if it were an icepick. I don’t expect public officials to eschew confidence-building rhetoric (indeed, the President could probably stand to have a bit more of that in his public remarks), but this unusually saccharine expression of optimism is not only at odds with the public mood, but it is just insulting.

Incidentally, the party convention structure explains the tone and cadence Jindal was using, and it explains why so much of the speech was about him. Convention speakers, especially if they are giving high-profile, primetime speeches, are supposed to use their personal biographies to illustrate the theme of the convention or the theme of the day, and the speeches are all supposed to be either upbeat and celebratory or energetic exercises in denouncing the folly of the other party. Jindal chose the latter. Matthew Gagnon at The Next Right objected to the lack of wonkishness and policy details, as well he should, but if you imagine that this speech was taking place in St. Paul in September its vacuity and irritating pacing would have been right at home. Remember, Jindal never had the chance to give a speech at the convention because of the hurricane, to which he very capably responded as governor, so it is quite possible that any convention speech he had ready to go was dusted off and reworked a little and turned into last night’s disaster. So, yes, the McCain campaign continues, and Hurricane Gustav has claimed another victim.

* Alex Massie’s post reminds me that Jim Webb delivered an effective response to Bush’s 2007 State of the Union.

Update: E.D. Kain responds:

So he was bad – really bad – but hey, tough act to follow and, you know, these response speeches are always bad so….what? If they’re always bad then it really begs the question of why we bother to do them in the first place.

First, not all responses are equally bad. Given the constraints of the format, Webb came as close to matching the President rhetorically as anyone I have seen in a long time. Of course, he is a talented writer and has a combative personality well-suited to this sort of speech. One reason why I think the opposition goes through the ritual of the response is to avoid becoming entirely irrelevant to the debate. As outmatched as the opposition is, it still pays to make an effort rather than concede the evening entirely to the President. There is the danger that this can backfire and the opposition party, if it is the minority party, can remind voters of exactly why the party is and will remain in the minority for a long time. Under normal circumstances, Jindal’s bad speech would not generate as much discussion, but there are several yawning gaps–between expectations of how Jindal would do and how he did, between Obama’s oratorical skills and Jindal’s, between the popularity of the President and the deep unpopularity of the party Jindal represents–that make a bad speech at this moment particularly unfortunate for the minority party. We have not recently seen a situation where the minority party is as badly beaten and bereft of ideas as the GOP is today, and so we are not used to the kind of pressure now put on their prominent spokesmen to deliver something interesting, which makes the failure to do so that much more damaging.

Under the best of circumstances, no respondent was going to outshine Obama, but it has been possible for respondents to put in a creditable performance. Jindal had the misfortune of representing a party with nothing to say and having the even greater misfortune to be matched up against a President who both definitely has something to say and can say it very effectively, which is why the normally ho-hum irrelevance of the opposition’s response has become full-blown disaster for the GOP. Aside from Michael Steele comments, this was the first time a prominent Republican leader addressed the nation since Bush left office, and this was a valuable opportunity to demonstrate that the GOP had learned from its failures and could now serve as a credible political opposition. As with the GOP leadership’s approach to the stimulus, the party showed again with the response that it had not learned any of the right lessons and that it was simply not up to the task of being that credible opposition. What some on the right seem to be missing is that this failure should seem far more terrible to everyone who reacted very negatively to the President’s address. If much of Obama’s domestic agenda should be stopped or limited as much as possible, as I believe it should, the face of the opposition party that Jindal presented to the nation last night is simply not up to the task, and this is demoralizing and slightly horrifying.

So, it seems clear that Michael Steele is interested in expanding the GOP coalition by bringing in more Latino and black voters, which helps explain his adamant opposition to civil unions. After all, if you think you can pander your way to a larger share of the Latino and black vote in some other way, it hardly makes sense to adopt a position that would remove one of the few things that most of these voters have in common with the GOP. Of course, the idea that minority voters with socially conservative attitudes are therefore ripe for the Republican taking is almost certainly wrong, and opposition to civil unions may be weaker even in these constituencies than opposition to “gay marriage,” but if we are trying to understand what Steele is trying to do this makes a certain amount of sense.

However, Steele’s message on civil unions, much like his fierce opposition to the stimulus bill, is showing the limits of what any RNC chairman can do, but it particularly highlights the political constraints that limit Steele himself. Clearly, Steele is hewing to views that command the support of a majority of Republicans, because to do otherwise would be to suffer repudiation by donors and activists. This is a reminder that party chairmen have very limited ability to reorient the party when the party is entirely out of power. Steele’s background complicates matters. Having come into the RNC contest with a reputation for collaboration with moderate Republicans (e.g., the RLC, Whitman, etc.), Steele has had to match every mild, vague bit of coalition-expanding rhetoric with a redoubled commitment to the party line being set by the leadership in Congress. This shows the basic futility of most GOP “outreach” efforts, because there is never an acknowledgment that they have anything other than an image problem. Under the perverse “only Nixon” rules that govern such things, Steele has less room to maneuver in changing the party’s priorities or direction than someone with a more conventionally conservative record who might be able to operate with greater flexibility and be permitted to take more risks without bringing down the wrath of partisans on himself.

Because Steele has had to dispel suspicion that he does not have the right conservative credentials, he has effectively closed himself off from much creative or imaginative thinking about the party’s predicament so that he does not revive these suspicions. As I observed early on, Steele has embraced the false lesson that “wasteful spending” was the GOP’s great flaw when in power and that it was this flaw that cost them the majority. His position on the stimulus and punishing Senators who voted for it is confirmation that he thinks preaching austerity will be the path back to power. I agree that the current legislation is deeply flawed, but there is simply no way to look at public attitudes on this bill and conclude that near-unanimous opposition is a political winner in the near or medium-term.

Politicians often talk about “morality” in foreign policy as if it were a choice between all or nothing. In fact, there is a vast middle ground between mouthing empty slogans in high-level negotiations — let alone threatening to invade — and doing nothing whatsoever. Many nations do overthrow dictatorships and become more democratic, or at least more open, as a result. ~Anne Applebaum

Many? Well, I can think of two nations that overthrew their dictatorships at least partly as a result of actions taken by a U.S. administration. These were Iran and Nicaragua. What followed was probably not the sort of thing Applebaum meant to hold up as an example. Filipinos, South Koreans and Indonesians have all done likewise, but these changes in regime had far less to do with anything coming from Washington. Spanish democratic government succeeded Franco’s regime following his death. Pinochet stepped down after he lost a plebiscite, and not particularly because of pressure from outside. How many nations actually fit the description Applebaum has given? As it turns out, not very many. When these nations have ended the rule of a dictator, they have done so almost entirely on their own initiative and using their own resources. This is why so many of the “color” revolutions of recent years were so meaningless and transparently so when it came to changing the way their respective countries were governed. To the extent that they were indigenous political movements, they represented merely swapping out one set of oligarchs for another and in several cases continued or intensified the authoritarian habits of the government they replaced. There are enough examples where withdrawing U.S. support from authoritarian regimes has resulted in worse, more abusive government that this should hardly be some guiding principle of our foreign policy. There certainly is something worse than empty rhetoric, and this is taking action to undermine other governments without having any idea of what will take their place or whether the collapse of that regime is, in fact, in the interests of the United States.

The election of 2008 proved catastrophic for opponents of comprehensive immigration reform. Republicans lost seven Senate seats — eight if the courts sustain Al Franken’s lead in Minnesota. On June 28, 2007, each of the eight previous office-holders (Republicans, all) voted to block the Bush administration’s immigration bill. Replacing these eight immigration hardliners are five new senators clearly favorable to a comprehensive approach — six, counting Franken — and two whose positions are unclear. All, of course, are Democrats.

In the House, comprehensive immigration reformers picked up at least 14 votes, and “enforcement-only” advocates lost 14. Ten incumbent members of the restrictionist House Immigration Reform Caucus were defeated. The “enforcement first/enforcement only” cause lost such major spokesmen as Tom Feeney, Virgil Goode, Thelma Drake, Marilyn Musgrave, Ric Keller, Bill Sali, and Nancy Boyda. ~Richard Nadler

This is a weaker argument against restrictionist politics than we usually see. Last year’s rising Democratic tide drowned Republicans of every kind. Chris Shays drowned right along with Virgil Goode. For the record, Goode was something of a special case, as he had been a fence-jumper from the Democratic side back in the ’90s and finally registered as a Republican during the height of the Bush Era. His district, where I happened to live for a few years, remained more heavily Democratic by registration and turned against him as it soured on Mr. Bush. Perhaps someone from the Fifth District can correct me, but my impression is that immigration policy did not figure as a major point of contention there, and it seems highly unlikely that Goode was being punished in Southside Virginia for being too interested in limiting illegal immigration.

It’s not as if immigration policy was a top issue in most, or any, of the races mentioned. The only reason why Kanjorski (PA-11) was even in danger as a Democratic incumbent in a “blue” state in an overwhelmingly Democratic year was because Barletta opposed him with specific focus on immigration policy. Barletta could not overcome the wave, and his campaign proves yet again that a candidacy largely founded almost solely on restrictionism cannot win, but there was no other reason that it was as close as it was (52-48). Barletta significantly outperformed McCain in that district. For example, Barletta lost Lackawanna County by 20, but McCain lost it by 26; Barletta won Luzerne County, which Obama carried by 9. Opposition to amnesty (oh, right, I mean reform) was the main reason why Barletta improved on his earlier 2002 run against Kanjorski. That is as close to indisputable as one can get in finding “lessons” from electoral politics.

Nadler may as well say that the Republicans lost the last election and so lost many seats in both houses. Nadler’s findings that Democrats have been winning competitive House races do not tell very much at all. There have been a relative handful of Democratic seats that have gone to Republicans in the last two cycles. If one wanted to “prove” that voters had rejected any position in a candidate’s platform, all you would need to do is cite the last two elections and say, “Republicans keep losing–it must be because of [insert pet issue X].” In reality, the exit polls do tell us that the war and the economy were most responsible for the respective electoral defeats in ’06 and ’08. That is, one does not need to work very hard to figure out why voters threw out Republicans–they were quite clear as to why they were doing it, and they have told us. Naturally, the official GOP response has been to escalate the war and preach austerity and a crusade against earmarks, as if they have been determined to reduce their numbers in Congress still more.

The mythical 44% apppears yet again in Nadler’s column. It has been demonstrated time and again that Bush won at most 40% of the Latino vote in 2004, so it is even harder to believe that the GOP’s share of the Latino Congressional vote was even higher. The flawed 2004 Bush figure has consistently been used to make GOP results in subsequent elections look worse on this question than they were (and always for the purpose of “proving” that amnesty is an electoral necessity). Ponnuru explained this some time ago:

As proof that their strategy works, the comprehensivists point to exit polls that showed Bush getting 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004. That figure was, however, debunked within a month of the election. The pollsters had overestimated Bush’s support among Texas Hispanics by 10 points. NBC News lowered its national estimate to 40 percent. The Velazquez Institute did a survey that found that only 35 percent of Hispanics had supported Bush.

Of course, assuming McCain underperformed Bush does not help Nadler’s argument. McCain’s underperformance of Bush’s numbers would simply drive home the point that a Republican candidate’s position on amnesty has no meaningful effect on his electoral fortunes with Latino voters. If McCain, the most ardently pro-amnesty Republican in office, cannot win as many Latino votes as Bush, anti-GOP sentiment among Latinos comes from somewhere else or is a function of the general anti-GOP public mood.

P.S. It is also telling that Nadler has to claim that Latino voters are against enforcing the law. Not only is this a doubtful claim, but it is exactly the sort of pandering argument that makes clear how little the advocates of “outreach” politics understand about the voters they think the GOP needs to win. There is also no evidence to date that shows that Republicans who favor amnesty can prevail over Democratic candidates who support the same, which means that there is unlikely to be much to be gained by adopting such a position. Not only will Republicans always lose in such a contest, but it is entirely possible that pro-amnesty Republicans are pursuing these voters by changing their stance on an issue that will have marginal effect on voting patterns. If two-thirds of Latinos voted for Obama the first time around, does anyone really think that this share of the vote will decrease in 2012? If the GOP shifted entirely to a pro-amnesty position between now and then, would it make any difference? Of course it wouldn’t, because the GOP’s woes with the general electorate are to be found elsewhere and cannot be solved by becoming more like President Bush in a way that alienates and demoralizes the vast majority of rank-and-file voters. Indeed, I can think of no other issue where we still hear arguments that the GOP must become more like the administration that just left office.

I have said before that I didn’t think Slumdog Millionaire deserved all the critical praise being heaped on it, and it may not have even deserved to win Best Picture last night. Then again, given the competition, I don’t see much point in dwelling on that last point. It is fair to say that if the admirers have been too fawning, the critics leading the backlash have missed the point entirely. For example, I think Ezra Klein misses the point when he writes this:

But Millionaire is much worse: An unconvincing and poorly drawn fantasy. The love story makes little sense, and mistakes a near-pathological fixation for romance. The game show vehicle is smart, but undeveloped: It’s a self-conscious narrative gimmick, which is rather the worst kind.

These are all elements that make Slumdog the re-worked Bollywood plot that I have described it as being. I’m not sure that Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy went this route deliberately to re-tell a story that is in many of its details and plot devices so typical of Bollywood, but I think any anti-Slumdog backlash argument that cites these things as the flaws of the movie have missed the important part of the movie. It also misses the function of Bollywood film-making more generally. Modern Bollywood provides fantasies quite deliberately for escapist purposes, which is why most of their relatively big-budget pictures set so many of their song-and-dance numbers in foreign locations and why so many of the stories tend to focus on the love stories of the fabulously wealthy caught up in some affair of the heart in Dubai, Sydney, London, New York (Kal Ho Na Ho, anyone?) or at least at a resort in Goa. The arc of many of these stories takes the character out of Chandni Chowk or its equivalent and sends him into some fabulous world of wealth and success, while many of the others keep the character in the latter world the entire time. To complain that Slumdog has followed this model is to complain that Danny Boyle made a movie in the modern tradition of Indian cinema.

Bollywood used to make many more grim, social realist films that used song to deliver a stark ethical and political message, but the tradition of social critique and reform evident in, say, Pyaasa has not been fashionable for a long time. To some extent, the “Slumdog” part of Slumdog was a nod to that older tradition, while the “Millionaire” part was an acknowledgment of a certain “Shining India” aesthetic that has been gradually taking over the major productions for the last ten or fifteen years. Yes, of course, this was a British production in India, and not “really” a Bollywood film, but it seems to have been governed by the conventions of Bollywood all along.

For example, treating near-pathological fixation as love (or portraying love as near-pathological fixation) is just what Bollywood movies do, so it is rather fitting that this is what Slumdog does as well. I’m saying this as a fan of Bollywood. Try just about any one of a hundred of the most popular Bollywood movies, but especially Dil Se, the most romantic suicide bomber movie you will ever see, and you will see the same pattern again and again. Dil Se also happened to have a soundtrack composed by A.R. Rahman. Depressing movies featuring Muslim characters seem to be where his musical genius really takes off.

Like the Dil Se soundtrack, the Slumdog soundtrack is an example of a fusion style mixing techno-pop with more traditional-style Hindi songs. One reason that more people seem to have been caught up with the music of Slumdog than with the music for other dramas set in India is that it is more high-energy and fast-paced than many of the others. For example, take the similarly creative soundtrack for Monsoon Wedding last decade–its soundtrack was much more melancholy and quiet accompanying what was a comparably lighter, much less harrowing story. Slumdog’s soundtrack also has the draw of celebrity with M.I.A. as one of the collaborators, plus several well-known playback singers, such as Alka Yagnik, who perform the Hindi songs. Fareed Zakaria wrote in The Post-American World that the culture created by globalization was going to look increasingly like the product of Bollywood, so whether or not you find it satisfying it is likely that we will see more and more of it in years to come.