What would we do without the so-called conservative “dogmatic aversion to statism”? For starters, we might actually start restraining the power of the central state and breaking up its collusion with concentrated wealth. In other words, we might start combating etatisme. Of course, that’s the point–in practice, most people who call themselves conservatives do not have a “dogmatic aversion to statism,” and when it comes to war and finance they are often defenders of an activist, centralized state. This actually makes a certain amount of sense, as most people who call themselves conservatives are, when you press them, essentially classical liberals, and classical liberals did not have a “dogmatic aversion to statism,” either. By comparison with their traditional conservative and monarchist foes in the 19th century, they were advocates for centralism and the expansion of the role of the state in the name of reason and liberty. Standardization, rationalization and uniformity in law and regulation were what most classical liberals prized, which is one reason why they tended to be strong nationalists hostile to the customs and privileges of regions and local parlements. The separation of modern strands of classical liberalism from nationalism (i.e., some forms of libertarianism) is a curious by-product of 20th century American politics, and I am guessing that this owes a great deal to influence of exiled liberals from central Europe on the evolution of these strands of American classical liberalism. These were exiles who were repelled by the nationalist politics of their home countries. In many European countries, it remains the case that nationalist parties are the direct descendants of classical liberal nationalists and the most classical liberal parties (outside Germany) tend to be inclined towards nationalism. As John says, “statist” is a somewhat useless designation, since at some point almost everyone accepts that there must be a government, and opposition to a centralized state as a matter of principle or “dogma” is a position held by relatively few people and many of them would not call themselves conservatives. Suffice it to say that when Will Wilkinson accepts the moniker “statist,” its value as a pejorative insult has been exhausted.

Lest things should be unclear, though, let me remedy that: by my lights, the American conservative movement as it exists is a horrid mess, pure and simple, and it’s precisely for that reason that I’ve taken such steps to (1) dissociate myself from it and (2) make the motivations for that dissociation quite clear. ~John Schwenkler

John was replying to Freddie’s response to this. I don’t know if John’s confession of disgust will satisfy Freddie’s sense of injustice, but perhaps it would be useful to review how the conversation reached this point for those now just joining it. Ages ago (sometime last week), Damon Linker declared that certain “radical” conservatives in league with Andrew Bacevich were possessed of an authoritarian spirit that warred against the human condition, which prompted Ross’ response and led Noah Millman to offer the following advice:

And, by the same token, more humble: recognize that communities with illiberal commitments are bound to continue to exist (and spring up) within liberal societies, and that liberals need these communities as a check on themselves, and cherish them, because they (liberals) are only human, as fallible as any other humans, and as prone to dogmatic certitude. Cultivation of skepticism and doubt will never be enough; you’ll need actual alternative certitudes to push against to be sure that you actually know anything. And, if you’re really a liberal, you have to leave open the possibility of being convinced that one of your liberal truths is actually, well, false.

John then elaborated on the ideas expressed here and called for something of a rough-and-tumble pluralist debate between alternative certitudes:

This pretty much gets it right, right? Recalling the Millman Desiderata, what we get is a liberalism that is at once more self-confident (because it’s willing to wait for its own commitments – to such things as “reason, science, the utility of the extended liberal order, and the authority of the liberal moral sentiments”, to use Will’s list – to prevail in a no-holds-barred battle) and much more humble (because it doesn’t claim the authority to let anything other than small-d democratic consensus choose the victor or set the terms of the fight). We just let things evolve, baby, and trust that selection will do its work.

Clearly, this is more evidence of rampaging authoritarianism lurking beneath the placid “radical” conservative surface.

In any case, what bothers Freddie is the dissident conservative’s habit of discussing and even advising on the future of conservatism while constantly distinguishing himself from the movement and GOP to avoid blame for their failings:

You can’t reform a movement from within when you want to but not be considered at all responsible for its failings when it suits you. That’s the challenge for many conservatives, to be advocates of a radically different conservatism than the one we have while not succumbing to the temptation to wash their hands of what conservatism actually means in practical terms.

This brings us back to Prof. Deneen’s observation that conservatism has not yet been tried. This will elicit even louder howls of protest from Freddie, as it will seem to him to be a case of uncritically accepting “the idea that Bush was just a uniquely incompetent traitor to the right.” In fact, I would be willing to say that Bush was not a traitor to the movement conservatives who celebrated him when times were good, but I would also say that he was obviously never a conservative in the way that Deneen means it. Here is Deneen:

It has become a trope, or “meme,” that the dismal ending of the failed Bush presidency marks the demise of modern conservatism overall. Liberalism is revived and regnant, ready to lead where conservatism failed.

This “meme” should be nipped in the bud: conservatism was never tried. A version of liberalism was implemented, particularly a toxic combination of Wilsonian visions of remaking the world combined with a particular brand of laissez-faire economics that gave particular favor to Bigness. BOTH of these pursuits, perfectly combined during the Presidency of George W. Bush, but present in various iterations throughout the years of Republican rule, are purely distilled varieties of liberalism.

We called it “conservative” because it wasn’t the more potent version of Statism. However, all the same, it relied upon basic liberal assumptions of self-interest, privatism, large and centralized government and growth economics that place a stress upon large scale, mobility, debt, and consumption.

So dissident or “radical” conservatives separate ourselves from the movement and its failings in two ways. We do not merely oppose certain policies and propose others in their place, as some of the “reform” conservatives do, but, like George Grant in his observations on America, we fundamentally reject the idea that the movement promotes conservatism. It is not surprising, then, if we are not inclined to take responsibility for ideas and actions that really do have nothing to do with us or our philosophical persuasion.

Closing on a related note, one of the amusing things about much of the Linker-Deneen debate is the extent to which all of the participants, myself included, tended to retreat to the comfortable space where we are effectively posing as better political liberals. While I think the authoritarian label is misleading as a way to describe our dissident cultural conservatism, both Prof. Deneen and I made a point of emphasizing our political and legal anti-authoritarian credentials, which in practical terms means respect for constitutionalism. I should add that Prof. Deneen has been more careful to emphasize his philosophical opposition to the liberal tradition more consistently than I have, as he did in his objections to defining conservatism merely as constitutionalism. Indeed, I am such a political and legal anti-authoritarian (as these things are usually defined) that I have written against torture at the ACLU’s blog and called for criminal prosecutions of administration officials. See? I’m doing it again.

Linker’s critique of the “radicals,” like his critique of the “theocons,” focuses on the authoritarian or theocratic danger they pose to the liberal order, which greatly underestimates how invested most of them are in the political and legal aspects of that order. The gist of Noah’s critique of Linker is that Linker’s own “liberal bargain” is in its way insufficiently tolerant of illiberal groups. Of course, if Linker were right that “theocons,” “radicals” or, for that matter, Mormons represented existential threats to the liberal order, he might have more reason to warn against their influence, but the trouble with Linker’s project is not its illiberalism–why, after all, should I be concerned if Linker is being illiberal?–but its flawed assessment of the threats to the order he is defending. Indeed, from the thoroughgoing “radical” critique of the liberal tradition Linker probably has the least to fear, because the “radicals” are far more interested in attacking core assumptions that are shared across the political spectrum and we are inclined to criticize precisely the aspects of government and society that are among the most popular and unquestioned.

The GOP needs to do a better job of reaching out to Hispanics, blacks, Jews, Muslims, women, and young voters. That doesn’t mean we need to compromise our principles, but it does mean that we do need to stop writing off these groups and giving up before we get started. The truth is that the Republican Party is a better fit for every one of those groups than the Democrats, and we can make that case. But to do that, we need to tailor our message to each group and make a real, consistent, long-term effort to bring more people from these groups into the fold instead of making a halfhearted effort, saying “they’ll never vote for us anyway,” and giving up. ~John Hawkins

The determined attitude is admirable, even though the proposal is still pretty bizarre. I would be fascinated to know what tailoring the current GOP message to Jews and Muslims in different ways would look like. Except perhaps for blacks, those two groups stand out as the most improbable targets for winning a lot of new voters, and it’s not clear to me how you tailor your message to one without flatly contradicting it with how you tailor it to the other. Social issues offer a good example of what I mean. Jewish voters are predominantly liberal or very liberal on social issues, and Muslims are typically much more conservative. Indeed, back in 2000 Bush won the Muslim vote thanks in part to some shared social conservative views, but it was also depended heavily on Bush’s public rejection of the use of secret evidence against Muslim suspects. What are the odds that the GOP is now going to become the vehicle of civil libertarian protest against the security state? After everything that has happened in the last eight years, it is absurd to think that the GOP can regain the goodwill of voters that it has consistently and deliberately alienated with its policy choices. My point here is not even that these policy choices were wrong, though I think most of them were, but that you cannot keep hanging on to all of the policies that brought you into the wilderness and expect to turn things around.

There is a constant tension in these six or ten or twelve-point plans for GOP revival. There is always some standard statement that no principles will be compromised, which effectively means that no policy positions will be changed, but there is some idea that the “message” can simply be restated in a pleasing way such that the target audience will forget that it doesn’t actually agree with the policy or just doesn’t like the messenger. The GOP has retained some marginal advantage among married women, but it suffers from a huge deficit with single women, and it is not remotely clear what “tailoring” could be done to the message that would not alienate core constituencies that the GOP can still reliably bring in. It is probably the case that the things that make the GOP attractive to half of married women in most elections are the things that make the party seem unappealing to single women, and the same problem will apply with middle-aged vs. young voters.

There is always the constant danger that the message will be “tailored” in a way that is essentialist and driven by stereotypes of what a certain constituency wants, and this tendency will be exploited by those forces inside the GOP coalition that already want to change policies in a certain direction. Pro-choice Republicans will say, “Oh, no, I guess we’ll have to modify our position on abortion to win over more women voters–strange how this is what I’ve been saying we should do for decades!” Pro-amnesty figures will say something similar about immigration and Hispanics, and on and on. The trouble is not just that this sort of policy change might come across as empty pandering or insulting stereotyping, but that Republicans have long since lost their ability to craft policies that actually serve voters’ interests rather than making generic appeals to their “values.” If they can’t even serve the interests of the constituents they have right now, why are other voters going to be inclined to support the party in the future? The party’s hostility to economic populism is just one part of this, but it is an important part.

For most, if not all, of the groups Hawkins mentions the tailoring would have to be closer to radically re-designing the entire concept, and that would mean sacrificing or at least risking support of existing constituencies to win over new ones. The track record of GOP outreach efforts in the past, as I have said before, is not reassuring as a matter of politics or policy. In principle, expanding a voting coalition is the right idea, but I have yet to see a proposal along these lines that does not sound like a call for a new marketing strategy, which fundamentally misunderstands why the GOP does not win the support of these voters.

Via Rod, I see that Michael Lind is warning that the Democrats are oblivious to the rise of economic populist sentiment in the country and that this might spell their political doom. It would be more accurate to say that the President has been oblivious to this, because he has tended to hew more to the establishment’s free trade, pro-globalization views. Congressional Democrats have been tapping into it for years, and it was an important part of their victories in 2006 and 2008. This is the point Sirota has been making. Huckabee flirted with the phrase “fair trade” and was attacked ferociously from almost every side of the conservative movement. There is a reason elected Midwestern Republicans are fast becoming as endangered as New England Republican officeholders, and much of it has to do with the fate of domestic manufacturing in these states. Even if it is true that only a third of jobs lost in this sector are the result of trade agreements, that is still an enormous number of jobs, and it has largely been the GOP, much more than the Democrats (whose leaders, it is true, are far from blameless), who have been singing hallelujah to the river god of “creative destruction” for the last twenty years. It has overwhelmingly been the Republicans in Congress who have been railing against the “Buy American” provisions in the stimulus, and it was their former presidential candidate who tried and miserably failed to introduce an alternative bill that had stripped out all of these provisions. At present, the provisions remain in the bill, but as I discuss in the new column in this issue there is still a danger that they will be stripped out before final passage. Obama has not shown signs yet that he will heed ideological calls for a veto of the bill if these provisions remain in place, but he has also hardly been a defender of the provisions. However, if the public is going to blame anyone for the removal of these provisions it is hard to see why they would not pin the blame on the party most of them already dislike, namely the GOP.

As a matter of electoral politics, it is insane that the GOP refuses to tap into economic populist sentiment, which is hardly limited only to working and middle-class voters after the last year, but this is a function of the structure of the party. Cultural populism, especially the empty posturing sort, is good for mobilizing voters and it does not for the most part threaten the status of GOP elites, because they tend not to be cultural elites. Directing the ire of your voters against academics, bureaucrats, journalists and entertainers is fairly easy when most of the targets are already on the other side. When your party exists primarily to serve the interests of corporations, it doesn’t matter to you what your voters think about trade policy, because your party is not going to support the trade policy that your voters want in any case. The GOP cannot capitalize on any unpopular moves that the administration makes in this area because they have strong disincentives to go down the populist road and most, with the exception of some House members such as Duncan Hunter, have zero credibility on this issue.

During the campaign, I was frequently amused to read arguments that claimed the election pitted an advocate of globalism against a defender of American exceptionalism. My question was always this: which one is which? In economic and immigration policy, no one was more of a globalist than McCain. Because of Democratic labor constituencies, Obama at least had to go through the motions of pretending that domestic industry and labor were important, but he was largely on board with most free trade agreements. As Lind’s piece suggests, the leadership of both parties is hostile or at least unresponsive to populist concerns, but it is the Democrats who have the opportunity to exploit rising anti-globalization sentiment in the country. The GOP had their chance in the ’90s and again when they controlled both Congress and the White House, and they blew it both times. Maybe they will have a third chance, but it seems improbable.

During the Republican primaries, Huckabee made some noises that caused a few people to think that he had Buchananite instincts (this was normally not a friendly observation), but actual Buchananites could see that his appeal to working and middle-class voters on trade and the economy was its own kind of pose. Just as national Republicans like to ham it up and pretend that they are just like culturally conservative, small-town folks, Huckabee put on an act that he would challenge free trade ideology, but this was purely symbolic economic populism that his critics mistook for the real thing. Huckabee caused most of the activists in the conservative movement to break out in hives; an actual protectionist candidate would send them screaming from the room. It is not just that there are huge obstacles to economic populism taking root in the GOP, but there is also the directly related problem that there just aren’t any viable candidates who can articulate these arguments with any credibility. Anyone who has wanted to make his way in Republican politics with any success has learned that free trade is one of the unquestionably good things that he must support, so even if some leading Republican were now to position himself opportunistically as a critic of NAFTA, the WTO or free trade generally it would be an exercise in posturing and would be seen as such.

It’s a rule of American comity that we all refrain from expressing doubts about the purely doctrinal aspects of each other’s religions. ~David Frum

It is? That’s news to me. There are a lot of televangelists, New Atheists, and, for that matter, rank-and-file believers and non-believers who express doubts about purely doctrinal aspects of other people’s religions. Granted, this probably doesn’t necessarily come up at social gatherings as a matter of etiquette, but in public discourse it comes up all the time and it is hardly limited to poking holes in official Mormon theology. It seems to me that Frum’s best argument in favor of Mormon candidates can be summed up like this: “Most Mormons don’t really believe or know about the more bizarre things their church teaches, so don’t hold it against them.” I would suggest that portraying Mormons as indifferent to or ignorant about their own doctrines is probably the best way to make Mormon candidates as unattractive to all religious conservatives as possible. One of the things that I found very unsettling about the arguments made by Romney’s Christian supporters was that they were saying that faith and doctrine are irrelevant to moral and social teachings, and essentially that it does not matter what you believe but only what you do. In any other context, I doubt many Christians would endorse this view, and this sort of weak, politically convenient ecumenist argument that some Romneyites offered would not have convinced many of the people making the argument if the candidate in question had been, say, a Muslim or a Hindu.

Indeed, Frum’s description gives the impression that the LDS is more cult-like in an unflattering way than it really is:

Note that he has nothing at all to say about the teachings of the church. Instead he talks about the warmth of community, the power of belonging. He says: “I don’t care if there’s Kool-Aid down in the basement. I’m drinking it. I want to be like that.”

How does this overcome skepticism? How does this do anything except fit into the most polemical stereotypes of Mormonism? And this is supposed to be a positive representation of the church?

In the end, the GOP could not even assemble the coalition of McCain voters if the party nominated a Mormon. This is the political reality. Arguments that insist that the religious doctrine a person holds is irrelevant to his public life are the least likely to persuade Christian conservatives, but I am not sure that there would be any argument that could persuade these conservatives, including myself, that doctrine is utterly irrelevant.

Update: In the new issue now online, Michael has an article (notnow online) discussing whether Mormons can be included more fully in social conservative politics. It is significant that Michael’s article focuses on the slight thaw between evangelicals and Mormons following the passage of Proposition 8, as this is probably the one culture war issue where there is some obvious common ground. However, there is not quite the same zeal among Mormons concerning the sanctity of life as there is about marriage, and the exceptions permitted by LDS authorities are considerably broader than most pro-life Christians would be willing to accept. Perhaps doctrine really does matter.

Alex Massie flags this item from the Post:

But Rep. Eric Cantor (Va.), the House minority whip who led the fight to deny Obama every GOP vote for the plan, is studying Winston Churchill’s role leading the Tories in the late 1930s, a principled minority that was eventually catapulted into power over the Labor Party. He calls the stimulus bill “a stinker.”

Massie remarks:

Well! It’s a shame the Post doesn’t seem to know any more British history than does Mr Cantor; then again it’s a shame Mr Cantor should want to make such an ass of himself. Presumably he hasn’t actually spent very much time studying 1930s British politics.

He would probably do better to look at how the Conservatives and Unionists recovered from their 1906 thrashing, since that is much closer to where the GOP is today politically, but that might be a bit too much to expect. Dave Weigel tries to find some way to interpret this in a way that doesn’t make Cantor look ridiculous, but despite his best efforts I don’t think Cantor can be saved on this one.

It is hardly a secret or some obscure piece of ancient lore that Churchill succeeded to the leadership only after Chamberlain’s ouster, and the Tories were in power for almost the entire decade before the war after the first Labour government imploded. I assumed this was the sort of thing Republican officeholders were required to learn by rote before they were permitted to take their seats, but evidently the one thing greater than GOP love for Churchill is ignorance about his actual political career. Mind you, Cantor’s Churchill Plan comes just a week or so after Rep. Sessions declared that the Taliban offered a possible model of political insurgency, so I suppose you could say that the House GOP has made a lot of progress if they’re thinking about following Churchill’s lead instead.

Freddie is nothing if not determined. Temperamentally, I am sympathetic to Freddie’s “no surrender” approach, and when it comes to foreign policy debates I am certainly not sympathetic to those hawkish neoliberals (not Kaus, I would add) who taught post-Vietnam liberals to be ashamed of their healthy skepticism about military adventurism and the security state and who urged military interventions all around the world. I have written a fair amount about why it is important to end the Democrats’ “defensive crouch” on foreign policy in some way that is not merely contributing to a bidding war on hawkishness, so I see the logic of calling for “no more capitulation” to the opposition. I can understand why a progressive on domestic policy would find neoliberals who are focused on welfare reform and attacking unions to be insufferable. That still really doesn’t make Kaus something other than a liberal.

Freddie cites the following passage as typical of Kaus’ writing and indicative of his contempt (Freddie’s word) for liberalism:

Welfare is a liberal sore spot that, if Republicans play it right, could become a bleeding open wound for the administration. Voters probably thought they’d settled the dole-vs.-work issue back in 1996. Obama will be fulfilling the crude GOP stereotype of his party if he even waffles on reopening it.

And there’s something fallacious (i.e. circular) about a liberal Dem citing MSM coverage as if the New York Times was an infallible oracle of the people, as opposed to an infallible oracle of liberal Dems. This is what you see when you look up “cocooning” in the dictionary! …

The first paragraph makes an obvious, almost banal political observation: welfare as an issue was and is a liability for Democrats in electoral politics. I am guessing one reason why the Republican attempt during the campaign to portray Obama’s pledge to provide tax subsidies to offset payroll taxes as nothing but welfare failed to shift sufficiently large numbers of voters into McCain’s column is that people did not find the accusation credible. It didn’t seem credible, because it wasn’t true. It is telling that the stimulus alternative now favored by many observers on the right is one that offers direct payroll tax relief, which would have the same result of returning taxpayers some of their own money. This was a goal that just six months their presidential candidate derided as socialism and misrepresented as “sending checks to people who don’t pay taxes.” But let’s set that aside for now.

In the actual stimulus bill, however, there really are large increases in welfare spending, and this makes up a large portion of the bill’s total costs. There are two arguments a progressive who wants to defend these increases can make against Kaus’ warning: 1) the public is more receptive to increases in welfare spending than they were during the boom in the ’90s (unlikely); 2) the increases in welfare spending do not really undo the ’96 reform, but operate within its constraints (possible). It could also be that the GOP will not have the credibility on this issue that it once had after the spending spree of the last eight years and especially after creating a new entitlement program with trillions in unfunded liabilities, so it is less likely to hurt the Democrats than it might have done in the past.

That is not what Freddie is saying. He is saying that Kaus obviously has contempt for liberalism because he thinks welfare reform was a) successful and b) popular, and assumes that it is politically risky to revisit the question. The first two claims Kaus is making here are basically accurate, and the assumption is a reasonable one to make. If Kaus wished liberals ill, but believed that a return to welfarism was politically dangerous, wouldn’t he keep quiet about this instead of bringing it to their attention? If he thinks that Democrats are playing into their opponents’ hands, why would he recommend a different couse of action if he wanted them to fail politically? Then again, if he were the enemy of liberalism Freddie believes him to be, wouldn’t he be rejoicing in the Democrats’ folly on the stimulus rather than warning them that they have made a mistake? In the end, Kaus may be wrong in assessing the public mood and the public’s level of knowledge about what the stimulus contains, but both of these are temporary and can change to the detriment of the administration and the Democratic majority. The comparison between the stimulus bill and the war in Iraq has been overdone, but there may be shred of truth in it. The war seemed like an obvious, undeniable politically winning issue and an overwhelmingly popular initiative, but turned into political disaster for its supporters as the public saw the results and learned more about how it had come about. The same thing could happen with the stimulus bill, and one part of the problem many voters may end up having with the bill could be the welfare portions of the bill as they learn more about it. Even if that turns out not to be the case because the recession has changed the politics of welfare or for some other reason, it is not a ridiculous thing for a liberal to take into consideration.

The second point about media bias is more vexed, as most progressives find the idea that establishment media outlets are biased in their favor to be absurd. However, what Kaus really seems to be saying here is that liberals should guard against falling into the trap of cocooning themselves and reinforcing their assumptions by relying on sources that confirm what they already believe. This is usually taken as evidence of reasonableness and a desire to enngage in self-criticism when Ross says something similar about conservatives and conservative media, but is a clear case of perfidy and contempt when Kaus says it. I can imagine that Kaus might have contempt for certain liberal individuals or groups who fail to heed what he thinks are important warnings, but that is something very different from having contempt for liberalism as such.

Update: Kaus addresses how the bill relates to ’96 welfare reform and lays out the reasons why the new legislation does not fully “unravel” it, but then goes on to make the political case why liberals should be particularly concerned about this aspect of the bill:

Preserving Clinton’s biggest domestic achievement isn’t something you should want “even” if you’re a liberal who believes in affirmative government. It’s something you should want especially if you’re a liberal who believes in affirmative government.

This is something that I, as a small-government conservative, appreciate only too well. The welfare state will never be pushed back or abolished so long as it can be made to “work efficiently,” or at least as long as reforms can be made that make the public believe that it is working that way.

During the campaign, I was frequently advised to steer clear of talking about polling, which I did not really understand well enough to discuss in much depth, and this was good advice I should have heeded early on. By all accounts, Nate Silver is an undisputed master of polling, so perhaps he ought to stick to what he knows and stay away from policy debates.

In a recent post, Silver lays out the differences between “rational” and “radical” progressivism. For someone inclined to accuseothers of dishonesty, Silver is being fairly deceptive in his labeling from the beginning. Naturally, he is going to set up his own position as the rational one and the one he is attacking as implicitly irrational. That isn’t the main point here, but it is typical of the technocratic, anti-populist side in any debate to frame disagreements with their critics as a battle between reason and passion. You can find this with David Brooks’ description of anti-TARP Congressmen as “nihilists” (even though their skepticism and advocacy for alternatives were entirely warranted and correct) or any of the usual pro-war and pro-immigration advocates that seek to impute malicious intent or hatred to their opponents. This is a method used for dismissing, rather than engaging, and for treating opposing arguments as inherently unworthy of attention or serious consideration. Technocratic types prefer practicing this politics of contempt, because it automatically rules out serious objections to certain policies as automatically invalid and invests them or people like them with a certain unchallengeable authority. They tend to make respect for expertise into a debilitating inability to question experts’ assumptions and biases.

With respect to the “Buy American” provisions in the stimulus bill, which is the policy issue in question referred to in the links in Silver’s post, it has been the free trade side of the debate that has been most inclined to knee-jerk, emotional responses. The free traders pretend that these measures will spark a trade war, when they do not violate any existing trade agreements, and they pretend that they are some kind of innovation when they are applications of existing law. They sputter and shout, “Protectionist!” to shut down debate and invoke Smoot-Hawley in much the same way that warmongers always use Munich to browbeat opponents, all of which points to their own unreasonableness and ideological rigidity.

On the specific charges against Sirota, Silver is not credible. He says that Sirota is playing “fast and loose with the truth” when Sirota said, based on comments made by Rep. Rangel, that Obama may be interested in going ahead with the Colombian free trade agreement. In fact, Sirota is correct that Rangel said this, and his interpretation of what it would mean is also correct. He also claims that Sirota uses “the same demagogic precepts that the right wing does,” by which I take it he means that Sirota’s use of the phrase economic patriotism is equivalent to conventional warmongering and security state rhetoric that uses references to patriotism as a bludgeon. If that is what he means, the comparison is plainly ridiculous. Just for a start, advocates for starting wars and expanding the role of the security state are usually arguing for policies that are illegal and result in detaining, harming or killing other people. The measures to which Sirota refers are basically measures that will provide some Americans in economically depressed regions of the country with employment. Naturally, then, it is Sirota and his populists who frighten Silver, and not the technocrats who plunged the country into the abyss. After at least twenty years of technocratic demonizing and marginalizing of populists on the grounds that the technocrats knew best, we are seeing where all of this trust in expertise has led us.

Update: Donald Douglas comments, demonstrating that he has not understood very much of what I just said. He writes:

Note how Larison dismisses those like Silver, who argues for pragmatic reason over radical ideological passion, as of the same kind of intellectuals who advocate “for starting wars and expanding the role of the security state” and “for policies that are illegal and result in detaining, harming or killing other people.”

My point about Silver in that instance is that claiming to represent pragmatic reason over and against ideology and passion is itself an ideological claim and a pose that may be no more or less motivated by passions. I am saying that it is Silver who is attempting to claim that Sirota is similar to those “advocate “for starting wars and expanding the role of the security state” and “for policies that are illegal and result in detaining, harming or killing other people.” It was Silver, after all, who accused Sirota of demagoguery, but left his meaning vague. I am really just guessing as to what he meant, but given the intra-progressive nature of the debate I assume that he means to align Sirota’s arguments on trade with the sort of demagogic arguments made in support of the war over the years. Those would be the arguments that I assume appeal to Douglas, who describes himself as “pro-victory,” which is just about as meaningless a label as one can invent. I prefer anti-defeat myself. In any case, I have made no equation between Silver and pro-war figures. Indeed, I am taking for granted that Silver is hostile to these figures. Were he not, his attack on Sirota would not make much sense.

Douglas goes for the big finish:

Basically, you get a lot of guys under different monikers who get along just peachy, making no need to carve out spacy cul-de-sacs of disagreement, since the point isn’t really to debate, but to mislabel and repackage policies that have already been repudiated by traditionalists in the great silent cultural majority.

Of course, we (people at OpenLeft, TAC, the pomocons, liberaltarians, etc.) all don’t “get along just peachy” except on very specific areas where we happen to agree on particular policy questions for different reasons. In his support for “current U.S. military operations around the world,” Douglas is aligned with Joe Lieberman and Christopher Hitchens–does he “get along just peachy” with them? I doubt it.

Paleos are in sharp disagreement with pretty much all of the people Douglas mentioned on culture war issues and immigration, and we are definitely in disagreement with almost everyone to our left on questions pertaining to the role of government. Occasionally, there is some overlap with radical decentralists on the left, but this is fairly rare. The great silent cultural majority must either be very silent or perhaps it is no longer a majority. The war and illegal immigration, to cite two examples of things paleos strongly oppose, are both very unpopular. For that matter, with respect to trade the public has turned against globalization in recent years, which suggests that “pro-victory” professors in California are not very familiar with what the majority of Americans wants or believes.

Yglesias:

But one important difference between the peace progressives and today’s right-wing defense skeptics is that the peace progressives were committed internationalists who believed in things like the Washington Naval Treaty, the Kellog-Briand Pact, and other multilateral arms control and conflict prevention efforts.

Ah, yes, the committed internationalists in the Coolidge administration. Indeed, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover were internationalists in the broad sense that they wanted to cultivate good relations with other states and negotiate international treaties. None of those Presidents was exactly clamoring for American entry into the League of Nations, but that did not stop them from involvement in international affairs. Arguably no one was more of a “committed internationalist” prior to Wilson than Grover Cleveland, who was also probably the most staunchly anti-imperialist/anti-colonialist President since Monroe. Cleveland was a great believer in arbitration as a means of settling international disputes. His addresses to Congress are remarkable for their inclusion of international disputes and subjects that had only the most indirect connection to the United States. He was also firmly against empire-building, and even in his most irresponsible moment when he flirted with entering into a conflict with Britain over the Venezuelan boundary with Guyana he believed he was defending the anti-colonialist legacy of the Monroe Doctrine.

If you want to call Cleveland an internationalist, I suspect you would find that most so-called right-wing “defense” skeptics also consider themselves to be “internationalists” in the same mold. Cleveland, like the peace progressives Yglesias mentions, showed that it was possible to be internationally engaged without abandoning our traditional neutrality, and they show that American neutrality is a necessary part of this sort of internationalism. In the unlikely event that liberal internationalists begin espousing an America First foreign policy, perhaps they will find a more receptive audience on the right for certain proposals for strengthening international law.