Patrick Deneen has an important post on protectionism and the dangers of a consumer society, and E.D. Kain ponders the interventionist nature of economic sanctions. The two seem to be concerned with very different things, but there is something that ties them together, which is why I thought it important to answer a question in the comments to Kain’s post:

Trade restrictions have the exact same effect on foreign populations regardless of your preferred political justification. So what’s the substantive difference between vindictiveness and economic nationalism?

Quite clearly, the difference is that economic sanctions imposed on “rogue” regimes are aimed at punishing a foreign population and trying to force changes in another government’s internal policies, which never works, while measures designed to protect against cheap competition are aimed at supporting domestic industries. Critics of protectionism do not deny that these supports are successful, but insist that they should not be implemented for the sake of efficiency and “growth.” Governments impose economic sanctions on the assumption that people in other countries think and act as nothing more than consumers whose loyalties can be manipulated through high prices for imports. Opposition to protectionist measures presupposes treating citizens as if they were consumers whose loyalties should be manipulated with low prices for imports. Protectionist policies take for granted that national sovereignty and citizenship are relevant factors in determing the regulation of international trade. Economic sanctions policies are based on the assumption that concepts of national sovereignty and citizenship mean as little to members of other nations as they do to globalists in the West. Does that about cover it?

P.S. Protectionist has always struck me as a strange epithet, as if it were an insult to say that you protect things. I suppose the opposite of a protectionist would be a despoiler. Now that‘s an epithet!

Glenn Greenwald and Scott McConnell have both picked up on a certain obvious double standard that will be applied in the international reaction to the prospect of Yisrael Beiteinu joining the next coalition government after tomorrow’s election. This is unfortunate, but if there is any problem here it is in the other examples of international condemnation of election results and the climate of fear and intimidation that critics of various parties want to create. Arguably, one might make an exception for Yisrael Beiteinu, whose leaders were so keen to ban certain Israeli Arab parties and whose policy positions are infinitely more offensive than anything to be found among European nationalist parties, and who therefore have the least claim to sympathy, but part of the trouble is the willingness to make exceptions to democratic norms supposedly in the name of defending democracy. So long as political parties do not call for their members to use violence, it is extremely difficult to justify banning a party or penalizing a country for including it in its government.

Of course, we are almost certainly not going to see the same outrage over Yisrael Beiteinu as we have seen in other cases, just as few in the West cared that extreme Ukrainian nationalists made up a significant part of the support for Viktor Yushchenko (he was “pro-Western”!) or that Saakashvili was a hot-headed nationalist demagogue with militant aspirations (he was anti-Russian, so all was well) or that the Croatian government of Tudjman was the direct descendant of the Ustasha. This is a simple guide for understanding when such groups are democratic and when they are anti-democratic. First of all, the “anti-democratic” parties are actually democratic in practice and in ideology–this is why some people find them threatening. They actually want the voices of their constituents heard and their views implemented as policy! Very frightening. Pro-Western “democrats” are often authoritarian in practice, or they are willing to engage in brutal treatment of their minorities, or they at least have neo-Nazi or Stalin-sympathizing supporters. Obviously these are the people the West needs to support against their enemies, and so we have and continue to do. The difference between the parties treated as harbingers of democracy and those treated as democracy’s enemies is a fairly simple one: the officially good parties are on board with what Washington and Brussels want to do, and the officially bad parties are those that object to the goals of either one or both. Pretty predictably, then, European reaction to Yisrael Beiteinu’s success is going to be fairly negative, while the U.S. response will be mildly critical or possibly even positive. If anyone thinks that this depends significantly on which party is in power in Washington, he is going to be surprised.

Let’s review the cases of the “anti-democratic” parties in Europe. In Belgium, the Flemish nationalist party, then the Vlaams Blok, was outlawed and scarcely anyone in the West so much as blinked. The party has since reformed under another name, but its popularity along with the paralysis of Belgian government that we saw for about half of 2008 are pieces of evidence that the Flemish nationalists represent a legitimate protest of the middle-class, Flemish-speaking population against a government that they have ceased to respect and which they believe does not govern in their interests. The late Joerg Haider’s party joined the Austrian government in the late ’90s, and Austria was penalized with diplomatic and other sanctions by other Western governments. This was mostly because it was more aggressive and outspoken in its opposition to mass immigration, which is a position that most center-right parties across Europe have now adopted. The FPO had the bad taste to be among the first, and the People’s Party Chancellor had the gall to respect the results of that election rather than try to form another bankrupt consensus government with the left. Recognizing that the protest that empowered the FPO was the result of a stifling consensus between the two major parties, the Chancellor brought them into the government. Le Pen’s advance into the final round of presidential voting in 2002 was widely treated as an apocalyptic event that very nearly excluded France from the civilized world, or at least that was how the media treated it. In the end, the vote was held, Le Pen lost and that was that. We should also not forget the pre-election hysteria surrounding Pim Fortuyn’s list in the Netherlands along the same lines, which more or less directly led to his assassination.

At least in the French case the election went ahead, albeit in an atmosphere of hysteria and groupthink the likes of which some communist dictators might envy, and French voters settled the matter themselves at the ballot box. In the other three, there were attempts to make an end-run around the electoral process or penalize voters in a sovereign country for voting the “wrong” way. Of course, one is free to oppose the positions these parties espouse, but it is always very dangerous when a country’s judicial system, international institutions, or foreign governments believe that they are justified in banning or punishing parties and countries that vote for them. Obviously, it is completely unacceptable for individuals to murder democratic politicians whom they regard as dangerous, but it is worth bearing in mind that such attacks do not occur in a vacuum. Would-be assassins can find justification in the exaggerated rhetoric of partisans, and things would generally be much better if we all carefully avoided stoking passions over these election outcomes.

Since I apparently haven’t talked enough about the stimulus bill, I’ll say a few words about it in connection with a topic I find to be interesting. Andrew cites a Gallup poll showing broad approval for Obama’s handling of the stimulus. Republicans receive very negative marks on the same question, which is consistent with being a wildly unpopular party that was just trounced in a second consecutive election and is loathed by more than half of the country. This brings me back to my initial reaction to the House Republican vote on the stimulus.

Suppose for a moment that all observers of the debate agreed that the House Republicans were right that the stimulus bill isn’t fast or effective enough and that it is larded down with all sorts of unnecessary spending, and let’s go one step beyond that and grant for the sake of argument that, say, a payroll tax cut alternative is far superior to what is being offered. Voting against the stimulus bill would still make no sense politically unless you believe two things: 1) the public is hostile to vast increases in spending; 2) the public judges these matters based on a high degree of wonkish detail. The first assumption is appealing to those of us who are hostile to vast increases in spending, but we make up a small portion of the electorate and are unrepresentative of the rest of the country. For that matter, such people make up a small portion of the GOP itself, which is why the sudden return of the GOP’s anti-spending enthusiasm seems so bizarre to me. Of all the times to acquire zeal for austerity, which is rarely popular in the best of times and risky even for popular majority parties, they have chosen the middle of a recession after having taken two huge electoral drubbings. This is something like discovering antiwar scruples only in the middle of an invasion. The second assumption about how the public judges the debate is simply fantastic. At most, these measures are judged by the parties’ stated priorities and their rhetoric.

During the bailout debate, the House Republican leadership voted for creating the TARP, which was also bad policy, and they were oblivious to the political toxicity of that measure among their own constituents. It’s not as if the leadership had some deep reservoir of populist credibility before the bailout. Even if the TARP had been a good idea and even if it had already had some success, it would still be perceived as nothing more than the scam and the giveaway to banks that it actually was. Even though the stimulus bill will probably have no desirable effects and will add vast sums to the debt, the stimulus and its supporters are going to continue to be perceived as acting on behalf of the public. Boehner and Cantor have twice managed to put themselves on the wrong side of public opinion on major pieces of legislation in the last five months, so again I have to wonder why it is they remain in the leadership. I have to assume it is because the members of the conference are as politically clueless as they are.

This brings me to an interesting survey of former Republicans from Pennsylvania who switched their registration last year (via Antle). Of course, most of them (54%) cited the war as a major reason, and many cited foreign policy generally and environmental issues, but 44% of those surveyed also gave taxes as their reason and 46% said their views on taxes were closer to the Democrats. That is, this 44% left the GOP in Pennsylvania because they thought it reduced taxes too much and not because it spent too much. To the extent that the GOP followed economic conservatives, it lost more voters in Pennsylvania because of that than it did because of social conservative positions. (Naturally, even though hawks and economic conservatives appear to be alienating more voters than social conservatives, the latter continue to be the scapegoats.) Most of the party-switchers identify as moderate and liberal, and just 26% defined themselves as conservative or very conservative, which on the one hand seems baffling to me given how much farther to the left of me the GOP has moved in just the last few years, and on the other it makes perfect sense considering the self-destructive embrace of Bush mainstream conservatives engaged in for most, if not all, of his Presidency.

Update: Commenting on FoxNews’ recent ratings bump, Dave Weigel says of the GOP:

They’re still losing, but now they’re doing it with more people watching.

Sounds like a recipe for success to me!

Discussing the pitfalls of tying U.S. policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan to meddling in the Kashmir dispute, I noted the unfortunate tendency in U.S. foreign policy debate to create unnecessary links between different, unconnected issues in the same region as prelude to a supposedly “comprehensive” solution. Via Yglesias, I see that Peter Berkowitz has given a perfect example of how this works in commentary on Israel and Palestine. The parallels between “grand bargain” arguments related to Pakistan and Berkowitz’s argument about Israel and Palestine are striking, and this reflects important structural similarities between the two cases. In both cases you have hard-line defenders of an occupation who want to use an unrelated regional security matter to advance their objectives in the occupied territory. In the Israeli case, invoking Iran is a way of distracting attention from its own policies and claiming that nothing can be done in the territories until Iranian intervention stops and the Iranian threat is neutralized. This is mostly a delaying maneuver, but it is also a way to channel international attention away from the territories and towards Iran, which is something else hard-liners would like to see. Suddenly, it is not perpetuation of settlements that makes negotiations extremely difficult, but Iranian intervention, which loads up the agenda for any negotiations with so many extraneous issues related to Iran’s position in the region that any progress on relevant issues is sure to be thwarted. In the Pakistani case, the military floats the idea of outside mediation in Kashmir and uses promises to increase pressure on the Taliban as leverage to win concessions that it could otherwise never hope to win, and then uses the “failure” to make progress on the unrelated Kashmir dispute a justification for its “inability” to do more in western Pakistan. Unfortunately, there is every reason to think that Washington will buy into both of these misdirections.

Via Blake Hounshell at Passport, Tom Ricks spoke on Meet The Press this morning about Iraq and Afghanistan and his new book, The Gamble. His comments on Iraq are important and need to be considered very seriously. “All of the basic problems that the surge was meant to solve are still there,” Ricks said. That is similar to what I was saying yesterday in connection with the elections. As practically every “surge” opponent said for the last two years, on its own terms of facilitating political reconciliation the “surge” clearly failed. This is why it has never been clear to me why advocacy for the “surge”–deepening our commitment to a war that we ought to have brought to an end years ago–is supposed to win someone a reputation for insight and wisdom. I have also never understood why war opponents are supposed to feel chastened for refusing to support the prolonging and escalation of an unnecessary war.

The Post is overflowing with commentary on sending signals today. If you are not baffled by Kevin Hassettadvertising for the Valentine’s Day racket discussing the science of mating, there is always Broder to provide his own, er, unique brand of political analysis:

Still, if real-world confirmation of Brownstein’s thesis were needed, the Republican National Committee furnished it on Jan. 30 when it elected Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, as the first African American to hold that post.

It was the clearest possible signal that the GOP realizes it must escape the shackles of its ideologically binding Southern strategy and compete in a more diverse, pragmatic and intellectually challenging environment.

Brownstein’s thesis is that the Democrats have established a reliable bloc of 18 states (plus D.C.) that have voted for their presidential candidate for at least the last five elections. This “blue wall” gives the Democrats a more or less automatic 248 electoral votes, which makes it much easier now for Democrats to win presidential elections. The thesis seems reasonable enough, but I fail to see how RNC chairman elections could confirm or reject it. According to Broder, Steele’s election is supposed to be evidence that Republicans have recognized how far their party has sunk, but the more I think about it the more it seems to me to be another in a long line of fumbling efforts to “re-brand” the GOP.

Republican party leaders have been trying to compete “in a more diverse, pragmatic and intellectually challenging environment” for many cycles. This gave us Dole-Kemp, “empowerment zones,” school choice mania, “compassionate conservatism,” No Child Left Behind, amnesty and “the ownership society.” In pretty much every case, the policies the GOP adopted as part of their lame but consistent efforts at “outreach” were deeply misguided, wildly unpopular or both. The GOP has been breaking out of whatever ideological shackles that once held it for over a decade, and in the end the results have been almost uniformly bad for them and the country. It was during this same period of shackle-breaking and “outreach” that the “blue wall” was built up. There is no question that some kind of adaptation to demographic changes is needed, but the GOP’s difficulty is that their answers are almost always the wrong ones.

For the most part, this is a function of pursuing minority voters least likely to be won over as a way of indirectly appealing to the sentiments of white moderates and independents rather than trying to craft policies that actually serve the interests of those moderates and independents. This is part of the GOP’s broader problem that it does not craft policies that serve the interests of most of the constituents it already has, but relies on signals, cues and lifestyle identity politics designed to mobilize people against the other party rather than to have any clear reason to support a Republican agenda. It is not surprising then that the GOP relies entirely on sending signals to moderates and independents through the adoption of bad policy proposals aimed theoretically at the benefit of entirely different groups, which creates a situation in which conservatives protest against these bad policies at the peril of sending contradictory signals that render the entire exercise pointless.

To the extent that housing policy of “the ownership society” brought about our current financial woes, the desire to be “compassionate” has helped plunge us into the worst recession in at least a generation. If Republican education reform ideas are now limited to school choice, it is little wonder that suburbanites now find little about the GOP that is attractive. Then again, considering the failure that has been NCLB, which punished the schools with the fewest resources by taking from what little they had to impose “accountability,” it might be better if Republicans steer clear of education all together. Indeed, at the national level this is exactly what they ought to do–make education once again entirely the concern of states and municipalities and give up on trying to craft some half-baked “market-oriented” federal education policy. Instead, as Steele has already indicated, the GOP is going to keep flogging school choice no matter how little the idea helps them.

All of this is guess-work, of course, but it has happened repeatedly throughout history. ~Michael Auslin

By “repeatedly throughout history,” Auslin seems to mean once. Naturally, this was during the ’30s and ’40s. One searches in vain for another example. Depressions in the 1870s and 1890s did not lead to general, large-scale conflicts among the major powers in any part of the world. The Panic of 1907 had no meaningful connection to the conflagration that followed many years later. The end of WWI saw an economic slump as the world adjusted to armistice and demobilization, but the war did not come about because of economic troubles. Looking back much earlier, we see that the bursting of the South Sea credit bubble happened to follow a prolonged period of warfare on the Continent, but the consequences of the end of the bubble did not facilitate war. The interwar period was extremely unusual in many ways, and if we use it as a model to base our expectations of what the next few years might bring we are going to be unnecessarily preoccupied with phantom threats. In the 1930s there was one major revisionist power deeply dissatisfied with the WWI peace settlement and an emerging, second-tier power that aspired to great power status, and you had a concert of status quo imperial powers that was going to resist them at some point. Conditions today in Asia are simply nothing like that.

Given the increasing dependence of the Taiwanese economy on China, China is more likely to buy out Taiwan than invade it. The Japanese public has no interest in military adventures. Regimes increasingly worried about social unrest enter into wars at the peril of being destroyed by revolution. It is stable, relatively prosperous states that can afford wars to distract their people. If Japan is facing “economic collapse,” it is not going to be in a position to engage in a war against its more heavily militarized and far more heavily populated Chinese neighbor. Anti-Japanese sentiment cultivated by Chinese nationalists is real enough, but the government is not going to make policy on the basis of that.

There has been a certain amount of cheering over the outcome of the Iraqi elections for a couple of reasons: the elections were not marred by serious violence, and the elections happened. This has led some to declare doubters of Iraqi democracy to have been wrong, but I am not quite sure how anyone comes to this conclusion. Four years in, most Westerners believed Russia to be an example of a largely successful transition to democratic government, and five or six years after that they would have had to conclude that the mass democratic element of the new system enabled the populist authoritarianism and illiberalism of Putin. This development is usually described as a “turn away” from democracy, but it is really just the natural end of democracy when democracy is not hedged roundabout with constitutional restrictions. Many of the same people who seem happy to claim that Russians are naturally prone to authoritarian government are horrified by the argument that democracy might not work well in a fissiparous multiethnic country with no significant tradition of constitutional government when it is part of one of our nation-building exercises. To some significant degree, Russians have rejected western European and American models because they associated them with national weakness and economic upheaval–how much more are Iraqis in the future going to associate the current system installed by a foreign occupation with the death and mayhem of the last five years? Do we really think that there is not going to be a backlash or political upheaval directed against the government?

Unless our forces maintain a permanent presence in Iraq to prop up the government, what will prevent officers in the newly-established Iraqi armed forces from seizing power in the event that the civilian government becomes too corrupt or ineffectual? We have seen in Bangladesh and Thailand very recently how the military will insert itself in the political process to topple corrupt elected governments, or at the very least the military has used the government’s corruption as a pretext to settle disputes that it has with the civilian leadership. Is there any precedent in modern Near Eastern history that would give anyone confidence that democratically elected government in Iraq will survive or that we can be sure that Iraq’s government is anything like the relatively stable democratic government of Turkey of today? Judging from the Turkish example, it might be several decades interrupted by numerous military juntas before we see something comparable in Iraq, and in the Turkish case the Westernized republican system was something imposed from within by nationalists and not from without, and even then it was not readily accepted and had to be imposed. Indeed, what will deter a future U.S. administration from colluding in a coup against the civilian government (or at least approving it after the fact) if that government seems to be tilting too strongly towards Iran? What will keep future Iraqi leaders from meeting the fate of either Mossadegh or Bhutto? The democratist cheerleaders likely have no idea, but they are positive that one more round of elections vindicates their fantasy.

Iraq has had yet another round of elections, but elections, as many of the same people would readily admit when it comes to Palestinian elections, are not always sufficient to create functioning, effective self-government. They may instead enable what we would consider to be some of the worst political actors. Nothing fundamental has changed in Iraq. The ruling party is still sectarian and Islamic fundamentalist in nature, and most of the other parties are still defined by religion, ethnicity or “secularism” (which is the main expression of Sunni sectarian identity), which portends continued tensions and rivalries among politicized religious and ethnic blocs. Even if they emphasize these differences less and stress their Iraqi identity more, the composition of the parties has not changed that much. None of the fissures in the Iraqi state has been healed. They have merely been covered over, and they will likely be exposed as Iraq experiences the woes of the global recession and declining oil revenues. Above all, Iraq is a petro-state whose political and economic stability depends on revenues from natural resource extraction and exporting, and the internal problems that Venezuela, Iran and others are facing as their oil revenues evaporate apply to Iraq as well. The temptation to become more authoritarian in a petro-state when its revenues are falling is strong, and there is nothing in modern Iraqi history that suggests that populist authoritarianism will not prevail there as it has in other democratized petro-states. In other words, even if Iraqi democracy survives all of the dangers listed above there is not much reason to believe that this will lead to good government.

A few days ago, I was asked to write about the final season of BSG, which continues tonight with the fourth of the final ten episodes, so here are a few thoughts on the season and where I think it may be going. Numerous spoilers follow. Don’t keep reading if you haven’t seen any of the new episodes.

Based on what I have seen so far this season and what I have heard and read in various interviews with cast and crew, the remaining episodes are going to be progressively bleak, violent and unpleasant. If the last three episodes have been unusually grim and depressing even by Ron Moore’s standards, the coming episodes are going to make these seem dull and peaceful by comparison. Those who have watched “The Oath” know that there is a full-scale mutiny going on. There is good reason to think that many more well-known characters are going to be killed off in fairly short order. Racetrack and Seelix are not long for this world. Assuming that Adama et al. eventually prevail, as I think they will, the mutineers are going to be executed in large numbers. Gaeta and Zarek will have to die, which will probably lead to an insurgency against Adama and Roslin by many of the ships that sympathized with the coup.

My guess is that at least one of the final Cylons is killed during the mutiny (bye, Anders!), which will provoke the rebel Cylons either to seek revenge and/or to abandon the fleet, and the death of one of the Five will provide the writers another excuse to create some hokey addition to their Cylon mythology. Maybe the Five survive through some process of metempsychosis, which might help to make sense of how they ended up being born on the colonies, so even if they kill off one or more of them they may not be gone from the show. Shortly after the mutiny, Cavil and the other models that did not rebel will reappear to harrass the divided, self-destructing fleet, perhaps with Ellen Tigh in tow. It seems to me that Moore will have no trouble coming up with a scenario in which the entire fleet and most, if not all, of the Cylons are annihilated in a final battle. I don’t see how he will settle for a pat happy ending at this point.