The Democratic candidates debate only the purity of one another’s antiwar stance: Whose denunciation of the war came first? Whose goes the furthest? ~Jeff Jacoby

Mr. Jacoby attempts the impossible: to use the Republican presidential field’s views on the Iraq war and foreign policy as vindication of the ever-popular “intellectual diversity on the right, mindless conformity on the left” trope.  Intriguingly, The American Conservativeand Ron Paul receive mentions that might almost be called respectful–which would be to ignore a sort of cordon sanitaire erected against the former by much of the “respectable” right and the vehement and widespread denunciations of Ron Paul by the “mainstream” conservative pundits.  Antiwar conservatives are now useful to mainstream pundits to serve as an exhibit to show off to the crowd: “Look, we have our very own war opponents!”  Perhaps if someone had been living in a cave for the last six years and emerged this week, he might be persuaded that foreign policy debate was sweeping through the GOP like wildfire.  On the contrary, anyone who has watched all three debates to date can tell you how mind-numbingly similar nine of the ten candidates are.  Brownback’s tripartition plan and Tommy Thompson’s three-point plan make vague gestures in the direction of a change, but have no fundamental disagreements overall on foreign policy or Iraq.  Like some of the disagreements on the Democratic side, theirs are arguments over how to pursue the same policy, not substantial disagreements of principle.  The lone principled opponent of the GOP field’s foreign policy views is Ron Paul.  Nine of the candidates, plus perhaps Fred Thompson, have virtually no differences between them.  On torture, eight of the ten agree (and I have a sneaking suspicion Fred would frown one of those hounddog frowns of his and say something about how it is a shame that terrible things have to be done to keep liberty alive, etc.). 

I won’t pretend that the Democratic side is exactly a free-for-all of exciting and vigorous debate, since this would be preposterous nonsense.  Modern political parties abhor exciting and vigorous debate for the same reason monopolies abhor competition: it forces them to operate at greater and greater efficiencies, it creates uncertainty and potentially threatens their control of the market by opening up the market to alternatives beyond the approved handful of products.  This would also be the sort of spin that partisans engage in and I am hardly one of those.  However, as an antiwar conservative who knows Mr. Jacoby is generally quite wrong about the diversity of conservative thought on Iraq and foreign policy, and as someone who has followed the foreign policy debate on the other side to some degree, I believe I have to call Jacoby on his rather gross exaggeration.  The point here is to get at the truth and understand the political reality before us.  Conservatives need to do this more than anyone else.  It seems to me that the last thing the right needs is more self-delusion about its intellectual vitality and freshness, since it was exactly this kind of overconfidence, complacency, laziness and groupthink that helped get the conservative movement into the present predicament.  Continuing to slap themselves on the back by pretending that they are at the center of a dynamic and lively exchange of ideas is probably one of the most certain routes to further disasters American conservatives can take.  This myth of the right’s present intellectual diversity only helps to reinforce the instincts towards conformity that have so crippled conservative thinking.  To have a mainstream conservative pundit peddling this junk is bad news for the right. 

If Jacoby can cite TAC and the Standard as opposing magazines on the right as proof of the vast diversity of opinion among conservatives, for every Washington Monthly war opponent you could probably name a New Republic editor war supporter.  As I talk about in my TAC article (sorry, not online) this week, there have been neoliberal hawks and antiwar neoliberals.  Democratic political and policy leaders are actually still divided over the broader contours of foreign policy, but on the question of where the left is with respect to Iraq today you have almost a reverse image of the right: a small band of war supporters, outnumbered and almost overwhelmed by opponents.   

The broad base of the Democratic Party opposed the war early on, and it has been only in fits and starts that many of their pundits have caught up with where their constituents were years ago.  As conservative support for the war has waned, there have been a few changes of mind by pundits on the right and a handful of GOP Congressmen, but the majority of the party continues to support the war and their pundits and activists are typically in agreeement with this majority.  On the Democratic side in the presidential race, you have almost every position ranging from Joe Biden, who voted for the war supplemental and remains the pompous voice of establishmentarian Democratic hawks on all other matters, to Dennis Kucinich, who opposes war itself as an instrument of policy, and Mike Gravel, who sees the other candidates as madmen bent on attacking Iran.  On foreign policy generally, you can find Barack “‘Every Ailing Indonesian Chicken Is A Security Threat” Obama and Dennis Kucinich proposing, for the umpteenth time, the Department of Peace.  Gravel’s fears about his fellow candidates are not entirely unfounded, since Iraq policy is probably the only specific foreign policy matter on which there is some relatively “dovish” consensus, while views on Iran seem to cover almost the entire range of options (stopping short of the majority of the GOP field’s openness to using tactical nukes–but not clearly enough to satisfy the former Senator from Alaska).  In short, there is debate over fundamental differences aplenty on the left.  It is possible to find similar disagreements over basic assumptions on the right (on immigration, for example), but it is very hard to find much of that when it comes to discussions of foreign policy.

Statist liberals often worry about the destabilizing effects of income inequality. Statist conservatives often worry about the destabilizing effects of cultural change. Ross evidently worries about both, which puts him at odds with cosmopolitan dynamism on two separate fronts. ~Will Wilkinson

It also puts him on the right side of both questions, since “cosmopolitan dynamism” is just an elaborate phrase for exploitation and upheaval.

Continuing to meddle in a controversy to which I was not invited, I give you something new from Will Wilkinson:

The ultimate reason to endorse liberal principles is that adherence to them produces conditions under which human beings are most likely to thrive (according to the broadest variety of different conceptions of thriving).

That’s interesting, since I am equally confident that rejecting liberal (and I do mean liberal in a broad sense) principles and organising social and political life according to the principle of good order and in defense of the Permanent Things are vital to providing the conditions under which human beings are most likely to thrive (decidedly not according to the broadest variety of different conceptions of thriving).  Plainly, freedom is not the moral baseline.  Freedom presupposes a moral order that entails other, prior obligations between kin and between fellow citizens.  Within a polity, fellow citizens have more obligations to one another than they have to non-citizens.  Even if the net benefits of a policy accrue to many citizens and non-citizens, but come at the expense of fellow citizens, it is very likely unjust and contrary to the obligations that members of a polity have towards one another.  For the success of any polity in providing for the welfare of its members, there must be a certain degree of solidarity, and it is those things leading towards social fragmentation and disunity that need to be justified.  Incidentally, on this point Christian social thought has much to say and has ample room for a solidaristic, patriotic nationalism.

Not only are concrete freedoms inconceivable without such a moral order, but without the fulfillment of these obligations such freedom is about as meaningful as paint on a tomb.  Besides, what does it profit a man to gain cheap commodities and inexpensive servants if he loses his country?

I can’t begin to tell you how tired I am of the South’s victim complex. Five of our last seven presidents have been from the South and the other two have been from the Southwest — and the reason, as near as I can tell, is that most Southerners just flatly refuse to vote for anyone who comes from north of the Mason-Dixon Line. And yet, somehow, it’s the rest of us who are supposedly intolerant of Southern culture. Feh. ~Kevin Drum

Of course, Northerners and Northeasterners are intolerant of Southern culture and have no problem saying so all the time.  Southerners used to vote for Northern Democratic nominees as recently as 1960, back when the Democratic Party actually saw fit to represent the interests of Southern Democrats.  It is amusing to hear this complaint from Northeasterners, who continue to dominate the country culturally, politically and economically far out of all proportion to their numbers.  They have the bulk of the financial and political establishment, and together with their kindred spirits in California they run most of the media and entertainment empires in this country, and they feel put upon by a few Southern Presidents?  Cry me a river.  The South and the Sun Belt are where a huge percentage of Americans resides, and they have moved there because they have grown tired of the way things are done in the North.  Besides, before LBJ the last  President who originally hailed from part of the Old Confederacy was Wilson (inasmuch as he was born in Virginia); before Wilson, you have to go back to Andrew Johnson, and the last Southern President before him was Polk.  The majority of U.S. Presidents has been one kind of Yankee or another, so stop the complaining already.

Also, since when is California part of the Southwest?  We Southwesterners don’t claim it.  It’s a Pacific state, and very un-Southwestern.  This is clear enough, since the vast majority of Californians lives west of the Mojave and the San Joaquin Valley.  The only connection we Southwesterners have with them is that lots of Californians keep coming to our states to get away from, well, everything that makes California what it is.

Yeah, there’s no parallel here at all [between 1992 and today] is there? There’s no fiscal problem in Washington unaddressed by both parties, is there? Traditional conservatives have not deserted Bush, have they? He’s not regarded as Carter was, is he (his ratings are, in fact, lower)? And when a sane, secular candidate promises to tackle entitlement spending and climate change, no fiscal conservatives will warm to him, will they? Naah. ~Andrew Sullivan

There is certainly an opening for someone, but it isn’t at all clear that Bloomberg, even if he were going to run (which he isn’t–that’s the last time I’ll mention it today), is the one to exploit that opening.  Besides, if people want change, the Democratic candidates are at least vaguely gesturing towards it.  I have no illusions that the two party establishments are very far apart or opposed on many things, but this is the very reason why I see absolutely no appeal for a “centrist” candidate whose chief complaint is about the excess of partisanship.  Surely, if change is what the public wants people should support rather more radical alternatives than the ho-hum leading candidates. 

“Centrism” is a very nasty thing to behold when it is at work.  It is not actually pragmatic, despite its claims to be non-ideological, but takes as its non-negotiable positions a commitment to serving the interests of the political and economic establishment.  It is the ideology of the elite.  It is the pursuit of the receding middle ground, towards which all “centrists” strive–if only they could escape a world of partisanship and contention (a.k.a., politics) for the far, green country of blue-ribbon commissions, Tom Friedman columns and conferences at Brookings, all would be well.  The main legislative effort on the agenda today that is dangerously close to advancing is the immigration bill in the Senate–that is the evil that bipartisanship and consensus cause.  Most Americans don’t care for the bill, but horrid bipartisanship and the rhetoric of  “tackling important issues” and “getting things done” are threatening to impose it on us.  Bloomberg’s candidacy, if it were to come about, would be more of this, but with hundreds of millions of dollars behind it. 

Besides, anybody can already campaign on fiscal restraint.  If you want that, vote for McCain–he at least talks about it fairly often and he might even mean what he says.  More to the point, a purely budget-balancing candidacy might pull 10% in a year where dissatisfaction with both parties is high, but for ’08 there is a strong trend away from one party and towards another.  The opening for just any independent is not nearly as large as it might at first appear to be.  It would have to be just the right kind of independent.  It would have to be someone who can exploit the broader dissatisfaction with the two-party establishment consensus on, say, trade, immigration and foreign policy,and who could be generously self-funded.  Ron Paul fits the first part of the bill, but unfortunately not the second.  

The other thing is that on the major issues of the moment (Iraq, terrorism, immigration, and, I suppose, health care) Bloomberg’s views are either completely unformed or carbon copies of ideas already on offer.  Perot was interesting and somewhat successful because he actually led on the deficit and on trade, and the bland consensus of the two parties on NAFTA created an opening for someone to represent the opposition.  Perot could tap into dissatisfaction following the ’91 recession that is currently locked up by Democratic populists in the Edwards mould.  Also, there are billionaires and then there are billionaires–a wacky Texan will do better running for President in this country than a New Yorker any day.  Incidentally, that is probably one reason why Bloomberg isn’t going to run–he knows that he would end up doing worse than Perot after probably spending even more money, and he would be forever associated with a campaign effort that would be routinely described as “not even as popular as Ross Perot’s ’92 run despite the public’s deep dissatisfaction with the direction of country.”

(Sample 311 answer: The call center provides service in 179 languages. “You can report a pothole in Korean, ask for a nicotine patch in Portuguese and ask about alternate-side-of-the-street parking in Zulu,” the mayor said.) ~The New York Times

However, as we are reliably informed by enlightened libertarians, there is no need for any of this wonderful multilingualism in New York City, that veritable cauldron of assimilation where all speak English and blend seamlessly into the tapestry of America.

Do a lot of people actually think that Bloomberg would hurt the GOP nominee in ’08?  Who are these people, and why are they holding forth on politics while on hallucinogens?  That’s not really fair to hallucinogens–not even these could make someone mistake Bloomberg for a candidate attractive to Republicans, except in the event of a GOP nominee so distasteful to his party that an independent candidate might become a tolerable replacement.  However, Bloomberg is hardly the ideal independent for disaffected Republicans, since he embodies all of Giuliani’s flaws as a social liberal and does not even have his imaginary virtues (“president of 9/11”) to fall back on.  In short, it is hard to explain why anyone would believe that Bloomberg would undermine the GOP ticket.  If anything, conspiratorially-minded Democrats have to be thinking that Bloomberg would be the GOP’s secret weapon to counteract Democratic dominance in ’08.  However, it is precisely his potential appeal to left-leaning voters that will ensure that he gets no support from them for the reasons I outlined in a previous post.  Democrats and Democrat-leaners are hungry for a President who is Not a Republican, and backing the Democratic nominee is the surest way to make that happen.  Backing Bloomberg means playing Russian roulette with the election outcome and hoping, somehow, that the billionaire either does poorly enough not to make a difference or so well that he has a realistic chance of winning the whole shooting match.  A Bloomberg candidacy has no purpose and addresses no need.  If it happens, it would be the purest of vanity presidential runs.  It isn’t going to happen.  There, I’ve said it again.  Put it down alongside my impeccable prediction that Richardson will win the Democratic nomination (an idea that truly seemed much less ridiculous when I first made it).

Marc Ambinder (via Ross) offers the obvious counterargument against this apparently prevailing conventional wisdom about Bloomberg’s largely Republican base.  If it is the prevailing view, I am very surprised.  I’m sure Ambinder is right about where Bloomberg would get his support–if he received any support–since Bloomberg was a pretty conventional Northeastern Democrat (plus a few billion dollars) until the opportunity to run New York appeared and it became useful to become a Republican.  Those were high times for the Goppers back in 2002, so becoming an elephant made sense at the time, and now it makes good sense to turn into something else.  It seems to me that Bloomberg will not run and that he is, like Gore and other non-candidates whom the media wish to draft, actually serious when he says he isn’t running.  (It is true he can literally afford to wait in one sense, but he would have no real reason to wait if he was going to do it–the true lesson of ’92 for him might well be that Perot started too late.)  In any case, whatever else he is, the man isn’t stupid, and only a stupid man–or a man with an ego the size of the moon (that would be Perot)–would waste tens of millions of his own money on a campaign doomed to failure.

That group is, of course, the Amish, and many of the same people complaining that Mexicans won’t assimilate flock to Lancaster to take pictures of women in funny hats vending sticky-sweet food and overpriced handwork [sic]. Can someone explain this in terms that don’t devolve into “But the Mexicans are brown“?

Can someone explain this in terms that don’t devolve into “But the Mexicans are brown”? ~Megan McArdle

Yes, I believe the regular paleo bus to eastern Pennsylvania leaves later this evening, and I would be on it if it weren’t for my Arabic classes this week.  In fact, the people who go to Amish country go there because they like to enjoy the quaintness of traditional, pietistic German communities without having to put up with the inconveniences of living in traditional, pietistic German communities.  For their part, the Amish have preserved an example of Old World immigrants from another era, and their example has probably helped to reinforce the mythic images of the hardworking, religious, socially conservative yeomen whom certain libertarians and conservatives believe are settling in California and Arizona in large numbers.  If anyone has a strange affection for the Amish and what they represent, it would almost certainly have to be those who see few, if any, problems with mass immigration. 

Of course, Indian reservations are an alternative example of people living apart from the rest of the country and maintaining a traditional culture, but even more than the Amish–who actually have their own share of some modern social ills–they also have significant social problems with alcoholism and drug abuse, considerable poverty and dependency on government.  (Admittedly, the Amish do lack casinos.)  However, fashionable tourists buy pottery on these reservations and eat fry bread on the sides of New Mexican state highways, so I guess that means these problems are all figments of racist imagination.  I suppose if you have been invited into a kiva at some point, as I have, you should simply stop complaining about immigration and accept the wonders of the American “fruit salad.”   

It occurs to me that someone who thinks the Amish represent a powerful counterexample to the mass immigration and considerable non-assimilation of millions of people from the neighbouring country must be having everyone on, but as I look at it again I see that Ms. McArdle is quite serious.  Very well, then.  I’ll give her question a shot.

There are at least four factors that drive the concern  about immigration, and particularly about modern Mexican and Latin American immigration.  The first is geography: the proximity of the country of origin for the vast majority of the current wave of immigrants is much greater than it was/is for groups from countries on the opposite sides of the oceans, which weakens the incentives for full assimilation (this is particularly true of those who continue to participate in Mexican elections), and the concentration of a large proportion of these immigrants in one region, which tends to make anything resembling assimilation to the culture of the rest of the country much less likely.  Granting that the children of these immigrants may acquire English language proficiency, this does not guarantee any depth of assimilation to what Huntington would call the common core culture.  There are lots of people in this country who do not accept that there is or ever has been such a culture, so they may find this idea mystifying, but it has existed and it is on account of the non-assimilation of these immigrants to it that many Americans are quite agitated.  Further, the ideas of our political and media classes about what assimilation means have changed, and whether it is because of multiculti preciousness or “proposition nation” ideology or both the old efforts to actively Americanise immigrants have weakened considerably.  The only way that the “melting pot” idea makes any sense is if there is sufficient heat and pressure, so to speak, to actually dissolve the constituent elements into the present mixture.  Without those things, full assimilation will not take place to the ultimate detriment of our national political life. 

The second factor is political culture: like virtually all immigrant groups, Mexican and Latin American immigrants are coming from a political culture that has extremely low institutional trust combined with an activist state and traditions of demagogic and authoritarian populism, and it is extremely likely that the immigrants who come to America will often have supported the leftmost politics in their home countries.  The problem here is that even if there is some real degree of assimilation and participation in the political process, the vast influx of such voters into the system will drive our politics in an even more statist, unfree, anti-constitutionalist direction (just as, historically, most every major wave of immigration has helped to do).  This is the objection that should be most significant for libertarians, but it never seems to bother a lot of them.

The third factor is social: along with all the workers doing the jobs that supposedly no one here wants to do (it is true that no one, not even the immigrants, really wants to do them for slave wages, for what it’s worth) come a certain number of criminals, an increase in the numbers of people living in relative poverty and many unstable or disintegrating families that, in turn, raise up (or rather fail to raise) a new generation that is more prone to all of the costly, destructive behaviours that impose a number of costs on the rest of the society through crime, dependency, etc.  In addition to importing the political pathologies of other countries, this situation brings with it social pathologies of its own. 

The fourth factor is more directly fiscal and economic.  That is, the demand placed on state services by immigrant populations–and here we are speaking more specifically about illegal immigrants–and the downward pressure that the influx of new labourers has on wages combine to make the voters who pay for those services and hold wage-earning jobs rather annoyed.  This seems to be the point that everyone understands or can at least acknowledge to be a reason why opponents of mass immigration are so opposed. 

Finally, it might be worth noting that Ms. McArdle’s question seems to take for granted that there is absolutely no qualitative difference between, say, the Russian programmer or the Indian engineer who comes here and the poorly educated or possibly even illiterate Mexican labourer from Michoacan.  The only reason why restrictionists would object to Mexican immigration, as Ms. McArdle tells it, is that it keeps coming back to their race, but this assumes that all restrictionists who are extremely concerned about mass Mexican immigration are similarly strongly opposed to non-white immigration as such.  If that were so (it isn’t), it would need to be demonstrated.  Naturally, this is the reason for the recourse to the Amish example, since it seems to me that pro-immigration advocates, stuck as they may be in the 18th or 19th century (because of their apparent conviction that our country is some sort of vast, empty territory in need of more people), are nonetheless convinced that their opponents are deeply reactionary and might be sympathetic to more immigration if it promised the creation of people living as if it were still the 17th century.  The idea that you might even want immigration policy that brings in the most productive, well-educated immigrants who contribute to the economy and society in a more substantial way than menial labour in the current generation (rather than waiting for some promised payoff 30 or 60 years hence) seems to be quite alien.

That brings us to another factor, that of education, and it may be the most significant factor of them all in a certain sense.  For immigrants and the children of immigrants to be competitive in this society, and for them not to get trapped in an underclass, it is imperative that they either have or are able to acquire quickly education comparable to that of their native peers.  Bringing in large numbers of poorly educated people is likely to ensure that their descendants remain fairly far behind for multiple generations.  Combined with the potential for cultural ghettoisation, this could easily create the kind of disaffected, unassimilated underclass that has created serious problems in places such as France and Britain. 

These are all real concerns grounded in observable facts, and we can go round and round with differing interpretations of which evidence is significant and which isn’t, but the habit of writing off the debate as inherently absurd because it must be driven by racial animus is an extremely bad one and one that hardly encourages a willingness among restrictionists to take pro-immigration voices seriously.  If there is more to the pro-immigration position than moral posturing, hand waving, accusations of racism, weak comparisons and extremely selective historical memory, I have yet to see it.

From a Reason magazine perspective, it seems to me that a Bloomberg Administration is likely to be substantially more libertarian than either a Democratic or a Republican one would be. Bloomberg, however, is specifically identified with a brand of trivial nanny-stating — indoor smoking ban, trans fat ban — that seems to be to aggravate libertarians in a manner that’s out of proportion to the actual significance of the policy issues. ~Matt Yglesias

Don’t underestimate the power of libertarian pettiness.  These are the sorts of people who found Rick Santorum deeply offensive not because he was one of the most ridiculous warmongers in America, but because he actually took sexual morality seriously and spoke publicly about these things.  Nothing generates so much spontaneous, incandescent libertarian anger as someone decrying licentiousness.  War may irritate them, intrusive government may offend them, and economic regulation may worry them, but when someone questions their idea of what constitutes personal liberty all bets are off.

I can’t say that I have delved deeply into the policy preferences of Bloomberg (you can only keep track of so many bad non-candidate candidates at a time), but it occurs to me that aside from their common love of importing poor labourers Bloomberg and libertarians would have very little in common.  I suppose his social liberalism would match up well with libertarian indifference to the usual social issues, but my impression is that he is about as libertarian as Giuliani but not as fond of tax cuts.  Of course, if Ryan Sager can hallucinate and see libertarianism in Giuliani, anything’s possible.

So Bloomberg has declared independence from the GOP and changed his registration.  Let’s assume that this means that he will run for President instead of what it probably really is (a desire to detach himself from a radioactive label that can only be damaging to his continued tenure in NYC).  In that case, New Yorkers will get very excited about the prospect of having a presidential election version of a subway series.  As with the actual subway series, the rest of the country groans at the thought of three New Yorkers running for President (Clinton is not really much more of a New Yorker than I am, but technically she is one).  It is at times like this when New Yorkers are reminded that, as a general rule, the rest of us don’t like them very much and wish they would stop bothering us. 

Fortunately, I don’t think this Five Boroughs three-way will happen.  I will even say that neither major party will nominate a New Yorker for President.  More than that, I will go so far as to say that I don’t think a Bloomberg ticket would get many votes at all, and certainly not enough to be competitive.  What, after all, is the rationale for the man’s candidacy?  Is it “I have to spend my money faster!”?  Could it be, “We cannot allow that right-winger Obama in the Oval Office”?  Honestly, I don’t see where Bloomberg gets real support from voters.  He would appeal mainly to cultural liberals and moderate Republicans, most of whom are already going to be leaning towards the Democratic candidate in a big Democratic year.  Their great fear is that supporting a third party candidate from the center-left or left could “Naderise” the ’08 election and ensure a GOP victory, putting a Fred Thompson or Romney at the helm.  That’s a sobering thought for all of us.  A Giuliani nomination might actually help Bloomberg by making the GOP’s nominee so loathsome to its core constituencies and everyone else that they would almost have no choice but to throw their support behind the independent, but Giuliani will not be the nominee.  The lesson is this: New York and New Yorkers are not nearly as relevant or as interesting as the folks there would like to believe.