Did the neocons expect that tribalism would make an Iraqi democracy function more smoothly?  Mickey Kaus proposes this idea (around minute 46).  He correctly observes that tribes can have relatively stabilising effects, and the promotion and politicisation of identities beyond the tribal will tend to break down the mechanisms of control that tribal leaders have.  However, I am fairly confident that virtually all neocons, if not all of them to a man, who were promoting democratisation in Iraq not only were not counting on tribal loyalties to help, they were positively certain that those loyalties, like ethnic, sectarian and other loyalties, were irrelevant once the people got a taste of Freedom.  Krauthammer’s old dismissive line about the importance of these things sums it up best:

This kind of contempt for the political and spiritual dignity of people who live in different circumstances never goes away. It simply gets applied serially to different sets of patronized foreigners. Today we are assured with confidence that Arabs, consumed by tribe or religion or whatever, don’t really care about freedom either. 

Not only was there no sense in which tribal or religious ties might have been both normal and useful, but they were regarded by neocons as antithetical to everything that was being attempted with respect to democratisation.  As I noted at the time:

Krauthammer sneers at those who perceive in other nations prior loyalties to “tribe or religion or whatever” because he regards people who make those loyalties a priority as regressive and rather frightening, and his global revolutionary faith, if we can call it that, cannot admit that anyone would actually prefer such atavistic attachments to the wonders of “freedom,” which to them is precisely ‘emancipation’ (always a favourite word of levelers, destroyers and other wreckers of human happiness) from all those ties and obligations that sane, rooted people take for granted and respect for the natural, decent affinities that they are.

Neocon “discoveries” of the importance of culture and the fissures of tribal society have been fairly late in coming.  The reason why neocons have consistently been wrong about democratisation in traditional societies is that they do not understand that the rules are different in those societies.  The universal, autonomous individual for whom their ideology is crafted does not exist in these societies.  Like one of their number, Elliot Abrams, neocons believe  that, in the words of Efraim Halevy, “you can promote a certain ideology anywhere and everywhere around the world if you think it’s the right ideology. And you really don’t have to know very much about the basic facts in the region that you’re dealing with, because you have to tailor the region to your ideology.”  Neocons didn’t worry about the tribes in Iraq and certainly didn’t incorporate them as part of the plan, to the extent that there was a plan beyond, “It worked in WWII, so it has to work now.”  It almost seems sometimes as if these social realities are largely unknown to them.

This is probably of interest only to other bloggers, but the old Kaus-Klein feud resumes here around minute 40:00.  Kaus defends the habit of liberals critiquing liberals as stemming from old-time left-wing principles, which means that he’s admitting that the old generation of New Left folks were engaged in their version of the netroots’ rebellion against their perceived enemies among the neoliberals and centrists.  What Vietnam hawks were to them, Iraq hawks are to the netroots, which I suppose is obvious enough.  It’s still a slightly unusual thing for Kaus to say, since it would seem to suggest that the neoliberals were once upon a time just a bunch of young punks toeing the Port Huron party line cluelessly.

In other circumstances I could see myself defending the rule of law. ~Harvey Mansfield

Those other circumstances would probably include: when the rule of law is threatened by anything other than the executive branch, when we are not in “time of war,” when we have a Democratic (or any other non-Republican) President.

Instead of reading the completely uninformative article on the French presidential debate in the Times (a lot of political journalism is pretty uninformative, but this one wins a prize), according to which the two contenders were even more vapid than the Republicans will be in California tonight, why not just read the transcript (via Debatable Land)?

Update: The initial moments of the debate clearly seem to have favoured Sarkozy.  Instead of answering directly the question posed to her, Royal went on the offensive, rattling off accusations against the government and her challenger, which provided Sarkozy an opportunity to come in and rebut, it seems fairly effectively, each of her points.  At the same time, he was able to maintain his somewhat overdone, but probably popular stance of attempting to unite the political spectrum behind a campaign for competence and common sense in government.  Just reading the first exchanges, I get the sense that this is actually a policy debate and not the pathetic excuse for presidential debates that we have. 

Royal then set up Sarkozy to make one of his expected law and order appeals, in this case making a promise to punish recidivism harshly and then proposed to try 16-year old criminals as adults.  Royal based her initial pitch around combating crime and inequality, and then proceeds to give Sarko the opportunity to dominate on the crime question from the very beginning.  Obviously, the effect on television may be very different, but Sarkozy comes off as doing very well against the rather excitable Sego. 

Second Update: The section on Turkey was quite interesting.  Sarko responds to accusations that he is being irresponsible and damaging relations with Turkey:

While it is a secular country, it is in Asia Minor.  I  will not explain to French schoolchildren that the borders of Europe are with Iraq and Syria….I don’t think that the stability of the world will be strengthened by killing Europe [bold mine-DL]….I prefer to say to the Turks, you will be associated with Europe, which will have a common market with you, but you will not become members of the Union for a very simple reason: because you are in Asia Minor.  

Nevertheless, he [Tom Cole] is sanguine regarding 2008: “The positioning is good for us” because “we don’t have to conquer new territory, we have to reclaim old territory.” ~George Will

Give the man credit for staying on message.  By this sort of thinking, the Macedonians, Greeks and Mongolians are on the verge of some of the greatest geopolitical comebacks in world history.  They don’t have to conquer new territory–they just need to reclaim their old provinces!  It is all terribly misleading.  It is possible for a declining stock to be an excellent buying opportunity.  It is also possible for that stock to be Enron, especially when the people in charge of the company deceive their shareholders and mismanage the company for their own temporary benefit.  From the way Rep. Cole is telling it, the Byzantines must have been in good shape after Yarmuk, because all they had to do was “just” recover lost territory.  Oh, well, if that’s all, why worry? 

Well, the worry is that, like any force after a big defeat, the Republicans are having trouble coming up with the recruits needed to fight another day.  Confidence in the commanders, so to speak, has been shattered, and precious resources have been depleted during the last, ill-starred contest.  The Three ‘Mo’s (momentum, morale and money) are all on the other side.  As Clausewitz might have said if he were a political blogger, “Voter identification is to fundraising as three to one.”  And the Republicans are also losing the fundraising race, which used to be their strong suit.

Plus, they are apparently not very good at analysing current electoral politics:

Cole thinks that Democrats, who he says have more litmus tests for their presidential candidates than Republicans do [bold mine-DL], are so convinced that they are going to win the White House, they are not resisting what they enjoy surrendering to — the tug from the party’s left.

He’s kidding, right?  More litmus tests?  Obama just gave one of the most interventionist speeches of any presidential candidate ever and the progressives have made a tiny bit of noise about it.  He has supported cap-and-trade, when the left wants something much more bold.  There have been no obvious consequences from the left for Obama taking the centrist hawk ball and running with it, and indeed I would surprised if we see any major attack against Obama from the left.  I think he believes he can win them over with his biography and charisma and his heavy-handed comparisons of himself with RFK, and he just may.  By contrast, just consider how much grief Edwards took (and not from Mike Gravel) for saying “all options are on the table” with respect to Iran, and then consider how easy Obama has had it after giving a speech praised by both Robert Kagan and Marty Peretz, a bipartisan dynamic duo of hideous foreign policy ‘thinking’.    With Obama’s speech, Edwards has become the de facto less obnoxiouly interventionist progressive on foreign policy that Obama was pretending to be earlier.  (Except for Kucinich and Gravel, there are no non-interventionists in the race on the Democratic side.) 

I suppose the argument would be that Iraq is the litmus test for Democratic candidates, and all have been forced to toe a line for phased withdrawal, timetables, etc.  Of course, what is remarkable in all of this is that the “litmus test” position that Clinton has supposedly been “compelled” to take is basically the centrist hawk position on Iraq that Obama has felt compelled to embrace to avoid appearing too antiwar.  No sense jeopardising his lifelong ambition to be President over something so trivial as real opposition to a war. 

Bruce Bartlett’s paeans to her courage notwithstanding, Clinton has not apologised for her Iraq war vote because she a) doesn’t think she needs to apologise and b) knows that she will not pay a particularly heavy price for not doing so.  This is because the litmus test on Iraq is very easy to pass: you have to make clear, in no uncertain terms, that as President you will end the war.  The thinking seems to be that what the candidate says or does before then is merely the means to that end.  It would appear that antiwar progressives may be willing to empower someone who has a foreign policy not substantially different from Bush’s simply to get a Democrat in office to make some attempt at concluding the war in Iraq.  Anyway, it is profoundly mistaken to think that the Democrats are in worse shape because of their confidence.  As a party they are much more united around their eventual nominee, whoever it may be, and their combination of confidence in victory and hunger for winning the White House are eerily similar to Republican indifference to Bush’s deviations from traditional conservatism after eight years of Clinton.  The left’s leverage in ’08 will be less than it was in the midterms, especially if an Obama or Edwards gets the nod.  Republicans keep planning their campaigns with the assumption that the Democrats will collapse in a fit of disunity and/or lunacy, but this didn’t happen last year and it isn’t going to happen next year.  The Republicans need to develop an actual strategy for winning in their own right.  From what I saw in Tom Cole’s remarks, they don’t have the first clue. 

Instead of being horrified that IL-06 in DuPage County, where Henry Hyde used to routinely pull 60% of the vote or more until 2004, almost fell to a no-name Iraq war veteran Democratic challenger, Mr. Cole believes the closeness of the race in 2006 works to Republican advantage!  The truth is that DuPage County isn’t the Republican stronghold it once was–the Dems got 44% in 2004 and 48% in 2006.  Obviously, if they keep making steady gains like that in what was once a suburban bastion of Republicanism, you can forget about retaking the House in the next decade.  

On the separate note, consider the beginning of Will’s column:

Tom Cole earned a PhD in British history from the University of Oklahoma, intending to become a college professor, but he came to his senses and to a zest for politics [bold mine-DL], and now, in just his third term in the House of Representatives, he is chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

While it does hold out hope for all Ph.D. students everywhere that they, too, might one day enter politics and become campaign coordinators in doomed, lost causes, consider the attitude Will’s shot at academia represents.  If anyone wants an explanation for why the academy is dominated by the left and why the youngest cohort of voters has gone even more overwhelmingly for the Democrats than usual, you need look no further than precisely this sort of professional cop-out, giving up on educating the next generation for the sake of the easy, cheap and ephemeral victories of politics.  Every conservative out there complains about the declining standards of education, the ruin of the academy, the politicisation of the classroom and on and on, but what happens when it comes time to step up and do some of the educating themselves?  They go to law school to get a “useful” degree, or go into politics or some other field where the “prospects” for the future are better, and then wonder how the media, academia, the arts and cinema have all been taken over by people who loathe everything they believe.  

When I am occasionally tempted by the political road (however ludicrously impractical such a road would be), I am often reminded of that quote from Max: “What would you rather do: change how people see or how they pay their taxes?”  The poverty of so much of conservatism today is a result of way too many otherwise decent and sane people opting for the latter goal rather than the former.  Nowadays, it seems that they can’t even do that part very well.  Perhaps it would be better if more conservatives turned to teaching, cultivating and creating things rather than running uninspired electoral campaigns.

He said that what “irritates many people in the world is the condescending, patronizing attitude of America, that we have all the answers and everyone should do what we want them to.” ~Contra Costa Times

Personally, I have no real problem with Romney’s quote, except that it is absolutely and completely antithetical to everything else he has ever said about foreign policy and foreign relations.  His numerous public statements on Iran have been filled with precisely this kind of presumption and the insistence that Iran do what we say.  One of the planks of his campaign is to jeer at and deride France.  Now he suddenly worries about Americans sounding patronising and condescending?  Does the man ever just tell the truth?  He should give it a try–he might find it liberating.

If I have bolstered Yglesias’s reputation in a way that advances his career, I’m glad to have helped. I think he’s the best blogger there is and entirely deserving of the breathtaking success he has enjoyed. But, given his astonishing success–a large base of readers, a job with The Atlantic, a book contract, all before his 26th birthday–it is odd that Yglesias believes the incentive structure of political journalism punishes his ideology. How much higher does he think he should have risen? ~Jonathan Chait

Saniora criticized the Israeli report for failing to address the destruction, estimated at more than $5 billion, inflicted on Lebanon by the IAF and naval bombardment as well as the ground incursion during the war.

The report on the “unjust war… did not make a single mention of the massive material, human losses and destruction Israel inflicted on Lebanon,” Saniora said. ~The Jerusalem Post

Obama gave a speech last week to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. It was an exhilarating speech to me. ~Marty Peretz

Worst of all, Peretz dubs Obama a “maverick, a real maverick.”  Other great mavericks of our time include McCain and Lieberman.  Obama has joined a select and very horrifying group of people.

This is a perfectly good question, though one to which I have only conventional wisdom to offer. Basically it’s this: Thompson is a guy whose political record in the Senate was a big zero; whose only real claim to fame is being a character actor on TV and in films; who has done nothing to distinguish himself this year except deliver a few vaguely Reaganesque pastiches in a nice baritone; who is apparently not Christian enough for James Dobson’s taste; who has no known issues that he really cares deeply about; and whose most famous quality is his laziness. ~Kevin Drum

What Brooks sees as a the base’s inability to accept change is often, in reality, a burning desire for change. He mocks the clamor for Fred Thompson to run as an “Authentic Conservative” but he fails to see, or at least credit, the degree to which the call for “Authentic Conservatism” is a rebuke of Bush. ~Jonah Goldberg

In light of continued Thompson fever (sounds a bit like swamp fever, doesn’t it?), it may be time to revisit the much-discussed David Brooks piece and the flurry of chatter it has generated.  One interesting response came from Daniel Finkelstein, who recounted an episode from the bad old days of the Major Government:

Early in 1995 my friend Jim Pinkerton, formerly the research point man for Republican strategist Lee Atwater, visited London at my invitation. I took him round to meet some of my friends in the Cabinet and in senior Downing Street roles. And when the meetings were done with we sat down to discuss Conservative prospects.

What would you do if you lost, he asked me. I rattled off a list of big changes that would need to be made. And will you lose, Jim inquired. Oh yes, I answered, no doubt about it. Then what are you waiting for, he replied.

Indeed–what are we waiting for?  Apparently, many people are waiting for Fred Thompson to lead them to the promised land.

It is possible that people saying they support Thompson are yearning for an “authentic conservative” and think that they have found him in Fred Thompson.  The question still has to be: why Fred Thompson?  After digging into his record even a little, it is clear that there is enough of the taint of McCain about him (plus his vote to acquit Clinton) that whatever makes McCain unpalatable to core voters ought to apply to Thompson as well.  If there were a real longing in the movement and party to return to the imaginary days of Reaganite purity, someone like Tom Tancredo, Ron Paul or Duncan Hunter would be a potential contender among the Republican presidential candidates in at least one of the primary states by now.  Sad to say, they are not. 

By just about anyone’s standards, it is fair to say that the deviants and heterodox rule the roost in the primary contest so far.  The activist base claims dissatisfaction with the field of candidates, but somebody is behind all these poll results that have been showing Giuliani, McCain and Romney as the “viable” candidates, while the relatively more “pure” no-hopers languish in obscurity (Brownback, the only self-identified “compassionate conservative,” also lags, but may still prove competitive in early contests).  The major conservative opinion journals and websites often seem obsessed with defining the field to the Terrible Trio, which reinforces the certainty that these are the only candidates that will gain any momentum with the audiences of these journals and websites.  It is true that, before his unfortunate “Jews and finance” gaffe, Tommy Thompson (a reformist, “compassionate conservative” before it was a nationwide bad idea) was gaining traction in Iowa.  In any case, if conservatives were yearning for change away from the last several years of “compassionate conservative” nonsense, they would not rushing into the ever-loving embrace of a social liberal, a frequent opponent of tax reduction and the governor that signed universal health care into law in his state.  The boomlet for Fred Thompson once again rewards someone who is no more and no less conservative than McCain and whose deviations are basically the same as McCain’s.  While McCain’s deviancy has been greatly exaggerated–by McCain as well as by his enemies–he has a poor reputation with core conservatives for good reasons, and those reasons ought to apply with equal force to Thompson.  If contrarianism from a Senator in a reliably Republican state really is unforgivable, Thompson stands convicted of the same error as McCain. 

If Brooks’ column was a roundabout defense of the legacy of “compassionate conservatism,” as Goldberg at least implies, he couldn’t be terribly unhappy with the current state of play.  Moving away from domestic policy for a moment, Brooks can hardly be disappointed when the two would-be “saviours” are Thompson and Gingrich, who are equally strident about an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy.  These five candidates seem to be more generally on the Brooksian side of things than they are on the side of supposed “George Allen” orthodoxy.  If the search for the “authentic conservative” has yielded Thompson as the answer, the seekers cannot be all that picky. 

The activist leadership may be saying all sorts of disgruntled things about the need to adhere to the old orthodoxy, such as it is, but it would appear that no one is listening to them at this stage.  It seems to me that the invocation of a “return to Reagan” is a kind of pose or maybe the sounding of a distress signal.  When a movement has exhausted itself and hit hard times, there is usually a call to go ad fontes where all can drink deeply from the restorative wells of living water, but in most cases the movement members never make it back to the sources and settle for wildly gesticulating in the direction of where they think those wells are supposed to be.  It is important that the Reagan Era be mystified and mythologised as much as possible, so that it is made into an Eden from which conservatives were expelled.  It is imperative that the flaws and compromises of that era be whitewashed as much as possible, so that there is some model on which conservatives can now model themselves.  However, if returning to the glories of the Reagan Era was the precondition of restoration for conservatism and the GOP every conservative should theoretically rally behind the pro-amnesty Giuliani or McCain, since they offer a way to relive the wonders of 1986. 

I think an important part of Brooks’ argument is that it would be very different if conservatives were responding to the dire political situation by opting for a return to old principles because they had seriously thought about how a revamped, purified conservatism stripped of Bushist deviationism would best defend the things they want to conserve.  It seems to me that Brooks’ criticism is aimed at an instinctive lurching back towards whatever existed before regardless of its usefulness, applicability or timeliness.  This lurching is done not so much because the conservatives grasping for it have any strong faith in it or even an understanding of why it will remedy the ills they face, but because they are looking for something comfortable and familiar after the disillusionment and defeat of the last few years. 

What is the principled conservative response to mass immigration?  Many of the declared candidates are more or less restrictionist because they assume that much of the activist base is restrictionist, but two of the leading three are openly pro-amnesty in one form or another, and this has apparently not caused any great weakening of those two.  The point here is that many activists may believe and be right in believing that the right conservative position is a restrictionist one, but this is one of those issues on which embrace of amnesty does not seem to be the political poison the polls suggest that it should be.  The yearning for an “orthodoxy” may simply not be present in many of the voters. 

Perhaps this is because there is no widespread interest in the old “orthodoxy” or the recent Bushist deviation from it.  Perhaps the reason for the enduring enthusiasm for such preposterous candidates as Giuliani and Thompson is a desire for something different from both of these, which Giuliani and Thompson in all their vagueness seem to offer.  Perhaps since most responding to these polls probably don’t know much of anything about either man, people are investing these blank slates with their desire for something else, a third option between an instinctive return to a mythologised past and a continuation of the disastrous present.   

Part of the problem with the movement today, at least as far as policy debates are concerned, is that there seems to be a good deal of agreement that enforcement and border security are important, but the basic continued flow of cheap labour in some form is not going to be interrupted.  This might seem to be a compromise between restrictionist and business conservatives, but it strikes me rather as an inability to set priorities (or, more accurately, a refusal of restrictionists to challenge and question the priorities of business conservatives).  As a result, immigration policy, which should be an obvious winning issue for the right, is allowed to drift rudderless year after year while prominent GOP leaders (and not a few conservative pundits) actively work against the interests of large segments of the coalition.  If restrictionism is the right answer on mass immigration, does it take a higher priority than cheap labour, free trade and globalisation?  I think it does, and I think if cast in the right way and put forward by a competent candidate it could change the nature of the political game in this country for a generation. 

It is these sorts of policies, together with other populist themes related to outsourcing and economic anxiety and insecurity, that make up the ground where domestic political battles are going to be waged in coming years.  A conservative who can articulate the appropriate balance of economic nationalism, defense of the interests of American labour, defense of borders, cultural conservatism and a rhetoric of social solidarity that focuses on local community organisations and municipalities rather than advancing another confounded centralist plan can advance a view that is at once populist and also reasonably decentralist and rightist.  It would be something like an American Christian Democracy, but where Christianity actually informs and elevates policy rather than simply serves as a rallying cry and where the Democracy would be a lot more like the Democracy of Jefferson and Jackson and a lot less like that of Konrad Adenauer.  Its federalism would involve concrete devolution of powers and would not simply be a convenient way out of embarrassing social issue controversies, which is mostly what it has become these days.  This populism would pay tribute to the “retroculture,” yes (and draw essential elements from the agenda outlined in the TAC essay about it), and would argue for a consistent culture of life and human dignity that does not wink at torture or nod at bombing civilians or smile knowingly at the killing of the unborn, and it would also seek to work on behalf of both workers and professionals ill-served by the regime of multinational corporations and globalist politicians.           

If I understand him correctly, Brooks objects to a reflexive return to old models that seems to show no awareness that it is not 1984 or 1988.  It is not necessarily the return to principles that is the problem, nor is it necessarily the principles to which people say they wish to return that are lacking, but it is the lack of imagination in addressing those principles to the present political moment that grates.  There are possibilities for a conservatism that is true to its fundamentals and flexible in its policy approaches, but it requires conservatives to snap out of their sleepwalking and face up to what it is that the public is demanding, what it needs and how conservatives can propose to provide remedies.