The year 2008 will witness Hillary and her fellow opportunistic 1960s student protesters known as the Coat and Tie Radicals campaigning against the young conservatives who in the late 1960s were dismissed as negligible but a decade later manned the Reagan Revolution. It is going to be an epochal match-up and a very bitter one.

Though the generation that fought World War II is called the “Greatest Generation,” the 1960s generation is the most momentous political generation of the 20th century. Now its left and right are squaring off for one last battle to claim title to their generation. Whoever triumphs, it will be as memorable a victory as Franklin Roosevelt’s defeat of President Herbert Hoover or as Ronald Reagan’s victory over President Jimmy Carter. What will make it even more momentous is that Hillary now represents the political heritage of liberalism that Roosevelt began. Though in the Clintons’ hands that liberalism has been disfigured, Hillary embodies an Old Order that is desperate for victory. The looming battle between the two wings of the 1960s generation — one championing the Roosevelt heritage, the Old Order, the other championing the Reagan heritage, a New Order — explains much of the bitterness of contemporary politics. ~R. Emmett Tyrrell

Unless, of course, HRC is not the nominee on the Democratic side, which is not just plausible but an increasingly likely outcome.  It is also unlikely to be the epochal, era-shaping electoral event that Mr. Tyrrell is making it out to be.  2008 is structurally very much like the 1920 or 1976 elections: coming off a war and two consecutive terms of the same party in the White House, the opposition party enters into a period of more or less brief control before the next real realignment takes place.  If 1932, 1968 and 1980 represent the major realignments of American politics in the last century, 2008 will actually wind up being one of those relatively uninteresting preceding election cycles that does not actually represent an epoch-ending moment.  2008 is actually more likely to be like 1976 in terms of the closeness of the race (there will probably be no 1920-like 60-34% victories for either side), and the results of a likely Democratic victory in 2008 may be as short-lived as was the Age of Carter.  In any case, 2008 will not be quite the Boomer generational battle royale described by Tyrrell, but I can understand why an inveterate Clinton foe who is writing about Bubba would want to cast the election as a contest between Hillary Clinton and the GOP as the last throwdown of the old politics of the Boomers.  

By the way, this may be another factor behind Obama’s rise as an alternative to HRC: in his age, if not in his actual policy views, he does represent a change from the preoccupations of the Boomers, which is something that all Americans under 45 would very much like to get away from.  We actually are tired of refighting the battles of the 1960s and 1970s, since many of us were not even born then, and we are definitely tired of having to speak about foreign policy with Vietnam constantly looming over our heads.  To the extent that 2008 represents one of the last gasps of this old argument, it does not point to the future but represents the beginning of the end of the brief Boomer ascendancy that began in 1992. 

The weariness of the younger generations with this dated bickering may be why some young conservative and progressive bloggers are impatient with the worn-out dogmas held over from the ’70s and ’80s in both parties, since these ideas, if they were ever useful, stopped having much relevance in about 1991.  It has taken many people of our parents’ generation the last fifteen years to figure out that the world cannot be understod through the respective lenses of bankrupt neoliberalism and neoconservatism, while some of us growing up in the midst of this tired rehashing of old points of dispute have instinctively moved away from the ideologies that seem suited, if they were ever suited to anything, to the end of the Cold War.  Both have failed primarily in the failure to recognise that the Cold War did, in fact, end and that this would have implications for both foreign and domestic policy.  The insane, bipartisan obsession with demonstrating hostility and opposition to Russia is one of the more destructive legacies of this inability to adapt.  The inability to confront jihadis in a way that faces up to the explicitly religious and specifically Islamic nature of the threat and the constant recourse to inaccurate and confused labels of generic terrorism and fascism both reflect how useless the old doctrines are for combating the threats of the present.

Neoconservatives in particular have been desperate to pretend that some kind of Cold War redux is always in the offing (first China, then Russia, then the Islamic world, then Russia again) and that we are now fighting Islamofascism, because their rather strange and warped Munichocentric foreign policy views only make any sense in the context of ideologically charged conflicts with totalitarian revolutionary world powers.  (They didn’t make that much sense even in that context, but at least they didn’t seem entirely self-evidently absurd.)  In a world where these powers do not exist or where religion, and not secular ideology, drives conflict, they have no answers because they don’t even understand what the questions are.  Uninterested in history, confused about the nature of Western identity and largely disconnected from the religious heritage of their own civilisation, they have neither the intellectual resources, nor the right understanding of who we are and what we are fighting to defend, nor the appropriate frame of reference for grappling with the threat from jihadis.  In their visceral opposition to economic populism of any kind and their embrace of free trade agreements, neoliberals seem to me to have been similarly myopic on the domestic front (however I must plead a certain degree of uncertainty about just who can reliably be called a neoliberal).  The Popperian moment has passed, and the Popperians of left and right can now offer nothing but dreary slogans.  May 2008 be the last year we must endure these derelicts.

He [Brownback] praised the dozen immigrants in the crowd at Oracle’s Nashua office, where more than a third of the engineers come from China, India and other countries.

“You make us strong,” he said. “You make us great. This is a nation of immigrants. . . . Thank you for helping us build a new box, a new mousetrap, for taking this nation to the world.” ~Concord Monitor

A new box?  Are there really that many ways to build a box?  Does Brownback think that the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants from Latin America are busily building “new mousetraps”?  It’s stupid, effusively sentimental episodes like this that make conservatives want to say zaijian and aujo to Samnesty.

Catching up with some responses to my pre-conference blogging, I noticed Philip Klein’s thorough response to my blast against his proposed limited government/activist foreign policy fusionism and Jim Antle’s comments on the same topic.  I appreciate Mr. Klein taking the time to give a more elaborated answer to my criticisms.  I do understand the haste with which blog posts are written (something that I think some non-blogging readers tend to forget when they accuse us of making unqualified or exaggerated statements), so I’m glad to revisit the question at some greater length.

Mr. Klein allows that calling this fusionism the “most practical” was probably too strong.  I think we all do agree that providing for the common defense is one of the few legitimate functions of the federal government.  Clearly, we will still disagree sharply about what falls under the rubric of national defense.  Jim has staked out the middle ground on this and he concludes thus:

This observation doesn’t solve all the problems of a neocon/libertarian fusionism. After all, there can still be disagreements about what constitutes a just national defense or vital national interest. Wars grow government, both in terms of foreign entaglements and domestic functions. But a conservatism based on performing government’s vital functions while shedding illegitimate or unsustainable commitments seems a lot more prudent — and thus more conservative — than one that fuses compassion at home with activism abroad.  

Jim is certainly right that this vision is more prudent than Brownbackian moral interventionism and Romneyesque rhetorical overkill.  Indeed, Jim has hit on the nub of the problem: do proponents of an activist foreign policy actually want to start shedding illegitimate and unsustainable commitments (e.g., deployments to Germany, Korea, the continuation and expansion of NATO, bases scattered around the globe, outdated Cold War-era defense treaties), or do they want to increase the number of commitments beyond what we already have?  If the former, a common approach of shrinking the size and scope of the government could be applied to domestic and foreign policy.  If the latter, any alliance between limited government conservatives and these activist foreign policy types would be doomed before it began.   

For my part, I was probably a little too ready to dismiss this fusionism.  This is not just because I am intensely opposed to interventionism, but also because I tend to have an allergy to all kinds of fusionism.  Let me explain why the concept irritates me so much.  In one of its latest iteration, fusionism has been associated with Joseph Bottum’s “new fusionism” of moralistic interventionism combined with social conservatism at home, which is an alliance that has inevitably privileged the interests of the interventionists and has expended little or no effort on social conservative concerns.  As I have somewhat harshly noted, such “new fusionism” in practice seems to mean that conservatives will argue that pro-lifers should back Giuliani because he will make sure that the government kills people in other countries (and, yes, presumably prevent people from other countries from killing Americans here at home).  This strikes me as a rather unsatisfactory arrangement.  A limited government/interventionist deal seems likely to produce similar unsatisfactory compromises.  I don’t insist on some absolute purism that avoids all political compromise, but the compromise has to actually serve the goals of both parties making the deal, and I simply don’t see this happening in the case of Bottum’s fusionism or Mr. Klein’s proposed alliance (about which more in a moment).  The other appeal to a new fusionism has come from Ryan Sager, who has made it his personal mission in life to denigrate social and religious conservatives and blame them for the political woes of the GOP and the confusion of the modern conservative movement.  So the word fusionism automatically conjures in my mind rather insultingly lopsided and exploitative alliances. 

I think most fusionist bargains are set up in such a way as to be profoundly unequal, where one party in the alliance ends up setting the terms and priorities of the alliance such that his would-be allies end up becoming marginal players.  If this were a matter of one party being numerically vastly superior, that would be one thing, but I am very skeptical that dedicated interventionists qua interventionists are actually all that numerous in the movement.  It is my impression that interventionists are disproportionately influential relative to their small numbers, because they tend to hold prominent positions in the journals of opinion and institutions of the movement.  Because of this, they have become accustomed to proposing and have come to expect others in the movement to do the disposing and not engage in much backtalk. 

I believe we have seen similar bad bargains before, and it has not generally advanced a limited government vision or socially conservative policies.  From the traditional conservative perspective, the original so-called fusionist bargain during the Cold War didn’t accomplish many specifically traditionalist goals, but rather overwhelmingly served the interests of the “libertarians” in economic policy and those who were primarily anticommunists in a relatively activist foreign policy.  (Of course, to some degree, all conservatives were some mix of these three, but those who placed the primary emphasis on anticommunism wound up becoming the dominant voices, especially after 1981.)  The fusionist hope was that all of these goals were complementary and mutually supportive, but I am skeptical that this was ever really true for the traditionalists.  The experience of the Cold War shows us that reducing government was practically very low on the list of priorities of all Republican administrations, even those brought to power on rather more explicitly conservative platforms, and the building up of the national security state (in both temporarily necessary and sometimes undesirable ways) not only took precedence but actively worked against the impulse for smaller and more constitutional government.  From the limited government conservative perspective, the overall fusionist bargain was slightly better because of some antitax successes in the ’80s, but the priorities of the internationalist, national security state folks always seemed to involve trading off pursuing shrinking government at home in exchange for getting support for expenditures on defense and containment. 

During the ’90s, interventionists tended to be proponents of reforming the current system rather than radically shrinking the state.  When the moment for a real rollback of the state in all areas came, those most associated with interventionism were fairly uninterested in doing that.  Many of the most interventionist people had no real beef with the extent or nature of the welfare state itself, but simply wanted to make it run more efficiently.  It is not clear to me how reducing the size of government would take greater precedence in any future alliance with interventionists than it did in the past.  It may have been the case that 9/11 created a moment when shifting resources from the welfare state to the warfare state could have been attempted, but it seems to me that the overall power and size of government would not have been reduced at all (here I am voicing the criticism Mr. Klein has already anticipated) but simply shifted to another part of the government, albeit one that does at least have some constitutional warrant at its core.  This might satisfy many limited government conservatives, but I don’t think it should.  In any case, that particular moment is gone, as I think Mr. Klein and I agree. 

Without some hint of “warfare reform,” if you like, where interventionists accept the cutting out of unneccessary, wasteful or redundant commitments to countries that can defend themselves right now, I am skeptical that the public would ever accept the linking of entitlement reform or the elimination of certain entitlements to the needs of national security.  Even if the savings from closing down redundant bases and ending deployments in Europe and Asia were not comparable with savings from changes to entitlements, it would be symbolically and politically important to show that the wastefulness or excess of the “warfare state” was being trimmed at the same time.  Beyond eliminating current ongoing costs, ending these deployments or dismantling NATO or any number of other changes in how Washington runs foreign and military policy would cut down on a host of extremely costly potential future conflicts, thus setting certain limits on what future spending on the military might be.  These are the sorts of changes I doubt most interventionists would be willing to make, since they do not believe that NATO or the deployment of American soldiers in South Korea are really optional and unnecessary.  That brings us back to what I expect will be more fundamental disagreements about what commitments really are in the national interest and what the real threats to our national security are. 

Mr. Klein ends his post with this:

However, I believe that such animosity was amplified by the fact that on top of being for military intervention, neocons acquiesced to the Bush administration’s spending spree. If neocons were committed to fighting spending, I don’t think the gulf between the groups would have become as wide as it has today.

I agree that neoconservative support for “big government conservatism” aggravated the rift, but I would point out that they didn’t merely “acquiesce” in this but, especially in the case of The Weekly Standard, became leading proponents of a big government view and defended the administration’s new entitlement program as part of the new Republican politics of the future.  This wasn’t just a case of neoconservatives failing to speak up against a policy that they didn’t really support–they actively endorsed and promoted the kind of government expansion it represented, and I assume they did this because most of them are not and have never been interested in shrinking government, eliminating entitlements or returning the federal government to its constitutional limits.  It isn’t just that they don’t think it is politically possible, but it seems that most of them don’t even think that it is desirable in principle. 

There is also still the question of electoral viability, and here I am beginning to be convinced that a straight-up Club for Growth-style limited government appeal is not going to win over many supporters, at least not in the present environment.  As a matter of contemporary politics, more populism of some kind and less (or at least smarter) interventionism seem to be the winning combination, rather than less government and more interventionism.  I would love it if Americans wanted both much less government and much less interventionism, but strangely enough that position seems to win relatively little support.

Cubans in Miami are steaming mad at former Gov. Mitt Romney for shooting his mouth off in stumbling Spanish, mispronouncing names and erroneously associating a notorious Fidel Castro-spewed Communist catch phrase with freedom fighters.

Politicians in South Florida have lashed out at the former Massachusetts governor and 2008 presidential hopeful for describing the socialist saying “Patria o muerte, venceremos” as “inspiring” and for claiming the phrase was swiped from liberty-seeking Cubans by leftist admirers of Castro.
The phrase, which means “Fatherland or death, we shall overcome,” was bellowed as a political speech sign-off by the dictator for decades. ~The Boston Herald

Wow.  This has to be the most disastrous ethnic pander gaffe ever.  What’s worse is that Romney knew that Chavez and Castro use this phrase, and he went ahead and said it anyway because he thought he understood Cuban patriotism better than the Cubans.  Always a mistake. 

There are good reasons why English-speakers should campaign in English, rather than lamely attempt to show solidarity with ethnic voters by speaking in their language.  The most obvious is that the potential for misunderstanding or mispronunciation is much, much greater.  The other is that you will use phrases that seem harmless or even good to you, but which have terrible associations in the minds of the audience.  This was actually a very easily avoidable error, and Romney’s failure here shows that he is not only a foreign policy dunce (Chavistas proudly use the patria o muerte slogan for a good reason–it is now a long-standing commie revolutionary slogan and everyone paying attention would know this) but he is also an absolute political disaster waiting to happen.  Can you imagine trusting this man to represent the country to the rest of the world?  His rhetorical bumbling might well start a war somewhere.   

It does Romney no good to say that the slogan “ought” to belong to a free Cuba.  Cuban-Americans and Cubans immediately associate it with Castro and communism, because it is inextricably tied up with that regime, and they have grown to loathe what might otherwise theoretically be an expression of genuine patriotic devotion.  The point is that the phrase has always been paired with Castroism–there wasn’t a time when it used to belong to pre-1959 Cuba and was appropriated by the communists.  Romney’s take on this is rather like saying the phrase “great leap forward” or “long march” shouldn’t belong to communists, either, because the phrases might be put to better use by someone else.  It doesn’t matter whether someone else might be able to use them or should be able to use them.  These are phrases indelibly marked by their communist usage and stained with the blood of its victims.  Only the rhetorically inept and politically mindless would attempt to transform the meaning of a phrase with an audience that very likely immediately associates it with everything they hate.  For his next tricks, Romney will go to the Republican Jewish Coalition and say that allahu akbar should belong to the Jewish people, and then he can go to a group of Armenian-Americans and say that “union and progress” are words that should belong to all Armenians.

Update: Ed Morrisey demonstrates that he doesn’t understand rhetoric or Cubans any better than Mitt Romney.  The people listening to the speech knew what Romney was trying to say.  They were just appalled and deeply offended by his lame attempt to tell them that the slogan associated with their most hated enemy is actually a nifty expression of their own deepest desires.  Instead of immediately backing down and acknowledging his error, Romney wants to insist that he meant this insulting gesture (which is how it was taken) in only the most friendly way.     

No one can stop the venture capitalists’ revolution!

It’s far-fetched to believe a political consultant told him that pushing back against cloning and gay marriage as governor of Massachusetts would be the perfect Iowa-primary pander. More likely, his staff – the core of which is conservative – told him “this is important for humanity,” and he did the right thing. ~Kathryn Jean Lopez

So it’s more likely that an ambitious politician with his eyes on the White House took up an issue that is deeply unpopular in Massachusetts but vital for the Republican nomination out of a concern for humanity and not his own political future.  Really? 

In some ways, I wish I could possess the kind of bright-eyed naivete and enthusiasm that so infects Romney supporters such as Hewitt and Ms. Lopez.  It must be so much easier to trust politicians when you think that they are actually out to do good things and not con people for the sake of power.  Like all optimists, however, these folks have a faith in something that doesn’t exist and will be doubly disappointed when their idol fails them (as all idols of this world do). 

What a happy, bright, completely unrealistic world you must live in if you believe that politicians come around on highly controversial issues because of the profound moral implications involved!  It seems simply incredible to me that Romneyites actually think that Romney is a man of conviction, when everything we think we know says otherwise.  Yet I have no real doubt that the Romneyites are sincere.  Indeed, almost all of them are so sincere that it is painful to watch them lash themselves to the deck of Romney’s doomed ship. 

I could at least acknowledge an argument that says Romney switched positions out of political expediency, but that in difficult times it is better to have a well-funded nominal ally than a relative electoral no-hoper, a loon (that would be McCain) or an opponent as the nominee of your party.  The argument that his political views bob about like a windsock and he has a deep abiding set of principles, so we therefore should support him because he is both flexible and dedicated to the cause, makes me slightly ill.

The White House either hired a bunch of incompetent U.S. attorneys to start with, or hired a bunch of competent U.S attorneys that were incompetently fired. ~Rahm Emanuel

Well, at least that’s a clear statement of what the stakes are.  They aren’t really very high now that we see them being laid out in a single statement.  If it is the former, how is it shocking any longer to find out that this administration chose people who were unqualified for their positions?  They almost always choose unqualified people (see Rice, Condi).  If the latter, how is it shocking that this administration bungled something so elementary and basic?  They very often bungle the firing of their people (see Brown, Michael; O’Neill, Paul; Rumsfeld, Donald).  The Democrats seem to think they can lower the public’s opinion of Mr. Bush, but it cannot go much lower before it begins hitting the bedrock of absolute loyalists.  These are partisans and “wingers” who will never turn on Bush, so there is really nowhere for this scandal to go.  Support for the administration can’t collapse much below where it is, and the only thing that will come of this is Gonzales’ resignation.  In other words, the covering up of the incompetent firing of incompetents will result in the resignation of an incompetent, and then that will be that.  What am I missing?

Several Democratic officials were unabashed in discussing the potential political benefits for their party if they can convince voters that President Bush ousted U.S. attorneys for political reasons. Democratic strategists said the controversy is already helping them recruit House and Senate challengers for ’08 races. “We know from last cycle that Democrats can win in Republican districts where corruption is an issue,” one of the officials said. ~The Politico

Don’t you usually have to have evidence of corruption that you can run against before you have your candidates run against corruption?

Much of the commentary on this story has seemed disingenuous about this: breathless revelations that the White House was involved in the decision, that it may have been (gasp!) political, and so on. ~Michael Kinsley

I share Kinsley’s puzzlement about the scandal of this when we are talking about something that was neither illegal nor obviously, necessarily unethical.  Believe me, an epic, administration-destroying scandal would be a glorious thing to behold, and no one would be more glad of it than I would be.  I would be cheering on the dogs as they tore Mr. Bush and his entire team down, if they were actually tearing him down for his real crimes.  My view here is very much like my view of the hounding of Clinton in ’98.  Had they gone after him and Gore for any of their real misconduct and violations of the law, whether in fundraising scandals, violations of the Constitution or possible breaches of national security, I would have been a lot more enthusiastic about the entire process; instead they chose to go after him for the most trivial of his failures and his lies about them.  Consequently, they could not actually remove him, even though he had broken the law, because the basis for the entire proceeding was ultimately too trivial to merit taking the political risk.  

In the case of this “scandal,” it is possible that something unethical is going on here, but if the case of Iglesias in New Mexico is representative the unethical behaviour may have been Iglesias’.  He may have demonstrated a lack of diligence in prosecuting voter fraud, and he may have done this because he didn’t want to upset the powers-that-be in Santa Fe.  Which is more corrupting of the course of justice: a prosecutor who overlooks prosecutable crimes, possibly out of concern for his own political career, or the administration that fires him because he does this?  The people outraged by this scandal often want to deal in great generalities (where the political firing of political appointees is political and therefore somehow bad), even though they insist that it is the details that indict the administration here.  The Democratic approach seems to be to keep stressing how “serious” the charges are: “Perverting the course of justice!  Politicisation of the law!These are very serious charges that have to be addressed!”  Baseless, meaningless charges in these particular cases, maybe, but very serious.  What baffles me is why the Democrats are pushing so hard on this.  Do they really want people to start digging into questions of voting irregularities in 2004?  Do New Mexican Democrats really want to get into an ethics contest with Pete Domenici?  They would lose.  Guaranteed.  And I don’t even like Pete Domenici.    

It seems that the main knock on the administration is that, after being the most obtusely politically-obsessed administration in its hirings of key managers and major agency heads, when it finally fired some political appointees for equally political reasons (and perhaps some other reasons as well) it refused to admit its political motivations and pretended that it actually cared about competence.  Since they have never cared about competence in six years, everyone could tell that something was fishy, and the AUSAs being denigrated didn’t want to suffer the indignity of being called incompetent.  This is the case even though, according to folks back in New Mexico, David Iglesias handled the prosecution of Robert Vigil pretty incompetently and only barely got a conviction in the second go-round, and he probably ran his office just as badly as he ran the Vigil prosecution.  So people are mad about this because…why exactly?  Because it proves the administration is incompetent?  We knew that already.  Now they are just shooting themselves in the foot politically rather than starting a war or abandoning an American city to be annihilated.  That sounds like a kind of progress to me!

I don’t know whether it proves that neoliberalism is dead, or that Joe Lieberman is just so easy to make fun of, but this parody is very good.

Right. This strikes me as the essential problem with most Obama-related theorizing. Pundits are basically using made-up stories about the roots of Obama’s political appeal as hooks for their own writing about race. If you look, however, at Obama’s base of support the phenomenon looks pretty banal. Obama is popular among the intersecting groups of black people, young people, and people for whom Iraq is a high priority issue. This, of course, is not very hard to explain. Obama is black, relatively young, and has a consistent record of opposition to the Iraq War. And, obviously, he’s good at giving speeches to large crowds. ~Matt Yglesias

Yglesias makes a fair point here.  Talking about Obama as a race-transcending figure (or the ways in which he is not actually that figure) makes no sense of why his current supporters among regular voters are supporting him, so perhaps a lot of this talk is less interesting in understanding current trends, but this talk seems very relevant to understanding why Obama has received an unusually large amount of unusually favourable media coverage and bizarrely effusive responses from crowds of people who don’t even necessarily know anything about his Iraq war views when they first show up to hear him talk.  This level of enthusiasm for a Senator of no great accomplishments after a very few years on the national stage is simply inexplicable without taking race and attitudes about race into account as significant factors.  They may not be as important as some of the observers have concluded, but it seems unlikely that they are entirely unrelated.  

Meanwhile, the media have shown tremendous tolerance for Obama’s preference for vague platitudes over substantive policy remarks, which is something that journalists do not normally endure for very long before becoming much more critical of a candidate.  He is getting something of a free ride, and has actually gotten such a free ride that the overkill of it is practically the only thing that has started to make people turn against him.  Some of all of that has to relate to his being the first “viable” black presidential candidate and what that does or doesn’t say about race relations and Obama’s appeal to people from different races.

This media love fest has probably helped propel Obama among younger voters who, I’m sorry to say, are among the least informed, least curious and least politically involved voters in the country.  I am guessing that young supporters are responding to the media’s treatment of Obama as a kind of cultural icon and they are most susceptible to his meaningless chatter about hope and a new politics.  Another possibility is that the “Millennials” have significantly different attitudes about race relations and therefore serve as a kind of leading indicator of what Obama’s strongest appeal is, which is that he represents or embodies (however ideally or fantastically) their own attitudes about race, which are rather predictably more “liberal” than that of their parents.