Before the election, I argued that “reformist” conservatives would likely wind up wielding inordinate influence on Republican policy thinking in the event that Republicans won a House majority. This seemed likely to happen because their arguments will seem more timely during a slow recovery than they did before the bursting of the housing bubble, and it seemed likely to happen because there will not be any serious competition from those conservatives that have sometimes been dubbed “traditionalists” or those conservatives who believe that there is no policy problem that a “return to first principles” cannot solve. However, looking at the sheer scale of Republican gains in the House, the political case for following reformist conservatives does not appear all that compelling.

It might be deplorable and maddening to watch, but what incentive do Republicans have to reflect on the errors of their former ways? None. What incentive have their supporters given Republicans to do this? None. What incentive do they have to abandon their tired refrains and formulate policies that address existing problems? None. Yesterday was a clear sign from Republicans’ core supporters that casting some symbolic nay votes and using the right kind of rhetoric are more than enough to keep them loyally voting for the very same people who just a couple years ago were seen (correctly!) as subverting and tainting the party and the conservative movement with their corruption and folly. There was a brief timeout followed by empty promises of doing better, and now one could assume that all or almost all is forgiven. Not only is there no reason why the Republican leadership would act differently this time, but they would be acting irrationally if they sacrificed the benefits of promoting corporate interests for the sake of principles in which they do not really believe.

The midterm results didn’t represent a dramatic shift in the overall public’s views, but they did confirm that rank-and-file Republicans and movement conservatives are quite happy to enable a party that badly disappoints them every time it is given an opportunity to govern. Four years ago, movement conservatives were looking for the exits and claiming that they as conservatives had nothing to do with those unpopular Republicans. Today, Republican triumph is taken as conservative vindication, and the deeply dysfunctional, unhealthy identification of conservatism with the cause of the GOP has become stronger than ever. In a little while, maybe a few months or a year or two years, the people who made John Boehner the next Speaker of the House will be groaning and complaining that Boehner and his colleagues are reverting to their old ways. That is inevitably what Boehner and his colleagues will do, and why wouldn’t they? They have every reason to return to their old habits, and they have just been shown that change or reform is entirely unnecessary to advance their careers. For a while, the disillusioned movement conservatives may be receptive to critiques of Republican leadership, but as soon as the 2012 campaign gets going they will begin rushing back to empower another batch of Republicans so that their interests can be neglected some more.

The refomist case takes for granted that Republicans need to have relevant policy ideas to be able to compete as a national party with a changing electorate. The GOP has just won one of its largest midterm victories in the last century while having no relevant policy ideas (as opposed to slogans, of which it has many) and relying heavily on its traditional constituencies. Yes, it was a midterm election and the electorate was more heavily slanted towards constituencies that tend to favor Republicans, but that isn’t going to register unless 2012 proves to be a particularly bad year. If the GOP’s overwhelming concern is to acquire and wield power, rather than actually serve the interests of its constituents, the brief four-year period in the minority would seem to be a small price to pay if the party can come storming back to better than 2004-era levels of control in the House without doing anything to earn it.

Reformists argue that Republicans have to be more than a rejectionist party, but rejectionism has rescucitated the party and undone most of the political losses of the last six years. It doesn’t matter that this is akin to the reanimation of a zombie. As long as there is some sign of life or undeath, that will be enough. Reformists and dissident conservatives alike have insisted that Republicans have to answer for their years of disastrous misrule and incompetence before they could hope to win back the public’s trust. Granted, the GOP doesn’t really have the public’s trust now, but they have been entrusted with much more power anyway, and they did this with an unreformed, unchanged party leadership. The Republican Party that the public rejected and repudiated four years ago has not meaningfully changed, and all that it had to do to regain power was engage in reflexive opposition and wait. Even if one believes, as I do, that time is not on their side, and that they are throwing away their future with the next generation, why would the current Republican leadership care? Their preferred way of doing things is to reap the benefits in the present and defer costs and responsibilities until later.

During the last few months, I have been reading the argument that angry Americans want to restore some measure of justice and order in society so that rewards go to the deserving and failures are not bailed out. It is a significant problem that the chosen method to express this anger has been to reward the undeserving and promote the failures.

In his Senate victory speech, Republican megastar Marco Rubio announced that “America is the single greatest nation in all of human history. A place without equal in the history of all mankind” because “almost every other place in the world…what you were going to be when you grow up was determined for you.” Almost every other place in the world? From China to India to Brazil, hundreds of millions of people are rising economically in ways their parents could scarcely have imagined, in part because their governments are investing in infrastructure in the way the United States did in the late nineteenth century. The American dream of upward mobility is alive and well, just not in America. And rather than looking at what those other countries are doing right, the Republicans have taken refuge in an anti-government ideology premised on the lunatic notion that America is the only truly free and successful country in the world. ~Peter Beinart

If there has been one unifying theme to the GOP’s attacks over the last two years, it seems to me that the “lunatic notion” Beinart identifies is it. For the purposes of his own argument, Beinart exaggerates the extent of “anti-government ideology” in all of this, but there is no question that Republicans have sought refuge in a form of American exceptionalism that has remarkably little to do with the real America. Republicans have made a defense of “American exceptionalism” the thing that is supposed to distinguish them from Obama, and in order to make that claim they have defined American exceptionalism to mean an absurd overconfidence in the political and economic uniqueness and supremacy of America. To take pride in economic opportunity available here, they feel that they must deny that it exists elsewhere. Lacking answers for, or even awareness of, the growing social and economic stratification in their own country, they project it to “almost every other place in the world.” Rubio’s CPAC speech in February marked him as one of the strongest advocates of this notion, which he repeated again in his victory speech last night. It didn’t matter to Rubio then that the U.S. actually lags behind a great many industrialized nations in terms of social mobility, and it still doesn’t matter.

I have cited the old Chesteron quote about patriotism from The Napoleon of Notting Hill many times before, but it bears repeating:

The patriot never, under any circumstances, boasts of the largeness of his country, but always, and of necessity, boasts of its smallness.

The sort of American exceptionalism that has become the defining feature of Republican rhetoric over at least the last two years seems to require “boasting of the largeness” of America at every turn. This is not healthy admiration for one’s country, but an idolatry that prevents its devotees from seeing things as they are. Last night greatly empowered that idolatry.

Via Andrew, Marc Lynch worries about the foreign policy implications of tonight’s vote:

Dan Drezner’s going to bed early tonight because he doesn’t think the outcome of Congressional elections matters much for foreign policy. But at least on Middle East issues, that’s crazy. If the GOP takes Congress, it might overwhelmingly approve an Iran sanctions bill which ties the hands of President Barack Obama’s administration and undermines its efforts to construct an effective negotiation strategy. Or it might irresponsibly fail to confirm ambassadors to Syria and Turkey, two key players in the region, for no good reason.

Certainly, irrational hostility towards Iran is worrisome. Consider Mark Kirk’s rather laughable essay in “support” of the Green movement, and ask yourself if you think his foreign policy contribution in the Senate will be a net positive in the event that he wins tonight. Lynch is right that there is no good reason to refuse to confirm these ambassadors, but Republican foreign policy leaders have reasons that reason knows not. I remember Ackerman mentioning hostility to Frank Ricciardone’s nomination as ambassador of Turkey, which Josh Rogin detailed here. My favorite quote from the Rogin report is this quote from Danielle Pletka:

Now is not the time for us to have an ambassador in Ankara who is more interested in serving the interests of the local autocrats [emphasis mine-DL] and less interested in serving the interests of his own administration.

Some democratists are bothered by Ricciardone’s understanding of why the Egyptian government was annoyed by the Bush administration’s anti-terrorist authoritarianism alongside its promotion of the “freedom agenda” in the Arab world. Perhaps some of them also think that the current Turkish government is too authoritarian, despite its efforts to hold its military more accountable to civilian courts. Ricciardone is eminently qualified, actually knows the local language, and would be well-received in Ankara. It seems clear that he should be confirmed. Presumably these facts will be used against him as proof that he is far too familiar with other nations, and has a dangerous habit of understanding their concerns. The fight over Ricciardone’s confirmation is just a stand-in for more general Republican hostility to Turkey since the Gaza flotilla raid and resentment that State Department FSOs are not mindless adherents of the failed “freedom agenda.” The bad news from tonight’s election results is that there are going to be several more Republicans in the Senate sympathetic to the nonsensical attacks on Ricciardone than there were before.

More to the point, if Israelis and Palestinians are really ready to conclude a peace treaty, no Congress will deny the president the security, economic, or technical assistance they need. In this regard, the national interest pursued in a smart way by a capable president always triumphs narrower domestic policy interests. ~Aaron David Miller

Miller is kidding, right? Admittedly, all of this speculative, since none of us, Miller included, believes that the Israelis and Palestinians will be “really ready” to conclude a peace treaty in our lifetimes. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that this improbable event occurs. Does Miller really think that its implementation wouldn’t be held hostage by opposition in Congress? Obama’s opponents in Congress fundamentally reject Obama’s handling of Israel policy and believe him to be an enemy of Israel. They would be the last to accept a treaty, because they would be convinced that the treaty had been “forced” on Israel or was too favorable to the Palestinians. We don’t need to be able to see the futue to know that Obama’s partisan foes extend their reflexive hostility to foreign affairs. Just look at the lock-step rejectionism that has greeted the new START.

The new START is a good test of Miller’s argument. The arms reduction treaty is something that has overwhelming support from the military, most arms control experts, and former national security officials, and it is a good example of Obama trying to do “something serious abroad.” It is also almost certainly dead, thanks to near-universal Republican hostility. It won’t even be debated during the lame-duck session if there aren’t enough votes to ratify, and after January it has no chance of passing with the addition of five or six new Republicans in the Senate. A modest, but important arms control treaty will go down in flames to satisfy a Republican fantasy that they are resisting “appeasement” and “weakness,” and the U.S. will be worse off for it. We can expect more of this in the coming years if the GOP should win a majority in the House.

So I agree with Miller that Obama should not focus on foreign policy for the next two years, but that is because anything substantial he is likely to achieve will most likely undermined or sabotaged by political opposition at home.

There are parts of this Michael Lind article that make sense. Of course, Lind overdoes it when he tries to give an entirely ideological explanation for the weakening of center-left parties in Europe and America. Dan is right that it is not enough to say, “The Third Way did it!” and leave it at that. Circumstances specific to each national electorate explain the fortunes of different center-left parties in Europe and America. Still, it is important to acknowledge that center-left parties over the last 20 years followed the advice of “centrists,” won a few elections, but alienated or disappointed many of their reliable constituencies in the process without gaining many loyal new supporters. The size of the GOP win in 1994 was made possible by NAFTA, and the thing fueling general disgust with the Democrats today has been the financial sector bailout as much as anything else. These were hardly great moments in left-liberal or social democratic governance. They were quite plainly the products of a Democratic Party that wanted to show that it was friendly to business and finance. The shift to the “center” that made Democrats competitive in the last 20 years has also created a much more unstable and shaky coalition, and it has been falling apart under the pressure of the recession and slow recovery.

There is something to be said for an argument that rightly identifies the “centrists” in center-left parties as chief contributors to the financial crisis and the political undoing of those parties. Conservatives who look askance at the cozy relationship between Republican office-holders and corporate and financial interests can appreciate that it is the “centrists” in power for the last two decades who bear most of the blame for the public loathing of the parties to which they belong, and they are also the ones who bear most of the blame for the policies that have created our current predicament.

There is also something worth considering in the claim that disillusioned, neglected, abused core constituencies gradually abandon party leaders that cease to represent them and their interests. Faced with the same old Republican leadership that excels at doing just that, we should hope that this is true. Center-left parties’ indifference to the public’s concerns over immigration may not be the main cause of their weakness, but it helps explain how they have been collapsing from France in 2002 to Hungary in the last parliamentary election. While I am guessing he will hang on, Raul Grijalva gave himself a much more competitive race in AZ-07 than he should have ever had by supporting a boycott of Arizona on account of its immigration enforcement law. The Democrats will likely lose PA-11 to a strong restrictionist candidate in northeastern Pennsylvania. Immigration is an issue that has and will continue to divide both parties in the U.S., but to some extent this division is more dangerous for center-left parties because their natural constituencies are so much more adversely affected by large-scale immigration.

We should not forget Gordon Brown’s participation in creating New Labour and serving as Blair’s supposed economics and financial wizard. His tenure as Chancellor was to Blair’s government what Bob Rubin’s turn at the Treasury was to Clinton’s second term. It is hard to separate Brown’s political collapse from the consequences of Britain’s loose monetary policy, housing bubble, overreliance of the government on revenues derived from the financial sector, and the financial crash. Brown’s expertise was suposed to be in economic competence and financial management, and as PM he presided over the disaster that his decisions as Chancellor had helped create. Blair got out just in time avoid taking the blame for his government’s policies. It was Brown’s demonstration of incompetence and the public’s recognition that Brown’s claims of expertise had been nonsense that broke Labour’s seemingly unshakeable grip on power. By the time “bigotgate” came along, Brown was already finished.

There isn’t much to add to the chorus of laughter that has greeted David Broder’s silly column advocating war with Iran as a means of economic stimulus. It should be enough to mention that no less than Daniel Pipes proposed an Iranian war as Obama’s political salvation, which should have thoroughly discredited the idea by now. What I do find worrisome is that Broder is nothing if not the embodiment of Washington conventional wisdom, so when he casually claims that “Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century” it confirms that this nonsense is widely shared and unquestioningly held to be true.

For his part, George Friedman at Stratfor speculated on this scenario without endorsing an attack. What I find interesting about Friedman’s analysis is that he seems to assume that war with Iran can solve Obama’s political problem at home. Friedman puts it this way:

The most obvious justification would be to claim that Iran is about to construct a nuclear device. Whether or not this is true would be immaterial. First, no one would be in a position to challenge the claim, and, second, Obama’s credibility in making the assertion would be much greater than George W. Bush’s, given that Obama does not have the 2003 weapons-of-mass-destruction debacle to deal with and has the advantage of not having made such a claim before. Coming from Obama, the claim would confirm the views of the Republicans, while the Democrats would be hard-pressed to challenge him. In the face of this assertion, Obama would be forced to take action. He could appear reluctant to his base, decisive to the rest. The Republicans could not easily attack him. Nor would the claim be a lie. Defining what it means to almost possess nuclear weapons is nearly a metaphysical discussion. It requires merely a shift in definitions and assumptions. This is a cynical scenario, but it can be aligned with reasonable concerns.

Part of the trouble is that the claim really would be a lie. For that matter, Obama has given the hawks all they could want in Afghanistan, but that has not stopped them from railing against him as the second coming of Jimmy Carter because he set a withdrawal deadline. If Obama claimed that Iran was about to construct a nuclear device, Republican hawks would react in a few different ways, and none of them would help Obama politically. Many would formally support the military action, but they would happily attack Obama in the process. Some would berate Obama for having let things get to this point, and they would actually blame him for having previously “failed” to stop it. Despite having spent decades fretting about Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons, they would pin an Iranian bomb solely on Obama, whose alleged weakness and “appeasement” invited the Iranian threat. McCain would be all over cable television saying something like, “This is what happens when you try to engage with dictatorships. Our military is paying the price for the President’s failed leadership.” No doubt they would throw in some added shots at his Israel and Afghanistan decisions in the process. “While Obama was wasting our resources on nation-building in Afghanistan, the real threat was gathering in Iran,” they would tell us. It won’t matter if this is consistent with their own previous statements or not.

Others would suddenly discover that they no longer trust the executive with unchecked, arbitrary power to make war on the other side of the world on the basis of shoddy evidence, and they would start calling for Obama’s impeachment. Other hawks would question the timing of the attack, and they would say that it was just a way for Obama to distract attention from whatever nefarious deeds he and his administration were carrying out back home. Some of the more aggressive hawks would condemn Obama for “limiting” the military action to air strikes and naval operations, and would call for the insertion of ground troops. This is not hard to imagine, since this is exactly what some of the more aggressive interventionists did during the bombing of Yugoslavia. Technically, these hawks “supported” Clinton during the bombing, but they were happy to find fault with him for being insufficiently aggressive.

As for his own party, enough Democratic office-holders were burned by trusting the Bush administration that they would not fall for the same ruse again. Some activists would be good partisans and support Obama, but for most progressives an Iranian war would be the last straw that confirmed the strong continuities between the Bush and Obama administrations. It probably wouldn’t matter whether the war went reasonably “well” or poorly, as the decision to start another war would provoke a primary or third-party challenge from the left that would wreck Obama’s re-election hopes, and it would push the majority into the arms of the Republican nominee in 2012. Then again, there is hardly any way that the war could actually go “well,” as a war would consolidate the hold the Iranian government has on the country, cripple the opposition, destroy any gains Obama has made in repairing America’s reputation abroad, provoke significant Iranian retaliation in the Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, and it would threaten Russian and Chinese economic interests enough that it could create problems for the U.S. in other regions that aren’t even being considered in these scenarios. On top of all that, an attack on Iran would only slow, not eliminate, Iran’s development of its nuclear program.

Ross:

Jonathan Chait and Stephen Spruiell have already chewed over this a bit, but neither have expressed what I think is an appropriate amount of mystification at the idea that immigration reform, of all issues, represents the toughest possible test for Republicans, and a target of opportunity for the Democrats. This is the kind of thing that makes me seriously doubt the White House’s political acumen.

I agree. Prior to anti-bailout anger beginning in 2008, hostility to the worst-of-both-worlds immigration bill in 2007 was the one thing that could unite substantial numbers of people across the political spectrum against the Washington consensus position. The hostility was strong enough to prevent passage of the legislation and make any future “comprehensive reform” bill politically radioactive for years to come. There is almost nothing that could more quickly turn Obama’s labor allies against him and rile up public opposition faster than a push for a new immigration bill. Obama might even be able to bring Republican leaders in the House along by proposing a guest-worker scheme that would please Boehner and Pence, but regardless of what the party leaders accept there would be a rebellion in the ranks of both parties in the House. Obama would expose himself to a punishing battle he couldn’t win, and he would hand restrictionists in the GOP an opportunity to inflict yet another embarrassing defeat on their own leaders. In the process, any compromise bill that might conceivably have enough support in the Senate would include so many provisions for bringing in cheap, unprotected labor and just enough fines for illegal immigrants that it would offend most of the Democratic constituencies interested in “comprehensive reform.” Another fight over immigration policy would probably have a couple salutary political effects. It would remind leaders in both parties what a political disaster advocating amnesty is, and it would force House Republicans to choose between representing their constituents or representing corporate interests.

Like its mishandling of Arizona’s immigration law, the administration’s plan to pick an immigration fight with Republican House leadership next year suggests that they truly don’t understand that advocates of “reform” (amnesty) are very much on the losing side of the issue. As far as Obama’s political interests are concerned, pushing an immigration bill would be a strange act of self-immolation.

The discussion in the comments section of my recent post on the midterms continues, but I wanted to post a couple of my responses from the thread to explain why anti-Bush, traditional conservatives shouldn’t be very pleased with the prospect of a Republican House majority.

Here is one response:

Speaking for myself, there are some movement conservatives that I have always identified as hostile to the conservatism we want to promote, and there have always been some movement conservatives that I, for one, have always regarded as “irredeemable” in the sense that they are diametrically opposed to much of what we believe and actively work to harm the things we wish to preserve. That’s nothing new.

On the whole, I don’t regard Tea Party activists as enemies at all, even if some or many of them might see me as one. In many respects, they are on the right track. It’s true that I don’t have much respect for movement conservatives who aligned themselves with Bush until things went awry, then pretended that they never treated Bush as one of their own, and have now once again identified themselves completely with Republican electoral fortunes. It’s certainly true that I am annoyed by some conservatives. These are the conservatives cheering on the current electoral wave driven by economic discontent and anxiety, but whose economic and trade policies would tend to exacerbate that discontent and anxiety in some of the very states that are about to deliver Republicans so many House seats. Do voters in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania really want to empower the party that is foursquare in favor of outsourcing and free trade? That’s what they seem poised to do, but I don’t think they’re going to be happy with the results. Do people who are furious over the bailout of Wall Street really want to make John Boehner, the pro-bailout friend of financial interests, into the Speaker of the House? If things work out as most people think they will, this is what will happen. I hope I’m not the only conservative who finds that a perverse and rather sickening outcome. I don’t consider that to be “making the same arguments the other side makes.” I consider that to be a critique rooted in conservative skepticism of state capitalism and decentralist distrust of concentrated wealth and power. Maybe I haven’t explained myself or made my arguments as well as I could have, but that’s what I keep trying to do.

I find it hard to get enthusiastic about Republican gains this year because they are wholly undeserved, and because they seem more than likely to result in the re-empowerment of all the same people who supported and enabled Bush’s agenda as if nothing had happened. Is it really beneficial for movement conservatives for their most visible elected political leadership to be John Boehner and Eric Cantor? I have been arguing that Boehner should be replaced for years, so I’m hardly going to become giddy at the thought of him as Speaker of the House. Has all of this clouded my judgment and made me hope that this rather appalling scenario (i.e., Boehner as Speaker) doesn’t come to pass? Maybe, but I don’t think so.

I assume that the activists who really are on the right track are going to be sidelined or marginalized at the first opportunity by a party leadership that is perfectly content to exploit their energy and then cast them aside. The “Pledge to America” has already told us that this is what will happen. On the policy front, I am concerned that some things, such as the arms control treaty, will be scrapped in the wake of the election, and that wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the broad, near-universal hysteria about Obama’s foreign policy coming from movement conservative think tanks, pundits, and activists. Far from correcting for the foreign policy errors that helped drive them from power, the most influential movement conservatives have become even more misguided.

Maybe it is counter-productive to point out that there is majority support for additional stimulus spending. I don’t point this out because I agree with that view, but because I see the denial of public opinion on this point to reflect a bad habit of wishing away inconvenient realities. When I see people claiming that there is a majority in favor of health care repeal, I become skeptical that this majority actually exists because it doesn’t really make sense to me, and I am even more skeptical that it exists for the reasons pro-repeal conservatives like to think that it does. When I see conservatives telling themselves pleasing fictions, it bothers me, since more than a few of our problems have their origins in such self-deception.

Ultimately, I see concentrations of wealth and power as the real enemies of conservatism as I understand it, and I see a lot of conservatives and Republicans aligning themselves with both in the service of getting themselves back into power, so I can’t say that I see that as conservative success. I am under the impression that the “centrists” dedicated to protecting centralized power and concentrated wealth are the real enemies of the bulk of both “Blue” and “Red” America, and I suspect that competitors within the political class want to keep pitting us against one another as a way of winning our support against their political class rivals while neglecting the interests of the rest of us.

Here was a follow-up response:

“I fail to see how it conceivably benefits us for the GOP to perform worse than expected.”

Well, it might depend on what we mean by “us,” but let me try to explain why it may be better for “us” broadly speaking (i.e., Republicans and conservatives) if the GOP does not win a majority in the House. I won’t pretend that I’m a good team player by the standards of Red Team vs. Blue Team (I’m not), but take this for what it’s worth.

First, a word about expectations. The expectations game was lost a long time ago. At this point, anything less than Silver’s projected 53 or Sabato’s projected 55 seats will be seen as underwhelming, and when you now have people breezily invoking 1942 and 1938 (!) as points of comparison there is almost no way that the GOP can’t underperform even if it does very well. I would like to point out that I have been arguing against raising unrealistic expectations for most of this year. Whether or not the GOP wins a lot more seats than I have predicted, it made sense for their leaders and supporters to make modest claims about likely gains. They chose to do something else and seem to have grossly exaggerated them.

A Republican House majority starting next year most likely makes Boehner and Cantor “our” spokesmen and the ones responsible for advancing “our” agenda. This is the political equivalent of getting out of a car that had just been driven into a telephone pole by a drunkard, finding a new car, and then handing the keys to the drunkard for another spin around the block in the hope that something different will happen. “It’s been five minutes, so he must be sober by now! He knows to watch out for telephone poles now.” It would be one thing to have trustworthy leadership that deserved respect trying to advance our agenda. They might succeed, or they might not, but we could assume that for the most part they were not actively conning us and abusing our trust. We could assume that they were actually working for our agenda rather than serving interests that have nothing to do with it. If the GOP falls short, it is hard to see how the current leadership remains in place. House Republicans could then make up for lost time and replace them.

For a while, I had assumed that the path to “victory” began with the discrediting of Bush Era party leaders and Bush loyalists in the conservative movement. Perhaps this was foolish of me, but I had assumed that the near-total, staggering failure of the Bush administration and movement conservative complicity in that failure would force significant changes. From there, working through the movement would at least be worth trying. Instead, what we are about to get is the re-empowerment of unreformed, unrepentant Bush Era Republicans with some Tea Partiers in tow, and we all understand that the latter are not going to be allowed to have much influence on legislation.

In other words, I can’t see a path to “victory” for any of the things we want so long as that first step hasn’t been taken, and it most definitely has not been taken. One reason it hasn’t been taken is that the GOP appears for the moment to be recovering politically without making any substantive changes. A Republican majority confirms that the GOP can succeed simply by being what it was during the last decade, and as long as it is succeeding in this way it will be as resistant as ever to our arguments. If Republicans fall short of a majority in a year when they’re certain they’re going to win, it may force them to start re-thinking.

Of course, I welcome challenges to Boehner, and have been calling for his ouster for years. I was agitating for getting rid of him after he presided over two massive consecutive defeats. What is the argument for removing Boehner after what it supposed to be a spectacular political triumph? The time for getting rid of Boehner was two or four years ago. The conference didn’t want to get rid of him, which should tell us plenty about the membership of the conference.

I think Daniel makes an important point that any group conceiving of themselves as a “New Israel” would be more likely to have ambivalent feelings at best, hostile ones at worst, toward any group calling themselves “Old Israel.” Christianity itself provides an excellent example. So saying that Americans have an affinity for Israel because we think of ourselves as a New Israel does leave something out.

What it leaves out, I think, is that the State of Israel is also a “New Israel_ – it’s both a settler society and a reborn nation. I doubt very much that Americans would have a similar affinity for Israel if neither of these things were true, if Israel were, say, a Jewish version of Armenia. This is a point I made in my dialogue with Ross Douthat this past summer.

I’m also slightly surprised to hear Daniel disparaging the argument that there is a cultural affinity between the United States and Israel, or that this impacts our foreign policy, because an argument very like that was the basis of his criticism of a personal favorite piece of mine from early 2009. ~Noah Millman

I appreciated Noah’s comments, but he may be misremembering what it was I said in response to his imaginative counterfactual. What I was trying to argue then was not that “there is a cultural affinity between the United States and Israel,” but that there would have been no cultural affinity with Noah’s imagined Angevin settler state. Noah was suggesting that America would support this Angevin state largely because of cultural affinity and because they would be seen as part of “who we are.” My point is that Americans would regard an Angevin state, well, rather like most Americans regard Armenia. That is, they would be indifferent or possibly even hostile because Americans would not recognize them as “who we are.”

What I was trying to argue in the twoprevious posts on this subject was not that there is no cultural affinity between the U.S. and Israel. I am saying that this affinity does not necessarily make Americans more receptive to arguments in favor of American Israel policy. I would also stress that the affinity that does exist today has been amplified and expanded especially over the last forty years by steady repetition that Israel is a reliable ally, that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East” (which always conveniently forgets Turkey), and more recently that Israel is a “front-line state in the war on terror.” Obviously, there was some foundation on which to build up an affinity, but there has certainly been a lot of construction work done in just the last few decades to make affinity between America and a state created by a secular Jewish nationalist movement seem like a natural or even inevitable product of American culture. That such an affinity can exist and not really shape U.S. foreign policy is fairly easy to show, since U.S. policy in the region in the 1950s and early 1960s was significantly different from what came later.

One reason I am spending this much time on this is that I find the “explanations” for current U.S. Israel policy offered by Mead entirely unconvincing and designed to shut down discussion before it begins. A less obvious, but no less important reason I am discussing this at length is that I have no patience with historical arguments that stress broad, sweeping cultural and/or religious factors at the expense of discernible, specific causes. That partly informs my impatience with claims that jihadists attack Western governments because of “who we are” rather than what those governments do. When we want to avoid understanding the realities of terrorism, we simply say, “Their god compels them,” and leave it at that. What is most bothersome about this is that it doesn’t actually take cultural and religious factors seriously at all. On the contrary, it ignores the actual significance of cultural and religious factors by distorting them beyond recognition and using them as the framing for essentialist arguments that are designed to perpetuate conflict and facilitate vilification of other peoples. Such arguments pretend to pay attention to deeper causes, but in the end provide the most superficial analysis dressed up in condescending rhetoric. Instead of explaining a phenomenon, they are intended to explain it away.

We saw a lot of this during the Balkan Wars, when fairly lazy journalists declared that the conflicts between Serbs and Croats or Serbs and Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s went back centuries and were the product of ancient hatreds that modern Westerners could barely fathom. In reality, the roots of the conflicts in the 1990s could be traced almost entirely to WWII and not much earlier. Invoking medieval origins for modern Balkan conflicts was one way of saying, “These conflicts are inexplicable and opaque to Americans,” and it was also a good way to impute irrationality to the peoples of the Balkans as a prelude to claiming the role of enlightened interventionists for ourselves. It was also a way of avoiding real understanding of the political movements the U.S. eventually supported. Worse than that, it was a concession to the mythology of one or both parties to the conflict.

It seems to me that enough Americans already embrace the mythology of one side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without adding on another layer of mythology about Americans’ inherent cultural sympathy for the State of Israel.

The cable-TV loudmouths who dismissed Obama right off the bat were unfair in certain particulars. But, on the question of whether Obama, if elected, would be more liberal or more conservative than his campaign rhetoric indicated, they arrived at a more accurate assessment than those of us who pored over his speeches, parsed his interviews and read his first book. ~Christopher Caldwell

It is this kind of claim that makes me distrust the rest of what Caldwell has to say. I was one of those people who pored over his speeches and parsed his interviews, and that was how I came to my assessment of him as a rather dull, conventional center-left Democrat. In a Culture11 article that has since vanished into the ether, I wrote this:

An apt description of what the next President will actually represent was penned, in a different context, by columnist Robert Samuelson, who once described Obama as the “sanctification of the status quo.” Though his lifelong search for stability and rootedness are frequently lost in the polemics and panegyrics about his life, close study of his biography reveals a desire for consensus and accommodation to structures already in place. Assimilation to the norms of the American cultural and political elite makes Obama seem alien mainly to those who feel great alienation from most national cultural and political institutions where Obama has thrived (i.e., conservatives), but the very elitism that they (correctly) perceive is also evidence of Obama’s aversion to challenging established norms and introducing radical change.

This will reassure most of his enemies as much as it disheartens many of his friends. If you have a high opinion of the Washington establishment and bipartisan consensus politics, Obama’s election should come as a relief. If you believe, as I do, that most of our policy failures stretching back beyond the last eight years are the product of a failed establishment and a bankrupt consensus, an Obama administration represents the perpetuation of a system that is fundamentally broken.

Two years ago, Republican partisans engaged in election-year misrepresentation were bound to get this wrong, but almost two years into Obama’s first term there is really no excuse for Caldwell’s misunderstanding. If one insists on mischaracterizing the legislation Obama has signed as being to the left of what he campaigned on, one will continually make the error that Obama governed from the left of his party and conclude that the “loudmouths” were right about him. In fact, almost every bill he signed was less to the liking of progressives than his original campaign positions. He hasn’t really been “more conservative” than his campaign rhetoric suggested. He has instead being more or less exactly what one should have expected given his campaign rhetoric and his political career.