Andrew:

I think the demagoguing of Park51 is a direct result of the GOP’s turn toward Christianism.

Long-time readers know that I disagree completely with Andrew’s notion of “Christianism” and especially with the idea that Chistian “fundamentalism” is at the root of the problems of the modern right. To the extent that “theocons” even exist, they have not been all that influential within the GOP, and most of the worst mistakes and errors Republicans and mainstream conservatives have made are the products of allowing secular ideological commitments to trump the obligations of the religions they claim to follow. If there is a religion, or pseudo-religion, that has warped American conservatism, it is Gelernter’s religion of Americanism or the nationalism that John Lukacs said had replaced or substituted for the religion of many American conservatives.

Indeed, as some serious religious conservatives have objected in the wake of the Beck rally, the problem is not that of “nationalist Christianity,” but simply a national civil religion that overwhelms and eradicates whatever might be distinctively or recognizably Christian. The impulse to treat the site of a terrorist atrocity as sacred space is not something derived from Christianity, but comes from the desire to make the place into a national symbol and to reinforce a feeling of national victimhood. The GOP hasn’t turned towards Christianism. The rise of Beck as a major figure on the right would be inexplicable if this were happening. Hostility to Park51 has entirely different sources. These are ultimately just as hostile to tradionalist Christianity, because any real religion stands as a rebuke and a threat to the cult of self-pity and self-congratulation that has been on display this summer.

What does Codevilla’s book have to do with the Castle-O’Donnell fight and our friends at the WSJ and NRO? Uncomfortably, I think, plenty. ~Jeffrey Lord

The Codevilla book is based on the long essayAmerican Spectator ran earlier this summer. Codevilla’s essay didn’t interest me much when it came out, mostly because Codevilla distinguished himself during most of this decade as a raving “super-hawkish” lunatic. Admittedly, I jumped to the conclusion that whatever he had to say wasn’t worth reading, and I don’t really trust someone so fanatically militaristic to be a reliable advocate for political decentralization here at home.

For his part, Lord has made some of the worst arguments of recent years. A few years back, he tried to tie opposition to the Iraq war to his endless obsession with liberal racism, and then last year was one of the most irrational critics of the Sotomayor nomination because of the same obsession, so I have a hard time taking either of them seriously. It is more than a little funny that Lord has become a champion of Codevilla’s recent work, since Lord’s anti-racist crusading makes for a slightly odd pairing with Codevilla’s obvious contempt for all other peoples of the world, but I am told that the “country class” is heterogeneous and hard to define. Lord’s impulse to make a largely irrelevant Delaware Senate primary race into a great moment of truth for all American conservatives doesn’t help matters.

As it happens, I sympathize with the desire to defeat Castle in the primary. If Republican primary voters in Delaware want a conservative nominee, they should vote for O’Donnell. Personally, I usually prefer supporting hopelessly outmatched underdogs and normally would rather vote for third-party candidates than accept the pragmatic argument of electability. Then again, I also don’t expect them to win.

Of course, it’s possible that Delaware voters don’t want a conservative candidate, which may help explain why Castle isn’t a conservative and why it is taken for granted that he is the most viable statewide candidate the Delaware GOP could field. As I have been saying all year, the main mistake Republicans have been making for the last two years is demanding candidates who show loyalty to a national agenda rather than addressing the interests of their constituents. That will work in Senate races in Utah or Alaska, but it won’t work in Delaware. O’Donnell enthusiasts should have no illusions about what they are trying to do. They are arguing that the GOP should throw away a virtually guaranteed pick-up of a Senate seat for a toss-up race that might result in a Democratic hold, and they are doing it on behalf of a fairly weak candidate. Naturally, more partisan outlets that are interested more in maximizing Republican gains are going to prefer Castle.

This primary fight in Delaware reminds me of the effort the Club for Growth launched to try to defeated Lincoln Chafee in the primary in Rhode Island. Everyone, including the Club for Growth, knew that the challenger Lackey would have no chance in a Rhode Island general election, but decided to fritter away resources there anyway to “send a message.” On the whole, the only message that was sent was that the Club for Growth was not very smart in choosing their battles. As it turned out, 2006 was such a bad year for Republicans that it didn’t matter whether Chafee was the nominee or not, but the primary challenge itself seemed certain to result either in a weakened nominee or an easy Democratic win in the fall.

Delaware is a different case. Even though this promises to be a good year for Republicans, the main reason why Delaware is a likely pick-up for the GOP is mainly because of the personal appeal and record of Castle. Take him out of the equation and suddenly the NRSC would have to work overtime to make it a close race. That potentially diverts resources away from other competitive races, and it could cause the national party to give up on Delaware entirely as the RGA has already given up on the hapless Colorado gubernatorial nominee.

I think what we’re seeing is a rejection of the Obama Democrats’ big-government policies. The president and his party thought that in times of economic distress most voters would be supportive of or at least amenable to a vast expansion of the size and scope of government. ~Michael Barone

This June poll was the most recent one I could find that specifically addressed the question of whether the public favored more government spending.  The result makes it fairly clear that as far as government spending is concerned most of the public is not recoiling from having too much of it.  Clearly, almost two-thirds support having more.  As you can see from the graphic, 52% of independents favored more spending at the start of the summer, which should make us question the assumption that Democratic woes are the result of defections by independents alienated by too much spending.  On health care, opinion was slightly negative and more closely divided than on any of the others, which makes the health care bill rather different from the Kansas-Nebraska Act in terms of the backlash against it.   

One of the reasons I have distrusted Barone’s analysis for most of the last year is that it is obvious that he very much wants his perceived backlash against big-government policies to be true, and he has been forcing the evidence to fit that interpretation.  I would actually be very pleased if there were a widespread popular rebellion against intrusive and expanding government, but I’m not going to kid myself that this is what we’re seeing.  Barone is trading on an idea that many conservatives want to believe, which is that adherence to principle and political success go hand in hand.  This is a lovely, horribly deceptive idea.  Generally, it isn’t true, and I’m not sure where anyone got the idea that it was. 

According to the story Republicans tell themselves, they lost power because they spent too much, and they believe they are proving that they understand where they went wrong by opposing all forms of new spending.  Even though they may be winning by default because of economic conditions, they very much want to link any success they have with this new opposition to more spending.  It’s a very neat, tidy, convenient and completely false narrative.  According to the same narrative, the public supposedly soured on the stimulus because they became anxious about deficits.  In fact, the stimulus lost support because it wasn’t enough of an actual stimulus bill, and so did not “work.”  In some of the early Republican criticism of the bill, there was a basic acceptance of the belief that enough money spent in the right way would be stimulative.  Now that a majority finds fault with the original bill, the new interpretation is that there should never have been one at all. 

This makes the same mistake that Barone and a thousand others have made about the health care bill.  They take all opposition to a complex, flawed, compromised, unaffordable bill and treat it as if it were all one thing, but opposition to the bill came from many different sources, including from those on the left who thought it was too weak, too much of  a sell-out to insurance companies, or insufficiently ambitious in some other way.  Hostility to the compromised bill that was passed does not imply support for returning to the way things were, and hostility to the compromised bill does not necessarily reflect opposition to an increased government role in the health care sector.  Barone wants you to think that it does, and he is basing almost his entire interpretation of the public mood and his expectation of a big midterm victory for the GOP on this misunderstanding.  Barone’s mistake is the national GOP’s mistake in miniature: he is treating the election as a national one with a unifying theme that has a clear ideological meaning when it isn’t and it doesn’t.  Barone may end up being right that the GOP is going to win the House, but it will have been mostly by accident, because he refuses to acknowledge the real reasons why the GOP is in a position to win.  The party is in a similar position: possibly on the verge of a great victory, but unable or unwilling to accept the real reason for it.

Dinesh D’Souza has authored what may possibly be the most ridiculous piece of Obama analysis yet written. He takes a number of decisions Obama has made on a grab-bag of issues, declares that they are “odd,” and then proceeds to explain the “oddness” he has perceived by cooking up a bizarre thesis that Obama is a die-hard anticolonialist dedicated to his father’s anticolonialist legacy. That must be why he aspired to become President of the world’s remaining superpower and military hegemon–because he secretly loathes the exercise of Western power and wants to rein it in! It must be his deeply-held anticolonialist beliefs that have led him to escalate the U.S. role in Afghanistan, launch numerous drone strikes on Pakistan, and authorize the assassination of U.S. citizens in the name of antiterrorism. Yes, zealous anticolonialism is the obvious answer. Even for D’Souza, whose last book was a strange exercise in blaming Western moral decadence for Islamic terrorism, this is simply stupid. Perhaps most painful of all is D’Souza’s condescending claim that ignorant Americans aren’t familiar with anticolonialism, and that because he is an Indian he can educate all of us about it.

Even if Obama were anticolonialist, it wouldn’t actually explain why he is “anti-business,” but then you would have to believe that he is strongly anti-business in the first place. D’Souza’s initial assumption that Obama is “the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history” is not much more than assertion. Viewed from most places in the country, Obama does not appear anti-business at all, but rather he seems pitifully captive to business interests in the worst way. One can find this reassuring or disturbing, but that is the reality.

It is hardly necessary to delve deeply into the Kenyan past or trace the roots of anticolonialist thought to discern why Obama, a thoroughly conventional center-left Democrat, favors raising taxes on wealthier people. This is a standard part of the Democratic agenda and has been for the last decade. Having opposed tax cuts for wealthier Americans earlier in the decade, Democrats are continuing to be against them. This is not mystifying. What is a little mystifying is why so many conservative pundits and writers feel the need to construct preposterous, overly-complicated Obama theories to explain what is perfectly obvious and straightforward.

D’Souza’s comments on foreign policy are even more misguided. First of all, he lumps in the Park51 project with his discussion of Obama’s foreign policy. Last I checked, Manhattan was still part of the United States, so anything Obama had to say about this really wasn’t a matter of foreign policy. Proposing to use NASA in some sort of multiculti outreach is silly, but it doesn’t reflect latent anticolonialism. It represents a clumsy and pointless exercise in showing that the U.S. “respects” Muslims at the same time that it continues to occupy and bomb Muslim countries and subsidize and arm states that subject Muslims to political repression. It is an easy gesture that costs us nothing and means nothing. Given that NASA is an enormously wasteful and unnecessary government agency that serves no real purpose, I find it hard to see how making its mission as modest as possible is a bad thing.

D’Souza trots out the very tired, already old canard that Obama does not believe in American exceptionalism. Even though he repeatedly said that his life story was possible “only in America” and he has repeated countless times his belief in the uniqueness, special role and exceptional qualities of America, because of one ambiguous answer he gave in a press conference overseas his critics have managed to figure out that Obama rejects something he explicitly endorses. It should worry them that they are leaning so heavily on such a thin reed, but these critics seem oblivious to how weak their argument is.

It is appropriate that the rest of D’Souza’s argument relies on imputing an ideology to Obama, anticolonialism, that he obviously does not accept. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that D’Souza has defined anticolonialism correctly. He writes:

Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America.

That claim about the source of Western prosperity is mostly untrue, but it certainly is true that there were many colonial powers that did invade, occupy and loot countries in Asia, Africa and South America. If Obama were an “anti-colonialist” in that he regards the old colonial empires poorly, this would actually put him very much in the American tradition and specifically in the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist tradition of the Democratic Party for much of the last century. That isn’t what D’Souza is claiming. He’s claiming that Obama is a “Third World” anti-colonialist and completely divorced from the American experience.

D’Souza goes on:

Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors.

This is hardly a controversial or strange idea. Newly independent, former colonies very often are economically dependent on their former rulers. This was true of the United States to some extent for more than a century after independence, and it has been true in many other cases. One need only look at the former Soviet Union and the continued dependence of many states on Russia as a major supplier of resources or as a major market for their goods and labor. Regardless, what does this have to do with Obama? Obama is actually a firm believer in the inevitability and desirability of global interdependence, and he seems to believe that neoliberal trade policy is an important part of this. On the whole, people who take anticolonialist arguments seriously do not like globalization or neoliberal trade policy, because they view these arrangements as exploitative, and there is zero evidence that Obama shares these views. There is substantial evidence showing that he does not share these views.

In case you hadn’t figured it out already, D’Souza makes his point explicit:

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying.

This is not incredible. It is inexcusably moronic. It is ideological Birtherism. What I mean by that is that D’Souza’s argument is another example of the embarrassing insistence coming from the right that America did not really produce Obama or the political views he holds and that the only way to understand him is to look elsewhere. For starters, it simply isn’t true that Obama “learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction.” He did not come “to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation.” Even when U.S. policies might have given him reason to see things that way over the decades, Obama did not see things that way.

All in all, D’Souza’s article reads like a bad conspiracy theory. On Obama’s support for progressive taxation, he writes:

If Obama shares his father’s anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more.

Or it could be that he believes that taxation should be highly progressive. Which seems more plausible?

On the Park51 project:

Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then again, perhaps he thinks a community center run by ecumenist Muslims that will have worship centers for Jews and Christians on private property with the overwhelming support of the local community is a remarkably peaceable and inoffensive endeavor. Which one makes more sense? Once again, this is the President who escalated the war in Afghanistan we’re talking about. If anyone is “unleashing the American bogey” from the anticolonialist perspective, it is Obama himself. While we’re on the subject, 9/11 did not push us into Iraq, and Obama would be the last one to believe that. As an opponent of the invasion, surely Obama would think that America foolishly jumped into Iraq, and he would not associate invading Iraq with 9/11, because they are not really related.

Considering how atrocious D’Souza’s argument is, why spend any time answering it? For one thing, when nonsense like this isn’t countered it tends to gain traction. Another reason is that conservative pundits and writers such as D’Souza have been indulging in so much evidence-free, ideological babbling for the last two years that many of them now seem convinced that this babbling is actually extremely serious, insightful commentary. If we are going to have anything remotely resembling an honest or informed debate over foreign policy or anything else during the remainder of Obama’s time in office, arguments like this one have to be knocked down.

Republicans and Democrats are tied at 46% among registered voters in Gallup’s weekly tracking of congressional voting preferences, marking a shift after five consecutive weeks in which the Republicans held the advantage. ~Gallup

Despite the change in polling, I recommend Jim Antle’s article on the midterms. He presents Republican advantages and disadvantages in a fair and matter-of-fact way, and he manages to go through the entire article without once referring to John Boehner as Speaker, which is more than we can say for some others. Of course, I suppose I would say that Jim is making sense when he writes the following:

The common thread in special elections Democrats have won is that they have succeeded in putting distance between themselves and the national party brand while their Republican opponents have tried to nationalize the election. Brown, by contrast, was successful in combining national and local themes while Coakley often behaved as if she had been dropped into Massachusetts by a UFO from Mars.

But how successful can Democratic incumbents be at denationalizing their races if they have a proven track record of voting in lockstep with the national party on controversial issues? The conditions do seem right for Republicans to retake Congress, with the major caveat of whether Republicans are prepared to take advantage of these conditions.

I wonder if the change in Gallup’s polling is going to temper any of the “tsunami”claims we’ve been hearing. Perhaps the best indication that the tsunami idea was mistaken was that Mark Halperin declared it to be obviously true.

One of the reasons why I continue to be bearish on Republican chances this fall is that I have close to zero confidence in the organizational and political skills of Republican leaders, especially when compared to their counterparts on the other side. This is that critical matter of being prepared to take advantage of favorable conditions. Even if there is the possibility of a “tsunami,” which is questionable, who actually believes that the Republican leadership currently in place can deliver? These are people so clueless that they want to rehash the “surge” debate two months before an election, apparently not realizing that the public is so eager to be out of Iraq that they will happily indulge Obama in his fabrication that “combat operations” have ended there.

Four years ago, the NRCC under Tom Reynolds was simply not up to the job of holding the House. In the next cycle, the likeable, doomed Tom Cole faced off against Chris van Hollen and his organization and lost, and now Pete Sessions is hoping to climb an even steeper hill than Cole faced and somehow outperform van Hollen. To this day, Republican leaders have no idea why they were sent into the minority. Sessions has the task of winning more seats in the House than the Democrats won in either of their successful cycles, and so far during his tenure Republicans haven’t won a single competitive special election except for the flukey result in Hawaii. It wasn’t just that things didn’t break the Republicans’ way in those cases. I would argue that was the intervention of the national party in the New York special elections and their candidates’ mouthing of cookie-cutter partisan platitudes that threw those seats to the Democrats. GOP leaders have made quite a habit of counting their seats before they are won, and it keeps blowing up in their faces. One would think they would learn by now to stop doing it, but these are not leaders who are interested in learning anything.

Bacevich complains loudly and frequently in Washington Rules that people who suggest things such as this are often denounced with the inevitably pejorative term “isolationist”, but if I comb back through the political science literature on what some called “Middle Western Isolationism” or “Midwestern Isolationism” (Billington, 1945; Smuckler, 1953; Rieselbach and Russett, 1960), it’s possible to see in Bacevich, a Midwesterner, an inheritor of this tradition — at least in terms of his preferences for how big the U.S. military should be and where it should be based and employed. If I were him, I would just own the term “isolationist” and let the haters hate. Instead of preemptively denouncing those who would accuse him of isolationism, it might have born more fruit had Bacevich instead asked his readers, in light of what you have seen in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan … why is isolationism so bad? ~Andrew Exum

Via Scoblete

Exum must know perfectly well why Prof. Bacevich doesn’t want to “own” the “isolationist” name. First of all, the word has always been intended and used as an insult designed to misrepresent the foreign policy views of the people who are thus labeled. As Greg says, it concedes too much, because it summons up the idea of a “Fortress America” that most non-interventionists did not and do not support, and this idea has been so widely and thoroughly mocked across the political spectrum that it becomes a huge burden for any non-interventionist or conservative realist argument. Obviously, it also carries all of the baggage of opposition to U.S. entry into WWII and later efforts to re-litigate the wisdom of entering WWII, and Prof. Bacevich has been emphatic that he sees that as misguided. Perhaps most important, it is a smear based in the false equation between an internationally engaged foreign policy and a willingness to enter into unnecessary foreign wars. It would be a lie for someone who does not actually want autarky and isolation to claim to be an “isolationist.” Finally, it means accepting the terms of the debate set by the militarists, which means that the debate will be biased even more in their favor than it already is.

The advice to “let the haters hate” is basically an invitation to self-sabotage or an ambush. The only “fruit” that this would have produced would have been this: a steady stream of self-satisfied arguments from hawks that Bacevich had finally “admitted” to being a dreaded “isolationist” and could therefore be dismissed from serious conversation from now on. It’s worth noting that this passage comes in the part of Exum’s review of Bacevich’s new book in which he is stressing what he liked about the book.

Over the weekend a commenter on my South Dakota post remarked that I had been “almost uniformly wrong” on my political race blogging for the last two years. That was an interesting claim, since I’m fairly sure that when it comes to House races my assessments of the special elections since Obama’s inauguration have been reasonably accurate. It’s true that it didn’t take great insight to recognize that Jim Tedisco was blowing an easy Republican win in NY-20. There were plenty of other people remarking on how poorly the GOP had to do to allow NY-23 to slip away for the first time in over a century. It was even easier in PA-12 to see that the Republican candidate was not going to win. It’s true that I never saw the Massachusetts Senate upset coming, but then the same might be said for the vast majority of observers.

When it comes to looking at House races during the past two years, I believe I have been correctly identifying the unifying theme that connects Republican failures in special House elections, and this is the tendency of the Republican candidate to run on a national party platform and to ignore or neglect local issues and interests. In NY-20 and NY-23, and again in PA-12, Republicans keep wanting to nationalize House races, and when they try this they are unsuccessful. Democratic candidates have been successful in these races because they have been resolutely parochial and preoccupied with their respective districts’ local concerns. If I understand Republican strategy for the midterms, it seems that they would like to nationalize the election and imitate their repeated failed attempts to hold or pick up seats in the last two years. Maybe that will work better during a general election. The GOP had better hope so. They now have the overwhelming majority of the media and the pundit class analyzing their impending victory almost as if it has already happened, so falling short will look even worse than before.

Most of the claims about the midterms we are hearing now continue to be based on the gaudy, seemingly incredible Republican advantage on generic ballot polling. As a matter of analysis, I find the obsession with the generic ballot poll to be something that unites Republican enthusiasts and Democratic doomsayers in their complete obliviousness to the variety of House races. The closer one looks at many of the individual races, the harder it becomes to see where the Republicans pick up all these seats they’re supposedly going to take over.

Obviously, an advantage in money isn’t everything, but when I see (via Weigel) the 8-to-1 money advantage belonging to Tom Perriello, the presumed dead man walking from VA-05, it makes me want to question my own assumption that he will lose. Of course, Perriello is probably finished because of the political leanings of his district, but most others can’t be taken for granted.

Walt Minnick in Idaho has an enormous 16-to-1 cash-on-hand advantage over his Republican challenger, and his seat is no longer seen as being all that vulnerable. If there is a tsunami coming, shouldn’t Democrats in Idaho (even if they are former Republicans who opposed every major piece of legislation for the past two years) be among the first swept out to sea? It did Jon Hostettler and Jim Leach no good to be antiwar, anti-Bush Republicans in 2006, but Minnick seems to have protected himself against the backlash. Why won’t other Blue Dogs be able to do the same thing?

I know I keep coming back to Travis Childers in MS-01, but he represents exactly the sort of district Republicans must win this year, and he is not doing that badly. Childers has a four-to-one cash-on-hand advantage, and he ran 17 points ahead of Obama in his district in 2008. According to the latest poll from there, Childers currently leads his opponent by five points, and he has positive favorability and job approval ratings. Presumably a GOP tsunami should be swamping a Democrat in northern Mississippi in a district that gave Roger Wicker almost 66% of the vote in 2006, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. At the very least, the race is so competitive that Republicans cannot assume that they will win MS-01, and if they can’t win there they are fast running out of easy pick-ups.

The point is not that Republicans aren’t going to gain a large number of seats. Gaining 25-30 seats is still significant. 35 or 38 would be even more impressive, but it still won’t be enough. My point here is that Republicans will have to win every single one of the seats I have mentioned here to manage a takeover of the House. As well as they are polling on the generic ballot, they are not doing nearly as well in several of the races that they must win.

Update: Buried in the new ABC poll is an interesting result. When asked whether their vote in the midterms will be to express opposition to or support for Obama, 25% said support and 27% said opposition, and 49% said that Obama is not a factor. Compare that to poll ahead of the ’06 midterms in which 35% said opposition and 18% said support. That is what a backlash against a President looks like.

Joseph Bottum has an entire article in The Weekly Standard that is supposed to show what an abnormal election year this is by describing the political difficulties of a Democratic House member from…South Dakota. It’s true, three-term Rep. Herseth Sandlin is vulnerable, and her at-large seat is listed on CQPolitics’ race rankings as a toss-up, but then again this is South Dakota (not the most natural Democratic territory in the country) in a midterm election year with 9.6% unemployment during a Democratic administration. Bottum claims:

If South Dakota is a bellwether, a synecdoche, and a marker, November 2 will be truly abysmal for the Democrats.

A brief review of South Dakota electoral history shows this to be silly. South Dakota has sent members of both parties to Congress, but it’s fairly misleading to treat it as an evenly-divided swing state. At the peak of Democratic political fortunes two years ago, Obama won just 45% of the vote, and Kerry and Gore both received a smaller share than that. That makes South Dakota fairly unrepresentative of the nation as a whole, and it makes South Dakota very different from the many swing districts where control of the House will be decided. What is interesting about Bottum’s “scarlet D” conceit in the article is that it is hardly a given that Herseth Sandlin is going to lose. There are some Democratic incumbents in the South and elsewhere who are going to lose and there is pretty much nothing they can do to stop it. In South Dakota, there is a Blue Dog Democrat who has voted the right way on controversial legislation as far as most of her constituents are concerned, she is personally popular, and her worst election result was in 2004 with 53% of the vote (running 15 points ahead of Kerry). She also has a better than two-to-one money advantage over her challenger, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense how she would lose. There must be any number of more vulnerable House incumbents from more representative districts that would tell us something significant about the public mood right now. Given the polling we’ve been seeing, reporting on the possible loss of a Democrat in South Dakota tells us almost nothing.

Via John Tabin, I noticed this back and forth between James Poulos and Nick Gillespie on Glenn Beck, public religiosity and libertarianism. James focuses on part of the two sentences that follow:

But they [Beck rally organizers and attendees] also want the government to be super-effective in securing the borders, they worry about an undocumented fall in morals, and they are emphatic that genuine religiosity should be a feature of the public square. Which is to say, like most American voters, they may well want from government precisely the things that it really can’t deliver.

James goes on to contest the idea that wanting religious expression in the public square has something to do with wanting something from government. Overall, James is right that these are two fairly different things. When James quotes Gillespie, he elides the first part of the sentence that refers to securing the borders, and this means that James spends most of his time addressing the rally’s religiosity without getting at the things that really unsettle libertarians about a lot of the attendees. While libertarians such as Gillespie may not like religiosity as a feature of the public square, it seems to me that religiosity is not the main thing that bothers them about the crowd at last weekend’s rally. One of the main things that bothers these libertarians is that the crowd was apparently interested in securing the borders, and more than this most were probably interested in enforcing immigration laws in the interior of the country. Indeed, my guess is that many of the people in the crowd would be content with the government being merely mediocre in policing the borders if the government were enforcing those laws with some reasonable regularity. I have to wonder if most of the attendees at that rally believe the government is capable of being “super-effective” at doing anything. Regardless, the crowd’s presumed support for border security is the main thing that prevents Gillespie from taking the “proto-libertarians” at the rally seriously. It is the one thing he mentions that actually has policy implications.

This reminded me of Brink Lindsey’s cover piece for Reason’s symposium on libertarians’ political alliances and Will Wilkinson’s recent post at Democracy in America on the Beck rally. One was written before the pair’s (presumably forced) departure from the Cato Institute last month, and the other was written just a few days ago. Both pieces identify conservative opposition to mass immigration and support for enforcing immigration laws as some of the reasons they regard contemporary conservatism as rotten and unacceptable. Support for border security and enforcing immigration laws is simply proof of conservatives’ “brutish nationalism” and “anti-immigrant xenophobia” for Lindsey, and Wilkinson refers to Arizona’s attempt to enforce immigration laws as a “nativist crackdown.” (Perhaps Wilkinson doesn’t know what nativist means, or that he simply wants to use the word incorrectly for polemical purposes.)

One reason why this stands out when I read these articles is that most of their other complaints against conservatives have something to back them up, but their complaints on immigration policy are mostly hot air. Having defined the enforcement of immigration laws as illiberal, authoritarian and xenophobic, they conclude that this is what most conservatives are on this issue, and that’s all they need to know. It doesn’t enter into their thinking that a significant part of the support for an “enforcement-first” position on immigration in general and the Arizona law in particular comes primarily from a law-and-order attitude. Neither are they interested that the Arizona legislature was acting out of frustration that the public’s strong support for enforcing these laws seems to have minimal effect on the federal government’s attention to the matter. It is difficult to trust Lindsey’s assessment that this is a product of “brutish nationalism” when he pairs the enforcement of existing, constitutional immigration law with foreign wars, and it is even harder to trust Wilkinson’s claims about the “Christian nationalism” at the Beck rally when he believes that patriotism is essentially the expression of deference to the coercive apparatus of the state and that love of country should bemerely incidental.

Certainly, Lindsey and Wilkinson have many other problems with contemporary conservatism. Lindsey’s Reason article seemed designed to define support for liberty in such a way that no social conservative, immigration restrictionist or traditionalist Christian could be anything other than anti-liberty. Wilkinson has spent years writing similar things. In the process of denouncing a third of their countrymen as hopelessly anti-liberty, they even get a few things right about jingoism and militarism, but they actually define support for liberty so narrowly and restrictively that many of the people here at TAC who are very critical of many of the same flaws in conservatism or conservatives strongly sympathetic to the work of the Cato Institute are automatically excluded. In the same way, these libertarians will never really consider attendees at Beck’s rally to be truly supportive of liberty so long as they retain any of their law-and-order attitudes and patriotic attachments.

This strikes me as eerily similar to neoconservative promises of “regional transformation” following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Just as those proved to be bunk, I think it’s safe to assume that any “echo effect” caused by resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute will be similarly insignificant. We should have learned by now that individual societies have their own grievances and their own dynamics and that basing U.S. policy on sweeping predictions about how they’ll react to changes in other countries is a recipe for trouble. ~Greg Scoblete on Clemons

For the most part, I agree with Greg that we should put no more confidence in an “echo effect” resulting from any deal made by Israeli and Palestinian leaders than war opponents put in the “demonstration effect” that was supposed to follow regime change in Iraq. If the interminable peace process finally did come to some reasonably satisfactory conclusion complete with a genuinely sovereign Palestine and the resolution of major outstanding questions on land, water rights, the status of Jerusalem, and all the rest, we need to understand that showing a willingness to address one set of grievances isn’t going to make other grievances elsewhere disappear. Muslims who are resentful of U.S. backing for authoritarian regimes and monarchies in the region are unlikely to become less resentful, because their main grievances will still be unaddressed. Indeed, there might be greater discontent in another country where the population feels that its grievances are just as important and significant as those of the Palestinians.

That said, there is a difference between what Clemons describes and the promise of “regional transformation” that war supporters made before the invasion of Iraq. At both the official and popular level, Muslim countries throughout the region and around the world make a point of saying that they want a resolution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. That doesn’t mean that such a resolution is necessarily realistic or that it will fix any other issues in the region, but we can pretty reliably assume that this is a major priority of most of the governments and publics in Muslim-majority countries. There were no calls for the U.S. to solve the region’s problems by launching an unnecessary war and throwing one of the larger countries in the region into complete chaos. On the contrary, there was vehement, constant opposition to such a course of action among the countries of the region that was going to be “transformed” as a result. The “echo effect” may not happen, either, but there is a much better chance that a resolution to this conflict will produce goodwill and positive political consequences for the U.S. among many of the Muslim publics Washington has futilely tried to win over in the past. The effect would probably be minimal, and it would be very brief, but it might give the U.S. some of its lost credibility back and repair America’s reputation to some extent.

In any case, the “echo effect” wasn’t the main point of Clemons’ argument. The core of Clemons’ argument was that the White House should “hard wire” linkage of the conflict to the Iranian nuclear issue, as the title of his post makes clear. The idea of linking this intractable conflict to Iran policy seems crazy to me. It isn’t just that the idea of linkage doesn’t have much going for it based on past precedents, but that there is absolutely no reason to link these two very distinct issues together. For linkage to make sense, one has to accept that there is an impending threat to vital U.S. and allied interests from Iran, and one also has to believe that Israel and the Gulf states are unwilling to collaborate effectively against this Iranian threat until the status of Palestine is settled and they can all normalize relations with Israel. If the Iranian threat doesn’t exist or if it is grossly exaggerated, resolving the conflict between Israel and Palestine therefore becomes much less urgent. If the Gulf states are truly terrified of Iran, they will presumably offer at least tacit support for any Israeli anti-Iranian action anyway. If they are trying to extract Israeli concessions on Palestine, the Saudis and other Gulf state governments have been doing a really poor job of hiding their anxieties about Iran.

Clemons makes the argument for linkage this way:

The interesting thing is that progress on a Palestinian state is what Arab governments may most need in order to be more robustly supportive of American, European, and Israeli designs with Iran. Delivering on Palestine may actually create conditions in which these states accept an “all options on the table” approach to Iran.

This is the sort of behind-the-back, triple-bank-shot approach to foreign policy that simply makes no sense. It’s a bit like arguing that the U.S. should try to force India to budge on the status of Kashmir to get the Pakistani army to take fighting the Taliban more seriously. As it turned out, this was completely unnecessary, it would have been nothing more than a free gift to hard-liners in Pakistan’s military, and talking about it just made the Indians upset and nervous. All of this is premised on the idea that the U.S. should want to get a lot of Arab states on board for an “all options on the table” approach to Iran, when this is the last thing the U.S. should be doing. What is most bizarre is that Clemons seems to be saying that an Israeli-Palestinian peace is essential so that the U.S. and our allies can escalate conflict with Iran. This is a weird, inverted version of the foolish, old hawkish claim that the “road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad” in that Clemons seems to be saying that the “road to Tehran runs through Jerusalem.”

Clemons’ reliance on the charge of anachronism makes his overall argument pretty weak. Consider this passage:

These naysayers surround themselves with and thrive in anachronistic assessments of these challenges in a way that have been appropriate and worked out over the last several decades — but which are simply out of place and passively reckless in the post-Cold War period.

It’s true that the world is different from the way it was during the Cold War, but the basic dynamics of inter-state relations haven’t changed all that much. If resolving the conflict between Israel and Palestine wasn’t essential to other geopolitical issues in the past, it probably isn’t essential now, because the secret is that the conflict and the parties to the conflict are not nearly as important as we and they keep pretending. Seeing his disapproval of the “passively reckless” views of naysayers, I am struck by how depressingly similar Clemons’ rhetoric is to the fiercely urgent claims that “9/11 changed everything” and that those attacks had dramatically and totally changed how we should assess international threats from then on. This sort of hastiness has caused a lot of people to make some huge mistakes in the last decade, and we would be wise not to encourage more of it.

On one side of this question, there is ample evidence based on historical precedent and experience that says that tying these two issues together makes no sense, and on the other side Clemons is insistently telling us how everything is different now. That’s not a good sign for Clemons’ argument. Incrementalism might take the U.S. over a cliff, but there’s a much better chance of going over the cliff if you leap off of it, and that seems to be what Clemons is inviting the administration to do. Let’s hope they decline the offer.