My new column for The Week is now online.

Erik Kain writes in his response:

Rather than promise to filibuster health reform, I wish Brown would bring some of the experience he has had with Massachusetts reform to the table and work to strengthen the bill. That he will not is my only sticking point against Brown, but it is a very substantial sticking point.

Let’s agree for the sake of discussion that Erik is correct that a strong mandate is imperative to cost containment. If that is so, how is it to Brown’s credit that he supported the Massachusetts legislation? If the federal bill has a weak mandate and if Erik is right that this will do a poor job of cost containment, the state legislation does not seem to have had a mandate that was any better. As I understand it, MassCare imposed an individual mandate and provided subsidies for those who could not afford insurance. According to reports I have read and by Brown’s own admission, there were no meaningful cost containment measures in the 2006 bill that he supported. Absent affordable coverage, achieving universal or near-universal coverage requires a subsidy, which Massachusetts has been providing, and it is this provision that has been eating up so much of the budget.

The bill has become a cause of serious fiscal problems in Massachusetts, the very same kind of fiscal problems Brown now claims as a reason for opposing the federal bill. Nonetheless, he continues to tout his support for the legislation, and he believes other states should “follow our example.” So they should follow the example of mandating expensive coverage and having taxpayers foot an ever-increasing bill? Naturally, Brown opposes the federal bill because he aspires to a federal Republican office and opposition to the administration’s agenda is a basic requirement of being accepted by the national party and conservative activists, so there was never any question of Brown bringing his experience with MassCare to change the federal bill. The point here is not that Brown shouldn’t oppose the Senate version of the bill. The point is that it strains credulity to listen to him reject the federal bill while urging other states to imitate a deeply flawed MassCare when it lacks the cost containment elements that make the federal bill similarly flawed and deserving of opposition.

Erik won’t like this comparison, but Brown’s attempt to have it both ways on this issue seems a lot like when Palin took credit for jacking up windfall profits taxes on oil corporations in one breath and then in the next played the part of champion of anti-tax activists and friend to Joe the Plumber. Back home, sticking it to oil corporations and spreading the wealth were all right by her, but on the national stage there was nothing more offensive to her than the redistribution of wealth. In Alaska, she was the populist sending out bigger checks to voters to buy support and popularity, and on the campaign trail she was the scourge of socialism. Arguably, this is a product of the national party’s ability to force rising politicians to conform and abandon whatever traits or ideas made them popular and electable at the local and state level, but Brown is no more immune to it than Palin was. Erik’s enthusiasm for Brown as a would-be refomist is likely to lead to disappointment.

When this blog began over five years ago, the disputed Ukrainian presidential election and the Orange “revolution” were among the first things I discussed. I was extremely skeptical of the significance of the “revolution,” I was very critical of the unthinking Western embrace of the criminal oligarch Viktor Yushchenko, and I was hostile to the proposed inclusion of Ukraine in NATO that Washington seemed so intent on pushing. Now a new presidential vote is taking place, and the incumbent Yushchenko has been eliminated in the first round after receiving record-low approval ratings. That is good news for Ukraine, but the damage of Yushchenko’s tenure has been done, and it is not much consolation to know that he will not have another term for even greater misrule. It is remotely possible that Yanukovych could manage to win the run-off, but it is much more likely that Tymoshenko will be the new president. As Douglas Birch writes today, both candidates recognize the reality that the relationship with Russia is crucial to Ukraine.

Late last year, a survey of post-communist countries showed that Ukrainians were one of two nations with abysmally low levels of support for democratic government and capitalism. Given the dire financial straits in which Ukraine finds itself and the disastrously dysfunctional government they have had over the last five years, it is not surprising that Ukrainians have soured on both. The absurdly high and unrealistic expectations for internal reform and charting a “pro-Western” course following Yushchenko’s victory have been dashed, and Ukrainians appear to be experiencing the acute disillusionment with Western models that Russians experienced during the 1990s. There is not much reason to expect that the regional and personal antagonisms that have done so much to cripple effective government in Ukraine will go away, but the good news is that tensions with Moscow are likely to be reduced and any disputes over gas pipelines, Crimea or the Black Sea Fleet are less likely to escalate into a crisis.

What this should teach us is that neighbors of a major power are going to be bound by their economic ties with and dependence on that power, and that the major power is naturally going to exercise political influence over its neighbors. Attempts to halt or reverse this lead to political paralysis or military confrontation, and the major power ends up retaining its influence anyway. It is the general population of the countries that Washington has been trying to “free” from Moscow’s orbit that suffers the consequences of these ill-advised, unnecessary and provocative attempts to pull Russia’s neighbors out of that orbit. The remarkable thing is that the attempt to take Ukraine and Georgia out of Moscow’s orbit has resulted in tying both even more closely to Russia, and it has made the neighboring states’ chances of charting independent courses in the near future far worse. Perhaps if Yushchenko and Saakashvili had not received such enthusiastic, blind and reckless support from the West, and perhaps if Westerners had not been so ready to encourage all their worst instincts by showering them with unthinking approval, the causes they claimed to represent might not be as politically moribund as they now are. What’s more, perhaps the countries Western sympathizers thought they were helping with their foolish enthusiasm might not be as badly wrecked as they are.

This is an interesting claim – that totalitarianism “inevitably” threatens American security. Looking at Freedom House’s own rankings in map-form here it sure doesn’t look like that. There’s unfree Africa, not posing much of a threat. And parts of Southeast Asia, not free and not particularly threatening. There’s the unfree Middle East, populated mostly with U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Jordan. All not free. There’s unfree China, which isn’t exactly an ally of the U.S., but it’s not an overt threat either. There’s unfree Russia, which is contesting American influence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but is pale shadow of the Cold War threat to American interests it once was.

Indeed, scan the list of unfree countries and quite a few of them pose no threat whatsoever to the United States. Far from being an inevitable threat, the existence of political repression appears to be just what it always was, an unfortunate expression of man’s inhumanity to man. ~Greg Scoblete

Scoblete has this right, which is why Kirchick’s claim about the inevitable threat from totalitarianism isn’t very interesting at all. This is a less developed version of the standard democratist claim that the nature of foreign regimes determines their foreign policy: unfree and authoritarian governments, which Kagan always insists on dubbing autocracies, should be expected to oppose democratic governments in international affairs because they are authoritarian. It is not enough for them to acknowledge that all states have divergent interests, and they seem not to realize that other major powers would resist U.S.-led policies regardless of their regime type. Democratists feel compelled to make the ideologically-loaded and false claim on top of this that unfree governments necessarily threaten free governments. This ultimately makes the other states’ liberalization and democratization into national security imperatives. Even though it is democratists who insist on aggressively subverting other governments, while the authoritarian states have opted to hide behind state sovereignty and preserving relative global stability, democratists seem to think that “we” have to undermine “their” system before “they” can undermine “ours.” It is an echo of the fear of Soviet-led global revolution, but, as Scoblete shows us, it no longer has even the slightest basis in reality.

Having wrongly assumed that unfree states “inevitably” threaten the U.S., democratists then make another completely baseless assumption. Democratists believe that if these states had liberal democratic governments, they would not be as “threatening.” In fact, there is good reason to think that as other states transition from authoritarian to democratic government the more difficult it becomes for Washington to reconcile divergent state interests. Obviously, I don’t think it is a problem that Turkey, Japan and Brazil, for example, have started pursuing more independent and even assertive foreign policies, nor do I view this new independence as a threat, but from a hegemonist perspective the empowerment of the majorities in these nations and the political weakening of “reliable” elites has been distressing at best. We have also seen more dramatic examples of democratization working against U.S. influence in Venezuela, Bolivia and, to a lesser extent, Ecuador. Democratization can make satellites rebellious or even hostile, and it makes once-“reliable” allies harder to bring into line. Democratization makes it much more difficult for regional allies to ignore that U.S. policies in their respective regions do not actually seem to serve the interests of many allies. When real democratization occurs and other nations elect governments that represent their interests, it does not result in the installation of reliable “pro-Western” lackeys, but quite often leads to the rise of politicians who are ready and willing to resist and criticize U.S. and European policies when these run counter to their national interests.

Most of the unfree states around the world have largely limited themselves to an authoritarian model. Some are populist authoritarian regimes led by nationalist strongmen and/or demagogues, others are organized around a central party and military leadership, and still others are built around personal dictatorship headed by a member of a particular family. Some of the latter in Arab countries have been our allies for many decades, and during the Cold War Washington frequently allied with anticommunist authoritarian governments. A number of anticommunist authoritarian regimes transitioned to democratic government, occasionally because Washington brought pressure to bear. These states had not been threats to American security earlier when they had illiberal and dictatorial regimes and then suddenly ceased posing a threat to American security when they had become democratic. On the contrary, they were bulwarks of American security policy in their regions. In some cases, they were reliable anticommunist allies because they were unfree regimes that served the interests of a minority of the population.

North Korea is probably the last state that can be correctly described as totalitarian. China, Cuba et al. are police states and undoubtedly repressive, but even these cannot be classed as totalitarian. North Korea is potentially dangerous to its neighbors because of its large standing army, but in terms of threatening American security it is pathetically weak. This is an important point. Totalitarian states wield considerable power, but this power is largely directed inwards at the control of their own populations. The development of any other institutions becomes a threat to the ability to concentrate all power in a relative few hands and endangers the regime’s control of society. Repression of all other institutions makes totalitarian states progressively weaker, both economically and politically, which also makes them much less threatening.

I have never quite understood why so many national security hawks and hegemonists like to wrap themselves in the mantle of democracy promotion. Of course, it is easy to imagine that it is just empty rhetoric or an attempt to make their aggressive and provocative policies appear as if they had some redeeming quality, but they keep coming back to the idea so frequently that it is difficult to dismiss as mere cynical posturing. Part of the explanation may be that they so completely misunderstand the effects of democratization that they genuinely believe it is a boon for U.S. hegemony, but support for democracy promotion remains strong despite all the evidence that it increasingly creates stronger opposition to U.S. policies.

One part of their problem must be that they seem to be always and forever analyzing every international conflict and crisis through the lens of the 1930s and ’40s, and they understand the dynamics of world politics according to their rather distorted, simplified memory of what happened before and during WWII. According to this memory, the interwar period was marked by the decline of democratic powers relative to authoritarian and totalitarian powers, the latter were unremittingly hostile to the former, and the inability of the democratic powers to counter and resist the rise of these other powers led to war. Even if this described that period of time correctly, these hawks seem to think this dynamic is the way things always work. They are weighed down by the constant comparisons they have frequently made between our present predicament and the great struggles of WWII and the Cold War, which gives them an inflated idea of how much power United States needs to project around the world, and many of them remain in thrall to a distorted memory of the end of the Cold War, according to which American containment somehow triggered the revolutions of 1989. Indeed, this distorted memory was strong that it shaped their misguided thinking of what would happen in Iraq after the invasion.

There is a tendency among these hawks and hegemonists to grossly overestimate the strength of other states and foreign threats. As real threats from other major powers have receded in the last twenty years, the need to emphasize inevitable conflict between ideologies has become that much greater. The hawks and hegemonists have the odd profile of paranoid triumphalists: they are certain that their ideology and vision will prevail, but they are also desperately frightened of anything that might possibly threaten a victory that they otherwise claim is inevitable. Hawks and hegemonists also tend to embrace a simplified progressive nationalist narrative of American history in which the forces of freedom and good prevail over unfreedom and evil, and according to the story these forces prevailed because Americans were willing to take up arms. It may be this last item that is most significant in explaining the weird preoccupation with democracy promotion. According to their selective interpretation of American history, projecting American power and promoting democracy and freedom have always gone together, and so apparently they must always go together. This ideological commitment seems unwavering, despite every indication that promoting democracy and maintaining U.S. hegemony conflict with one another more and more.

P.S. It’s also worth drawing attention to Kirchick’s weak attack against the so-called “neo-isolationism” that is supposed to be on the rise in the U.S. That misleading Pew result has been very useful to many different arguments. In this case, Kirchick is dusting off the tedious use of “isolationism” as a bogey to scare Americans into supporting an even more activist and ambitious foreign policy overseas. As I have said several times now, a large majority of the respondents to that survey didn’t really believe in “minding our own business,” and two-thirds of them were ready to attack Iran. The chimera of latent American “isolationism” is almost as useful to hawks and hegemonists as whipping up the public into a frenzy over small or non-existent threats.

Erik Kain rallies to Scott Brown’s defense:

While the op-ed doesn’t address spending issues explicitly, it’s not as though Republicans or Brown in particular are calling for more spending. Perhaps spending cuts aren’t the best idea in the midst of a recession any more than hiking taxes. Additionally, one of the reasons Brown states for his opposition to the healthcare reform bill is its increased spending and tax burden. Perhaps he should also be proposing ways to cut current spending, but certainly there is nothing inconsistent with opposing future spending either.

Here’s what Erik is missing and what Andrew found so irritating about the op-ed: Brown opens by listing his his concerns, including his concern over our $12 trillion in debt, and then urges tax-cutting without stating how this would even begin to address this massive debt. Fiscal conservatism isn’t a combination of the endless desire for tax reduction and lip service to mounting debt. Fiscal conservatives recognize large public debt to be a cause of economic weakness. Debt reduction is as much a part of any “pro-growth” policy as tax-cutting. Debt reduction has just as much to do with controlling the size of government as cutting taxes does. That Republicans predictably always prefer the latter is a source of increasing frustration for all of us on the right who would like to see both some glimmer of intelligence in Republican policy proposals and some readiness to address policy problems that exist today rather than addressing the problems that existed in 1981.

Absent significant increases in revenue to begin paying off that debt, tax reductions are a means to buy short-term support at the expense of our long-term fiscal and economic health. In Brown’s case, I suspect that one reason he included his “across-the-board tax cut” proposal in this particular op-ed is that he wanted to find some way to invoke John Kennedy and tie himself to the famous Massachusetts dynasty whose seat, of course, he will not be filling. Fiscal conservatives should find this much debt abhorrent because of the economic burden it places on the present and the obligations it imposes on our posterity, but other than saying “no more stimulus!” Brown tells us nothing about how he would work to reduce the debt. What bothers Andrew, and what I think moves him to dub Brown’s op-ed as “mindless,” is the readiness to exploit voter discontent over public debt without any willingness to propose how to pay it off, especially when it was his party at the national level that racked up a majority of that debt. Reflexive Republican opposition to new spending would not be so hard to take seriously if there were any sign that national Republicans were trying to eliminate the debt they and their predecessors left us. There are few signs of this, and Brown is not giving us any reason to think he takes this problem seriously.

Granted, this is a candidate’s op-ed the week before an election. No one expects him to lay out a detailed budget proposal. After all, even the House Republican leadership has difficulty doing that during budget negotiations! Brown is also running in Massachusetts, so I wouldn’t expect him to make radical calls for eliminating entitlement programs. Brown does at least save us the irritation of telling us how all of our budgets problems can be fixed by cutting out “wasteful spending” and earmarks, but he could offer one or two examples of a progam or department he thinks could be reduced or abolished. As it is, there is nothing.

Where I think the charge of “Romney-like cynicism” sticks is in Brown’s desire to have it both ways on health care. He voted for MassCare, which means that he endorsed the state’s individual insurance mandate, and now that he is trying to leave town he makes noises about controlling cost, which was something the legislature did not even attempt to address when the bill passed. Controlling cost is something a system with a universal mandate cannot do.

The federal legislation Brown opposes is not that different from the Massachusetts bill he supported. He sees the federal bill as a fiscal disaster, so how can he really say that he still supports the state system when it shares some of the flaws of the federal legislation he rejects? He says this because he assumes MassCare is popular enough in the state and because he is on record supporting it, but he also knows that he cannot possibly win Republican and conservative backing if he gave any hint that he might support Democratic health care legislation in Washington. The trouble here is that he does not admit that supporting MassCare was mistaken, as he might, nor does he say that he has learned from the flawed product the state legislature created, which might help make sense of his record and his current position on the federal bill. Instead, he wants to have it all by retaining his moderate Republican record to assuage uncertain independent voters while affirming his party-line opposition to the federal health care bill.

Come to think of it, this is not quite Romney-like cynicism, because at least Romney has pretended to change positions as electoral circumstances demanded. Brown is trying to occupy both sides of the health care debate at the same time even as he seems to claim that there is no contradiction in doing so. Both Massachusetts voters and national Republicans have reason to wonder which side he will eventually take when it comes time to vote on the bill. Most likely, as a freshman Senator he will fall in line with whatever the leadership says. He is being quite plain about his opposition to the federal bill, but I wonder whether voters will find his inevitable party-line voting to be at odds with his claim to represent “all independent-thinking citizens.”

David Brooks is right that culture and habits matter, but this one line rang false:

There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile.

Of course, it seems odd to count the first part of this statement against practitioners of voodoo at the present time, since a natural disaster is one of the most obvious ways in which we see the capriciousness of life on display, but more important it seems to me that Brooks’ description simply gets voodoo wrong. He is describing these beliefs as if they were fatalistic, when practitioners of voodoo believe that they can use their rites to influence things and be empowered.

There is also something about this remark that reminds me of old, fairly absurd stereotypes of Catholic societies as stagnant and uncreative. Haitians are also overwhelmingly Catholic, and many of them practice voodoo as well, but why should we assume that their religious practices are the destructive influences in their society? Isn’t it just as plausible that the social function of voodoo is attempt to reclaim some power over circumstances amid misfortunes and adversity? Viewed in that way, it could be seen at the very least as a socially stabilizing mechanism for coping with life’s burdens. The line rang false all the more because it was followed by the far more significant observation that “[t]here are high levels of social mistrust.” When trying to discern reasons for social dysfunction and weak institutions, social mistrust would seem to be the overwhelmingly more relevant factor. Further, it is probably the case that shared religious beliefs are a source of social solidarity and cohesion, and so would potentially be a means of building social trust, which would make such beliefs part of any larger solution.

Andrew:

The Netanyahu government has all but declared war on the Obama administration and then openly disses a vital ally, Turkey.

The Netanyahu government certainly shares in the blame for the deterioration in relations with both Washington and Ankara, but there are several factors here that this statement obscures. First of all, the Netanyahu government is not Israel, and it does not represent all of Israel, so the attitude problem Andrew identifies is not “Israel’s attitude,” but the attitude of a government whose largest two parties received a distinct minority of the vote at the last election. After Lieberman was given the foreign affairs portfolio, we had to expect that the conduct of Israeli foreign policy was going to become more combative, short-sighted and reckless. Lieberman is proving to be a perfect foil for Erdogan’s demagogic posturing on foreign policy and the growing anti-Israel sentiment in the Turkish public. Israelis can see the results of this kind of foreign policy, and it seems unlikely that they are going to reward it. Already the government is being excoriated for its incompetence:

The Israeli media on Thursday slammed the government’s handling of a diplomatic row with Turkey in which it humiliated Ankara’s ambassador and then retreated with public apologies.

Incredibly, the one Israeli paper that has come to the defense of Ayalon and Lieberman has been Ha’aretz on the grounds that the pair were defending national honor!

Turkish-Israeli relations have been in decline since at least 2006. That increasingly negative sentiment in Turkey did not come out of nowhere, nor is it simply the product of AKP propaganda or of the “eastern” or “Islamic” tilt of Turkish policy. Prior to the war in Lebanon, which was extremely unpopular in Turkey, Erdogan’s government enjoyed reasonably good relations with Israel. Even before the Gaza operation, Erdogan was operating as a trusted go-between with Syria. Gaza was really the turning point, when Erdogan felt that he had been deceived by Olmert during the days leading up to Cast Lead. The Turkish PM saw the Gaza operation as being partly timed to sabotage his efforts as a mediator with Syria. The operation itsef incensed Turkish opinion, and Erdogan played to the crowd as he always does.

Things continued to spiral downwards with the confronation at Davos, and relations worsened even more after the provocative decision to exclude Israel from joint military exercises. Even if we want to say that this decision was as much a part of Erdogan’s jockeying for position against the military at home as it was an insult to Israel, the effect was the same. It is not as if the “dissing” has been all in one direction. Naturally, most “pro-Israel” commentators are going to view the last few years as an uninterrupted string of Turkish attacks on a blameless Israel, which is absurd, but that doesn’t mean that the opposite view of a blameless Turkey is correct. A major part of the problem is that Israel is acting as if it has all the advantages in the relationship and as if Turkey needs Israel more than Israel needs Turkey. This is a horrible misreading of the situation in the region. Turkey has been improving its relations and deepening commercial ties with all of its neighbors, and Israel has been doing almost the exact opposite. Minor disputes and diplomatic rows happen even between allies, but Israel does not have the same luxury of damaging its relationship with Turkey that Turkey has in poking fingers in Israel’s eye.

The television series that sparked the row in question, Valley of the Wolves, contained elements that would understandably offend Israelis. By itself, the issue seems a trivial one as a matter of international relations, but when viewed against this background of deepening mistrust and anger it is easier to see why the Israeli government wanted to slight the Turkish ambassador. With someone such as Lieberman in charge of the Israeli foreign ministry, the television show served as the perfect sort of symbolic problem nationalists love to exploit for their own purposes. The purpose of such exercises is not to accomplish anything valuable, but to engage in public theatrics of outrage to demonstrate to one’s core supporters that you are defending national honor. Of couse, in this case it backfired when Ankara escalated the row. If our State Department were run by similarly incompetent, boorish types, our government might have engaged in the same kind of pettiness over the content of Metal Storm. The problem is that Turkey might have to put up with such behavior from Washington, but increasingly it does not have to endure even minor mistreatment from Israel.

As for U.S.-Israel relations, yes, the Netanyahu government has resisted the administration on settlement policy, but the administration deserves some criticism for how it handled all of this. If the administration had been serious in its desire to pressure Israel on this point, it would have been willing to take the necessary steps to apply pressure to Israel’s government. It should at least have been willing to say that it might take such steps, but that was a confrontation Obama evidently did not want to have. As it turned out, the administration was not willing to take the political risks to follow through, Netanyahu called his bluff, and the settlement freeze proposal died. Netanyahu leads a coalition of mostly nationalist parties, and parties of all governments have supported settlement expansion in defiance of all agreements, so the Israeli response was not only predictable but virtually inevitable. Obama gave the impression he wanted to take on Netanyahu, which was surprising, and Netanyahu made just enough of a concession to appear cooperative without having given up anything. Having met resistance, Obama stopped, and meanwhile Netanyahu has consolidated public support at home.

If Netanyahu and his government have a bad attitude, Obama has shown no desire to do what would be required to change it. Meanwhile, this attitude is a gift to Erdogan, whose demagoguery will continue to yield political benefits for him and his party at home.

Now — Scott Brown has run as a conservative candidate, and not a moderate, and isn’t terribly popular with the GOP establishment. That makes him all the more attractive to the anti-establishment factions in the TP movement. There are plenty of Tea Partiers who want to buck the two party system, and plenty more who wouldn’t support a pro-choicer, but there seem to be more than a bucketful of them who want to leverage their energy into getting Republicans elected to Congress — Republicans who can be counted on to block the Democratic Party’s agenda. ~Marc Ambinder

The interesting thing is that the activist support for Scott Brown seems to be somewhat different from the inexplicably nationalized nature of Hoffman’s campaign and the overwhelmingly national sources of his support. Instead of fitting the cookie-cutter model of the nationally-acceptable, talk radio-approved conservative, Scott Brown seems more suited to and interested in the state he wants to represent. Despite being pretty much a classic moderate Massachusetts Republican in the Weld-Romney mold, he seems to be winning Tea Party and movement activist support, and he seems to be winning it because he has a better-than-expected chance of winning in traditionally very difficult territory. Interestingly, he has distanced himself from the GOP much as Romney did when he first ran for Senate, but in the present environment Brown’s self-declared independence is both politically smart in Massachusetts and it has not been a cause of conservative activist dismay.

So Tea Party activists in the Northeast are backing a viable candidate in Massachusetts to seize the opportunity of competing for an open Senate seat. This should make clear that the nature of the Tea Party agenda is going to depend on the region where the activists are operating, and it should also emphasize how relatively unimportant social conservative issues are to the Tea Party agenda, whose focus is heavily fiscal and economic. The willingness to acknowledge regional political differences is an encouraging sign that these activists could combine their anti-establishment populists instincts with attention to local political conditions and grievances. That shows the flexibility needed to rebuild a national political coalition.

It also suggests that the specter of vote-splitting between Republican candidates and Tea Party activist-backed candidates is mostly the product of wishful thinking on the part of national Democratic committeemen. Tea Partiers may be quite ready to support reasonably tolerable Republican candidates, so long as those candidates have not crossed certain red lines of offering support to the administration’s agenda. Even though Crist is closer to movement conservatives in some ways on paper than Brown, Crist crossed the red line of actively endorsing the stimulus legislation. It seems that this, more than anything else, has been killing Crist during the primary.

Granted, the vote next week is a special election in a midterm year, so we should expect the insurgent Republican candidate to have a much better chance than he would normally have in a general election there, but even though Brown will probably still lose narrowly he will have done so in a statewide race in a traditionally Democratic state. This makes him extremely different from Hoffman, who failed to win in an historically Republican district that was also one of the most right-leaning House districts in the region.

Andrew cites Abbas Milani on Green Shi’ite theology:

The most significant innovation—found in essays, sermons, books, and even fatwas—is the acceptance of the separation of mosque and state, the idea that religion must be limited to the private domain. Some of these thinkers refuse to afford any privileged position to the clergy’s reading and rendition of Shiism–a radical democratization of the faith. And others, like Akbar Ganji and Mostafa Malekian, have gone so far as to deny the divine origins of Koran, arguing that it is nothing but a historically specific and socially marked interpretation of a divine message by the prophet. The most daring are even opting for a historicized Muhammad, searching for the first time in Shia history for a real, not hagiographic, narrative of his life.

It seems to me that this drives home the political problem with a lot of the intellectual leaders aligned with the Green movement. Note how Milani describes these things. He refers to innovation and describes these moves as radical and daring, and almost seems to brag that these people are denying “the divine origins of Koran.” Even when we understand that this is not a denial of revelation, but rather a denial of the uncreated nature of the Qur’an, this is still a significant break with the religious teachings that most Twelver Iranians would accept. It is as if a group of liberation theologians tied to a movement of largely non-religious students were trying to appeal to a traditional Catholic population by rejecting papal authority and questioning the reality of the Incarnation and the Virgin Birth. This would probably not herald a transformation of Catholicism in that country, but would instead mark the beginning of the end of the movement in question.

Can you imagine anything less likely to appeal to most believers? Is there anything more useful to the regime than identifying leading thinkers of the Green movement with a highly liberalized form of Shi’ism? When a political protest movement has been able to tie its cause together with a people’s traditional religion, or at least when the movement does not appear to attack that religion openly, it tends to win far broader and deeper support. If it appears to challenge established claims of the religion as part of its “reform” project, it necessarily meets with stiffer resistance and wins less support. It opens itself up to charges of impiety and religious error, which the movement may not take seriously, but which a majority of the general population may be only too ready to believe. Instead of appropriating traditional religious language and ideas and turning them against the regime, these Green theological arguments distance the movement from the religion of the majority and they permit the regime to reclaim some of its lost authority.

If it is true that most adherents of the Green movement “are young Iranians with little or no religious motivation,” as Milani says*, the movement is probably far more culturally narrow than it needs to be to succeed. One of the greatest bulwarks against political change is the fear that traditional religion will be corrupted or lost as a result. Sometimes this fear is reasonable, and sometimes it is paranoid, but it is always a problem that political reformers have to contend with in societies that are still fairly religious. So long as the Green movement was appropriating the religious language and ideas of Shi’ism and the revolution, it had some small chance to undermine the government, but the more that it acquires the reputation of trying to transform Shi’ism the more limited it appeal will be. After all, these are not ideas that will unite diverse groups in common cause. They are quite obviously controversial and would likely divide political allies within the movement.

After all, why are clerics going to be inclined to support a movement when the latter’s intellectual spokesmen are making arguments that not only undermine the status of clerics, but also attack basic articles of faith? On this point, Dilip Haro’s recent article is relevant:

On the other hand, what the 1979 movement and the present one have in common is the idea of making political use of the Shi’ite religious days, the Islamic custom of commemorating a dead person on the 40th day of his or her demise, as well as of the martyr complex engrained among Shi’ites. It was Ayatollah Khomeini who pioneered such tactics. He consistently used the 40th day of mourning for the martyrs of the shah’s regime to draw ever bigger, ever more enthusiastic crowds in the streets, and used the holy month of Ramadan to charge the nation with revolutionary fervor.

The attempts of today’s opposition leaders to emulate Khomeini’s example have not succeeded, chiefly because their camp lacks a religious leader of his stature [bold mine-DL].

The “Greening” of Shi’ism Milani reports may be one of the worst developments that has happened in the last six months as far as the political success of the movement is concerned.

* It is worth noting here that if Milani’s statement were made by a skeptic of the Green movement, it would be written off as nothing more than arrogant dismissal.

Ross:

What’s more, I think that all of his warnings will still hold true even if Republicans do “make big gains at all levels,” as Ponnuru puts it, and head into next year with a larger minority in the Senate, control of more statehouses, and maybe even a slim majority in the House (hey, it’s possible).

Ross is discussing the GOP’s difficulty in coming up with a credible agenda for governing, so I realize this is a bit of a throwaway line, but barring something dramatically, catastrophically bad for this administration it is not possible for the GOP to win any kind of majority in the House. Breitbart’s colleagues may be dreaming about another ’66 or ’94, but we are still a very long way from such a result. The Democrats’ Senate prospects are noticeably worse than they were just two months ago, where they could now conceivably drop as many as five seats, but they have not lost nearly as much ground in their House races. Right now, the Republicans can look forward to picking up a maximum of 15 seats, and they are probably more likely to net just 12 more seats.

One problem with the comparisons to 1966 and 1994 is that they usually ignore the differences between 2008 and the other presidential elections that preceded these midterms. The last time we had a midterm election following a presidential vote in which the Democratic candidate won more than 50% of the vote, Democrats lost 15 House seats in 1978. 2010 still seems more like 1978. 2010 is the first midterm election after two strong Democratic cycles that we have had since then. There were dozens of open Democratic seats in 1994, which it much easier for the opposition party to pick them up. There are only eight open competitive seats this year, two which are Republican-held, and according to CQPolitics there are fifteen vulnerable Democratic seats overall. Del Beccaro notices that the GOP was able to make huge gains during a period of economic expansion, and then wrongly concludes that the GOP is in an even better position to make large gains during a period of economic weakness.

The last time we had midterms in such poor economic conditions was 1982, when the Democrats netted 27 House seats after the very severe ’81-’82 recession. While the opposition party stands to benefit from poor economic conditions, the GOP may be in a bad position to take advantage of this. There is the lack of an agenda that Ponnuru and Ross mention, and the GOP’s reputation remains terrible, but no less important is the limited appeal Republicans usually have during recessions. This appeal may be even more limited to the extent that voters still remember and care that the recession and financial crisis began on a Republican President’s watch.