The Post has an op-ed denouncing Brazil’s reception of Ahmadinejad, which brought to mind an article I had read earlier on “how the West lost Turkey.” The Post’s predictable line was that Brazil was harming its chances of being taken seriously as a major power by welcoming Ahmadinejad. Many similar threats have been made against Turkey on account of the foreign policy moves Erdogan has been making. The interesting thing about these threats is that the Turks and Brazilians don’t seem to care.

Danforth notes near the start of his article:

Understanding Erdogan’s political calculus starts with understanding that in Turkey anger at the West is near universal.

As Turkey becomes more democratic, and as Turkish interests always seem to get short shrift in Washington and Brussels these days, the Turkish public is going to reward politicians who make a show of challenging Western policies and will not punish them for building closer ties with neighboring and other Muslim-majority states. Likewise, understanding Lula’s thinking requires that we see that what the Post calls “anachronistic Third Worldism” is actually a very savvy, timely effort to tap into a broad Latin American backlash against U.S. influence in the region. As in Turkey, the direction Brazil is pursuing can be seen as the “outcome of long-brewing domestic trends.”

What is interesting about both states is that it is their unwillingness to pressure Iran over its nuclear program, which has somehow become the West’s litmus test of respectability, that seems to bother Washington politicians and pundits the most. In other words, two significant regional powers, one of which is a long-standing NATO ally, refuse to toe the line on an absurd and unworkable Iran policy, and this is supposed to prove that they are being unreasonable and irresponsible?

Something that Danforth does not stress enough in his article on Turkey is how much U.S. policies (and to a lesser extent EU foot-dragging on accession) have created the “near universal” anger there. Typically, Erdogan and the AKP are blamed for whipping up and exploiting these sentiments, but for the most part they are simply playing to the crowd and feeding off of sentiments that already existed. The more democratized Turkey becomes, the more likely it is that its government will disagree more often with Washington, but this is practically guaranteed if Washington continues to take the alliance with Turkey for granted and ignores Turkish concerns when formulating policies for the region. Invading Iraq over strenuous Turkish opposition was one of the greatest blows to the alliance, but the ongoing effort to isolate Iran could be the thing that creates a wider breach between our governments.

There is every reason why the U.S. and Brazil should be able to build a constructive economic and diplomatic relationship. If Brazil is trying to use some of its newfound global prestige to push back against a foolish and futile Iran policy, perhaps the wiser thing would be to reevaluate the merits of our Iran policy rather than jeopardize good relations with a rising power in our own hemisphere.

Sure, Iran sees Evin as the mirror image of Guantánamo. But undoing that U.S. aberration was central to Obama’s message. Speaking out against the abuse of Iranian political prisoners must be equally so. Obama should continue to seek engagement — it’s the only way forward — while denouncing the outrages. ~Roger Cohen

Remedying our own government’s errors is one thing, but it is not at all clear why “speaking out” against Iran’s abuses should be equally vital to Obama’s administration. “Speaking out” against another regime’s abuses cannot be as important as eliminating our own abusive practices. This is true even when our practices pale in comparison to those of other governments. There are some things over which our government has essentially no influence. Indeed, one of the reasons our government has so little influence in this case is the decades-old insistence on severing all ties with Iran and endlessly ratcheting up pressure to try to isolate Iran.

In this case, “speaking out” is worse than useless. It is the sort of empty rhetorical gesture that Westerners engage in to feel better about themselves and to make a public display of compassion for people for whom they cannot (and possibly would not) do anything meaningful. In the meantime, harping on Obama’s lack of public outrage aids the forces in the U.S. that would like nothing more than to see continued mistrust and hostility between our governments.

Cohen says that Obama “needs to express the outrage of the United States of America,” which takes several things for granted. He assumes that Americans are particularly outraged by the treatment of Iranian political prisoners. No doubt, all of us believe this treatment is unjust and wrong, but how many are really outraged by it? What does it mean to say that we are outraged by it? If Obama “speaks out” on behalf of Iranian political prisoners, it might give them momentary encouragement, but it would change nothing in the regime’s behavior, except perhaps to make things worse. The demand that Obama “speak out” is ultimately a selfish one made by people who want to feel as if they and their government have some control over a situation that is beyond our control. If Obama issued ringing denunciations of Iranian abuses, it would give Western audiences some comfort, and it would offer some false hope to Iranian dissidents who would expect to see Obama shape his policy decisions accordingly, but it would primarily be for our own consumption and it would be a very easy way for Obama to score cheap political points with a political and pundit class steeped in our modern moralistic foreign policy traditions.

Extending such an honor to the leader who hosted a conference of Holocaust skeptics and deniers, often predicts Israel will disappear from the map, stole his last election and is stiffing the West on Iran’s nuclear program is clearly a poke in the eye of Barack Obama.

Nor is this the only dissing of Obama and America by Lula. ~Pat Buchanan

The other “dissing” is supposed to be the ongoing support Brazil has given to Manuel Zelaya, the deposed Honduran president, but this cannot really be a show of direspect to Obama and America when the administration has taken the same pro-Zelaya position as Brazil’s government. I think the administration has been horribly wrong in how it responded to Zelaya’s deposition, and its subsequent treatment of Honduras has been outrageous, but if Obama and Lula are both backing Zelaya it is hard to see how the latter’s backing can be seen as an anti-American gesture.

So what of Ahmadinejad’s visit to Brazil? Certainly, that is a bit more provocative, or at least the Brazilian government should have known that it would be seen as something of a provocation, but a good question might be why this matters. Brazil is a rising power, a country of almost 200 million people and the eighth-largest economy in the world, and Lula has somewhat unrealistic aspirations of making Brazil a major player in international affairs. Brazil is Iran’s largest trading partner in the hemisphere, most of Iran’s neighbors accept Ahmadinejad as the elected Iranian president, and Lula believes that isolating Iran achieves nothing. Washington has made Iran’s nuclear program one of its top priorities, so it is conceivable that Brazil’s government sees an opportunity to insert itself into a major international issue and raise its profile by representing the position of many non-aligned states that simply do not see Iran’s nuclear program as a problem. Once again, the trouble may not be that other states are “failing” to get on board with our Iran policy. The trouble could be that our Iran policy is so ridiculous that few other major states see any reason to support it.

What other displays of disrespect have we seen? Mr. Buchanan believes that the new DPJ government’s foreign policy shift, which I think American realists and non-interventionists should welcome and encourage, represents some disrespect for America. The disagreement about renegotiating basing rights on Okinawa stems from long-standing local complaints about the ongoing U.S. presence there and the DPJ won some of its support because of this Japanese dissatisfaction with the existing negotiated arrangement.

64 years after the end of WWII, why do we still have bases in Japan at all? To the extent that the DPJ’s decisions represent moves towards less Japanese dependence on U.S. military power and a more independent Japanese foreign policy, this is the natural and long-overdue result of Japanese postwar development and something that critics of empire and overstretch should be happy to see. If Japan is otherwise reverting to “checkbook diplomacy” abroad, providing financial aid for Afghanistan and Pakistan but not participating in military operations, that seems to me to be the best of both worlds. If Japan moves towards greater economic and political cooperation with China, as the DPJ seems interested in doing, that could reduce the likelihood of future hostilities between them and relieve the U.S. of at least one of its numerous security responsibilities. Unless we are going to be the guarantor of Japanese security forever, something like this will have to happen sooner or later.

Mr. Buchanan says that Iran has “slapped away Obama’s open hand,” but this is because of a fundamental flaw with the Iran policy of the last three administrations: we demand that they scrap a program that they will never abandon. Russia and China will not support sanctions, but I am reasonably sure that Mr. Buchanan also believes additional sanctions on Iran to be useless and unnecessary. Likewise, scrapping the missile defense program in central Europe has not resulted in a direct quid pro quo as some, including people in the administration, seem to have expected, but the decision was right on the merits, it has removed an irritant from the relationship with Russia and undid one of the most unnecessary provocations of the last years of the Bush era.

Buchanan mentions Moscow’s opposition to Yushchenko’s re-election, but when Yushchenko was first elected he did not see this as a great success for the Bush administration. If Yushchenko was “our man in Kiev,” so much the worse for both us and Ukraine. As I recall, Yushchenko’s Western backing combined with the insane idea of bringing Ukraine into NATO were precisely the things that drew Mr. Buchanan’s criticism of Western interference in Ukraine’s presidential election. If Yushchenko is on the verge of humiliating defeat, which is as much a result of Ukrainian disillusionment with his failed tenure as it has anything to do with Moscow’s meddling, that seems to me to be an almost entirely good thing. During the tenure of the “pro-Western democrat” Yushchenko, Ukrainian confidence in multiparty democracy has collapsed, and the aftershocks of the financial crisis have similarly shaken Ukrainian confidence in market economics. Not all of this can be laid at Yushchenko’s door, but like any executive presiding over bad times he is taking the blame. If Yanukovych becomes the new president, that will likely mean less antagonism between Moscow and Kiev, there will be fewer disputes over natural gas pricing and delivery and therefore fewer shut-offs (the two governments have already negotiated a new deal that should make these less likely), and this means that Europe’s supply of natural gas is less likely to be jeopardized by political quarrels to the east. All of this points towards a decrease in tensions over the Crimea and Black Sea Fleet and a gradual improvement of ties between Russia and Europe, all of which should come as a relief to Americans, who need no more crises and conflicts to manage than we already have.

It is probably true that the administration’s policy on Israeli settlements is the one where the other government has demonstrated that it has no respect for Obama and his demands, and on this one Obama really has no one but himself and the members of his administration to blame. Unlike our Iran policy, where we do not have the means to achieve the stated objective, our Israel policy is defined by refusing to use the means of leverage we have. In short, Netanyahu called Obama’s bluff. In reality, the policy did not fail because Obama made the demand, but because in the end he was unwilling to exact a price for refusal and Netanyahu already knew that he would not even try.

As Mr. Buchanan acknowledges in this column, none of the things he mentions “represents a grave threat to any vital U.S. interest.” It is also difficult for me to see how most of these things demonstrate contempt or disrespect for America. In almost every case, local political conditions beyond American control or unrealistic policy goals account for all of the “setbacks” listed here.

My new column for The Week on Obama’s Asia trip is now up. Tish Durkin makes a different, related point in her column from earlier in the week:

In short, if a goal of this trip was to foster a feeling among the Chinese that they can and should work with the U.S., that goal was certainly achieved.

Other, headier goals were not. But who set those goals in the first place?

Peter Beinart is right when he says that Lieberman’s opposition to the public option is driven to a large degree by personal bitterness, but he begins with the odd claim that Lieberman was once an “interesting” “iconoclast” and has now become a “right-wing pol.” I suppose there was a relatively brief time when Lieberman’s combination of domestic liberalism and hawkishness abroad was different and interesting inside the Democratic Party, but most of Lieberman’s career has spanned the last two decades when this combination has been more or less the one preferred by party leaders.

Looked at from either side of the spectrum, Lieberman has been anything but interesting. He has been the reliable defender of the “centrist” consensus established in the ’90s that finally accepted welfare reform and insisted on U.S. hegemony abroad. In practice, this “centrism” can be used to justify the most extreme, violent and destructive policies, but it is considered reasonable and acceptable because it does not partake of “fringe” ideas and enjoys the support of respectable, “serious” people. The trouble for liberals who accept this consensus is that they feel a constant pull to align themselves with corporate and financial interests in addition to endorsing every military action and security measure imaginable.

What has embittered Lieberman was not just the decline in his personal political fortunes inside his party, but it was also his recognition that the party that had been dominated by New Democrats was increasingly coming under the influence of progressives. Even if the increase was minimal, Lieberman found it intolerable, and he has penned more than a couple of op-eds decrying the supposed abandonment of his party’s national security tradition. In fact, the shift in the party’s foreign policy has been negligible, and Lieberman’s tantrums have been unnecessary, but this is what has pushed him in the direction he has gone. While most on the left were in some respects radicalized during the Bush years and even many liberal hawks were forced to question some of their assumptions, Lieberman showed time and again that his priority was always the promotion of his deeply misguided foreign policy views, and in practice this meant identifying closely with the Bush administration and its supporters. It was this, along with his own pride and ambition, that drove him to run an independent Senate campaign in 2006 (because the antiwar Lamont had to be stopped), and it was the same thing that led him into McCain’s presidential campaign.

Over time, he found that all of his strongest defenders were to be found among hawks in the GOP, and most of his fiercest critics were within his own party. It has become easier to side with his new friends rather than with other Democrats. In this way, Lieberman is just like McCain, whose flirtations with the Democratic Party and the occasional liberal legislative initiative were similarly driven by bitterness over his experience in the 2000 primaries. Arguably, the health care fight ought to have pulled Lieberman back into his party’s orbit and could have won him new respect among the party rank-and-file, but the problem is that he is too much like McCain. They both have an unusually inflated estimate of their own importance, they both tend towards sanctimonious moralizing, and they enjoy the attention they receive for breaking with their party leaders. The more contentious the issue, and the more the party’s base wants something, the more attractive breaking ranks becomes. The health care debate was too tempting.

Domestic policy is secondary to both McCain and Lieberman, and they take their positions on it based on what will make them appear “independent-minded” and secure their “centrist” reputations. He cannot emphasize his unflagging hawkishness as McCain did when the latter needed to rehabilitate himself with Republican primary voters, and the habits of years of hewing to the “centrist” line have finally made it impossible for him to align himself with progressives in a major domestic policy debate.

Mike Pence is one of the few members of the current GOP House leadership with any credibility when he criticizes bailouts (he opposed the TARP when it was first proposed), so that isn’t the problem with his recent address to The American Spectator‘s Robert Bartley dinner. Pence refers to a “great American awakening” in response to “runaway federal spending, bailouts and takeovers by both parties.” He might be right, but even if there weren’t such an awakening he wouldn’t be wrong to speak out against these things. What is amazing about the beginning of this speech is how quickly it turns from an area where the GOP may now have some advantages (i.e., fiscal and economic questions) to foreign policy, where it has nothing at all worthwhile to say. Fiscal conservatives can rightly point to mounting debt, a weakening dollar and an unsustainable entitlement system and can offer something in the way of a remedy or at least a serious alternative, but the moment the subject turns to foreign affairs they become ridiculous idealists and paranoid alarmists.

Pence begins:

On the foreign stage, the American people know that weakness arouses evil. They know that bowing and kowtowing to foreign dictators only diminishes our standing in the world. And they know that standing idly by while the Ayatollahs in Iran crush innocent civilians, clamoring for free elections, is totally inconsistent with our history of standing with those who stand for freedom around the world. Ronald Reagan didn’t stand before the Brandenburg Gate and say, “Mr. Gorbachev, that wall is none of our business.” The American cause is freedom and in that cause we must never be silent again

This is idealistic claptrap at best, but what worries me is that Pence may actually think this is a serious criticism of Obama’s foreign policy. In 1956, our President did not confuse the American cause with the cause of Hungarian rebels, admirable and courageous as those rebels were, and WWIII was avoided. Indeed, it was the empty rhetoric of rollback fanatics who led those Hungarians to believe that they would receive U.S. support if they rose up. They believed the fantasy that “the American cause is freedom,” and they were killed as a result. That is precisely what Pence is urging our government to do with respect to Iran. In other words, he is calling on our government to give Tehran a pretext for even bloodier repression.

Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that we accept the fairy tale that the Georgian government of Mikheil Saakashvili has been representing the forces of freedom and democracy in the Caucasus. By Pence’s standard, because “the American cause is freedom,” we would be obliged to have come to the defense of Georgia when Russia retaliated against Georgian escalation. To do anything else would be to betray our principles, right? If our government were as foolish and reckless as Pence’s rhetoric would have it be, we would have been entering into new major international wars on a regular basis in recent years. At the very least we would have been sacrificing American interests to take sides in foreign political conflicts in which we have no real stake.

Idealists love to make commitments that our government is then bound to keep or else be accused of “betraying” the cause of freedom. What Pence does not make explicit is that the national interest often diverges from the interests of foreign dissidents. How could it be otherwise? Pence has a lot of fun throwing around accusations that Obama has been “bowing and kowtowing” to other governments, but Pence plainly wants to subordinate U.S. interests to the causes of political dissidents around the world.

To sustain sanctions over any length of time, however, will require international co-operation, especially from Russia, China and India. Will that co-operation be forthcoming? So far, the record is not promising. But if those countries understand that the final destination of the Iranian effort is an Israeli military strike on Iran, maybe they will rethink. For that reason, the whole world has an interest in enhancing the credibility of Israeli action. For that reason, the campaign to penalize and demonize Israel for its actions in Lebanon and Gaza is an affront to world peace. Only an effective Israel can believably threaten the strike that will incentivize Iran’s trading partners to join the U.S. economic campaign. ~David Frum

Via Andrew

Put another way, Frum believes we should not criticize Israel for excessive and sometimes illegal military actions that it has taken in the past because this would make its next illegal military action seem less “credible.” One of the problems with Frum’s argument is that “the world” has no such interest, because “the world” at large does not care about Iranian nukes or simply doesn’t believe that Iran will have a nuclear weapon anytime soon. Consider the attitudes of the governments of the four major “emerging-market” economies of Russia, India, China and Brazil. Ahmadinejad visits Rio today, underscoring the significant economic relationship Brazil and Iran have and demonstrating how irrelevant Iran’s nuclear program is to one of the most important countries in the world. Put simply, whether or not Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon (and I would agree that they almost certainly are), the Lulas of the world have no desire to follow our lead in condemning it. We can, of course, sabotage our budding and constructive relationship with Brazil over this, or we can take the hint that very few other states seriously believe that Iran poses an international threat of the kind our government describes. Russian and Chinese indifference to Iran’s nuclear program is well known. Much like Brazil, India has a growing economic relationship with Iran and it has been pushing to build a strategic partnership with the Iranians to counter-balance Pakistan, Iran’s modern rival for influence in central Asia. When virtually all major non-Western powers don’t think they have a real interest in something, it does no good to tell them that they ought to take the opposite view.

Now let’s consider this idea of an “effective Israel,” whose reputation for being “effective” would somehow have remained intact if not for all of the naysayers and critics of Israeli actions. In 2006, Israel overreacted and waged a major military campaign against all of Lebanon when a far more limited response would not only have been warranted but would have received near-universal support. Israel was able to punish Hizbullah (and the rest of Lebanon’s population), but in the process exposed the limits of what it could achieve through military force and revealed its political leadership to be completely lacking in strategic thinking. Politically, Israel has scarcely been more isolated internationally than it was after the war in Lebanon. The exception is the aftermath of Cast Lead, which has driven an even deeper wedge between Israel and its sole Muslim ally, Turkey. The operation in Gaza earlier this year confirmed all of Israel’s weaknesses and made it even more of an international pariah. The question is not whether this is fair, but whether it happened. The reality is that the Gaza operation brought even greater international scrutiny on both the excessive tactics used against the civilian population of Gaza and on the cruel, counter-productive blockade that continues to starve the territory of supplies. Israel’s “effectiveness” has been substantially weakened because of these two military actions, and not because Western critics have pointed out that Israel’s excessive and illegal actions were excessive and illegal.

Were Israel to launch a third military campaign in four or five years, and this time without even a shred of legitimate justification, it would greatly harm the generally good bilateral relations it has with Russia and India. It could very possibly destroy the alliance with Turkey permanently, and it would probably shatter the possibility of an anti-Iranian coalition among Arab countries. Such an attack would send the global economy into a severe downturn, it would greatly strengthen every authoritarian petro-state around the world, and it would achieve nothing except a brief delay in the progress of Iran’s nuclear program while triggering an ongoing campaign of retaliation against Israeli interests by Iran and its allies, to which Israel would be able to offer ineffective responses as it did in 2006 and earlier this year. The affront to world peace is the idea that certain states can launch military actions against any other at will and can use the threat of such illegal actions as leverage in making unreasonable demands as to how other states conduct their own affairs.

P.S. It also doesn’t follow that the “credible” threat of Israeli military action would push Russia, China and India into supporting sanctions on Iran. On the contrary, the more other states threaten Iran with an attack the more likely it is that these major and rising powers will lend moral and political support to Iran on the world stage. They will not involve themselves directly, of course, but they will work to strip the attack of all legitimacy in the eyes of most of the world’s population, and given the nature of the strike this will not be very difficult. I’m sure Moscow is just terrified of the prospect of lecturing the West on international law and seeing oil prices go above $200.

Ross:

A slew of conservative economists and think tankers, led by the University of Chicago’s Luigi Zingales and the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas, have been working on ways to protect free markets from a re-run of last fall’s “too big to fail” fiasco. But most Republican politicians would rather rail against bailouts that have already happened than talk about how to prevent them from happening again.

Ross is right that a lot of anti-bailout rhetoric now coming from the right is focused on the past. He could also add that a lot of it is very new. Many of the new high-profile critics of “bailout nation” were nowhere to be found last fall when it might have mattered. Republican politicians who could have played the role of cautious skeptics and leaders unwilling to be stampeded into emergency measures instead chose to fall in line as they had done time after time under Bush. Most national Republican politicians weren’t railing against bailouts at all. They were desperately embracing them. Ross doesn’t mention here that Luigi Zingales was one of many scholars explaining why TARP was unwise and unnecessary, and he presented various alternatives at the time. It was conventional for many in certain reform-minded, wonkish circles to lump together all opposition to the TARP and other bailouts as nihilistic and purely negative, because they, too, were ignoring or dismissing the arguments of Zingales et al. As it happens, Reihan was not one of them:

To beat back the populist revival, conservatives need to articulate a new approach that is pro-market and anti-insider. Last week, University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales offered a brilliant alternative that Republicans, led by John McCain, ought to have embraced.

In a stinging essay, Zingales essentially argued that Paulson was offering welfare to the rich. Rather than pay premium prices for toxic assets, Zingales called for the federal government to craft a restructuring plan that would involve some amount of debt forgiveness or a debt-for-equity swap, saving taxpayers billions and imposing well-deserved financial pain on the reckless creditor who created the mess in the first place.

So why did the GOP go along with such a profoundly flawed approach? If you can think of a better reason than laziness or cowardice, let me know.

What Reihan defines as “beating back the populist revival” is really nothing other than channeling the absolutely legitimate populist outrage generated by the financial crisis into the institutional and regulatory reforms scholars such as Zingales are proposing. One of the reasons why reform-minded wonks are waiting for politicians interested in their proposals is that far too many wonks insist on setting themselves in opposition to populists, who then conclude that they have no need of wonks (at least until they are in office). This perpetuates and deepens the divide between the people who spend most of their time thinking about policy proposals and their natural base of support.

Arguably, what we saw last year was just a Bush-era mirror image of what we have now. Instead of heeding smart arguments, most national Republicans resorted to echoing whatever the party line happened to be. Last year it was imperative to follow blindly whatever the Fed and Treasury said, and so most did, and this year it is now imperative to pretend that last year never happened and most Republicans had nothing to do with it. Perhaps it is just as important that leading national Republicans learn how to break from party leadership when the latter is clearly heading in the wrong direction. That would require a major change in how both the GOP and the conservative movement respond to internal dissent.

Ross:

Before the 2008 election, almost nobody outside Alaska and Arkansas had heard of Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee. But in a long and crowded campaign season, they were the only Republican politicians who inspired any genuine enthusiasm.

This is not entirely true. Obviously, Ron Paul inspired very intense enthusiasm. It is fair to say that this did not translate into much electoral success, but ultimately the same is true of Palin and Huckabee. What seems worth noting is that Rep. Paul inspired this enthusiasm on the strength of his substantive policy positions, which also tapped into some existing currents of public distrust of government. Huckabee and Palin, I’m sorry, thrived almost entirely on their personalities and charisma. That may be a bit unfair to Huckabee, insofar as his social conservative credentials were well-established and actually related to how he had governed in Arkansas, but on the whole it is true.

It is interesting that the one 2008 Republican candidate capable of generating much enthusiasm also happens to be leading the charge for accountability and transparency at the Federal Reserve, and this is producing real legislation that proposes to put greater scrutiny on how the central bank operates, and that will begin to address significant public dissatisfaction with the central bank. This is the sort of republican populist reform that Palin pretends to advocate and to which Huckabee mostly pays lip service. If much of the rest of Rep. Paul’s domestic policy agenda does not necessarily resonate with most Americans, his criticism of the Federal Reserve does. As Greenwald observes, this is because criticism and scrutiny of the Fed answer broad public outrage at how government and major private institutions conduct themselves that transcends party and ideological lines. It is worth noting how readily most observers, including more than a few Paul sympathizers, scoffed at how much attention he paid to the Federal Reserve and the ongoing depreciation of the currency, when these are proving to be two of the most important financial and economic matters of the day. Despite having had minimal electoral success in the Republican primaries, Paul’s candidacy has proved to be the more significant one as far as pushing reform legislation is concerned.

When Ross and I were at Princeton last month, I spoke of the need for a credible reform conservatism to challenge the interests of concentrated wealth and push for the reduction of the warfare state. There were not many takers. Regarding the latter, Ron Paul is virtually the only Republican office-holder who has any interest in such reform, and the audit of the Fed could be the beginning of a more serious effort in pressing for the former. There are many reasons why the idea of reducing the warfare state has so few Republican politicians behind it, and it would take a longer post to work through all of them, but what struck me about Ross’ post and his column today was that policy wonks are “waiting for the reformers” to some extent because they have already ruled out listening to the reformer(s) that do exist. There is at least one elected reformer that we have on the right, but as far as most wonks are concerned he wants to fix the wrong things (or they regard his solutions as disasters). Some of Paul’s proposals already command significant public support, and that would seem to point the way Republican reformers should start moving. Otherwise, the reform-minded wonks are going to continue to wait, because their domestic policy agenda leaves their natural constituents cold and their foreign policy horrifies two-thirds of the country.

But for Larison to sugeest that for Palin to keep in the good graces of her base, she has to back the more conservative candidate in every single race, no matter what other circumstances are in play, is totally ludicrous. ~Philip Klein

Had I said that, Klein might have a point, but I clearly didn’t. I’m not talking about Palin siding with the conservative in “every single race, no matter what other circumstances are in play,” but I am definitely talking about this Arizona Senate primary and the Palinite loathing of McCain. Rank-and-file conservatives dislike McCain as much for how he disrespects them as for his actual policy record, and it is especially the Palin loyalists who believe that it was McCain’s people who sabotaged Palin and sought to blame her for the failings of the campaign. In the Palinite story of her “persecution,” McCain and his staffers are seen as treacherous and untrustworthy.

It is easy to underestimate the significance of McCain’s record on immigration when considering how much rank-and-file conservatives in Arizona loathe him. Remember that his advocacy for immigration legislation nearly destroyed his candidacy on a national level. It was only after he gave up on talking about immigration during the campaign that he was able to revive his political hopes. There is a large bloc of Republican primary voters in Arizona who regard immigration as one of the most important issues, and they rightly regard McCain as one of the leading Republicans on the wrong side of the issue. That is why endorsing McCain would be very different from endorsing, say, Mark Kirk in Illinois, who has already been actively seeking her endorsement. Kirk may be a moderate, but for most people his name doesn’t mean anything and he hasn’t gone out of his way to aggravate and insult conservatives. Palin could endorse moderate candidates in blue states such as Kirk to her heart’s content, and her supporters probably wouldn’t think twice about it, but to support McCain for re-election to what has been a safe Republican seat would be more of a pragmatic compromise than a lot of them would be willing to tolerate. That doesn’t mean that she has to back Hayworth.

Klein may be right that Palinites are such cultists devoted to the person of Sarah Palin rather than to any discernible set of beliefs, in which case the Palin phenomenon is even more devoid of substance than anyone thought. On the assumption that her supporters actually object to “moderate” Republicanism for some coherent and intelligible reason, Palin will do herself great harm if she backs McCain.