But at least you always knew that Bush loved America and that he loved Americans. You knew that he valued America’s allies even if he didn’t always do right by them. You knew that his values were American values.

You can’t say any of that about his successor. ~Caroline Glick

Yes, this is what you would expect from Glick (or from anyone, for that matter, who thinks that the last two years of Bush’s foreign policy were his worst), but it’s offensive all the same. As tempting and easy as it would be to turn this formulation around on one of the worst Presidents of all time, I don’t assume that Bush did any of the things he did because he didn’t have “American values” or didn’t love his country. I don’t assume that he trashed our relations with Europe, Turkey and Russia because he wanted America to be isolated or because he loathed these other nations. It is certainly true that he harmed American interests, weakened American power, wrecked our fiscal house and isolated us from many of our allies and potential partners, but the world is full of stories of people who harm that which they love. Bush’s problem wasn’t that he didn’t love America. The problem was that he had no idea what he was doing and substituted ideological fantasies in place of understanding.

Indeed, most of his catastrophic blunders came from an excess of sentiment and emotion concerning these things, combined with absolutely incompetent execution and an ideological obsession with American virtue and strength that ensured that his actions would be excessive, arrogant, ill-conceived and unrelated to the real world. Bush’s love of country was something similar to what the Apostle called in another context “zeal not according to knowledge.” The man was actually overflowing with saccharine, do-gooding, Gersonian sentimentality and he had no shortage of emotional, demonstrative professions of patriotic devotion. So what? What good did it do anyone? It might even have been better had Bush been less enthusiastic in trying to protect the United States, since he would not have been so ready to see dire threats around every corner where none existed. America needs fewer paranoid, jealous lovers, not more.

When we look at policy and the results of policy, however, all of Bush’s love and emotion count for nothing. We also hear all the time how much Bush cared about dissidents overseas, but what we forget to mention is how much stronger authoritarian regimes of various stripes, both allied and non-allied, became on his watch. Bush loyalists very much want to have him and Obama judged on expressions of weepy sentiment and professions of good intentions rather than on concrete results, because they know that their idol has to fare very poorly if he is judged on the merits of what his policies produced. Amusingly, they would like nothing more than to damn Obama for not imitating Bush’s style, which they find reassuring or satisfying for one reason or another.

It may be that Obama will prove to be a poor President, and he could inaugurate policies that will fail as spectacularly as Bush’s did, but we would not be able to conclude from this that he did not love his country or share American values. If we could conclude such things from what politicians do, surely the man who launched aggressive wars, and who sanctioned illegal, arbitrary detention, illegal wiretapping and torture would not come out looking very good at all.

Rod has an interesting post on allegiance to God and country connected to the Fort Hood massacre, but I think he misses something when he writes this:

If any Jew or Christian would put his national identity over his religious identity, he is an idolater and should repent. I pray that I will in all times and at every opportunity choose fidelity to God over fidelity to nation. The thing is, as a Christian, one has pretty much never had to make that choice. I do not worry, and indeed honor, the Muslim soldier who places God above country — but only as long as there is no serious conflict between serving both.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and it occurred to me that there have probably been cases in the past in which American Orthodox Christians serving in the military were either training for a possible conventional and nuclear war that would annihilate the better part of the world’s Orthodox population or were deployed as part of a mission to bomb an Orthodox country (i.e., Serbia). Would these Christians have been in the right to turn on their comrades? Absolutely not. Even though the attack on Serbia was completely unjustifiable and morally wrong, Orthodox Christians pledged to U.S. and NATO military service would have been obliged at the very least to remain loyal to their governments. If there were a severe conflict between their obligations to their fellow Christians and their duty, they would either have to resign or at least refuse to engage in hostilities. In practice, as regrettable as the conflicts themselves were, Orthodox Christians have warred against each other for centuries dating back to the middle Byzantine period. That in itself is not a good thing, but no one on either side in these conflicts believed his religious obligations compelled him to betray his natural and political loyalties. There were Orthodox soldiers on both sides in the Russo-Japanese war, and the bishops in both countries prayed on behalf of the armed forces of their respective nations.

Treason and mutiny, which are the actual crimes that Hasan committed in addition to murder, are not justified by one’s political views of what is being done to one’s co-religionists by the government. As I understand it, only if the government demanded apostasy and the abandonment of the faith would Christians be required to resist or disobey a legitimate government. Hasan seems to have believed that he had a religious duty to make a violent political and policy protest on behalf of other Muslims. To the extent that Islamism blurs or even erases the lines between religious and political obligations, or makes loyalty to the ‘umma greater than loyalty to one’s own government, the distinctions I mention above would be extremely difficult to maintain. There are going to be times when there will be serious conflicts between duties to God and country, but for the most part that is not what compels treason of this kind. Men commit treason to achieve a political objective or to make a political statement. Their politics may be infused with or closely identified with religious ideas, but it cannot be pinned squarely on their religious convictions when most of their co-religionists do not reach the same conclusions and do not share those politics.

I would add one more thing. Americanists who want to continue bludgeoning and bombing other countries cannot expect the immigrant populations they so happily welcome to remain indifferent to what is being done to their home countries or co-religionists. To the extent that the Americanism to which they expect immigrants to assimilate involves unnecessary and aggressive wars against other nations, it is the hawkish Americanists who are contributing to the erosion of national unity even as they squawk about the need for assimilation and it is they who are putting the loyalties of new Americans to the test.

Alex Massie enters the debateover Parsi and NIAC from a different angle in response to some of Melanie Phillips’ crazy talk. Massie writes:

So, to reiterate: pretending that the only sensible way forward vis a vis Iran is to continue the failed policies that have done nothing to avert or alleviate the current problem is as sensible as suggesting that US policy towards Cuba has been such a triumpant success that it must never, ever be altered in any way whatsoever. This is a very strange way of thinking indeed.

Of course, according to the standards of Goldberg, Phillips et al., Massie’s post proves that he is also working on behalf of Tehran. For that matter, the Iran expertise and personal experience of the newly appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for Iran, Jim Limbert, will probably be counted against him by the anti-NIAC crowd. How this usually works is that the people most familiar with a country or region are deemed “unreliable” because, well, they actually know something and understand that the proposed heavy-handed policies of hawks, who typically know little or nothing about the place in question, will backfire badly. The most well-informed wind up being considered virtual agents of the other government or, in Phillips’ despicable formulation, “in hock” to the regime. Obviously, this sort of criticism is intended to have a chilling effect on policy debate and to automatically rule out certain policy positions as treacherous support for the interests of a hostile government.

Reading another Politico article on the 2010 midterms, I found the treatment of the ’94 elections tremendously unsatisfying. Cook writes:

It is the 1994 election that actually draws the greatest comparison with 2010. As was the case 15 years ago, there is a charismatic young Democratic president engaged in a long, messy battle for health care reform. And the Democratic numbers in Congress are eerily similar now to what they were then. Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 with 258 Democrats in the House and 57 in the Senate. Obama was elected last fall with 257 House Democrats and 57 Democratic senators.

Countless articles have been written that in some way touch on the elections in 1994, but one thing almost all of them have in common is their consistent omission of any mention of the impact of NAFTA on Democratic turnout and voting that year. In the wake of losing the NAFTA battle, unions and their members were disaffected going in to the midterms, and this compounded the problems that national Democrats were already having thanks to numerous retirements and their own complacency in the face of a serious Republican electoral threat. If one goes looking, it is nonetheless possible to find reports that detail the effect this had on Democratic electoral fortunes:

In the 1994 midterm election, a year after the NAFTA vote, union activists, stung by losing that fight to Clinton and by the president’s failure to get a Democratic Congress even to vote on his promised health care reform, deserted their posts. Phone banks went unmanned; the turnout of union families plummeted; 40 percent of those who bothered to vote backed GOP candidates, and the Democrats lost the House for the first time in 40 years.

One of the things that distinguishes 2010 from 1994 is that the White House and Democratic leaders are not pushing through any new free trade agreements. The major legislative item that concerns major unions is EFCA, which the current majority has not been able to pass, but this is still not a case of an administration trying to force an undesirable bill on its own recalcitrant partisans in Congress. That suggests that unions will be much more likely to play their role in turning out Democratic voters next year, and union voters may be more energized if the GOP makes its opposition to EFCA a major theme of the election. Emphasizing that certainly did nothing to help Hoffman*. The union factor has been important for turnout in both of the special elections in New York this year, and the unions have delivered for the Democrats and put two new Democrats into the House. That is not going to be the case in every district, but it is a reminder that Democratic House and Senate candidates will have solid support from unions that their counterparts lacked in 1994.

* Another example of national GOP messaging at odds with local interests was Hoffman’s anti-earmark pledge, which was crazy in a district that relies on Fort Drum for a significant part of its economy and a perfect expression of the Washington-oriented blindness that has afflicted the national party leadership for years. It is another expression of the absolutely unfounded notion that the public turned against the GOP because of spending and especially because of earmarks. The (mostly rhetorical) hostility to earmarks is a more general form of national GOP contempt for local district interests, whose representation in Congress Boehner et al. have decided to equate with corruption and wastefulness.

Zakaria’s column on U.S. domestic politics and international trends seems weakest in this section:

Imagine you had been told five years ago that a huge economic crisis would erupt, prominently featuring irresponsible financiers, and that governments would come to the rescue of firms and families. You would probably have predicted that, politically, the right (the party of bankers) would do badly and the left (the party of bureaucrats) would do well. You would have been wrong. It’s not just the Republicans who came out ahead. Last month a conservative coalition swept into power in Germany. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy’s party has considerable public support. In Britain, conservatives are poised to win their first national election in 17 years. Even in Denmark and Sweden, where social democrats usually win, the right is in power. In fact, across continental Europe, only one major country, Spain, has a left-wing ruling party.

Just as we need to look at local conditions to understand last week’s off-year elections, we should be careful not to make claims about international trends without heavily qualifying them with the specific reasons for electoral outcomes in all of these countries. The European elections earlier this year were supposed to be “surprising” for the same reason, when these results were heavily driven by anti-incumbency feeling regardless of the leanings of the national government. The fact is that center-left coalitions in Germany and France have been remarkably weak for much of the last decade (remember the ’02 French presidential election in which the Socialist failed to make the run-off?), and the SPD in Germany has been a shambles since Schroeder left office. Had it not been for Merkel’s uninspired campaigning last time around, the election of a Union-Free Democrat coalition would scarcely be news.

On the other hand, fatigue with Labour’s long tenure in power and disgust with Tony Blair’s foreign policy have only very recently translated into serious electoral problems for the ruling party in Britain. It took the devastation of the financial crisis, and the indictment of Brownian economic mismanagement that came with it, to make it possible to imagine an end to Labour dominance. That period of dominance had not been defined by its old-time socialist roots, but was instead defined as a very cozy pro-business regime. Were we to look at Indian and Japanese elections, we would find counter-examples in which the center-left coalitions either expanded their hold on power or dramatically ousted the long-serving center-right ruling party. Of course, we could explain the Japanese result as being driven by recession-caused anti-incumbency and see the Indian result simply as the rallying of the public around the governing party in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, but these elections in rising Asian democratic powers seem to tell us a different story than what has been happening in Europe.

Zakaria is right to stress competence as the deciding factor in much of this, but this is hardly encouraging for the GOP, which has yet to recognize, much less correct, the errors of its previous turn in national government. In this way, despite state-level successes, the national party continues to resemble the confused post-1997 Tories.

Reihan:

Democrats focus on the Tea Party movement because it represents a kind of wish fulfillment. Conservatives delighted in the ideological exuberance of Howard Dean’s progressive youth, and they were unprepared for Barack Obama’s slickly post-ideological campaign that drew on the left’s energy while running a disciplined centrist campaign. We’ll see if history repeats itself. Like a lot of people, my gut tells me that Sarah Palin or perhaps Mike Huckabee will be the Howard Dean of 2012. Of course, that would suggest that the Republican nominee in 2012 will be the right’s answer to John Kerry, which is a prospect too disturbing to contemplate for very long.

It might be amusing to speculate on who would be the Republican Kerry of 2012, and I think Romney has to be the leading contender for that special dishonor, but missing here is an acknowledgment of what made Dean into the candidate of progressive activists and the netroots and what made Kerry the drab establishment candidate favored by party insiders. Dean tapped into the strong antiwar sentiment of Democratic rank-and-file, and it was opposition to the war, not his original signature issue of health care reform, that defined Dean’s candidacy in is exciting early phase and its dramatic flame-out phase. After all, Dean may have been coming from Vermont, but he was centrist not only by Vermont standards but also by national Democratic standards. He was an unlikely leader of progressive protest, but he exploited the establishment candidates’ initial support for the war to drive a wedge between them and the party’s activists. When the race began, he would probably have been seen as being slightly to the right of Kerry on domestic issues, but his positioning on the war ended up identifying him with the party’s left.

The split between Obama and Clinton was similar to the split between Dean and Kerry, but a crucial difference was that Obama had built up his own organization alongside of the netroots and activist groups and was able to match and outperform Clinton on the ground, especially in all those caucus states she took for granted. Dean relied so much on the netroots and activists that when it came time to get his voters to turn out that he simply didn’t have the campaign infrastructure to translate tremendous fundraising and media coverage into votes. In this and other respects, Ron Paul’s campaign in 2008 was already the right’s answer to Howard Dean, and McCain was in many respects the Kerry of last year.

What the war was for Democrats in 2004, health care legislation and bailouts will be for the Republicans in 2012. Romney fits the Kerry mold perfectly, and like Kerry he will be forced by the strength of the primary challenge from some Dean-like representative of the “Republican wing of the Republican Party” to run away from his record on health care and bailouts. In fact, Romney has already been trying to make people forget that he favored the bailouts when it mattered, and no doubt he will engage in some of his typical dishonesty when confronted with the question of his record of support for health care mandates. Like Kerry, he will have zero credibility in opposing most of the President’s agenda, which means that Romney’s already fairly strange focus on foreign policy and national security may have to become the centerpiece of his campaign to distract attention from his record of signing off on universal health care in Massachusetts and endorsing deeply unpopular bailouts of Wall Street. For all of the ridicule he received, Kerry nearly won, but I doubt that Romney would be able to do as well as Kerry did unless economic conditions worsen severely.

Alex Massie brings a bizarre Robert Kaplan column to our attention. In this column Kaplan offers his best Otto von Bismarck imitation. Bismarck was once quoted as saying that the world would succumb to materialism without war; Kaplan replaces materialism with decadence, but the idea is much the same. It is also worryingly similar to Teddy Roosevelt’s concept of war as a kind of invigorating sport. As Massie notes, Kaplan is rehashing ideas that were last fashionable approximately a century ago before WWI taught (almost) everyone that they were complete rubbish. In fact, the main movements that came out of the horror of WWI convinced more than ever that constant struggle and endless wars of “liberation” were essential to political health were the communists and fascists.

What really makes no sense is why Kaplan would be so hostile to the EU. I can understand why European (classical) liberals, conservatives and nationalists find the EU offensive in many ways. Were I in their position, I would have many of the same problems with the Union’s institutions and regulations, because I am generally opposed to consolidation and centralization as such. The push for centralization by Europe’s “federalists” naturally generates resistance from these quarters, but why would someone with Kaplan’s views see a more politically consolidated, unified Europe as a problem? Apparently, it is because Europe is not terrified of a series of threats that either do not exist or which have little to do with them.

First, we have Russia, of which Kaplan says:

Indeed, once again – thanks to its plans to build natural gas pipelines directly to Western Europe—it holds the ability to split Eastern Europe off from the West and hold the former Warsaw Pact nations captive.

Russia’s ability to do this does not seem to be very effective, since it is not, in fact, holding former Warsaw Pact nations captive and has so far failed in every case to split eastern Europe from the West. Except for the highly contentious cases of Ukraine and Georgia, every central and eastern European nation that has desired and pursued accession to the EU and NATO has been welcomed in as a member or as a member that will be integrated very soon. Russian energy leverage is real, which means that all European nations are less likely to engage in unnecessary provocations of Russia on its own borders, which is partly why the EU refused to whitewash Georgian errors leading to last year’s war with Russia and why leading EU nations are not interested in providing security guarantees to Ukraine and Georgia. However, Russian leverage is not so great that it has been able to prevent its former satellites from doing pretty much whatever they want with respect to integration into Europe.

The “dangerous” possibility of German “neutrality” towards Russia is the re-establishment of the one major policy that Bismarck had absolutely right as far as German interests were concerned, which was the friendly alignment of Germany and Russia. If the largest economy and political power in Europe and the great Eurasian power are on good terms, the peace of Europe is much more likely to be preserved than it would be if the Germans somehow became as anti-Russian in their policies as Washington has wanted them to be. There was a time long ago when I was still in college when I speculated that the EU would need to cultivate an anti-Russian stance to unite all of its member nations more closely together. I argued this on the assumption that the Union would otherwise fail to coalesce and hold together. That now appears to have been mistaken, as European integration and a decline in (western) European hostility towards Russia seem to be going hand in hand. What Kaplan sees as “losing Europe” is actually the way to ensure that Europe is much less likely to become the battleground of a major international war, which other people might describe as saving Europe.

In any case, Kaplan is simply wrong about Germany. It is not “torn between east and west.” The country best described this way might be Turkey, and even that is debatable. It is Turkey’s entry into the EU that France and Germany seem intent on opposing for the foreseeable future. Entry of Turkey into the EU would do more to prevent the establishment of a “hard and fixed border” between Europe and the Near East than just about anything else, so Kaplan ought to be satisfied with the unwillingness of major EU members to let Turkey in.

Kaplan imagines that Iran presents a challenge equal to that of “liberating eastern Europe.” This is not true. The challenge of the latter was larger and of greater strategic significance than anything related to Iran. Losing Iran as an ally in 1979 was a significant blow to the U.S. position in the region; communist collapse was vastly more valuable for advancing U.S. interests in Europe. The two things are not all that comparable in significance. Kaplan writes, “Iran holds the key to changing the Middle East…” Why Iran? Well, he will tell us:

Iran has been a state in one form or another since antiquity, and has a far more urbanized and sophisticated population than most in the Arab world.

Where have we heard this before? It used to be that Iraq held the key, and a lot of people made a great deal of noise about Iraq’s “central” location in the region, and many stressed the importance of its sophisticated, well-educated, urbanized, more secularized population. It used to be the case that agitators for war with Iraq believed that changing Iraq could change the region precisely because it was majority Arab and not Persian as Iran was. Now it is Iran’s Persianness that makes it the more suitable for regional transformation because of the cultural advantages this is supposed to offer. The new story is no more true than the old one.

Kaplan holds up a fantasy as a likely future:

With a reformist regime in power in Teheran, turmoil in Iraq will lessen and Hezbollah may eventually be robbed of a sturdy patron, even as Syria is forced to make its peace with the West, and hopefully with Israel, too.

File these predictions under Things That Are Never Going Happen. Reformists are no less interested in projecting Iranian power in Iraq and Lebanon, and why would they be? Mousavi was partly responsible for the foundation of Hizbullah. Does anyone really believe that he would now turn against them? What will happen in Iran to “force” Syria to do either of these things? If Syria breaks with Iran, it will be in spite of Iranian political change and not because of it.

European politicians are working on the assumption that the EU is being built up for the benefit of Europeans. It is possible that they are wrong and the EU is not the best thing for Europe, but this has nothing to do with Kaplan’s call for endless struggles for liberation to the east. European governments do not seem to consider the ever-eastward march of “liberation” a top priority. Given that this march has mostly involved the smashing of Serbia and the invasion of Iraq, it seems to me to be a very good thing that Europeans seem to have little appetite for more of it.

This Politico story makes the 2010 House elections seem much more contested than they are likely to be. Earlier this year I looked at CQ’s race ratings for 2010, and I concluded from those early projections that the GOP would have a difficult time picking up many seats in either chamber. Obviously, this was before the August recess, the upsurge in right-populist protests and the main debate over health care legislation. One would assume that the Democrats have lost ground in these race ratings since July, and they have, but the interesting thing is how little ground they have given up. There are now more Democratic seats that are rated as toss-ups, but even if all the toss-ups went to the Republicans and the Democrats lost LA-03 the Republicans would at best net seven House seats. Not seventeen or seventy, but just seven. If that were the outcome, that would be the smallest first-term midterm loss in the House for the party controlling the White House since 1962 and the second-smallest midterm loss for the President’s party since WWII. A loss of just seven seats for the Democrats would be the fourth-best midterm performance for the President’s party in House elections since 1986, including the post-September 11 GOP success of 2002 and impeachment-year gains for the Democrats in 1998. Unlike the other three midterms, the President’s party would not be benefiting from the high approval ratings of the President, but would instead be performing fairly well despite somewhat weak approval ratings for Obama. Were that to happen, we would have to conclude that Republican tactics for the first two years of Obama’s Presidency had failed to move many voters and did nothing to repair the damage to the reputation of the national GOP.

There is another passage in Continetti’s Palin article that tells us a lot about the mentality of Palinites and those who would pander to them:

Dismiss airy prophecies about “peak oil,” “green jobs,” and “limits to growth.” Pledge, instead, that Americans will have access to as much of the cheapest, cleanest energy they need to stimulate the economy. Palin is right. No limits.

In other words, the right-populism of which Palin can supposedly be the great leader is going to a movement of irresponsible consumption, limitless appetite and unfettered desire. This is so obviously at odds with both Christian stewardship and conservative temperament that it scarcely seems necessary to mention it, but here we find the moral vacuum at the heart of Palinism. It happens to be expressed here in connection with the use of natural resources, but it conveys hubris, arrogance and self-indulgence and indifference to the welfare of the commonwealth that will be inherited by those not yet born. “No limits” is the slogan either of the anarchist or the libertine. There is no sane populism that would embrace such an idea, and it certainly has nothing to do with anything recognizable as conservatism.

Matthew Continetti proposes that Palin become a Jacksonian tribune. What he means by being a Jacksonian is this:

Andrew Jackson’s plantation is a lot more than a beautifully restored example of Greek Revival architecture and design. It’s also a monument to the seventh president’s democratic legacy–of rule by the people, of competitive commercial markets, of entrepreneurial individuals lighting out to the territories. It’s a legacy to which Palin is heiress.

In reality, Jackson’s legacy is the antithesis of much of what the Whigs and Republicans have stood for in domestic politics since 1824, and Palin has no claim on such a legacy. The financial sector bailout last year was the sort of close collusion between government and banks that infuriated Jackson and his followers. The so-called heiress of Jackson endorsed the bailout. There is a Jackson-like anti-Fed populism out there, but Continetti and his colleagues have no interest in encouraging Palin to embrace their arguments. So Continetti creates a safe, generic Jacksonian “legacy” that sounds as if it had come from the late Jack Kemp. Everything that made Jackson and Bryan’s populism interesting gives most Republican and movement conservative leaders hives, because these men married cultural and economic populism together. As the GOP’s Palinolatry itself shows, cultural pseudo-populism is at least tolerated as a gimmick or electoral maneuver, but even a whiff of real economic populism has always been toxic for Republican leaders and activists. There is a reason why Palin’s own Alaska record of hiking windfall profit taxes on oil companies has been carefully and consistently eliminated from all conservative discussions of her time as governor. That is her claim to some measure of populist leadership, and it is the one thing about her economic conservatives and national GOP leaders would like to forget. Indeed, as she has become a national figure she has run as far away from the substance of what she did in Alaska as possible, because raising any taxes on major corporations for any reason is exactly the one thing that will never fly with Republicans on a national level.

Continetti notes the angry, distrustful public mood, and mentions this:

In September, the Democratic pollster Peter Hart asked registered voters who they thought had benefited most from the Obama administration’s economic policies. Sixty-two percent said the main beneficiary had been the “large banks.” In contrast, 65 percent said the “average working person” and “small businesses” hadn’t been helped. Seventy-three percent said “my family/myself” hadn’t been helped.

Now obviously one way to tap into that reservoir of dissatisfaction would be for Continetti’s would-be Jacksonian heiress to rail against the influence and power of banks and the government’s unduly close relationship with them. This is the one thing Continetti has no wish for her to do, so what is the point of writing the article?

Of course, we understand that the purpose of the article is to give favorable press coverage to Palin and to continue The Weekly Standard‘s embarrassing cheerleading for her. There is also a clear desire to burnish Palin’s credentials as the “rogue” anti-elitist and to make her part of the most absurdly artificial tradition of “Jackson-Bryan-Reagan.” After all, no Palin love letter would ever be complete without some reference to how she resembles Reagan in some intangible, mystical way that only devotees can understand. I simply don’t know how one draws a line between William Jennings Bryan, an intense evangelical Christian who fiercely opposed concentrated wealth and power, and Ronald Reagan, a mild Unitarian Presbyterian and former FDR Democrat whose practical domestic legacy was the advancement of corporate and large business interests. Of course, Bryan never won a presidential race, so it’s hard to know whether he would or could have translated his rhetoric into policy, but I doubt very much that he would have recognized any of his legacy in Reagan. How much less is Palin in the same tradition?

So we come to the core of Palin’s pseudo-populism, which is her cultivation of the cultural grievances of her audience and the manipulation of their feelings of relative powerlessness to promote her own ambitions. She feeds off of the elite anxiety that her performance generates, and elites are happy to fuel her rise, because she makes populism appear ridiculous and makes their positions even more secure than they were before. After all, when given the choice between the incompetent and ridiculous populist and even a moderately informed establishment figure, the public will tend to favor the latter despite their dissatisfaction with the status quo. They may also suspect that she has no intention of giving any substance to her complaints against elites. This makes her useful as a means of diverting populist anger away from them and their preferred policies and channeling it into useless identitarian protest movements that congratulate themselves on how deeply American they are before fading into obscurity. This is why many movement and party elites tolerate and even encourage Palin, but regard Huckabee as a serious threat who must be thwarted, because he occasionally gives them reason to worry that he is hostile to their interests. In reality, even Huckabee’s gestures towards economic populism are empty, but they have seemed real enough to terrify some of the very same people who now happily boost Palin as the great populist hope.