Quite a fewpeople are talking about Robert Kagan’s apparent inability to understand the difference between an actual cut in defense spending and the refusal to endorse the Pentagon’s entire budget request for the coming fiscal year. Some seem not to notice that Kagan is arguing against an administration position that does not exist. Defense spending, not including appropriations for the wars, is scheduled to go up 8% 2.7% (per CQ’s correction for last year’s budget) for the coming year. This is consistent with Obama’s campaign pledge to increase the Pentagon budget, which was frequently ignored or treated as an empty promise on the right during the campaign. Bizarrely, Kagan was one of the hawks who acknowledged Obama’s interventionist foreign policy views and support for increasing the size of the military, and he even attempts to portray Obama’s defense spending increase as being at odds with his earlier pledges. This last bit is the strangest things of all, because drawing attention to Obama’s campaign statements makes it all the more clear that Kagan is just making things up to repeat all of the standard “we must not lose our resolve” chatter that these types enjoy so much.

I don’t get it. Certainly it would not be difficult for someone who thinks we should be willing to mount an invasion of Pakistan to come up with a similar argument stressing the need for even more vast increases in military spending. That might require Kagan to start talking numbers, and he would be forced to say, “Only $527 billion? That’s chump change–we need at least $1 trillion!” As we all know by now, one trillion is now the bare minimum for any amount of government obligation to be counted as real money. For that matter, Kagan could play the “irresponsible pundit” role he assigns to nameless others and warn breathlessly that unless the U.S. vastly expanded its military and international role that our “decline” would be inevitable. Railing against non-existent budget cuts to mask advocacy for even larger increases is a desperate tactic, and it tells me that interventionists on the right are getting annoyed that they have been unable to paint Obama as “weak” on national security.

Daniel Kennelly makes some interesting observations about the Peters column I criticized below. I should say a few words on why the column irritated me so much. As Kennelly notes, it was hardly the sort of column that someone already inclined to cheer on foreign wars, wink at “enhanced interrogation techniques” and dismiss civilian losses should write, unless he wants to appear, as Jim Antle says, as a sort of parody of a neoconservative written by his opponents. But that is exactly the problem. Peters’ columns often seem as if they could only be parodies of interventionism, or interventionist exercises in self-parody, because the views expressed in them seem so unmoored from reality, but more often than not interventionists are deadly serious when they make these claims. By the end of Peters’ column, he has to resort to a fairly lame qualification to keep from saying what he has been saying the entire time, which comes across like this: “I’m not saying Pashtuns are non-human, I’m just saying it sure seems that they are….”

If liberal internationalist views can be reduced to a simplified “all people want the same things” that ulimately leads to a squishy One Worldism, neoconservatives will modify this universalist idea with Peters’ sci-fi-inspired take. Both liberal internationalists and neoconservatives are globalists, especially in that they believe there need to be mechanisms for global governance, but neoconservatives (and liberal hawks who tend to agree with them on policy) seem to thrive on retaining the idea of a frontier or a periphery that still needs to be actively guarded. (Insert obvious open borders joke here.) As universalists, however, neoconservative interventionists are usually inclined to say, against mountains of evidence to the contrary, “All people want to be free,” which makes the ensuing “liberations” seem more legitimate because they are merely giving the people what they want. Peters might be less inclined, especially after this latest column, to say that all people want to be free, but the only way he seems to be able to make this point rhetorically is to turn the people who don’t want this into aliens and the places they inhabit into other planets. One World globalism and the idea that all people want the same thing survive by denying anyone who wants something else the status of human. Yes, what Peters is doing is rhetorical and arguably Peters does not “mean” it when he says that our enemies are not human, just as his confreres never “mean” it when they imply that dissenters against certain foreign policy decisions are traitors to their country and Iraq war supporters never “meant” it when they claimed that opponents sympathized with the enemy and wanted American forces to lose. Perhaps these, too, were merely mental exercises designed to shake things up.

For that matter, Peters’ qualification is not really good enough. Peters says that this does not mean that Pashtuns in the Taliban are “inferior,” but he insists that it means that they are “irreconcilably different beings.” To say that another group of people, no matter how different they are in custom and religion, is irreconcilably different is to say that we must be at war with them forever, or at least until one group is wiped out, because there can be no reconciliation, no peace. It is a more polite way of saying, “It’s them or us.” Sane people, on the other hand, know that it is not a question of it being a matter of “them or us.”

Indeed, Gen. Petraeus, who presumably knows something about these matters, thinks it is possible to negotiate and reconcile with at least some of the supposedly irreconcilably different people, which suggests that Peters may have learned the wrong lessons from his experiences. Of course, it is possible that there are people who prove to be unwilling to reconcile with their enemy as a matter of their upbringing and conditioning. What Peters does not even attempt to do is to consider whether the upbringing and conditioning of members of the Taliban allow for the possibility that they are not simply “irreconcilably different.” To the extent that the Pashtuns involved follow Pushtunwali more than they follow strict Wahhabist or Deobandist codes, their code of conduct not only permits but facilitates reconciliation after conflict. Indeed, one of the reasons why Pushtunwali endures and is reproduced over the centuries is that it serves a vital function in regulating vendetta and war. Peters’ gravest error is to conflate for rhetorical purposes significant cultural difference with a difference in nature, which at once minimizes the cultural basis for our radical differences in “values” and also exaggerates the degree of separation between us and the Pashtuns. It is a complete failure to understand the enemy, because the attempt to understand them is not even being made, which would be prelude to the failure of policy if anyone in government were foolish enough to take heed of Peters’ argument.

P.S. It is also worth contrasting Charles Krauthammer’s ridiculous “tribe or religion or whatever” argument with Peters’ alien thesis. Neither is correct, but if they meant what they wrote Krauthammer and Peters would have to regard the other’s argument as nonsense.

The reported plan to appoint Christopher Hill as ambassador to Iraq seemed strange given his lack of background in the region, but now this story makes it seem even stranger. Apparently, Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni (Ret.), former Centcom commander, war opponent and briefly one of Clinton’s regional envoys (and an Arab-American), believed that he had the job as recently as a week ago after being told as much by Secretary Clinton. Ackerman finds the story credible, which makes me wonder what they are thinking at the White House to make Zinni believe he had the job and then give the impression that it was going to someone else.

I have my doubts about the Holbrooke apppointment for Afghanistan/Pakistan, and these are not allayed by the fact that Holbrooke has no particular familiarity with his designated region. This is the same problem with Hill. Actually, like Holbrooke, Hill is most familiar with East Asia and the Balkans from his previous assignments, and like Holbrooke Hill is reportedly being assigned to one of our more critical diplomatic posts without extensive background in the place where he will be serving. Hill has a reputation as a successful diplomat, having handled North Korea negotiations for the last administration, but the choice seems odd if Zinni was the first choice.

One of the common and correct complaints about the last administration was its willful ignorance of local conditions and culture before plunging into Iraq*, and it became something of a journalistic pastime to show how little our political class in both parties knew about the details of Iraqi history and society with Mr. Bush serving as an outstanding example. We can hope that this administration is not going to fall into the same habits. The good news about Afghanistan/Pakistan is that Holbrooke has selected Vali Nasr as his chief advisor, so perhaps Hill will also choose appropriate assistants once he is confirmed who will help make up for his lack of experience in the region.

* This is not to say that a better-informed administration would have been right to launch an unnecessary, aggressive war.

Update: Laura Rozen has more on the bungled ambassador appointment.

Ralph Peters somehow always manages to outdo himself. Not satisfied with being staggeringly wrong throughout the presidential campaign on Obama’s foreign policy, among other things, Peters now aspires to fit every last stereotype of militaristic imperialists, according to whom our rebel subjects are not merely misguided, backward or even simply evil, but are actually not really human:

A fundamental reason why our intelligence agencies, military leaders and (above all) Washington pols can’t understand Afghanistan is that they don’t recognize that we’re dealing with alien life-forms.

Oh, the strange-minded aliens in question resemble us physically. We share a few common needs: We and the aliens are oxygen breathers who require food and water at frequent intervals. Our body casings feel heat or cold. We’re divided into two sexes (more or less). And we’re mortal.

But that’s about where the similarities end, analytically speaking.

Yes, if there’s one thing the last eight years have shown it is that Washington politicians are prone to too many fits of respecting our enemies’ humanity! So many times we have had to plead with them: please treat Arabs and Afghans like alien beings! But would they listen to us? No! Their dedication to human dignity knew no bounds. Their tender concern for the “body casings” of enemy combatants was so great that you could easily confuse the subjects for human beings if you weren’t careful. Fortunately Peters is here to remind us that we are not really dehumanizing our enemies with propaganda and unjust treatment, since they are not really human in the first place. Where would we be without Peters’ keen insights?

It would be easy to dismiss Peters as deranged or simply hateful, but that does not give him enough credit. Every ideologue is tempted to follow the route Peters is going, and every person is tempted at times by the appeal of one ideology or another, and invariably the result is the same. Ideology teaches that those who do not fit into a universal scheme, whatever it claims about human nature and society, cannot really be human or at least they are not deserving of the treatment accorded to fully rational human beings. If another people has radically different cultural values that order things in an entirely different way, it is ultimately not enough to acknowledge that the values of different cultures clash, sometimes violently, or even that one culture may be deeply wrong about many things. It is apparently necessary to insist that the people who practice that culture are not the same species and do not share our nature, which implies that we do not have to afford them the same protections and respect that we extend to our fellow man.

At the end, of course, Peters must retreat and claim that he just wants this to be an “exercise” that is “meant to break our mental gridlock, to challenge our crippling assumption that we’re all merry brothers and sisters who just have to work through a few small understandings.” Yes, we are so badly crippled–obviously we have been suffering from an excess of empathy and recognition of shared humanity. If the pious internationalist claim that “all people just want the same thing” is misleading, Peters’ position is far, far worse in that he seems unable to imagine that other people could hold views that are radically alien to his own without falling into the habit of describing them as members of another species.

There has been a good deal of discussion about Michael Steele’s election as RNC Chairman. Even though this is a job he actively sought, I have to say I feel sorry for the man. Supposing for a moment that he proved to be as effective in his role as Howard Dean has been at the DNC, Steele is faced with an electorate so much more hostile to his party that his task is the thankless one of a coach who labors in obscurity rebuilding an absolutely decimated and humiliated franchise. Jim Schwartz, the unfortunate new head coach of the Detroit Lions, comes to mind as an example of what I mean. It is not going to be Schwartz’s fault that the Lions will continue to be terrible for the next several years; the flaws of the organization and the legacy of years of poor management would drag down the most successful and talented of coaches. Schwartz is by all accounts an excellent defensive coordinator, and the Titans’ defense has been outstanding during his tenure, but he is not a magician. Steele reportedly has been successful as a political operator, albeit not as a candidate, which is how he has maneuvered himself into the current position, so one imagines that he has some instincts for political tactics that may prove valuable. Regardless, his talent is not going to be all that important. The flaws of the party and the legacy of the last eight years will drag Steele down despite his best efforts, at which time everyone will hold forth on what it means that Steele, who we will continually be reminded is the GOP’s first black chairman, “failed” to work miracles. Like Schwartz, he is inheriting a team that has little talent. Unlike Schwartz, he isn’t going to get the opportunity to recruit the best new talent, because these are the people (i.e., degree-holding and young voters) who are fleeing from the GOP the fastest. Among these groups of voters, it is more and more as if the GOP held a draft and no one bothered to enter.

Curious to see what Steele had to say, I watched the interview he gave on FoxNews, and I can’t say I was all that impressed. To what did he attribute the GOP’s political decline over the last two cycles? Naturally, it was spending. That was it. Spending. It’s not just that he didn’t address the GOP’s failures in foreign policy and its errors in anti-terrorism, which I would have been interested to hear, but that this was the only reason he gave, which suggests that he thinks the main solution to GOP woes is to come out against spending (unless, of course, it relates to “defense”).

Steele refers to Republicans’ “value for a sound economy,” and this did not seem to be a joke. He said quite seriously that the election results had nothing to do with “our value for a sound economy.” I don’t know quite how to take that claim. One wonders where this “value” was over the last few years–no doubt being inflated by loose monetary policy along with the housing market. Then, when asked for a new idea, Steele invoked school choice! I can’t really blame Steele. He has become the national chairman of a party whose Congressional leadership has believed for years that the only thing it ever did wrong was to vote for too much spending, and he has become the public face of the GOP at a time when it has zero fresh ideas, which is why he had to keep returning to lines referring back to debates from the ’90s that could have been delivered in the ’90s without changing a syllable. The problem is not so much that Steele’s answers lack imagination, but that if he had shown an inkling of imagination much of his party probably would turn on him.

Janet Daley makes many good points here, but I find it curious that she thinks there is some meaningful difference between the stimulus bill’s “Buy American” provision and Mr. Brown’s “British jobs for British workers” notion that striking laborers there are now insisting be taken seriously. Our friends to the north are a bit put out by the “Buy American” provision, as the U.S. normally imports large amounts of construction materials from Canada, and you can see that Daley is also annoyed at the provision when it seems to adversely affect Britain, but without blinking she wants to insist that free trade does not entail the free movement of labor. This is a pleasant fiction that some generally pro-corporate conservatives like to tell people: I’m not a protectionist (I hate protectionists!), and I believe in market forces, except when they apply to the cost of labor. For years whenever “creative destruction” shuttered some small-town factory and led to greater efficiencies and cheaper goods for the consumer, the Janet Daleys here and elsewhere shrugged and declared that this was just the way things have to be. Now even some globalists are beginning to get agitated by the idea of undermining domestic labor. It might have social and political effects! Really, who would have guessed?

Daley thinks government should defend the interests of the people who voted it into power, except when those interests involve the import and export of goods and the competitiveness of domestic businesses. The interests of those citizens can be ignored, perhaps because they do not have the dramatic and headline-worthy option of launching wildcat strikes. According to Daley, the Americans should adhere to free trade ideology, regardless of the effects it has on American workers, but there ought to be some controls to protect the British worker. In other words, common sense tells her that the British government ought to be serving the interests of British citizens and ought to be able to limit or control the influx of foreign labor, but free trade ideology–something that is at the heart of the European project–keeps forcing her to pull back from her claim that the government has obligations to protect its citizens against cheaper competition more generally. That is horrid protectionism, economic “isolationism,” you see, and she will have nothing to do with that.

At the same time, she is outraged, simply outraged, that all those E.U. treaties compel her government to follow rules permitting the free movement of labor. She really cannot have it both ways. Globalists like Daley have spent the last two decades opposing and berating critics of free trade and mass immigration, only to find out now in a moment of global economic contraction (probably the worst time to make this discovery) that the critics may have been onto something. Even then she is not really willing to follow her position through to its logical conclusions, because one thing remains crucial: to keep the line dividing people like her from the “real” protectionists and nationalists as bright and clear as possible.

Daley is quite correct when she says:

It is not purblind nationalism, let alone racism, to resent the importation of cheap labour en masse when its conditions of employment (transport and accommodation provided, as seems to be the case at Lindsey) allow it to compete unfairly with indigenous workers. The drafting in of low-wage work gangs has always been seen as unjust: exploitative of the foreign workers, and destructive of the social cohesion of existing communities which, incidentally, is something about which the Tories say they are much exercised.

But then Daley wants to make another distinction between the sort of importation of cheap labor taking place with this oil rig operation and the general importation of cheap labor that is mass immigration. When it is prearranged by an employer, that is a dirty, rotten trick that harms all of the workers, but when it is not prearranged it is just a case, I suppose, of people doing the jobs Britons won’t do. Daley believes free trade in goods is essential to economic recovery and the relief of poverty elsewhere in the world, so how exactly does she square that with opposing the free movement of labor? Once you get past all of the caveats, that is what she is saying: the government should be able to restrict the importation of labor to protect native laborers. In the end, national sovereignty and citizenship should still count for something in the economic sphere. She has picked an awfully awkward moment to realize the obvious.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with this position, and there are good reasons to take this position, but just watch how desperate she is to avoid granting any legitimacy to other anti-globalist arguments. On top of all that, recent events have her so agitated that she even manages to confuse FDR for some kind of tariff-hiking maniac, when he continued to represent the traditional Democratic position of opposition to protective tariffs that were strongly supported by the other party. Whatever else I might say about FDR, it is simply not correct to describe him as a pro-tariff man.

It is a bit frustrating that the moment at which creating protections for domestic industry and labor is most likely to be popular is also the moment when imposing those protections makes the least economic sense. Having pursued utterly imbalanced trade and immigration policies that harmed domestic industry and lowered wages during the expansion (ultimately worsening many Americans’ ability to cope with the eventual contraction), Western industrial states are faced by increasingly angry electorates that are facing prolonged recession after having been urged on to spend themselves into oblivion. The prosperity of globalization was financed by the total irresponsibility and lack of discipline that was positively encouraged and cultivated by policies of globalists: keep goods and labor cheap, flood the system with money, keep inflating various bubbles and tell people that they can have it all without any consequences. The real perversity of globalist policies is that they have so sapped national economies of their ability to be anything remotely like self-sufficient that any attempt to break out of patterns of dependence would be extremely painful. Instead of suffering the short-term discomfort of some higher prices that would have resulted from correcting flawed trade and immigration policies when times were better, our governments avoided making the necessary corrections and deferred responsibility. Today we are seeing something similar in other areas: instead of enduring the consequences of the bubble’s collapse, our governments are desperately putting off the day of reckoning and delaying eventual recovery by burying us and our descendants under even more debt. We missed the chance during the last three decades to bring sanity to our trade and immigration policies, and we are now going to see what the full cost of those policies really is. Let’s hope that we are now able to stop from being quite so foolish and short-sighted in fiscal and financial matters.

I expect I will have more to say about this in another venue, but I will just note that Soner Cagaptay is once again on his mission to stir up distrust of Turkey with another op-ed. No doubt one can find illiberal AKP measures, and I am far from being a defender of the AKP, but under the old, supposedly more “liberal” regimes in Turkey’s past free speech was as curtailed as it is now, Islamist governments were banned, the Kurds were kept down and at the margins and the current Prime Minister was imprisoned while mayor of Istanbul for reciting a poem. It was a militant poem full of Islamist rhetoric and authored by the chief ideologue of of the Young Turks, but it was nonetheless just a poem. To the best of my knowledge, no politician of similar stature has been imprisoned for such an “offense” under Erdogan’s tenure. Turkey and the AKP have their flaws, which I will be happy to spell out, but this mythology that the AKP is turning away from some prior liberal order is utter nonsense, and it is very much like the people who lament Russia’s “turn” from the West and democracy after the ’90s. What these critics seem not to grasp is that these states are going to act in their own interests, which may sometimes be at odds with ours, and the products of their elections are not necessarily going to be in alignment with Western designs when policies undertaken by Western governments prove to be deeply unpopular with the population in these countries. Indeed, the “problem” with Turkey, as with Russia, is that its government does rather too good of a job of representing its people’s sentiments and fails to ignore public discontent as effectively as Washington does.

It is simply daft to facilitate the continuation of Hamas rule. ~Efraim Inbar

It certainly is if your stated objective is to bring about the end of Hamas rule, and it is even more so when you believe that you will bring about the end of Hamas rule by doing exactly those things that are guaranteed to keep it in power, such as laying waste to the enclave’s agricultural infrastructure and creating conditions that will either create a humanitarian disaster or lead to even deeper dependence on foreign aid. If the infrastructure is not repaired and Gazans do not receive food to make up for the shortfalls caused by the damage to their agricultural infrastructure, do you suppose that they will become embittered against Hamas for bringing this upon them (which, as we know, is itself a somewhat oversimplified explanation of how things have reached this point)? Or will they instead reasonably hold responsible those who refuse to send aid after their existing means of providing for themselves were badly damaged or destroyed by the governments of the very people who now concoct reasons to deny them aid? Haven’t Gazans already learned that Hamas rule carries dire consequences? Has it brought Hamas crashing down, or had the opposite effect? Besides the siege and the damage from the recent strikes, Hamas’ political killings have also made clear what Hamas rule offers. Who believes that making life in Gaza more miserable and making its people even less self-sufficient will make Gazans less inclined to support Hamas?

Of course, the former policies of siege and attack distract anger against Hamas, while Hamas’ willingness to eliminate vocal opponents ensures that mounting resistance against Hamas is very difficult and dangerous, and at the same time the siege makes opposition to Hamas seem like the act of a collaborator and makes material conditions more difficult in such a way that perversely makes the population more dependent on whatever social services Hamas can provide. Obviously, if you want to encourage people to rise up against thuggish rulers, the key is to eliminate their ability to raise an independent food supply, and you absolutely want them suffering from malnutrition and disease. This is clearly how you create the most effective insurgent political force. Professional strategists have told us so.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Inbar’s assessment of the blame is entirely correct–what then? In the end, more people will come away remembering that Hamas was attempting to provide them help–for self-serving reasons, of course–than will think through an elaborate chain of causality to determine that Hamas is actually to blame. At the same time, the pressure not to break ranks when under siege and attack is very strong, and it is even stronger in societies steeped in nationalist ideology, so even if Hamas did not kill its enemies there would be strong self-censoring and conformism in Gaza to avoid being seen as unduly sympathetic to the Israeli side. Even if Inbar is right about who deserves the blame, it does not follow that this group will receive the blame, nor does it follow that it is the proponents of aid who are most engaged in serious strategic folly.

The recent fighting in Gaza has provided the opportunity for critics of developmentalism and foreign aid to note that Palestinians in Gaza are heavily dependent on foreign aid and that this is ultimately not good for Palestinians in Gaza. As a critic of the ideology of development and a skeptic of the effectiveness of foreign aid, I think these critics are right on one part of the question and they are horribly wrong on another part when they make arguments like those Inbar puts forward. Inbar’s basic mistake is to assume that inflicting collective punishment on Gazans will make them more likely to turn against Hamas, when we have seen time and time again that this is not how populations under siege and attack behave. Inbar’s argument is not merely one that says that cultivating economic dependence on international donors is self-defeating for helping the Palestinians’ well-being, but that their well-being should be deliberately kept poor to continue the failed political experiment of the siege of the last two years. It seems to me that this particularly grim experiment has been run and the results are conclusive: starving and battering people does not elicit their cooperation, but causes them to grow in resentment and anger. It is simply daft to facilitate the continuation of Hamas rule. So why do most of the supposedly hard-headed hawks and self-styled friends of Israel insist on doing it?

Inbar warns that sending reconstruction aid to Gaza will send the wrong signal, as if withholding it and being seen as the ones withholding much-needed humanitarian aid will encouage the kind of political behavior outsiders demand. Leave aside for now the assumptions that go into the idea that another people’s political behavior should be for someone else to manage or dictate, and consider simply whether these hard-line policies ever achieve what their proponents say that they will achieve.

An education ministry circular particularly annoyed Israel by telling Turkish schoolchildren to observe a minute’s silence in solidarity with Palestinian children. In the event, the Israelis persuaded the Turks to cancel a proposed essay and drawing contest for schoolchildren to air their feelings of hatred towards Israel. Israeli officials were apparently poised to respond by proposing a programme in Israeli schools for discussing the genocide of Armenians by Turks in the first world war. ~The Economist

This last item jumped out at me as I read this article. Israeli policy has dictated a certain avoidance of the question of the Armenian genocide and Ankara’s continued denial of it, and generally “pro-Israel” forces have rallied against any efforts to have the genocide recognized by Congress for this and other reasons. Last year, the ADL was caught up in a fairly serious controversy when it tried to discipline one of its chapters for daring to acknowledge that the Armenian genocide was something other than an unfortunate wartime incident, and grudgingly the ADL leadership was compelled to make vague statements that paid some attention to the reality of the genocide. As Turkish-Israeli relations sour over other matters, it might just work out that the genocide resolution in Congress will meet with less resistance this time around and could pass in the House if it continued to have President Obama’s support.

As tedious as it seems, I have to say a few words on the exchange between John Schwenkler and R.S. McCain. McCain seems to be laboring under the false impression that C11 was a) building a political movement and b) uniformly hostile to Sarah Palin. Neither is correct. The name of the site might have clued him on the first point, and paying more than passing attention to what its contributors had to say would have helped him with the second. Nor is McCain’s implicit claim that “the public” embraced Palin correct. If “the public” is never wrong (a strange claim for a conservative), Palin must be as bad as her critics claim, since most of the public does not care for her or at the very least does not embrace her. Is Palin “arguably the best hope for preventing the four years of Obama from becoming eight years of Obama”? Obviously not. It’s not even close, and the left would like nothing moe than for the GOP to believe this. Those who think she is the answer need to pause and reconsider before lecturing anyone about their lack of political insight. If anyone has had a “fanatical obsession” in connection with Gov. Palin, it has been McCain and his endless mooning over how wonderful she is.

McCain isn’t done yet:

Schwenkler seems to argue, as do so many of Palin’s critics, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the Republican Party seeking the support of voters who don’t have college diplomas.

John does not “seem” to argue this, and there is nothing in his remarks that suggest this. Goodness knows we could stand to have the GOP do more to seek the support of voters who don’t have college diplomas–and they could do more to seek the support of voters who do have them. They might start by crafting policies that actually serve the interests of both groups and take it from there. Instead they throw up symbolic champions who are supposed to embody a certain way of life, give all the right signals and ham it up as jes’ folks while supporting the most conventional establishment policies that work to the detriment of precisely “voters who don’t have college diplomas.” At the same time, the GOP strikes the pose of the willfully, proudly ignorant, delighting in its members’ lack of expertise, that alienates those who have graduated from college. It’s the worst of all worlds: ignoring the interests of its natural constituents while deliberately mocking the education of the middle and upper-middle class. If the GOP keeps “building” its political coalition like this, it will soon be gone from the scene. Palinites don’t accept either populism in any meaningful form, at least not if Palin’s positions during the campaign count for anything, and they are satisfied to pay lip service to “the people” to co-opt them in the perpetuation of establishment policies that do them no good. Unlike most of Palin’s conventional boosters, McCain does not go along with all of those policies, but he is more than happy to be a cheerleader for a politician who does. Behind all of his endless blather about being duty-bound to defend the common people, McCain is helping to enable every habit in the modern GOP that works to harm them and their communities. Perhaps that is why he so desperately clings to the fiction that Palin’s critics hate Middle Americans. Perhaps at some level he is aware that he is doing more to undermine Middle American interests with his shameless Palin-worship than any of them ever will.