One constant in the history of the expansion of the state is the reliance on “emergency conditions” to justify extraordinary usurpations of power.  Paralyzing dissent and resistance with mindless fear is a time-honored way to deprive people of their liberties and fleece them of their wealth, and we are seeing plenty of this these days.  In recent weeks, most especially last week, we have been told that dire catatstrophe awaits us unless we cede to the government–the same government that worked to create and deepen the crisis–vast, unprecedented powers that will be used mainly to use its coercive apparatus to aid a relative few.  This is a state run by an oligarchy, and run for the benefit of the dynatoi who use their ties to government officials to arrange for assistance provided by the public.  Naturally, the pseudo-populists roaming the land and ridiculing elites have nothing to say about this most outstanding example of elite perversion of constitutional and good government, because they have no real objections to concentrated wealth and power and merely want their share of both.  Indeed, they are in agreement with the pro-oligarchy moves that the administration has been making. 

All of this takes place under the threat of impending doom, which is almost certainly exaggerated, as every threat used to expand state power has been exaggerated for at least the last century.  Others have noticed the ad hoc, hasty, abrupt and irregular nature of this power-grab, as egregious in its usurpation and recklessness as the war in Iraq, and once again we are treated to the claim that the cost of inaction is too high or the failure to embrace the administration’s solution is intolerable.  This was a lie five years ago, and I am not clear why it is any less of a lie today.  The mega-bailout is nothing less than a very expensive way of saying, “I’m here from the government, and I’m here to help you,” which should strike terror in each and every heart. 

Yes, people are justifiably anxious, and no one wants to suffer the losses that bank failures would bring, but all of this is one more effort at a grand deferral of responsibility.  The mega-bailout is another attempt to avoid taking responsibility for debts already incurred and excessive consumption already enjoyed.  No one wants to pay the tab, and so “we” all pay it with the knowledge that it will mostly be our descendants who shoulder the real burden.  There is no greater proof of the anti-conservative nature of this administration than its absolute contempt for the welfare of generations not yet born.  We have great obligations to those future generations, as we are bound by the pact among the dead, living and unborn, and this anti-conservatism can be seen in its fiscal, foreign and immigration policies, among others.  Preserving the patrimony for the future, not squandering it for present enjoyment, is the quintessential conservative duty, and yet time and time again ostensibly conservative politicians rob the future and debase the patrimony for the sake of some temporary gain.     

On the one hand, the public will take on the debts of bankers, and on the other the current generation will simply pass the bill on to their children.  Rather than bear the costs of financial irresponsibility and excess, there is a natural instinct to want to be sheltered and protected from the consequences of the unsustainable expansion, which simply burdens future generations with even more unnecessary debt that is piled on top of an unsustainable entitlement system that will either drive the nation into bankruptcy or collapse.  The refusal to confront reality and make sacrifices for the good of our inheritors is the fundamental moral failing behind the mega-bailout.

The last thing he [Obama] is is African-American. ~Limbaugh

This is truly weird.  Even by Limbaugh’s standards, it makes no sense.  Kenya is an “Arab part of Africa” and Obama is an Arab?  Don’t tell the Kikuyus and Luos–they think it’s their part of Africa.  This is either the most ignorant thing the man has ever said, or it is a calculated attempt to mobilize the strong anti-Arab sentiment in this country against Obama.  Take your pick.  What’s particularly bizarre about this is that Obama is someone who has a far better argument for calling himself African-American, since he is the son of someone from Africa and was born in America.

Update: Limbaugh has done it again, this time interpolating the word Arab into a description of Obama’s heritage.  I think this settles the ignorance vs. deception question squarely in favor of deliberate deception.

Yglesias:

Soviet mucking around in Latin America never accomplished much of anything for the USSR, but it was at least in keeping with the broader strategic logic of the Cold War. The current situation is totally different. Russia basically got what it wanted out of the war with Georgia. But it did harm its relationship with the United States and to some extent with Europe. The smart play would have been to consolidate gains in the Caucuses [sic] by making nice with the West, and making Americans and Europeans wonder how much we really care about Georgia. Picking new fights just increases the chances that we’ll decide to help rearm the Georgians in a robust way.

Let’s think about this for a moment.  Besides making the pedantic point that self-appointed foreign policy thinkers should know how to spell the names of the places they are discussing, I would make some additional observations.  Russia could not have made the “smart play” Yglesias outlines here, because “making nice with the West” and consolidating its gains in the Caucasus are mutually exclusive.  Washington insists on making them so, and Moscow has made clear that it is not bothered by this.  Russian gains include removing the separatist regions from any possibility of being recovered by Georgia, demonstrating that NATO membership for Georgia is extremely foolish and making the point that Kosovo’s independence comes at a price.  “Making nice” at present would involve acceding to U.S. and European demands to respect Georgian territorial integrity, which Russia is committed at this point to disrespecting.  So long as it is the bipartisan policy consensus that Ukraine and Georgia should be brought into the Alliance and missile defense sites should be established in eastern Europe, Russia cannot continue on its present path and simultaneously engage in rapprochement with the West.  Moscow does at least seem to understand that relations with the West will suffer when it engages in actions the West deems provocative and outrageous, while Washington continues to express its bewilderment about Russian behavior in response to each Western provocation.  

The bombers flying to Venezuela and efforts to tweak Washington with support for Morales are the sort of empty gestures that do not augur an era of Russian competition for influence in Latin America.  These are headline-grabbing moves that signify nothing, but which are probably calculated to imitate and thus belittle Washington’s support for democracy promotion in Russia’s backyard.  You can almost imagine officials at the Kremlin laughing about their recent expressions of solidarity with the “democratically-elected governments” of Venezuela and Bolivia, as if to say, “Oh, look, we can support corrupt quasi-democratic regimes, too!”  Morales does have his own autonomist/separatist problem in the east; the situation is almost exactly reversed from the one in Georgia: in Bolivia, the autonomists are generally pro-U.S. and the government is hostile to American influence.  Perhaps Medvedevwould say mockingly, “Mi vse Boliviitsi!”  None of this constitutes “picking a fight.”  It is more like exploiting discontent with U.S. influence in the region to get some good P.R. back home and offer some small demonstration of why Russian citizens should be glad that all those oil revenues have been wasted invested in rebuilding Russian military power.  Considering how weak Venezuela and Bolivia actually are in the region, Russia could try to build up real strategic relationships with them and still accomplish next to nothing.  Shambolic, corrupt, poor countries make for lousy proxies, especially when they are headed by hot-headed demagogues whose bark is worse than their bite.  Rather like the Russian peacekeepers who took the Pristina airport in the middle of the night back in ’99, all of this is an exercise in nose-thumbing in place of being able to project real power overseas.  Besides, Moscow must already know that Washington has every intention of rearming the Georgians.  Our policy towards Russia is so reflexively hostile and irrational that there is no incentive for Moscow not to engage in these little dramas, which definitely are evidence of how weak internationally Russia still is and how unthreatening Russian resurgence is to real American interests.

Ross:

The belief that populism has a place in American politics does not require a belief that every populist candidate should be uncritically supported; and the belief that one can acquire political wisdom outside Washington does not absolve an outsider candidate of the obligation to demonstrate that they have wisdom, as well as talking points, to fall back on.

If I understand Ross’ larger point, Palin’s more sympathetic critics want to insist that extra-Beltway experience and unconventional backgrounds can be healthy and desirable things to have in national candidates, but they would very much like those candidates to have at least some preparation in and understanding of national policy issues.  That seems reasonable enough, but what is not clear is what any of this has to do with populism.  If Palin sometimes talk as populists talk, it is boilerplate “make the government work for you” talk that means nothing.  Listen to these excerpts from her speech before that massive crowd in Florida and find something she says that is not simply a talking point.  Turn challenges into opportunities!  Better regulation, not worse regulation!  “We defy them!” it is not.    

If Palin is a “commoner” by background, and indeed that is the main appeal of her candidacy to her enthusiastic fans, she is necessarily even more wedded to conventional GOP establishment views on policy because it is assumed, apparently correctly, that she has to be brought up to speed on most of these issues.  The deal is straightforward: Palin exchanges her outsider status for membership in the highest level of the national political class, and in return for the boost her outsider reputation lends the old establishmentarian she agrees to accept the establishment’s views, which obviously have nothing to do with populism of any kind.   

The different treatment of Huckabee and Palin continues to amaze me more than a little.  Conservative elites–including most Palin fans–seemed to hate Huckabee with the fury of a thousand suns mainly because he was an evangelical with a working-class background and a strong regional accent who frequently made fun of puffed-up Eastern elites, but most, including no less than Romney himself, seem to have made the adjustment to embracing Palin’s derision of the same Easterners.  A legitimate criticism of Huckabee was that he, like Palin, wasn’t terribly well-versed in policy detail.  (Then again, neither is McCain, as his daily off-the-cuff be-bopping all over the ideological map on domestic policy in recent weeks ought to make apparent.)  This didn’t seem to hurt Huckabee or McCain electorally, while Mitt “The Weeds Are Important” Romney did suffer on account of his technocratic instincts, but it did leave Huckabee open to mockery when he talked about the Fair Tax despite clearly not understanding the consequences of such a policy. 

One of the most frustrating aspects of Huckabee’s candidacy was the coverage of it, as he was routinely described as some kind of economic populist for mouthing platitudes about the ingenuity of the American worker and the need to pay attention to the interests of workers.  Economic conservatives believed this, and consequently went to war against Huckabee, who had a fiscal record that was no better and no worse than the sanctimonious fraud they embraced as their champion.  Meanwhile, Huckabee supported exactly the same trade, immigration and economic policies that a real economic populist would find abhorrent.  Huckabee’s so-called economic populism had nothing to it except for stump refrains about wanting to be a President “who reminds you of the guy you work with, not the guy who laid you off.”  This reminder-based populism was necessarily toothless and had no real implications for negotiating trade deals, enforcing immigration laws, reforming the tax code and entitlements or any of the policies that are detrimental to the interests of the many.

Palin has given cultural populist cues derived from her biography–we are told endlessly that Palin’s story reminds voters of their own lives, or that she “gets” their experience, and the same cues that endear her to Middle Americans freak out people on the left who imagine Palin to be some sort of theocrat.  Likewise, Huckabee gave those meaningless so-called economic populist cues by talking about “reminding” people of the guys they work with, and those same cues freaked out conservative elites who thought he was coming to take their money.  In neither case are these cues indicative of the policies that Palin and Huckabee support.  In both cases, the hysterical reactions against the candidates showed how absolutely intolerable anything that even resembled populism was.  On closer examination, we find that neither one of them is actually a populist once you get beyond their stump speeches.  It would be interesting to see the reaction to a well-informed, policy-driven populist campaign would be, if there were any campaigns of that kind in either major party.  Then again, those who remember the derision heaped on Pat Buchanan during each one of his campaigns already know what the reaction would look like.

George H.W. Bush won the White House not because of the tawdry Willie Horton ad but because he convinced the country he was the only candidate ready to be presidentin an unknown post-cold-war world [bold mine-DL]. ~Jonathan Darman

The post-Cold War world was so unknown in 1988 that it did not yet exist.  I know some people like to credit the voting public with wisdom and common sense–don’t ask me why–but I don’t know many who attribute to them the powers of prophecy.  What’s very odd about this claim, besides being so wrong that it subverts much of Darman’s argument, is that Bush ran for re-election as the only candidate ready to be President in the changed post-Cold War world and lost.  Perot factored into it in an important way, of course, but what one finds in the ’92 result is the public’s indifference to the appeal to the extensive foreign policy experience Bush insisted made him more fit for the office.  That doesn’t mean that America is not in some respects still a center-right country, even though we are constantly defining down what center-right means, but it does mean that Darman gives the public far too much credit for making its presidential choices for substantive reasons, or at the very least Darman gets the reasons for those choices completely wrong.  While we’re at it, Nixon did not win re-election because “he offered an effective alternative to the New Deal consensus that government could help mankind be its better self,” since his first term offered nothing of the kind, and his win in ’68 was an anti-incumbency victory every bit as much as Carter’s was in ’76. 

Finally, if Darman were right about the electorate and past elections, he could not seriously conclude that the Democrats should try to fashion a new center-left consensus in the closing weeks of the election, since the lesson he has just tried to teach them reinforces the argument that Democrats cannot win presidential elections without playing it safe, hedging on their progressivism and running to the center as quickly as possible.  Indeed, to the annoyance of the netroots and many other progressive activists, Obama consistently ran a more modestly progressive campaign in the primaries compared to Clinton and Edwards and has tacked still more to “the center” since he secured the nomination.  Obama’s own campaign has already accepted the idea that a robust, full-throated progressive presidential campaign cannot win in the United States, and he probably owes his small lead to the recognition of this political reality.  What Darman also does not take into account, of course, is that it was precisely Rovian base-mobilization strategy and purely symbolic culture war tactics that kept Bush the Younger in office, and it has also been the only thing that has made McCain a viable candidate over the summer months.  The evidence is hard to ignore: as McCain’s campaign became more trivial and more obsessed with the symbolism and politics of cultural grievance, the better it did.  There is a certain annoying quality to the oft-heard complaint that Democratic policy positions are obviously better and more in the interests of the electorate, since this is not always obvious and frequently not true, but this complaint also misses the point: elections are not decided by the relative merits of policy proposals, but by salesmanship, slogans and affected bonhomie.  If there is one thing that ties together Democratic nominees across the last three decades, it is their relatively greater fascination with earnest wonkery, and it is this that explains many Democratic defeats over the years.

Under Venediktov’s canny direction, the main presenters for Echo have developed an ear for what is permissible and what is not. “You can call Putin or Medvedev a fool, which, of course, was totally impossible in Soviet times, but you might get into trouble if you look into their pockets,” Albats said. “You cannot say you’ve heard that So-and-So has sent x trillion dollars to this or that offshore account. These people are total conformists, total pragmatists, they have no interest at all in ideology. They care about their power and their assets [bold mine-DL].” ~David Remnick

Via James

That is the essential difference between the old system and Putinism.  That isn’t to say that Soviet leaders didn’t care about their power, but there was an ideological dimension to their attempts to control society that made it very different.  This is one of several reasons why people who warn about “Sovietization” or a neo-Soviet empire today are utterly wrong, and it is why a Putinist Russia is even more manageable than the old USSR.  Far from being the “unpredictable” danger that alarmists want to make it out to be, Russia is quite understandable and predictable.  It is clear what Russia wants and that its objectives are fairly limited.  The less complaining about “archaic” spheres of influence we hear from the people who treat the entire globe as their sphere of influence, the better the chances of a thaw in U.S.-Russian relations.

The McCain campaign has a lot of holdovers from the Bush administration, but among the most important of these is the person serving as Palin’s foreign policy advisor, Stephen Biegun, who also functions as McCain’s top Russia advisor.  As Paul Weyrich notes here, Biegun was partly responsible for drafting the 2002 National Security Strategy that outlined the preventive war core of the Bush Doctrine.  From 2001-03, Biegun was executive secretary of the NSC, and so was at the heart of administration policymaking at its most reckless and dangerous. 

This tells me not only that Palin should have been more familiar with the subject matter than she was, but that her policy views take the most extreme form of interventionism possible.  Her prepared remarks for the anti-Iran rally, published in The New York Sun, confirm this.  As Steve Clemons observed when there were reports that Biegun would be advising Palin, it meant that Biegun “will turn her into an advocate of Cheneyism and Cheney’s view of national-security issues.”  Biegun is head of the Moscow office for the International Republican Institute, which is one of the more obnoxious organizations engaged in political meddling in former Soviet space and elsewhere in the world.  While McCain’s Russophobia seems as personal and visceral as any of his other views, Biegun is as important for understanding McCain’s anti-Russian attitudes as the presence of Scheunemann as an advisor to the campaign.  The Moscow Times quoted Biegun as saying this earlier this year:

I think there’s a fundamental false trade-off that many people make, and most certainly the Bush administration has accepted this false trade-off, that if you talk about democracy and you stand up for human rights, you’re going to alienate President Putin and you’re not going to get him to do the real things that matter to America.

This would be the same administration that sent Cheney to Vilnius and then to Kazakhstan to lecture Russia on its lack of democracy, backed all three “color” revolutions in former Soviet republics and pressed for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, but which still thinks that the Russians should cooperate with us on Iran.  They don’t seem to recognize that the trade-off exists, or if they do they are quite willing to alienate Moscow if it allows them to keep wrapping up hegemony in the cloak of democracy promotion.  Biegun’s remarks suggest that he does not understand Russia even as well as the current administration, or else it means that he is even more ideologically driven in his support for democracy promotion than the current administration, which he seems to think is compromising its commitment to the same.

Observe the strange inversion of all order and sense!  Dignity debased; how vilely is the function of a consul prostituted! ~The Craftsman 

In the wake of one of the largest government interventions in the American private sector in history and on the eve of the terrible interventionist plan for the mega-bailout, Noemie Emery asserts that the following is not true:

Three weeks ago, the wisdom was that the conservative movement was over and done with. It had burned itself out, taking the Republican party down with it, and setting the stage for the biggest explosion of liberal governance since perhaps the New Deal.

Probably the better way to describe what had happened was that the GOP took the conservative movement down with it, but either way this is basically correct.  What no one foresaw three weeks ago was that the biggest explosion of liberal governance since the New Deal, much of which had already happened on Mr. Bush’s watch in years past, would be capped off with a veritable nova of government intervention in the economy to make up for the blunders in monetary, housing and fiscal policy that took place under Republican leadership, at the behest of Republican appointees and in service of stated Republican objectives.  Mr. Bush’s prattling on about the “ownership society” contributed directly to the current crisis, since this drive to put people in houses they owned encouraged many to take out mortgages they could not afford.  This risky path was recommended by no less than the guru Greenspan himself.  Call it the soft bigotry of adjustable interest rates.

Of course, there was some irony that Mr. Bush was talking about ownership in the same decade when a Republican-dominated Court did everything it could to vitiate property rights for the sake of development corporations in Kelo, but no matter.  The same people who ridicule government support for industries that actually produce things and who simultaneously glory in the de-industrialization of the country (“creative destruction”!  the global economy must be served!) are suddenly very anxious when the old Hamiltonian alliance of concentrated wealth and power is endangered by its own recklessness.  Suddenly the destructive aspect of “creative destruction” worries them when it begins to affect them and parts of the country they can be bothered to notice.  When the very centralism and concentration of wealth that they have championed threatens the welfare of the entire commonwealth, watch as they become the most devoted believers in socializing risk and imposing the costs of their vision on the people.  Actually, that has always been the point of “creative destruction”–the people bear most of the costs, and the dynatoi receive the benefits.     

The collusion between financial interests and the government is an old story, and it is one viewed with hostility by the Country tradition, a significant part of the American political tradition, dating back before Jefferson inveighed against “the moneyed interest.”  Nothing can better demonstrate how antithetical this collusion is to a free market economy than the last week’s events.  And what does the conservative movement, supposedly so energized and dynamic now that Sarah Palin has arrived on the scene, to say about any of this?  Very, very little.  These are the people who will refer to prominent figures in the movement’s past, will name-check their books and will talk about reducing the size of government, but they are ultimately quiescent, or even actively supportive, when an administration that they have empowered oversees one of the largest expansions of the state in U.S. history.  Absurdly, their new champions, including the mighty Palin, talk about fiscal responsibility and restraining spending…while more or less signing off on some of the largest spending measures ever undertaken that will ultimately add over one trillion to the national debt.  That does not even touch the merely fiscal costs that the war that they have cheered on has imposed.  If the last eight years of Republican administration have not shown that the GOP is an unworthy representative of conservatives, and if conservatives cannot wean themselves from the debilitating alliance with the GOP even after the last week, the conservative movement probably should be over and done with, as it seems not to have done very much for our country in recent years.

Frustrated by the campus climate and skeptical of anti-Bush claims that struck me as outlandish, I did a foolish thing: I let my preference for who would win the presidency be influenced—though not wholly determined—by the emotional satisfaction I’d get from seeing people who annoyed me lose the election.

Of course, the candidate I preferred on the issues did win. But my behavior as a voter sent the message that an unimpressive man, drafted by the party apparatus, could help his chances at being elected by provoking hyperbolic criticism and cannily taking umbrage. The Bush Administration exploited that tactic to such spectacular, damaging effect later on that I am loath to admit my complicity in the schadenfreude, even all these years later. ~Conor Friedersdorf

Conor makes several interesting points in this article, but this is the most important one.  Even though I was not a Bush voter and voted for Buchanan, I have to admit that my contempt for Clinton and Gore was so strong in 2000 that I was quite pleased when Gore finally conceded defeat.  I was no Bush partisan, but even then I could see that he was somewhat preferable to McCain, who promises once again to be much worse than Bush once in power, so Bush seemed the least awful of the lot of them.  What many conservatives would prefer to forget now is how much worse by virtually every measure Bush has been compared to Clinton, and Clinton was certainly no prize, which should be a humbling realization for anyone who thinks visceral reactions should guide political behavior.  The desire to see Clinton and Gore suppporters disappointed and outraged combined with a politics of contempt for these politicians, fueled by my distaste for the leading Democrats, worked to distort my assessment of Bush in at least the first few months of his administration.  That he launched an airstrike on Iraq within weeks of assuming office should have told me something about the obsession with that country that would cost us so much, but at that point I was still in thrall to my contempt for Gore.  If there is one last thing for which I blame Clinton, it is how easy he made it to despise him and his backers and how he helped pave the way for the appalling joke of a President we currently have. 

Delighting in lamentations is a strong temptation, and it is one the selection of Palin was designed to provoke, as there is a powerful urge to cheer on Palin if it turns the likes of Mark “Obama is a Lightworker” Morford into more of an incoherent, sputtering buffoon than he already was.  Even so, we all know that this is a ridiculous way to respond.  It makes your loyalties hostage to the most idiotic of your opponents, and it compels you to ignore your interests and any semblance of independent thought.  I would add another point–even those who seem to break from the herd and back a candidate from “the other side” to repudiate all the worst elements on your own “side” are falling prey to what Conor calls the politics of Schadenfreude, as an important part of the rationale for conservatives backing Obama or conservative Democrats backing McCain is not that these candidates better represent them but that they function as scourges for elements in their own party that they find appalling.  We hear it all the time–an Obama victory would be a judgement on the neocons, or Democratic defections would be a repudiation of Obama’s progressivism–and somehow we do not see it as part of the same moral blackmail that keeps the two-party system functioning.  If we voted our interests and paid no mind to the kinds of people who would be outraged by the victory of one candidate or another, we would quickly realize that neither party represents us and serves mainly as a rallying point for our undefined grievances against other people, most of whom we have never met.

In many ways he’s McCain’s McCain—a passionate and unorthodox reformer, and a stalwart freedom fighter ranged against the Russian bear. ~Owen Matthews

In many ways, Saakashvili is a perfect example of how absolutely meaningless the word “reformer” is, since self-righteous nationalist prigs who believe themselves to be on a mission of restoration and revitalization such as Saakashvili are dangerous, intemperate fools who bring disaster on their own countries more often than they fix serious problems of corruption and abuse of power.  Indeed, the zeal of many of these “reformers” is such that it justifies corruption and abuse of power in the name of the cause of reform–Saakashvili is a living example of this tendency.  Indeed, he is McCain’s McCain–belligerent, reckless and absolutely convinced of his own moral superiority such that he has no qualms about plunging his country into hell to prove a point. 

These descriptions in this article are exactly the sort of misleading journalism that has inspired at least a decade of senseless pro-Georgian sentimentality in Washington and helped give Saakashvili the false encouragement that the West would aid him in his reckless gamble.  Say it with me: he is not a freedom fighter, he is an authoritarian nationalist.  Just like his Washington patron.