Sullivan:

“Far left” means a man that Joe Lieberman was thrilled to get to support his last Senate campaign.

Of course, Lieberman was thrilled to get any support in his last Senate campaign from national Democrats during the primary, but it might be worth pointing out that by voting record and ADA score Obama actually is to the left of Lieberman, who is, with the exception of his “centrist” (a.k.a., militarist) foreign policy views, pretty far to the left of center himself.  When defining someone as “far left” (or “far right”), it matters who is doing the defining.  From my perspective, the current administration is pretty far to the left, and Obama would be demonstrably farther to the left on most, if not all, things, so to the extent that the right-left spectrum has any meaning (questionable) how else would you define him?  To many far leftists, Obama appears to be a sell-out and someone willing to compromise with the GOP in unacceptable ways, but the irony of this complaint is that he is much closer to them than they or Obama’s conservative supporters believe. 

To be to the right of Hillary Clinton on nationalising health care is still pretty far out there for a lot of people in this country.  The relevant question is whether the country has moved significantly to the left, or indeed already was there when Bush was elected but had not yet fully expressed it electorally, and there is some evidence that it has when we look at some of the voting for the House or polling on specific policy issues.  That said, there seems to be tremendous stability at the presidential level in the voting coalitions, which is why, according to Rasmussen, McCain doggedly polls at around 45-46% and Obama anemically polls the same, which seems to mean that the center has not shifted all that much despite the last eight years.  That means that a nominee who is running on the most left-wing platform of any candidate since McGovern (as is Clinton, as was Edwards!) is effectively pretty far to the left.  If you’re a liberal or an Obama supporter, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with that and presumably it is the reason why you’re supporting him (conservatives who are supporting him primarily because of the war are obviously the radical exception).  In theory, Obama’s potential was supposed to be that he would mainstream left-liberalism with the aid of his style, charisma and inclusive rhetoric, but the consolation for those on the left annoyed by his accommodating language was that he would be unabashedly governing as a left-liberal on the assumption that left-liberalism has the best answers. 

The then state senator who was considered the pride of Chicago’s progressives–that is to say, the candidate in the Senate primary who was to the left of most of his competition–can be fairly described as a leftist, and the only reason to fear such a label is if such a political alignment really does put the candidate so far out of the mainstream that he is not electorally viable.  The meme is not exhausted, or else there would be no reason to challenge its use.  Whether it still has the same political punch that it once did is an open question, but the description of Obama as being far to the left would not worry Obama supporters if it were either manifestly untrue or lacking in power.  Arguably, relative to, say, a Russ Feingold, Obama may be closer to the center, but not that much closer.  Then again, Obama has had higher ratings from NARAL than Feingold and a higher ADA than Ted Kennedy in the past.  As the linked page shows, during the relevant period Obama had an average higher rating from several progressive interest groups than any of his colleagues–so how is it outrageous to say that he is far left?  These interest group ratings are imperfect and are focused on some pieces of legislation at the expense of other votes, but they are one way to quantify someone’s political leanings.   

It seems to me that his conservative supporters are allergic to this description of him because they are aware of how that label has been used to sink Democratic nominee after Democratic nominee, and so they want to insist that Obama is not politically what, in reality, he is and has been for his entire career.  It seems to me that this is to recommend the same halting, fearful sort of campaign in which the Democrat has to run away from what he actually believes to be “common sense” (as Obama has described his own views) for fear of being “tarred” with the beliefs that he holds.  This is the same kind of lack of confidence that has plagued Democratic responses to the charge of being a liberal or “weak on national security” for decades.  

Meanwhile, this objection seems particularly strained:

“Far left” means well to the racial right of Jesse Jackson.

As a matter of policy, how is this even accurate?  Because Obama does not lead street protests and engage in the rhetoric of racial grievance–matters of tactics and expression–he is to Jesse Jackson’s right?  In what significant way is his current position on affirmatve action really any different from Jackson’s?  He has gestured vaguely towards replacing racial preferences with class-based preferences, but he is always doing that–gesturing vaguely towards reforming this or that policy, and then predictably endorsing the traditional party line when it comes time to vote on anything. 

Then there is this sort of thing, which I’m not sure his supporters want to keep stressing:

“Far left” means retaining the right to bomb Pakistan if al Qaeda is deemed a threat there.

That’s right.  He supports violating allied sovereignty without the ally’s consent, which is the same position that George Bush holds.  It is in his attitudes towards the use of force and intervention abroad where the “far left” label does not apply very well, because in this area of policy he is firmly entrenched in the Washington consensus that supports U.S. hegemony and will consistently disappoint his progressive supporters who think of him as representing a significant break from past U.S. foreign policy. 

Update: A more comprehensive list of Obama’s ratings can be found here.  As you can see, his ADA varies from year to year, but the overall impression from his ratings is that he consistently and predictably votes with liberal interest groups, which is what you would expect from a left-liberal Democrat.

Though I am a bit late coming to this story, Dionne has a column on the denial of Communion to Prof. Kmiec on account of his endorsement of Obama that deserves some comment.  I havediscussedKmiec‘s endorsement and his arguments before, and while I have not found them persuasive it seems clear that he has maintained a recognisably pro-life view throughout.  He has gone out of his way to propose that Obama adopt a measure advanced by Democrats for Life that could, in theory, reduce the number of abortions significantly in the near term, and he has certainly wrestled with the problem of Obama’s support for legal abortion.  The most unfortunate thing is that Prof. Kmiec has consistently taken Obama at his word that he respects pro-life views, which has given Kmiec the false hope that Obama will take pro-life arguments seriously to the point of embracing them or implementing pro-lifers’ proposals in the context of retaining legal abortion.  What matters in Kmiec’s case is his intent, and clearly he is not supporting Obama in order to promote a grave evil.  The mistake that Kmiec has made, which is the same mistake that many pro-life Obama supporters are making, is to believe that Obama has any intention of following through as a matter of policy on his rhetoric of listening to all sides and building consensus.   

Even so, if Kmiec has participated in a grave moral evil simply by endorsing Obama, how much more have all those tens and hundreds of thousands of Catholic Democrats across the Rust Belt and elsewhere who have actually cast votes for Hillary Clinton?  The question answers itself–obviously he has not so participated.

My WWWTW colleague Steve Burton discusses Richard’s Takimag post against Lukacs and my response concerning Lukacs’ (and Kennan’s) anti-anticommunism.  I appreciated Steve’s comments, and he raises an important challenge that goes to the heart of why I think many conservatives find Lukacs and found Kennan to be so puzzling when they have critiqued popular anticommunism:

It just strikes me as incredible that any reasonable human being could still believe that universalist communism was, in the long run, a trivial threat, in comparison to German nationalism.

I mean, c’mon, guys…what is the biggest problem we face today? Is it nationalism, of any stripe?

Or is it universalism?

These are two different issues, but both are relevant to the ongoing debate.  First, we should clear up some misconceptions.  I should say straightaway that the anti-anticommunism I have been defending is the kind Lukacs described thus: 

And there is another kind of anti-anticommunist who has no sympathy for communism but who is appalled by the errors and dishonesty of anticommunist ideology and its propagation.

As Grant Havers correctly notes, Lukacs has some things in common with Peter Viereck.  Viereck, of course, quarreled with National Review and with Russell Kirk himself back in the ’50s over the question of anticommunism and “its propagation,” and specifically over the response to Joe McCarthy.   

As Lukacs argued in The Poverty of Anticommunism and again in later works, the threat from universalist communism was less (though I don’t know that anyone would claim that it was “trivial”) because universalist communism could not inspire the same enduring loyalty that various nationalisms could and did inspire.  One part of the argument is that Soviet communism derived most of the strength it had and also derived at least its external objectives from Russian nationalism, and I think this interpretation is strong for the post-1924 period and even stronger for the WWII and postwar periods.  The extension of that argument is that communist revolutions have fed off of nationalist resistance movements or communists have taken the lead in fomenting nationalist resistance movements, which meant that communists often provided the leadership of nationalist revolutions and guerrilla forces but they gained the popular support that they had because they pursued nationalist goals (chief among which was independence from colonial rule or foreign interference) first and foremost.  Having acquired power or credibility through this use of nationalism, communists either established themselves as the new government or, in the case of their failures, were outflanked in gaining popular support by a stronger anticommunist nationalism that could effectively tie the communist insurgents to foreign patrons to undermine their claims to national loyalty. 

The second part of the argument is that the USSR qua Russian empire represented a significantly less dangerous strategic threat than Germany, especially if we are talking about a Germany victorious over the Soviet Union and in control of most or all of Europe.  While I find the idea of enduring German rule in a counterfactual postwar world far less compelling (precisely because domination by one nation would provoke nationalist resistance), the two points are simply these: 1) communism is not a system that people wanted to defend to the death (hence the much-maligned references to the suicide rates of Nazis vs. the preservation instinct of apparatchiks) because it is not a system that inspired genuine belief, or at least certainly not on a large scale, whereas a nationalist ideal does inspire such devotion and consequently is a much more potent belief; 2) the USSR was much less of a threat than Germany in terms of ability to project power and the spectre of unified global communist was always something of a chimera because of the national rivalries between different communist regimes that would hinder collaboration and would provoke intra-communist conflicts (as actually happened briefly between the USSR and China in the 1960s and China and Vietnam in 1978) and made it possible to split non-Stalinist communist regimes away from the USSR (as Washington did in 1972 with China and again in cultivating good relations with Yugoslavia). 

The ideological reading of the Soviet threat exaggerated the long-term international appeal of communism and also exaggerated the staying power of the Soviet system, which, as we all remember, crumbled in a matter of a few years with only the most minimal resistance from the old guard.  Instead of going down with their ideological ship, communist apparatchiks became “ex-communists” or “reformed” communists all over Europe, began preaching the virtues of liberal democracy and started obeying their new masters in Washington and Brussels.  So, nationalism is more powerful than communism for mobilising popular support and loyalty because it inspires genuine and stronger belief, in part because it is tapping into (and also perverting) natural affinities and loyalties.  Universalist ideologies are dangerous because of their imperative for attacking and demonising those natural affinities and loyalties, but they have less staying power because they are constantly in conflict with those affinities and loyalties.  As Lukacs would say, nationalism is a half-truth and communism is a lie, which is why the latter is weaker.  Some might say that this doesn’t give lies enough credit, but I don’t think that’s a very strong objection.  So it isn’t a question of whether German nationalism would have remained a long-term threat, but that nationalism is more powerful than communism because it is likely to be considered more acceptable and will be more popular because it is drawing on (and abusing) natural sentiments, and in a contrast between a German nationalist empire and a Soviet empire that is, in this interpretation, basically a Russian nationalist empire the German one poses a greater threat because Germany was a wealthier, more efficient, more modernised state capable of greater power projection than its Russian counterpart.  The world is seeing today in the case of China of a nominally communist system that mobilises loyalty to the regime on the basis of Chinese nationalism.  The loss of confidence in Maoism as a reigning ideology is pretty much an open secret.  For that matter, on what did the CCP build its political credibility?  To some large extent on its reputation as an anti-Japanese, anti-colonial force that successfully consolidated control over all of China.  All of that seems to confirm the estimate that nationalism was and continues to be the most powerful force in the last hundred years.  

Think of it another way: what destroyed most of European civilisation?  The short answer is WWI, in part because WWI also unleashed the forces that led to WWII, and so the forces that led to WWI were responsible for a much graver, more enduring work of destruction, and among the forces that led to the war the foremost was nationalism.  There are important arguments that many of the horrors that find their origins in WWI might not have happened had the post-war settlement not taken place in the wake of an American-backed Allied victory, but this view implies that 1914 was the decisive year of the century and 1917 merely an after-effect whose long-term consequences might have been avoided or checked.  In any case, much of the damage to European civilisation had already been done by then, and the governments of Europe had been taken over the edge into that abyss in no small part by popular enthusiasm fuelled by nationalism and given expression through democracy; it was, of course, the democratic nature of most of the belligerents’ governments and the nationalist passions stirred by the war that ensured that it lasted as long as it did. 

As for what the biggest problem “we” face today might be, it depends on how we define this “we.”  Confronted with progressive globalists here at home, many on the right think that we could stand to have a little more nationalism and a little less criticism of nationalism, and certainly there is the temptation to embrace nationalism because it is more powerful than universalist systems, whether liberal or otherwise, but as with the Ring nationalism is a force that cannot be used without inviting the dangers that almost always accompany it.  It is precisely because nationalism has the potential to be more powerful that it is also extremely volatile and the effects of encouraging it can lead to very undesirable outcomes.  Whether or not you want to agree with me that many members of this administration are ideological nationalists of a specifically universalist, propositionalist kind, it seems harder to dispute that the wave of nationalist enthusiasm that swept the country in 2001-03 made the war in Iraq not only politically viable but also advantageous.  Ideas of national greatness and national mission intoxicated a lot of people in that period, if they did not already hold them before then, and it is hard to imagine how the war could have gone forward with the overwhelming support that it had without these passions and ideas blunting all criticism and dissent and making it politically risky for any prominent member of the opposition party to resist administration policy.  So when we are asking what big problems we face, it seems to me that we need to bear in mind how one of the greatest policy blunders of the last 30 years unfolded and what forces made that blunder possible.

My Scene colleague Jim Manzi objects to Obama’s Wesleyan commencement address, and finds particularly risible Obama’s habit of referring the theme of the address (which is the boilerplate appeal to public service and “giving back”) back to his own biography.  I take his point, and one might extend the same criticism to almost every major address Obama has given that is not specifically policy-oriented (the subtext of which might be, “I am the change History has been waiting for”), but why is it any more or less annoying in principle when Obama does this?  John McCain endlessly refers back to his military service, as he has every right to do, and certainly no one (certainly no one sane) is going to attempt to make McCain’s time in the Navy and his years as a tortured POW and Obama’s lean years on the South Side into equivalent experiences of hardship, since they are not remotely equivalent.  McCain prominently placed his military service at the center of his heavy-handed, “An American President Americans have been waiting for” ad, whose official title was McCain’s serial number, for goodness’ sake!  In many of his public remarks, he defines his campaign, as he did eight years ago, in terms of inspiring a new generation to dedicate themselves to a “cause greater than themselves.”  If there is one constant mantra of McCainism, such as it is, it is this.  He implicitly and explicitly refers to his own service as a model for public service all the time. 

The reason why so many have been objecting to Obama’s commencement address is not that Obama has held himself up as a role model, but that Manzi and others are not terribly interested in taking Obama as an “exemplar of the well-lived life.”  Fair enough, but what does Manzi expect from most politicians, especially those who have traveled the conventional path of post-graduate school, activism and politics?  Are they going to denigrate what they consider to be important forms of public service, even if they seem obviously narrow, constrained and unimaginative to the rest of us?  Are government employees really going to dwell at length on the virtues of entrepreneurship and for-profit work?  Someone who worked as an activist and then went into politics is going to frame his appeal to public service in terms of his own experience.  Also, it is probably easier for a college student audience to relate to this sort of boilerplate call to “give back” if the speaker can provide some concrete examples from his own life. 

Many people have noticed that Obama did not mention military service in his speech, which viewed as a strictly political matter seems like the sort of glaring oversight that should be caught by one of his advisors or noticed by the candidate himself, since it has now become common to assume in (incorrect and) Barone-like fashion that he never says anything about honouring those in the military.  Then again, it might have seemed out of place to him for a couple of reasons: first of all, he knows that the vast majority of his audience is not going to go into military service, and second he might have assumed that he would not have been able to make an appeal to that kind of service with enough credibility to make it worth doing.  What his critics probably assume is a snub to those in the service or a built-in bias against military service may have been an attempt to focus the theme of his speech and make the appeal to public service–as he understands that service–in the most effective way given the audience he was addressing. 

Manzi concludes, “Unfortunately, Obama’s guidance pretty much boils down to: Greenpeace good; Goldman, Sachs bad; U.S. Army not worth mentioning.”  Looked at yet another way: what would you expect a left-liberal Democratic presidential candidate to say that doesn’t in some way boil down to something very much like this?  We might boil down some John McCain speeches to their most simple elements, and it would come out sounding fairly absurd and probably more dangerous.

As for the charge of solipsism, one could more easily make the case that most of the Obama campaign has been an exercise in this.

That is not the part of the song that Obama’s campaign staffers will be singing today.  They will probably prefer the second verse.  Results are slow to come in, but obviously if the exit polls are even within 10 points of the actual vote tally Clinton has won one of her largest victories of the year.  Exit polls indicate that it may be a 70-30 blowout.  Depending on turnout, Clinton may net several hundred thousand votes.  Fortunately, Puerto Rico is one of the contests that actually won’t be relevant in the fall,  which is good news for Obama, since the exit polling says that only 52% of primary voters would back him in the fall if they were voting.  Most of the rest say they would vote for McCain (18%) or not vote (22%).  50% said that they would be dissatisfied if Obama won the nomination. 

Interestingly, Obama did the best (40%) among those who are more likely to identify as Puerto Rican rather than American, those who belong to the PPD, the Popular Democratic Party (51%), and therefore naturally also those who believe that Puerto Rico should be a commonwealth rather than a state (51%).  The New York connection seems to have given an added boost to Clinton in a place where she was probably already going to do quite well, but she did almost as well with those who have no relatives in New York (62%) as she did with those who did (72%).  It can’t hurt that Puerto Rican Democratic voters continue to have a very favourable view of Bill Clinton (82% fav/15% unfav).

Sullivan reminds us of something Ross said in his June Atlantic piece that had not caught my attention the first time:

The Bush administration has often seemed bent on vindicating, in the short run and by force of arms, Francis Fukuyama’s famous long-term prediction that liberal democracy will ultimately triumph. Now Bush’s hopes for vindication depend on the Middle East’s following a gradual, Fukuyaman track toward free markets, democratic government, and the “end of history.” And just as crucially, they depend on American troops’ staying in Iraq for as long as it takes for that to happen [bold mine-DL].

There is something a bit strange about this paragraph.  If Bush’s hopes for vindication rest on the old long-term evolution towards the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism, which will, if we believe Fukuyama, happen because there are no viable rival doctrines or systems that can compete with these things, and the attempt to force that vindication through the war in Iraq was the wrong way to promote this, how exactly does it aid in Bush’s vindication over the long term to keep American forces in Iraq?  Either Fukuyama’s long-term argument about the effects of modernisation is basically correct, in which case the U.S. does not need to maintain a neo-colonial steward role in shepherding Iraq towards continued modernisation, or it isn’t, which raises the prospect that liberal democracy and capitalism will not endure in Iraq without a perpetual American presence propping up an alien and artificial system that will collapse as soon as we leave.  The latter alternatve is neither realistic nor desirable, and the former theory is almost certainly false, but in either case vindication by Fukuyama’s long-term theory necessarily means that a continued U.S. presence is unnecessary, just as the war was actually unnecessary in the first place on the terms most favourable to Fukuyama’s original argument, or Fukuyama is wrong and our forces will have to stay there indefinitely, which is not a politically or militarily viable possibility.  Any way you slice it, the prospects of Mr. Bush’s future vindication are not very good.  As Ross says, “This seems improbable, to put it mildly.”

As Mike Steketee in The Australian relates in a new article on Fukuyama:

And what about the Islamic rejection of modernisation? Fukuyama argues this does not invalidate his thesis because radical Islam is not a viable alternative to democratic government. Radical Islamists had come to power only in Iran and for a period in Afghanistan and had influence in Saudi Arabia. China has managed spectacular development while remaining an authoritarian state and Fukuyama concedes that this looks like the strongest challenge to the idea that economic growth leads to democracy.

But he argues it is early days, with China only half as rich as South Korea and Taiwan in the 1980s, when they became democracies.

The implication of Fukuyama’s position (which, I suppose, is more consistent with his break with the neocons and his new support for Obama than with his old pro-war views) is that liberal democracy and capitalism will prevail in these places eventually regardless of whether our forces leave Iraq or not, which seems to drive home the point that war really was for nothing.  If he truly believes that there are no viable alternatives that people will continue to accept and champion far into the future, then his is an all together more fanciful and ideological, but potentially less dangerous way of thinking about the “end of history.”  It is the gradualist approach rather than the Leninist revolutionary one, to borrow a comparison that Fukuyama himself once used. 

As an aside, I would just add that it has always been a glaring flaw in imagining that modernisation would result in anything that could credibly be called “the end of history,” since there will continue to be nations and a number of independent states (and possibly more states emerging all the time on account of the enduring power of nationalism), and their democratisation and economic development will increase the occasions for conflict and intensify national rivalries.  The assumption that international conflicts are produced by ideological clashes is itself an ideological one that ignores the importance of concrete interests and power relations, and partakes of the same fantasy that those in the administration had when they proposed that “democracies don’t war,” to quote the President’s succinct and false claim.  The role that modernisation has had in intensifying the power of religion in modern politics, and particularly fairly strict or severe forms of religion, also points to a rather large hole in the Fukuyaman vision.

I suppose this will make Jameshappy:

Political donors report Sen. John McCain complains he is under pressure from President Bush and his former political adviser Karl Rove to select former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney as his vice presidential running mate.

If someone were telling me I had to associate myself with Mitt Romney, I would complain, too, but the striking thing about this report is how Bush has continued not-so-secretly to prefer the one candidate of the 2008 major Republican candidates possibly less electable than he would be if he could run for a third term.  (No, I’m not kidding.)  If Mr. Bush is preoccupied with legacy-building at this point, it is quite odd that he would be pushing McCain to take on the dead weight political strength of Mitt Romney, who demonstrated a remarkable ability to become less popular the more people saw of him.  Perhaps this is an expression of Bush’s unconscious desire to see McCain fail, the product of some leftover animus from years ago? 

What do they say the first rule of VP selecting is?  Isn’t it “do no harm”?  You don’t need to be as much of an inveterate Romney foe as I am to see that this choice would do a great deal of harm to McCain.  Where McCain is beloved by the press, Romney is hated.  McCain is considered, rightly or not, to be genuine and honest, while Romney is widely held to be a fraud.  McCain wants to close Guantanamo as a detention facility, and Romney famously wanted to “double” it.  McCain is supposed to run against Obama’s health care plan with a running mate who signed into law health care legislation that was effectively to the left of Obama’s position on mandates?  McCain is going to compete in the Rust Belt with the living embodiment of corporate America standing by his side?  Romney might help in Michigan and (marginally) in Massachusetts, but he would cost McCain dozens of electoral votes elsewhere.  In the spirit of Romney’s withdrawal speech at CPAC, I think Romney should withdraw himself from consideration for VP, since he said he didn’t want to contribute to a Democratic victory and putting him on the ticket would all but guarantee one.

Less impressed with it than Ross seems to have been, I was not persuaded by much of Mark Schmitt’s article, and the two sentences that sum up why are these:

The politics of American-ness needs to be cloaked in policy, simply because it’s unpalatable otherwise.

This year the Republican argument is reduced to its barest essence: Americans versus “pluribus,” unprotected by the politeness of issues or safer symbolism.

No one knows for sure what Mark Schmitt thinks pluribus means, but he seems to think it refers to minorities and marginal populations.  Of course, appeals to American-ness don’t need to be “cloaked in policy,” since expressions of Americanism are rampant and all around us, especially in an election year.  That Schmitt treats such appeals as inherently unpalatable speaks volumes about why Republicans are able to exploit such appeals to their advantage year-in and year-out.  While American-ness can be and has been deployed as a cudgel, it is potentially both extremely inclusive and conformist the rest of the time and worryingly requires the subordination or even elimination of other forms of identity.  When the content of American-ness can be made as vague and ahistorical as possible (usually when it is reduced to an abstraction or a set of propositions), it can mobilise a number of different sentiments of loyalty, pride, aspiration, resentment and fear all at the same time.  When people joked about John Kerry being “vaguely French,” there was no real policy issue at stake, but a simple effort to distance him from his American identity.  That he actually had European cousins (as most of us, in theory, also have at a great remove) was somehow treated as disqualifying because it made him seem less American, which was then tied to various policies on national security and so forth to put those policies in a bad light.  These sorts of appeals for or against a candidate’s American-ness and general appeals to American identity are not only palatable to most of the public, but they are treated as absolutely necessary for presidential candidates. 

Schmitt comes close to making a good point, but then misses it when he says:

When Republicans went after Michael Dukakis for his policies on crime, they weren’t just saying his policies were bad. They were saying, he’s not like us; he’s a cold-blooded, academic mush-brain who wouldn’t give his kids a whupping if they needed it.

On crime, they were quite explicitly saying that he was a weak abettor of felons, and that you can’t trust him.  It’s questions of strength and trust that make law and order appeals so effective for the GOP.  On the Pledge of Allegiance controversy in 1988, they were saying very plainly, “He doesn’t respect the flag, he doesn’t think people should be loyal to this country, he doesn’t want to instill patriotism in children!”  That this was rubbish is beside the point–respect for the flag, patriotism and loyalty to America have no obvious connection to the Pledge in any case.  It was this sort of purely symbolic issue, combined with making use of legitimate issues such as crime, and then portraying the opponent’s record on that issue in the worst possible light that increased the overall power of the attack more than any one alone could have done.  If you can sow doubts about a candidate’s American-ness, you make it harder for people to identify with him and therefore harder to trust him, which then makes any critiques of his policies more effective in peeling away supporters than if you had simply laid out why you think the policies are objectionable.  You don’t need policy to function as a cover or a code for this move.  Indeed, without the original challenge to the opponent’s American bona fides, the policy critique might not gain traction at all.

A shockingly large group of people, that’s who.  On the economy, McCain is trusted more than Obama (47-41%), and likewise on Iraq (49-37) and national security (53-31).  Concerning the economy, McCain leads Obama 55-33 among men, wins every age group except 18-29, gets 31% black support, 25% of Democrats and wins every income group above $40K.  On Iraq, McCain wins men 56-31 and wins women by a point, he wins every age group, he gets 39% of black voters, 22% of Democrats and every income group above $20K.  On national security, obviously it’s a blowout: McCain wins men by 33 points and women by 13, he wins every age group (including 18-29 year olds by 27 points), gets 44% of black voters, 28% of Democrats and wins every income group. 

In light of the respective positions of the two parties and public attitudes towards them and in light of public attitudes about which party they trust more on these very issues, these numbers are amazing.  The question of trust is going to be decisive, and Obama is being beaten like a drum when it comes to winning the public’s trust.  Look on the bright side, Obamaites–his numbers can only go up, right?

But compassionate conservatism has come under criticism for a variety of reasons. For some, it is fundamentally at odds with fiscal conservatism — no social priority is deemed more urgent than balancing the budget. For others, it is a violation of their vision of limited government — the state’s only valid purpose is to uphold markets and protect individual liberty. But by drawing these limits so narrowly, such critics would relegate conservatism to the realm of rejected ideologies: untainted, uncomplicated and ignored. And by leaving great social needs unmet, they would grant liberalism an open field and invite genuine statism. ~Michael Gerson

As opposed to the supposedly faux statism that Gerson and his minions promote?  Raise your hand if you’re sick of this condescending garbage! 

How tiresome it is to hear that “social needs” are unmet because government is not involved in meeting them, or that government must be involved if those needs are, in fact, unmet.  If they’re unmet, they’re probably unmet because someone whining in the name of “compassion” forty years ago complained that the government wasn’t doing enough, so the state usurped the proper social functions of existing institutions that have since withered and died from neglect and lack of support, and now all we are left with is recourse to still more government.  However the program or initiative is designed, it will always be another form of dependency and another means to concentrate power in the state by creating these bonds of dependency on government initiatives.  How insulting to listen to someone who has never blinked at proposing spending other people’s money on the problems of people he has never met mock fiscal responsibility, and then claim that those interested in the profoundly moral effort to not pass on our debts to our posterity supposedly believe that balanced budgets are the top “social priority.”  What is Michael Gerson’s top social priority?  It seems that gratifying his undying need for atoning vicariously through good works that he isn’t doing that are paid for by wealth he isn’t creating in places he will never go is his top priority, and woe betide the moneychangers who block him on the path of righteousness!

Gerson continues:

But it is a stretch to interpret his personal challenge to the rich young ruler as a biblical foundation for libertarianism.

But then Tom Coburn isn’t urging libertarianism on anyone.  He was calling for voluntary charity and self-sacrifice, which are not exactly what most people would associate with any form of libertarianism.  That isn’t to say that libertarians can’t be charitable and self-sacrificing, but that libertarianism does not call you to be these things; Christ does.  But you have to remember that for Gerson there is Catholic social thought, which he doesn’t understand very well but claims for himself, and then there is the howling apocalyptic wasteland infested with demonic zombies that is “libertarianism” (a.k.a., whatever Michael Gerson wants to identify tendentiously with his opponents in a policy debate).  There are theological arguments for preserving and upholding the common good, but Gerson never makes them and sometimes he makes me wonder if he even knows them.  If he engaged with these arguments, he would have to grapple with questions of subsidiarity, the same principle of subsidiarity that the policies he and his allies have championed have trampled all over. 

Once again, Gerson invokes Shaftesbury, as if what Shaftesbury did has any real relationship to the state intrusion into religious charities that was the faith-based initiative or the state intrusion into local schools that was NLCB.  That is what “compassionate” conservatism has meant in practice.  You don’t get to cite what Tory reformers or Christian socialists of another era on another continent did that happened to be successful when your agenda has been a catastrophic failure.  “Oh, look, they were Christian reformers, too!”  These examples also make no effort to ground this sort of activism in an American context.  Different peoples are suited to different kinds of regimes, and they are likewise suited to different sorts of collective action. 

Instead of a supposedly libertarian Christ, Gerson offers us Christ the social worker, which is an appropriation every bit as unpersuasive as the other caricatures he rejects, and the disciples of this social worker have an unerring ability to be extremely annoying.