Philip Giraldi makes a lot of sense in challenging the recentfrenzyof“Obamacan”discussion.  He is quite right that we have been caught up in speculation that’s quite far removed from most Republicans and conservatives, and he’s also right that at this point it is premature to dismiss Obama.  It’s worth noting that a lot of the speculation about Obama’s electoral prospects has often taken for granted that he is in a position to poach on McCain’s territory and expand the Democratic coalition, but it seems distinctly possible that he will hemorrhage so much Democratic support in the general that any gains will be quickly erased.  To the extent that polling this far removed from November is any indication of real voting preferences, however many Republicans say they will back Obama are outnumbered in just about every state by the Democrats who will back McCain.  One example of this comes from North Carolina today, as Rasmussen has found that 56% of Clinton backers in the Democratic primary say they are not likely to vote for Obama against McCain.  Since just 33% of respondents prefer Clinton, the probable loss of this many voters is in line with the 16-20% of Democrats Obama loses to McCain across the country outside of “blue” states such as Maine.  (In fact, this figure seems slightly better than the 23% of Democrats he was losing to McCain in a poll from late March; in that poll, he was getting 15% of Republicans.)  Typically, Obama is drawing two-thirds or sometimes just half as many Republicans outside “blue” states.  It is likely true that Obama is drawing many long-time Republican voters to his side, but what he seems to have difficulty with is keeping the Democrats that previous nominees have won.

P.S.  For a few other examples of this: in New Jersey, McCain has 24% of Democrats, Obama 18% of Republicans as of a week ago; in Wisconsin, McCain has 16% of Democrats, Obama 10% of Republicans.  By comparison, Missouri is a disaster for Obama: McCain gets 22% of Democrats, Obama 7% of Republicans.

Jeffrey Hart’s article on William F. Buckley in the 3/24 issue is a fine piece, and I recommend it to any who haven’t read it yet.  It has received a fair amount of attention, mostly because of the anecdotes Mr. Hart includes, but it has also received some recentcriticism along other lines: it is “gloomy” about the movement’s prospects and “meanspirited.”  This latter charge, which seems to hinge on referring to Limbaugh as a blowhard (a more or less accurate description), doesn’t stand up when you look at the article as a whole.  On the whole, Mr. Hart describes and recounts; this is not a polemic.  Though I cannot know about what was in Mr. Hart’s mind when he wrote those words, I would guess that he called Limbaugh a “radio blowhard” because that is what he thought of him and other purveyors of what is called popular conservatism, and I expect that this is a result of Mr. Hart’s more general opposition to populism. 

Mr. Freire objects:

Why conservatives heap onto other conservatives in such a way, I don’t understand.

As the rest of Mr. Hart’s article makes clear, conservatives “heap onto other conservatives” this way because they have strong disagreements and have been heaping scorn on each other for over fifty years.  There are ways to make strong criticisms without resorting to ad hominem attacks, and this is desirable, but Mr. Hart is not exactly criticising a Limbaugh argument in the anecdote, and he is describing him with the word he thinks is fitting.  Calling people names is unnecessary, unless the names are the proper ones to use.  Why might Mr. Hart take a dim view of someone like Limbaugh?  The article gives us a hint when he writes:

…I learned a great deal from Burnham, most importantly to resist ideology, reflexive partisanship, wishful thinking, emotion. Fact and analysis.

Limbaugh has spent much of his career indulging in one or more of these with regularity, and this has become particularly noticeable during the last eight or ten years.

As for the charge of gloominess, there may be something to it, but the conclusion that the movement is probably finished seems to me to have strong arguments behind it.  No doubt there are smart, young conservatives who will continue to represent the best of intellectual conservatism, but after their complicity in the disasters of the Bush Era the movement institutions probably do not have much of a future over the long term.  The political conservative movement, having bound itself to an unnecessary war, has suffered such a loss of credibility that it probably is finished.  Maybe the better question to ask is whether a movement that enabled and defended such disasters should survive.  As I said when I spoke at CPAC, in its current form I doubt that it will, and I tend to think that it probably shouldn’t.

The fact that Ross thinks it would be “obvious” to update The Manchurian Candidate by making Cheney a dupe of al-Qaeda mind control is interesting, because that reflects a paranoid – and not a rationally paranoid – concept of what al-Qaeda is and how it operates. The “paranoid style” movies he’s criticizing reflect a worldview that is off-the-shelf paranoid, and that is indeed a real weakness. But a movie about an al-Qaeda sleeper agent controlling the government would only be persuasive to an audience that actually held paranoid beliefs about the world, because it is so completely detached from the actual nature of the enemy we face. ~Noah Millman

Noah is right that an “al Qaeda controls Cheney” story probably would make no sense to anyone who doesn’t already think that the resurgent caliphate is just around the corner and poses an “existential threat” to us all.  Actually, I am going to guess that Ross regards this as the obvious way to update the story because he has been watching too much Battlestar Galactica in which the Vice President (at least during seasons 1 and 2) was/is a quasi-conspirator with the Cylons and then becomes their open collaborator thereafter.  BSG is probably the most outstanding example of post-9/11 paranoid style storytelling, so it’s too bad that Ross’ article (well worth reading) does not include more discussion of this aspect of the show.  He is right to describe it in terms of ’70s revival and tragic realism, but the show is rife with paranoia, too.  The entire show is premised on a “conspiracy so vast” that ends up destroying almost all of humanity and which achieved that goal through the infiltration of the Colonies with both covert operatives and sleeper agents.  I think that meets Noah’s standards.

P.S.  This post gives me an excuse to mention that season 4 of BSG premieres tonight.

The good times are here: anti-Romney ads and petitions seem to be everywhere these days.  The idea of selecting Romney as VP never made much sense to me, but then I was never exactly what you could call a big fan of the former governor.  When the speculation about selecting Romney first started, it seemed clear to me that Romney’s baggage would hinder McCain, who already had a reputation for neglecting social conservative concerns, so it made no sense to bring on someone who might alienate many pro-life, Christian conservatives.  Further, Romney would be a liability in a general election that will probably hinge on Rust Belt states.  Any possible benefit in Michigan from the Romney name would be offset by demoralised voters simply not turning out in other states, and in some swing states with large evangelical populations (e.g., Colorado, Missouri) it could end up costing McCain the election.  These advertisements and petitions are the first clear indications of just how big of a problem a Romney selection would create for McCain.  If the fundamental rule of VP selections is, “first, do no harm,” Romney would seem to be simply out of the question, and I don’t think you have to dislike Romney to recognise that millions of conservatives really do dislike him and some might sit out the election.  Ironically, because of his desire to appear independent, McCain may be instinctively driven to reject the demands of social conservative leaders and will select Romney for the sake of “party unity,” unwittingly fragmenting the party with this choice.  Then again, given how much he personally dislikes Romney, this protest against a Romney selection is probably a lot of agitation over nothing. 

As severalpeople have been observing, Paul Weyrich’s opposition to Romney as VP is a rather remarkable switch from his previous endorsement.  Personally, I’m glad Mr. Weyrich changed his mind about Romney.  I didn’t thinkhis endorsementmade much sense at the time, and opponents of Romney are always glad to welcome converts.

Update: Here is the story behind the open letter.  Here is the relevant section:

The room—which had been taken over by argument and side-conversations—became suddenly quiet. Weyrich, a Romney supporter and one of those Farris had chastised for not supporting Huckabee, steered his wheelchair to the front of the room and slowly turned to face his compatriots. In a voice barely above a whisper, he said, “Friends, before all of you and before almighty God, I want to say I was wrong.”

In a quiet, brief, but passionate speech, Weyrich essentially confessed that he and the other leaders should have backed Huckabee, a candidate who shared their values more fully than any other candidate in a generation. He agreed with Farris that many conservative leaders had blown it. By chasing other candidates with greater visibility, they failed to see what many of their supporters in the trenches saw clearly: Huckabee was their guy.

Maybe the Huckabee movement Dan was talking about is getting started a little sooner than we might have thought.

The folks at EFM are not happy.

James said:

Now, only a crazy person would suggest using NATO to smash up Europe’s dangerous Islamic ghettos.

Fair enough, but I tend to take the view that “only a crazy person” would want to include Georgia in NATO.  (Happily, James and I are entirely on the same page in opposing entry for Georgia and Ukraine.)  We have these “crazy people” already–how much longer before we get the next batch?  Besides, we have seen NATO used as a hammer for smashing states that are deemed to be too harsh on their Muslim population.  The principle of using NATO to handle the internal political problems of European states has already been established.  How much longer before a NATO with nothing to do becomes Europe’s military police force?  Granted, it would probably be used to crush an attempted Flemish declaration of independence (at which point the defenders of Kosovo independence would express grave anxiety about separatism!) before anyone in Brussels would entertain the idea of directing its attentions elsewhere, but this is exactly why NATO as guarantor of “local security” also seems to me to be a very bad idea.  Croatia’s local security is just fine.  Albania is, of course, a center of criminality and human trafficking, which is a good argument for keeping Albania out of any European structures, and the only thing NATO could do to improve local security in Albania is to occupy it.  Meanwhile, since NATO has become America’s de facto posse in Afghanistan, shouldn’t the priority of the moment be building up existing members’ military strength to spread the burden more evenly among the allies we already have?  Albania does not contribute to this, and may detract from it to the extent that it is no position economically to fund the kinds of military upgrades that its forces would need just to bring them up to alliance standards.  We already have enough allies-as-dead-weight.  Why take on more?  It’s not as if our current burdens are light and few.

Bob Barr’s approaching entry into the presidential race should be at least slightly exciting, but for some reason I have not been encouraged by the prospect of the Barr run.  First, let me state the potential good news.  In many state polls, there has been resistance to both Obama and McCain, such that 7-10% regularly say that they will vote third party.  (To take a new example, 9% of Maine voters prefer “some other candidate” rather than a major candidate in the two possible match-ups.)  Not all of that will go to Barr, but if he can get even 5% consistently around the country that will be the best showing ever for a Libertarian candidate on the national level.  I should also say at the outset that a Barr Libertarian candidacy now provides some reason to vote where few or none existed before, and many traditional antiwar conservatives will no longer face the prospect of engaging in acrobatics and contortions to explain their voting preferences.  We will be able to vote for someone who actually believes what we believe, and given how depressing things were looking during the last six weeks that is an accomplishment all by itself.  However, I would not be a curmudgeon if I didn’t outline some of the potential problems with this Barr candidacy. 

Despite what the polling says about the potential for some limited third party success, this election doesn’t pit two almost indistinguishable “centrists” that can be easily portrayed as two sides of the same coin.  Despite the fact that both nominees are broadly committed to maintaining much of the status quo, there are enough real differences on policy that third party critiques that focus on the “duopoly” will be much less effective this time.  Disgruntled progressives don’t want a repeat of 2000, and disaffected conservatives have to bear in the mind that any strong showing for a third party candidate backed by them will be used as a scapegoat for any McCain defeat.  The paradox for the antiwar right challenger remains: win enough votes, and you may actually pull antiwar support from the Democrat, thus electing the Republican against whom you are rebelling; win just enough votes that make the difference and throws the election to Obama, and McCain’s defeat will be pinned on the antiwar right rather than his own militarism and pro-amnesty views.  The latter will serve two purposes: it allows the interventionists to save face and fight another day (another reason why the 2008 outcome will probably not affect the strength of interventionists in the GOP), and it frees mainstream conservatives of any blame for their previous intransigence against McCain.  If the purpose of the protest candidacy is simply to provide an alternative and a voice for disaffected conservatives and libertarians, none of that matters.  IHowever, if it is supposed to accomplish something more significant, I am not sure how it does that.

The Democrats’ question to antiwar conservatives will be: “Don’t you want to vote for the candidate who could actually win and possibly end the war?”  The Republican attack on pro-life conservatives will be: “Do you want to throw away the chance at overturning Roe?”  Framed this way, antiwar conservatives are going to feel pressure to rally around a major party candidate one way or the other.  These objections to antiwar conservative backing for Barr both turn on single issues, so neither one should be persuasive, since it is the single-issue voters more than anyone who “throw away” their votes.  By refusing to use even what miniscule leverage they have, these voters all but guarantee that they are not going to get what they want. 

In fact, I think giving in to this pressure will be a mistake, because before there will ever be any chance of building additional competitive national parties it is imperative to reject the assumptions that support the two-party system.  That is why it is important to back third party candidates especially when a successful showing could lead to the election of an undesirable candidate (and this year any remotely strong showing is going to be deemed the “spoiler” in what will probably end up being a reasonably close race between two undesirable candidates).  We already know that there is essentially nothing to be gained within either of the two parties over the long term, as years and years of experience have taught us, so this is not a question of gradualism vs. a desire for more rapid change.  This will be a matter of backing someone who actually represents us, and refusing to be unrepresented.  To persist in backing a major party candidate when neither one represents your interests is to ensure your continuing lack of representation.

So why am I not more enthused at the prospect of a conservative running as the Libertarian nominee?  Because I have the sneaking suspicion that enough disaffected conservatives will fall for one or the other of the objections mentioned above and they will opt to back candidates who will probably not do much at all on the very single issues that were the reason for supporting them in the first place.  The fear of “irrelevance” or playing a “spoiler” role may overwhelm the desire for real representation, but that fear needs to be resisted.  The way to make the antiwar right irrelevant is if we back a candidate that is either pro-war or not on the right. 

Update: Jim Antle makes the important point that people who are likely to vote for Barr were probably not going to vote for McCain otherwise, so the actual “spoiler” effect will be minimal. However, what worries me is the perception and the spin of the outcome that will blame any McCain defeat on Barr rather than on the appalling policies of this administration and McCain’s embrace of them.

Dan McCarthy makes some similar arguments on the main blog.

John Schwenkler, who has written another very insightful post, takes apart that Joe Klein column from another angle, and makes a vital point:

To start, what exactly does it mean for one country to be “greater” then another, let alone for a single country – especially one riddled with all of the sorts of tremendous problems that ours is – to be the “greatest” of them all? What could make such a thing true? How in world would we set ourselves to finding it out?

There are many different kinds of standards for measuring greatness, of course, but even then there is a nationalist impulse to rank and set nations against one another.  The point is not to deny virtues where our country has virtues or to obsess about its flaws, but to acknowledge that every nation has both and it should be the patriot’s business to attend to his country and not dwell on the failures, real or imagined, of other nations. 

Contrary to Yglesias, I don’t think that it is necessarily the “liberal” understanding of patriotism that it is contingent.  This is, in fact, a basic assumption of paleoconservatives and, I think, of pomocons as well.  Indeed, the contingency of our loyalties is what gives them their meaning.  This is also why we generally prefer particularism over universalism and particular identities over grand, abstract and universal ones: one derives from experience, and the other is derived from ideology or theory.  You don’t love your mother because she is the Greatest (even if she is as far as you are concerned) or because she instantiates the form of Motherhood or embodies an abstract principle, but because she is your mother.  Furthermore, a student of Lukacs and Kuehnelt-Leddihn has no problem whatever agreeing with Yglesias when he says, “a cosmopolitan in the real world doesn’t become one by purging himself of particularist affections, rather he multiplies them and recognizes that others have affections of their own and that these sentiments are all owed a certain amount of respect and consideration.”  The patriot has to recognise that each people regards its customs as best and best-suited for them and that each people loves its country just as he loves his country.  This is not simply to say, “How would you like it if a foreign government invaded your country and tried to remake it in its image?”  That’s a useful exercise, but the point is much deeper than a foreign policy Golden Rule.  It is not just that these efforts will fail, but that it is good that they fail, because it is inherently wrong to attempt them.  More to the point, even if it were true that our country is demonstrably “the greatest” in something, I think Chesterton’s famous saying is the key to understanding patriotism and what is wrong with a lot of Americanism: “the patriot boasts not of the largeness of his country, but of its smallness.”  This is related to the patriotism Prof. Lukacs described in his biography of Kennan, the love in spite of, which leads the patriot to love his country even if he finds much of it to be flawed.

Rod is right that Democrats today suffer from the public perception and the stereotype of insufficient patriotism, but as the discussions of the last few weeks have made clear much of this stereotyping has to do with a misunderstanding of what patriotism requires.  If you come to believe that patriotism has something to do with the national security state and power projection overseas, and that failure to support these things with sufficient zeal is “unpatriotic,” this has inevitably stacked any policy debate in favour of intervention, surveillance and increased police powers.  As Lukacs noted in Democracy and Populism, Democrats have been the less nationalistic party for at least the last half century and Republicans have been more so, and in the last half century this seems to have worked to Republicans’ advantage. 

Most of the time when I see the bumper sticker, “peace is patriotic,” I shake my head.  That isn’t because peace isn’t patriotic, because it is pretty much always desirable for one’s country to be at peace, but because the formulation conveys that the person using this phrase feels the need to assert what should be obvious.  (The phrase can potentially obscure the virtue of fighting in self-defense as well.)  The far more damaging part of what some have called the “defensive crouch” is the belief not just that so-and-so is “weak” on national security (which for the last 18 years has meant “unwilling to start unnecessary wars”), but that he is “weak” because he is not as patriotic as his opponent.  That transforms a disagreement about policy into an argument about whether or not the dissenter or opponent is loyal enough to be allowed to participate meaningfully in the discussion.  That is the really appalling thing about Barone’s article, which falsely imputes to Obama and his “academics” a general and total disrespect for the military and those who serve in the military.  Once again, this conflates criticism of certain policies with some supposedly “unpatriotic” contempt.

Thomas Woods makes a point that I agree with entirely:

Racial insensitivity is not as bad as mass murder.  I guess that’s what I’m saying.  Yet the latter is considered a “point of view,” and the former is unforgivable and grounds for character assassination and smears.  The moral universe I inhabit ranks these offenses differently.

Last month, I said something quite similar:

Such is the strange nature of what counts as “controversial” in our discourse: advocating aggressive war, the bombing of civilians, torture and the possible first-strike use of tactical nukes are all considered debatable positions on policy and have all been offered by major candidates for the Presidency either during the campaign or in their previous work, but to engage in intemperate and indeed appalling rhetoric that will actually harm and maim no one is evidence of the need for exclusion from respectable society.  There is something deeply wrong about those priorities that seek to police thought, but which do little or nothing to challenge advocacy for deeply immoral actions.  If the one merits being driven out of the debate, how much more should the other merit even more severe consequences? 

TAC Contributing Editor Jim Pinkerton and David Corn are back in action at bloggingheads.

Dan McCarthy talks about the future of Huckabee and Paul on the main blog.

The obvious starting point of analysis here is that the odds of any American troops dying in a war for the defense of Albania are vanishingly small. And that’s the point. Albania is a small and weak country that one could imagine some neighbor maybe trying to push around with military force. But nobody’s going to want to take on NATO over some beef with Albania. Meanwhile, over the longer term the goal would be to bring the entire Balkans into a common security architecture that could help ensure the peace among all of them.  

Recall that NATO’s great achievement in the 1940s and 50s wasn’t just that it helped face down the Soviets. That was important, of course, but in many ways equally important was that it allowed the various countries of Western Europe to rebuild their militaries without those militaries appearing threatening to other European countries. ~Matt Yglesias

Of course, the odds of the U.S. having to go to war to defend Estonia are much greater, and that is a better example of NATO expansion that is positively dangerous.  The entry of Albania is not necessarily quite so dangerous as it is absurd.  It’s probably true that Albania will not pull us into a war, because no one threatens Albania, and no one is likely to threaten them (the main territorial dispute they have is with Greece, a NATO member, so presumably Albania would not start a war with NATO, either).  Albania will contribute little or nothing to the alliance, except to become a market for weapons systems (which is one of the real reasons for this round of expansion), and in the event that another state did attack Albania Washington would simply pay no attention to its obligations, because it would dawn on most everyone that Americans fighting for Albania is pointless.  Extending defense guarantees that we have no intention of keeping is an inherently bad idea, and I do not believe for a moment that Washington is going to come to Albania’s defense.  Never mind the problem of allying oneself with a government that promotes irredentism and regional instability. 

Now that the USSR is gone and those European militaries have been shrinking, can we please close down the entire shop?  NATO has outlived its usefulness, which this latest round of expansion underscores.  There is no menacing or aggressive power that threatens any of these countries.  I think this is what Krikorian is really getting at: there is no reason why the United States should be guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Albania, or any other Balkan states, because it is of no consequence to us whether Albania and its neighbours are at war.  To the extent that anything happening in Yugoslavia did matter to the West, it was the risk to NATO’s “credibility” that seemed to be invoked most often as the strategic rationale for intervening.  But alliances that serve no purpose don’t need credibility, because they are obsolete.  Nothing could better demonstrate that obsolescence than the incorporation of the land of Enver Hoxha into NATO.

Update: Clark joins the swelling anti-NATO chorus over on @TAC.