What follows is a very long post, largely made up of a block quotes from recent long posts by Hilzoy and Timothy Burke. My post and theirs are about what to make of wingnuts now that Democrats are going to be in power. If that interests you, read on. But I’ve placed this material below the fold, because Vance has an excellent post up (as usual) immediately below this. And I don’t want people, even libertarians, to ignore it. Thanks.
Hilzoy reminds me that I meant to write something about this, a post in which Timothy Burke suggests:
It’s schadenfreudey fun to read the ongoing psychotic meltdowns at various far-right sites like the Corner, I agree. But there’s little need to take the really bad-faith conservatives seriously now. For the last eight years, we’ve had to take them somewhat seriously because they had access to political power. You had to listen to the hack complaints about academia from endlessly manipulative writers because it was perfectly plausible that whatever axe they were grinding was going to end up as a priority agenda item coming out of Margaret Spelling’s office or get incorporated into legislation by right-wing state legislators. You had to listen to and reply to even the most laughably incoherent, goalpost-moving, anti-reality-based neoconservative writer talking about Iraq or terrorism because there was an even-money chance that you were hearing actual sentiments going back and forth between Dick Cheney’s office and the Pentagon. You had to answer back to Jonah Goldberg not just because making that answer was arguably our responsibility as academics, but also because left alone, some of the aggressively bad-faith caricatures he and others served up had a reasonable chance to gain even further strength through incorporation into federal policy.
There are plenty of thoughtful, good-faith conservatives who need to be taken seriously…
There are plenty of criticisms of academia which retain their importance and gravity, or which will continue to inform policy-makers in an Obama Administration. Don’t expect pressure for accountability and assessment to go away, for example. It doesn’t matter that Chuck Grassley is a Republican: a lot of the muck he’s raking up deserves to be raked.
But I think we can all make things just ever so slightly better, make the air less poisonous, by pushing to the margins of our consciousness the crazy, bad, gutter-dwelling, two-faced, tendentious high-school debator kinds of voices out there in the public sphere, including and especially in blogs. Let them stew in their own juices, without the dignity of a reply, now that their pipelines to people with real political power have been significantly cut.
Hilzoy agrees:
I think he’s right, and I plan to act accordingly. Until last Tuesday, I felt I had to take arguments made at, say, The Corner somewhat seriously. They were, after all, arguments that were likely to be taken seriously by people in charge of our government, and by some voters. Starting now, though, that changes. I will write about those arguments if they seem to be gaining broader currency, and I can imagine writing a thoughtful post on, say, what’s gone wrong with the conservative movement in which I might quote them. I will also keep reading them, just because I think it’s a good idea to know what other people are saying. But I will not feel any general need to point out when they are wrong. They have no more power. Some of them have gone so far over the edge that they have lost any credibility they might ever have had. I wish them well, but I will not comment on them unless I see some particular reason to do so. I now have the luxury of debating only thoughtful, sane conservatives who argue in good faith, and I intend to enjoy it.
All of which leaves me with two questions: Are they right? Is it time to ignore the lunatic fringe of movement conservatism? And second, who are the “thoughtful, sane conservatives who argue in good faith”? That’s not snark, by the way. I’m asking a serious question. I’d like a list.
205 comments
November 9, 2008 at 11:35 am
tf smith
I dunno if he is seen as a leader by the Republican party or not, but Mel Martinez was on Meet the Press this morning and did not appear to be frothing at the mouth.
Progress for the GOP?
November 9, 2008 at 11:48 am
silbey
Progress for the GOP
No, because Martinez’ role in the echo-chamber is not to be the rabid partisan. That’s for talk radio, the Internet, and so on.
November 9, 2008 at 12:03 pm
hilzoy
Ari: I start with the various conservatives at the Atlantic, Daniel Larison, The American Scene, and The Next Right.
November 9, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Rich Puchalsky
Burke is half right. People used to have to take conservatives seriously because they were in power. However, there are no thoughtful, sane conservatives who argue in good faith, so no one needs to take them seriously now that they are out of power. (Except for watching out for them as they try to come back, of course.)
I predict that over the next few years, relatively non-frothing conservatives will appear in greater numbers. However, the assumption that they will remain that way as times change is just as potentially flawed as the Democratic assumption that the youth who vote predominantly Democratic will continue to vote that way as they age. The “reasonable” conservatives will become Corner denizens as soon as the political climate permits them to, because there is no intellectual substance behind their arguments, and they have no moral code that would keep them from behaving badly as soon as they can get away with it.
November 9, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Sifu Tweety Fish
It may be right, but what the argument’s missing is that making fun of those people is super fun.
November 9, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Ben Alpers
Let me repeat something I posted over on ObWi:
I’m afraid this is wishful thinking. I read, for example, this passage:
You had to listen to the hack complaints about academia from endlessly manipulative writers because it was perfectly plausible that whatever axe they were grinding was going to end up as a priority agenda item coming out of Margaret Spelling’s office or get incorporated into legislation by right-wing state legislators.
..and I’m reminded of the fact that my state, Oklahoma, has just elected a Republican majority to both houses of the state legislature for the first time in our history. Crazy, Horowitzian bills that had, in the past, been blocked by Democrats now will not be, and we will have to rely on our unreliable Democratic governor to veto them.
As an employee of a (red) state university (heck, as a resident of a really red state), Obama’s election simply does not allow me to ignore the “really bad-faith conservatives,” as they actually have more control over my state now than they did before this election. I sincerely hope that my many blue state allies in these fights won’t take their toys and go home simply because things are now fine (or at least dramatically better) in our nation’s capital.
November 9, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Sifu Tweety Fish
I also am not wholly convinced that the argument’s right; I think a lot of people on the left felt comfortable ignoring these sorts of nutbars in the eighties and even into the nineties because it seemed like the mainstream of the GOP had just as much interest as we did in keeping them on the fringes. When the Rovian inflame-the-base strategy was launched, that was no longer true, and crazy base world had been given the benefit of the beter part of two decades to convince a substantial minority of people that the bullshit they were spewing was, in fact, true. I don’t think we can let that happen again. The lunatic fringe needs the cold light of the sane shone upon it. That doesn’t mean taking them seriously, or treating them as anything other than half-conscious hacks, but it doesn’t mean ignoring them, either.
November 9, 2008 at 12:11 pm
kid bitzer
“I’d like a list”
i have here in my hand a list of 205 people who were known as thoughtful, sane conservatives.
unfortunately, they’ve all come down with leprosy.
November 9, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Rich Puchalsky
Ben Alpers is right. I hadn’t really thought about it, but no matter what happens at the national level, there are always going to be enclaves in which the nutbars continue to have power. Get ready for states’ rights to make a big comeback, I guess.
November 9, 2008 at 12:45 pm
silbey
We won the election by smacking them in the mouth repeatedly. No reason to stop now.
(Meta-analysis: Why do Democrats always default to the ‘oh don’t pay attention to them, they’re crazy and harmless’ position? Or, as I like to call it, the Dukakis-Kerry Meme.)
Kick them when they’re up, kick them when they’re down.
November 9, 2008 at 1:14 pm
matt w
who are the “thoughtful, sane conservatives who argue in good faith”?
We might start by looking at some conservatives who endorsed Obama, or at least refused to endorse McCain. Not all; I really don’t want to hear from Colin Powell after his behavior in the run-up to Iraq, even if his endorsement of Obama was apparently quite moving.
It may be necessary to disaggregate some, too, When I read Burke’s comments, I thought, “Charles Grassley, the man who thought that telling the truth about Bush’s policies made you like Hitler?” But it seems as though Grassley may be doing good work on conflicts of interest between academia and big pharma. OTOH, that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily going to be arguing in good faith the rest of the time. I agree with Orrin Hatch on stem cell research, but I wouldn’t call him honest.
November 9, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Prof B
Interesting stuff all the way around. But to put a different spin on it — whither Rachel Maddow, Keith Olberman, the Daily Show, and Colbert now that “our” guy is in charge? Whither Sadly, No!, Crooks & Liars, and Eschaton? These are all artifacts of the Age of Bush.
Wouldn’t be much fun watching Stewart mock Obama.
November 9, 2008 at 1:44 pm
glashyo
Interesting…
November 9, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Sifu Tweety Fish
Speaking for the Poor Man, I’m pretty confident we’re going to keep on mocking the same people, if for no other reason than that they’re fun to mock, and likely to be, if anything, even crazier than they were over the past eight years.
We’ll likely still keep to our once-every-couple-weeks-or-so posting schedule, but that’s neither here nor there.
November 9, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Charlieford
Ross Douthat, arguably.
November 9, 2008 at 2:02 pm
John Emerson
Haven’t read the comments, but:
I mostly agree about The Corner, Powerline, et al, but Kristol, Will, Broder, Brooks, and their kind still control a lot of media real estate, and O’Reilly, Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Michael Savage, and the rest still have substantial constituencies.
November 9, 2008 at 2:03 pm
andrew
I would not be surprised, now that Krugman has weighed in, to see Brooks bring up the 1930s unemployment stuff in a column.
November 9, 2008 at 2:13 pm
JK
Because I love a good time, I’m with Silbey. But more importantly, the biggest challenge facing the country is the runaway ignorance of a large part of the electorate. Now, I don’t mean stupidity, but ignorance.
A lot of decent well-intentioned people haven’t had the benefit of a good or well-rounded education, and don’t have the time now to make up for it, so they turn to the net as a fast way to get up to speed.
Think for instance of the 30 year old guy who’s starting to become interested in history and he wants to learn something about, say fascism, and so he does a search which leads him to, say…well, you know where this is headed.
We all have a duty to help this guy out, and we shouldn’t feel guilty just because it’s so much fun.
Ignorance is hard to stamp out, and always ready to spring forth like a weed. March forth and do your duty.
November 9, 2008 at 2:18 pm
SEK
While it’s pretty clear where I stand on this, I’m amused that a substantial critique of my position arose a week after my talk. (I’m less amused that I didn’t foresee my coming irrelevance, but honestly, I had many a pessimistic moment in which I was sure McCain was going to pull it off.)
November 9, 2008 at 2:21 pm
John Emerson
Having read the comments:
We shouldn’t ignore these people — they’re not going to go away voluntarily. We should ridicule and demonize them. They should become standing jokes. Those who are prosecutable should be prosecuted. Careers should end. Alumni associations should be silent about them. Their children should renounce them and change their names.
I have never, ever been able to understand the desire of nice semi-liberals to engage in dialogue with “intelligent honest conservatives”, except perhaps the way I understand birders’ desire to see an ivory-billed woodpecker. Most of those guys have disgraced themselves by refusing to separate themselves from Gingrich, Delay, Dubya, and the Republican base, and most of the rest of them are completely demoralized. Furthermore, the Honest Conservatives have always been pretty shitty on labor questions, racial questions, fiscal policy, civil liberties, etc.
It makes more sense to have a dialogue between centrist Democrats and liberal Democrats. (This would certainly be an improvement on the two-decade-long effort of the centrists to marginalize and destroy the liberals) Beyond that, it would be even nicre if the Democrats would begin dialogue with the DFHs to their left. (Hi, Rahm!)
The Democrats won, and they should capitalize on that. Let’s not be too timid.
November 9, 2008 at 2:24 pm
John Emerson
I wish we could put the stupidity / ignorance meme to rest. A lot of people firmly believe things that are false, but that’s disinformation, not ignorance.
I agree that we should work harder to get the word out to the informationally ill-served demographics.
November 9, 2008 at 2:26 pm
kid bitzer
ross douthat? oh please. he’s like a male megan mcardle.
on the other hand, i did read a sane, thoughtful conservative recently, reflecting on voter participation in the most recent election:
“Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio — a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane — the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ‘lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin. Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me — I’ll never vote agin as long as I live.”
November 9, 2008 at 2:29 pm
John Emerson
You want to know an honest conservative I’m willing to dialogue with? Glenn Greenwald.
November 9, 2008 at 2:31 pm
urbino
he biggest challenge facing the country is the runaway ignorance of a large part of the electorate. Now, I don’t mean stupidity, but ignorance.
And Alpers:
As an employee of a (red) state university (heck, as a resident of a really red state), Obama’s election simply does not allow me to ignore the “really bad-faith conservatives,” as they actually have more control over my state now than they did before this election. I sincerely hope that my many blue state allies in these fights won’t take their toys and go home simply because things are now fine (or at least dramatically better) in our nation’s capital.
Exactly. As a resident of the South, I read Burke and Hilzoy and I see gated-community liberals.
This is extremely short-sighted, parochial thinking.
November 9, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Rich Puchalsky
“We shouldn’t ignore these people — they’re not going to go away voluntarily.”
It’s a matter of priorities, though. Ideally, we should never ignore anyone or anything. But there isn’t time for everyone to do everything. Some people should continue to watch, mock, whatever, but I don’t think it’s going to be as much of a focus for as many people as it has been, because there is actual positive work to do now.
To put this another way, solving the problem of global warming (to take just one example) is a goal; engagement of whatever sort with conservatives is just a means to that goal. If we can reduce that engagement to the minimum necessary, we can use more time on actual work.
The situation would be different if the conservatives had anything to contribute to solving actual problems, of course. But they don’t. We’ve seen all their ideas, unrestrained, and they are intellectually bankrupt.
November 9, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Ben Alpers
I agree that there are some sane/thoughtful/honest conservatives (e.g. Paul Volcker and Daniel Larison, to name two very different examples).
But I think John Emerson has the right idea. The political goal is not to find people with whom we can have a semi-intelligent conversation and have that conversation. The political goal is to adopt sensible, progressive policies. And if, in order to do so, we find that we must engage in civil conversation with thoughtful, sensible conservatives, so be it. But if we find we need to eviscerate, ridicule, and demonize reactionary nutjobs, that’s fine, too. And I suspect that we’ll still have to do more of the latter than the former.
Like a number of other people, I’m reminded, by all this talk of sensible conservatives with whom we can rationally talk, of losing Democratic campaigns past. It also reminds me of all those who have confused civility and decency over the last eight years (about which one ought to reread this old HTML Mencken post to which Glenn Greenwald recently linked).
Finally, I also with the second half of John Emerson’s post: the sane and thoughtful conversation that I really wish those who won this election would have is with people to their left.
November 9, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Rich Puchalsky
The honest conservative that I’m willing to have a dialogue with is Kos.
November 9, 2008 at 3:19 pm
John Emerson
The crazified 27% still bears watching.
November 9, 2008 at 3:26 pm
kid bitzer
so instead of civility, i think what we need is our own version of charles krauthammer, to keep the 27%’ers in line by accusing them of ‘obama derangement syndrome’.
because they are deranged. deeply deranged. and they have already broken out all of the hitler-comparisons, and stalin-comparisons, and out heroded-herod with their hysterical hyperbole.
they are already calling obama every bad name they can think of, short of ‘michael moore’ (because say what you like about obama, he *sho* ain’t fat.)
somebody needs to splash some cold water on their faces and tell them to get ahold of themselves, before they do something that we all regret.
November 9, 2008 at 3:30 pm
AWC
Sure, there are thoughtful conservatives. And, yes we should talk to them. But please, can we call them something else? We don’t want to make “thoughtful” into the liberal version of “serious.”
Moreover, someone has to fisk the crazies because they’re the overwhelming majority of the GOP right now. I refuse to accept the mythology that reveres the old “thoughtful” Buckleyites as the authors of an intellectually sound post-Goldwater conservative movement, discarded in 2001. The reality is nearly the opposite: fundies and segregationists have long provided the organization and the votes. Seducing Brooks, Douthat, Caldwell, and Sullivan won’t change that fact.
November 9, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Ralph Luker
Too bad that Eric’s perfectly legitimate question — to which there’ve been a few good suggestions here — gets co-opted by a chorus from the usual suspects of “I am more left than thou.”
November 9, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Sifu Tweety Fish
Sanctimony works better when you get the author of the post right, Ralph.
November 9, 2008 at 4:02 pm
AWC
Ah, we co-opted the thread! Did we stage a coup, Ralph?
Let me explain something: you can just scroll through the comments you dislike. And you’re free to answer Ari’s question too!
November 9, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Daniel De Groot
The work of watching and mocking the crazies remains important. Until the Washington Times, National Review and other organs of wingnut welfare are shuttered for lack of funds, we ignore them at our peril.
So I can see some shifting of emphasis, because we need to keep after the Democrats to do the stuff they were elected to do, and keep their noses clean, but it should be a question of changing focus, not moving the camera.
November 9, 2008 at 4:34 pm
bitchphd
We won the election by smacking them in the mouth repeatedly.
I think this is wrong. I think we won because (1) our candidate *actually presented a thoughtful, patriotic case for supporting him* and (2) his campaign was well-organized and *recruited* a lot of people–terrified lefties, sure, but also the patriotic centrists who really have been waiting for someone to appeal to their better selves.
Most people are not idiots, and most people respond pretty well to a clear, direct appeal. We *all* love to feel superior; some of us do it by mocking wingnuts, some of us do it by getting Outraged by the Decline of American Values, and some of us do it by deciding that politicians and government are for suckers. But I do think that the end effect of the risibility/superiority olympics is a more cynical electorate, and I think that people have gotten pretty sick of cynicism.
November 9, 2008 at 4:46 pm
John Emerson
Ralph, rather than grumble, you should try to scrounge up some non-stupid uncrazified conservatives yourself — conservatives who haven’t entirely ruined their reputations by their venal, servile, opportunistic collaboration with Gingrich, Delay, and Bush.
Finding ivory-billed woodpeckers and sane conservatives is NOT MY JOB.
November 9, 2008 at 4:46 pm
AWC
I agree that superiority is an unattractive attitude, best eschewed in public. Mea maxima culpa. But 48% of the voters chose John McCain, Bob Barr, or Ralph Nader. And a big chunk of them want Sarah Palin to be president some day. So please don’t tell me cynicism is unjustified. I’m delirious that Obama won– and optimistic too– but not so euphoric that I’ve forgotten 2004.
November 9, 2008 at 4:49 pm
John Emerson
Well, Bitch, The People should get used to being sick, because cynicism is never going to go out of style.
Just remember, if more people had been cursing the darkness, and fewer lighting candles, we wouldn’t have had the bubble, and we wouldn’t be headed into a depression.
Fucking darkness.
November 9, 2008 at 4:49 pm
silbey
I think this is wrong.
All right, I’ll unbend enough to say that it was one of the reasons we won. But it was *one* of the reasons. In the month after the Palin pick was announced, the Obama campaign put out hundreds of press releases, blast emails, etc., criticizing her hard and repeatedly. The news stories on the Al-Qaeda endorsement of McCain and the $150,000 shopping spree were likely the result of oppo research by the Obama campaign (or the DNC).
The electorate insists that it is sick of negative campaigning, while still believing much of it.
Too bad that Eric’s perfectly legitimate question — to which there’ve been a few good suggestions here — gets co-opted by a chorus from the usual suspects of “I am more left than thou.”
It was Ari asking, it was two questions, and the answers have been 1) yes, it’s still worth paying attention and 2) there don’t seem to be reasonable conservatives out there.
Those may not be the answers you like, Ralph, but they are answers.
November 9, 2008 at 4:49 pm
ben
Rather, Vance has an as usual excellent post up.
November 9, 2008 at 4:56 pm
ben
I stumbled across Larison’s blog recently and was confused by the sanity and reasonableness thereof. “But just look at the hosting!”
November 9, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Martin G.
You thought that was a long post? Have you ever read Michael Bérubé’s blog?
Meh, I don’t know. Bérubé, incidentally, has this attitude which he takes from Rorty and which I like a lot. Basically what he’s saying is that since arguments cannot be resolved permanently, you have to constantly maintain a rhetorical agon. While that doesn’t mean you should listen to unreasonable arguments – and one of the things that Obama has been good at is facing unreasonable arguments by joking them off the stage. But it does mean that occasionally you should smack down these arguments with as much malice and mockery as humanly possible. Just so they don’t return to strength, like.
But while we should smack them in the mouth, I think it’s important not to smack the people who listen to them. That just cements the culture wars, making willful ignorance part of their identity.
November 9, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Rich Puchalsky
Berube had an excellent post on whether Obama’s win was due to “fighting back” and the rhetoric modes that seem appropriate right now. And I don’t just say that because it quotes me.
November 9, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Martin G.
Yeah, I read that. That’s where he puts Obama in with the Rachel Maddow-Stewart/Colbert school of political rhetoric, right?
November 9, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Rich Puchalsky
Not quite Stewart/Colbert. Quote:
“What we’re seeing in Maddow and Obama, I think, are public figures who combine high seriousness and all-purpose unflappability with flashes of scary-smartness and moments of dismissive snark. This M-O m.o. is qualitatively different from the 80-to-100 percent snark content of the Stewart/ Colbert demeanor […]”
November 9, 2008 at 5:12 pm
dana
We won the election by smacking them in the mouth repeatedly.
I think this is false generally (bad fundamentals mean bye-bye incumbent Republicans and their friends.) and in the specific case of blogs. Someone’s being snarky on a blog didn’t win Obama the election; refraining from laughing at right-wing idiocy won’t help the thoughfulcons find their place in the party, nor will it banish idiocy from sane discourse.
One poorly-executed gag on the Daily Show is worth ten thousand arugula poems, to put it another way. One can ride an influential hobbyhorse; the other is a pretentious hobby.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t take a break from beating on stupid conservatives; it’s just it’s probably worthwhile to get a sense of proportion about what one actually does on the Internet.
November 9, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Ralph Luker
Here’s the beginning of a list: Andrew Bacevich, David Brooks, Robert George, Orin Kerr, Douglas Kmiec, Daniel Larison, Jacob Levy, Andrew Sullivan, Eugene Volokh, George Will, and Garry Wills. I could go on ….
November 9, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Martin G.
Hmm. Interesting – I read that too fast and just assumed that he was putting Maddow in the box with Colbert and Stewart. I’m actually not so sure they don’t belong in the same box. The ironic mode of Colbert and Stewart has as its foundation an underlying seriousness which comes out in flashes here and there, and which really is not that different from the mocking and dismissive Maddow style we know and love. So I’m not entirely sure the difference is as great as MB says. But he’s the guy with the PhD. What the hell do I know?
November 9, 2008 at 5:23 pm
silbey
I think this is false generally
By “we” I meant Democrats, not blogs. Blogs are part of a larger effort.
November 9, 2008 at 5:29 pm
dana
Yeah, I meant more hilzoy’s argument, but I think it goes for Obama, too. (I just used you as a springboard.) He did hit back, usually by making a joke about it, but I think there are years where that wouldn’t have been enough. I don’t think it would have been in 2004.
I think it helped that they went off the deep end on their own. For crying out loud, we had a serious nominee for the vice presidency screaming that her opponent was a friend of terrorists. All Obama had to do was show up at the debates and bore everyone to death to prove he wasn’t a radical.
November 9, 2008 at 5:32 pm
John Emerson
You could have started off that way, Ralph, instead of whining.
Garry Wills does not count as a conservative and hasn’t for decades. David Brooks is a sly, malicious, Republican hack. His fluency shouldn’t allow us to forget that. And he makes too much chit up. Andrew Sullivan is an eclectic libertarian who supported Obama, but there’s no reason for us to forgive him for calling us all pro-Osama fifth columnists. George Will writes competently, but he has his own load of malice and dishonesty and I’m convinced that he’s amazingly more reactionary than he lets on — essentially a crypto-Confederate.
I’ll withhold judgment on Bacevich, George, Kerr, Kmiec, Larison, and the two Volokhs, about whom I know little.
November 9, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Rich Puchalsky
I might have expected that list from Ralph.
Andrew Sullivan? Andrew “traitorous enclaves on the coasts may form a fifth column” Sullivan? There is no reason why anyone who ever called me a traitor ever deserves serious consideration from me. Other people can engage with him, if they want to be suckers.
Douglas Kmiec? Mr. the government is not competent to rule on abortion unless it gets a supermajority? That’s some serious thought, there. Maybe we should do all of the Bill of Rights like that.
Eugene Volokh? (Or, you know, I could have gone with so many others. But the Poor Man Institute archives are down.)
Is it too much to ask that some combination of basic human decency and thought be required to make someone a “thoughtful, sane” conservative?
November 9, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Daniel De Groot
See Greenwald over the past few days on Kerr. Another civil but not decent conservative arguing politely for torture and limitless executive authority. Also dishonest for ignoring Greenwald’s critiques of a previous case where it was clear Kerr had not actually read the ruling.
As for Will – I particularly enjoyed his September column where he complained about early voting being bad for democracy because it decreases the “quality” of the electorate. Crypto-confederate sounds right.
November 9, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Rich Puchalsky
The Greenwald posts on Kerr are here and here.
“Some political issues, including ones that provoke intense passion, have many sides, but not all do. Not all positions are worthy of respect. Some actions and policies require outrage and condemnation, to the point where it becomes irresponsible to comment on them without expressing that. Some ideas are so corrupted and dangerous and indefensible that they do reflect negatively on the character and credibility of their advocates, on the propriety of treating those advocates as though they’re respectable and honorable.”
November 9, 2008 at 5:50 pm
silbey
He did hit back, usually by making a joke about it
Don’t underestimate how much his aides were on television talking about McCain being “erratic,” etc or how negative the television ads were in PA. They shredded McCain from top to bottom, while keeping Obama clean.
I’m in favor of that approach.
You could have started off that way, Ralph, instead of whining.
Second that.
November 9, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Colin
Look, there’s a problem, as the immediately-above kerfuffle shows, with naming anybody: you get into unproductive spats about the totality of folks’ careers. I have no trouble with Ralph’s list if we take it as containing people who sometimes write smart conservative things, some more reliably than others, and I’d rather respond to a given piece of writing than try to make judgments about people which, even if I can make them, are still kinda thin.
Micahel B’s agon, if I read it aright, is directed not against conservatism but against bad faith and making up evidence.
There is also a problem in discussions of this kind with the indeterminacy of “conservative.” This is not helped by the fact that certain “conservatives” seem to think of conservatism as an identity or a cultural pose.
Anyway, I’m a fan of James Buchanan (the economist not the President), I’ve learned from Milton Friedman, I admire a lot of contemporary Austrian economics. I’ve been dismayed in the recent interblog spat that the more creative, thoughtful side of Marginal Revolution has not been on display.
November 9, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Rich Puchalsky
“you get into unproductive spats about the totality of folks’ careers”
I’m not pretending to judge the totality of anyone’s career. But there are certain things which, having been said, can’t be unsaid, and which permanently mark a person as fundamentally unserious. I don’t care whether Sullivan becomes the leftiest guy on the left tomorrow. He’s still a guy who, at a moment of national crisis, could write about traitorous enclaves within America.
November 9, 2008 at 6:55 pm
Colin
Which bears out my point that Ari is asking the wrong question. Sullivan has written smart and non-smart things. Unless you’re his biographer, I don’t think assessing Sullivan as a whole is the most interesting thing we can do.
November 9, 2008 at 7:13 pm
politicalfootball
I posted this link on another recent thread, but here’s George Will, on a matter of recent discussion:
Mind you, this is in the column lauding Shlaes. The thrust of this column is to tell us that government pump-priming is unhelpful.
Is there any way to defend this? Personally, I think Will is stupid – no intellectual at all – and probably sincere in his beliefs. But for those of you who think he’s a smart guy, how can you regard him as something other than a propagandist?
The Republican Party is the party of creationism and other manifestations of nonsense – and modern conservatives have sworn fealty to the Republican Party. A few weeks ago, I saw a Ross Douthat oped in the Washington Post blaming the credit crisis on government efforts to help poor people get housing. This belief is not available to someone who has a minimal ability to ascertain the truth, and who gives a damn about telling the truth.
I know some conservative folks in real life who aren’t bad eggs, but any effort to become a conservative public intellectual means losing interest in the truth. It’s a job requirement.
November 9, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Rich Puchalsky
“Sullivan has written smart and non-smart things. ”
Well, no. No one who could have written his worst things could ever have written anything smart. The best that he could have ever done is accidentally been right in a stopped-clock sort of fashion.
November 9, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Brad
Ari asked And second, who are the “thoughtful, sane conservatives who argue in good faith”?
The answer to that depends on what audience do you think you are speaking with?
If you are talking to Rich, the answer is, I suspect, “none.”
If you are talking to my grandmother, the answer is “George Will and David Brooks” regardless of whether or not what you may actually think of those two.
And, if you are talking with Ralph, well, you got the list.
So who is the dialog with?
November 9, 2008 at 7:32 pm
ben
Which bears out my point that Ari is asking the wrong question. Sullivan has written smart and non-smart things. Unless you’re his biographer, I don’t think assessing Sullivan as a whole is the most interesting thing we can do.
I think that is the right question, though. You don’t want to know who has occasionally, perhaps even accidentally, written the smart thing or two. You want to know who’s on the level—even if in their sincerity they occasionally don’t write smart things. I don’t want to have a conversation with someone who’s only writing cogently now because it happens to serve his or her purpose, or who is so far gone that he or she doesn’t even realize when a good, solid argument is being advanced and when a bunch of rhetoric in the derogatory sense. (I suspect D. Brooks goes in the latter category.)
The impulse some people have to treat the occasional seemingly-sensible emittance of a hack as if it’s worthy of serious discussion, when the hack has no real intention of having one (is really, perhaps, just running interference), is misplaced. One swallow does not a summer make. A presumption of sincerity works and is only charitable when you’re dealing with someone you don’t know well; a proven knave had better establish a history.
November 9, 2008 at 7:34 pm
ben
Sophisticated analysis, Brad.
The second paragraph of my immediately superior comment, dramatized.
November 9, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Brad
Here is the problem I have. If I tell my grandmother what I honestly feel about George Will, that he writes well for a hack, because if I do, the conversation is over.
But, this is a woman who listens to NPR, it is not like an intelligent dialog is impossible and we have the same cultural basis to have that dialog.
Instead, I have to slowly and quietly demolish Will’s latest idiocy without resorting to the fact “look, this guy moves the goalposts and he is a complete hypocrite” as an argument. Sometimes, one is just stuck with the idea that someone is a “serious thinker” because that is popular view.
November 9, 2008 at 7:52 pm
bitchphd
Or perhaps rather than getting hung up on ad hominems, we can stick with, e.g., “Sullivan writes smart and not-smart things” and deal with the arguments worth engaging and laugh at the arguments that are patently absurd.
November 9, 2008 at 7:53 pm
urbino
I know some conservative folks in real life who aren’t bad eggs . . .
These are the folks I’m interested in and concerned with (and for). I know lots of them. Unlike Will or Kristol, their problem isn’t lack of honesty, it is, as noted upthread, ignorance. As long as intelligent liberals continue leaving them behind, they’re going to remain ignorant. And conservative. And a roadblock to much that intelligent liberals want.
November 9, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Ralph Luker
Add: Anne Applebaum and Daniel Drezner. If I say anything other than list names, John Emerson will wheeze that I’m “whining.” Get over yourself, John, and conceive of the possibility that the whole truth isn’t in your little bag.
November 9, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Rich Puchalsky
Sadly No’s bit about Yglesias is incredible, and I largely agree with ben. But it’s more than just sincerity. It’s also whether they really have ideas as such.
John Holbo had a few good posts about this, a few years ago. From here:
“And so it turns out Lionel Trilling was maybe not such a poor prophet after all, when he wrote way back in 1953: “in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition;” for the anti-liberals do not, by and large, “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Irritable mental gestures. Yep. Frum.
OK. Trilling too strong. I do concede there are serious conservative thinkers and intellectuals. I make a point of reading – and I quite enjoy reading – quite a number of quite conservative writers and thinkers, and I hope I am smart enough to learn from them when I should. But it is seriously easy to pretend you’ve got a conservative philosophy when really you’re armed with nothing but irritable gestures.”
November 9, 2008 at 7:57 pm
ben
Or perhaps rather than getting hung up on ad hominems, we can stick with, e.g., “Sullivan writes smart and not-smart things” and deal with the arguments worth engaging and laugh at the arguments that are patently absurd.
It’s rarely worth engaging with an argument made by a person who isn’t worth engaging.
November 9, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Ralph Luker
John also needs to read my two articles on Garry Wills that show him to be a deeply textured conservative, whose rhetorical slight of hand leads wits like John to think Wills is “of the left.” That couldn’t be further from the truth.
November 9, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Ahistoricality
Going back, if I may, to one of the original questions, not only are there substantial portions of this country where Republicans — often extreme ideologues — rule and reign, but there is a substantial network of institutions developed in the 70s and honed in the 90s which are devoted to the maintenance and development of right-wing intellectual and political figures. Scaife, Murdoch, Gingrich and others have created a way to ensure that the issues will not go away, that the ideas will find outlets and new expressions, and that we will have to contend with all this over again.
The real question, by the way, isn’t “what conservatives are worth listening to and engaging with?” but “what conservatives are speaking reasonable truths to their conservative audiences and whose ideas are going to be influential enough to be worth taking into consideration?”
November 9, 2008 at 8:09 pm
urbino
Going back, if I may, to one of the original questions
Originalist.
November 9, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Josh
No one who could have written his worst things could ever have written anything smart.
Well I guess we don’t need to worry about anything you ever write again, Rich. Ta!
November 9, 2008 at 8:12 pm
politicalfootball
I’m not inclined to mock Ralph’s inclusion of Garry Wills among legitimate conservatives.
Given my (perhaps idiosyncratic) view, the answer to ari’s original question is easy: If ari is looking for “thoughtful, sane conservatives who argue in good faith,” he need look no further than the guy he voted for for president.
November 9, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Brad
Given my (perhaps idiosyncratic) view, the answer to ari’s original question is easy: If ari is looking for “thoughtful, sane conservatives who argue in good faith,” he need look no further than the guy he voted for for president.
Well, the US is a center-right nation. I mean, it is all over the news….
November 9, 2008 at 8:19 pm
John Emerson
Ralph, Wills can call himself a conservative, and so can you, but you’re being unidiomatic. In America conservatives are bigots, nativists, imperialists, Armageddonists, authoritarians, free-market ideologues, and anti-tax country clubbers.
As I said at the time, in 2004 Kerry was the radical candidate, the liberal candidate, the moderate candidate, and the conservative candidate.
As for “the left”, it consists of about 10% of the Democrats and the less crazy half of the third party supporters.
November 9, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Ben Alpers
There are certainly conservatives worth reading and taking seriously. From Ralph Luker’s list I’d emphatically agree about Andrew Bacevich. (I like Garry Wills, but also don’t really consider him a conservative anymore.) Bruce Fein has written some insightful things about the Bush administration’s view of the Constitution. John Dean would also make my list. On a very different note, Joel Salatin, who is a great innovator in sustainable agriculture, is certainly an important voice from the political right.
And in my current project I’ve read some really interesting (though rather old) essays on American politics by Martin Diamond, Harry Jaffa, Herbert Storing, and a variety of other Straussians.
But I still think that we need to also pay attention to the conservatives that other conservatives pay attention to, not merely conservatives whom we happen to find edifying.
November 9, 2008 at 8:35 pm
matt w
Ralph, Wills can call himself a conservative, and so can you, but you’re being unidiomatic.
Seconded. At least: I’m willing to listen to arguments that Wills is a conservative, but I know him as the guy who got on Nixon’s enemies list, wrote a book that (in what I read of it) took Reagan apart, wrote some incredibly moving contemporary stuff about Martin Luther King, and that just doesn’t sound like the kind of conservative we’re talking about. We’re talking about people we can now listen to instead of the Corner folk, and someone whose deeply textured conservativism has led him to oppose the Republicans for forty years isn’t exactly what we’re looking for.
Or maybe it is. The point is to listen to whoever has something good to say, isn’t it? And there’s no damn reason that that should be just conservatives. As someone said above, centrist Democrats really should be engaging liberal Democrats and even people further out than that — they have the advantage over the Cornerites of not having been spectacularly wrong about everything ever, why not listen to them? As for the conservatives, some of them may be consistently worth engaging, some of them may make some good arguments and some hackish ones, and (as ben was saying) some may be hackish so often that it isn’t worth trying to figure out when they are and aren’t worth engaging with, except when you’re dealing with someone who already thinks they’re worth taking seriously. (In which case you’re going to have to deal with the likes of Limbaugh too, or at least the likes of Shlaes.) As I said above, I think the good ones are going to have voted for Obama. But there’s no more reason to go in search of the conservatives who are worth talking to than there is to look for honest, intelligent people on your left, or in some other direction.
November 9, 2008 at 8:57 pm
John Emerson
I’ve been hearing people talking about the need to dialogue with conservatives for decades. It’s all just been defeatist, Stockholm syndrome flinch and cringe, always associated with the demand that the left and the old liberals be isolated and denounced.
Forgive me for not being fair minded. For thirty years or more I’ve been one of the rejected while Bill Buckley and his kind strutted around telling everyone how it is. So when I propose that the conservatives be cast into the outer darkness for a few decades, I have a very clear idea what it is that I’m saying.
Anyway, I have no reason to be confident that under Obama things will better for me and mine. He’s pretty centrist and may make his opening to the right regardless of anything we say here. But let’s not encourage him.
November 9, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Rich Puchalsky
If you want serious analysis of this, it’s probably best to go with Berube’s description of a category called the “radical right”, which is largely but not exactly the same as “movement conservatism”. There may be thoughtful, sane conservatives somewhere, but the radical right is not where you’re going to find them.
But the radical right has driven any other form of conservatism away from all levers of public power, and appears to be likely to continue to do so even when the GOP itself is in eclipse. So why the hunt for reasonable conservatives? If you’re looking for interesting political thinkers who have no political power, why not read some anarchists? They will probably be less familiar, more interesting, and more coherent in their belief system.
John Emerson above wrote about the hunt for reasonable conservatives as being like the hunt for rare woodpeckers; you want to see one because they’re rare. But it’s more than that. The hunt primarily serves the ideological purpose of reassuring frightened centrists that one side can’t really be that bad. As long as they can find one guy who said something interesting back in 1979 or something, they can think that everything is normal, everything is fine, and save their anger for that guy in the comment box who keeps annoyingly telling them that for all practical purposes, they’re trying to put themselves in the center between normality and evil.
November 9, 2008 at 9:11 pm
urbino
As Douthat and Tucker Carlson demonstrate in this conversation with other conservatives, perhaps the first difficulty in finding a reasonable conservative* is that so many of them are assholes.
(* I refer here to public conservatives, which seems to be the kind of conservatives everyone here besides me is talking about.)
November 9, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Ralph Luker
Rich and John want to read only writers with whom they agree on everything. Intelligent people don’t. Burke and Hilzoy argued for ignoring the right wing ranters that John and Rich say speak for the whole of American conservatism. They don’t; it’s only a way of short-circuiting Ari’s question and continuing the lefty circle jerk Rich and John want to promote. It’s as productive of thought as a circle jerk is of life.
How much of Garry Wills have you read, John?
November 9, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Sifu Tweety Fish
The problem with your framing, Ralph, besides that you’re being kind of a dick about it, is that the “reasonable” conservatives you name are — more than ever — men without a country. You could certainly find any number of people who describe themselves as “conservative” who aren’t disingenuous or crazy. The problem is that those people are even less relevant than the wingnuts, because at least the wingnuts have a national party that’s willing to pander to them. I don’t take libertarians very seriously for a similar reason; if your own party isn’t interested in hearing what you have to say, why should I be?
November 9, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Rich Puchalsky
“Rich and John want to read only writers with whom they agree on everything.”
Ralph is proving my point above, of course. But I also admire his civility. For some reason, public defenders of civility always appear to me to be some of the most deeply uncivil people around.
November 9, 2008 at 9:32 pm
ari
I’m persuaded that you and Ben are right, urbino, for what it’s worth, that large swaths of the country are still ruled by conservatives, and so the rest of us really should pay attention. I’m somewhat less convinced that nobody on the left tries to reach out to deep red areas of the country. The internet is a pretty powerful tool, with a pretty long reach. Even forgetting that, though, people like Ben spend an awful lot of their time organizing at the local level.
I’m also increasingly convinced that “conservative” isn’t a very meaningful modifier any more — if ever it was. As much as John E. is doing his best to provoke, he’s nonetheless certainly right in implying that there really isn’t much of a left these days. To a very great extent, I think the same is true for the right. The wingnuts turn out to be what we always thought: hysterics, paranoids, racists, xenophobes, bedwetters. Real conservatives — again, if there ever was such a thing — are pretty hard to find amidst the detritus of humanity that calls itself the right wing. Garry Wills, in this view, probably is a real conservative, even though I understand John’s reluctance to accept that. But what does that mean? Probably only that many of my closest friends and most trusted colleagues are also conservatives. I may be, too. The broader culture, though, has shifted, and these people are now called progressives (another pretty empty term, if I think about all the different people that fit under that blanket).
In the end, I think we might need a new nomenclature. Perhaps this is what happens in the wake of the Third Way. I really don’t know.
November 9, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Sifu Tweety Fish
In the end, I think we might need a new nomenclature.
Of course I’d lean towards “normal people” vs. “crazy idiots”, but I’m not one of your civil types.
November 9, 2008 at 9:44 pm
John Emerson
I think that we should ignore Ralph and the rest of the righty circle jerk. Let them shoot their wads at each other instead of us. (See how it is to refute someone, if you’re Ralph?)
The right wing ranters dominate American conservative and have dominated American politics and public opinion for decades. Very few conservative intellectuals have failed to shame themselves by implicating themselves with the Gingrich-Delay-Bush regime. The ones who have not (Garry Wills, Glenn Greenwald, John Dean) are no longer counted as conservatives.
I propose an opening to the left rather than to the right. That hardly amounts to “wanting to read only writers with whom they agree on everything.” I dialogue with rightwingers like Brad DeLong and Matt Yglesias all the time.
Or to put it differently, I think that at long last the Democratic party should start talking to me. They’ve been talking to the neocons, Bob Kerrey, Alan Greenspan, David Broder, et al for far too long, and nothing good has come of it.
November 9, 2008 at 9:46 pm
John Emerson
I can make an argument that Adlai Stevenson and Eugene McCarthy were conservatives, if anyone wants me to.
November 9, 2008 at 9:49 pm
urbino
I’m persuaded that you and Ben are right, urbino, for what it’s worth, that large swaths of the country are still ruled by conservatives, and so the rest of us really should pay attention.
My point isn’t that large swaths are ruled by conservatives, but that they are populated by conservatives. Ruling conservatives I have no interest in or concern for, except insofar as I can make fools of them.
I’m somewhat less convinced that nobody on the left tries to reach out to deep red areas of the country. The internet is a pretty powerful tool, with a pretty long reach.
Maybe it’ll have a deeper influence than I expect, but it’s hard to see how.
Even forgetting that, though, people like Ben spend an awful lot of their time organizing at the local level.
I’m not aware of Ben’s organizing activities, of course, but I’ll put my money on more Ben’s before I’ll put it on the internet.
November 9, 2008 at 9:51 pm
ari
That’s pretty much what I mean, John. I’m just not sure what the labels mean, any more. I think, for the purposes of clarity, I’m going to stick with Republicans and Democrats — and then narrow it down from there (CBC, Blue Dogs, etc.).
November 9, 2008 at 9:52 pm
ari
By which I mean, people make a decision to join a party, and thus I don’t worry too much about associating them with that party’s policies. There are outliers, to be sure, the Dan Borens of the world. But D and R are nowhere near as squidgy as conservative and progressive or liberal or whatever.
November 9, 2008 at 9:54 pm
ari
I’m not aware of Ben’s organizing activities, of course, but I’ll put my money on more Ben’s before I’ll put it on the internet.
You’d be very smart to bet that way. But I’d bet that the Bens who are out there are able to cover a lot more ground, reach a lot more people, create a much bigger community, because of the Web. They don’t call it a Net for nothing.
November 9, 2008 at 10:00 pm
urbino
What kind of organizing are we talking about?
November 9, 2008 at 10:02 pm
ari
Mary Kay, Amway, LDS, that kind of thing.
November 9, 2008 at 10:07 pm
urbino
Hellz, why didn’t you say so?
November 9, 2008 at 10:10 pm
ari
Seriously, he used to (and perhaps still does — I don’t live there any more and so don’t know) organize for the Greens and other “progressive” causes. Those aren’t scare quotes; I’m just trying to be true to myself.
November 9, 2008 at 10:30 pm
urbino
Sounds like fightin’ the good fight.
What’s really needed in red America, though, is considerably more. We’ve talked about this before.
November 9, 2008 at 10:36 pm
bitchphd
It’s rarely worth engaging with an argument made by a person who isn’t worth engaging.
Well, of course, and I tend not to read most of the things mentioned here either because I think they’re written by crazy people or because I don’t generally read political blogs, to be honest. But it’s surely silly to be asserting, as a fair number of people here seem to be, that there are *no* conservatives worth engaging. Sullivan, for instance, has doubtless written stuff that I think is stupid and asinine, but he’s no Ace of Spades. And I rather doubt that 48% of Americans are just flat-out assholes–or even, as someone said upthread, that everyone that calls themselves conservative these days is ignorant. Ari might be right about terminology, I don’t know. And it’s surely true that teh internets tend to reward the shouters, and that in the era of Fox News, the conservative blogosphere in particular has had a lot of crazy people in it. But I kind of suspect that my own ignorance about who the reasonable conservatives are doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.
November 9, 2008 at 10:44 pm
Ralph Luker
Ari, I appreciate your discomfort with the meaning of words like “conservative” and “progressive,” but, in light of Burke’s and Hilzoy’s comments, I understood your question to be “are there conservative public intellectuals worth engaging.” My answer is: of course there are. I don’t think that Burke or Hilzoy would settle for your terms, Republican and Democrat. It isn’t a question of whether they control or, even, belong to a political party or not. It’s a question of whether there are spokespersons of a contrasting intellectual stripe who have a significant public audience. George Will certainly does. Garry Wills may be the most important historian as public intellectual in our time. I’d add Sam Tanenhaus to the list: editing the NYTRB puts him in a very significant position. Someone like John Dean probably doesn’t need to be taken very seriously, at all.
November 9, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Colin
Exactly. We need better terms. Distinguish Burkeans from Austrians, take people like Wills seriously, recognize the conservatism of our next President…
For me one of the weirdest moments in recent political history was the Terry Schiavo controversy, in which people who claimed to be “conservatives” tried to monkey with the constitutional structure of the Republic in order to reverse a state judge. At that point “conservative” lost any meaning — or became at best a term for a certain alliance of convenience, in which case it deserves all the scorn that John and Rich heap on it. Mark Lilla’s piece in yesterday’s WSJ, though arguably late in the day, is appropos.
November 9, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Jesse
Thanks for the excellent post. I agree with your sources, to say the least. They confirmed everything I’ve been thinking about the transformations (regenerations?) occurring right now.
Sure, conservatives are an easy target. I couldn’t mention any names that haven’t been mentioned/aren’t completely obvious (David Brooks comes to mind), but even as a far-left oriented individual, I still believe there are fundamentally valid conservative economic and social views that we discredit only at great cost. Even if many of those views are only tenuously valid, I still think they are a credible part of the national discourse, and must not be excluded. Let’s not forget that the fundamental driving mechanism of democracy is the plurality that helps to dissolve the highly partisan views that pervade any nation’s discourse. Yes, even the Ridiculous has a say, but that only means it is incumbent upon us to provide a stronger counterpoint. What did the Supreme Court judge say about free speech, something to the effect that we should appreciate even radical, prima facie-incorrect views because their “collision with truth” provides a clearer lens for all? Other’n that, I’d suggest others research paleoconservativism. It’s pretty respectable, though I couldn’t name any PC’s, and those who claim to be so are just your usual communitarian neo-con. As incredible as it seems, there are certain conservative positions that retain prestige.
…But then, the center/far right is doing nothing to assuage the venom coming out of their fragmented and disenfranchised core lately. What gives with this sudden return to the seventies and eighties–this return to being a country of fringe, violent factions? It really is concerning. If there is another mass shooting in my state (Washington) by some right wing nut ambushing a court or a police station, I will require that Obama wear a Bush mask at every speech and press conference. Seriously. We’ve had a half-dozen or so this year, two of which occurred within miles of where I live, and all of which involved some lunatic “on a mission from god” (actual quote). I’m so tired of it. And the people who knowingly instigate such views or create environments that incubate violent intentions, they need to be held accountable. Otherwise its back to Neo-Nazis, mail bombing mountain men, and this country’s assembly line of Timothy McVeigh’s. I hate to even suggest it, but it seems inevitable, not to even mentioned the race issue. All it takes is one guy, and we’ve got plenty to spare.
Thanks for you post, though. I’m delighted to say I really like your blog—it’s part of that much searched-for, nary found 1% or so.
November 9, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Jesse
“Schadenfreudey fun”. And indeed it is… Just read that again. Goodness, what a great first line.
November 10, 2008 at 12:28 am
ari
Yes, that was what I was after originally, Ralph. I tried to be clear, in my very short part of the original post, that I was talking about two different sets of people: the wingnuts, the lunatic fringe of movement conservatism, the folks that Burke and Hilzoy both say it’s time to dismiss, as compared to the actual conservative thinkers, people who might be out there producing interesting stuff that I should be reading. But as I was grappling with this thread, and considering the various arguments, it became clearer (this is not a novel thought, in other words) to me that, sometime in the last few decades, identifiers such as conservative and liberal stopped having very much meaning. That might be a good thing. But it makes a discussion like this one much harder to have.
November 10, 2008 at 2:11 am
Michael Turner
urbino writes:
My point isn’t that large swaths are ruled by conservatives, but that they are populated by conservatives.
That is indeed the problem. And how do you reach them?
Part of the problem is a combination of sheer concentration and the fact they are on different media channels than we are. Yes, the winger blogosphere is only a tiny fraction, believe it or not.
In what some are starting to call the Cracker Crescent — the startlingly contiguous swath from eastern Oklahoma up through Kentucky (but emphatically not to be equated with Appalachia, or even to overlap much with it, according to our budding crackercrescentologists) — there was a dramatic counter-swing to the GOP ticket. It was much more pronounced than the favorite son/daughter GOP swings in Arizona/Arkansas. I’m sure it correlates closely with “low-population poor county” nationally, but there’s a lot of that in America, and you didn’t see this swing in those places, at least not as much.
My bet is that relatively few of these people even have internet access, much less spend any time browsing Sadly, No! to research out how stoopid liberal and lefties think they are. You can snark all you want on the intertubes, they are tuned and feeding back into another part of the electromagnetic ether entirely: talk radio. Technology helps them here: they are on talk radio with cell phones, now, so they can reinforce one another’s biases wherever they are, even if stuck in traffic commuting into Louisville.
That said, I’m not so sure they are unreachable through the Internet. Let’s imagine a network of people all over the English-speaking world who are streaming Cracker Crescent talk radio 24×7. On their web consoles, they have menus of typical winger talking points. The menu items are linked to pithy statements of what’s problematic in each point, in case memory requires refreshing.
Team WingClip uses VoIP to get onto the airwaves in the Crescent and respond, to say how the issue is being distorted, or to get into the other side of it, or to simply express why the opinon being pushed is wrong. Bonus points for callers with country accents or the ability to fake those accents persuasively. Bonus points for people who can put the objections across in words of one syllable. Bonus points for people who can do this humorously. Bonus points for people who don’t call Sarah Palin a fucktard. Special bonus points for those who can even aver that they like her, and sound credible.
Team WingClip. An idea whose time has come. Are you with me, junior birdmen?
November 10, 2008 at 5:03 am
Michael Turner
Uh-oh, I’m already discouraged. Kevin “Dow-Umpty-Six-Gajillion” Hassett speaks to this very issue of dialogue, possibly trying to qualify as one of our “They”. His suggestion: “Try to be someone your opponent would like to invite to dinner.”
How absurd. But of course we’ve wanted to invite Kevin Hassett to dinner! For ages, now. Don’t be silly! All over lib/leftie blogdom, the hilarity must be breaking out, followed by the invitations. “Oh, Kev, dear, of course, please come, we’d love to have you over. There’ll be 4-and-20 crows baked into a humble pie as appetizer, after which the main course will be served: a heaping bowl of dicks. Unfortunately, there’s only enough for you. But don’t worry about us. We’ll be OK with just champagne. Ta-ta! Don’t be late!”
I guess when Kevin Hassett begged off from a radio conversation with Brad Delong a while back, it was in anticipation of a case of indigestion. Just a little miscommunication about meal timing, you know.
I’m trying to give Hassett a chance, but the first graf of Step One of his Recovering Our Civility program is this:
“. . . refrain from impugning the character or motives of those you disagree with. All incorrect statements are not lies.”
Uh . . . Kevin, wouldn’t that be more gracefully expressed as “Not all incorrect statements are lies”? Oh, wait a minute, maybe you actually do mean that when someone makes an incorrect statement, one should never call it a lie. But the thing is, which side makes the overwhelming bulk of the incorrect statements that actually are lies? Is this your idea of levelling the playing field? Wrong metaphor, you say? OK: Are you perhaps worried that a rising tide of civility would swamp your boat, that people might actually take umbrage at being lied to, blatantly, across the dinner table? Oh, sorry: I just impugned your character, didn’t I.
Shorter Kevin Hassett: nice doggie, sorry we were kicking you for so long, can’t we be friends now?
Better Kevin Hassett: Hey, guys, I have an idea — if we stop lying, we’ll eventually be seen as occupying the higher moral ground whenever the other guys lie, right? So let’s stop lying! How about it?
I think we’re stuck with “shorter”.
November 10, 2008 at 5:44 am
matt w
Fareed Zakaria! Completely forgot about him. There’s about no criterion on which George F. Will is more worthy of attention than John Dean, up to and including participation in high political crimes.
November 10, 2008 at 6:10 am
Rich Puchalsky
Kevin Hassett: good example.
To misquote Twain, civility is now the first refuge of the scoundrel. Here’s a quote from that Hassett article that Michael Turner links to above:
“He may appoint angry partisans to key positions, and continue to blame, as Nancy Pelosi recently did, America’s problems on Republicans.”
Hassett writes about the Pelosi claim as if it is uncivil, therefore wrong. But it’s true. Republicans had control of every branch of government during the time when these problems were created.
After the Bush years, I have no interest in fogging the truth for the sake of civility. We should all be done with hiding our metaphorical crazy uncle’s alcoholism, denying it to strangers and ourselves by saying that when he’s sober he can sometimes say some quite intelligent things, and that we can’t just call him a drunk and start to figure out what to do about it.
I could see favoring civility — i.e. lying — for the sake of political effectiveness, if it truly is effective. But it isn’t. Hassett isn’t the guy with any votes in the Senate; those people have already started to threaten filibusters. We’d be much better off just counter-threatening the same “nuclear option” that they created right away.
November 10, 2008 at 6:20 am
Rich Puchalsky
“sometime in the last few decades, identifiers such as conservative and liberal stopped having very much meaning.”
ari, I think that functions primarily as a gesture of denial — if you redefine the words, you don’t have to accept the reality. Or if you redefine the words, you don’t have to acknowledge that in fact there hasn’t been much change in philosophy as opposed to content in what “conservative” and “liberal” mean since American liberals embraced positive rights in the early part of the 20th century.
I mean, conservatives used to lynch people. All the violence that people are seeing now, the denial of rationality — that’s all an organic part of their tradition. Someone upthread professes surprise at the Schaivo case, but come on, every decade of the American 20th century has had its equivalent. The whole idea that conservatives stood back from trying to control people’s lives was just propaganda, propaganda that developed in reaction to their criticism of socialism. It has never, ever been reflectred in actual behavior.
November 10, 2008 at 6:44 am
Ben Alpers
Since he came up in passing, I’d add Mark Lilla to the growing list of conservative public intellectuals who are generally worth reading (and why hasn’t Niall Ferguson’s name come up yet? He’s not a favorite of mine, but he’s certainly serious).
As far as organizing is concerned: I’ve been involved in a lot of progressive political work in Oklahoma over the last decade, and by far the most successful efforts have been nonpartisan and truly local. Our city government in Norman is much, much better than it was just a few years ago, and that’s thanks to decades of effort by local gadflies. I was lucky to be able to join these fights fairly late in the day and play a small part in them. Interestingly these battles were really nonpartisan. The divisions in our city’s politics are between a Chamber of Commerce/developer nexus and the rest of us. That first group include both prominent Republicans and prominent Democrats. And although most of their opposition are Democrats, some of us our registered independents and Republicans, too. And a lot of “property rights” folks with whom I don’t share a lot of theoretical common ground are great allies in some of these fights. Still, Norman is a very progressive, very “blue” community by Oklahoma standards, and that’s made a lot of these changes possible.
Things I’ve done at the state level have largely been noble failures (though I was involved, in a very minor way, in a successful effort to keep an English-as-the-official-language initiative off the ballot a few years ago).
So I don’t have any magic suggestions to transform the politics of my very red state (and, unfortunately, I’m afraid “more Bens” wouldn’t do it!).
I would say that getting involved in local politics is interesting and worthwhile. It also helps one see beyond the Democratic/Republican and liberal/conservative divides in much more concrete ways than searching for thoughtful public intellectuals from the other side of the aisle does.
November 10, 2008 at 6:55 am
politicalfootball
ari is my favorite conservative thinker – for certain values of “conservative” and “thinker.”
November 10, 2008 at 6:56 am
Ben Alpers
Tom Wolfe (though not much he’s written in the last couple decades has been up to the level of his earlier stuff)
…and I just read that excellent Lilla piece from the WSJ linked above. It concludes with Lilla referring to himself as a liberal. So I suppose we have to cross him off the list.
November 10, 2008 at 6:59 am
Ben Alpers
In fact, there wasn’t an earlier link to the Lilla article, just a mention.
So here’s a link for the Google impaired. (Incidentally, I disagree pretty strongly with Lilla’s dating conservative intellectuals’ embrace of populism to the 1980s….see Bill Buckley’s defense of Joe McCarthy, for example.)
November 10, 2008 at 7:00 am
kid bitzer
ben a.–
i think it is very cool and admirable that you do this work. and i’m pretty sure that it *does* make a difference.
i don’t really contribute anything to the political realm–like wodehouse’s psmith, i’m just a purveyor of general invective–but i can still recognize someone who is doing what engaged citizens ought to do.
and if i can just point out one way that your efforts may have unanticipated benefits:
red state denizens who get their world-view from limbaugh and o’reilly have been told that all liberals are vicious, lunatic whack-jobs (as well as being ineffectual and effete–it’s always al sharpton *and* michael dukakis).
by being politically active and visible, while at the same time responsible and sane, you can make it harder for your fellow-oklahomans to believe that stuff, and easier for them to imagine that liberals might be trusted with the nation’s business.
again, sincere thanks.
November 10, 2008 at 7:19 am
John Emerson
No one has actually responded to my point, so I’ll spell it out: which leftists thinkers should be invited into the dialogue?
The premise of this whole “dialogue with conservatives” meme has been that the Democrats are a left party. But they’re not. Even in purely liberal terms, the dominant group is neoliberal on economic questions, weak on civil liberties, and generally hawkish on foreign policy, especially regarding Israel.
November 10, 2008 at 7:20 am
John Emerson
For example, the dialogue over foreign policy is between realists (George Bush I) and neocons (George Bush II).
November 10, 2008 at 7:24 am
Ben Alpers
which leftists thinkers should be invited into the dialogue?
Given our current mess, giving some heterodox economists a seat at the table would be a good first step.
November 10, 2008 at 7:34 am
Rich Puchalsky
The Mark Lilla article refers to Peter Berger as a conservative. I’d never really thought of him as one, but if he is, then there’s at least one conservative thinker who I respect. (Although, of course, I don’t always agree with him.)
November 10, 2008 at 7:43 am
Rich Puchalsky
Also see Delong on that Mark Lilla article here. I agree with DeLong that Liila is myth-making about a conservatism that never existed.
November 10, 2008 at 8:09 am
John Emerson
Once you get down to the philosophical level, the areas of disagreement with conservativism are deep. You’re not really talking about policy tweaks or areas of possible compromise.
For example, one branch of conservativism, represented by George Will, does not accept “one man one vote” or universal suffrage. Another branch believes, or pretends to believe, in severely limited government, and that by and large the federal government should be relatively weak and the state governments strong. Some believe in almost total laissez-faire. Some don’t accept public health measures or public education, much less any other social services. Some believe in severe restrictions of free speech rights. Some believe that sodomy should remain illegal. Some believe that the present dynamic of international relations means that one nation must be globally dominant, and that if it isn’t us, it will be Russia or China. The “unitary presidency in a monopolar world” has serious advocates. I’m not talking abut the crazies, I’m talking about the deep thinkers.
Obama has been chosen to manage the government for a maximum of eight years, and the principles upon which he was elected are, on these points, non-conservative. Is there reason to engage in dialogue with people who disagree so fundamentally? It seems to me that the most we could do would be to recognize that if we fail, conservatives (after reconstructing and rehabbing after their Bush orgy) might be waiting in the wings to take over. We certainly should keep an eye on them.
As for the 46% of the electorate who voted for Bush, if Obama succeeds the confused ones and the venal ones will probably come on board. The convinced ones (the crazified Alan Keyes 27%, including the deep thinkers among them) should just be allowed to stew miserably, hopefully for decades. (As I did. Schadenfreude is not to be scorned.)
I say this in full awareness that Obama does not agree with me about most things and that many of those who voted for him are center-right. There are practical reasons why Obama has to keep these people happy. I don’t see that they require dialogue with conservatives, though.
November 10, 2008 at 8:18 am
Mike
I don’t want to come off as uncivil, but Ari’s original question about “conservatives who argue in good faith” strikes me as wrongheaded. The question assumes a difference between, say, Bush II era neocons, and those conservatives who truly believe in small government, robust federalism (as opposed to simple states’ rights), local control, balanced budgets, free markets, free trade, and the rest of the usual bromides such “thinkers” like to trot out.
The problem is that every time these post-Goldwater “thinkers” have actually grasped the levers of power, they have violated every single principle they’ve claimed to embrace. From Nixon’s wage and price controls to Reagan and Bush’s S&L bailout to AIG, and from COINTELPRO to FISA, and from the bombing to Cambodia to Iran-Contra to Iraq and executive signing statements, so-called conservatives have dispensed with their principles and their good faith each and every time.
At a certain point, it seems to me that we have to accept that there is more substance in what they actually do than in what they say, and given what conservatives have done, and done repeatedly, I ask in all sincerity, when have they ever argued in good faith?
November 10, 2008 at 8:21 am
politicalfootball
Tom Wolfe
Ooh – that’s a good one, Ben, with the caveats that you mention. He’s a real-deal conservative, and has a genuinely interesting mind. I was beginning to despair that we’d be able to find someone to meet both conditions.
November 10, 2008 at 8:24 am
Timothy Burke
Look, there is on one hand “conservatism”, broadly speaking, as an intellectual artifact, and some of its strains are worth taking seriously even if only to talk about why they’re wrong. I think we could all name thinkers from the 20th Century who could potentially be called conservatives in some aspect of their thinking whom we nevertheless find to be interesting to read and engage.
There are on the other hand individuals who in the present self-label in some respect as conservatives whom we might, in varying ways, recognize as having an authenticity, consistency and intellectual rigor in their thinking. That to me is a different intellectual practice that the folks who just move goalposts every five seconds based on whatever they think is the batshit-lunatic fantasy of the moment in the 27% crazy fraction of the electorate. There is for me a difference between honest and consistent argument that derives out of some starting premise with which I disagree and will-to-power guttersnipery. That most “conservative” voices in America now are the latter is absolutely true, and I agree that it’s been true since the 1960s at the least.
But at least some of what I’m thinking about “message discipline” is not about conservatives. It’s about progressives.
First, I honestly think at least some of the people who voted for Obama voted because they want a change in psychic atmosphere, in the way politics sounds and feels. Obama himself certainly held himself forth in that way, and was very careful about where and when he fired back in the spirit of those attacking him. If progressives now turn into the rhetorical mirror image of public-sphere conservatives (however correct or justified the intensity of their rhetoric), I think that the people who were drawn to Obama by his calm, unruffled, hopeful self-presentation and hoped for that to take hold in the public sphere at large are going to turn away from politics. Yeah, I know, that makes me a gated-community liberal or whatever, but throw me a bone: Obama won not by breathing populist fire and brimstone, but through a very mannered and deliberate presentation of himself as thoughtful, controlled, disciplined.
Second, I think that a triumphalist mood is a good way to make serious missteps later on, to overestimate the intensity and consistency of political support for progressive policy. I think that’s one place that the cultural left in the U.S. got into trouble in the 1970s, by pushing too hard and with too much intensity within civic institutions and practices where liberals and leftists had some greater degree of influence or authority. You don’t want to overindulge in daily binges of right-wing scourgery because that tends to make you feel too righteous, too entitled, too justified in everything you think. Spending every day roughing up the latest postings at Redstate not only is picking off the low-hanging fruit, it’s a way to avoid some of the genuinely tough intramural disagreements and to misperceive the real social landscape of opposition to some progressive reforms.
November 10, 2008 at 8:36 am
John Emerson
I agree that Obama should tread lightly in various respects for various prudential reasons, but I have confidence that he’ll do so. He’ll probably overdo it. I don’t see that this requires paying attention to the seriosu ideas of the ivory-billed conservatives.
I’ll be much happier pitching shit at Obama than I was pitching shit at Reagan, the Bushes, and Clinton.
November 10, 2008 at 8:48 am
politicalfootball
Timothy, that blunt language is from Barack Obama, explaining his opposition to Iraq. Calling one’s opponents “dumb” is not considered nice. He hasn’t been unduly nice in the campaign, and he shouldn’t be now.
Nor should we. People like Jonah Goldberg – to pick an example – aren’t going to go away, and they are always going to be influential in framing the national debate. The belief that we can ignore people like Goldberg is one reason that liberals are rightly derided as “elitist.”
November 10, 2008 at 9:03 am
Timothy Burke
Why should Jonah Goldberg be influential in framing the national debate? Inasmuch as I think the language of ‘framing’ is useful, isn’t the point to frame debates rather than be framed by them? I’d rather that progressives start having the kind of debates they’d rather have, the ones that are about the actual choices and problems that we genuinely acknowledge as issues, instead of always playing defense against the indefensible.
Again, for the folks who have long counseled that all we needed was a paint-scorching take-no-prisoners populist on the left, Obama’s victory is at the least proof that this is not required for electoral success. And it’s not a refusal to use blunt language: it’s a judicious, targeted use of it. You can’t do that if you’re up every morning spraying intellectual pesticide on every crawling thing that’s appeared on the blogsphere overnight. Grant Obama at least enough credit that you give his approach a whirl.
November 10, 2008 at 9:05 am
Timothy Burke
BTW, Ben Alpers’ point back up the thread is a really important one: in some regional public spheres, the crazy strain is still very dominant and closely welded to actual political power. I can only hope that in some of those places, the magnitude of Obama’s victory will blunt the edge of crazy rhetoric and policy, but I doubt it.
November 10, 2008 at 9:06 am
politicalfootball
Barack Obama on the endorsement by the vice president of the United States of the Republican nominee:
Sure, Obama shouldn’t go around calling McCain a coward and a traitor and whatnot, but he shouldn’t shy away from insult and mockery, either. Contempt is an entirely appropriate -an entirely moderate – response to the last dozen years. Pretending otherwise gives the SOBs legitimacy that they don’t deserve.
November 10, 2008 at 9:17 am
[links] Link salad for a sick day | jlake.com
[…] Who are they? — The Edge of the American West on the marginalization of conservative fringe speech (ie, the Bush White House) and who the “thoughtful, sane conservatives who argue in good faith” might be. […]
November 10, 2008 at 9:17 am
politicalfootball
Well, he shouldn’t be, but he is. Look at the most recent post on this blog. It’s about Paul Krugman telling the world that, well, Keynes had a point. This is nearly 40 years after “We’re all Keynesians now.”
It’ll be nice when pure bullshit isn’t a dominant strain in the national discourse, but pretending it ain’t out there doesn’t make it go away.
The idea that people like Krugman ought not engage this stuff – or ought to treat it respectfully – is such folly that I’m sure that’s not what you’re proposing. I can’t figure out, though, exactly what it is that you are proposing.
November 10, 2008 at 9:19 am
silbey
Obama himself certainly held himself forth in that way, and was very careful about where and when he fired back in the spirit of those attacking him
You’re misunderstanding the Obama strategy by presenting it as a dichotomy between the above and (from a later post):
paint-scorching take-no-prisoners populist on the left
Obama did what Bush did in 2000 and 2004. He stayed above the fray, while his surrogates went after the opposition quite viciously, ‘paint-scorching’ even.
Grant Obama at least enough credit that you give his approach a whirl
Uh, that’s exactly what I’m suggesting. Hit them in the mouth, repeatedly. It shouldn’t be the candidate who does it, but somebody should.
November 10, 2008 at 9:22 am
Rich Puchalsky
“Obama won not by breathing populist fire and brimstone, but through a very mannered and deliberate presentation of himself as thoughtful, controlled, disciplined.”
I have to again recommend this Michael Berube post. Once again, no one wants a candidate who curses like a blogger. But claims that Obama didn’t end up doing what the stereotypical angry bloggers said he should do are counterfactual.
November 10, 2008 at 9:38 am
Timothy Burke
Well, Berube basically hears Obama doing what Michael himself does well. Maybe unsurprisingly I hear him doing a bit of what I try to do, not nearly so well as Berube executes his approach. What he didn’t do, though, is what at least some blogospheric folks have been crying out for: hitting back blow-for-blow, never giving a rhetorical inch.
Who are the political surrogates who peeled paint as part of Obama’s strategy, by the way? E.g., the people that he or his managers sent forth with that purpose, as Rove/Atwater sent their surrogates forth? Unless this is just the left-wing version of the Fighting Keyboard Brigades and we’re all giving ourselves credit for being the fire-breathers who did the dirty work of effectively fighting back hard, and assigning ourselves the continuing job of doing so.
November 10, 2008 at 9:38 am
John Emerson
I’ve been talking about this stuff on the internet since 2002. My views have developed during that time. I ended up hoping for three things.
1. Find new voters instead of hammering away at the same old centrists and undecideds. With the help of ACORN, Moveon, et al, Obama got 100% on this one.
2. A more pro-active, more aggressive, less cringey campaigning style. Obama got at least 50% from my point of view, but I’ll also grant that his political instincts are far better than mine.
3. Less centrist policies. I give him about 30% on this one, but I’d pretty much given up on policy by the time the primaries rolled around. Getting the Republicans out is enough. My new policy slogan is “The American people don’t agree with me about most things, and beggars can’t be choosers”.
My demand for paint-blistering rhetoric was directed at whomever happened to read my words, not Obama. When I showed up in 2002, people were responding seriously to Kaus and Sullivan and Instapudit and even LGF and Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin.
I still think that a take-no-prisoners assault on the corrupt, compromised Bush conservatives is completely justified. Those people should sit silently in the back of the room with paper bags over their heads for at least five years.
November 10, 2008 at 9:42 am
John Emerson
The blogosphere performed very effectively as, unofficial, unacknowledged and possibly unappreciated surrogates in my opinion. Republican disinformation didn’t have the “traction” it used to have, because it was always caught immediately and widely exposed.
We’re still not on the bus, though. Rahm is the boss.
November 10, 2008 at 9:45 am
Michael Turner
Just to be fair (since I’m clearly unbalanced), Uncle Miltie said Time misquoted him with that “We’re all Keynesians now.” As best Friedman could reconstruct what he’d said, it was more like this:
In one sense, we are all Keynesians now; in another, no one is a Keynesian any longer. We all use the Keynesian language and apparatus, none of us any longer accepts the initial Keynesian conclusions.
That might be substituting one half-truth for another slightly more nuanced half-truth. Surely, when he wrote, there were estimable Keynesian economists? But at least it’s from the horse’s mouth, not Time magazine’s ass.
Paul Krugman, certainly a neo-Keynesian, and Brad deLong, increasingly neo-Keynesian, never seem absolutely settled on whether they want to bury Friedman or praise him. I mean, sometimes they obviously want bury him, but then they dig him right back up and praise him again. You have to wonder if you could make Miltie Walk the Earth Once More, and show him what’s going on now, whether he wouldn’t scratch his head, and go off and revise . . . and come back and say something very intelligent that would at least give our ascendant neo-Keynesians pause.
I recommend following the link above, which is from a Libertarian source; it exemplifies the kind of respectful disagreement Kevin Hassett holds up as the ideal even though Hassett can’t even approximate it himself. One thing that clearly distinguishes econ hack pundits from true economists (and some close followers of the field) is that the econ hack pundits divide the big names of economics into Holy Us vs. Satanic Them, somehow never noticing that those big-name economists themselves never seem to have engaged in that kind of simplistic ideological idiocy. Well . . . except for maybe Greg Mankiw, sort of. He only outsources simplistic ideological idiocy on his blog, because (I guess) actually writing scurrilous trash would be unremunerated work, and he’s against unremunerated work because . . . because . . . well, because economics itself tells him it would be pointless! Just in case you needed a reason to scratch Greg Mankiw off the list.
November 10, 2008 at 9:49 am
Rich Puchalsky
“What he didn’t do, though, is what at least some blogospheric folks have been crying out for: hitting back blow-for-blow, never giving a rhetorical inch.”
But I think that he did. And I think that I’m more in touch with what the hitting-back-blow-for-blow people really wanted than you are.
To go back to the example that I used, Obama started turning his campaign around when he responded to McCain’s Ayers ad with one that said “Barack was eight at the time. Why does McCain want to keep talking about the sixties?” That’s not civil. That’s striking back directly, implying that McCain is old and senile and out of it.
And pretty much all of the strike-backs that people could have wanted him to use were used. Keating Five. His age. His erratic behavior. His racist campaign. No, Obama did not get up there and personally bluster that McCain was a racist meanie, but no one wanted him to.
November 10, 2008 at 9:52 am
silbey
Who are the political surrogates who peeled paint as part of Obama’s strategy
Uh, Robert Gibbs, Obama’s communications director, for one, who repeatedly accused McCain of being “erratic” (hello, senility) and who asked Joe Scarborough if he was an anti-Semite during an interview.
November 10, 2008 at 9:53 am
politicalfootball
Timothy says:
Timothy, this is the part I’m not getting. You start out by talking about how “progressives” should behave, then switch to talking about how a political candidate running for president ought to behave. These are two different things. To those who respond to your original point about progressives, you then say:
But it was you who initiated the call here for “message discipline” among “progressives.” You really seem to be trying to have it every which way here.
November 10, 2008 at 9:59 am
politicalfootball
Michael, I was quoting Nixon. I was unaware that the quote had ever been attributed to Friedman.
November 10, 2008 at 10:03 am
Timothy Burke
Two different points but related, politicalfootball.
1. I’m saying that hubris is dangerous, and that progressives writ large (not merely bloggers or public-sphere commenters) need to be careful that they don’t become the mirror-image of overreaching conservative activists in the last twelve years, pushing their concerns heedlessly or with rhetorical arrogance. Emerson is certainly right that Obama really brought some new voters in, but he also won because he swung some older, established swing constituencies. If you think he (or someone else later on) can do it with just the new voters who came in this time, I think you’re not reading the polls. So it’s about listening carefully to where and when rhetorical heat, or matching conservative crazies punch-for-punch is going to work and when it’s going to blind you to the real political landscape around you. I do think that there’s a hubris on the left that was part of what fed into the rise of “Nixonland” politics as Perlstein describes it. (A smaller part than entrenched racism, etc., but not irrelevant.)
2. Hubris is also dangerous when it leads you to give yourself too much credit, e.g., that debates between (most) bloggers are a very small, intramural affair. When we get up to Malkin/Huffington Post levels, there’s more of an impact.
November 10, 2008 at 10:21 am
Rich Puchalsky
“progressives writ large (not merely bloggers or public-sphere commenters) need to be careful that they don’t become the mirror-image of overreaching conservative activists in the last twelve years, pushing their concerns heedlessly or with rhetorical arrogance.”
Why? Because we might win? Because we might have a long, uninterrupted time during which we dominated government, set the agenda, and got everything we wanted?
Conservatives won, and then failed, because their ideas were bad. Ours aren’t. It’s just centrist arrogance to think that we need to keep policing our behavior because no our can ever believe that they’re really right.
November 10, 2008 at 10:22 am
JPool
There’s a bit in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (I don’t have it in front of me and can’t find the exact passage on the webs, so I’m paraphrasing) where he’s critcizing Buhkarin, and argues that it’s a mistake to focus solely on criticizing your political opponent’s weakest arguements. He says, it’s easy to see why people fall into this, because it’s easier and it’s what you would do in a millitary conflict (and, as Sifu noted, it’s fun), but in a political conflict all it does is leave their strongest point unaddressed. I think this was part of the mistake that the McCain campaign made. They thought that they could get by on insinuation and association alone. Whereas Obama/Biden were at their strongest when they hit substantively (I think the best moment for this was during the VP debates when Biden laid out the special interest money grab nature of the McCain helath plan, then said “I that doesn’t show you the difference … I don’t know what will”), and looked weakest when they went the innuendo route (the “doesn’t know how to use a computer” sillyness).
As to Emerson’s question of how do we leftos get a seat at the table, I think Obama’s cleared part of the way for us, both in committing himself to the issues we care about (labor, justice, environment) and by recognizing that in order to get anything done he’ll need an engaged citizenry. If we keep showing up as part of that citizenry our ideas will be on the agenda. The other way is by being selective about the whole mouth-punching thing, so that folks won’t get nervous about having us over. Nothing ruins a party faster than an ill-timed mouth-punching.
November 10, 2008 at 10:22 am
Rich Puchalsky
That should be “because no one can ever believe” above.
November 10, 2008 at 10:23 am
John Emerson
The left-wing version of the Fighting Keyboard Brigades
Me! Me!
November 10, 2008 at 10:26 am
politicalfootball
So it’s about listening carefully to where and when rhetorical heat, or matching conservative crazies punch-for-punch is going to work and when it’s going to blind you to the real political landscape around you.
I think you realize that this is a bit of a caricature of my view. I don’t think liberals can put together the same sort of slander machine the conservatives did. But who are you thinking of here? Who is the liberal example we ought to fear? Seventies liberals? Seriously? They weren’t even influential in the Seventies.
Liberals have been learning to be more effective through nastiness, but Kos and, say, Jonah Goldberg have little in common. Kos and Grover Norquist, on the other hand …
Anyway, you seem to think that the modern conservative movement is/was a failure. I don’t see it that way. Consider how far-out Reagan was when he talked about abolishing the estate tax, for instance.
November 10, 2008 at 10:27 am
John Emerson
The right has controlled the political dialogue since at least 1980, and in many respects since 1968. So we shouldn’t sneer at their brutish methods. With Bush they collapsed because of hubris and graft. Even so, if they’d succeeded in pacifying Iraq and had delayed the financial crash another six months, they’d probably still be in power.
November 10, 2008 at 10:30 am
John Emerson
||
One of the people I cnavassed believed that the Democrats were going to confiscate her 401k. Rush Limbaugh told her that. She was already a Republican, but this is just a reminder that we’re not out of the woods yet. And also a reminder of what it means to “dialogue with McCain voters”.
|>
November 10, 2008 at 10:30 am
Timothy Burke
Being right is not in and of itself any guarantee of political success, Rich.
Evolutionary theory is undoubtedly right, but here we are with many many decades gone with no guarantee that many public school districts in the U.S. will teach this material as it is right to teach it. That’s one kind of problem: what do you do when a sizeable minority has intensely strong feelings in a “wrong” direction and will constantly push to defeat or subvert a consensus support for the right direction? The problem of creationism isn’t a problem of wrong and right; it’s a problem of how to do politics and rhetoric. There are other issues which fall into a much wider zone of centrist sentiment where the problem of how to act politically becomes sharper still, where simply being right gets you almost nowhere.
It’s also possible to be right about a general principle and yet fatally wrong about the specific policy or political practice that comes to be seen as the equivalent to the general principle. Right, for example, that there is an urgent need to create affordable housing for all, but wrong that the best way to do is build huge high-rise housing projects. I think the more intense the conviction about being right about all principles, the more likely you’ll get a misidentification between the principle and the practice and not know the difference until it’s too late.
November 10, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Rich Puchalsky
Timothy, I wasn’t really trying to assert that being right guaranteed political success. I was trying to ask why “pushing [our] concerns heedlessly or with rhetorical arrogance” was bad. After all, conservatives won decades of political control with just such tactics. So why not use them? Perhaps after the decades of control, we’ll overreach, but that’s a problem for another generation. You could legitimately criticize conservatism by saying that they didn’t know what to do with power once they got it, but I don’t think the same criticism applies to liberals; we do have actual positive goals.
It’s an appropriate criticism to say that these tactics were not in fact effective, or would not be effective from our side. But I don’t think that either of those are actually the case.
I think that this bit about hubris — and the associated conflicts about civility and so on — are important because they bring out actually different political goals. The way I see it, if being uncivil and/or arrogant allows power to be used towards liberal political goals, then it’s not just a good idea to do it, it’s an obligation. Anything else is a betrayal of the people who we’re working for.
Too many centrist objections seem to come down to holding out civility as the political goal itself. It’s as if we were supposed to be struggling towards a civil society, and now that incivility from the right had been pushed back, it was time for the left to follow suit. Well, no, that isn’t our goal at all. I could care less about a civil society that is unconcerned with what happens to people as long as everything remains quiet.
November 10, 2008 at 1:34 pm
matt w
I think another important point here is that, having your policies work is important. And getting stuck in an echo chamber really isn’t good for your policies. You should listen to dissenting viewpoints.
But which dissenting viewpoints? Most prominent people on the right have spent the last eight years demonstrating that they have nothing to contribute. The way to good policy is not to listen to them. There’s enough dissent within the Obama coalition to keep everyone on their toes. (And that means that we shouldn’t mindlessly close up ranks behind Obama, which would really be the mirror image of public-sphere conservatives during the Bush era — but I don’t think there’s much danger of that either.)
November 10, 2008 at 1:55 pm
silbey
The way I see it, if being uncivil and/or arrogant allows power to be used towards liberal political goals, then it’s not just a good idea to do it, it’s an obligation. Anything else is a betrayal of the people who we’re working for.
Too many centrist objections seem to come down to holding out civility as the political goal itself.
Exactly.
(I agree with Rich on a civility-related post. The world is definitely shifting).
November 10, 2008 at 3:29 pm
AEP
Spent my lunch hour watching C-SPAN: Heritage Foundation sponsored a panel of noted conservative women on the impact of the election. Aside from the many outrageous and outright lies I heard from these apparently well-informed and well-educated women, I could hear the beginnings of a post-loss narrative. It is a story of supression by “the” liberals (not kidding, Diana Furchtgott-Roth put the “the” there) and outrageous abuse of taxpayer money (my god, do conservatives have NO sense of irony?). Obama should be stopped by such “brave souls” as Mitch McConnnell before he can implement his misguided policies. For example, I was amazed to hear that we should deny women basic employment rights in order to ensure that (presumably male) employers will continue to hire them without being fettered by federal laws like maternity leave. Don’t Republican women work, have babies, get excluded from day care, get divorced, pay mortgages? I felt my womb constrict when Furchtgott-Roth let that one out and I wondered how all those women could sit there and take it. But they do. They do. And then they clap.
November 10, 2008 at 3:47 pm
urbino
Timothy Burke @8:24:
If progressives now turn into the rhetorical mirror image of public-sphere conservatives (however correct or justified the intensity of their rhetoric), I think that the people who were drawn to Obama by his calm, unruffled, hopeful self-presentation and hoped for that to take hold in the public sphere at large are going to turn away from politics. Yeah, I know, that makes me a gated-community liberal or whatever, but throw me a bone
Actually, that doesn’t make you a gated-community liberal. Mirroring conservative rhetoric isn’t what’s needed outside the gates. In fact, there are few things better suited to driving ordinary conservative people further into conservatism.
What’s needed are people. Liberal people. Living next door, working in the same office, going to the same gym, drinking at the same bar, etc., with conservatives. Real, live people, in all their complexity and ordinariness. As long as liberals stay behind the gates of large (largely coastal) urban centers and university communities, nothing will change in the deep red regions of the country. The cycle of conservatism will go on among those left behind, and they will continue to be a political roadblock to progress, and, I think, eventually the nation will be back to sectional strife.
November 10, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Vance
So, seriously, urbino, do you recommend that individual coastal liberals move?
November 10, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Ralph Luker
I think urbino is correct about this. That’s one reason I regretted that, in 22 months of campaigning, Obama made virtually no appearances in West Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, or Oklahoma. Idaho, at least, got some early attention.
Incidentally, Matt, neither Clinton or Obama appear to agree with you. The word I hear is that both the former president and the incoming president want Lieberman in the Senate Democratic caucus. I don’t recall his having been a part of the “Obama coalition.”
November 10, 2008 at 4:05 pm
urbino
Michael Turner @2:11:
That is indeed the problem. And how do you reach them?
Part of the problem is a combination of sheer concentration and the fact they are on different media channels than we are…
…and have different schools, books, online encyclopedia, etc. Many of them live in a completely different information world than we do, with few points of contact, if any.
My bet is that relatively few of these people even have internet access
I doubt that, actually, but I could certainly be wrong. I haz no data.
much less spend any time browsing Sadly, No! to research out how stoopid liberal and lefties think they are. You can snark all you want on the intertubes, they are tuned and feeding back into another part of the electromagnetic ether entirely: talk radio…
That said, I’m not so sure they are unreachable through the Internet…
Team WingClip uses VoIP to get onto the airwaves in the Crescent and respond, to say how the issue is being distorted, or to get into the other side of it, or to simply express why the opinion being pushed is wrong…
I’ve never heard of WingClip, but, from your description, it’s not clear to me how it would work. People would have to access it in some way in order to receive its information, right? And why would they?
I’m all for WingClip and efforts like it, but I think ultimately they’re going to be of extremely limited utility. What deep red conservatives need isn’t more sources telling them why what they’ve heard and believed all their life is wrong; they need somebody who has heard something else and believes something else living next door to them, coming over for barbecues, etc. You know. Friends.
Along with that, they need investment in better jobs and better education in their regions. The Research Triangle seems to be having a cultural impact in North Carolina. If the Obama administration is looking to stimulate the economy, anyway, investing a couple billion in red America to raise the standard of living and the level of educational would be extremely shrewd — economically, politically, and culturally.
November 10, 2008 at 4:08 pm
ari
the nation will be back to sectional strife
This has crossed my mind more than once in the past few years. But, as Vance suggests more broadly, it’s going to be a very hard sell if you want me, specifically, to move back to Oklahoma. And yet, I hear what you’re saying and link it to the case of Ben: the tendency to treat politics as what happens on the national stage is very strong and ultimately misleading. Local interactions are as ore more important, particularly in slowly reshaping the political culture. Still, I’m really happy in Northern California. Don’t make me leave!
November 10, 2008 at 4:11 pm
dana
Along with that, they need investment in better jobs and better education in their regions.
I think this has to come first. Create mini-Austins everywhere. Make it a live option for their best and brightest to come home and put that college education to work, rather than moving other places.
November 10, 2008 at 4:12 pm
eric
I’ve assumed that friendly interactions and conscientious dialogue will lead to better understanding. Isn’t that the lesson of this blog in the past few days?
November 10, 2008 at 4:14 pm
ari
If the Obama administration is looking to stimulate the economy, anyway, investing a couple billion in red America to raise the standard of living and the level of educational would be extremely shrewd — economically, politically, and culturally.
This seems right to me. It also seems right to me that, for the fifteen minutes before the next campaign begins, he should spend some time in deep red America. Faulting him for having not traveled to these places in the last election, though, seems iffy. The Obama camp clearly had a plan; they executed their plan nearly perfectly; and they expanded the map for Democrats quite a bit. I’m inclined to laud them for that hope they do more going forward, that they really move toward a true 50-state strategy.
November 10, 2008 at 4:16 pm
ari
I’ve assumed that friendly interactions and conscientious dialogue will lead to better understanding. Isn’t that the lesson of this blog in the past few days?
You just need to try a little harder.
November 10, 2008 at 4:17 pm
urbino
So, seriously, urbino, do you recommend that individual coastal liberals move?
Not individuals, Vance, no. Groups. Individuals is a recipe for failure. Peeps need support. In one of my comments to the hippos post I linked upthread, I talk about the Civil Rights Movement as a case of what can be accomplished when even a relatively small number of educated liberals come to red America.
The CRM required those people to make a very high-risk, short-term commitment to improving deep red America. What I’m proposing — what I believe it’s going to take to make any real difference — is a low-risk, very long-term commitment.
But it is a commitment. Don’t get me wrong. I’m an educated liberal in deep red America, so I know how much of a sacrifice I’m talking about. Nonetheless, it is what I think will be required, if deep red America is ever to change.
But, as Vance suggests more broadly, it’s going to be a very hard sell if you want me, specifically, to move back to Oklahoma.
Don’t be silly. Why would we want you?
November 10, 2008 at 4:19 pm
urbino
I’ve assumed that friendly interactions and conscientious dialogue will lead to better understanding. Isn’t that the lesson of this blog in the past few days?
Or maybe it’s a lesson in why the internet isn’t a substitute for a nice person living next door.
November 10, 2008 at 4:24 pm
urbino
I’m an educated liberal in deep red America, so I know how much of a sacrifice I’m talking about.
I should clarify that. I don’t consider myself to be making any great sacrifice. I’m of deep red America, so I know how to get along in it. And, aside from a grad school stint in NYC, I’ve never really felt the benefits of living in a large, coastal city, so I don’t really feel the loss of whatever it is I’m missing out on. (Except sometimes when I come here and realize a lot of you guys know each other in real life, and get to interact in real life like real human beings.)
November 10, 2008 at 4:28 pm
John Emerson
Why do we have to convert those people? As long as we can keep the crazified 27% in the minority, we should be happy. It doesn’t bother me if Oklahoma stays permanently in the minority for the next century. I hope it does.
As I’ve said, this solicitousness about the 27% has always seemed to me to be grounded on suspicion of old liberals and “new” leftists. If you you want to find people who’ve been wrongly scorned and rejected, the Nader-Chomsky 5% is a lot better place to look than the Delay-Gingrich-Rove Bush 27%.
November 10, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Vance
That makes sense, u. I basically agree with your diagnosis that the regional concentration of “elites” is not a good thing. I know something of the “sacrifice” to which you refer: my brother followed the same path I did (grew up LA, college away, grad school in CA) but is now a professor at LSU. Had I not slipped off the rails after the PhD, no doubt I’d be one of those thousand points of left.
Two, three, many Austins!
November 10, 2008 at 4:33 pm
urbino
As long as we can keep the crazified 27% in the minority, we should be happy.
You mean like, “as long as slavery is confined to the South, why should we care?”
Less dramatically, have the last 8 years not happened, or is it that you believe this election has created or signaled a new liberal-ish permanent majority?
November 10, 2008 at 4:34 pm
ari
You mean like, “as long as slavery is confined to the South, why should we care?”
Oh, good: bear baiting.
November 10, 2008 at 4:38 pm
John Emerson
The last 8 years was when the 27% became the majority. This country has always had the crazies. They seem to be slaves of themselves, if anyone, and want to make others their own slaves.
November 10, 2008 at 4:40 pm
urbino
?
Would, “as long as we can keep the negroes in the ghetto, why should we care,” have been a better example?
November 10, 2008 at 4:40 pm
John Emerson
But to answer your question, the new liberalish permanent majority should be the goal, keeping the people we’ve just got, rather than trying to change the minds of the hard Republican core.
November 10, 2008 at 4:43 pm
John Emerson
I don’t think of the 27% as victims. They’re agents, and enemies. Let them rot.
November 10, 2008 at 4:43 pm
urbino
the new liberalish permanent majority should be the goal
I don’t think we get to anything like a permanent majority without changing deep red America. And even if we do, it’s eventually going to lead to violence.
November 10, 2008 at 4:44 pm
andrew
In California, which isn’t all coastal or northern or whatever, 27% gets you very close to being able to block taxes and budgets. What’s really needed is for conservatives to get into a dialogue to their left – for example, non-No Tax Pledgers have trouble getting out of primaries in conservative areas. In districts where it’s really unlikely to get a Democrat elected, it matters what kind of views the Republican candidates hold.
November 10, 2008 at 4:45 pm
urbino
the new liberalish permanent majority should be the goal
I don’t think we get to anything like a permanent majority without changing deep red America. And even if we do, it’s eventually going to lead to violence.
November 10, 2008 at 4:47 pm
ari
?
I could give you a serious answer about how the analogy doesn’t hold up, and will lead to more heat than light, but I mostly was marveling at your willingness to use rhetorical excess with Emerson.
November 10, 2008 at 4:48 pm
ari
And even if we do, it’s eventually going to lead to violence.
As noted above, it’s easier than I’d like for me to imagine this happening.
November 10, 2008 at 4:52 pm
urbino
I could give you a serious answer about how the analogy doesn’t hold up, and will lead to more heat than light, but I mostly was marveling at your willingness to use rhetorical excess with Emerson.
Yeah, I know. My point was the eventual violence. Slavery and the look-the-other-way attitude of some in the North was the first thing that came to mind. That’s as far as I intended the analogy to go. Same thing with the ghetto example.
November 10, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Josh
re Internet access in Red America
I doubt that, actually, but I could certainly be wrong. I haz no data.
The CIA World Factbook sez that 223 million Americans have Internet access, but according to this Wikipedia page only 66 million of those have broadband access. FWIW.
November 10, 2008 at 4:56 pm
urbino
Thanks, Josh. Lots of slow, dial-up access I find quite believable, though even that, I suspect, is changing pretty quickly. Or was, anyway, before the current economic dogsandwich.
November 10, 2008 at 5:05 pm
ari
dogsandwich
Okay, bear baiting is one thing. But this, this is a bridge too far. Consider yourself on notice.
November 10, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Josh
Lots of slow, dial-up access I find quite believable, though even that, I suspect, is changing pretty quickly.
Not really. The U.S. appears to be gaining broadband users at a rate of about 3 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants per year (from here), but if you look at the other countries on that page, you’ll note that comparatively, we suck.
November 10, 2008 at 5:15 pm
urbino
I knew we were slower than many, but my impression from having worked for some of them was that telco’s and such were still building out broadband capability in the less populous parts of the country. That speaks to availability rather than to actual use, though, so, you know, my bad.
Consider yourself on notice.
You’re not the boss of me.
November 10, 2008 at 5:21 pm
karen marie
jeffrey feldman has a post up over at his blog “frameshop” on rightwing nationalism that points to the significant potential from violence from the pot of ugly underbelly that’s been stirred by palin and her adherents.
http://jeffrey-feldman.typepad.com/frameshop/2008/11/frameshop-election-brought-hard-right-nationalism-into-light.html
November 10, 2008 at 5:46 pm
matt w
neither Clinton or Obama appear to agree with you. The word I hear is that both the former president and the incoming president want Lieberman in the Senate Democratic caucus. I don’t recall his having been a part of the “Obama coalition.”
I’m not surprised if neither Clinton nor Obama agree with me, Clinton especially being well to my right and an instinctive triangulator; and wasn’t my entire point that we shouldn’t mindlessly support Obama on everything? But since Lieberman is a senator rather than a commentator this is a complete non sequitur anyway.
November 10, 2008 at 6:07 pm
John Emerson
And even if we do, it’s eventually going to lead to violence.
They sound like appealing folk. But I agree, that’s been the subtext of a lot of the “we must dialogue with the right” / “we can’t move too far left” / “we can’t be doves” opinionating. And many of them do believe that we are traitors and deserve to be killed.
Historically, there’s nothing intrinsically unthinkable about one substantial area of a nation permanently being in the minority. I’m sure that multiple examples can easily be found in various parts of the world.
November 10, 2008 at 6:14 pm
John Emerson
It reminds me of Milosovic. He’s supposed to have actually said something like “We Serbs are only good at one thing, and that’s warfare. So we’ll start to war”.
November 10, 2008 at 6:16 pm
ari
“We Serbs are only good at one thing, and that’s warfare. So we’ll start to war”
This strikes me as very much like evidence for what urbino has suggested upthread is the danger of non-engagement with the red states.
November 10, 2008 at 6:23 pm
John Emerson
“We must persuade them not to kill us” doesn’t seem to be where we were going when we started this thread.
November 10, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Rich Puchalsky
So we need to go be missionaries, and if we don’t civilize those savage people they will break out in uncontrollable violence? Right. Wow, I don’t know why we ever had problems with perceived elitism.
There’s a big difference between what Ben Alpers wrote about people being conscious of what was going on in red states and between this odd kind of Pax Romanum that is supposed to have us forming colonies to hold the lands across the border. Thanks for the invite, but no.
November 10, 2008 at 6:31 pm
urbino
No offense, Rich, but you weren’t really what I had in mind.
November 10, 2008 at 6:34 pm
John Emerson
It also reminds me of what Justice Kennedy, the deciding vote in Bush-Gore, said. Something along the lines of “The US could not endure more turmoil”. What he meant was “The Republicans will tear the country apart”. He wasn’t worried about Democrats tearing the country apart. (Newsweek, Sept. 17, 2001; “The Accidental President”, Kaplan; no link).
Now that we’re all paranoid I feel much more comfortable.
November 10, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Rich Puchalsky
In all seriousness, I didn’t think we should change everything because of scary Islamic terrorists, and I don’t think we should change everything because of scary domestic terrorists either. The next administration will, hopefully, pursue economic policies that will make things better for everyone. And even if that works, there will no doubt be some residuum of violent people anyways, and that’s what we have police for.
November 10, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Jesse
Wish I could chime in with the historical insights of the rest of the group, but I think a broader, universal context for politics may help clear the air. Quite a few comments back someone mentioned the diminishing clarity in the definitions for “liberal” and “conservative”. So if we accept such identifiers as increasingly arbitrary and circumstantial, it is as if a cognitive view of difference begins to take precedence. Having binaries like lib/con create easy categories for people to develop a sense of relation in mass politics. If we accept such a condition, it follows that identifying with one of only two primary identifiers (disproportionately representing 300 million people) makes things accessible again. I’ve always believed that the majority of either self-described liberals (few) or self-described conservatives (many) have little or no philosophical platform by which they articulated their political identifications, and these are the folks who determine elections. The irony, then, is one of arbitrary, utilitarian identification, such that the contentious politics which precipitate from our political “differences” are nothing more than a territorial dispute over magnified small differences. The use-value of such a dynamic is that if you have these easy monikers of con or lib, they develop into schemata which may be deployed in order to organize a very large, pluralistic situation (society) into an accessible, buttons-and-levers, automatic operation. Granted this model pretends that formally liberal or conservative philosophies are equivalent and arbitrary (false), but its parallels in everyday life are many. And fun to explore.
However…the point of such a model is the reduction of pluralism; the reduction of a heterogeneous society into only two primary representative ethos (pl., “ethii”?) for the sake of expediency. The project, subsequently, is the reduction of thought via conditioned disjunctivity—the dissolution of a prior, inductive state of accepting and examining our pluralities as opposed to our more certain commonalities, those things of greater integrity. I’ll leave it there, but basically I’ve always been a pluralist at heart. The more heterogeneous a discourse is, the more democratic in its multiplicity and its oppositions, the better its consequences. Kinda like finding mean average in math; the more sample numbers of a larger group you have, the more precise your mean becomes. And if anything has crippled this country in the last eight years, it is the reduction of thought, the perceptual narrowing of our national consciousness through partisan games. So should the far right be abandoned? Yes. Centrists/moderates? Absolutely not, and we should pursue their favor moreso than other more likely candidates.
November 10, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Michael Turner
politicalfootball, you couldn’t have been quoting Nixon, because Nixon is not on record saying “We are all Keynesians now”, even fragmentarily. Nixon is reported as having said to Howard K. Smith, “I am now a Keynesian”. My vague recollection of reports at the time is that he spoke more tentatively, saying, “I think I am now a Keynesian,” rather as if he’d just grown a tail overnight.
He might have been off the record, or might have thought he was — remember, this was a guy who had to be told by handlers to stop picking his nose because cameras might be on, and who, with a tape recorder running almost continuously in his office, somehow forgot that posterity might be listening and said “cocksucker” more times in a few years than most merchant marines do in their entire lives.
Of course, Nixon’s slip is a good clue: there are plenty of crypto-Keynesians in the GOP. They know the score, they just can’t say so. George Will wrote recently, in a warmly receptive review of The Forgotten Man, that it was WW II that ended the Great Depression, not the New Deal. Well, how did WW II do that, if not through the mechanism Keynes prescribed?
George Will has even more wiggle room: Keynes’ General Theory came out in 1936, well after the inauguration of the New Deal. Keynes himself said that FDR was never Keynesian enough to really turn the economy around.
So one can actually argue that the New Deal was only incidentally and retrospectively Keynesian stimulus spending, and was at heart a statist power-grab facilitated through blatant vote-buying and court-packing. It’s like, “We’ll come back to the issue of whether Keynes’ economics had any merit after we’re finished settling whether FDR was a crypto-communist or merely a crypto-fascist. The discussion wil be intellectually tidier that way.” (That’s the part where you point your nose in the air, finger your bow-tie, and peer through half-lidded eyes at an opponent who is thinking, “Why oh why can’t we have debate moderators who, at moments like these, grab guys like this by the crotch, and grate out through gritted teeth, ‘Are you going to behave? Or am I going to have to make you eat this op-ed you wrote last week about civility, that I’ve conveniently used as toilet paper in the interim?'”)
[Ed. closed that link for you.]
November 10, 2008 at 9:59 pm
urbino
Okay, okay. I said it. Yes, I was an infant 40 years ago, but it’s very likely my first words were, “We’re all Keynesians now.”
Can we put this ugliness behind us?
said “cocksucker” more times in a few years than most merchant marines do in their entire lives
David Milch wrote for Nixon? Who knew?
November 11, 2008 at 12:26 am
Michael Turner
Can we put this ugliness behind us?
I’m in a forgiving mood, urbino, so … yes.
Btw, I was totally making up Team WingClip, and am flattered you believed it for even a second there. But you’re right: de-redshifting Deep Red America won’t be some social-network-meets-talk-radio hack. It’s better done porch-to-porch. As are most things. Wouldn’t mind being porch-to-porch with you myself, but I’m in Tokyo where porches are practically illegal. (Google on that city and my name, and you’ve got at least one of my e-mail addresses, if not both.)
November 11, 2008 at 12:32 am
ari
There’s only one Michael Turner in Tokyo? (Or is there a Tokyo, North Dakota that I don’t know about?). And what time is it in Tokyo? So many questions.
November 11, 2008 at 8:43 am
Martin Wisse
Timothy Burke is somebody who could seriously argue in the runup to the War on Iraq that anti-war protestors weren’t dignified enough for his liking and that this was the most important issue of the day, so I’ve never been able to trust him since, let alone any conservative thinkers he endorses.
November 11, 2008 at 9:07 am
politicalfootball
Michael, I think that the George Will column you reference is a magnificent specimen, so much so that I’ve been promoting it (and linking it) in this very thread.
You may say that Nixon never said the Keynesian thing, but another leading light of conservatism (and a bona fide Nixon expert), says otherwise:
Would Bill Safire lie to you?
November 11, 2008 at 9:08 am
jeffbowers
I’d like to be able to say that conservative irrationality is solely attributable to the mixing of religion and politics, but that’s only half the story. Conservatives cling to an ideology that seems less and less relevant in the 21st century world, and the incoherence of their world view comes out in their rhetorical flailing. The recent sputterings of the right fringe come off as someone who is drowning, albeit in the shallow cesspool of their own making.
November 11, 2008 at 9:59 am
Vance
“bottomed on” struck me as so strange I had to look it up. It’s attested, all right, notably in Moby-Dick, in a passage describing how sailors might take the corpse of a whale for a shoal, and mark the spot in maps as a warning —
November 11, 2008 at 11:55 am
silbey
By the way, one of the reasons NOT to ignore the crazies is that they feed into the crazies with power, e.g.:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_11/015619.php
Where a GOP congressman is talking about Obama’s plan to establish a “Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist dictatorship.” The crazies feed up the line.
November 12, 2008 at 6:12 pm
About that agon . . . « The Edge of the American West
[…] 12, 2008 in history and current events | by SEK In the comments to ari’s post, Martin G. noted his fondness for Bérubé-style agon. I couldn’t agree more. That is, […]
December 7, 2008 at 10:18 am
Famous Quotes
exactly , most of the people who are in power are crazy.