The Sniper's Tower
After the Republicans’ 8-point trouncing in an erstwhile congressional stronghold in Mississippi this week, former Representative Tom Davis likened the GOP to “dog food” due to be “taken off the self.” Well, whatever “re-branding” this expired can of victuals and gravy will undergo this fall, I’m beginning to sense that the Democrats, too, might be in for a fairly dramatic internal transformation in the near future.
Tom Childers, the victor last Tuesday, has proven that a Democrat can win in a mostly rural, mostly white redneck bastion. Moreover, in the Indiana, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia primaries, the loyalty to Hillary Clinton of former Regan Democrats (“hard working Americans, white Americans… without college degrees”) has a been a phenomenon as significant as Obamania. I agree with Paul that it’s ridiculous that graying blue-color Catholics see Hillary as sticking up for the common folk, but the fact is, it’s happening.
None of this means that these voters have taken a wholesale political 180; they’re clearly being driven in droves from the GOP due to Bush and the war, but I doubt they have changed much on most other issues. I sense instead that we might be witnessing a kind of rebirth of the Dixiecrat, a historically important aspect of the party’s identity that Nancy Pelosi probably hoped had been flushed down the memory hole long ago. The new Dixiecrats are “conservative Democrats,” that is, Democrats with “values” but with no real interest in small government ... well, I guess this makes them much like actual Republicans but without any Dubya milstone hanging around their necks. The war make it easy for Dixiecrat voters to leave the Republican party, but then the Democratic party and its candidates are also perfectly willing to allow a lot of the red-state stuff to pop up the (largely symbolic) discourse of the campaign.
On one of his commercials, Childers announced that he’s pro-life and pro-gun, and even that he’s never raised taxes.
I’m not sure Childers will be reliable on any of these issues, or that he’ll be more or less effective advocating them as a Democrat, but it’s clear that this kind of rhetoric wins.
As described in the Politico, Childers even scored big by opposing atheism, gambling, and the Chinese in one swoop:
In Mississippi, a [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] radio ad asked why Davis was accepting support from ‘the world’s No. 1 casino czar and one of atheist China’s top American business partners.’ The DCCC referred to a massive casino Adelson’s Sands Corp. owns in Macau, just outside Hong Kong, as ‘an investment in a country that steals our jobs, persecutes Christians, uses forced labor and forces women to have abortions. ’And what has Greg Davis said about all of this?’ the ad asked. ‘Absolutely nothing.’
Whatever one wants to say about all this, there are ways that more Dixiecrats in Congress would be of great benefit. Of the Democratic senators supporting the crucial SAVE Act, the most significant piece of legislation aimed at attrition of illegal immigrants through workplace enforcement, two of the three are southerners. In the House, 21 of the 49 Democratic supporters come from the land of the old confederacy.
The Conservative Democrats will need issues with which they can prove their “conservative” bona fides; for such a purpose, immigration restriction serves well.
In ’06, many of us hoped Jim Webb might be the start of something new; now he’s seeming more like the revival of something rather old. Whatever the case, I much prefer the Dixiecrats’ “big government conservatism” to the kind Fred Barnes and the contemporary GOP has on offer.
I was rather surprised by David Brooks’s column this morning, which included a scatter shot of the kinds of crude, hallow neoconish phrases one would expect from the likes of Kevin James: “intractable enemies” who could never be “pacified with diplomacy”; “If Obama believes all this, he’s not just a Jimmy Carter-style liberal. He’s off in Noam Chomskyland.” Much of it had the quality of hastily assembled lines offered in response to the editor’s request [Insert appeasement reference here]. I thought Brooks was supposed to be an actual neocon, not one of their talk-radio dupes who let the Frums and Podhoretzes do their thinking while they happily mouth “Islamofascism.”
This aside, Brooks actually did some reporting, speaking directly with the potential appeaser himself, and it’s here that his column actually gets interesting.
‘This is not an argument between Democrats and Republicans,’ [Obama] concluded. ‘It’s an argument between ideology and foreign policy realism. I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush. I don’t have a lot of complaints about their handling of Desert Storm. I don’t have a lot of complaints with their handling of the fall of the Berlin Wall.’
In the early 1990s, the Democrats and the first Bush administration had a series of arguments—about humanitarian interventions, whether to get involved in the former Yugoslavia, and so on. In his heart, Obama talks like the Democrats of that era, viewing foreign policy from the ground up. But in his head, he aligns himself with the realist dealmaking of the first Bush. Apparently, he’s part Harry Hopkins and part James Baker.
I’d first note that the idea that Obama might resemble Bush the elder and James Baker sounds pretty good to me right now. But there’s more to it than this. For Brooks’s linking of Obama with Baker and the architect of the New Deal reveals that what’s he’s actually saying is much more complicated and ambivalent than it might first appear.
After Obama became the frontrunner, the neocons have assured us that they fear his dangerous political messiahnism, his hope to save the world and chat about world peace with Hugo and Mahmoud, and have struck a pose of being level-headed, prudent realists. Such gamesmanship obscures the fact that the neocons made noise on the right in the early ‘90s with their contemptuous words for George H. W. Bush and Baker, whom the they opposed precisely because the pair resisted America’s world-transforming mission and focused on stability and international consensus. Bush and Baker were the ones Frum and Pearle attacked for propping up the collapsing Soviet Union and failing to rush in and democratically transform post-Saddam Iraq in ’91. Bush and Baker were two of the central villains in Michael Ledeen’s narrative of “freedom betrayed,” when America “walked away” from her duty to fight for a “global democratic revolution.” (All of this was, in many ways, a replay of the neocons’ antipathy towards Henry Kissinger in the ’70s over his détente policy with the Soviets and opening towards China (again the “appeasement of dictators” meme.)) It’s safe to say that Brooks has internalized this literature.
It’s also important to remember that Harry Hopkins, FDR’s chief advisor for the Works Progress Administration as well as foreign policies like Lend-Lease, is in Brooks’s mind far from some terrible precussor to Hillary but, to the contrary,is the kind of state-builder of a “modern democracy” whose legacy Brooks wants to preserve. (See his essay for the collection Why I turned Right, p. 80.)
Read closely with all this in mind, it becomes clear that the passage quoted above has just about the opposite meaning of the one most will take away at first read. Obama might be like Hopkins not because he’s a weak-kneed liberal but because he speaks the language of America’s democratic mission (which Brooks unequivocally endorses). Obama might be like James Baker not because he’s a cynical dealmaker but because he might not be up for enough foreign adventures in the near future. The prospect that Obama might side with an older version of the GOP over the interventionism of Albright, Clinton, and The New Republic is, for Brooks, deeply vexing.
I got my “stimulus check” in the mail last week, (thank you, Treasury) and being the impulsive consumerist that I am, I just blew on all on this luxury item:
I don’t know where to begin…
We seem to be passing from an era in which our president and his intellectual coterie felt that all foreign-policy decisions must be justified in light of 1938 into a new one in which think-headed “value conservatives” trot out their big value words (damned appeasers!) without even the pretense of knowing what they once referred to.
For the love of God, can’t the people at “Hardball” hire one of the writers from this website, all of whom know a lot about the crucial year of 1938 when George Washington defeated Hitler in the Battle of Waterloo.
Hat tip: Talking Points Memo.
Throughout the primaries, John McCain instructed us that the Republicans’ congressional ass-whipping in ’06 had nothing to do with the war, nothing at all, and that it was in fact those nefarious earmarks, symbolized by the “bridge to nowhere,” that did them in. While attending this Tuesday’s immigration conference put on by the Manhattan Institute, I witnessed a new “myth of ’06” taking shape, this one just about as plausible as McCain’s. The progenitors of this latest whopper were the leading lights of open-borders conservativism, including Michael Barone, Alan Ehrenhalt, the executive editor of Governing, and Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. The outlines of the myth are as follows: 1) the leaders of the anti-immigration movement are the ultra-conservative “Social Right”; 2) the Republicans lost because the good-hearted American public was sick of all the mean, nasty anti-immigrant rhetoric.
I very much wish that the Religious Right, Catholics, and Pro-Lifers were all solidly against amnesty in ’07 and supportive of restrictionism now; however, the fact is, they weren’t and they’re not. Within social conservatism, the status of immigration is actually very equivocal. On issues like abortion and the war, “social rightist” Sam Brownback stands as the bogeyman of secular progressives everywhere (the good senator’s even been linked to Opus Dei, oh my!) and yet, on the issue of immigration, Brownback’s basically indistinguishable from George Clooney or Nancy Pelosi (or Dubya or McCain for that matter).
What Barone & Co. don’t want to admit is that immigration reform actually isn’t one of those Republican wedge issues that backfired, much like Congress’s grand standing during the The Shaivo affair; to the contrary, it has appeal across the board and is used by Republicans and Democrats alike. (Whether this bipartisan opportunism will actually lead to any good is another question altogether.) This past summer’s anti-Amnesty rebellion against Bush, Kennedy, and McCain was by no means simply a conservative movement thing. Rush Radio might have gotten people angry, but it was non-partisan, and by no means manifestly “conservative” groups like NumbersUSA that were organizing the mass faxing and phone calling of senators. Today the SAVE Act actually has a fairly good chance of going through because of its support among liberals.
Barone actually cites some evidence for his myth, mentioning that border hawk J.D. Hayworth was ejected in Arizona due to his insensitive anti-immigrant tone. Well, the fact is, Hayworth’s opponent, Harry Mitchell, promised to “Station more Border Patrol agents along the border,” “Extend existing fencing in urban areas,” and “oppose amnesty and will not support it.” Put simply, Mitchell deftly neutralized the immigration issue by promising to be just a Hayworthian as Hayworth. In multiple cases in ‘06, Democrats would prevail even when their districts would approve of tougher immigration laws in a series of related state referendums.
Whether Barone & Co. admit it or not, immigration is not some extreme conservative issue that killed the Republicans in ’06, it’s perhaps the only the thing the GOP has going for it.
I was off to NYC on Monday to meet with our beloved patron and editor, and while I was there attend an interesting-sounding conference on the question “Are New Immigrants Assimilating?” put on by the Manhattan Institute. Unfortunately, on the train ride over, I caught a wicked 24-hour bug and thus have been out of commission and unable to comment on it yet. (Although I was thankfully roused back to health by reading Bill Kauffman’s review of Ron Paul’s book.)
I was shocked, though not particularly surprised, to observe that while I lay in repose, the study presented at the conference, written by the capable Jacob Vigdor of Duke, was misrepresented in a fashion that can’t be explained by “liberal bias”—I think outright lying would be closer to the mark.
Take for instance, the opening line of the Washington Post’s report written by N.C. Aizenman:
Immigrants of the past quarter-century have been assimilating in the United States at a notably faster rate than did previous generations, according to a study released today.
The conference was an invitation-only affair, and when we arrived, we were presented with professor Vigdor’s white paper and a list of all attendees; Aizenman was not among them. The Post hack could have always downloaded a pdf of the study, but then this might have been a bit too demanding. If Aizenman had gotten past the executive summary, he would have come across this paragraph and graph on page 11:
Figure 11 shows that between 1900 and 1920, a period when the immigrant population of the United States grew by roughly 40%, the assimilation index declined substantially, from an initial value of 55 to 42. After 1920, as more severe restrictions were placed on immigration, the index rebounded somewhat, to a level surprisingly similar to that observed in 1980, the beginning of the modern era of immigration. By this index measure, which is based for purposes of comparison on only the information available in early Census enumerations, the drop in the assimilation index between 1980 and 1990 was more precipitous than that depicted in Figure 9. The period between 1990 and 2006 continues to be marked by the lack of a net trend in assimilation.
One could conclude that assimilation is not declining as precipitously as it was between 1980-1990, although the current composite index of 30 out of 100 is not exactly anything to brag about. The only unequivocal “good news” from the study is that as immigrants spend more time in the country, they become more assimilated (duh).
David Weigel reproducedAizenman’s reportage on the study’s “findings” over at Reason and proudly announced, “Could Tancredo have been … Wong?” to the glee of his colleagues, no doubt.
Weigel didn’t, however, reproduce what even Aizenman couldn’t keep out of his report, the fact that the largest immigrant group, Mexicans, are by far and away the least assimilated, particularly in comparison with Canadians and East Asians who quickly reach levels of income and civic engagement equal to the natives.
But the real issue (which almost everyone has ignored) is one of terminology—what exactly is “assimilation”? Vigdor has a very PC version of the term, assuring us that he’s not talking about adherence to an ideal type—the “real American”— but instead the degree to which the diversity of new immigrants reflects the diversity of the country as it is. One “assimilates” not simply by learning English and registering to vote but by committing crime and having out-of-wedlock babies at current levels as well. Lawrence Mead, who offered the strongest criticism of the report at the conference, pointed out that this kind of index basically compares immigrants to immigrants. That is, the study asks whether new, mostly third world immigrants reflect a population that has received a massive influx of third world immigrants over the past 30 thirty years. The more substantive question would be to ask whether new immigrants resemble the American populace of, say, 1960. Such a question would also give us a hint of the degree to which the country has been transformed since the ’65 immigration act. A critical look at Vigdor’s index also basically wipes out the one piece of “good news” from the study (that assimilation is no longer in decline): obviously, Mexicans are going to more closely resemble American society as American society includes more and more Mexicans. Thus, what’s truly remarkable about Vigdor’s findings is that even with a rather generously conceived index, new immigrants, well, aren’t assimilating.
Of the amazing, wonderful things that Obama would do if elected, I think we can safely chalk up “making Muslims love us” in the “ain’t gonna happen” ledger.
Edward Luttwak talks some sense in the Times:
One danger of such charisma, however, is that it can evoke unrealistic hopes of what a candidate could actually accomplish in office regardless of his own personal abilities. Case in point is the oft-made claim that an Obama presidency would be welcomed by the Muslim world.
This idea often goes hand in hand with the altogether more plausible argument that Mr. Obama’s election would raise America’s esteem in Africa — indeed, he already arouses much enthusiasm in his father’s native Kenya and to a degree elsewhere on the continent.
But it is a mistake to conflate his African identity with his Muslim heritage. Senator Obama is half African by birth and Africans can understandably identify with him. In Islam, however, there is no such thing as a half-Muslim. Like all monotheistic religions, Islam is an exclusive faith.As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.
This is certainly true, but I think that Luttwak might be giving a bit too much credit to the Obamaniacs (not the undeceived Obamacons, like myself). They don’t so much confuse the potential reactions of East Africans with Muslims to an Obama presidency as conflate most all Third World people into one big happy “they’re not white or Asian” soup.
Take for instance, Andrew Sullivan’s definitive articulation of the “Obama will make them love us” fantasy.
Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.
Of course, if one mentions Obama’s middle name or his attending a Manassas as a child in other contexts, then it’s “coded” racist talk, but when you’re speaking of how Obama can magically “reach out,” then it’s A-okay.
I’d be curious to learn exactly what a Pakistani young person thinks of someone like Obama. Being that our hypothetical Haazig’s idea of a black American is probably some composite image of Colin Powell, Flavor Flav, Tiger Woods, Terrell Owens, and Barrack Obama that’s been piped into Waziristan through the Internet and Satellite TV, I’d imagine he’d probably look upon a President Obama with a combination of curiosity, fear, fascination, and disgust. I’m not sure though. I am positive, however, that Barrack’s brown skin and his salad days in a Manassas won’t help us in slightest to win over the Muslims. I think there’s something about invasions and military bases in their holy lands that kind of overrides that pan-Third World solidarity thing.
Since the GOP didn’t feel many pangs of conscience over No Child Left Behind or the 500 some-odd billion dollar Medicare extension package, it’s rather surprising to be reading passages like this from the Post:
House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) yesterday called the domestic add-ons ‘unnecessary extra spending’ and denounced Pelosi’s decision to bring the bill to the House floor without first letting the Appropriations Committee review it. To show their displeasure, Republicans forced procedural votes this week that delayed consideration of the bill.
What is this pork-barrel bill? A big corporate bailout? A new welfare program? Appropriations for Hillary’s Woodstock Museum? No, it’s Jim Webb’s new 21st-century G.I. Bill, which provides 11 billion for benefits to veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, including one year of college tuition.
Webb added his program on to a $195 billion bill, 162.5 billion of which was allocated to continuing both wars well into 2009. The added benefits and tuition credit amounts to around 5% of the total expenditure.
McCain made it clear a while ago that he wouldn’t back Webb’s bill, and now the GOP is threatening a filibuster.
Our ”big government conservative” love to spend, spend, spend on programs that make them feel really “conservative"--like federal marriage counseling or abstinence training in Africa. They become tight-fisted, however, when a bill comes up that might serve as a constant reminder of the f%cking mess they’ve made of soldiers’ lives.
It is extremely rare indeed to attend an “Old Right” speaking event and find the entire audience, including the liberals and neocons on hand, rolling in the aisles. But such was the case when Bill Kauffman spoke at CATO yesterday afternoon about antiwar conservatives and his new book. I certainly can’t reproduce his charm, sharp wit, and èlan, so I’d suggest that you watch a video of the event here.
There are two lines from his talk worth repeating:
“Why should political discourse be delimited by Arthur Schlesinger’s ghost and Bill Bennett’s ghost writer.”
“War: it spreads venereal disease, if not quite democracy.”
As my last attempt at humor shows, I’m highly skeptical of all forms of conservative Obamania. Still, I think that voting for Obama over a third-party traditionalist like Chuck Baldwin might be a good idea. Even if I’m not totally convinced myself, here’s my reasoning:
Baldwin might get the VDARE-Takimag seal of approval, but he’s simply not going to be taken seriously by the major media outlets, and he’ll undoubtedly end up getting under 1% in the general. That is, he’ll quickly become the “crazy conservative” candidate who’s all too easily marginalized and demeaned. None of this is fair, but it’s reality.
Republicans crossing over for Obama, on the other hand, is a major phenomenon, and the media is beginning to key in on it. Moreover, this represents the kind of movement that is disruptive of the Left/Right status quo in ways that the Constitution Party simply is not.
Sure, lots of the Obamcons are far from perfect (and here I’m thinking of those that actually believe in the Hope crap). But even these people prove that there is a large contingency of fairly conservative people who don’t go in for “Conservatism=Iraq + GWOT + vulgar Bushian patriotism.”
An Obamacon movement could be perceived, if we communicate effectively, as “these guys see little difference between McCain and Obama on domestic issues, and they really want to end the Iraq war now. Wow, maybe we need to rethink Left and Right.” This isn’t too much of a stretch, even a FOX News regular like Ann Coulter would say publicly that what divides Mac and Obama on domestic matters is inconsequential.
If we went for Baldwin, our vote would be perceived as, “Wow, those guys are to the right of John McCain!” This is not helpful.