Daniel Larison makes a point that should be blindingly obvious were it not for the need for our talking heads to turn every single election into a referendum on the talking heads’ own framing of the President’s agenda:

“What we have been seeing in all of the elections over the last year is a readiness on the part of the electorate to oust the parties that have traditionally held sway in the district or state in question….The candidates that could best address the local concerns of voters prevailed. Those identified with distrusted political establishments or discredited national parties failed.”

I assure you, the average New Jerseyan is smart enough to recognize that their state governor has approximately no relevance to the President of the United States.  I am quite certain that the foibles of the New Jersey state Democratic Party and of former Governor Corzine, and the state’s own economic problems had about 1000 times more to do with why there is a Republican in the Governor’s Mansion right now than anything related to President Obama or Democrats in Congress.  As early as March or April of last year, Democrats in this state were already certain that Corzine would lose.  Indeed, Christie led in every single poll taken between January and September of last year, almost always well outside the margin of error.   Even casting aside that this was a governor’s race, it seems rather unlikely that New Jersey voters were already looking forward to sending President Obama a message a week after he was sworn, and less than 3 months after they had overwhelmingly voted him into office. 

 It was only in September and October, when it became clear that Christie was just another establishment Republican, that Corzine caught up in the polls and turned it into a meaningful race again.  Ultimately, Christie pulled it out by four points, but this was a far cry from the 10-15 point leads he was consistently polling in July and August.  For anyone who had actually been following this race, the shocking thing wasn’t that the People’s Republic of New Jersey elected a Republican; it was that a Republican with a reputation for fighting political corruption almost blew an opportunity to rout a Democratic Party and administration known primarily for its corruption and incompetence.  Yet somehow the meme that came out was something along the lines of “New Jersey Voters Send Obama a Message.”

But most importantly, as Larison points out, when times are tough, voters blame incumbents.  They don’t just blame the party in power in Washington – they blame the people who are supposed to represent them, they seek out more competent candidates, or they savage the establishment of whatever party is most relevant.  That’s what happened in NJ, it’s what happened in NY-23 (both with respect to Hoffman’s destruction of Scozzafava and the Dems’ ultimate victory), and it’s at least arguably a big part of what happened in Massachusetts, where angry voters combined with a terrible Dem candidate and a very good Republican candidate to create a perfect storm. 

To the extent voters are sending a message to Washington, it’s simply this: It’s not all about you.

A lot of the reaction to my conservapedia piece falls along the lines that you would expect – essentially that I’m painting with too broad a brush.  I probably was in that post.  Obviously a lot of conservatives are thoughtful, independent-thinking, and honest people.  It’s primarily, therefore, a reaction to the conservative leadership that leads me to write posts like that one.  To the movers and shakers on the quasi-populist right.

What I think we’re seeing and have been seeing now for some time is the heating up of an internal war within the GOP and the broader conservative movement, which includes the Tea Parties and other grassroots efforts that may or may not be directly affiliated with the Republican Party.  This was bound to happen after the McCain loss.  It gave the real right-wingers in the party (and outside of it) a chance to blame the moderates for the loss, and it gave the GOP insiders a chance to settle old scores.  I’m not at all sure that the factions here are really “moderates vs conservatives” so much as a certain brand of right-winger vs. another.

I’m not really entirely sure of Sean Scallion’s break down of the sides involved as Conservative Inc. vs. the establishment.  I think that they overlap far too much, and I think that it is a certain faction within the establishment that is also at the heart of the Tea Parties, warring against other factions within the establishment.  In other words, the grassroots base is not its own entity but rather part of a larger faction.

Nor is it simply social conservatives vs. fiscal conservatives, or neoconservatives vs. realists, or neoconservatives vs. social conservatives.  The factions at play here are not the old divisions, and the old rules don’t apply.  People like David Frum are pushed to the margins for entirely different reasons than people like Daniel Larison. [Read more →]

This interview with Daniel Larison over at The Economist is quite good.  You should read it.

I’m not sure if Daniel Larison’s latest column should be interpreted as an endorsement of McChrystal’s political independence or his actual strategy for Afghanistan, but it’s worth reading in full. His criticism of the Biden approach to counter-terrorism is particularly apt.

I had the good fortune yesterday afternoon to attend a panel discussion on the future of conservatism featuring Ross Douthat, David Frum, Daniel Larison, and Virginia Postrel.  It was a rather enlightening discussion, but at the same time also a discussion that drove me to the conclusion that we are a long way from seeing a Republican Party capable of garnering a coalition that is serious about the task of governing. 

One thing that made this panel so worthwhile was that it provided a good cross-section of the various schools of thought that have largely made up the conservative coalition for the last 30 or so years.  Equally notable was that even though each speaker represented an individual strain of conservatism, each speaker was also something of a dissident that would be readily labeled a RINO by most movement conservatives. [Read more →]

Props on the title go to Eunomia commenter Grumpy Old Man who was commenting on the second of two very strong posts from Daniel Larison regarding the Iranian riots.   Larison worries that too much enthusiasm over these elections will invariably lead to our doing something stupid – some statement or symbolic gesture, such as Obama wearing a green tie (the color of political Islam) out of solidarity and thereby further propagating the myth that he is in fact a Muslim.  Obama’s a sharp guy, though.  I doubt he’d do anything quite so silly, though he really ought to wear a green tie next St. Patrick’s Day.  In any case, as Larison notes:

One of the great problems with a foreign policy that takes global “leadership” as a given is that it seems to compel the U.S. government to have an official view on every event and crisis around the world. The idea that there are events that have nothing to do with us, and which we have no business concerning ourselves with, is so alien to our policymakers that I am fairly sure that it never occurs to them. Certainly, if it ever did, they would dismiss it immediately as unacceptable “inaction” in a “time of crisis.” Discretion sometimes truly is the better part of valor.

Now, I admit to having been very caught up in these elections and the subsequent protests, riots, and so forth.  I felt that a less hostile Iranian regime would put a damper on all this talk of invasion – both in Israel and in the United States.  Then, too, despite my generally non-interventionist stance, I nonetheless feel a great deal of empathy for the people in other parts of the world who feel powerless in their political process.  I sympathize with a populace who cares enough to go to these lengths after what they perceive to be a stolen election.  Once upon a time Americans had this passion, but we’ve lost it along the way.

My enthusiasm, I think, was mainly one of contrasts.  I was enthralled with the flood of information – however scattered and incomplete it may have been – that came in via youtube, twitter and the blogs.  The silence on mainstream outlets was deafening.  The lack of interest in so many of my fellow citizens was startling.  Then again, I remember talking to a young lady just before elections and asking her who she was voting for and she shrugged her shoulders and said she wasn’t interested in politics.  So apathy over Iranian elections is hardly surprising. [Read more →]

Daniel Larison has put together some excellent thoughts on the current leading objections to Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the SCOTUS.  I have my differences with Larison’s preferred jurisprudence, but he does a far better job than most explaining why the current primary objections to Sotomayor make exceedingly little sense from a conservative standpoint. 

Larison’s explanation that the opinion in Ricci is better explained by the messy state of existing employment discrimination law than by judicial activism is pretty much exactly correct.  As he further notes, in Ricci the plaintiff was an abnormally sympathetic individual fighting against a powerful government entity – if “empathy” were guiding Judge Sotomayor’s decisionmaking more than precedent and objectivity, then she would have sided differently.   Indeed, the opinion in Ricci is remarkable only for its brevity – one paragraph simply stating that the Court agreed with the opinion of the district court and that the City was exempt from suit because to hold otherwise would mean that the City would have been liable no matter what it did in the case.   This is not the type of decision you would expect out of a judge seeking to make policy with her opinions.   

Frankly, reading the district court’s decision in Ricci, it’s tough for me to see how a lower or appellate court could have reached a different conclusion.  It was essentially uncontested that the test at issue was indisputably in violation of existing employment discrimination law.  The result of this violative test was that the plaintiff would have been eligible for promotion.  Realistically, it should be beyond dispute that a government entity has to be able to correct its own violations of the law; it probably should also be beyond dispute that one who would otherwise benefit from that violation of the law (however inadvertently, and however sympathetic they may be) is not entitled to that benefit, at least not until they have actually received it.   Short of overturning or weakening settled aspects of Title VII (which the SCOTUS may well choose to do), it’s difficult to see how the district court or the appellate court could have reached a different conclusion in this case.

Larison’s strongest paragraph, though, is with respect to the brouhaha over Sotomayor’s statement that she “would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”  Larison writes:

Suppose for a moment that a conservative Catholic man in a similar position said that he hoped that the richness of his religious tradition would inform and shape his judgments that would more often than not help him to make better judgments than someone without that background. Such a person might reasonably and legitimately claim this. No doubt there would be a comparable freak-out in certain circles on the left that theocracy was on the march, while conservatives would declare it outrageous (indeed, the imposition of a religious test!) that anyone would object to a statement about the importance of the man’s faith to his formation and thinking. She is not asserting that Latinas are naturally superior judges, nor is she even saying that they are necessarily better on account of their experiences, but that she hopes that they would be. One might almost think that her recognition that impartiality is something to be pursued, but that it is never fully achievable, would be considered a refreshingly honest admission that judges have biases and are shaped by their past experiences.

This sounds exactly right to me. 

Ultimately, the fact is that we don’t know a heck of a lot about where Judge Sotomayor stands on various hot-button issues despite the fact that she’s been an appellate judge for quite some time.   To me, this may actually be one of her best qualifications – this does not appear to be someone who has a reputation for fiery polemic or attention-seeking, but is instead someone who pretty clearly seems to have a calm and measured temperament. 

To be sure, my very initial readings on Judge Sotomayor’s decisions raise a few question marks – just not on issues that are likely to enrage modern movement conservatives even as they don’t appear to be libertarian-friendly.  By and large, though, I have yet to see an objection to her that has a lot of validity to it.  This isn’t to say that there aren’t any – just that they haven’t been made yet.

UPDATE: Larison has a follow-up post that is equally well worth a read.

Mark and I had the opportunity to chatter a bit last night with Pomocon James Poulos on the issue of torture, where things currently stand and what some possible paths forward might look like. It was a pretty lively discussion, check out the audio below: [Read more →]

Daniel Larison picks up arguably one of my most awkwardly worded sentences in one of my most awkwardly written posts and then writes:

It’s true that idealism would be quite heavily burdened by idealism, but if we set this odd statement aside I’m still not sure what Kain means

Quite right.  It was an odd statement.  Poorly written.  Look, I’ll reproduce it one more time:

The idealism of the paleoconservative cause is simply too burdened by the idealism of its vision. Politics is not a time machine and we are not ever going to travel back to whichever pre-modern, small government existence that many paleos envision.

What I meant to say, I suppose, is simply that the paleo/agrarian/localist cause is often too wrapped up in its own idealism and fails largely to come up with practical solutions to the ills of modernity.  There is a lot of great writing out there on the subject.  Go spend a few hours pooring through the Front Porch Republic – Deneen, Larison, Kaufman, Stegall, Shiffman, etc. – these are all smart people writing excellent critiques of modernity, globalization, free trade, and so forth.  I find myself nodding in agreement much more often than not.

So what I was attempting to do with that post, after writing about a dozen posts in the localist, anti-corporate vein, was to try to see where the chinks in the armor were.  And quite frankly, the most glaring of these is that despite all of this very smart stuff, there is little being offered by me or anyone else that is terribly practical; or rather that offers a very concrete alternative plan by which to enact this alternative vision. Vision is all well and good, but without a map, without a plan – well, it becomes very, very difficult to implement.

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So last week I posted a piece saying that Republicans and conservatives were missing a golden opportunity to engage in a full-throated  reconstruction dialogue under the Obama administration and noted that to date Republicans seemed to be presenting themselves as nothing more than the Party of No. The presentation of what is by all accounts an extremely flimsy budget alternative seems to indicate that not much has changed. In that post, I said that conservatives and Republicans needed to put themselves to the formulation of a conservative movement for the twenty-first century, particularly given the tide of demographics working against them. “Old-timer” Bob rightly asked for some details on what I meant by twenty-first century conservatism and while I’m a bit late in getting back to him, I’ve been tossing the idea around in my head. Below is what I’ve come up with (in no particular order or ranking):

Go populist without going populist: I’ve spent some time warning against the dangers of populism in regards to the AIG scandal and generally, but the fact of the matter is that there is smoldering populist sentiment out there that is not completely off-base in terms of its raison d’etre. People rightly believe that their government has gotten away from them and increasingly has little to do with their everyday lives and addressing the issues present in those lives in a positive fashion and a movement/party that can present a believable narrative about how they care about the challenges facing Americans and are interested in focusing on those issues in a collaborative fashion stands a decent chance of capturing a sizable proportion of the national imagination.

Look, John McCain and Sarah Palin were on to something with their decision to go hyper-local in how they addressed supporters and finished in what was a respectable place given that this election was the Democrats’ to lose and they did very little to actually lose it. The problem is that Palin and McCain practiced actual, base-line populism that appealed to people’s lowest common denominator inclinations. Such traditional populism generally winds up looking pretty ugly as a result and will get you a certain segment of support, but doesn’t offer the means for developing a broad base of support. But if conservatives can find a way of walking the walk of populism without necessarily talking the talk of populism, they might have a recipe for success sooner than we all tend to think. Walking the walk but not talking the talk to me means eschewing notions of appealing to peoples’ lowest common denominators and meeting people where they are but challenging them to bring the angels of their better nature to the game. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s arguments around Sam’s Club Republicans come to mind in this regard, as does the kind of localism/regionalism/integrity of living articulated by the likes of Daniel Larison, John Schwenkler, and particularly Rod Dreher (though Rod runs in to his troubles in other areas). [Read more →]

UPDATE, 3/25: In response to some accurate criticism, I have pulled back some of the arguments made in the below post; my revised argument can be found here.

The good Mr. Dr. Larison has some tough but thoughtful words in response to my defense of free trade.  They are well worth reading.  I would like to address some of his arguments, especially because, much like many other free trade libertarians, I find myself agreeing with Larison far more often than not. 

At the outset, he notes that:

Localists tend to take for granted that dependence on distant centers of wealth and power, which the interdependence at the heart of globalism requires, is antithetical to a decentralized political and economic order. I can imagine why someone might want to reject such a decentralized order, but I simply don’t see how someone maintains that it is compatible with the results of globalist policies.

I’m not so sure about this claim, as I noted in my original post.  The protectionism advocated by localists is not a localist protectionism, but is instead one that relies heavily on tariffs instituted by a distant centralized government.  Admittedly, this may simply be a result of Constitutional realities, but as a practical matter, a one-size-fits-all tariff imposed by bureaucrats in Washington seems like an awfully blunt instrument that is likely to negatively affect just as many local interests as it protects. 

Larison continues:

If regional differences remain in the U.S., they are much less pronounced today than ever before thanks to a combination of mass mobility, technological advance facilitating rapid transport and communication across the continent and shared consumer culture. Minnesotans may not eat fatback and Vermonters may not eat rellenos, but everyone is importing the same pork from the same factory farms in the Midwest, and perhaps the less said about the homogenizing effects of the national Buffalo wing phenomenon the better. We are steadily moving towards the economic, cultural and political monoculture that Thompson claims we are avoiding.

First, whatever the homogenizing effects of the Buffalo wing, the cuisine of my quasi-but-beloved-hometown has far more going for it than a few pieces of chicken scraps – witness the magnificent Beef on Weck sandwich, amongst other things – though what is called a “Buffalo Wing” in the rest of the country is often little like the wing you will get at, say, Duff’s.  Second, Larison specifically talks here about our food coming from the same giant factory farms in the Midwest, no matter where we happen to live, which is certainly and sadly true; but this ignores the fact that those giant factory farms in the Midwest are amongst the biggest benficiaries of protectionist policies that remain. 

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….are in order for Daniel Larison whose graduation was today.  The Ph.D. is finally in the bag.  Now he can bring out the big guns….