“Reformers should be focusing on lifting limits on the flow of money from parties to candidates and restoring the role of the parties as the funders of campaigns. Instead of Candidate Smith asking Donor Gonzalez for money – and Donor Gonzalez asking for a favor in return – party chairman Robinson will ask thousands of donors for money on behalf of a slate of candidates, who will never know precisely whose gift was directed to them. That step will diminish corruption and the appearance of corruption.” ~ David Frum

I asked our own Mark Thompson what he thought of this idea, and Mark replied:

From a corruption standpoint, Frum’s proposal is a recipe for creating machine politics on a national scale.  Strengthening parties is a guaranteed way of ensuring that everything will be a party-line vote, which may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your perspective.  But because it strengthens parties so much, it just shifts the appearance of corruption from individual politicians with only one vote or one voice who are at least nominally accountable to the electorate to national party chairmen with near-absolute control of every vote in their party and of every agenda item in their party who are not even nominally accountable to the electorate.  It amounts to the Boss Tweed-ization of national politics.  My feeling is that corruption would be better addressed by weakening parties through various ballot reforms.  That’s also one of the benefits of this recent decision – it weakens political parties quite a bit.

This is the danger of campaign finance reform – the unintended consequences of ideas which on their face seem pretty good.  Similarly, while I really enjoyed Glenn Greenwald’s piece on Citizens United, I think that his idea for reform is both vague and probably a recipe for unintended consequences as well:

There are few features that are still extremely healthy and vibrant in the American political system; the First Amendment is one of them, and the last thing we should want is Congress trying to limit it through amendments or otherwise circumvent it in the name of elevating our elections.  Meaningful public financing of campaigns would far more effectively achieve the ostensible objectives of campaign finance restrictions without any of the dangers or constitutional infirmities.  If yesterday’s decision provides the impetus for that to be done, then it will have, on balance, achieved a very positive outcome, even though that was plainly not its intent.

I’m right with Greenwald on pretty much everything up to that last bit.  What does meaningful public financing of campaigns mean?  And even if we could find a way to actually publicly finance everybody without creating a huge barrier to entry in politics, would this really even begin to address the problem of corporate influence in Washington? If it would, then I’d fully support it, but I can’t help but think that the corporations and special interests would simply find other ways to lobby and peddle influence.  Transparency is the only thing I can think of that can really even begin to break the stranglehold corporate interests have over Washington.  All the rules and regulations we can dream up, they can get around.  And neither Frum or Greenwald seem to provide the answer to that.

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 →]

A dialogue on Afghanistan worth watching.

I hate to say it, but I really don’t like the new name.  Frum Forum?  New Majority may not have been perfect, but I just don’t think Frum Forum really….works.  I would have just opted for “David Frum’s New Majority” or “David Frum’s Comeback” or something like that – if the idea was to get the branding more Frum-centric.

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 →]

David Frum in his column at the Week, writes: [Read more →]

So, true to form, there were problems hooking the discussion up via Blog Talk Radio, but Dan, Conor, and I gave Skype another whirl and managed not just to get through over an hour of conversation, but also had a really great and spirited dialogue. [Read more →]

I’ve been holding my tongue on Levingate 2009 because most of what I would say is old trope around these parts and I didn’t want to add to, as commenter and fellow blogger Bob Cheeks astutely noted as, the “bullshit” of this ridiculous firestorm. But E.D. has reawakened the discussion here at our home digs and so while I might not feel compelled to link to and comment on others in the fracas, now that it’s at my door step I can’t but give in to the urge to stamp on this flaming bag. [Read more →]

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 →]