I’d just like to agree publicly with every last word of this piece by Glenn Greenwald:

[T]he bill recently introduced by Joe Lieberman and John McCain — the so-called “Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act” — now has 9 co-sponsors, including the newly elected Scott Brown. It’s probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act. It literally empowers the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect — including American citizens arrested on U.S. soil. The bill requires that all such individuals be placed in military custody, and explicitly says that they “may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,” which everyone expects to last decades, at least. It’s basically a bill designed to formally authorize what the Bush administration did to American citizen Jose Padilla — arrest him on U.S. soil and imprison him for years in military custody with no charges.

In what way does this bill differ from pure, thought-experiment grade tyranny? Of the kind that, in our country at least, is only dragged out to gesture at when you’re making an argument about something else entirely? And then you put it back up on the shelf with a quiet “but of course, that doesn’t happen here…”

Since the wattage of Palin-mania is currently at full blast, causing rolling blog brown outs, I think it’s worth stepping back for a second and discussing what is and isn’t valuable information when studying a politician’s personal life/biography.

So here’s my running theory on politicians.  And here I’m thinking high-level ones.  e.g. Someone willing to run for president of the United States in the media age.

In order for someone to be willing to go through the insanity that such a process is, they have to be, well, insane.  My baseline assumption is that all such politicians (of whatever political persuasion) have some deep-seated “off” tendencies.  I assume they are some pretty emotionally messed up human beings in some pretty key existential areas.  [That's my basic running theory on all human beings btw, it's just with politicians of that level, they end up with way more power than the normal person.]

Think of these names:  Tony Blair, The Clintons, George W. Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and yes the current President.  Not lacking in egos those folks, to put it oh so mildly.

But they are still human beings and should be afforded the basic decency, particularly in relation to their families, that such humanity brings.

On the other hand, personal biography matters.  This is my second basic principle of politics:  people don’t really change, politicians even less so.  Call it the political law of karma if you like: the conditions will play out.

As a wise friend of mine once told me, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

With politicians this is oh so true. [Read more →]

By Kyle (of Vogue Republic)

In the grand discussion of where should Conservative leaders lead and where do they go, it’s important to get a good lay of the land, a solid bearing of where Republicans and Conservatives are, and an accurate reading of where the competition is. Building off of Mark’s exploration of the relationship between the base and wonks and E.D. taking that ball and running with it, I hope to add another piece to the puzzle.

In talks about conservative dissidents, conservative wonks, what we really need to talk about are conservative elites, of which some of the former are included. Elites are, leaders, columnists, idea-mongers, and purveyors of vision.

In that sense, Rush Limbaugh, reviled though he may be, is certainly an elite but not a dissident nor wonk. What he does do, is project an image of what conservatism is and just as importantly what is not. Some elites are dissidents, quite a few are wonks but they are – for better and for worse- leaders of conservatism.

The conservative base and its elite leaders are fractured unlike their competition, Democrats, progressives, and/aka liberals. The very strong alignment between the liberal base and liberal elites forms an iron binary, a group whose fundamental agreement on issues joins them inviolably. Their broad agreement on social and economic issues allows them to work – more or less – in harmony. By contrast, the right has a fairly sizeable disconnect between both. For example with the bank bailout and gay marriage there are sizeable chunks of the conservative elite who either support them or simply don’t care at the same time that the huge chunks of the base have been positively apoplectic over them. There’s a reason you see one of the most prominent conservative lawyers in America working for marriage equality but zero liberal lawyers seeking to overturn Roe.

Another contrast between the two, effective signaling between elites and the base allows liberal elites to organize for health care and channel the energy of a strong base into focused issues of consensus whereas tea parties and town halls reflected a base only enough organized enough to be a disorganized mess.

We saw this contrast as early the 2008 presidential primary. The Democratic candidates came in all regions, genders, and colors but basically agreed on 90%-95% on their policy. The Democratic contest was a contest of packaging not direction or political identity.

The Republicans were the exact opposite. They were all wealthy, white, men but their ideas couldn’t have been more heterodox. Giuliani, Thompson, Huckabee, Romney all presented very different visions of the future of the Republican Party and consequently conservatism’s role within the party. The only candidate whose selection and platform amounted to tinkering around the edges rather than changing directions was also the one least offensive to the most number of people, John McCain. This is also why he suffered from an enthusiasm gap until he picked Palin.

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I’m not sure how well Freddie and I addressed the central question of our discussion last night, to wit, how to overcome the institutional problems in our representative democracy.  But the discussion about health care alternatives and the lack of significant hope for Wyden-Bennett has gotten me thinking about the role of divided government not only in limiting government (which is a standard libertarian argument for divided government), but also, counterintuitively, in ensuring that changes (whether of the government-growing, government-limiting, or size-neutral variety) that do become law are meaningful.

In the six months that Democrats have had control of the Presidency and overwhelming control of the House and Senate, they have pushed three particularly major pieces of legislation: a stimulus package, cap-and-trade, and health care reform.  In each case, Republican/conservative opposition has been pretty much unified and, uhh, outspoken (Sens. Collins and Snowe notwithstanding).  Also in each case, the resulting legislation has been a huge letdown to liberal wonks and, really, the liberal “base” in general – at best, this group has viewed the legislation as a disappointingly inadequate (if important) step in the right direction, and in some cases has even viewed it as counterproductive (see, e.g., the reaction of various environmental groups to Waxman-Markely). 

In response, liberals have typically been blaming “Blue Dog” Democrats for insisting on watering the legislation down to a ridiculous level, although I’ve also seen attempts to blame Republicans for having no interest in negotiating in good faith such that the only way to pass legislation is to horse-trade with the Blue Dogs.

To a certain extent, I think this finger-pointing is accurate – Blue Dog Democrats with relatively conservative constituencies have very much been at the center of watering down these proposals, or at least adding on various goodies for their constituencies that have the effect of undermining the legislation’s purpose.  Similarly, there would be little need for horse-trading with the Blue Dogs if Republicans had any interest in passing legislation that would fix the problems these piece of legislation are supposed to fix – that’s not to say that the legislation would meet the liberal ideal if Republicans were serious about these problems, just that it would better reflect good faith ideas about how to correct those problems.  So, if Republicans were serious about health care, for instance, the result wouldn’t be the liberal ideal of single-payer, but it would probably be something along the lines of Wyden-Bennett, which just about everyone agrees would be a meaningful reform that would solve a lot of our system’s biggest problems. 

At the same time, though, this finger-pointing at Blue Dogs and Republicans misses something pretty important – no matter who’s in power, there are always going to be squishy centrists on the side of the majority who have constituencies that need to be bribed and/or appeased in any reform legislation.  Similarly, whenever you have single-party control of government, the opposition party will have no real reason to do anything other than be the “Party of No” – if a reform achieves its goals, the party in power will get all the credit, ensuring the party out of power falls even further out of power; if the reform fails, the party out of power will be able to heap all the blame on the party in power – but only if the party out of power almost uniformly opposes the legislation. 

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To a certain extent, I think Freddie’s being too harsh on Reihan in this post.  But at the same time, his broader point is an important one that I think a lot of conservatives and libertarians utterly miss when we discuss the issue of health care.  It is also a point that explains why conservative and libertarian perspectives on health care reform have virtually no traction with the general public and why the discussion of health care reform is almost completely driven by liberals.  This is true whether or not conservatarian solutions to the health care problem would, in fact, be better solutions.

No one denies that our current system is simply not working.  No one denies that it causes a lot of unnecessary suffering.  To be sure, there are disagreements as to which aspects of the system are failing and which are causing unnecessary suffering. 

But the way in which conservatives and libertarians approach the issue often comes across as if we’re just proposing solutions for the sake of proposing solutions.  The impression left on the average person is that the interest in fixing the health care system is subservient to the interest in creating a freer market, even if what we actually believe is that the problems in the health care system are a result of lack of free markets.

For years, whenever you see a Dem or liberal discussing the health care issue, they almost always begin with an acknowledgement of the problem – the “57 million Americans are uninsured” refrain, or perhaps a story of someone who died as a result of lack of treatment or because they couldn’t get their insurance company to pay for treatment.  These stories and statistics tug at the heart strings, but more importantly they make people care about the issue because they make the issue relatable to those people, making them think “that could be me,” or in many cases “that is me.”  As importantly, they give the listener the impression that what follows is a good faith proposal to solve that problem, not some half-assed proposal that’s really intended to advance a broader ideological agenda.

When you hear a conservative or libertarian speaking about the issue, though, you rarely get an acknowledgement of the problem.  Instead, you may get a set of objections to the Dem proposal (usually including a rant about “socialized medicine”) or a statement that the free market solution is the better solution or some discussion of the areas of our health care system that are not the problem and that must be preserved and defended.

While Freddie’s argument is making a generalization, and it’s problematic to draw generalizations from one example, I think this exchange from one of the debates last year between McCain and Obama helps explain what I (and I think Freddie) am talking about:

Q: Is health care in America a privilege, a right, or a responsibility?

McCAIN: I think it’s a responsibility, in this respect, in that we should have available and affordable health care to every American citizen, to every family member. And with the plan that I have, that will do that. But government mandates I’m always a little nervous about. But it is certainly my responsibility. It is certainly small-business people and others, and they understand that responsibility. American citizens understand that. Employers understand that.

OBAMA: Well, I think it should be a right for every American. In a country as wealthy as ours, for us to have people who are going bankrupt because they can’t pay their medical bills–for my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies–there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.

Notice how McCain just assumes that everyone, including himself, ”understands” their responsibility and, by extension, the problems in the health care system.  Obama, however, actually shows he understands the problem. It’s thus not surprising that the average person, who has neither a strong commitment to free market economics nor a strong commitment to government centralization, would decide that Obama’s discussion of the issue is more credible.  Again, this is true even if McCain’s proposal would better solve the problem.

And let’s be honest, the reason conservatives and libertarians rarely put the problem front and center is because our interest in improving health care is often a lower priority than our interest in defending free markets.  It’s not that we don’t care about health care reform, it’s that our ideological commitments force us to defend the ideology first: liberals and Democrats first diagnosed the problem and we’ve been doing little but play defense ever since. 

This isn’t to say that this is an inherent flaw in libertarianism and conservatism – after all, there’s no shame in believing that on a macro-level, freer markets solve more problems than they create, and there’s also no shame in defending your ideology against what you believe to be unfair and/or inaccurate criticisms.  It’s just to say that most people are a lot less concerned about some ultimate vision for society than they are about individual issues that affect their day-to-day lives.  If you don’t show that you understand how that individual issue affects their day-to-day lives, then you’re going to have a hard time convincing them that your solution is better.

For what it’s worth, I suspect that ultimately liberals and Democrats are going to face a similar problem on the issue of school choice.  There, conservatives and libertarians have the advantage because we’re talking about parents with children stuck in failing schools, while liberals and Democrats are left talking about how “public schools work!” (the equivalent of “the free market works!”), and warning about separation of church and state and privatized education (the equivalent of “socialized medicine!”).

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 →]