I am vast and right-wing, hear me roar

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: Megan McArdle does it again: finally, an explanation for our campaigns.
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The agony and the ... well, no ecstasy yet. Conservatives are in a funk about McCain winning the Republican primaries and the smooth walk he apparently has ahead of him to the Republican nomination. Conservatives deserve a Valentine. So here's a belated one.

How did he do it? Independents, my dear. They can vote in most primaries, and they've recently been the fastest-growing group in American politics. McCain plays well among them. Conservatives are in conniptions, and rightly so, about some of McCain's politics - his support for restrictions on campaign donations and speech (which are unconstitutional, shut out challengers, and have done serious damage to our politics), and above all, his questionable views on illegal immigration, which, for state and local governments, has become a major welfare-state crisis that national politicians, who set the policies or lack thereof, pay no price for.

McCain, like Romney and Giuliani, is a liberal Republican. (Romney spent a lot of time and money unconvincingly presenting himself as a conservative - which is too bad, because he would have done himself and everyone else a favor by just being himself.) Liberal Republicans are the smallest of the three factions of the Republican party (liberals, conservatives, and populists). But they are critical: they are the closest to the center of gravity of American politics, somewhat to the right of center. They do not share conservatives' fatal ambivalence about modern government, but they are also free of faith-driven big-government populism - you know, where miracles are more important than math.

Conservatives should not have been surprised by this. While waiting in vain for a viable conservative Presidential candidate this year, many conservatives are still mentally stuck in the 90s. Conservatism lives on as an ideology, as an intellectual movement, and as an attitude. But as a politics, it's been dead for almost a decade. Conservatives who thought there would be a conservative comeback this year were always deluded. Conservatism didn't die a natural death, of course. It was shunted aside, by the Republican party - it was in the way. The irony is that, the Republicans would be in far better shape now if they had stuck consistently to their earlier conservatism. Like Nixonism, the Bush-Rove-ism approach was too clever by half.

So conservatives are going through separation trauma. They once had enough confidence in themselves that, in the late 70s and the 80s, they were able to take over the Republican party. But the last 13 years have not been kind to them: the Republicans lost their ideological moorings. Conservatives overidentified with the party, which became less and less conservative while becoming more and more partisan. Now conservatives have to go back to where they were in the 1950s and 1960s: they need to disentangle themselves from the Republican party and revisit the basics. They can start by mending fences with libertarians. And they need to figure out what they have in common with the "good government" liberal Republicans. (Hint: nowadays, "good government" usually means "smaller government.") For electoral politics, they need to face what I wrote here last year:

Once Bush & Co. are gone, it will be springtime for Republicans, who are more likely than not to retake the Senate in 2008. But it will not be a new conservative era: the 20-year era of conservative ideological dominance, from the late 70s to the late 90s, will probably not return in our lifetimes. Everyone now loves big government ....

Will the liberal Republicans ride to the rescue? Maybe. Liberal Republicans like politics and don't suffer from the conservatives' fatal ambivalence about being in charge of modern government. And unlike Bush, they value competence above machine politics and loyalty. They also lack Bush's faith-based, blindfolded, trust-walk style, and are not tainted with [it]. Although liberal Republicans are the smallest faction of the Republican party, they sit the closest to the center of gravity of American politics - unlike the conservatives or the Bush fraternity house .... the future of the Republican party, if it belongs to anyone, belongs to them.

Conservatives need to grasp that the game this year is, not pick a viable conservative candidate, but pick an acceptable liberal Republican. Now the primary voters have done that for them and picked McCain. If conservatives don't like the result, they should have been stronger in the primaries for Romney or Giuliani. Instead they were twiddling around with Ron Paul or Fred Thompson.

Conservatives also need to rebuild at the state and Congressional level. They have always had a strong tendency towards ghettoizing their issues as "ideology." They need instead to do what conservatives before the mid-70s did, anticipate and understand what the big governmental crises are going to be, and then be ready when those crises appear. (Back then, they were out-of-control expectations, the post-1965 explosion of federal spending, stagflation, the dead-end of détente; today, they include the coming entitlements crisis, illegal immigration, the possible break-up of the Western alliance system, the rise of the "oil" axis). Conservatives need to disconnect completely from the conventional television media and encourage everyone else to do the same. The news media will do its utmost to obscure important issues and change the subject. Instead of arguing with them, everyone should be ignoring them. If voters do, then the politicians will eventually get it. Those who don't get it, will find themselves less and less relevant.

There is real upside for the Republicans: the cards are still stacked in their favor this year. Bush and Cheney are out of the picture. The negative referendum on them already happened, in 2006. As a proportion of voters, self-described liberals are still shrinking. The Congressional Democrats' poll ratings have been crawling on the bottom since they took over 13 months ago (teens or single-digits) and consistently well below Bush's. If the Republicans are smart, they'll run against Congress. The 2008 presidential race is the Republicans' to lose. The interesting question is whether they have a chance to regain one of the houses of Congress as well.

POSTSCRIPT: Speaking of which - is it all over for Hillary? Peggy Noonan considers. My answer is, obviously not. She's won most of the big states and will probably win Texas and Ohio. The Democratic race is far from over. And given the Democrats' weird superdelegate rules, we may end up with an old-fashioned brokered convention. Of course, it won't be totally old-fashioned: the back rooms will have women as well as men, and they'll be free of smoke.

Running on empty

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: Another thought about Ron Paul, this time from former Reason editor Virginia Postrel. Those of us over a certain age know about the "paleocons"; under a certain age, and you don't know about them. It's not your fault. And if you are a cosmopolitan, you needn't be rootless - another political joke from us old fogeys - guess you had to be there :-0

Postrel rarely comments on politics these days, at least directly; when she does, pay attention.
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Does Iowa mean anything? And what's up with New Hampshire? The ugh of politics returns.

It was nice to see the party establishments get it in the eye, with the rejection of Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani - they deserve it. But what did Iowa caucusers pick and what does it mean? Overall, Huckabee and Obama are bad omens.

The parties have far less influence over voters' choices now than they once did. The media filled the void for more than a generation, but increasingly, no one fills that role - more and more people are tuning the media out (not a bad thing in many ways). So what we're getting is the bulk of voters less informed than ever, leavened with a small group of politics junkies. After seven years of complaints about Bush's inexperience and being domineered by an older and more experienced Vice President, we're getting the youngest and least experienced candidates. Whatever their rhetoric, they reflect a deep ignorance and indifference to serious political issues (especially foreign affairs) that have been growing since the end of the Cold War.

Another striking fact is the apparently complete changeover of the Republicans into a big-government party. In spite of his and the Congressional Republicans' love affair with growing government, even Bush didn't have what it takes to pull this off, and he's spent the last two years backtracking on the federal budget and foreign trade. But Bush and Rove made Huckabee possible. Make no mistake: that's his real significance, not the 20% or so of Republican voters who are evangelicals. Although Fred Thompson and Ron Paul still appeal to a strong remnant of small-government conservatives, that faction seems to make up no more than about 25%, a striking change from a generation ago. That's the impact of all those ex-Democrats now fully rebaptized as Republicans. The party transformed them; but they also transformed the party.

This development also explains another important fact. Although we live in a center-right country, and self-described liberals are shrinking as a proportion of voters, Republicans have been unable to translate these trends into a stable partisan majority. They reached their peak in 2002. The real winner of the last 15 years of political evolution has been "None of the Above." Voters who 10 or 20 years ago seemed to be headed toward becoming Republicans are now filling the ranks of independents, the only political grouping still growing in the United States. They make up almost 40% of voters and more than half in some states (including liberal strongholds like Massachusetts and California).

It is this development that has deprived the Democrats of the chance of becoming a majority party again, while at the same time preventing the Republicans from taking their place. Now that the Republican party is, in many ways, a party of conservative and populist Democrats ("compassionate conservatives," "neoconservatives," populist evangelicals, etc.), the right-leaning independent vote seems to be lost to them for good. That gives the Republicans a solid plurality (well over a third of voters), but not a majority. In a winner-take-all system such as ours, that creates a permanent problem: Republicans barely winning and barely able to govern; then conservative and independents abandoning the Republicans, the Democrats winning by default as a plurality but definitely unable to govern.

What do we have on the Democratic side? Candidates with little experience, struggling to increase the breadth of their appeal, with little depth. Obama right now acts more as a Rohrschach test than anything else, something he's clearly determined to maintain for as a long as he can. While he's cleverly fallen back on the Kennedyesque idealistic rhetoric of the pre-1965 era, what political beliefs he has are all post-1965. Meanwhile, there is a blatant contradiction between what Obama believes (racism is rampant, fight the Man) and what he is (a successful black politician for whom race is not that significant). Obama's friend Deval Patrick, governor of Massachusetts, suffers from the same problem, disappointing everyone by turning out to be an empty suit.

It might be better if we abandoned the two-party system as an obsolete relic at this point and had candidates just run as free agents. It seems crazy, but with both parties now permanent minorities, maybe it's not so crazy. Neither party can muster solid majorities. Instead we end up with Republicans struggling and never quite reaching majority, and Democrats elected as a minority by default when the Republicans can't put together a majority. The last two Democratic presidents were minority presidents.

Finally, it will be a wonder if the US emerges from this campaign as a serious country: winners barely out of their diapers, populism, tearing up trade agreements (how about some more unilateralism?), and semi-isolationism seem to be the order of the day.* The populism monster is the main practical thing that has undercut Republican efforts to put together a majority. The Republicans were damaged this trend once before, in the early 90s, with the rise of Perot. Do we really want to keep punishing our most experienced leaders, while falling for callow candidates who are quickly in over their heads? It's true that Obama is less experienced and has accomplished little, less than Hillary (after all, he's never been First Lady). But there's not a lot more to be said about Hillary.

Herewith, predictions. I don't know who's going to win in New Hampshire. If Romney doesn't, or at least tie, he's finished, which is too bad. If Thompson or McCain don't place first or second somewhere by March, they will drop out, which is also too bad, since they're decent candidates. The Democratic race is topsy-turvy, but Edwards might come in second. I can't see his candidacy going much further though; he'll probably drop out before the end of February. It will be Clinton and Obama. I doubt if Obama will win more than a few states, and he can't win the general election. But if Clinton doesn't win in New Hampshire, she will emerge as a seriously wounded candidate and in no shape to win in November.

All in all, the general election is shaping up as expected: definite advantage to the Republicans. But the wild card remains: who will their candidate be?

POSTSCRIPT: Ron, we hardly knew ye. And what's up with that Ron Paul guy? Is he a racist or not? Who knows? We can't read his mind. All we can do is look at his history.

Although Paul has tried to present himself as a libertarian or small-government conservative, anyone who knows anything about him knows that he's part of the self-labelled "paleoconservatives," whose best-known representative is Pat Buchanan. (The only Goldwater-Reagan style candidate running this time is Fred Thompson.) Over the years, Paul has been associated with some offensive ideas and causes. Whether he believes in them now is anyone's guess. Maybe running for president means that he's left behind the strange and parochial paleocon subculture. Just keep in mind that these are the people who were ejected from the modern conservative movement back in the 1950s, mainly by William F. Buckley, Jr., and his National Review: they include the gold standard obsessives, the anti-Zionists, the conspiracy kooks, etc. The Democrats, last time, had their own version of such crazies ("netroots") adding unwelcome baggage to one of the candidates (Dean). This time, "nutroots" has been marginalized, thankfully.

By the way, you can read what some real libertarians (David Boaz and Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute) think of Huckabee's Christian-tinged nanny-statism and (more ambivalently) about Ron Paul as a protest candidate - which has been his main role this election cycle.
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* While we're wallowing in this silliness, some pretty serious things are going on in the rest of the world - in Pakistan, Kenya, and the Persian Gulf, for example - while no one in the campaign (Thompson excepted) is talking about the entitlements crisis now only a few years away.

It's hard to escape the impression that American politics has become a frivolous exercise in self-indulgence, an indoor sport for couch potatoes, with little connection to reality. It does make good television, which, I suppose, is the point.

Before they leave the starting gate

American elections have become absurdly drawn-out circuses - for 2008, the chatter about candidates started as soon as the 2006 mid-term elections were done. With our politics dominated by the media and media consultants, I suppose there's no going back to, say, six-month campaigns.

About the Democratic possibilities, there's little left to say. It's virtually certain that Hillary will be the nominee. For VP nominee, the media-liberal-activist choice is Obama. The smart choice is Richardson. We'll have to wait and see what she does.

A few months ago, the Republican side was dominated by Rudy, but with Romney providing a significant challenge. Even though Romney would be a better president in many ways, his campaign since then has fallen flat, while Giuliani's has gone from strength to strength. Rudy doesn't have it sewn up the way Hillary does, but unless some major unexpected detour happens, he will be the Republican nominee. Fred Thompson is making a big splash right now as the "real conservative," but his candidacy is unlikely to go anywhere - it's a Web-driven Deaniac-type bubble.

Romney's big mistake is that he's trying to be everything to everyone. He's trying to hold on to the liberal Republicanism inherited from his father, former Michigan governor George Romney, that formed the core of his success in Massachusetts. At the same time, to appeal to the religious wing of the Republican party critical in the Republicans' newly consolidated Southern base (about a quarter to a third of Republican voters), he's playing up his conservative side. But he's a Mormon, and that puts off conservative Christians and others ... you see his problem.

Giuliani, OTOH, knows exactly who he is: a former mayor of New York, a liberal Republican through and through - plus his name ends with a vowel. He's perfectly happy to take votes from conservatives, but he doesn't pretend to be one, a powerful advantage. Not that most Republicans have become liberals; rather, the conservative wing of the party is paralyzed by its ambivalence about modern big guvmint, and the religiously-tinged statist populism of Bush (with neocons, white Southerners, and Catholics in tow) has come a-cropper, big-time. Although the latent appeal of the latter is still powerful, it's been discredited for the time being. Only the liberal Republicans can save the party from its current mess.

The Republicans have a better-than-even advantage in the 2008 presidential race: thus Giuliani is likely to be the next president. They will also probably take the Senate back.

A final curious thing to note: 2008 will the first presidential election since 1960 in which (1) a senator has a serious shot at becoming president, and (2) the major candidates and likely winner are not from the Sunbelt (South, Southwest, West).* Does this presage a shift of political power back to the older Northeast and Midwest? Probably not. It's due to the fact that the Democrats' former base in the South, strong until the mid-90s, has been largely wiped out, and the Democrats cannot be a majority party without it. The Republicans' center of gravity continues to shift, along with the country as a whole, west and south. Their stronghold however is no longer the Midwest and West (a legacy of the Civil War), but the South (a legacy of the 1960s-70s breakdown of the New Deal coalition). This gives the Republican party a different flavor from the old Lincolnesque midwesterners and the more recent Goldwater-Reagan individualism - more populist, more overtly religious, friendlier to big government and machine politics.

In the next generation, the new, post-1994 character of the Republican party will continue to be a source of both electoral strength and a lot of turmoil. While it's put the Republicans in a good position vis-a-vis southern and Catholic voters, it has also antagonized and alienated the older Republican base of conservatives and right-leaning independents.
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* Hillary is from Illinois and now lives in and represents New York. Romney is from Michigan and now hails from Massachusetts. Giuliani is New York City born and bred.

Digging out

What does American politics hold in the next couple years, as the Bush era (mercifully) limps to an end? The GOP's degeneration in the last eight years has been astonishing - if Bush is not the worst president ever, this is definitely the worst GOP ever. Neither liberal nor conservative, it's become a bad - incompetently, if unintentionally, bad - parody of liberalism.

I could spend this posting telling you about what 2008 will be like ... so you can roll over and go back to sleep. The Republican nominee will probably be Rudy, although Romney has a significant chance as a darkhorse - and would make a better president than Giuliani. The Democratic nominee will almost certainly be Hillary. It might thus be a cross-town World Series for New Yorkers, with Rudy the more likely to win.

But that would be trite crystal-ball gazing. Let's instead survey the forces and dynamics and apply the kinematics and boundary conditions as best we can.

The Republicans: confused and in disarray. The "disillusioned conservative" trend ("conservative" not to be confused with "Republican") has grown from the cottage industry of 2002-03 to boom times. Well-known conservatives like William Buckley, George Will, Robert Novak, Christopher Caldwell, Irwin Stelzer, Andrew Sullivan, Tucker Carlson, P. J. O'Rourke, and Peggy Noonan have been expressing their dismay and displeasure for several years running. A more recent crop of the disillusioned are now cranking out books: they include Bernard Goldberg's Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right, Richard Viguerie's Conservatives Betrayed, Larry Diamond's Squandered Victory, and Bruce Bartlett's Impostor. The most striking thing about the post-1998 years, as Bartlett acutely points out, has been the sharp decline of ideology and serious policy debate, as evidenced by the silence of the Washington think tanks (except for Cato - see below). The liberal-conservative debate about the proper scope of government that reached fever pitch in the 1960s and 70s - and dominated through the 90s and a Democratic presidency - has vanished. The danger that the then-approaching GOP majority posed was predicted more than 12 years ago by David Frum in his Dead Right, just before the Republicans took control of Congress: Republicans would learn to love big government - for ostensibly conservative purposes - and lose sight of any larger goals, especially pruning and reforming the welfare state and readjusting America's foreign commitments post-Cold War. Instead, he suspected they would develop a strong taste for big government, as long as they were running it. The conservative movement was even then (in 1994) confused about the difference between the conservative message and being Republican partisans. And in 1994, no one foresaw, say, Jack Abramoff's future career or the explosion of earmarks and pork-barrel.

The Republicans faced a difficult choice in 1995, one that becoming the majority party forced on them: after talking conservative for years, they had to put or shut up. Four years later, in 1998-99, we got the answer. Newt resigned and the conservative era came to an end, with some accomplishments (welfare reform, reigning in farm subsidies) that would soon be partly undone. The Republicans then drifted into a new direction. Unwilling to really be a conservative party, they stumbled into the big government Republicanism that Frum predicted: socially conservative, patriotic, mildly authoritarian, more government - and more pork. They settled on a presidential candidate (Bush) answering to this description, and a campaign strategist (Rove) determined to permanently win over the Catholic and white southern vote for good with big government. With a Republican White House and Congress, everything seemed set. Congress would not interfere with Bush, and Bush would sign everything Congress sent him - including two new major middle-class entitlements (Medicare D and Leave No Child's Behind). Congressional Republicans would vote themselves enough pork to guarantee their re-election in perpetuity. A new era seemed at hand - the new politics was anti-ideological, but intensely partisan. In place of small-government conservatism or the liberal Republican devotion to "good government" would come "loyalism" and vote-buying: government as frat house.*

Unlike liberalism, conservatism did not die a natural death. And conservatives didn't disappear either. Instead they were marginalized by the only force that could marginalize them - the Republican party itself. Conservative fixtures of the House and Senate retired from politics, their place taken by right-leaning Democrats newly converted to the GOP. The conservative base became confused, hesitant, then more and more angry. Something had gone wrong.

The Democrats: desperate, still a bit unhinged. They want the White House back so badly, it hurts. Many still suffer from Bush-derangement syndrome. Now that they control the Congress, controlling all the elected branches of government again would be sweet - not that they deserve to. The modern Democratic party went off the rails in the 1960s and 70s and has never recovered. The distinction between the left fringe and the mainstream has become more and more blurred - it's the Democratic party's biggest long-term vulnerability. And the real problem with that left fringe is not that they're stupid and juvenile (they are); it's that they crave power but no longer know what it's good for. The implicit signal they emit is very obvious: they don't like or understand power, and they don't know what to do with it. Voters have been picking up this message for more than three decades and reacting accordingly.

And this from the party that invented modern big government to serve broad public goals - it's no longer sure what the public good is or whether it even exists. Only special interest group and identity politics push their buttons now. The Democrats have been politically, morally, and intellectually braindead for thirty years, and they lack coherent rationales for the very things they invented - the modern welfare state and an interventionist, globalist foreign policy. A striking example of their incoherence is immigration; see Mickey Kaus' discussion for more about the Democrats' apparent indifference to all the worrisome trends of the last 15 years: rising inequality, state and local government bankruptcy, and the failure of sovereignty. It shows that while the US is not in the dire straits of denial that Europe is in, it's not all smooth sailing here. The religion of political correctness is powerful in the US as well, as is the role of elites in suppressing politically touchy but critical issues.

This bankruptcy was again on display in the Democrats' 2006 campaign themes: no mention of the desperate need for entitlement and welfare-state reform, for curbing Congress' appetite for pork, or changing the entrenchment of incumbency. Of the three serious Democratic candidates, only Hillary has any realistic awareness of these issues, and what she will make of them is anyone's guess - she'll be coy about them for as long as she can. Forget about Obama: he's callow, too young, and has no experience. The Democratic candidate with the most depth (Richardson) has no chance of being nominated.**

For the Democrats, 2008 promises to be their last hurrah for the forseeable future, so they should make the most of it. Against a background of disillusionment with Bush, their victories in 2006 were due far more to Republican confusion and cluelessness (and conservative voters staying home) than anything else. Once Bush & Co. are gone, it will be springtime for Republicans, who are more likely than not to retake the Senate in 2008. But it will not be a new conservative era: the 20-year era of conservative ideological dominance, from the late 70s to the late 90s, will probably not return in our lifetimes. Everyone now loves big government. Only the doughty libertarian Cato Institute has had the balls to consistently sound the alarm, best seen in their two major studies of the Bush years, Buck Wild and Leviathan on the Right.

Will the liberal Republicans ride to the rescue? Maybe. Liberal Republicans like politics and don't suffer from the conservatives' fatal ambivalence about being in charge of modern government. And unlike Bush, they value competence above machine politics and loyalty. They also lack Bush's faith-based, blindfolded, trust-walk style, and are not tainted with same. Although liberal Republicans are the smallest faction of the Republican party, they sit the closest to the center of gravity of American politics - unlike the conservatives or the Bush fraternity house. To update what I said last year: the future of the Republican party, if it belongs to anyone, belongs to them.***
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* Rove is the bespeckled, geeky schemer that many frat houses seem to have.

** Note to Hillary: Richardson would make an excellent VP choice.

*** Apparently the New Republic is now saying the same thing.