The best-selling conservative books these days tend to be red-meat titles such as Michelle Malkin’s “Culture of Corruption,” Glenn Beck’s new “Arguing with Idiots” and all of Ann Coulter’s well-calculated provocations that the left falls for like Pavlov’s dogs. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these books. Politics is not conducted by Socratic seminar, and Henry Adams’s dictum that politics is the systematic organization of hatreds should remind us that partisan passions are an essential and necessary function of democratic life. The right has always produced, and always will produce, potboilers.

Conspicuously missing, however, are the intellectual works. The bestseller list used to be crowded with the likes of Friedman’s “Free to Choose,” George Gilder’s “Wealth and Poverty,” Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times,” Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” Charles Murray’s “Losing Ground” and “The Bell Curve,” and Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man.” There are still conservative intellectuals attempting to produce important work, but some publishers have been cutting back on serious conservative titles because they don’t sell. (I have my own entry in the list: a two-volume political history titled “The Age of Reagan.” But I never expected the books to sell well; at 750 pages each, you can hurt yourself picking them up.)

But, therein lies the crux of the problem for conservatism; people don’t want intellectualism (or at the very least they do not appear to want intellectualism). The modern conservative movement, led by the likes of Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, wants to be spoon-fed right-wing talking-points like so many tiny jars of Gerber baby food. If people would be willing to pick up a 750-page book by a conservative intellectual once in a while, our political discourse might sound a bit different right now. I would venture a guess that there would be a lot less ’socialist!’, ‘fascist!’ and ‘racist!’ invectives being thrown around, no?

Though I will admit that the ‘more Buckley less O’Reilly’ comparison is a bit off for my tastes. I feel that (with my recent warm-fuzzy feelings for him — if you can call it that) Bill O’Reilly is not nearly as divisive and, frankly, offensive as Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity.

Oh, and for the record, this is not a problem that is exclusive to conservatism. The Keith Olbermanns and Ed Schultzs of the world aren’t as bad as their conservative counterparts, but they are not necessarily helping the progressive movement either. This is a knife that does indeed cut both ways.

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Photo: Jan Lukas/Little, Brown

“The role Glenn Beck is playing is harmful in its totality. My hunch is that he is a comet blazing across the media sky right now—and will soon flame out. Whether he does or not, he isn’t the face or disposition that should represent modern-day conservatism. At a time when we should aim for intellectual depth, for tough-minded and reasoned arguments, for good cheer and calm purpose, rather than erratic behavior, he is not the kind of figure conservatives should embrace or cheer on.”
- Pete Wehner in Commentary magazine

Obviously I agree, and not just because I think Beck is a hack.

We need REAL, honest debate and the Becks of the world (Hannity, O’Reilly, Malloy, Rhodes) are only their to make a fast buck off of people’s ignorance. These folks aren’t truth tellers. They merely 21st century snake oil salesman, only this time they’re bottling impotent partisan rage and saying that you can make a difference if you just scream loudly enough.

Well, we’re seeing where all this screaming is leading and it’s not good…especially online. The internet is lousy with thousands of garbage blogs that do nothing but parrot Beck’s lunacy and the net effect is a very, very small minority that gets attention from the media because they’re simply too crazy to ignore.

And that’s why conservatives need to run away from this guy as quickly as they can. Because while he may be responsible for a drop in Obama’s popularity numbers, he’s doing absolutely nothing to bolster yours. You still are less trusted than Democrats in never every category and you’re not going to win elections on the basis of deficit reduction alone.

In any event, fair warning. Don’t say we didn’t tell you so.

It really is disappointing to see McCain and Graham behave like this, especially when they haven’t filled in the blanks as to what Obama should say and why that would be more effective than the current course.

And, again, what’s the end game to tough talk? I’ll tell you what…more dead Iranian protesters. As the President mentioned earlier in the press conference, the Iranian leadership is already trying to trick their supporters into believing that we’re fomenting revolution by mistranslating things he has said and reporting that the CIA is behind this uprising.

As is the case with most foreign policy calls Republican lawmakers have made in the last 8 years, I genuinely have no clue as to how they’re arriving at these decisions. And I think Americans are equally perplexed and that’s one of the reasons McCain lost by 9 million votes last year.

Moving on…

Usually, when people debate why the conservative movement has hit hard times, they argue about whether Republicans are fiscally conservative enough or whether they are too focused on social issues. Rarely does the third tent pole of modern conservativism get mentioned: the national security conservatives. But that’s the exact group to blame argues Daniel Larison in The Week:

The faction most responsible for the GOP’s political failure is national security conservatives. Yet within the party, they remain unscathed, their assumptions about the use of American power largely unquestioned, and their gross errors in judgment forgotten or readily forgiven. Among the mainstream right, the foreign policy of the Bush administration is barely a subject of debate. Rather than reorienting Republican foreign policy towards a political center defined by realism, humility and restraint, the GOP’s leadership and activists have redoubled their commitment to Bush and Cheney’s hawkish stances and to a lock-step defense of the Bush administration’s policies.

Larison is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, part of the Pat Buchanan wing of the conservative movement (wing? More like alcove these days) – so you know he comes at this with a certain isolationist bias. But is he right? Are Republicans losing because they can’t divorce themselves from the national security policies of the Bush years?

Seems to me it’s a lot more complicated than that. But it’s worth considering. After all, the Republicans were once known for their realism abroad and that, in turn, made the party look mature and capable. Without that realism on weighty matters, can the party hope to regain the trust of the American people? Does Larison have a point?

Mona Charen of National Review Online notes that major media outside of Fox News either ignored the tax day tea parties or took an adversarial tone in reporting on them. Charen rightly notes that part of the problem is that Fox News promoted and actively participated in the events, giving other news outlets the excuse that the tea parties were illegitimate. But does that make the frustrations of the attendees illegitimate as well?

Charen points out that maybe tea party participants deserve more credit for their concerns. Writing about a specific attendee who was confronted by a CNN reporter, Charen says:

Perhaps [the stimulus and tax credit don’t] buy his support because he is skeptical that his taxes can remain low when the federal government is embarked on a record-shattering spending spree. He may be offended by the bailout culture, and worried that the obligations of taxpayers cannot remain low when it seems that every irresponsible borrower, failed car company, and free spending state is being rescued by the federal government. Additionally, he may be dubious that the government will spend the money wisely. It has been rumored that government spending has produced waste, fraud, inefficiency, and corruption. But he also may simply believe that engorging the government and enfeebling the private sector — no matter who is writing the checks — is not good for the economic or spiritual health of the country.

Or maybe he believes President Obama is leading us towards a socialist, totalitarian state where capitalism will be discouraged and guns will be forbidden. And that’s the problem with these tea parties. From my observations, it’s hard to separate the reasonable complaints from the outlandish accusations. Too many people associated with these groups have reached for ridiculous rhetoric rather than formulating smart, convincing critiques.

That said, the reasonable pro tea party argument laid out by Charen is a difficult one to disseminate without losing people’s attention. Fiscal responsibility is not something on which great slogans or firebrand speeches are built (although Ross Perot did a pretty good job with the issue back in the day). Unfortunately, overstating the risks of fiscal irresponsibility ruins the credibility of the critic. As of yet, the tea party organization has not found the right balance between firing up the populace and presenting a consistently reasonable argument free from rightwing chicanery.

The good news for the tea parties is that they have time to perfect their message and move away from the controlling influence of Fox News and other powerbrokers who make the organization seem more like a coordinated campaign than a grassroots movement. It would be nice to see the group become an alternative to the sedentary, bitter, social-conservative dominated Republican Party. But the group could also just become a MoveOn.org of the right — more partisan tool than positive force.

Regardless of what I might think of how they were started, promoted or whether or not they’ll last, it’s always a good thing when Americans peaceably unite to protest. Thankfully we’re lucky enough to have those rights and, as we all know, rights are best when exercised often and vigorously.

Also, I understand the anger over the bailouts. I genuinely do. A lot of “T”s haven’t been crossed or “I”s dotted. And when there aren’t a lot of answers as to the whos, whys or hows, frustration is inevitable.

Again, all of this is certainly within the protestors’ rights, but anybody who doesn’t admit that Obama inherited this mess is playing fast and loose with the facts. And I appreciate that they think he’s going down the wrong path, but where are the alternative plans? All we’ve seen so far from the Republican leadership are tax cuts that would destroy social safety net funding around the country. Or, in other words, all we’ve seen are plans that are completely unrealistic.

And riddle me this…what are the tea partiers for? What are their ideas? We know what they’re against, but they haven’t been effected AT ALL by the government’s bailout of the banks. I also find that there’s a basic lack of recognition that the financial system a) can’t be allowed to fail and b) this was caused by unregulated, unchecked free marketism. So I find it disingenuous that these protests are even being likened to the Boston Tea Party when our forefathers acted because of genuinely prohibitive grievances that were effecting their daily lives. And they protested again and again and again for years and years and years.

So yes, my guess is a genuine populist storm isn’t truly brewing yet, and if conservatives think it’ll happen after today, they’re kidding themselves. Also, if this Tea Party crowd truly wants to make an impact, they better realize that they’ll have to stand out in public places with signs for months on end, and that’s certainly not something most conservatives are use to. Because one big media hit isn’t going to do it. In fact, it could very well hurt them because all subsequent protests will most likely be smaller.

And, let’s face it, we’re seeing a lot of nutty anti-Obamaism at rallies today and that’s unsustainable. Because eventually the serious folks will be turned off and simply not show up.

Those are my thoughts.

What are yours?

Goldberg also makes this odd statement:

A justly convicted murderer should be punished regardless of his race. A justly convicted drug dealer should be punished, regardless of his race as well. If we’re punishing a disproportionately high number of blacks, that’s a sign we should crack down on more guilty whites, not give up on punishing crimes.

This is particularly puzzling because Goldberg has argued that anti-statism is at the core of conservatism and is also why libertarians should continue to coalition with conservatives. Obviously, increasing drug prosecutions is not only inconsistent with any conception of limited government, it’s also an expansion of the size of government. And not an insignicant expansion either, given that this can definitionally only be achieved by pursuing people with enough resources to put up a tough fight against drug prosecutions (a fact that at least partly explains the socioeconomic discrepancies in such prosecutions in the first place).

Goldberg’s statement does indirectly suggest one point worth exploring, though – that human liberty is increased when laws are enforced more uniformly; unfortunately, he takes this point to be a justification for the expansion of drug prosecutions.

Much has been written of late about the difference between small and limited government – specifically, small government refers only to the fiscal “size” of the government, whereas limited government refers to the government’s actual powers. If you accept that the State must exist, as even most libertarians do, then one must have a desire that the Stated do well that which it is authorized to do. If the State does its job poorly, then it will actually have a more negative impact on individual liberty than if it does its job well, because at that point enforcement of the laws becomes arbitrary and based on one’s ability to curry favor with the State in some other non-germane arena.

If, on the other hand, the State does its job well, then people may act in reliance upon the law being enforced equally without regards to other issues. So there may be a marginal decrease in liberty due to the existence of the law in the first place, but this is mitigated by the fact that uniform enforcement ensures that people may act in reliance upon the law and without having to curry favor with the State in some other arena. This means less State corruption, less connection between wealth and power, and less fear of interference from the State more generally.

The trouble is that very often uniform enforcement is simply not possible due to the State’s limited resources. Put another way, in the words of the inestimable Wirkman Virkkala, “regulation is not scalable.”

In the case of the War on Drugs, this problem is particularly apparent. For any given drug, there are going to be potentially millions of users spread out over a vast country. The only way to have uniform enforcement of the drug laws in such a situation is to have an incomprehensibly large budget far bigger than the already-incomprehensibly large Drug War budget we have. Other programs, some of which may or may not be enforced in a relatively uniform fashion will need to be scaled back (and thus enforced more arbitrarily). Short of that, given the nature of prohibitions on the possession of banned personal items, the only way to truly enforce the law uniformly would be to turn our neighbors and friends into de facto secret police.

Still, under some circumstances, I suppose it’s possible to enforce such prohibitions in a more or less uniform fashion without creating a de facto secret police force – whatever Singapore’s flaws (and it has many), drug use is not something that flourishes there. Part of that, though, is that Singapore is a tiny nation geographically, and another part of it is that it spends very little on many other types of restrictions, such as economic regulation.

Which brings me to my final point – even regulations that are not outright prohibitions can be uniformly enforced only if they govern a sufficiently small number of actors or if the enforcing agency has the very substantial amount of resources necessary to enforce the regulations uniformly over a large number of actors. Again, they are not scalable. If the regulations are to apply to more actors than the agency has the resources to oversee, then the only solution an agency may follow will be to make the regulations so restrictive as to ensure the reduction of the number of actors over whom they have jurisdiction. In other words, regulatory capture doesn’t just benefit the capturing business – it also benefits the captured regulator.

There is, I think, a solution to this problem: terminate any set of laws or regulations that cannot be uniformly enforced without an unrealistic budgetary expansion, and fully fund those laws or regulations that can be enforced in a relatively uniform fashion. Unfortunately, this is impossible in a two-party system where the Executive is increasingly viewed by both supporters and detractors as omnipotent and where few are willing to admit the unrealistic nature of their pet programs.

Cross-posted at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.

From the negative side, Janet Daley at Britain’s Telegraph argues that Obama is handing the reins over to liberal Democrats in Congress:

[W]hy, when [Obama] went to such pains to assemble a huge and widely experienced team of White House economic advisers (even going to the lengths of parading them at a press conference before he took office) he then handed over the actual drafting of his economic policy to the old Democratic fixers in Congress. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, are now, for all intents and purposes, running the Obama recovery plan.

Needless to say, Daley has a very low opinion of Pelosi’s and Reid’s motives and capabilities.

From the positive side, former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, writes in Salon that Obama is plotting a radically ingenious course likely to remake America and end the economic troubles started under Reagan.

The basic idea of Reaganomics was that the economy grows from the top down. Lower taxes on the wealthy make them work harder and invest more, and the benefits trickle down to everyone else. Rarely in economic history has a theory been more tested in the real world and proven so wrong. In point of fact, nothing trickled down. After the Reagan tax cuts, increases in the median wage slowed, adjusted for inflation. After George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, the median wage actually dropped. Meanwhile, most of the income went to the top. In 1980, just before the Reagan revolution, the richest 1 percent took home 9 percent of total national income. But by 2007, the richest 1 percent was taking home 22 percent.

Obamanomics, by contrast, holds that an economy grows best from the bottom up. Obama’s program increases taxes on the top and uses the proceeds to raise the living standard of average Americans by giving them lower taxes, better schools and more affordable health insurance. That may not seem very radical, but compared with the last quarter century it’s revolutionary.

Reich notes that Obama’s administration is working hard to present his programs as incremental changes, but Reich sees them for the radical change they are.

Here’s why I think these two narratives are likely to compete for public attention for at least the next two years:

First, on the Daley side of things, Reid and particularly Pelosi are certainly harmful to Obama’s hopes for change. They seem far more interested in political payback and rewarding key interest groups than they are in improving government. As long as the current Democratic congressional leadership is in place, Obama will have to either fight the good fight or acquiesce to bad policy. So far, he’s done more acquiescing than some of us would like, thus setting himself up to be labeled a pawn of the liberal/establishmentarian wing of his party.

On the Reich side of things, he’s putting the Obama presidency into the kind of framework from which legacies are born. If the economy turns around, Reich’s narrative would give Obama the kind of big idea, reformer credit which only Roosevelt and Reagan have enjoyed in the last 75 years. A good economy in 2012 would give Obama the opportunity to run not just as a competent manager but has a political savoir, potentially ushering in an era of “trickle up” dominance.

The difference in the positive and negative narratives is that the negative is based on a very real problem (the small mindedness of the Democratic congressional leadership), while the positive is based on the hope/belief the economy will indeed rebound and we’ll be better off afterwards. I would go so far as to say for the “Obama as savoir” narrative to work, the president must first solve the “Congress as stone-around-the-neck” problem first.

Right now, none of us knows what the next few years will bring. But don’t expect that to stop the world’s pundits from trying to define Obama before a single result is in.

One thing that has long baffled me has been the idea on the American Right that Europe is some kind of socialist hell-hole that borders on Communist. The thrust of the argument always seems to be that European government is so large and intrusive, and it public mores so lacking and dare I say nihilistic that it is something akin to Hell on Earth. Mark Steyn, not surprisingly, expresses this attitude fairly succinctly, writing:

Europeanism is like Communism: the less time you’ve spent living it in practice the better disposed you are to it in theory. In the same way, few of those Americans who want to introduce Canadian-style health care to the U.S. have ever had surgery at the Royal Victoria. Indeed, America is full of immigrants whose hostility to Euro-Canadian public policy derives explicitly from their prolonged exposure to it.

Of course, the definition of “Europeanism” is ill-defined. So far as I can tell, it’s a reference to a government with a large social welfare system combined with a secularized social policy. The assumption, which is largely based on a false equivalency that social safety nets = socialism = Road to Serfdom and that United States = World’s Only Bastion of Free Market Capitalism = World’s Only Free Country, is that these “Europeanist” policies make Europe an absolute hell-hole.

Despite my deep love of the free market, I’ve always found this chain of thought to be utterly absurd. For starters, the idea that Europe is some kind of hell-hole at all doesn’t seem to line up with reality, as Alex Massie points out:

Never mind that, according to the most recent World Values Survey, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, Malta, Luxembourg, Sweden each reported higher levels of happiness and “life satisfaction” than the United States. That isn’t to say that the US is unhappy, merely that there is more than one route to happiness. And that’s the point: europe (however broadly defined) and the United States are each remarkable success stories permitting a greater percentage of the population than at any point in history has the opportunity to make their own choices about how to lead their lives.

But there’s more to it than this. If “Europeanism” really is that much of a restraint on freedom, one would expect that European nations would have exceedingly tightly restricted economies, with comparatively little economic liberty. Thankfully, that lunatic left-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation has long compiled a statistical ranking of economic freedoms around the world.

In the current iteration of this list, based on data from late 2007 to early 2008, shows the good ol’ USA ranked 6th – right behind Ireland and New Zealand, and just barely ahead of Canada, Denmark, Switzerland, and the UK. But things get even more interesting when you look more closely at the data. After all, the argument seems to be that larger and more expensive government leads to less economic freedom (amongst other problems). And yet, when one looks at measures of economic freedom other than the size of government, one quickly finds that the US is outperformed by numerous European countries and Canada. Canada for instance surpasses the US in things like Fiscal Freedom (ie, taxation), freedom from corruption, business freedom, and trade freedom; Denmark in business freedom (where the Heritage Foundation considers Denmark just about perfect!), investment and financial freedom, property rights, and labor freedom; the UK and Netherlands in investments, property rights, and corruption; Iceland in business freedom, trade freedom, fiscal freedom, property rights, and corruption; and Austria and Belgium also comparing pretty favorably.

Meanwhile, there are a number of governments that seem to score extraordinarily poorly on these measures despite having relatively small governments. In fact, by the Heritage Foundation’s measurements, the US actually has a larger than average government compared to the rest of the globe, but has a far smaller government than most of Western Europe and Canada, most of which – including Sweden, with the third largest government in the world according to Heritage – score in the top 30 most economically free countries in the world. The sole exceptions are Portugal (#53), France (#64), and Italy (#76).

Meanwhile, countries with relatively small governments seem to largely be ranked pretty poorly in terms of overall economic freedom as I previously discussed here. If you rank the countries by size of government (keeping in mind that higher scores equal smaller government), the “best” governments are, in order: Burma, Liberia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and the Central African Republic. None of these are exactly bastions of economic freedom in any other respect.

This isn’t to say that smaller government equates with less economic freedom generally – I don’t think it does, and one can’t ignore that Singapore, Hong Kong, and Chile all have rather small governments combined with quite a bit of economic freedom. Instead, it’s simply to say that there is a complete lack of evidence of any sort that “Europeanism” is a first-class ticket to disorder, totalitarianism, or regulatory hell.

Meanwhile, whatever the flaws of secularism (and in the case of so-called Human Rights Commissions, it’s pretty clear that there are quite a few such flaws), it’s worth noting that Europeans seem to have a closer attachment to their culture and history than just about any part of the US outside the Deep South. Indeed, in France, the desire to preserve that culture and history is probably one of the biggest causes of French restrictions on economic liberty, which results in a level of protectionism that is noticeably higher than the rest of Western Europe (except for Italy).

On the other hand, the idea that the solution to American problems lies in adopting European-style policies (whatever that may mean) is pretty foolish as well, for the simple reason that the U.S. isn’t Europe. We are a far more culturally and ethnically heterogenous society than any European country, we are far larger in terms of both population and area than any Western European country, and – as is the case with any two countries – we have completely different established institutions upon which to base our policies, as Ms. McArdle recently noted.

Regardless, can we please stop pretending like Western Europe is the closest thing to Hell on Earth or, in the alternative, some kind of socialist paradise? It’s neither – instead, it’s just a collection of several different governments that in general seem to have each found a balance between government and liberty that works pretty well for the specific people who are subject to that specific government’s jurisdiction.

Cross-posted at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.

It is no secret that being a Republican isn’t the most hip political stance a person can take right now. President Obama has successfully established himself as the hippest politician around. You know you’re big when Katy Perry wears a dress with your face on it to host the MTV Europe Music Awards. To my fellow Republicans: I’m sorry, I wish I could be more positive about the current “hipness” of our party. But being a Republican is about as edgy as Donny Osmond. Granted, being “hip” is not a reason to join a political party, or a reason to agree with its ideals. But it is a way to get the attention of a generation—or, more specifically, my generation.

To make matters worse, certain individuals continue to perpetuate negative stereotypes about Republicans. Especially Republican women. Who do I feel is the biggest culprit? Ann Coulter. I straight up don’t understand this woman or her popularity. I find her offensive, radical, insulting, and confusing all at the same time. But no matter how much you or I disagree with her, the cult that follows Coulter cannot be denied. She is a New York Times best-selling author and one of the most notable female members of the Republican Party. She was one of the headliners at the recent CPAC conference (but when your competition is a teenager who has a dream about the Republican Party and Stephen Baldwin, it’s not really saying that much).

…but it’s still worth your time to read the whole thing.

Several readers have written in to point out that I keep talking about and linking to pieces written by Meghan McCain. While this is true, I submit to you that there is very good reason for this: She’s onto something. Her conservative voice is refreshing on so many levels — especially when compared to the usual conservative pundit-class. Ms. McCain is using her platform not to call Obama a socialist or Democrats evil-baby-killing-liberals, but rather to have a coherent discussion about the path forward for the conservative movement in America. She represents a younger generation who, if the GOP continues on it’s current path, will be increasingly turned off to the idea of conservatism.

[cross-posted at ThePajamaPundit.com]

I’m no fan of Rush Limbaugh. I find him neither elucidating nor entertaining — even on occasions when I agree with him. But he is quite popular with a core group and is increasingly powerful within the Republican party. What’s behind this expanding power? Would you believe the Democrats are?

Apparently, Democratic strategists, inside and outside the White House, have decided there’s no better way to marginalize the Republican party than by purposefully promoting Limbaugh as the heart and soul of the GOP. And Limbaugh is happy to play along.

“The Administration is enabling me,” he wrote in an email to POLITICO. “They are expanding my profile, expanding my audience and expanding my influence. An ever larger number of people are now being exposed to the antidote to Obamaism: conservatism, as articulated by me. An ever larger number of people are now exposed to substantive warnings, analysis and criticism of Obama’s policies and intentions, a ‘story’ I own because the [mainstream media] is largely the Obama Press Office.”

The bigger, the better, agreed Democrat James Carville. “It’s great for us, great for him, great for the press,” he said of Limbaugh. “The only people he’s not good for are the actual Republicans in Congress.”

Remember those dark days for Democrats just a few years ago when controversial characters like Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan became symbols of the liberal movement? Certain portions of the base loved it. The rest of American turned away.

Limbaugh could very well have the same effect on the conservative movement. And here’s why — like the Michael Moore of the Bush era, Limbaugh seems to be actively rooting against America. That’s not to say he’s anti-American (or that Moore is/was either), just that he’s so vituperative in his critique of the current administration that his words can easily be turned against him and the right in general.

Politically speaking, Democrats are smart to play up Limbaugh’s influence within the Republican party. But they don’t want to overplay it. If Obama’s early economic initiatives fail or if he mishandles an unforeseen foreign crisis, Limbaugh has the rhetorical power to whip American resentment into real anger. The more prominent he is, the more damaging to the Democrats he could be.

But for now, while Democrats are safely in power and Republicans flop like fish on the shore, Limbaugh is a liability to Republicans. Conservatives need a leader with ideas, not just negativism. Of course, if that person shows up, don’t look for Democrats to give him or her any free publicity.

Does this mean that the party is permanently doomed? No – we live in a two-party federalist system, and that’s not about to change soon.

Today, I think I finally have a picture of exactly how that road back to relevance is going to look (which is different from the normative picture of how I think it should look), thanks in part to this Politico interview with Gov. Huntsman of Utah. In the interview, Huntsman spells out a worldview that some would call “moderate,” but is instead quite along the lines of the various reformist conservatives – it’s a distincly different type of worldview from that of Arlen Specter & Co.

Matt Yglesias thinks the growth of reformism amongst elected officials like Huntsman and Gov. Crist of Florida means a coming civil war for the GOP. But he argues that these voices seem confined to the state level, and that the GOP won’t actually start to reform on a national level until similar voices start getting elected to Congress.

I disagree. The reality is that change in political party policy doesn’t happen overnight; instead, it happens subtly and gradually over the course of years. What we see in the reformist governors is the beginning of that change – it’s just not a change that is being consciously directed.

Patrick Ruffini’s much-ballyhooed and criticized post on de-Plumberizing the Right gives a pretty good idea of where the Right is likely to go over the next few years on the federal level. Specifically, Ruffini argues that what is need is not a change in policy, but a change in focus onto issues where 80% of Americans agree with Republicans, per Newt Gingrich’s strategy. This actually makes quite a bit of sense as political strategy because it doesn’t involve alienating any of the base, which a political party cannot do without putting itself in an even worse position in the short-run. Meanwhile, Robert Stacy McCain is probably right that it is politically more sound for Republicans to simply oppose anything the Dems try to do, and make them own it if (and some would say when) the Dem policies fail. Besides, there’s rarely an electoral penalty for opposing something that succeeds; there’s frequently an electoral reward for opposing something that fails. And this, of course, is precisely what Congressional Republicans seem to be doing.

The trouble with this approach, while it probably will work in the short-term, is that it is superficial, and only gets part of the GOP’s problems right, as Ross Douthat and Daniel Larison argue. It allows Republicans to stop the bleeding, but those 80% issues aren’t going to be big picture enough to make the GOP relevant again in the minds of a lot of those who have abandoned it (”Drill, Baby, Drill” may be popular with a lot of people, but it’s not something that’s going to suddenly make many people Republicans).

But GOP governors have the burden of actually governing rather than just criticizing, which is part of why several of them are solidly in the reformist camp. They have no choice but to depart from dogma on core issues, which is precisely what Huntsman and Crist are doing. Eventually, though, the national GOP’s change in focus will loosen the dogma on issues where the national GOP is no longer proposing serious policy alternatives. At that point, you will see reformist thought actually start to infect Republicans in Congress and maybe even Presidential primary candidates because it will no longer require annoying part of the base.

To sum up: continued populism on the national level, but with a focus on pushing different issues while reflexively opposing Obama on just about everything; renewed reformism on the state level that ultimately winds up providing an example for a new affirmative agenda on the national level. And no one will have planned it this way, since really it’s not what anyone wants right now – the change is too slow from the perspective of the reformists, and too much from the perspective of the base. But happen, I think it will. I just don’t know what reforms will wind up carrying the day, nor whether I personally will find those reforms palatable in a way that brings me back to the GOP fold (no matter what happens, I’m pretty happy staying an independent).

Cross-posted at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.

[A]re there some downsides to conservative talk radio? Taking the conservative project as a whole—limited government, fiscal prudence, equality under law, personal liberty, patriotism, realism abroad—has talk radio helped or hurt? All those good things are plainly off the table for the next four years at least, a prospect that conservatives can only view with anguish. Did the Limbaughs, Hannitys, Savages, and Ingrahams lead us to this sorry state of affairs?

They surely did. At the very least, by yoking themselves to the clueless George W. Bush and his free-spending administration, they helped create the great debt bubble that has now burst so spectacularly. The big names, too, were all uncritical of the decade-long (at least) efforts to “build democracy” in no-account nations with politically primitive populations. Sean Hannity called the Iraq War a “massive success,” and in January 2008 deemed the U.S. economy “phenomenal.”

And if you dared to be one of those criticizing the Bush Administration’s domestic policy, or question it’s foreign policy, then watch out. Even if you were a Republican you were still a traitor, a RINO, un-American. For eight long years, with only a few minor deviations such as the nonsense over the Dubai Ports Deal or Bush’s inexplicably stupid selection of Harriet Meirs for the Supreme Court, conservative talk radio carried the water for an Administration and a Republican Party that was anything but conservative.

During the 2008 Election, you heard more from Rush, Sean, and the rest of the gang about the race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama than about the Republicans. There was precious little discussion about Mike Huckabee’s love for taxes, Mitt Romney’s flip-flops, or John McCain’s, well, John McCain-ness. And voices in the party for limited government and rational foreign policy, like Ron Paul, they either weren’t talked about at all or they were ridiculed.

But it’s not just their slavish loyalty to whatever Republican happens to be in power that bothers Derbyshire about the talk radio crowd:

Much as their blind loyalty discredited the Right, perhaps the worst effect of Limbaugh et al. has been their draining away of political energy from what might have been a much more worthwhile project: the fostering of a middlebrow conservatism. There is nothing wrong with lowbrow conservatism. It’s energizing and fun. What’s wrong is the impression fixed in the minds of too many Americans that conservatism is always lowbrow, an impression our enemies gleefully reinforce when the opportunity arises. Thus a liberal like E.J. Dionne can write, “The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity. … Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans.” Talk radio has contributed mightily to this development.

(…)

Why engage an opponent when an epithet is in easy reach? Some are crude: rather than debating Jimmy Carter’s views on Mideast peace, Michael Savage dismisses him as a “war criminal.” Others are juvenile: Mark Levin blasts the Washington Compost and New York Slimes.

You could see this triumph of low-browism in full force during the 2008 General Election from the adulation given to a totally unknown Governor who virtually celebrated anti-intellectualism, to the attention given an unlicensed plumber from Ohio who managed to get himself YouTube’d repeating a GOP talking point, to the unstated assumptions that many had about Barack Obama that just weren’t true.

And you could see just how well that went over on Election Night.

Joe Gandelman makes this excellent point about the damage that this has done to the right, and the GOP:

Just talk to a high school or college student who is NOT a member of the Democratic party or Republican party and get his/her reaction to hearing a typical conservative talk show that sounds like three hours of rip and read RNC emails while raging against anyone with a “D” in front of their party affiliation. Most young people listening to sputtering and name-calling partisans on the air consider them lame — and many of these young people are conservatives or liberals.

(…)

The question is whether conservative talk radio will continue to grow as a dominant high profile voice of Republicans — one that decidedly turns off many independent, moderate, centrist, conservative Democrats, moderate Republicans, and young people who are not “damaged goods” baby boomers (like me) and makes them think this is what the Republican party is and stands for — or whether it can go back to being one tool in the GOPs’ get-out-vote arsenal.

In the 1970s the voice of conservatism on the air was Firing Line. Today it’s Rush, Sean, Laura, Mark, and Michael. If anyone doesn’t recognize that’s a step backward, it’s only because they’ve become used to associating the right with the latter rather than the former.

Rush Limbaugh may be the “leader of the opposition,” but he doesn’t have to be, and he shouldn’t be.

Cross posted from Below The Beltway.

As a political impulse, the sort of libertarianism that scoffs at creationism and traditional marriage wields limited influence, because it appeals chiefly to a dissenting sect of the intelligentsia. It’s a sort of free-market heresy of progressivism, with no significant popular following nor any real prospect of gaining one, because most Ordinary Americans who strongly believe in economic freedom are deeply traditionalist. And most anti-traditionalists — the feminists, the gay militants, the “world peace” utopians — are deeply committed to the statist economic vision of the Democratic Party.

Yikes. Now, of course, McCain is being somewhat hyperbolic in his characterization of the coalition of the political Left. But in many ways there is a fair amount of truth to McCain’s fundamental point, which is that the response of the political Left to the economic crisis has dramatically undermined the basis for any theoretical coalition of “liberaltarians.” To be sure, McCain thinks that the entire concept of such an alliance is a “luxury” that never had any chance at success, but the more pertinent issue is the role of the economic crisis in exploiting the divide between liberalism and libertarianism/classical liberalism. This is a particularly difficult truth for me, as I have repeatedly gone on record predicting that “libertarians,” broadly defined, are likely to continue their recent trend towards the Democratic Party in terms of their voting habits. Heck, I even put my money (and daughter’s toys) on the line by making a bet to this effect with John Schwenkler.

One of the things that has happened in the early days of the Obama Administration has been some fairly good (but by no means great) steps in the direction of restoring civil liberties and reigning in executive power. While this is something libertarians such as me have absolutely cheered, the reality is that these issues were a major part of what was pushing libertarianism to the left in recent years. As victories have been earned on those fronts, the entire basis for that move leftward is getting removed (although history tells us that we’re not about to see a complete restoration of civil liberties and balance of power anytime soon, either).

To be sure, really good bases remain for a left-libertarian coalition on certain specific issues, especially the War on Drugs. And I still fully agree with the great FA Hayek, whose opus Road to Serfdom describes many of those we now call liberals as essentially misled classical liberals (that we now call libertarians). And that says nothing of his essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative” – still relevant nearly half a century later.

So I still think that, at some point in time, progressives and libertarians will be reunited within a political coalition separate and distinct from conservatives. But at a minimum the progressive response to the financial crisis, with its finger-pointing for the crisis almost solely at deregulation and its use of the stimulus bill as a means for implementing all sorts of pet projects that have little to do with stimulus even under a Keynesian analysis, has brought the economic divide between liberals and libertarians to the forefront in a way unseen for decades.

To be sure, I think conservatives – especially conservative politicians – have played a role in the whole situation, both by saddling us with massive debt in the name of the War on Terror and by repeatedly (and falsely) campaigning on the idea of Obama as a socialist (and thereby turning an unwinnable election into a de facto referendum on socialism). But the fact is that the political Left, led by Congress, is now using this opportunity to implement wide-reaching policies that are anathema to libertarianism.

Simply put, it appears that liberals and Progressives, at least the influential ones, have once again taken up the mantle that regulation is always (or almost always) good, and so is just about any form of non-military government spending. As Virginia Postrel notes discussing the refusal of influential progressives to concern themselves with the effects of the abysmal, horrible, no good Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act:

Unfortunately, once you are ideologically committed to the idea of regulation, you can’t say that a given regulation is bad–or, worse, that maybe doing nothing new would have been the best course.

And this is the problem the rebirth of dogmatic support for regulation has created for any liberaltarian coalition. Rather than consider ways of achieving liberal ends (which are usually shared by liberals and libertarians alike) that may have incorporated libertarian thinking or were at the very least highly targeted, progressive politicians have been choosing extraordinarily broad and intrusive means of achieving those ends. This is not to say that those politicians ever really cared what libertarians thought; only that this route of action has undermined any possibility of a significant percentage of libertarians (again broadly defined as fiscally conservative and socially liberal) becoming intermediate-to-long-term members of the Dem coaltion.

All that said, Will Wilkinson is no doubt correct that all this talk of a left-libertarian political coalition misses the entire point of “liberaltarianism,” which is not properly understood as being about coalition-building:

I think Obama and the Democrats are already in the process of screwing it up. The romance of transformative hope is going to wear off pretty quick as all-but-uncontested Democratic policy deepens and lengthens the recession. There’s a lot of culturally and psychologically liberal people out there who are, and are going to be, interested in a liberalism that actually works. I want to use this time of ferment to work on developing the missing option in American politics: an authentically liberal governing philosophy that understands that limited government, free markets, a culture of tolerance, and a sound social safety net are the best means to better lives.

One of the major reasons I continue to support the concept of “liberaltarianism” is that ultimately I think it can only serve to increase the pathetic influence of libertarianism on American politics, turning libertarians into true political free agents that must be pandered to, year in and year out (if you use the broad “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” definition, we’re large enough a group to be worth pandering to). Just as importantly, it promises to improve libertarianism itself by encouraging a purer form of classical liberalism that is not, as Wilkinson says, “pretty well shot through with conservative reflexes bred by the long Cold War alliance between libertarians and the right.” Or as Reihan Salam notes in a sentence that speaks particularly well to me: “The liberaltarian idea, as I understand, is to start rethinking coalitions that appear to be natural because they’ve been in place for so long.”

Cross-posted at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.

Now it’s true that immigration reform is a tough subject for conservatives. True too, that when it comes to immigration there are some many on the restrictionist wing who consider Bush to be either a) a sentimentalist or b) corporate America’s pawn or c) both of the above. Equally, the orthodox Republican position on immigration – border enforcement first, then reform – is not desperately unpopular. But a popular (or at least not unpopular) position is only half of the matter: you have to sell it well too. And on a subject as contentious as immigration, that requires a degree of tact and sophistication that, by and large, seems alien to many Congressional and grass-roots Republicans.

***

So it isn’t just that legal Hispanic immigrants might be turned off by the GOP’s language on immigration, so too are educated, upscale white voters who don’t like the idea of endorsing a party that gives the impression, unwittingly or not, of being hostile to immigration. The GOP’s posture on immigration fosters the impression, fairly or not, that they’re the “nasty party”. As far as political branding goes, that’s a toxic position for any party to find itself in.

And this is the real problem the GOP faces, and which we’ve been discussing over the last several weeks. The biggest problem with the party’s current situation (i.e., the problem of “talk radio dogmatism”) isn’t its position on the issues – it’s the downright meanness upon which it insists to push those positions.

As I wrote during my stint subbing for John Schwenkler, it’s terribly difficult to persuade people to vote for a party or even support its policies (regardless of whether they agree with those policies in principle) when:

• That party’s guiding lights, rather than make principled arguments for various “anti-terrorism” policies, insist on labeling your religion as “Islamofascism”;
• Rather than make principled arguments for stronger restrictions on immigration, you and your family are portrayed as foreign invaders seeking to destroy the country from within because of the Mexican flag hanging on your balcony – even as nothing is said about the Italian or Irish flag hanging on your neighbor’s balcony
• Rather than make principled arguments against gay marriage, you are accused of wanting to destroy your country’s traditions because you want legal recognition of your relationship.
• Those same guiding lights proudly promote, rather than simply defend, the use of words and phrases with a well-known role in oppressing you or your ancestors.
• Rather than make principled arguments against an auto bailout, you and your friends are accused of bleeding the American people dry
• Rather than make principled arguments for the use of force and/or for restrictions on civil liberties, you are accused of being a “Defeatocrat” or wanting to “let the terrorists win.”

The reason this meanness comes about is that the party has lost sight of the principles that gave rise to its policy preferences in the first place, principles that came from a number of different strains of political thought. Far from being a sort of “master conservatism,” the resulting set of litmus test policy preferences thus lacks a coherent ideological basis in any cognizable form of conservatism.

And when a party loses sight of underlying principles, the only way to maintain party unity is to scare its constituents into loyalty, turning every issue into “Us vs. Them.” While this can work in the short-term, it must inevitably result in unprecedented discord as once-loyal coalition members become fed up with consistently being called one of “Them.” Case in point – see Weigel on Malkin on Voinovich. And that says nothing about the effects it has on ensuring you don’t make inroads into the other coalition’s constituencies.

H/T: Conor Friedersdorf.

Cross-posted at Publius Endures.

And without a doubt, the basic tenets of neo-conservatism, with its emphasis on the spread of democracy as an end unto itself, are tenets with which I profoundly disagree. But it’s also worth remembering that neo-conservatism, at least in its most philosophical form, is very much concerned with a positive, idealistic worldview just as any other true political philosophy is. And while, just as other strains of conservatism and libertarianism, many prominent neo-conservatives have fallen under the spell of “talk radio dogmatism,” the actual philosophy of neo-conservatism itself – again much like other strains of conservatism and libertarianism – has deep intellectual roots.

Perhaps nothing provides a clearer example of the distinction between this “talk radio dogma” neo-conservatism and actual philosophical neo-conservatism than the reaction in conservative circles to the impending nomination of Leon Pannetta to head the CIA. As an outspoken critic of torture (aka “harsh interrogation techniques”) and the intelligence failures of the last 8 years who has no previous connection to the CIA, the Pannetta nomination has unsurprisingly drawn the praises of civil libertarians of all stripes – including Greenwald, Sullivan, Schwenkler, and Hilzoy.

What is, however, surprising is the way in which the pick has split the portions of the political Right that hold to a more-or-less neoconservative view of international relations. On the one hand, some of neo-conservatism’s biggest intellectual heavyweights, including Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, are almost completely supportive of the nomination – in spite of Panetta’s harsh criticism of policies that Feith and Perle either pushed or excused. The common thread for this group seems to be an acknowledgement of the failures of the last eight years, and a belief that those failures arose due to systemic, institutional problems within the Agency. To them, these problems can only be fixed by someone outside the Agency with strong managerial skills, and preferably, it would seem, a critic of the Agency. At base, this group recognizes that a neo-conservative agenda cannot succeed unless there is some sort of comprehensive reform of our intelligence services – and it is that idealistic (if, in my view, deeply flawed) neo-conservative agenda that remains their ultimate concern and goal.

But the GOP dogmatists, who do not understand the intellectual roots of the fundamentally neo-conservative foreign policy they advocate, have taken a vastly different tack.

Ed Morrissey, who is as close to an intellectually honest dogmatist as you will find:

Even the notion of “change” doesn’t apply here. Obama has no executive experience in government, and neither does Panetta, but Panetta hardly represents a breath of fresh air in Washington. He’s another Clinton-era retread, only in this case, put in charge of an organization about which he knows nothing. He’s there to exercise Obama’s political will and nothing more.

Similarly, Wizbang calls the pick the equivalent of the Bush decision to choose Mike Brown to head FEMA, while Ace of Spades says Panetta’s only qualification is “being a lifelong partisan hack.” And, of course, Michelle Malkin says “Another day, another clueless Clinton crony named to a top job for which he has no experience. The unqualified fish rots from the head down, after all. ”

Notably missing from any of the discussion amongst the dogmatists is an acknowledgement of the systemic problems faced by the CIA, whether it be in terms of the moral issues related to interrogation techniques or in terms of the embarassing intelligence failures in recent years.

Cross-posted at Publius Endures.

Over the last few months, there has been much finger-pointing as to which particular sect of the old GOP coalition is to blame for the policy failures of the last 8 years and the electoral failures of the last 2 years…..I think these accusations are deeply misplaced – the problems have not been caused by religious conservatives or adherence to free market beliefs, but instead by a sort of “talk radio” dogmatism in which any given issue becomes a litmus test for whether one is a “true” conservative or Republican.

This dogmatism has become terribly pervasive, dominating the party infrastructure and including many of the most prominent faces of conservatism both online and on the air. It is a dogmatism that is in some ways pushed by a wide variety of conservatives – free market conservatives and libertarians, religious conservatives, and defense conservatives. And yet it is also a dogmatism with which large elements of each of those groups take significant umbrage.

In and of itself, though, a little dogmatism is not necessarily a unique hindrance to a political party or movement’s electability or even its legislative agenda – political dogma has existed for at least as long as political parties have existed, and without some of it political parties cannot distinguish themselves from their competitors.

Instead, the problem with this particular form of dogma is its all-around meanness. Under this dogmatism, dissenters of any stripe are treated as the enemy, regardless of whether the dissenter’s general viewpoint could be described as “conservative,” and regardless of the dissenter’s political affiliation. Wide nets are cast to stereotype anyone who may be adversely affected by implementation of one of the dogma’s tenets. Where a particular tenet relies on a particular fact, and a suggestion is made that the fact is inaccurate, the personal loyalties of the questioner are called into question – even if the fact is demonstrably wrong.

What’s important here isn’t that GOP dogmatism (or political dogmatism more generally) is overly ideological – quite the opposite, actually. Instead, the problem is that it doesn’t recognize its lack of a firm ideological basis, turning the individual policy preferences of whichever strain of conservatism is most passionate about a given issue into a litmus test for some imagined “master conservatism.” Because this dogmatism represents the conclusions of numerous different philosophies, though, it cannot rely on the ideological arguments that gave rise to the policy preference in the first place. For instance, relying on principled libertarian arguments for a particular economic policy is not possible when you take a position on social policy that is inherently at odds with those arguments; similarly it is not possible to rely on principled religious conservative arguments for social policy when you take a position on economic policy that is directly at odds with those arguments. In short, the problem with dogmatism isn’t that it elevates principle over the common good – it’s that it is almost completely devoid of principle in the first place, a fact which Conor Friedersdorf seems to get. The result is that this imagined “master conservatism” is forced to rely on arguments that rely on a sense of fear and an “us against them” mentality.

This is not to say that this type of dogmatism is without value – it’s useful as a means of creating party unity and “getting out the base.” Nor is it particularly the province of conservatives – liberals and Democrats most certainly have their own type of fear-based, “us against them” dogmatism. Instead, the problem here is that the dogmatism has become far too pervasive, both in terms of those who insist on this dogmatism and – as importantly – in terms of the number of issues to which it extends (even extending to issues that have no inherent connection to policy preferences, such as whether Iraq had WMD’s, whether global warming is real or imagined, or whether AirTran was morally correct in its refusal to permit a Muslim family to reboard a flight after they were cleared by the FBI).

For instance, it’s one thing for talk-show hosts to rant and rave about “Defeatocrats,” the “homosexual mafia,” etc., since their purpose is not to persuade but is instead almost exclusively to rally the people who are already predisposed to agree with them. It’s a far different thing, however, when that attitude extends to campaign tactics, and/or a huge percentage of “talking heads,” whose purpose is at least nominally to persuade people to either vote Republican or to support a particular policy position.

Similarly, it’s one thing to rant and rave against a particular group as a means of motivating your “base” and maybe to scare the bejesus out of some fence-sitters into supporting your position. It is a far different thing, though, to do this on virtually every issue. So while Muslims, for instance, may be a tiny minority group whose support on any given issue is not worth being concerned about losing, the combination of Muslims, gays, social safety net beneficiaries, Latino immigrants, war opponents, etc. is a pretty large group.

By relying on rhetorical arguments that demonize so many groups and by making those arguments through so many different mediums, this form of dogma dramatically reduces the “pie” to whom conservatives may appeal – both for voting purposes and for purposes of winning support on policies that have nothing to do with the issue on which that group has been demonized. As Rod Dreher points out: “…if you build your political movement around constantly pointing out that it’s Us vs. Them, pretty soon you’ll find that there aren’t too many of Us left.”

But again – this problem is not one that is uniquely the province of conservatism or the Republican Party. Instead, it is a problem that will inevitably arise as any particular political coalition becomes ever-larger and attains a certain level of political success on issues where there is near-uniform intra-coalition agreement; in order to maintain the successful coalition, the party needs to manufacture loyalty on issues where there is less intra-coalition agreement. This is, however, an unsustainable strategy due to the way in which it “shrinks the pie” by demonizing policy opponents, even if they happen to be in the same political party. Eventually, the pie becomes small enough that the party can again find a coherent set of positive principles around which to build, and the cycle will begin anew.

The extremes of this cycle are just exacerbated today due to the way in which modern technology allows politics to pervade so much of everyday life. Eventually, the Dems will face similar problems as a result of their own successes, even as the GOP rebuilds around some as-yet unknown set of principles with a relatively broad appeal.

(Cross-posted at Publius Endures).

Kristen Soltis pens a great post over at The Next Right that’s definitely worth a read. Because by talking about refocusing what religion means to the Republican party, she’s helping drive the conversation for a new generation of conservatives…and that’s long overdue…

The notion that every human life is sacred is an important one, and not one that should be cast out of the party, I’ll readily agree. But the dignity of human life is important for the unborn as well as those born and living among us as our neighbors – the alone, the sick, the needy. We need advocates for the unborn in our party, but so too do we need an agenda that focuses on the dignity of human life and mutual respect in our inner cities, in the third world, in our schools. We can’t focus on one and ignore the other without essentially cherry picking when we decide we care about human life. [...]

Do our candidates and leaders need to wear their religion on their sleeve? No. Religion itself is a very personal matter to many Americans, and the blend of religion and politics that is intended to demagogue and divide will hopefully find its way out the door. A focus on religion as a litmus test for our leaders, as an exclusionary aspect of partisanship, is doomed to failure.

But many Americans have a place for spirituality in their lives, whatever shape or form that comes in, and there is something important driving millions of Americans to go to church tonight. God matters to America, and matters in politics – just maybe not in the way we’ve been lead to believe. The season of hope, happiness and love isn’t just a Christian phenomenon; it’s something everyone can take part in, and it’s a spirit I hope won’t be forgotten as soon as the presents are all opened.

This debate will go on and on and on in the coming weeks as we prepare to select our RNC chair and to set our party on a course to bounce back in 2010. The role that religion, and in particular Christianity, will play in the party will hopefully receive a healthy amount of attention and discussion.

Here’s the thing…I honestly don’t think that Republicans will get their act together with regards to wedge issues for quite some time. In fact, it may take another 20 years for what Kristen is talking about to really gain a foothold because an entire generation of politicians has to come of age and start running with these new values.

But what younger Christians can start doing immediately is creating grassroots buzz via social media channels to let the older folks now that this is where they’re going and they can start to adopt their policy positions or risk losing an entire generation of conservative voters.

After all, with Obama inviting Rick Warren to give his invocation, Dems are starting to make inroads with issues that matter to many younger religious “conservatives.”

One of the few saving graces with respect to this legislation, which will devastate small, medium and domestic businesses in numerous industries, has been a recent opinion letter which held that the bill’s ban on phthalates would apply only to products manufactured after February 10 and not to pre-existing inventory that was manufactured prior to the statute’s effective date (products containing any amount of lead, no matter how unlikely to be “mouthed” by a child or to contain the legitimately dangerous lead paint, are not so fortunate). This exemption for some pre-existing inventory is important because without it, businesses would be forced to destroy products already on their shelves, even if those products were legal when manufactured. The exemption is particularly important to small and medium sized businesses because of how businesses of that size order and/or manufacture their products many months in advance in order to take advantage of bulk discounts; larger businesses can obviously turn over large quantities of inventory much quicker than small businesses and, moreover, were much more capable of being aware of this law’s potential effects as early as October/November of 2007.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, having solved all “Natural Resources Defense” problems, is apparently not happy with the Consumer Products Safety Commission’s issuance of the exemption for pre-existing phthalate inventory. As such, they have sued the CPSC to make sure the law, with its $100,000 minimum penalties, is enforced in as draconian a manner as possible.

In defense of this lawsuit, the NRDC’s spokesperson expressed little sympathy for businesses that will have to close:

The problems of the retailers and the toymakers are beside the point, Colangelo said. “Congress decided these toys are unsafe,” he said. “That’s critical here. […] We’re talking about something that Congress decided was unsafe and shouldn’t be on the shelves.”

So why are these products so particularly unsafe that it justifies forcing hundreds of businesses to close in the midst of a severe recession? “Because Congress said so.” And why did Congress say so? “Because they’re so particularly unsafe that it justifies forcing hundreds of businesses to close in the midst of a severe recession.”

Again, if ever there was a time for conservative blogospheric activism (although liberal and/or libertarian activism would also be more than appropriate), this would be it. Unfortunately, the Malkinized portion of the Right (also the most activist portion) is much more concerned with talking about the NY Times’ latest flub on the all-important issue of Caroline Kennedy’s qualifications for Senator, not to mention Obama’s amorphous ties to the equally important issue of who the 800th Most Corrupt Chicago Politician of All Time spoke with and when, to even be aware that this problem exists and can realistically be prevented.

(Cross-posted at Publius Endures)

PS – I promise my next post here at Donklephant will be on something other than this issue.

From NewsMax…

Regardless of whether or not you agree with him, we definitely got the lesser Bush son as president. This guy would have been better, but there’s no way he’ll ever be viable as a candidate. W ruined it for him.

By the way, he gives Bobby Jindal a shout out as the model of a good Republican Governor.

Paging 2012…