After the Future

Republican Intellectuals

Look- the intellectual wing of the Republican party is dead. What is left are brain-dead acolytes spreading meaningless and simplistic anecdotes, trite stories, and distilled nonsense passed on that has a more fitting home in AM radio. The McCain campaign, once again, is just a symptom of the real problem- an intellectually incurious and lazy movement in the final ugly spasms of death. The McCain campaign is now, in their interviews with the press, spreading what we can all recognize as wingnut email chains. John Cole

I've been reading Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, and it's been very helpful for me in filling in some gaps and in stimulating me to think why I lean left rather than right or why people like Douthat, Larison and some of the others at Culture 11 lean right instead of left. When I read these people I find that I have more common ground with them than I have with a lot of people who self-identify as Democrats, but I guess I still can't get past the idea that some of these--Douthat in particular--can self-identify as Republicans. 

I'm not going to make the argument here, but I think the argument could be made that the policy prescriptions in his and Salaam's book have a better chance of being adopted by moderate Democrats than by the people who are running the GOP. (And this defense of McCain by Salaamis a perfect example of how very smart people can indulge in  ridiculously delusional thinking. Or is his motive just to be a smart-ass contrarian? Can he possibly believe what he's writing? Does he have no grasp what the Republican Party has become? Does he believe that even if the "real McCain", as opposed to the "bad McCain" we've been exposed to in the last year, were to reemerge that he would control his party rather than the party controlling him just as his campaign controls him now?)

Maybe the issue is generational. I grew up Catholic in a Republican dominated suburb on Long Island graduating from a Catholic High School in 1968 and from Boston College, a Jesuit university with a conservative reputation in 1972. Just about everybody I knew was unconsciously conservative, and I think I associated being conscious with being liberal--at least until I began understanding unconscious liberalism.

Obama Interview with Maddow

I've reached a point where I've become constitutionally incapable of listening to anythng any politician has to say at this point. talking. Nevertheless, I found myself watching this interview tonight, and It broke through all the sound blockers I've set up. And I found it encouraging for some reason.

I don't know.  Maybe I'm just a sucker for refreshingly candid, intelligent, thoughtful answers asked by an intelligent questioner. Compare this interview with anything we've seen in recent years with other pols. Obama's remarkably relaxed and fluent for somebody at the end of a grueling 18-month ordeal.

Anyway, I think this clip is worth watching on its own merits, but also because it reinforces the point I was making in the post earlier this week. You can disagree with him--I disagree with him--but if you're a sane conservative, it's hard to see what's to be afraid of here. The interview starts at about the 3:20 mark.

There's a difference between splitting the difference compromising with people you disagree with and looking for common ground as a place to begin a conversation about where we need to go.  Common ground is extraordinarily difficult to find with a rigid ideologue, but you can find it with most normal people whether they self-describe as Republican or Democrat.

Obama has been very lucky that he hasn't had to throw many elbows in this fight, and I think he will have built up a lot more good will and political capital than Bill Clinton had in 1992. He might even get a honeymoon of sorts. There is only so much he will be able to do, but I think I'm encouraged because he seems to have thought out what he wants to do, and I think he has mostly the right ideas. And, yeah, he's probably wrong about Afghanistan, but I'm willing to give him his shot at doing it his way.

What Do Conservatives Have to Fear from a Dem Govt.?

Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He's not interested in playing around the edges. He seeks "fundamental change," i.e., to remake society. And if the Democrats control Congress with super-majorities led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he will get much of what he demands. Mark Levin

Maybe guys like Levin and others at NRO are strawmen--theirs are such absurd exaggerations of a point of view that they can't be taken seriously. Nevertheless there seems to be an assumption, even among principled, sane conservatives (as contrasted with most of those at NRO and The Weekly Standard), that the Dems will once again over-reach in their agenda to push the country to the left. I am open to the idea that I have a blindspot here, but I need somebody to explain to me how Dems have over-reached in the past. I just don't see it. What did they do back in the day in either the legislative or executive branches that is not better explained by standard-issue pork-barreling that can be described as truly egregious over-reaching caused by their Liberal political ideology. I would like a sane, principled conservative to explain to me where I'm wrong. But the idea that Democrats are for pork barreling in a way that Republicans are not is just plain ridiculous.

I would argue that fundamental change that frightens Levin so, if it were to happen, would mean moving the country away from an ideological hard right where he sits to a pragmatic center, which is really where Obama would like to sit. The idea that this country could be moved to the hard left, even if Obama wanted to do that, is just plain silly. Why? Because there is no far-left or even a coherent ideological left-liberalism in the American political sphere, and there is no potent political movement that can drive a left-liberal agenda. If there are such left ideologues, they have no political power or meaningful constituency. So the idea that the Democrats are going to be a party united around a hard-left or even just a "progressive" agenda, even with a filibuster-proof senate, is to me ridiculous. The best we can expect from them is a higher level of competence and pragmatism in solving serious problems all sane Americans agree can't be solved by market ideology or faith-based initiatives.  To fear that the government is being taken over by proto-socialists is nonsense.

The Democrats are not driven by ideology the way the GOP is. Because conservatives, especially hard-right social conservatives, tend to be so ideologically driven, they assume Liberals are. They project onto Liberal Democrats their worst fears rather than see them for what they really are. Liberals are better understood as a kind of temperament or the sensibility of those who have made an adjustment to life in post-traditional world. Because social conservatives have not made this transition, they think there is something profoundly wrong with Liberals, something ungrounded and decadent.

A Conservative Libertarian Case for Obama

Radley Balko at reasononline

While I'm not thrilled at the prospect of an Obama administration (especially with a friendly Congress), the Republicans still need to get their clocks cleaned in two weeks, for a couple of reasons.

First, they had their shot at holding power, and they failed. They've failed in staying true to their principles of limited government and free markets. They've failed in preventing elected leaders of their party from becoming corrupted by the trappings of power, and they've failed to hold those leaders accountable after the fact. Congressional Republicans failed to rein in the Bush administration's naked bid to vastly expand the power of the presidency (a failure they're going to come to regret should Obama take office in January). They failed to apply due scrutiny and skepticism to the administration's claims before undertaking Congress' most solemn task—sending the nation to war. I could go on.

As for the Bush administration, the only consistent principle we've seen from the White House over the last eight years is that of elevating the American president (and, I guess, the vice president) to that of an elected dictator. That isn't hyperbole. This administration believes that on any issue that can remotely be tied to foreign policy or national security (and on quite a few other issues as well), the president has boundless, limitless, unchecked power to do anything he wants. They believe that on these matters, neither Congress nor the courts can restrain him.

That's the second reason the GOP needs to lose. American voters need to send a clear, convincing repudiation of these dangerous ideas.

The idea of returning a Republican to the White House is unthinkable. It's obvious to anybody who is paying attention and not blinded by tribal loyalties or some form of perverse  cognitive dissonance. But as Balko says, it's not just a question of not electing Republicans--what they have come to stand for must be repudiated. If you're Libertarian and can't bring yourself to vote for a Democrat, vote for Bob Barr, but don't vote for a Republican.

Garry Wills on the Unitary Executive

Why a McCain win would cause me to lose hope: court appointments.  Liberals are foolish to be obsessed about Roe; they should be more concerned about this deeper and more far-reaching issue. I'm surprised there isn't more discussion of it.  From the New York Review of Books:

When Charles Gibson was questioning Governor Palin, he should not have asked about the Bush Doctrine (a wavering concept, and touching only one matter, war). He should have asked for her views on the unitary executive—the question Cheney asked the Court nominees. That is what matters most to the Bush people. It affects all the executive usurpations of the last seven years—not only the right of the president to wage undeclared wars, but his right to create military courts, to authorize extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, more severely coercive interrogation, trials with undisclosed evidence, domestic surveillance, and the overriding of congressional oversight in every aspect of government from energy policy to health services.

All these policies were driven by the unitary executive theory of the Constitution, which emanated from David Addington in Vice President Cheney's office. Charlie Savage has documented that four Supreme Court justices are already enthusiastic supporters of the unitary theory—Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas. It takes only a fifth justice to solder that theory into place for the foreseeable future. This would be the most thorough reworking and distortion of the Constitution in all our history.

The stakes are staggering. That is why the Republicans are so desperate to win this year. If they fail, not only will their previous encroachments be endangered, but the investigation of illegal acts will be removed from protection by presidential veto. Nothing short of wholesale pardons by the outgoing president can give many people cover for acts they undertook on the assurance that the unitary executive was exempt from congressional action. This prospect is so terrifying that John McCain has taken over the thuggish tactics that defeated him in 2000. The Republicans have everything to lose. . . .

There is something terrifying in the fact that a sweeping presidential power that is rejected even by an early advocate of the unitary executive is now accepted by four of the nine Supreme Court justices. Add a fifth justice to them, and the Constitution will be under the severest siege in its history. There can be no higher stakes.

Shrewd as Serpents, Guileless as Doves

I was going to write something about Republicans and their absurd campaign to accuse the Dems of voter fraud and how the fabric of Democracy is in jeopardy, not because of the long list of things that the Bush administration has perpetrated but because of ACORN?! But who cares at this point? I'm just going to assume that it's all too ridiculous, too desperate, and too late for McCain and the GOP, and Americans have made up their mind by now. If I'm wrong I commit myself here and now to giving up blogging on political matters. It has been until now a kind of act of hope.  A GOP victory will squeeze the last bit of that out of me. 

So I want to shift gears and write about John Steinbeck's East of Eden, which I've been reading on and off for the last month. It's interesting for the ways in which it succeeds and fails. He's telling his own family saga while interweaving it with the fictional mythopoetic saga of the Trask family. I'm not sure it succeeds as great literature, but I admire its ambition--for its attempt to take on a big idea, and to use fiction as a tool to explore it. The book in this sense points us to something that is worth our thinking about. East of Eden is a 600-page exegesis of Genesis 4:1-16, which tells the Cain and Abel story. Steinbeck is at pains to make clear he sees this as a story that discloses a universal truth about the human condition, not an exercise in Judaeo-Christian theologizing.

He is right in pointing to this story as a key to understanding the paradox at the heart of the human moral predicament--that our soul-life comprises the impulses of both the serpent and the dove. And he is right to point to the possibility of resolving resolution of this paradox in the Hebrew word "timshel," which appears in verse 7: "Surely if you improve yourself, you will be forgiven. But if you do not improve yourself, sin rests at the door. Its desire is toward you, yet you can conquer it."  That "you can conquer it" is the key idea in the book. Steinbeck pushes the idea that timshel means "You can" or "Thou mayest"--not 'You will' or "You must," as it is sometimes translated.  In his journal about writing the book Steinbeck said, "Here is individual responsibility and the invention of conscience. You can if you will but it is up to you. This little story turns out to be one of the most profound in the world. I always felt it was, but now I know it is."

Dems Need to Keep Some Perspective

Greenwald today:

If those who spent the last eight years vigorously opposing the radicalism, militarism, and anti-constitutional abuses of the Bush administration fail to oppose the Democratic leadership with equal fervor when they violate the same principles -- as they inevitably will -- then the humiliation of the Right and its removal from power will be emotionally satisfying, perfectly just, and a very mild improvement, but will ensure the continuation rather than the termination of most of the worst abuses of this government.

It's certainly true that there are more good national Democratic office-holders than Republicans -- it's not even close (anyone doubting that should just review the vote totals on the key votes during the Bush era).  But within the Democratic Party, the good members are vastly outnumbered by the bad.  The (understandable) euphoria over the anticipated obliteration of the extremist right-wing movement that has dominated our politics for years (which I share) shouldn't obscure the fact that the alternative -- the national Democratic Party -- shares many of the same sicknesses and is burdened by whole new ones as well, and itself will need far more opposing and changing than supporting and affirming.

While principled conservatives would probably endorse the first paragraph, they might have trouble with parts of the second.  But I think Greenwald has it right. The Republicans as a group are bloody awful, but the Dems are only slightly better. Pelosi and Reid are loathsome. The Blue Dogs, DLC, and New Democrats are deeply implicated in the worst parts of a corrupt corporate-lobbyist system that plays way too strong a role in shaping the legislative agenda. The Progressive Caucuses are a mixed bag. I'd like to see what I've been describing here as a Whig coalition of principled conservatives and "good" Democrats to be formed that would push for changing the rules of the game.

Most Republicans and Democrats are unprincipled game players who do what they have to do to advance their careers. They are passive followers who accept that the rules as they are currently configured are reality.  That was my problem with Bill and Hillary. They were both too comfortable with the current rules. But we have an historic opportunity to change them, and if they get changed these passive pols will fall into line. They are like Pavlov's dogs; they just need to be retrained to new behaviors when they hear the bell.  But someone has to do the hard work required to change the conditioning routines. That's where leadership comes in.  Will Obama bring it?  I think he understands the problem, and a part of him wants to change the game, but it's unclear whether he has the capability and courage to do it.  It's up to the Whigs among us to push him where I believe he wants to go.

Capra and the Ownership Society

Ross Douthat and Patrick Deneen have interesting takes on the significance of Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" as it relates to the current over-reaching in the credit markets. In a couple of post I've written, I've argued that this movie is a fairy tale that depicts an archetypal conflict between the left and right wings of capitalism in America. A left-wing capitalist like George Baily is by no stretch of the imagination a socialist, but he is focused on using capital to improve the lives of working people and in shoring up the middle class.  The right-wing capitalist Potter is an old-school Puritan, now morphed into a Tory whose primary interest is in maintaining his elite prerogatives and so therefore in keeping working and middle class folk under his thumb.

Douthat points to the ambiguity at the heart of the Capra vision: Did it promote the American Dream or an American nightmare? Was it at the heart of creating a broader middle class of homeowners or was it at the heart of the suburban sprawl and the prodigal mentality that lusts after McMansions and Hummers? Can you have one side of the dream without the other? 

It's an interesting question. But my preliminary answer would be that America is the place where people are free to be as self-indulgently bad or virtuous, wise or stupid, as they choose.  The only rule is that we don't hurt anyone. Otherwise anything goes. There are remarkably few restraints because of the remarkably anomic character of our consumer-driven mainstream culture. The typical conservative differs from the typical liberal in feeling a vestigial shame about breaking traditional sexual taboos, but it's not felt strongly enough to lessen the frequency that they break them. Americans who self-identify as conservative are no better and arguably worse in many respects when it comes to the various vices connected to self-indulgence. Self-restraint is hardly ever a practiced conservative virtue in the economic sphere. It's never a Republican one.

Our ideas about the good life have created a broad consumerist cultural mentality that is ridiculously superficial, disconnected, and impoverished. Conservatives, whatever their pretensions, don't have anything vital to offer that actually models the good life for our time. Liberals are so soul poor now that they don't even know what they have lost. Conservatives feel the loss more than liberals, but that doesn't mean they haven't lost it. We're all in the wasteland, and while I, like the conservatives, feel acutely the loss, I see moaning and groaning about it as conservatives are wont to do a waste of energy.

Conservatives are like exiles who long for the day when they can return home. But their situation is really like the exile who if he finally found his way home would find that it was no longer there, that it had been conquered by the enemy or laid waste by a flood. It's gone, and we all have to deal with it. The culture is what it is. We are who we are. It's gone, but it's ok. Grace abounds. We mustI try to look at it as an advantage: Unlike the the ancient Israelites and later the Egyptian Desert Fathers who fled into the desert to recover their deepest identity and sense of purpose, we have no need to flee because the wasteland has come to us.  Our job is to learn how to live in it and find ways to turn it gradually into a garden.

My inclination is to look at the excesses of the postwar period as aberrant--and this aberration, what I described the other day as the combined result of delusion and good luck, has been a huge mistake from which we must learn. I don't want to facilely dismiss Deneen's argument, but it's not Capra's fault or the fault of New Deal style politicians--it's hard to imagine how things could have played out differently. But now the question is whether the constraints that will inevitably come with our running out of luck will force us to learn the right lessons or find some other collective delusion to which we'll hitch our wagons.

People will always choose delusion if something substantive and life-giving isn't offered to them instead. That's where the cultural challenge lies. The people who know better now have nothing really to offer except their critiques. The destruction of traditional wisdom and disciplines creates an unprecedented situation in which we have enormous latitude to stumble and to get up again. We have now a peculiar kind of freedom, and the only wisdom broadly available to us is that which comes from learning from our mistakes; and in learning from our mistakes my hope is that we will stumble toward what it means to be good.

Peter Maurin famously said that he wanted to work for a society in which it was easier for people to be good, and property ownership was a part of insuring a basic level of human dignity.  It's a very American idea. Owning a modest home and some savings was for Maurin something that should be within the reach of every American. He and Capra weren't far apart in that regard. But if in the struggle between Bailey and Potter, Bailey won, his victory was Pyrrhic.  The Potters of the world figured out that it was not in their self-interest to fight Bailey's humane idea about liberalizing credit, so they coopted it to serve their own ends, and in doing so distorted and ruined it. It was inevitable, I suppose. But our allowing that to happen is the mistake the current crisis is bringing into focus and there's still a chance that we might learn the right lessons from it.

American Unexceptionalism

Would it be such a bad thing to lay aside the burden of indispensability and be ordinary again? I think it would be relief. A humbled America would allow us Americans to be ourselves without all the pretense that we are more than we are, that we are exceptional in some way.  We're not, we never were. We made a contribution--lots of nations have. I'm sure we'll contribute more in the future, but the idea American Exceptionalism was always a combination of inflated jingoistic fantasy and good luck. But it looks like our luck is running out, and with it the fantasy is burst. But it's ok. It's ok to be human, to have a more down-to-earth, less fanciful idea about who we are and what we can do. And I think it will be easier then to live up to the ideal of our best American self. Excessive power and excessive wealth corrupt, and we have been deeply corrupted by both.

I am not worried that we will not recover from the madness of Iraq and the de-regulated financial markets; I am worried that we won't learn the right lessons and regain our sanity. After recovering from the initial horror after 9/11, I was moved by the sympathy that the world extended to us, and I thought then that this could perhaps be one of those shocks that knocks some sense into us. Maybe some good could come of it.  Maybe this experience would help us to understand what other nations suffer because--since WWII at least--we never suffer the way other nations do.  We're so insulated in this country and have only the most abstract understanding, if we have any at all, about the kind of suffering endured by so many people who are not us. Maybe this would enable us us to connect, that it would humanize us.

Fat chance. Instead because we had this ridiculously inflated sense of our importance in a so-called unipolar world, we flailed out like a wounded animal, we become the raging bull that stupidly rampaged through the Middle East, wreaking havoc, smashing everything in our path. Instead of learning from our suffering, we just went and created more. The stupidity of it, from top to bottom.  And why?  Why? And to what effect?  On the one hand it has ruined us morally. And now add to the enormous financial cost of the war this economic collapse. The utter bankruptcy of the Reagan framework has been exposed. We're getting what we in our self-indulgent grandiosity and greed deserve.  A discipline we were unable to impose on ourselves reality is imposing on us instead. Reality has a way of deflating our pretensions, but it's still an open question whether we'll learn the right lesson this time around.

If we don't, I think what Patrick Deneen wrote last week points to a very real possiblility:

...perhaps the entirety of ancient and medieval political thought was correct, and democracy is actually an untenable regime. Before our age that regarded it to be apostasy to utter these words, the longstanding view among political philosophers was that democracy was a deficient regime subject to internal self-destruction due to the ultimate inability of a populace to govern itself. Democracy was, quite simply, the rule of the many over the few, and subject to the same sorts of temptations to tyranny as any regime. Because "the many" (hoi polloi) exhibited the tendency toward mob behavior that descended to the lowest common denominator, it was widely held in antiquity until very recent times - about 150 years ago - that democracy always and ultimately devolved into anarchic mob self-indulgence.

About 150 years ago, confidence in democracy grew, in part as a result of the 50-100 year evidence of the success that resulted from grafting democracy to liberalism. Liberalism provided protections to the few (wealthy) against the many (poor) by enshrining a set of rights - particularly rights of property - and arranging governments of divided powers and checks and balances. However, its true genius lay in draining the traditional curse of democracy - resentment of the many toward the (wealthy) few - by means of encouraging a dynamic growth economy. By dispelling the belief that every person was born and destined to remain in a certain fixed station, democracy became defined above all as a kind of mobility - upward, downward, onward and westward. This was the genius of Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of democracy in Democracy in America, his awareness that modern democracy more than merely a form of government, but a set of mores that above all blasted apart the ancient arrangements of aristocracy.

So does the end of American Democracy coincide with the end of its open-ended, no limits mobile imagination of itself?  For surely our becoming ordinary means that we can no longer see ourselves as unlimited.  And so do we become now more like the social democracies Canada or France, or do we become more like the oligarchies typified by Brazil or Mexico?

After this orgy of inflated self-importance and self-indulgence, is it possible for Americans to relearn republican virtue?  Or is there a fundamental lack of discipline in the American character that makes that impossible? We're at a crossroads here, and if we're not already, we need to wake up to what's at stake. I don't know if there is enough ballast in the American character to prevent our capsizing should the winds continue blow hard. Things could get very ugly here--a lot will depend on what kind of leadership Obama brings.  I still have hopes that he will be the right man at the time we need him, but we should be prepared for what will happen if he isn't. 

Quote of the Day: Chris Hayes

But if, in the actual lived world of politics, Hayek has mostly been honored in the breach, then what to make of that rump caucus of the right that still clings to him? That is: how seriously should we take the intellectual tradition of the free-market right? Was it all just a convenient front for capital all along? And is there anything morally and intellectually salvageable from the wreckage what it has wrought?  At TPM Book Club discussion of Frank's Wrecking Crew

Why is it that, as Hayes puts it, "the actual real-world result of the ascendancy of a putative "free-market" philosophy has resulted in a larger, more coercive state, one that uses the power of Big Government to benefit the interests of Big Capital"?  It's because Libertarians are the unwitting allies of tyranny.

Conservatism's King Lear Moment (Updated)

There is a rich treasury of conservative thought waiting to be mined, contemplated, reinterpreted and adapted for our particular time and culture. Read Nash, then read further. We need to think hard within our own intellectual tradition. We need to understand why it is that we're losing people, especially the young. To disdain intellection and intellectuals is a dead end. It's a culture war in which we on the Right have turned our guns on ourselves.  Rod Dreher.

I will be very interested to see how  conservative intellectuals respond to the widespread repudiation of the party most of them have supported in the last thirty years.  Conservatives like Sullivan and Larison caught on earlier, but others are catching on now, that whatever is principled and valid in conservative thought has been contaminated by its association with the agenda of the far right. People like Dreher still think of Reagan as their ideal and for some reason seem incapable of seeing how Reagan was a front man for this far-right agenda and that the seed planted in 1980  has produced the bitter fruit we are all eating today. The naivete or blindness of so many conservative intellectuals sometimes just takes my breath away.  So now the more honest of these conservatives are going through their King Lear moment. It will be good for them to have everything stripped away so that they will see themselves more clearly, even if what they see is hard to bear, but they will learn what and who is worth loving and what never was.

I think that conservatism in this country is largely inspired, not by a positive, creative impulse, but by a rejection of secular liberalism, and I sympathize. And while I understand conservative concerns about statism, I think they exaggerate the dangers posed by New Deal-style social democracy. Nevertheless, to have allowed these legitimate concerns to have driven them enthusiastically into the arms of the people who have crafted the GOP agenda over the last thirty years is at best stupid and at worst an unconscionable refusal to see what was always in plain sight. 

A litmus test for me for such unconscionable stupidity would be whether or not such a conservative intellectual voted for Bush in '04. I think the blindness is rooted in a deep-seated aversion for everything they see as the evils of Liberalism that they associate with the Democratic Party, and they could not, and in some cases even now cannot, bring themselves align themselves with that. They see the many dust motes in the eyes of Liberal Dems, but not the logs in their own. So this Lear moment will be clarifying in that regard--at least for honest conservatives.

I have often described myself as temperamentally conservative. I like small, human-scaled things. I prefer things to move slowly rather than too quickly. I think the great traditional religions are an essential resource for the flourishing of human culture. I think there is much about modernity that directly follows from the rationalist assumptions of the Enlightenment that has produced the soul crushing world in which we now live, and I think that for all we've gained in the last five hundred years, we have lost more. I think that conservatives have always been partisans of don't-let-them-take-away-even-more. 

But who is responsible for the taking away?  Liberals?  Yes, if you want to count among them those thinkers who embrace unencumbered free-market capitalism.  But who are they except the most persistent drivers of the agenda in the Republican Party since after the Civil War. Social Democracy arose to fill the vacuum created when traditional ways of finding a social balance were destroyed by capitalism.

Quote of the Day: Tom Engelhardt

In the last year, the Bush administration's top officials have sunk much of their increasingly lame-duck energy into pacifying Iraq, and so getting it out of the news and the spotlight at least long enough for election '08 to happen (and undoubtedly long enough as well for them to get out of town in January). And then what happens? The administration is ambushed, not by Sunni militants or Shiite radicals but by its own people: investment bankers, lenders, hedge-fund managers, financial management types -- the very people for whom they organized the world and who had long been playing fast and loose (and profitably) with our economic system. The ambush, of course, took the form of a financial meltdown of massive proportions for which, as in Iraq in 2003, the administration had clearly done no significant preplanning or war-gaming. And, as with the insurgency then, so now they operated by the increasingly worn seats of their pants. Their attempted $700 billion "surge," as stock exchanges around the world indicated yesterday, wasn't likely to pacify a global financial system near cardiac arrest.  (Read more.)

Second Debate (Updated)

I was working tonight so didn't see it. Have it taped, but probably won't watch it. Quick scan of online reaction suggests that it was not interesting enough to sit through and Obama won it pretty much the way he won the first one--maybe this time he was a little more assertive. Whatever.

The race is over. The debates aren't going to change anything, and there's nothing more to learn from them. Everybody's mind is pretty much made up. And in the time between the debates the slime will still be slung, but it won't stick. Nothing anybody says at this point will make a difference. Even if McCain proposed the most brilliant, fairest-minded solution to get us out of this crisis, it wouldn't save him because he and his party have no credibility. And becaus anybody with any sense understands that nothing either candidate says now is anything but the vaguest indicator of what he will do once elected.

The economy is the only thing that matters and the Dems win that argument by default, no matter what either says he's going to do about it. The only thing that change the dynamics is some unforeseen event of the October-Surprise variety. It could happen, but don't expect it. I suppose you can't by definition expect a surprise, but you know what I mean.

***

UPDATE: From Eunomia the most basic reason nothing McCain says has credibility:

Even among McCain critics, there are some who still insist on coming up with excuses for the former media darling, and they echo the excuses journalists have made for McCain for years: sure, he’s lying about this or that, but he’s clearly uncomfortable doing it, which proves that he’s actually a good guy.  More recently, McCain has seemed angrier and grumpier than usual, prompting the same excuses: he doesn’t enjoy doing this kind of campaigning, and it shows, which somehow makes it better.  This has been the strange ethical standard applied to McCain for as long as I can remember.  According to this odd view, if someone is not very proficient at lying and smearing his opponents and gives the impression that even he knows what he’s saying is nonsense, that somehow proves that he is honest and decent at heart.  The correct view is exactly the opposite–if McCain knows the truth, doesn’t really believe what he’s saying and tells lies unconvincingly, that is evidence of the far deeper corruption of the man.  Instead of being badly misguided or misinformed, he willfully says things that he knows have no merit or that he knows are unworthy of anyone in his position.  In short, being a bad smear artist does not make someone ethical or honorable; it makes him unethical and incompetent.  

And Cindy says that Obama has run the dirtiest campaign in U.S. history.  What is it about Republicans and their beam-in-the-eye syndrome which compels them to accuse Dems of doing what the GOP is doing are even when the Dems are not?  Is it simply naive projection, or is it a conscious strategy to neutralize public perception about how awful their behavior is?

Slow-Motion Apocalypse

(Revised 10/5 am) One of the most bizarre aspects about what we're going through as a nation now is how little our sense of normalcy has been affected by what is happening. Sure, people are worried about this and that, but people are always worried about this and that. Nothing in any deeply felt way is different. It's as if we simply don't have the imagination to grasp the significance. 

Until we are actually experiencing something cinematically apocalyptic, it's easy to assume that nothing much has really changed--because it hasn't. Kids go to school every morning, and most of their parents go to work. People watch their favorite TV shows. The baseball playoffs go on, and and so do college and pro football. Cars are on the streets.  People are in the parks. There's such a profound disconnect between what's happening and our experience of it. It's dizzying. We are egregiously disconnected from the reality of what's happening; we're all having the experience but missing the meaning.

When we think about previous political or social apocalyptic events--the American Revolution, the French and Russian revolutions, the crash of the economy after 1929, the ascent of the Nazi party in Germany--we look back upon them and see only the most dramatic, cinematic moments. Do you not think that life, for the most part, went on as usual in the weeks and days leading up to these high-profile cinematic moments?  Do you think most people really expected things to be changed significantly in the way that subsequently they were?

We don't see now in our imaginations the incremental series of events that led to the big, game-changing moment, and 99% of people contemporary with the run up to these moments wouldn't have seen or understood them either. Because those incremental events occurred mostly out of sight or, like our hearing about the way reporters were treated during the GOP convention in St. Paul, we hear about what's happening, but then shrug our shoulders and say, "So? If Brian Williams and Wolf Blitzer aren't making a big deal about it, why should I?" And do you think the St. Paul police understoodd what they were doing, what they were participating in?  They just saw themselves as doing their job.

Do you think that even the people whom we now see has the architects of those epochal historical events understood the significance of what they were involved in? Did the younger Robespierre envision the Terror?  Did the German generals who supported Hitler foresee the holocaust. If you told them beforehand that's where things were headed, would they have believed you?  These huge events are the cumulative effect of so many individuals who in the pursuit of their own small goals and plans just react to events, and in the choices they make, they either abet or resist this larger movement of history.

VP Debate

I don't disagree with the conventional wisdom about this debate. Palin did as well as could be expected in a format where there are no follow-up questions. She was able to say what she had been prepped to say.  As a result she helped herself and staunched the bleeding. 

But that should be no cause for GOP rejoicing. She said nothing interesting or surprising.  She's thin, thin, gruel.  She did nothing to change the fundamentals, and the fundamentals are determined by Americans being sick of Iraq and scared about the economy.  Nothing she said, no matter how cutely, provided any real evidence that a McCain administration would be anything different from the Bush one responsible for both foreign and domestic messes. 

This new GOP talking point trying to inoculate Republicans for blame for the mess they've created by accusing Dems of playing the blame game or looking too much to the past is hilarious, as is the whole strategy that she and he are running against the corrupt Beltway system. I think enough Americans understand how ridiculous these talking points are, and are refusing to buying it. The Dems could do a more emphatic job making sure those too slow or too uninformed to get the joke get it explained to them, but it doesn't matter that much.

Palin will now recede into the background restricted to appearance before friendly base rallies.  She's a failed bet. The rest of the campaign will be about McCain/Schmidt throwing as much slime at Obama as they can get their hands on, and I doubt it will work. Assuming nothing disastrously unpredictable occurs, Obama's job then will be simply to keep trotting steadily to the finish line.