I’m back

Previously, whenever I let time go by without posting on this blog, visits would drop off to a daily average of 0 until I resumed; this time, though, I have been surprised to note a steady trickle of visitors throughout. One day recently I actually hit double digits. So in spite of too much else on my plate, I have decided to start writing again. Let’s see how long I can keep it up this time.

Let’s see, what has been going on since my last post… Oh yes, there was an election, wasn’t there. More or less as I expected – or at least as I remember expecting, I haven’t checked to see whether what I actually wrote here confirms this – the Romney campaign focused on economic conservatism at the expense of other flavors, but failed to come up with anything  to make such a platform more attractive to the general public than it has been since 1929. Romney seems to have taken it for granted that the widespread and understandable disappointment in the rate of the recovery since 2008 would translate automatically into an eagerness to embrace the Republican alternative; whereas in fact lots of us still blame Republican policies for the collapse itself and believe that returning to them can only make the situation worse. In fact the GOP has done as well as it has in presidential elections since World War II by focusing on things other than its classical economic program: patriotism, fear of street crime, concerns about increasing cultural diversity and the decline of sexual morality, all that sort of thing. The one time I can remember when a Republican won on largely economic grounds was 1980, when neither candidate actually embraced his own party’s traditional position: Carter did not run as much of a New Dealer, and Reagan claimed to be offering something radically new (which his running mate had actually called “voodoo” when running against him in the primaries). If the parties that year had nominated Bush Sr and Ted Kennedy instead, then maybe the election would have been a clear referendum on the New Deal. But we didn’t have one, most GOP candidates have done their best to avoid one, and Romney’s going all out for one seems to show an unprecedentedly naive trust in his own talking points. Now I’m not saying he couldn’t have won such a referendum, that an argument couldn’t have been found to win his case for him; I do tend to think it couldn’t, but my point here is that it didn’t seem to occur to Romney that some new or more vigorous argument was needed.

Nevertheless the election was a rather close one, nationally, though individual states and counties seem to be turning more solidly “red” or “blue” than ever before. So polarization is still very much in the  news. A couple of weeks ago I finally read The Big Sort, the 2008 book on how liberals and conservatives seem to be crystallizing into two separate cultures with ever less contact and communication between them. I’ve also been going back to the origins of two-party politics in Restoration England. Maybe I’ll manage to post something on these subjects in the days to come.

Wish me luck!

 

Romney-Ryan

Well.

I’ve said before that Romney wanted to make this election a referendum on the New Deal, and now he seems to have done exactly that. I really don’t believe he picked Ryan under pressure from the Tea Party; if it looked like he could coast to victory he might have gone with a more boring choice, but Ryan is just the kind of hard-core conservative who is most compatible with what we can plausibly assume to be Romney’s own beliefs. (Although I am not the first to note the irony, given his touting of his business experience as essential to the ability to lead the country, that his running mate’s entire career has been in Congress.)

As I’ve also said, the whole primary contest wasn’t about Mitt’s degree of conservatism but his particular flavor of conservatism. If he’d picked someone better known for religious-right culture-war credentials, or for race- or immigrant-baiting, that would look more like panic.

So now it’s Romney-Ryan, and everyone in both parties is professing to be delighted with the fact. Actually I think Ezra Klein hit the nail on the head when he wrote:

Both Democrats and conservatives are going to get the exact debate they wanted. I’m not so sure about Republicans.

Because there is a very real possibility that senior citizens and other beneficiaries of government programs will totally freak out over the Ryan budget, making the election another 1964. Maybe not, but at least there’s a clearer choice than we’ve had in a while. No side issues like patriotism or sexual morality to induce people who don’t really buy conservative economic theory to vote Republican anyway; nor even a chance that people will vote Republican because they like the sound of the anti-“big government” slogans, without thinking through what they mean in practice. The Obama campaign will have and will take every opportunity to spell it out in gory detail. For the first time, if the Republicans do win, no one can deny that they have a clear mandate to roll up the safety net and run the country like the Depression never happened. And if they lose, it will be equally clear that all their victories over the past few decades were due to those side issues they managed to wrap themselves in. We shall see.

Another commentator, Amy Walter of ABC news, argues that the average swing voter doesn’t want an ideological battle:

They aren’t spending their evenings debating the benefits of Hayek or Keynesian economic models. They are just trying to figure out which candidate is capable of getting something done. They will reward the politician who succeeds in getting things moving again. But that shouldn’t be taken as proof that voters are endorsing the philosophical underpinnings of that success.

In other words, voters are looking less at ideology and more at competency.

Tell that to Mike Dukakis. I mean, Walter may be right that a significant number of voters do feel that way, but it is still unrealistic. There’s no point in discussing competence if we disagree radically about what we want done in the first place. Clearly President Obama, whatever one thinks of his personal abilities, could have carried out at least somewhat more of his agenda if he hadn’t been obstructed by the Republicans in Congress;  where we disagree is on whether this would have been a good thing or a bad thing. There’s been a lot of handwringing in the pundit class for decades over “failed Presidencies,” but the fact is most of us can think of some things we are glad that one or another President has failed at; we’re just split down the middle over which things. If either side wins a decisive victory this November, maybe it will put the question behind us for a while…

More about Mitt

The issue of Governor Romney’s experience at Bain is not so much whether anything he did was ethically wrong, or disqualifies him from the presidency; the issue as I see it is his own insistence that his background in venture capitalism is a uniquely valid qualification for the presidency, that he is thereby better suited for the job than someone whose job experience has been primarily political.

Now people have reached the highest office in the land by a number of different paths, including military service (especially in the aftermath of a great war). I don’t think it can be said that any honest job disqualifies a candidate. My point is that even in the golden age of pro-business Republican domination, from the election of McKinley in 1896 down to the Great Depression, most GOP presidents and candidates were primarily politicians – had spent much of their working lives in elective office – and were, I think, quite proud of the fact. McKinley himself had been a congressman for 15 years, then governor; Teddy Roosevelt – well, he had done just about everything; Taft had never been elected to anything but had been a judge, a colonial governor (!) and a cabinet member; Hughes, who almost won in ’16, had been a judge and governor of NY; Harding, a governor and senator; Coolidge, who famously stated that “the business of America is business,” rose through the ranks of Msssachusetts politics to become governor of the state, then VP.

Hoover was the one real instance of someone whose path to the presidency was largely through the private sector, having made a fortune as a mining engineer; however, he then became well known and respected for his work organizing humanitarian activities during and after the First World War, and served in the cabinet during the 1920’s.

As I said, no honest job should be seen as necessarily disqualifying a candidate; but even at its most pro-business, the Republican Party always had a certain respect for public service and political life. Romney, who often seems to be running away from his one term in public office, is something new, the culmination of the post-World War II conservative movement’s delegitimization of government itself. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this plays itself out in the coming campaign.

Another return to BlogSpace

OK, I’m back.

One more time.

I see my last post was in January, dealing with the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hosanna-Tabor case. An old friend turned up out of the blue a few weeks ago and told me that he read it. Didn’t understand a word. I said that’s fine, religion-clause law doesn’t really make much sense anyway.

So what shall I do now? Well, first of all, admit the obvious: Mitt Romney did manage to lock up the Republican nomination for the Presidency. I didn’t think he’d do it, at least quite so easily, but he did. Money helped, and the support of a lot of party establishment types who feared a Goldwater-scale disaster if they nominated Gingrich or Santorum.

There’s a lot more to say about this; there’s still a lot that isn’t quite so obvious yet, including of course the outcome in November. Here I shall just flag a point or two, which I’ve alluded to before.

The primary campaign, for all the apparent predestination of the result, did take a few interesting turns, not least of all the way Gingrich and Santorum tried briefly to differentiate their evangelical, Christian conservatism from Romney’s pure business-first variety. For just a moment we had a glimpse of an argument over not just which candidate was the most conservative, but whose kind of conservatism was the real, essential conservatism. Romney won the primaries, but the argument may well not be over; President Obama’s recent references to Romney’s business background may well keep alive the doubts of some evangelicals over whether their only decades-old alliance with the laissez-faire movement was really made in heaven. Romney for his part seems determined to make the general election into what most leaders of his party had been successfully avoiding since the 1930’s:  a referendum on the New Deal. Under Bush, the neo-conservatives thought they could make the country forget the legacy of Vietnam; Romney seems to think he can do the same with the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, it appears that one aspect of the Goldwater movement of 1964 – the infiltration of the party organization so that the conservative hard-core could never again be counted out – is being replicated to some degree by the Ron Paul campaign, which didn’t win a single state outright but elected enough people in caucuses to have them percolate into positions of real influence up at the state level, not only in the presidential nominating process but in lower-level nominations and party offices. For a while it looked like the Paul and Romney supporters were co-operating, in at least a few caucus states, to keep Santorum out; but now the Paulists are out to win all they can for themselves.

All very interesting indeed. I hope to be back over the next few days with more about the elections, as well as my other favorite topics.

A few last words on Mitt

… at least for now.

To sum up: Mitt seems to think of  himself as the kind of candidate who dominated Republican politics in the era from McKinley to Hoover: one who believes, as Coolidge said, that “the business of America is business.” I could also cite the Eisenhower cabinet member who said “What’s good for General Motors is good for the United States,” except that Romney’s position on the auto industry bailout needs some interpretation…

Unfortunately for his prospects, no Republican has won the Presidency since 1928 as a pure business-first candidate. Eisenhower won as a moderate who accepted the New Deal; Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes won by appealing to the sorts of sentiment that McKinley disdained and let Bryan represent, the fear (aggravated by the events of the 1960s) of urbanisation and cosmopolitanism and immorality among the young…

The closest thing since the Depression to a GOP national victory based on economic issues was 1980; but Carter did not run as FDR, nor Reagan as Hoover. Reagan won on an economic platform that his running mate, a far more traditional Republican, had previously derided as “Voodoo.”

If in the course of the year the economy starts looking so bad that Romney can run by just pointing at it, and not going into his own ideas of what to do about it, he may well win the Presidency. If not, probably not.

In days to come I plan to blog more regularly than I’ve done recently. I’ll look in on the campaign again from time to time, but will continue to address my broad range of interests.

Thanks for looking in!

More about the GOP

The latest turn in the GOP primary contest, in which Newt Gingrich and others who had all along been attacking Gov. Romney from the political right are now criticizing him for his profit-seeking activities in the private sector, has come to many as a surprise.

To me it is a reminder that the alliance we have come to take for granted between religious conservatism and laissez-faire capitalism is a fairly recent phenomenon.

Less than a century ago William Jennings Bryan, who in Vachel Lindsay’s words “scourged the elephant plutocrats” throughout his career, and most famously at the Democratic convention of 1896 where he proclaimed the following –

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

– ended his days in Tennessee prosecuting a certain John Thomas Scopes.

William McKinley (with whom Karl Rove liked to compare George W. Bush, himself taking the role of sidekick Mark Hanna)  beat Bryan twice for the Presidency precisely by letting him have the Bible thumpers and xenophobes who had until then tended to vote Republican, appealing instead to the urban and largely immigrant masses in the Northeast and Midwest who, however severe their own issues with the plutocracy, saw no place for themselves in Bryan’s rural Evangelical  vision of America.

So what changed? Several things, I think.

First the New Deal of the 1930’s. It addressed the grievances of all who suffered most from the Depression, and at first it drew their support whatever their regional or demographic background; but after a while the buildup of Federal bureaucracy which it required left Bryan’s old Western constituencies feeling that Washington had become at least as hostile to their vision as Wall Street had been.

Then the Cold War: with Stalin’s Communism as a universally acknowledged enemy, which threatened capitalism and religion both, people came to feel that both were somehow on the same side, both part of the America that needed to be defended.

The articulation of a rigorous but “Big Tent”-ish conservative ideology in the 1950’s, most eloquently by William F. Buckley; Barry Goldwater’s luring  Southern whites away from populism by linking it with Civil Rights; finally the great parental freakout of the late Sixties – all these things combined to produce the constellation of political forces that seems to us so natural.

So I am not at all surprised by occasional signs that like all composite things, it is prone to decay…

So it’s Mitt after all?

My friend John  has been blogging all along that Mitt Romney is the inevitable GOP nominee this year, the ongoing parade of crazies being hardly more than a sideshow. I never quite thought Mitt could manage to win with so much of the party base having such a profound dislike toward him; but thanks to the failure of any of the right-wing non-Mitts to emerge from the pack (Ron Paul, with his stance against war whether military or anti-drug, hardly counts as a classic right-winger) it seems John just may turn out to have been correct.

I still don’t think it was a foregone conclusion; if Gingrich had found a way to counter the negative ads in Iowa, or if he had sunk farther faster and left the field clear for Santorum, we could still be looking at a triumph of the hard right. But the combination of luck and megabucks at Romney’s disposal seems to have turned the trick for him.

Which means we can look forward to a whole year of Gail Collins, one of my favorite newspaper columnists, reminding us at least once a  week of the time Mitt drove to Canada with his dog on the roof of the car.

Oh well.

Romney in ’12?

My friend John Burciaga has posted – here, and here – some excellent reasons why Mitt Romney should be the Republican party’s nominee for President, for the good of the party and the country.

It is not however clear to me that these reasons will persuade a majority of Republican primary and caucus participants.

Mitt does have a natural appeal to a large part of the party’s base: that part which is most concerned with economic policy, and is impressed mainly by a candidate’s business experience. In the 2008 primaries he did well in the northernmost states. (Also wherever there is a large concentration of Mormons.) But will this be enough to win? It seems to me that among the grass roots of the party the business-minded are outnumbered by the social/religious conservatives, who have a strong distaste for Romney because he clearly isn’t one of them – not only because of his Mormonism (evangelicals generally don’t consider him a “Christian”) but because he never particularly supported their issues until he started running for national office.

Bachmann may have been a flash in the pan, but Perry has much more solid credentials, political preferences aside. He is after all the governor of a large and prosperous state, the longest continuously serving governor in the country (someone recently pointed out that he’s the only current governor who was in office on 9/11/01). And while his views on many subjects may seem way out to people like me and most of my friends, they aren’t that far from the mainstream in today’s GOP. John expects the grass roots of the party to be overcome by a wave of (well, what seems to us to be) good sense; if that were the way it worked, we could have gotten a President Romney back in the 1960’s… Of course a lot can happen between now and next year’s convention, but as of now, I see no compelling reason not to regard Perry as the front-runner for the nomination.

Over the next few days I may write some about how I see the present situation in historical context; I think I have some interesting quirky stuff to say.