I’ve written before on the topic of how the Republican Party in general, and conservatives in particular, might react if the party loses the 2012 Presidential election. With some scenarios positing that the Romney-Gingrich battle could last for months, and signs fairly apparent that hard-core conservatives still aren’t sold on the idea of Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee, the topic is coming up all over the place now. At The New Yorker, George Packer argues that if the nominee is Romney and the GOP loses, it will empower a reaction from the party’s right wing that will likely lead to a 1972-style electoral disaster down the line:

[W]hat if Romney wins the nomination and loses the election? This scenario is still the odds-on favorite. To deduce the consequences among Republican activists, let’s imagine a counter-factual from 1972: pit Nixon against Humphrey or Muskie or Jackson, a candidate imposed on the liberal Democratic base much as conservative Republicans feel Romney is being imposed on them. A Nixon win would have convinced the liberal base that the party had not been true to its core. The theology would have hardened a little more. Next time, they’d nominate a real liberal, a candidate of the grassroots.

It’s easy to picture hard-core Republicans coming to the same conclusion: Romney and the party élite betrayed the party’s principles (again, after McCain) and gave the country four more years of the hated Obama. Never again! Next time, a real conservative! (Go back another twenty years, to the G.O.P. convention of 1952, and Senator Everett Dirksen, of Illinois, a supporter of the conservative Robert Taft, pointing at Thomas E. Dewey, the party’s moderate two-time loser, and thundering, “Don’t take us down the path to defeat again!”)

(…)

If Romney wins the nomination and loses the election, the party will continue down into the same dark hole where Palin, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Santorum, and now Gingrich all lurk. So a sane Republican has a terrible dilemma, today in Florida and beyond. That’s what happens when political parties are captured by a minority of fervent believers.

It would be better for the Republican Parry in the long term, Packer argues, if Gingrich were to win the nomination and lead the party to what seems to be a certain, probably massive, electoral defeat in November. At that point, it’s likely that the Party establishment  and the fiscally conservative wing of the party will assert itself by making the argument that taking the party down the road to Gingrich-ian radicalism was the wrong idea. In the end, it could mean a saner GOP in the model of men like Chris Christie and Jon Huntsman rather than Michele Bachmann and Allan West.

At this point, though, it looks like Romney will be the nominee notwithstanding Gingrich’s challenge and, as if to confirm Packer’s hypothesis, Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator is already talking about a “take no prisoners” strategy if Romney fails to beat Obama:

If Romney is nominated the hard-edged bashing of Gingrich will vanish when the opponent becomes President Obama. Why? Because, Romney and the Establishment GOP will run the updated version of the Dewey-Ford mortgage driven campaign. After all. A presidential campaign, to quote Romney, isn’t talk radio. One can’t attack Barack Obama in this fashion. One can’t say the reason this presidency is an utter failure is because of an Alinsky-ite, far left philosophy. Nooooooooo. One must say simply and politely that Obama is, to quote Romney directly, just “over his head.”

In other words, if Romney loses Lord and those who agree with him will argue that it happened because the Romney campaign wasn’t tough enough against Obama, that it didn’t go after his alleged “socialism,” or that he didn’t bring the Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers up again for the umpteenth time. They’ll point to his loss, and McCain’s in 2008 and Dole’s loss in 1996 as another piece of evidence in support of their argument that the GOP loses when he doesn’t nominate a candidate that’s conservative enough. Of course, there’s really no evidence for this argument at all. Dole lost in 1996 because he was running against a popular, telegenic, well-liked incumbent President in time when the economy was booming and was, well, Bob Dole. I’m not sure that a Republican candidate with more personality than Dole would have done any better, but it’s fairly certain that Dole didn’t lose that election because of doubts about his conservative bona fides. John McCain lost because he was a Republican trying to succeed an incredibly unpopular Republican President in the middle of the most several financial crisis in a generation, and because he ran one of the worst campaigns in modern American political history. A better run campaign might have held on to a few of the traditionally Republican states that Obama won that year, but I doubt any Republican could have won that election under the circumstances that existed at the time. If Mitt Romney loses in 2012, it won’t be because isn’t conservative enough, it will be because he didn’t give the American public sufficient reason to fire the incumbent President.

Of course, those facts don’t matter in the middle of a heated political battle for the soul of a political party, and the right wing of the GOP seems to have convinced itself of the fact that all it needs to do is nominate the most conservative candidate and it will instantly win. The one example the point to in support of this argument, of course, is Ronald Reagan. The problem is that Reagan was not a typical politician and he was able to overcome many of the arguments that were made about his being too radical due to his personality, the skills he gained as an actor, and a connection to middle America that Republicans don’t really seem to have any more. Furthermore, it’s not even really true that Ronald Reagan was the “most conservative” candidate running for the Republican nomination in 1980; that title should probably go to someone like Phil Crane, the former Congressman from Illinois who was also a candidate that year. Furthermore Reagan didn’t beat Carter because he was “more conservative,” he beat Carter because the economy was bad and getting worse and, between the Iranian Hostage Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States seemed to be losing ground abroad. The additional fact that Carter was a sub-part President and a bad campaigner helped too.

Noah Millman doesn’t think that the GOP would be torn asunder by a Romney loss in November:

Regardless of who the GOP lost with this year, I wouldn’t expect a profound soul searching. The Democrats had to lose a run of five out of six Presidential elections over two decades to thoroughly remake their party. If you want to know what will likely follow a Romney loss, take a look at what followed Dole’s loss in 1996.

The thing about that is that I don’t think the conservative base would be all that eager for another George W. Bush either, even if it meant winning the White House. Between the increased political activism by conservatives that came with the rise of the Tea Party, and the false sense of history that this community has developed by sheltering itself inside the talk radio/Fox News bubble, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a 2016 nomination fight that starts years earlier and ends up being much more contentious, with the result being a candidate so far to the right that the GOP ends up losing its third Presidential election in a row in 2016. Maybe by then, they’ll be willing to listen to the people that have been warning them all along.

 Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

(…)

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

The article goes on to explain how the advantage that Apple found in China wasn’t just cheap semi-skilled labor, but the economies of scale and speed with which requests could be complied with that really sealed the deal. The story about the iPhone’s screen tells the tale most effectively:

For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.

Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The Chinese plant got the job.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

(…)

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

The article is already the subject of much commentary on both the political side, as tracked by Memeorandum, and among technology writers tracked at Techmeme. Tyler Cowen suggests that it’s reason for us to spend less time worrying about the wage gap with China and other nations, and more time worrying about the economies of scale issues that the article raises.  Henry Blodget makes a starker point that makes one wonder exactly how the United States could ever get the “iPhone jobs” back:

 [Y]es, money is part of why all of our gadgets are built in China. But what started a couple of decades ago as a reach for efficiency has now resulted in the entire electronics-manufacturing ecosystem being lifted up and transferred to China.

Apple doesn’t build iPhones in the United States, in other words, because there is no longer an ecosystem here to support that manufacturing. There’s no supply chain, there aren’t enough super-low-cost workers, and there are not enough mid-level engineers.  And many Americans looking for work are still hoping for a return to jobs, salaries, and lifestyles that have simply disappeared.

This is a complex problem, and there’s no easy solution. But it’s a problem this country is going to have to fix. Or the massive middle class that once drove America’s prosperity will just cease to exist.

Of course, the problem with American politics is that easy solutions are all we ever hear from politicians because that’s all that voters want to hear. Any politician who dares to present ideas that cannot be summarized into nice easy sound bites usually ends up getting ignored, and all that putting out a detailed plan of any kind tends to accomplish is that it leaves the candidate in question open to more and more criticism. More importantly, though, the American people don’t want to hear things like Blodget says from their political leaders. Just ask John McCain when he bluntly stated during the Michigan Primary in 2008 that many of the manufacturing jobs that went overseas weren’t going to come back. He was right, but he was roundly denounced not only be Democrats by members of his own party. Pessimism, or to put it better honesty, doesn’t play well in politics. Americans want to hear that things are going to get better, quickly, that we will always be the leader of the world, and that we are the greatest nation ever to exist in the history of the world. Admitting that we’ve got a serious problem and that there’s pain to come in the future? Yea, try to make that sell in a race for the White House

Yves Smith doesn’t share in the praise for the article and notes that the authors missed a very important fact in their story about those iPhone glass screens:

So basically, the Chinese funded a completely non-economical glass R&D facility IN ANTICIPATION of getting the Apple order. There is no way anyone would build a factory like that unless the money was close to free. It already had glass samples in stock! The “some subsidies trickled down” sounds way too innocent. It sounds more like someone recognized the importance of Apple as a marquee customer, and whether the push came from the officialdom or businessmen with the right connections in high places, it doesn’t really matter. This project smells of having serious government backing. How can private businesses anywhere compete with that?

They can’t, of course, but I also don’t think that anyone is seriously suggesting that the United States can or should adopt anything resembling Chinese industrial policy. For one thing, it goes against the entire ethos of our economic and legal systems not to mention our culture. For another, it doesn’t strike me as an efficient use of resources. China has been pumping billions into projects like this, and many of them have laid dormant. That’s seems to me like the classic signs of a bubble, when and how it pops is another question. Smith also points out that Apple may not be the best example of  how and why an American manufacturer prefers to rely on overseas labor. Changing the screen design mere weeks before product roll out, be points out, is as much an example of Jobs’s erratic genius as anything else and isn’t necessarily a sign of good project management. The only reason it worked out well for Apple, it seems, is because the Chinese firm was able to push its workers to work longer hours than any American ever would. In other words, Chinese near-slave labor saved Steve Jobs’s ass.

Notwithstanding these valid criticisms, the article raises compelling points that should deeply concern all of us. As Blodget notes, it’s principally the lack of the infrastructure needed for the kind of manufacturing that Apple, or any cellphone or electronics manufacturer for that matter, would need that makes it unlikely that those kinds of jobs will return any time soon. Moreover, thanks to offshoring, advances in technology, and increases in worker productivity, there are entire classes of employment that either no longer exist anymore or don’t require nearly as many bodies as they used to. Many of these are the semi-skilled positions that were once a ticket to a middle class lifestyle. The same thing goes for the positions that used to be waiting for college graduates, and are now harder to come by. Where, exactly, are these jobs going to come from?

There is one factor the article cites that we could do something about. We don’t graduate nearly enough engineers in this country, partly because American college students seem inclined to pick “easy” majors rather than one of the STEM subject areas. We also don’t do much to encourage foreign students who come to the United States to study in these areas to stay here after they graduate. On that last point, many have suggested that we should offer H1-B visa’s to any foreign college student who agrees to stay and work in the United States after graduating. It’s a reasonable idea, as is any the encourages immigration by high-skilled workers and professionals, but right now immigration policy is ham-strung by a Republican Party unwilling to compromise at all until some ridiculous ideal of “border security” is achieved, even if its a policy that helps the economy. It’s a dumb position to take on many levels, and it’s hurting the economy.

Apple is now the leading corporation in America by any number of measures. However, even accounting for its overseas factories, it employees barely 1/10th of the number of employees that General Motors employed in the 1950s, and just a fraction of the number of employees that General Electric employed in the 1980s. Quite simply, they don’t need that many workers anymore. And yet,  the population of potential employees is far higher now than it was in the 50s or the 80s. Unless everyone is going to be a software designer, we’re going to have to find somewhere to employ all those people that provides more than just a minimal wage. During  his campaign for the Presidency, Jon Huntsman talked about a manufacturing renaissance that he believed was on the verge of occurring in America. One hopes he’s right about that because, otherwise, we’re going to have some big problems to deal with.

Update: Don Boudreaux shares a Letter To The Editor he sent to the Times in response to the article linked above:

As your reporters admit, Apple uses lots of overseas workers precisely because those workers are willing to work in worst conditions and for lower pay than are American workers – strong evidence that the options open to even low-skilled Americans are far superior to those of most workers in developing countries.  Our prosperity enables even the poorest of us to avoid such toil.

Of course, some people (apparently including, according to your report, Pres. Obama) wonder why Apple doesn’t simply hire American workers at American wages to do more of those jobs.  Alas, the unavoidable result of that policy would be a substantial rise in the price of Apple products and a fall – likely total – in the number of such products produced and sold.

Put differently, your report, like Mr. Obama, insinuates that low-wage jobs overseas (and jobs currently performed by machines) would, if transferred to America, somehow become the same – but higher paying – jobs for workers here.  This insinuation is wrong.   If Apple followed Mr. Obama’s suggestion, there would soon be no Apple and, hence, no “iPhone work” that the U.S. could possibly “lose out on.”

This is a fair point, although I would quibble with the assertion that there are so many options open to Americans right now. As anyone who’s been unemployed for more than a month or so can tell you, that’s not necessarily the case, and for large segments of the American workforce it does seem like the path to a middle class life that used to exist is disappearing. That’s not to say that Chinese wages and working conditions should be brought to the United States. That would be absurd, and I doubt most Americans would accept it. However,  it still leaves unanswered the question of where the jobs are going to come from in the future.

The propagandist Michael Hastings has yet another credulous story attempting to smear the United States military, a Reuters piece titled “Obama’s power grab at the Pentagon.”

Normally, Hastings’ byline is enough to dissuade me from reading a story but the headline succeeded at grabbing my attention. How, I wondered, could the commander-in-chief of the US armed forces engage in a “power grab” over his subordinates?

That President Obama wasn’t really in charge of the Defense Department might come as something of a shock. He is, after all, the commander in chief. But considering the size of the nation’s defense apparatus, it shouldn’t. The Pentagon has become the 51^st state—America’s largest bureaucracy, employing three times more people than the population of Vermont and Wyoming combined. Its capital is the Five-Sided Puzzle Palace, as my journalist friends fondly call it, where 23,000 work daily. Its other residents are the 3.2 million military, intelligence and civilian personnel who live inside its borderless confines around the globe. And since the attacks of September 11^th, the influence of the Pentagon’s constituency has grown exponentially, its budget increasing from $295 billion to $549 billion, sucking up some 54 percent of federal tax dollars.

First of all, the fact that Hastings’ journalist friends don’t know that the Puzzle Palace is the National Security Agency, not the Pentagon, explains a lot.

Second, the 51st State analogy makes no sense whatsoever.

Third, we’ve had a massive standing military since, oh, 1941, so this isn’t exactly something novel to the Obama administration.

Yes, its massive bureaucracy has an enormous ability to resist the desires of presidents–including former war hero Dwight Eisenhower–to transform it. It has a strong constituency on Capitol Hill, K Street, and with the American people.

Additionally, the Pentagon’s top leadership answers to both the president and to Congress. The Joint Chiefs, for example, routinely testify and give answers that undermine the policy preferences of presidents of both parties.

Even so, the military does what it’s told at an operational level. They might not like it when a Jimmy Carter or a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama cancel a pet acquisitions program. They might even fight it in the halls of Congress. But, once they lose, they salute and march on. Similarly, they might not like getting sent off to fight unwinnable national building exercises; they go anyway.

The Pentagon’s unprecedented power and influence turned it into a fierce rival of the White House. And so when President Obama crossed the Potomac last Thursday, he was on a mission to reclaim enemy territory. In an unusual move, he made the budget announcement from within the Pentagon itself. It was something of a triumph that he chose to do it there. Upon arriving in Washington three years ago, Obama had a very different reception from the brass. The building was populated by Republicans. The last three defense secretaries had been with the GOP, and the rank and file were still supporters of the previous administration. They were heavily invested in the Iraq War—a war Obama had called “dumb.” At one of his first meetings in the Pentagon in January 2009, as I recount in my new book The Operators, he met General Stanley McChrystal, who would later confide to his staff that Obama appeared “uncomfortable.” A senior official at the meeting described the president as “intimidated by the crowd.” Months after the meeting, the Pentagon’s leadership would take advantage of this perceived weakness, pushing the president to escalate the war in Afghanistan and tripling the scope of the conflict.

It’s doubtless true that top brass often look at new presidents with disdain. That’s true at State, the non-DoD intelligence services, and other highly specialized bureaucracies, too. They view themselves, not without justification, as subject matter experts and incoming presidents and political appointees as amateurs.

Nor is it a surprise that the staff in place when a new president takes over is highly invested in the policies they’ve been engaged with. That’s especially true in the case of wars, which simply can’t be effectively waged without cultural buy-in. Only psychopaths send people off to die in ventures they consider “stupid.”

And, yet, when the commander-in-chief decided to end the Iraq War on schedule, they left. When Obama–quite rightly, and much too late in my judgment–fired McChrystal, he not only left graciously but almost all of the brass and former military officers alike supported the move.

The tension between the president and his generals reached its climax in June 2010 in the weeks after I published a Rolling Stone story exposing the contempt the military leadership had for their civilian counterparts. The president fired McChrystal and replaced him with General David Petraeus (tying Petraeus to the fate of the doomed mission, an association that Petraeus had wanted to avoid, according to McChrystal). Within the next year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates would retire as well (but not before Obama twice overruled his advice—on Libya and the Bin Laden raid) and was replaced by Democratic ally Leon Panetta. Petraeus came home from Kabul in June 2011, and was quickly defrocked and installed at the CIA (preventing the popular general’s potential and oft-rumored run for the presidency, another outcome the White House wanted to avoid). When Petraeus pushed to move troops to eastern Afghanistan, rather than bringing them home, Obama overruled him, prompting General John Allen (the man there now) to admit the president was no longer following the military’s advice. Either by accident or by design, the young president had neutered his formidable opposition. The celebrity generals were gone, a friendly Defense Secretary was in and a string of what were perceived as foreign policy successes had been accomplished.

Here, Hastings unwittingly undermines his entire case. McChrystal was fired before the Rolling Stone article actually hit the streets, with the decision made once a digital copy leaked to the blogs. Gates–who was still Secretary only because Obama reappointed him–was popular and powerful and yet twice overruled on major decisions. Petraeus was arguably the most powerful American general since Douglas MacArthur and yet Obama overruled him without consequence.

If Petraeus wanted to run for president, he’d have by God run for president. By all accounts, he asked for the CIA job and was eager to serve. Would he have rather been Army Chief of Staff or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs? Probably. But he could have resigned in protest when Obama overruled him on Afghanistan, created a massive stink for the president, and rode the wave to the Republican nomination. That he didn’t speaks to either Petraeus’ professional ethic, his lack of interest in the presidency, or something else known only to him. It sure as hell isn’t because Obama outmaneuvered him.

There were other signs of the president’s new confidence. Tucked into Obama’s defense strategy—which he unveiled the same day as the cuts-was another not-so-subtle rebuke of the military’s much beloved counterinsurgency doctrine, which accounted for much of the $1.2 trillion poured into Iraq and Afghanistan. The new defense strategy called for “limited counterinsurgency”—a concept akin to being “slightly pregnant,” as Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman observed. Keeping a reduced counterinsurgency initiative was a sop to the brass who had built their careers on the past decade of war, but not a convincing one.

Dude: The military brass hates, hates, hates, hates counterinsurgency. Some of them–most notably Petraeus–embraced it over the past decade because they were tasked by successive commanders in chief with putting down insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Counterinsurgency, as the name implies, is the best means of completing that mission.

I guarandamntee you that the Pentagon brass didn’t have to be talked into shifting away from the kind of fights that they’ve hated going back to Vietnam–indeed, they unlearned how to fight counterinsurgencies most Ricki-Tick after Vietnam–and refocus on the high end of the spectrum of conflict. They love preparing for that kind of war!

Now that the White House has the political power to control its military moves, the question is: Can the administration pull it off in 2012 and beyond? The Pentagon and the president may want to keep the focus on China over the next decade, but there’s going to be serious pressure to get drawn back into other misadventures in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The United States military never has and never will decide which wars it fights. To be sure, they’ll push very hard to man, equip, and train for the kinds of wars it would prefer to fight. But the president gets to decide where to fight, when to fight, why to fight, and how to fight. (Technically, Congress has some say over that as well. Operationally, it’s limited.) The brass might try to talk presidents out of fighting dumb wars; they’re usually unsuccessful.

It wasn’t the Pentagon that decided to engage in an air war over Libya. Indeed, the top intelligence and military leadership argued vociferously against it. The guy in the White House overruled them and–guess what?–they went.

We here at OTB have spilled a lot of pixels already on Jon Huntsman, the major Republican candidate for president least popular among Republicans. But the former Utah governor’s comments to Politico‘s Jonathan Martin (“Trailing in New Hampshire, Jon Huntsman takes the long view”) reveal the real strategy behind the seemingly Quixotic run.

Huntsman already is sounding like someone taking a longer view of his own presidential fortunes and the political party he’s always called home.

In an interview Friday, the Utah governor turned China ambassador said bluntly that the GOP had lost its equilibrium in the Obama era but predicted it would eventually return to its bearings — and vindicate his own brand of pragmatism.

“I believe in the ideas put forward by Theodore White, the cycles of history,” Huntsman told POLITICO. “I believe we are in one such cycle. I think that cycle ultimately takes us to a sane Republican Party based on real ideas.”

Suggesting that the GOP currently is something other than sane isn’t the best way to win the support of Republican voters and may stir speculation that he’s preparing to launch a third-party bid. But Huntsman increasingly appears less focused on the political landscape of 2012 and more fixated on what his party will look like post-Obama — and what role he could have in it, come 2016.

Citing the cyclical theory of American political history — he’s confusing White for historian Arthur Schlesinger — Huntsman said the GOP’s transition away from its current moment of conservative purity may take years. ”[It's] hard to know, but cycles never come about quickly, there’s an arc to them,” he said when asked when the Republican Party would shift. “But I suspect that what I’m talking about now and what I am putting forward as remedies for the economic deficit and for the trust deficit ultimately will be the core of our Republican Party — a governing majority.”

He adds: “It could be this time it could be two, three, four years from now — it’s hard to know.”

In a Twitter conversation Friday with Matt Duss and Dave Roberts, I observed, “I hold out small hope that Huntsman represents what the GOP could become again. Very small hope.” Apparently, so does Huntsman.

It seems fanciful right now, I know. The Republican Party seems to be dominated by an alliance of religious extremists and warmongers. It’s a longstanding trend but one that captured the leadership of the party only with the 2010 elections.

Ronald Reagan, the great hero of the modern GOP, was perhaps the origin of the problem. He was a master of rhetoric and whipping up the crowds with red meat. While Richard Nixon helped start it, it was Reagan who cemented the coalition between anti-Communists and Southern white evangelicals. The Soviet Union was the Evil Empire; anti-Communist rebels everywhere could count on American support (the Reagan Doctrine); and abortion, school prayer, and Family Values–with the implication that Democrats were baby killers who didn’t love Jesus– were central to political campaigning.

The difference, though, is that Reagan fundamentally understood the difference between campaigning and governing. While he continued Red baiting, he immediately seized the opportunity to work with Mikhail Gorbachev to reduce the threat of thermonuclear war and generally ratchet down tensions between the two superpowers. While he continued flogging Jimmy Carter, Teddy Kennedy, and other Democratic villains in campaign speeches, he did so while working with Tip O’Neil and other Democratic leaders to get as much of his agenda passed as possible–and willingly compromised away the parts that he didn’t have the votes for. And, while abortion remained part of his stump speeches, he understood that the combination of a Supreme Court that held it to be a fundamental Constitutional right and a Democratic House of Representatives meant that it wasn’t worth wasting much political capitol doing anything about it. Ditto, for that matter, school prayer and other hot button social issues of the day.

Over the years, though, the party got captured by the people Reagan’s speeches were aimed at. Long people at the margins of American politics, they took over the grass roots of the Republican Party. Typically,  Republicans had turned to candidates who had successful careers in some other business and then entered elective politics running for major offices: Congress, state governorships, or the US Senate. Indeed, one reason Democrats had dominated the House for decades was that they had a much stronger grass roots of candidates who had come up the hard way, through the school boards, county commissions, state legislatures, and so forth.  That started to change, especially in the South and rural areas, with evangelicals taking over local school boards and running candidates for those low level offices Republicans had previously eschewed.

Over time, then, the Republican candidate base began to shift from the Chamber of Commerce types who had dominated the elite level of the party for decades to this new crop of ideological true believers. Beginning with the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994, they emerged in force in national politics and became the feeder system for not only the House but also the Senate and governorships. And, eventually, the presidency.

Thus far, they haven’t quite taken over the very top of the party. At the presidential level, they’ve still nominated the likes of Bob Dole, George W. Bush (who seems extreme in hindsight to some, but is considered a RINO by most Tea Party types), and John McCain. Currently, Mitt Romney is the frontrunner for 2012 but it’s not inconceivable that social conservatives could rally against Rick Santorum and put him over the top. At the congressional level, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are traditional Republicans ideologically–albeit pushed to scorched earth tactics politically by a caucus that they can barely control. But Eric Cantor and Jon Kyl are knocking at the door.

It’s pretty obvious to dispassionate observers that the trend of the last twenty years or so is unsustainable if the GOP is to remain a nationally competitive party. Cultural and demographic changes are such that relying on Southern whites and a social message stuck in 1980 will mean permanently ceding the White House and the Senate to Democrats. While Ron Paul-style isolationism will never appeal to a majority of Americans, neither will perpetual war. While safeguarding our borders and enforcing our laws will remain popular, policies and rhetoric that come across as anti-Hispanic will not. And, as the younger generation supplants the older one at the ballot box, anti-gay, anti-science talk will come across as positively alien.

Now, while I happen to like Huntsman and would prefer him over all the candidates running this year, he’s almost certainly never going to be the Republican nominee. He’d make an excellent prime minister but he doesn’t have the campaign chops to come out on top in our presidential nominating system and wouldn’t even if the Republican nominating electorate were more moderate; he’s just not very charismatic on the stump. (True, that was also true of George H.W. Bush, the last Republican nominee in the Huntsman mold. But he likely wouldn’t have gotten the nod if he hadn’t been Reagan’s obvious successor.)

Whether someone like Huntsman will be the Republican nominee in 2016 depends almost entirely on what happens these next ten months. If Romney wins the nomination and loses to Obama–both of which seem likely right now–then we’ll likely see a swing to the right in 2016, as it would reinforce in the nominating electorate the notion that nominating moderates is a recipe for disaster. If Romney wins the nomination and beats Obama, he will, barring tragedy, be the nominee in 2016 and 2020 will proceed along something like the current path, with no lessons being learned.

The only real way to speed up the learning curve–and it might take two presidential cycles even then–would be if Santorum were to get the nomination and then lose in an Electoral College landslide to Obama despite a down economy. Were that to happen, it would be hard for the base to tell themselves that they got beaten because they didn’t get behind a Real Conservative. But the base itself would have to transform for them to rally around a Huntsman type in 2016.  Nominate another Santorum type in 2020 and lose the White House a fourth straight time, though, and reality would have to set in.

Bruce Kesler has an article in City Journal titled “Cal State’s Chutzpah” and the curious subtitle “A hypocritical university goes silent while a math professor spouts anti-Israeli politics.” The intro:

Spend any time on a university campus, and the official culture will become obvious in short order. Bigotry and prejudice against blacks, gays, or women simply isn’t tolerated. Even a hint of racism or sexism is met with quick and decisive punishment. But anti-Israel rants on California’s public-college campuses seem to be tolerated, politely ignored, or even tacitly condoned by the powers that be.

Now, I’m dubious of the degree to which political correctness and speech codes are enforced on some campuses, fearing that a stifling of the exchange of legitimate ideas in violation of the fundamental notion of academic freedom is a natural result. But prejudice based on immutable traits is simply different from vehement disagreement with the policy views of a country. Indeed, even if one is “anti-Israel” to the extreme degree of arguing that they have no right to exist as a political entity, that’s a very different thing than spouting hateful rhetoric against Jewish people.

Consider the case of David Klein, a math professor at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). Klein maintains a page on the university’s web server having nothing to do with mathematical physics, teacher education, or standardized testing, his main areas of research. Rather, the page is devoted to the evils of the state of Israel. Students and other members of the university can learn that “Israel is the most racist state in the world at this time” and that the Jewish state engages in “ethnic cleansing.” Visitors can discover, furthermore, that the answer to the question “Aren’t Palestinians equally responsible for the violence?” is an emphatic “No.” Klein provides links to an assortment of Israel haters and, of course, calls for a boycott of Israeli products and U.S. companies that do business with Israel.

Now, I don’t think universities should house pages where their employees spout personal opinions about controversial matters outside their expertise. In the early days of the blog, I wrote quite a bit about the nature of academic freedom and staked out the position that it only extends to scholarly endeavors within one’s field. A mathematician spouting off on things having nothing whatsoever to do with his discipline just comes across as a crank.

That said, Kesler’s description of Klein’s pages–I haven’t examined them in any detail–isn’t particularly damning. Given that Israel exists as a “Jewish state” and imposes significant political limitations on non-Jews, once could construct a plausible argument that it’s a “racist state.” I don’t happen to think “racist” is the right word for it and think plenty of other states, including some in the immediate neighborhood, are more worthy contenders for the world championship; but it’s not an outrageous enough position to merit a stern talking to, much less banishment from the academic community. And, certainly, the positions that Israel engages in ethnic cleaning and that Likud policy are the proximate cause of most of the recent violence are mainstream, if not majority, positions in the field of Middle East studies.

It isn’t hard to imagine what would happen to a professor who used the university’s website to post content opposed, say, to illegal immigration or legal abortion, especially if the subject was outside his academic field.

Actually, it’s pretty easy to imagine: Not a blessed thing.

Administrators would demand that the pages disappear, and they’d cite the university’s policies, chapter and verse. We know university administrators would loudly condemn a professor who maintained a website off campus that had a “deleterious effect on the university’s reputation.” That’s what happened in 2010, when CSUN erupted in outrage over economics professor Kenneth Ng’s personal site, Bigbabykenny.com—which, his critics claimed, promoted illegal sex tourism in Thailand.

Yes, because promoting illegal, immoral activity is exactly the same as stating unpopular political views.

Both the Gender and Women’s Studies Department and the Asian-American Studies Department publicly denounced Ng, and several students and faculty demanded that he take the site down or lose his job. But while university officials blasted the site, they stopped short of forcing Ng to take it down. Ng removed the site anyway, after weeks of public pressure. “I think he realized he’s putting the university in an awkward position,” CSUN provost Harold Hellenbrand told the campus newspaper, adding, “We expect that [faculty] act at a higher level than their profession requires.”

So . . . even in the extreme example cited, the university didn’t do what Kesler proposes be done in this instance? Doesn’t that completely undermine his argument? Yes. Yes it does.

Yet no one within the CSUN community has condemned Klein, and his webpage remains active—though it clearly violates university policies, which state that “use of computers, networks, and computing facilities for activities other than academic purposes or University business is not permitted.”

But that’s entirely subjective. While I believe math professors ought to stick to subjects relating to math, one can certainly make the argument that lively discussion of controversial issues is an academic purpose and a core business of a university.

The university also prohibits associating its name with boycotts and other politically motivated activity.

Again, subjective. Does the mere use of the university’s domain to publish one’s views constitute associating its name? And, generally, “politically motivated activity” relates to domestic partisan politics. A professor using the university website to raise money for President Obama’s re-election would surely get a cease-and-desist order the moment administrators discovered it was happening. Calling for a boycott of Israeli products? Meh.

CSUN further retains the right to remove “any defamatory, offensive, infringing, or illegal materials” from its website at any time.

Reserving the right doesn’t mean that every possible instance will be invoked. We at OTB reserve the right to delete comments and ban commenters who violate certain site policies; we tend to exercise that right only in extreme cases. Further, it’s not clear that Klein is in violation. No evidence has been offered that he’s used infringing or illegal materials. Presumably, Kessler finds them defamatory and/or offensive; but he’s not the ruling authority in this case.

A recent administrative review, however, cleared Klein of any violations. “The University does uphold and preserve the principles of academic freedom—and Professor Klein’s right to express his views,” CSUN president Jolene Koester said in a statement. “Our review affirmed that this right extends to the use of an individual’s web pages, as part of the University website, as a vehicle for expression.”

Well, there you go.

Again, in my ideal formulation, mathematicians would stick to engaging in matters where their expertise sheds useful light. Given the elasticity of that discipline, it should be easy enough to do. Let political scientists, philosophers, historians, and regional specialists tackle Middle East policy. But if the university has a broader conception of the nature of scholarship than that, I don’t begrudge it.

Kesler closes:

Contrary to Koester’s claims, the David Klein matter has nothing to do with academic freedom and everything to do with official hypocrisy. A professor has the right to speak on his own behalf, but not to use a public university’s resources to smear Israel as a murderous oppressor. In the private sector, such conduct would be grounds for censure or termination.

That depends entirely on the nature of one’s employment. Indeed, the vast majority of workers are perfectly free to speak out on anything they please. Granted, most of them aren’t provided server space by their employers; but if the employer wants to give employees web space to promote the free exchange of ideas, it would be absurd to censure or terminate employees who use it for that purpose.

It’s true that many companies would fire high level employees for posting this sort of thing. Not because they find it immoral, offensive, or illegal but because they hate controversy. (See, for example, the recent case of the Lowe’s home improvement chain pulling its ads from a controversial television program after receiving modest criticism.) But universities are precisely not in the business of avoiding controversy; their mandate is to take controversy head on.

Jazz Shaw has a post about predictions for the upcoming year over at Hot Air, and that’s kind of inspired me to come up with a list of my own. Please note I reserve the right to claim that these predictions were made under the influence of New Year’s Eve pre-partying if it turns out that I was completely wrong.

Politics

• Mitt Romney will be the nominee of the Republican Party for President of the United States. This will largely be an accepted fact by the end of January after Romney (1) either wins Iowa or comes in second to Ron Paul, (2) wins New Hampshire, (3) wins or places a close second in South Carolina, and (4) wins Florida.
• Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum will effectively end their campaigns before the Florida primary
• Newt Gingrich will last through the end of February, but will end his campaign when he is trounced in the Illinois Primary at the end February
• The effort to get any candidates other than Mitt Romney and Ron Paul on the Virginia ballot, either by legislation or litigation, will fail
• Ron Paul will stay in the Presidential campaign until the end, and will demand as the price for his loyalty to the GOP (if not his formal endorsement of Romney, which will not happen) a prime time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention, which he’ll get. Paul will not run as a third-party candidate.
• Mitt Romney will select Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell as his Vice-Presidential running mate, although much of the pre-convention press coverage will involve speculation about Chris Christie
• Chris Christie will be the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention
• The American Elect effort to create an independent candidate for President will end in failure
• Barack Obama will be re-elected to a second term, but the Republicans will hold on to the House of Representatives and take control of the Senate by a narrow majority.
• Elizabeth Warren will defeat Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race. The Democrats, meanwhile, will lose Senate seats in Nebraska, North Dakota, Missouri, Florida, and Montana.
• There will be rumors in November of a challenge to John Boehner for Speaker of the House, but Boehner will hold on to his position in the end

Legal

• The Supreme Court will uphold the Constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate.
• The Supreme Court will strike down Arizona’s immigration law
• Jon Corzine will be indicted for activities related to the collapse of MF Global
• There will be no indictments, resignations, or attempts at impeachment related to the “Fast & Furious” scandal

International

• There will be no outside military intervention in Syria
• The Egyptian military will break its agreements to implement democratic reforms in the face of the rise of Islamist parties, leading to more protests
• Tensions in the Persian Gulf will increase, with at least one incident involving exchanges of fire between an American naval vessel and Iranian forces
• North Korea will create a crisis on the Korean peninsula. It will last about a month, and then calm down.
• Russia will see more protests over fixed elections

Sports

• The Green Bay Packers will win Super Bowl XLVI
• The Alabama Crimson Tide will defeat the LSU Tigers in the BCS Championship Game, leading to another round of calls for a College Football playoff

Miscellaneous

• Starting sometime around November, the media will start hyping the “Mayan Apocalypse” story. Nothing will happen on December 21, 2012.

I’ve asked other OTB contributors to add their own predictions to this post, and feel free to add your own, or criticize mine, in the comments.

And, Happy New Year!

UPDATE (Rob Prather):I have two predictions:

• Alabama will beat LSU in the BCS Championship game.
• President Obama will win reelection. He’s been blessed with terrible opponents.

UPDATE (James Joyner):

Politics

• Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee. None of the Not Romneys will mount a serious challenge once voting begins.
• No candidate other than Obama or Romney will win any votes in the Electoral College.
• Rob Portman of Ohio will be the vice presidential pick, helping push Romney over the top in a crucial swing state. It won’t be enough.
• Barack Obama will be narrowly re-elected, owing to a mild resurgence in the economy and the weakness of the Republican message.

Legal

• The Supreme Court will strike down the Constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate by a 5-3 margin, with Elena Kagan abstaining.
• The Supreme Court will strike down Arizona’s immigration law.

International

• The United States will not go to war or engage in significant kinetic military action with either Syria, Iran, or North Korea.
• The Arab Spring will widely be seen as a lost opportunity this time next year, with Tunisia serving as the outlier.
• The Eurozone will consist of fewer countries than it does now at year’s end.

Sports

• An NFC team will win Super Bowl XLVI. It will not be the Green Bay Packers.
• While I will be rooting for my graduate alma mater, the Alabama Crimson Tide, they will again lose to the LSU Tigers in the BCS Championship Game owing to inferior special teams play.
• The 14-team Southeastern Conference will again have a representative in next year’s BCS Championship Game.

Glenn Greenwald argues in the pages of the Guardian:  “Vote Obama – if you want a centrist Republican for US president.”

In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party’s defining beliefs. Depicting the other party’s president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.

I know many regular commenters here at OTB will scoff at such assertions. After all, many of them frequently assert that Obama is a radical who, if given four more years, will utterly transform American into something none of us will recognize.  However, the truth of the matter is, if one actually looks at what Obama has done in office, it is really very difficult to reach the conclusion that he is especially liberal  in the American sense of the word (let alone a radical, a socialist!, or whatever other term one wants to deploy).

Here’s the challenge:  what policy has Obama pursued that could not have been pursued, at least until very recently, by a Republican?  And once we get beyond  the PPACA (and even that is a lousy example for reasons discussed below)  what actual policy has Obama pursued that would prove his alleged extreme liberalism?  And even if a handful of examples can be conjured, what does the preponderance of the evidence actually demonstrate?

Off the top of my head, the following policy areas come to mind (and note, I am not making value judgments about whether the policies are good  but whether they are uniquely “liberal”):

The Major Initiatives

PPACA (aka “ObamaCare”):  Health Care reform has been Obama’s signature legislative achievement.  Regardless of anything else, we know that in the 1990s this approach (keeping insurance private and the creation of an individual mandate) was touted as the “conservative” alternative to “socialized medicine.”  As we well know, this was the system put in place in Massachusetts during Romney’s tenure as governor (and, indeed, is his signature legislative achievement) and was the system favored by the conservative Heritage Foundation during the Clinton administration.  And, as Doug Mataconis has pointed out over the last couple of days, Newt Gingrich praised such systems within the last couple of years (see here and here).  Note:  the truly liberal preference was a single-payer system (or, the semi-liberal preference was a public insurance option).

Cap and Trade:  This, of course, has not passed. However, this used to be a Republican idea.  The goal was to create a market for carbon and let the magic of that market fix the pollution problem by incentivizing polluters to reduce emissions via the profit motive (i.e., selling off part of their allotment of allowed carbon) instead of just imposing caps (the more traditionally liberal solution).

On both of the above, see my post from a while back:  Obama: Moderate 90s Republican?

Stimulus:  While it is true that the fact that Democrats had huge majorities in both chambers in 2009 meant that the stimulus package passed was going to be laden with Things Democrats Like, the bottom line is that a Republican president would have also signed a stimulus bill, so the notion that this was some uniquely “liberal” or “socialist” move is problematic.

TARP/Bailouts:  This started under Bush and would have been continued under McCain.

Deficits and Debt.  I know a lot of people assert that Obama came to office and exploded the deficit.  However:

Source:  NYT.

Foreign Policy:  While I know it is fashionable in certain conservative circles to assert that the president’s foreign policy is just to go around and apologize for the US, the truth is that US foreign policy under the Obama administration is hardly all that different from that of the second Bush administration and apart from bomb, bomb, bombing Iran, I defy anyone tell me how a McCain foreign policy would have been especially different (more aggressive in Libya, perhaps?).

Taxes

While Obama has argued for the need to increase taxes, he has only done so by targeting upper income levels (either in terms of increased the top marginal rate to the pre-Bush levels, or via a millionaire surtax in the latest go ’round over the payroll tax holiday and unemployment benefits)—hardly radical suggestions.  All of that, by the way, has been rhetoric to date.  The reality has been tax cuts:  he signed into law the extension of the Bush era income tax rates and he pushed for, and saw passed, the payroll tax “holiday.”

Social Issues

It is true that Obama is pro-choice (although the degree to which this has been of any serious policy relevance of late is questionable at best), so that marginally puts him in the Democratic/”liberal” camp (although plenty of moderate Republicans are pro-choice as well).  Further, he is pro-gay marriage (although, again, this is a matter that is shifting in many Republican circles as well).  I expect that “don’t ask, don’t tell” would not have been aggressively repealed by a Republican president, but again, even that issue is one of salience these days only to portions of the hard right.

I will allow that Obama is more likely to appoint members of the judiciary that are more liberal on these issues but again, the degree to which they substantially different from those a moderate Republican might appoint is questionable.

Civil Rights

While Obama did end certain torture techniques, his record in this area is hardly all that different from the Bush administration.  Guantanamo is still open, Americans on foreign soil are considered legitimate targets for assassination without trial, and now, with the signing of the NDAA, American citizens arrested in the US can face either indefinite detention or military tribunals.  All of this is “liberal” how?

Conclusions

Understanding that words like “conservative,” “moderate,” and “liberal” can shift in meaning over time, I would still submit that it is quite difficult, from an empirical and dispassionate point of view, to call Barack Obama anything other than a moderate (and one whose policies would have been welcome, in large measure, within the Republican Party in the 1990s, if not more recently than that).

One can call President Obama “extremely liberal” or even a “”socialist” but the facts run counter to such claims (unless, of course one wishes to utterly redefine the words).

The bottom line here is that a lot of voters really pay attention only to party label, and not to actually policies.  To wit:  if Obama signs the PPACA, it must be socialism, but if Bush signs Medicare Part D, it is just “moderate” social policy.  That is:  too many of us react too much to the party symbols and not enough to the policy views, when making decisions (and forming opinions of said policy initiatives).

What does all of this mean?  Well, it depends on who you are.  If you truly are liberal, you are likely quite disappointed.  If you are a disaffected Republican, it explains why supporting/tolerating Obama hasn’t been that hard (e.g., Andrew Sullivan, David Frum, Bruce Bartlett, etc.).  It also means that if you are one who has made constant accusations of extreme liberalism, socialism, etc., that you are simply wrong.  And for the GOP it has meant a continued shift rightward by their candidate pool (and in a way that has diminished, not increased, their electoral chances in 2012).

As I have noted on multiple occasions, one of the most fundamental jobs of a national legislature is setting the budget.  The establishment of basic spending parameters for a given year, while complex (especially for a country the size of the United States) is not rocket science.  This is doublytrue when we consider, for good or for ill, that a substantial amount of the budget is effectively pre-set (i.e., entitlements* and interest on the debt).  The latest half-measures (and calling them “half-measures” is a kindness) regarding avoiding a showdown over the payroll tax cut (which still needs to pass the House), not to mention avoiding yet another possible government shutdown over lack of spending authority  simply underscores this situation all the more.  Indeed, as of this writing the measures have not passed both chambers, so they are not yet settled.

While one might point to partisan bickering as the main issue (or, worse, just assuming a “lack of leadership”) the fact of the matter is one would expect there to be partisan bickering in a legislature.  It is less that I expect everyone to get along and “do the people’s business” as much as I expect that governing institutions be designed in a way that they produce the results for which they were designed.  In the case of the Congress, there is no doubt that they have been charged, both in a theoretical and a practical, constitutional sense, with power and responsibility over the budget.

So, the question becomes:  what are the incentives put in place by the current institutional structures and, further, are there any factors within the functioning of Congress that impede adequate outcomes?**

This, of course, suggests a rather complex analysis (as multiple variables are in play).  Still, let me focus on one issue:  the electoral process.  As all of this leads me to a basic conclusion I have discussed before, and it is twofold:  there is fundamentally a problem with the feedback loop and, moreover, where the feedback loop works, it is supporting dysfunction.

Let’s consider the following:

1.  Congress is clearly not performing a basic function (the budget) and we further know that we have some serious issues that require addressing in terms of long-term issues of fiscal stability (both on the taxing and spending sides) and especially entitlement reform.   The prospects for seriousness any time soon on these issues appears grim, to be honest.

2.  The public, in general, is quite unhappy with the Congress.  Indeed, public approval of Congress is historically low.  Via Real Clear Politics:

3.  And yet, we keep re-electing most members.  As Doug Mataconis noted the other day, the re-election rates for both chambers, especially the House, are phenomenally high.

First, the House:

Second, the Senate:

There is a clear disconnect between the public’s view of Congress and the results of elections.  Yes, part of this is the phenomenon of “its pork when other members of Congress do it, but it is vital activity when my representative does it.”  But, I would argue that there is a more substantial disconnect here than that.

The bottom line is that the Congress doesn’t do a very good job of representing the population.  This is a problem if one values democratic governance.***  I am not sure how anyone can objectively look at the approval numbers, and then the re-election numbers, and not see a disconnect.  Also, it is worth nothing that while Congress is especially unpopular at the moment, it is generally the least popular institution of the federal government, historically speaking.

All of this leads to the conclusion that a major problem within the US at the moment is an antiquated electoral system, i.e., the uses of plurality winners in single member districts.  One of the fundamental problems of a single member district system is that it has a tendency to limit competition (by definition there is an incentive to form large, catch-all parties).  Moreover, when districts are drawn by partisan entities (e.g., state legislatures) you end up in a situation where the parties pick their voters.  This is an unhealthy situation for democratic governance, as the way the feedback loop is supposed to work is that voters pick the parties by selecting representatives in truly competitive elections.  Note, of course, this latter point only applies to the House, as Senate districts are state boundaries (and note while there is still remarkably high re-election rates in the Senate, the numbers are a bit more volatile over time).

This situation is exacerbated in the US by the usage of primary elections.  Consider:  if one lives in, say, a safe Republican district then the real competition in in the primary election, not the general election.  As a result, the member of Congress is really selected in the primary.  Primary elections are notoriously low-turnout affairs and also ones in which ideologically driven voters are more likely to participate and much more likely to sway outcomes than in the general election.  The combination of the safe district and the primary process for nomination leads to members who are likely not as representative of their districts as one might think.

Consider a very real political dynamic at the moment:  there is a severe anti-tax strain in the Republican Party at the moment (something that even a very conservative Senator, Tom Coburn, has noted) that makes legitimate debate and compromise more difficult.  Now, not only is this often a factor of principle (which I can respect, even if I think it misguided) it is also a function of electoral politics:  many GOP members know that they will face a primary challenge if they fail to follow through on a hardcore anti-tax agenda (ask, for example, Bob Bennett of Utah).  The bottom line is this:  many of these members of Congress are from safe districts, but they are not safe at the primary level.  A primary challenge can empower the most conservative elements of the party to nominate a candidate who is not representative of the district (and may not even be representatives of the Republicans in that district, given the turnout issues inherent in primaries) but said candidate will be a shoe-in for election because of the districting issue noted above.  This is not a healthy pattern for a system predicated on the notion of representation.****

Is this the only issue at the moment with the US Congress?  No, but one blog post at a time, I guess.  There is also, for example, the fact that the public itself isn’t sure what it wants, not to mention the problems of the filibuster, as well as the fact that federalism, bicameralism, and separation of powers all create their own difficulties for efficient policy-making.*****

Regardless:  I take the time to write this because first and foremost I think it identifies a real issue that needs scrutiny within the US public.  I am fully aware that the default position for most Americans is a combination of assumptions that the current system is fine (after all, we’ve always done it that way, the Founders!, etc.) and a total lack of understanding that there are a myriad of ways to elect legislatures.  At a minimum, I would advocate for greater awareness of the issue in the hopes of generating debate.  I will allow, by the way, that no set of electoral rules is perfect, but some clearly work better than others.  Nonetheless, just because something isn’t a panacea doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile.

To put it more succinctly:  I would like to see a national discussion to emerge on the topic of electoral reform.  And I think that the disconnect between congressional approval/performance and the re-election rates of its members demonstrates that such a discussion is not just something that theoreticians should be interested in, but rather is of serious practical significance.

*And yes, it is feasibly possible to redefine entitlements on a yearly basis, but the degree which it is a good idea is a whole other issue.  The bottom line is this on, say, Medicare:  once you have defined the benefit (i.e., in this case certain medical care for all people over a certain age) then the only real way to change it is to either a) change the nature of the benefit or alter the age of eligibility.  This really isn’t a practical process on an annual basis.

**I would define “adequate” in this case not to mean any specific budget outcome but, rather, simply a functional budget, i.e., the basic fulfillment of their responsibilities.

***And I am quite aware that not everyone does, in fact, value democratic governance because they prefer the morass of the moment over improved representativeness.

****After all, its even in the name of one of the chambers, the House of Representatives.  And, as we may all recall, part of the reason for seeking independence from the UK was, you know, taxation without representation.

*****And I do recognize that built in inefficiencies can have advantages—but it must also be acknowledged that they create disadvantages as well.

Last night, the Atlantic Council honored Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor to Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush.  A common theme of the evening was the paralysis of American politics, which in turn imperils US leadership in the world.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates bemoaned the “oversized egos and undersized backbones” of America’s political leaders, wishing more of them would emulate Brent Scowcroft’s “steadfast integrity, common decency, and moral and political courage” to deal with enormous global challenges.

Speaking at a gala dinner honoring the great soldier, scholar, and statesman as part of the Atlantic Council’s year-long launch of the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, Gates declared that he was “deeply concerned with the decline in view and values associated with Brent Scowcroft when it comes to how we govern and relate to one another,” lamenting that “civility, mutual respect, putting country before self and country before party” were “increasingly quaint” and becoming “historic relics.”

For a variety of reasons, including gerrymandered Congressional districts which promote ideological politicians and a “24/7 digital media environment” that advantages “the most extreme and vitriolic views,” Gates believes that American politics has become so polarized as to put our system in danger. We’ve seen a “coarsening and dumbing down” of our national dialogue. As a consequence, Gates argues, compromise has became a dirty word. The “moderate center” which historically governed American foreign policy “is not holding.” And a series of “wave elections” makes it virtually impossible to “sustain strategies beyond one presidency and one Congress.”

Gates’ theme echoed remarks made in a pre-dinner roundtable featuring four former National Security Advisors: Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jim Jones, and Scowcroft.

Brzezinski was the most blunt, declaring “We have this strange situation in which the party in power is kind of almost frozen in the face of this complexity and the party out of power is raving mad.” There’s plenty of blame to go around, Jimmy Carter’s top advisor declared. “The American public is abysmally ignorant about the world” and “we don’t have a mass media that provides a significant degree of pertinent information about the world.”

Mostly, though, he blamed our political leaders, observing that George H.W. Bush was the last president to truly understand how to lead the world, charging that all subsequent presidents–including his own party’s Bill Clinton and Barack Obama–have been “inward looking” and lacking a grand strategy. Additionally, the political climate and the need to pander to a simplistic electorate leads to “demagoguery” which in turn “imperils intelligent decision-making.”

Kissinger agreed, observing that “there are too many tactical issues for any National Security Advisor to solve.” The truly effective ones keep their focus on the strategic level issues, which Kissinger allowed is incredibly difficult given “the philosophical and cultural problem as a society of immediacy.”

Jones served the sitting president and was naturally far more cautious. But he allowed that the media and political climate forces politicians to focus on the minute-by-minute fight over issues, which “makes strategic thinking next to impossible.”

Additionally, Jones warned that “We must get our own economic house in order.” He lamented that “Decline comes when a nation is not doing the things it knows it must do.” He cited America’s decades-long refusal to come up with a sustainable energy problem, despite repeated system shocks.

Scowcroft concurred but noted with characteristic understatement, “The world is not going to call a recess” while America sorts out its own problems.

The transcript and audio of Gates’ speech can be accessed at the link. Video will be up later today.

As I’ve been following the news out of the corner of my eye these past two weeks, I’ve seen a spate of stories on Newt Gingrich’s improbable rise to frontrunner status. Quite a few take the snide tone of Christian Whiton‘s “Why Washington Is Shocked, Shocked By Newt Gingrich’s Rise Over Mitt Romney.”

One of the more enjoyable spectacles out of Washington lately has been the horror of establishment Beltway Republicans that Newt Gingrich just might be their presidential nominee, having jumped ahead of Mitt Romney in recent polls. The cause of this is simple if often disguised: Newt is the opposite of everything they just know to be true.

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The problem is that most of what Gingrich proposes runs counter to what they have been conditioned to accept.

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Now reenter Newt Gingrich, the man whom Republican Washington just knows failed as Speaker of the House, despite the welfare, capital gains tax and balanced budget reforms that bear his fingerprints.

On EPA replacement, for example, Gingrich says: “I don’t think you can train the current bureaucrats. I think their bias against capitalism, their bias against local government, their bias against economic rationality, is just amazing.”

Here, Gingrich is revealing his reverence for Andrew Jackson, who in his presidency succeeded in replacing fully one-fifth of the federal bureaucracy, seeing this as a requirement for radical change.

Most Washingtonian Republicans view desires like this as hopelessly naive. During their careers, they have seen modest changes, but nothing like the major shifts in Washington that have occurred at turning points in American history. Those with historical knowledge of them tend to know only of times the bureaucracy grew as opposed to those where it was actually tamed.

The idea of reversing federal growth is fine to keep on the wish list, but those who advocate it seriously are seen as rubes—either new arrivals in Washington who just fell off a turnip truck or unsophisticated congressmen from ‘flyover country.’ To be a true Beltway Republican is to have accepted the assumption that the scope of government cannot be radically altered. And they think it is politically foolish to try.

Thus the establishment just knows that you run a moderate like Mitt Romney for president. Conservatives have no place else to go and independents will be attracted—historical evidence to the contrary be damned.

Gingrich challenges this, believing 2012 may be one of those historical turning points where voters will be most attracted by a candidate who offers a radical divergence.

There’s more but you get the idea.

The problem with all of this is that it presumes that the only meaningful factor in assessing a potential president is the policy positions they take as a candidate. In reality, though, neither “the establishment” nor ordinary voters actually operate that way.

Policy positions are pretty far down the list of reasons most of us don’t want Gingrich to be our standard bearer. Indeed, despite being closer to me on a host of public policy issues than Obama, I’d be hard pressed to vote for Gingrich in a head-to-head matchup. Simply put, I don’t believe Gingrich is morally fit to be president.

I continue to believe Bill Clinton should have been removed from the presidency for his sleazy conduct as president and that his sleazy conduct as governor should have been enough to keep him out of office. Once upon a time, Gingrich professed to believe that, too. But Clinton’s problems all stemmed from an inability to keep it in his pants; his crimes were limited to lying about it when caught. Gingrich seems to be a pretty disgusting fellow across the board.  There are the two divorces under very unfortunate circumstances. The numerous ethics violations in four short years as Speaker. The personal pettiness. The hypocrisy. The lobbying.

I was a big Gingrich fan in 1994. While, in hindsight, I find some of the tactics used to get attention for himself and bring discredit on the Democratic House leadership of the day unsavory, he was a shrewd tactician. And he was as articulate a spokesman for core Republican principles as any national politician since Reagan.

But, like many a revolutionary, he was a lousy leader once he took power. He was constantly maneuvered into corners by Bill Clinton, who managed to use Gingrich as a foil in his triangulation policy. Gingrich alienated most of his own caucus and the country within a few months and became the bogey man of the 1996 elections, with every Republican morphing into his likeness in all the ads.

As to the issues, Gingrich makes Mitt Romney look like a pillar of consistency. At least Romney has an excuse, even if he can’t use it: he was running to govern and then governing one of the most liberal states in the union back then and is now looking to run the whole country now. It’s hardly surprising that he’d take different policy stances under those vastly different circumstances. Gingrich, on the other hand, has been a public intellectual for the past fifteen years and has been known to flip-flip on an issue in the space of a weekend.

Whiton’s specific examples illustrate the other major problem I have with Gingrich: he’s an unserious wonk who likes to throw ideas against a wall and see what sticks.

Here’s the EPA idea, as listed on his campaign website, in full:  ”Replacing the Environmental Protection Agency with an Environmental Solutions Agency that works collaboratively with local government and industry to achieve better results.” That’s simply a non-policy. Changing the name of an agency doesn’t give us “better results,” any more than rearranging agencies (see: Department of Homeland Security) does. Whatever you call the EPA, its employees would still, by definition, be “government bureaucrats” and no more trainable than they are now. Similarly, there’s no reason to think the employees of the new agency would be magically free from “bias against local government” and “bias against economic rationality.” And, if those obstacles can somehow be overcome by executive order, why, just issue the order.

Gingrich is a bright man–I hear he has a PhD in history–but he’s still got the mentality of the young graduate student who thinks the world could be radically reshaped if only it were run by people as clever as himself.

Rhodes Cook, a “senior columnist” for Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, argues that the field may not be closed for the 2012 Republican race. In so doing, he demonstrates that, for all but practical purposes, the field is closed.

Such a scenario could not have unfolded in 2008, when the early January events were followed in short order by an early February Super Tuesday vote-fest that involved nearly half the country.

But the elongated layout of the nominating calendar this time provides the opportunity for a late-starting candidate to emerge. Should Mitt Romney stumble badly in the January events in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida, another establishment Republican could enter the race in early February and still compete directly in states with at least 1,200 of the 2,282 or so GOP delegates. Many of them will be up for grabs after April 1 when statewide winner-take-all is possible.

My immediate reaction was Doesn’t this idiot know about filing deadlines? Several paragraphs giving examples of surges by candidates from decades past–before the modern primary system started–didn’t inspire much confidence. But, by and by, he offers this:

The main problem calendar-wise for late-starting candidates is there is often a lag time of two to three months between a primary filing deadline and the primary election itself. As a result, a candidate that jumped into the race early next February would still be too late to get his or her name on the ballot in all the primaries through early April, roughly 20 states in all. In these states, a late starter would have to be creative — “adopting” the Uncommitted line, for instance, in states where they are listed or mounting write-in campaigns in states where they are permitted.

But a late-starting candidate would be able to compete in caucus states immediately, where filing deadlines are rarely an issue. There will be fully a dozen states, plus territories, that will be holding their caucuses from Feb. 4 on. They will be offering a total of roughly 450 delegates.

And a candidate that entered the Republican contest in the wake of the Florida primary would be able to enter at least 15 primaries from April 24 on. It is a number that includes delegate-rich New York and Pennsylvania on April 24, Indiana and North Carolina on May 8, California and New Jersey on June 5 and Ohio on June 12. Taken together, this late array of primaries offers roughly 800 delegates, many of them to be awarded on a winner-take-all basis.

In addition, candidates that fall by the wayside as the primaries unfold often release their delegates, providing another significant pool for late-starting candidates to woo.

So . . . a candidate could swoop in after the key early states, immediately be more organized than most of the existing candidates, have more success getting on ballots than Newt Gingrich (the current frontrunner) and amass the needed 1142 delegates to win the nomination by essentially running the table in every remaining state? And this seems to wish away the fact that Super Tuesday is on March 6, less than a month after this candidate jumps in to save the day.

Here’s a handy dandy chart of the GOP calendar, complete with delegates and filing deadines:

You’ll note that the filing deadline has already passed for three Super Tuesday states and that the window is about to close in most of the others. The only ones left after January 9–a month before Cook’s proposed entry point–are some caucuses which award a whopping total of 125 delegates.

Indeed, most of the post-Super Tuesday states will have closed by early February, too. That includes the vaunted “delegate rich New York.”

And, seriously, this daunting obstacle is going to be overcome by creative use of the Uncommitted line, write-in ballots, and the kindness of strangers?

There’s one other small point: Who, exactly, is this candidate?

In order to swoop in and dominate the field at this late stage, someone would have to already have enormous name recognition, appeal across the wide swath of the Republican nominating electorate (we’re talking someone who can win Texas, New York, and California for starters), and raise or bring to the table boatloads of cash. Cook mentions Sarah Palin, Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie. I’ve also heard Mike Huckabee’s name bandied about lately. Presumably, there’s some reason that these people aren’t already running.

Like it or not, the guys showing up in the thrice-weekly debates are your 2012 Republican candidates. One of them will be the nominee.

She leaves behind two little girls she loved more than anything, Katie, who turns 3 on New Year’s Eve, and Ellie, who was born June 21.

We met in August 2004 and were married on October 8, 2005. She had just turned 35 and I was a few weeks shy of 40 but neither of us had been married before. We shared religious and political worldviews but very different personalities. She was extroverted, sunny, and patient to my introverted, grumpy, and antsy. I almost certainly got the better of that bargain.

Kim was my partner, helpmate, and confidante. Her passing leaves a gaping hole in my life.

I still haven’t told Katie. She knows something unusual is going on, since the paramedics came at a little after 1 this morning and the police didn’t leave until well after 4. But she seemed pretty much herself, requesting her favorite cartoons and playing with toys until I got her back to sleep a little while ago. Sadly, neither of my little girls are likely to remember their mommy other than from photos and videos.

The next few days will be stressful, not only dealing with my grief and suddenly becoming a single parent but the throngs of people coming by to pay their respects and deal with their own grief. Kim has a large extended family that she was close to and a lot of friends.  While I prefer to deal with people in small groups and small doses, I owe it to Kim to do that for her.

Obviously, I’m still in shock at this unexpected loss. Organizing my thoughts and writing them down is how I process, well, pretty much everything.  Words fail me right now.

As Steven Taylor noted this morning, David Frum has an interesting piece at New York Magazine today in which he explores how he went from one of his party’s most respected voices to persona non grata in most conservative circles:

America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.

Frum’s article is long, and well worth your attention. In it he cites a number of factors that have shaped the Republican coalition in the post-Reagan, post-Cold war era, but one in particular struck my interest:

Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.

Kathleen Parker made a similar point in a column looking at the GOP field that ran over the weekend:

[T]he conservative brain trust once led by William F. Buckley has been supplanted by talk radio hosts who love to quote Buckley (and boast of his friendship) but who do not share the man’s pedigree or his nimble mind. Moreover, where Buckley tried to rid the GOP of fringe elements, notably the John Birch Society, today’s conservatives have let them back in. The 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference was co-sponsored by the Birchers.

Meanwhile, the big tent fashioned by Ronald Reagan has become bilious with the hot air of religious fervor. No one was more devout than the very-Catholic Buckley, but you didn’t see him convening revivals in the public square. Nor is it likely he would have embraced fundamentalist views that increasingly have forced the party into a corner where science and religion can’t coexist.

Scientific skepticism, the engine that propels intellectual inquiry, has morphed into skepticism of science fueled by religious certitude. In this strange world, it is heresy to express concern about, for example, climate change — or even to suggest that human behavior may be a contributing factor. Jon Huntsman committed blasphemy when he told ABC’s Jake Tapper that he trusts scientists on global warming.

What Huntsman next said, though refreshing and true, ensured that his poll numbers would remain in the basement: “When we take a position that isn’t willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Sciences has said about what is causing climate change and man’s contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science and, therefore, in a losing position.”

Of course, plenty of Republicans agree with this appraisal, including other presidential candidates. They understand that the challenge is to figure out to what extent humans contribute and what humans can reasonably do without bankrupting the planet.

Nevertheless, the Republican base requires that candidates tack away from science toward the theistic position — only God controls climate. More to the point, Rush Limbaugh says that climate change is a hoax and so it must be. Huntsman may as well be a Democrat. c

It takes courage to swim against the tide of know-nothingness that has become de rigueur among the anti-elite, anti-intellectual Republican base. Call it the Palinization of the GOP, in which the least informed earns the loudest applause.

No doubt, both Parker and Frum will get excoriated by commentators on the right for what they’re saying here. Indeed, to a large degree, both of them have been written out of acceptable conservatism in much the same way that people like Bruce Bartlet and David Stockman have and in which Jon Huntsman has bizarrely been ignored in the 2012 race despite his record and his conservatism. Who exactly decides who gets written out of the movement isn’t always clear. Sometimes it’s Rush Limbaugh, sometimes it’s one of the Tea Party groups. Sometimes, all it takes is for a politician or pundit to endorse Mitt Romney over the supposed “true conservative” alternative, whether that happens to be Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, or Newt Gingrich at the moment. The most important thing to note about this new brand of GOP conservatism, though, is that there’s little ground for dissent from the party line as set by the talk radio culture that Frum refers to.

It’s important to note, I think, that the primary purpose of the Limbaugh’s and Hannity’s of the world has almost nothing to do with politics, and even less to do with having an honest discussion of public policy issues. They exist primarily as entertainers, and their goal is to garner high ratings to allow their syndication companies and local radio stations to charge high advertising rates. They don’t make money by being honest about the issues, they make money by getting people to listen. Because this is their goal,  they all tend to follow the same pattern of repeating, with little theoretical or evidentiary support, the talking points of conservatism as they happen to be at the time. Those talking points can change on a dime — remember how quickly Rush Limbaugh’s utter disdain for John McCain during the Republican primaries turned to adulation once he won the nomination, only to turn back to disdain after he lost — with almost no recognition of the fact that the host may be contradicting themselves from one day to the next. All that matters is that they’re mindlessly repeating something, day after day, to which the audience can respond “Hell, yeah” It also helps to be able to serve up what James Joyner once referred to as “healthy chunks of red meat, generating faux outrage, and flaming the passions of a single minded audience than to persuade people towards your point of view. ”

John Derbyshire, who is certainly no squish, noted the problem back in 2009:

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.”

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.

That’s about as far away from the Firing Line style of conservatism as you can get, and the impact on the political culture of the right is quite apparent.

The biggest impact has been what Parker refers to in her column as the “Palinization” of the GOP. While Mitt Romney remains as the establishment Republican candidate to beat (an ironic place to be for the man who was the conservative golden boy in 2008), the GOP base and the Tea Party have spent the last  year hitching their banner to the likes of Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and now Newt Gingrich. Even when one points out the inadequacies of many of these candidates when it comes to the basic skills one would think a President needs, the response from supporters tended to be something along the lines of saying that their lack of intellectual heft was “refreshing,” whatever that means. The rejection of basic science, or even scientific inquiry, seems to be a requirement to be considered part of the clib among this species of conservatism as well. So, we find that a movement that was founded by men like William F. Buckley and Russel Kirk, and celebrated intellectualism in more ways the one, has devolved into one where a phrase like “we don’t need no fancy book learnin’” seems to be more of a badge of honor than a joke.

Frum ends his piece with by citing the hopeful fact that, even within the GOP, the Tea Party consists of at most 1/3 of self-identified Republicans. Hopefully, he says, the red meat conservatives, the people like Jon Huntsman and Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie, for example, will speak up and pull the conversation away from the nonsense that it seems to devolve into all the time. Of course, Daniels and Christie chose not to run and Huntsman is ignored by his party, largely I think because he committed the “sin” of accepting a job representing his country from Barack Obama. As long as the Limbaugh-Hannity-Coulter wing of the GOP is setting the agenda, then I don’t see how the GOP reverts back to the kind of party it was under Ronald Reagan.

Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling.

Amen and amen.  This is a major problem in US politics at the moment and I see no end to it any time soon.  From a pure business of media perspective, Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes are geniuses:  they found market niches for infotainment (heavy on the “tainment”) and very effectively exploited them.  The problem becomes, however, the talk radio gang and the commentary programmers on Fox News are not in the business of actually providing information.  They are entertainers who entertain via commentary.  While this may be a very effective way of confirming one’s belief that Democrats are clowns, it is a rather lousy way of understanding complex issues of foreign, fiscal, and/or social policy.

Indeed, as Frum notes, it goes beyond the entertainment to something more problematic:

the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”

We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.

I think Frum raises a key problem with all of this here:

When contemplating the ruthless brilliance of this system, it’s tempting to fall back on the theory that the GOP is masterminded by a cadre of sinister billionaires, deftly manipulating the political process for their own benefit.

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Yet, for the most part, these Republican billionaires are not acting cynically. They watch Fox News too,and they’re gripped by the same apocalyptic fears as the Republican base.

I think one can go a step further and state:  elected politicians watch it too.  I used to think that people could tease out the entertainment part of things like Limbaugh (gee, that song making fun of Ted Kennedy is hilarious!) and understand that one was not getting an actual education about politics from him.  Not only do I no longer think that that is the case for most people, I think that the influence of the entertainment over the voter and the elected alike help create real policy problems (like the debt ceiling debate where the rational and the empirical go out the window and simplistic ideology informs actions or elected officials).

Understand:  I am hardly arguing that all of our problems are linked to talk radio.  I am, however, arguing that it is making the political situation worse.

The counter-argument (which has been Rush’s credo for decades “I am equal time”) that the conservative infotainment industry is nothing more than a balance to the dreaded Mainstream Media is nonsense.   And while there is plenty to criticize about mass media in general, there is a marked difference between commentary-based, personality-driven entertainment programming (e.g., Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Beck, Levin, Fox and Friends, Huckabee, etc.) and straight news reporting, even if the reporter might have voted Democratic in the last election.

And let me conclude with: yes, there are liberal/Democratic counter-examples (e.g., Ed Schulz), but it is by no means a balanced problem. If anything: liberal media personalities are not the made leaders of liberal politics the way conservative media personalities are.

The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal has an interesting discussion of the ebbs and flows of police violence in crowd control situations in modern American history. Under the provocative headline “Why I Feel Bad for the Pepper-Spraying Policeman, Lt. John Pike,” he argues that it’s institutions, not individuals, who should receive most of the blame.

Our police forces have enshrined a paradigm of protest policing that turns local cops into paramilitary forces. Let’s not pretend that Pike is an independent bad actor. Too many incidents around the country attest to the widespread deployment of these tactics. If we vilify Pike, we let the institutions off way too easy.

That these changes in the police force have occurred is not in dispute. They’ve been sufficiently open that academics can write long papers detailing the changes in police responses to protests from the middle of the 20th century to today. They are described in one July 2011 paper by sociologist Patrick Gillham called, “Securitizing America.” During the 1960s, police used what was called “escalated force” to stop protesters.

“Police sought to maintain law and order often trampling on protesters’ First Amendment rights, and frequently resorted to mass and unprovoked arrests and the overwhelming and indiscriminate use of force,” Gillham writes and TV footage from the time attests. This was the water cannon stage of police response to protest.

But by the 1970s, that version of crowd control had given rise to all sorts of problems and various departments went in “search for an alternative approach.” What they landed on was a paradigm called “negotiated management.” Police forces, by and large, cooperated with protesters who were willing to give major concessions on when and where they’d march or demonstrate. “Police used as little force as necessary to protect people and property and used arrests only symbolically at the request of activists or as a last resort and only against those breaking the law,” Gillham writes.

That relatively cozy relationship between police and protesters was an uneasy compromise that was often tested by small groups of “transgressive” protesters who refused to cooperate with authorities. They often used decentralized leadership structures that were difficult to infiltrate, co-opt, or even talk with. Still, they seemed like small potatoes.

Then came the massive and much-disputed 1999 WTO protests. Negotiated management was seen to have totally failed and it cost the police chief his job and helped knock the mayor from office. “It can be reasonably argued that these protests, and the experiences of the Seattle Police Department in trying to manage them, have had a more profound effect on modern policing than any other single event prior to 9/11,” former Chicago police officer and Western Illinois professor Todd Lough argued.

No one wanted to be Seattle and police departments around the country began to change. “In Chicago for example, paramilitary gear such as that worn by the Seattle Police was quickly acquired and distributed to officers,” Lough continued, “and the use of force policy was amended to allow for the pepper spraying of passive resistors under certain circumstances.” (That emphasis is mine.)

9/11 put the final nail in the coffin of the previous protest-control regime. By the time of the Free Trade of the Americas anti-globalization protests in Miami broke out eight years ago this week, an entirely new model of taking on protests had emerged. People called it the Miami model. It was heavily militarized and very forceful. The police had armored personnel carriers.

That’s a generous excerpt but there’s a lot more at the link and I encourage you to read the whole thing. But I tend to agree: Pike’s blase spraying of peaceful college students with a chemical agent is a function of his socialization and training; he’s probably not a monster at all. As a former military officer, I’m both fully aware of the process of training decent human beings into trained killers and horrified at the notion that we’re applying the same techniques to domestic law enforcement forces.

Yesterday afternoon, Glenn Greenwald asserted, “There’s a common bond b/w those supporting drones to kill without due process & pepper-spraying peaceful protesters: #Authoritarianism.” I pushed back against this quite vigorously, because I simply view domestic law enforcement and warfighting to be completely separate matters with very different rulesets. Democracies have often been quite ruthless in the use of force against wartime enemies while respecting civil liberties at home.

While I’ve got some serious concerns about our use of drone warfare in Pakistan and elsewhere, it doesn’t concern me in nearly the same way that domestic police brutality does. The nature of the state is that the duty of the government to protects its citizens is high. That means bending over backwards to protecting their rights at home. And it sometimes requires being ruthless in the pursuit of enemies abroad. I’m a staunch advocate of the laws of war and the duty to protect non-combatants in war zones. But even the most staunch proponents of humane conduct of war recognize combat as a more permissive environment for violence than the fighting of crime at home.

But Keith Boyea interjected with a salient point: “unending wars can lead to war-like tactics at home.”

The United States has seldom not been at war since roughly 1940. We were in World War II well before Pearl Harbor and once our intervention began in earnest it had a tremendous domestic impact. WWII was quickly followed by Korea and then Vietnam. Moreover, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Cold War in general meant that we had a permanent national security state. We didn’t draw down our military force and accepted a wartime footing as background noise.

After the Cold War, this abated to some extent. But America’s professional soldiers–including its large reserve component that had previously been thought of as an emergency-only force–soon began a deployment tempo that outpaced what had been the norm in the Cold War with action in the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, and elsewhere. And then 9/11 kicked us into a war with no end in sight against “terrorists with a global reach.”

The upshot of all of this has indeed been a creeping authoritarianism. Police forces have become “first responders” whose Orders Must Be Obeyed. (Hell, we’ve done the same with airline flight attendants.) We’ve accepted all manner of indignities and intrusions on our liberty in the name of fighting terrorism and keeping the public safe. We dutifully stand in line to be searched in all manner of places now, emptying our pockets and taking off our jackets and shoes. And we’re quite literally not allowed to question any of this, lest we be detained. While we’re still innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, we’re presumed guilty everywhere else and have to prove that we’re not terrorists or criminals.

UPDATE: Greenwald was apparently writing his extended analysis at the same time as I was this morning. In a posting titled “The roots of the UC-Davis pepper spraying,” he makes several salient points.

Despite all the rights of free speech and assembly flamboyantly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the reality is that punishing the exercise of those rights with police force and state violence has been the reflexive response in America for quite some time. As Franke-Ruta put it, “America has a very long history of protests that meet with excessive or violent response, most vividly recorded in the second half of the 20th century.” Digby yesterday recounted a similar though even worse incident aimed at environmental protesters.

The intent and effect of such abuse is that it renders those guaranteed freedoms meaningless. If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist. Every time the citizenry watches peaceful protesters getting pepper-sprayed — or hears that an Occupy protester suffered brain damage and almost died after being shot in the skull with a rubber bullet — many become increasingly fearful of participating in this citizen movement, and also become fearful in general of exercising their rights in a way that is bothersome or threatening to those in power. That’s a natural response, and it’s exactly what the climate of fear imposed by all abusive police state actions is intended to achieve: to coerce citizens to “decide” on their own to be passive and compliant — to refrain from exercising their rights — out of fear of what will happen if they don’t.

Now, I think this goes overstates the situation. Rather than a grand scheme to discourage protest, I see it mostly as a police force which sees themselves as warriors and “civilians” as the enemy, who must be bullied into submission. This comes from a variety of sources and is at least understandable, if still impermissible, for police accustomed to dealing with gang violence and a confronted by organized criminal activity hardly distinguishable from an insurgency from a fight-or-flight standpoint.

But there are far too many Americans, as illustrated by some of the comments below, who are under the impression that any infraction of any law–even misdemeanor disturbing the peace or trespass ordinances–can reasonably be met with police violence. This is an authoritarian mindset bordering on Fascism: if you’re not doing anything wrong, why, you have nothing to fear.

Pervasive police abuses and intimidation tactics applied to peaceful protesters — pepper-spray, assault rifles, tasers, tear gas and the rest — not only harm their victims but also the relationship of the citizenry to the government and the set of core political rights. Implanting fear of authorities in the heart of the citizenry is a far more effective means of tyranny than overtly denying rights.

Again, I don’t see this as part of a coordinated scheme in the way Greenwald seems to. But we’re in agreement that the primary harm here is the long lasting damage to society and the citizens’ relationship to its government than the incidental harm to individual protestors.

Where we depart most seriously, though, is in this conclusion:

This is the most important effect of the Occupy movement: acts of defiance, courage and conscience are contagious. Just as the Arab Spring clearly played some significant role in spawning, sustaining and growing the American Occupy movement, so too have the Occupy protesters emboldened one another and their fellow citizens. The protest movement is driving the proliferation of new forms of activism, citizen passion and courage, and — most important of all — a sense of possibility. For the first time in a long time, the use of force and other forms of state intimidation are not achieving their intended outcome of deterring meaningful (i.e., unsanctioned and unwanted) citizen activism, but are, instead, spurring it even more. The reaction to these protests are both highlighting pervasive abuses of power and generating the antidote: citizen resolve to no longer accept and tolerate it. This is why I hope to see the Occupy movement — even if it adopts specific demands — remain an outsider force rather than reduce itself into garden-variety partisan electioneering: in its current form, it is demanding and re-establishing the indispensable right of dissent, defiance of unjust authority, and sustained protest.

I truly hope Occupy doesn’t devolve into rioting. We’ve got real problems in this country with the scope of government power but this isn’t Mubarak’s Egypt. Here “authoritarian” is a tendency that we need to combat and that people like Greenwald and I can openly and forthrightly discuss without fear of reprisal and stronger than stupid comments from Internet trolls. Organized interests, particularly monied ones, have outsized influence in our system precisely because they care whereas most of us are apathetic most of the time. But there are still nonviolent political tools at our disposal and protests must be peaceful and, for the most part, law abiding.

There are times when civil disobedience is permissible, even necessary. The movement to end Jim Crow is a classic example. In that case, the laws themselves were unjust. Massive breaking of those laws–in a nonviolent manner–was necessary to bring attention to that injustice. Throngs of people being arrested for doing nothing more than sitting at the front of a public bus or trying to order lunch in a restaurant created a powerful image. That police often used violence against these peaceful protests only made the message more powerful.

It’s hard to make the same case about the right to set up permanent campsites in urban parks or the right to block access to buildings on a college campus. One can question the wisdom of breaking them up with police action; the authorities in Washington, DC have wisely, I think, looked the other way against technical violations of the law to avoid an unseemly conflict with demonstrators. But authorities have a right to demand that the law be enforced and police have a duty to professionally enforce it.