Clark Stooksbury, Gerald Russello and Leon Hadar all make important points in response to Dr. Gottfried’s article and this item I posted at Taki’s Magazine.  Let me try to address them.

Mr. Russello makes the fair, and fairly depressing, observation that “the resonance of unlimited immigration and aggressive war is stronger in the average American than most paleocons like to admit.”  With respect to the former, I am not sure that there has been much persuasion involved, but simply the creation of a mass immigration problem in the teeth of popular discontent, followed by the proponents of mass immigration declaring, “Well, look at the mess we’ve created–you can’t just deport all these people, so you have to follow our lead in fixing it!”  Meanwhile, discontent with this arrangement is diffuse and often inchoate, but I would argue that “the average American” is much closer to us than he is to the policy status quo, much less the fantasies of open borders and unlimited immigration.  At least three candidates were fighting over the restrictionist vote after Tancredo dropped out, and their tallies taken together were much greater than McCain’s share of the vote.  Pressure to get control of immigration enforcement must be significant enough in the country, since the North Carolina blue dog Democrat Heath Shuler has been pushing a bill that mandates a new enforcement mechanism (McCain seems to have had a role in keeping the bill from the floor).  Significant majorities want restrictions on the level of immigration, but they have little effective representation in Washington, and they will have an opponent in the White House no matter who wins.  In anticipation of my later remarks, I should say that I find it remarkable that all of us, myself included, have gone round and round on conservatives and Obama and have scarcely touched how far to the left Obama is on immigration; he makes McCain seem like a Minuteman by comparison.  On this question, divided government may prove to be a restrictionist’s best friend given the bad alternatives.  (Conversely, a McCain administration confronted with a large Democratic majority might succumb to the errors of Bush the Elder and yield on domestic policy while pursuing his foreign ambitions.) 

As for aggressive war, I am inclined to agree that there is a good deal of support for this sort of policy, though some significant part of this support relies on maintaining the fiction that the aggressive war is a war of self-defense, or at least a “preventive” kind of self-defense.  Nonetheless, the last 18 years have seen enough unprovoked and unjustified military actions around the world with solid majorities backing all of them to vindicate Mr. Russello’s point.  The odds are especially stacked against non-interventionists on the right, as this election year has shown us, since a thoroughgoing opponent of the war on moral and legal grounds gets little traction.  A pragmatic revulsion at the incompetence and bungling of the war in previous years motivates some significant part of antiwar sentiment on the right, and it is difficult to mobilise people with such sentiments with full-throated condemnations of aggression and empire. 

The others critique the assumption that Obama will be the worse of the two.  Clark says:

I don’t believe that Obama will be worse than McCain and he would have to work awfully hard to be worse than Bush. If he gets us out of Iraq and doesn’t start a war with Iran he might turn out to be a halfway decent president.

Of course, everything rests on that conditional statement.  For what it’s worth, I don’t know that Obama will be worse, but I see the potential for him to be just as bad.  As it happens, I share Dr. Hadar’s impatience with trying to game the system by basing my vote on what politically strategic goals it might advance, which is exactly why I think backing Obama does not make sense.  To justify it, there seems to be a tendency to build up an ornate architecture of rationalisations of what his victory will represent, when what it will represent is the endorsement of reckless liberal internationalism more ambitious than the New Frontier.  We can develop elaborate arguments about what an Obama administration might do that we would find more agreeable, but so much of it, whether on Israel-Palestine, NAFTA or even Iraq is at best based on things Obama did before he was on the national stage or things he has said in an election year.  When the pressure has been on and he has been in the national spotlight, to say that he has been uninspiring in terms of what he has done with respect to foreign policy would be an understatement.

Filed under: politics