A Vision Of Our Possible Future
Posted on October 12th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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My paleoconservative friends, obsessed with battling neoconservatives over Iraq, apparently failed to notice that a substantial share of Iraq hawks parted ways with the Bush administration on immigration. Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin — this just begins the list of those broke ranks over the Bush/McCain open-borders policy.
With Bush gone, McCain defeated, and President Obama inheriting the Commander-in-Chief role, foreign-policy disagreements among conservatives will fade in significance after this election. In seeking a path back to a Republican majority, domestic issues will dominate the debate, and immigration will almost certainly be one of the most important [bold mine-DL]. (For instance, Obama and his allies are likely to insist on a national health-care policy covering illegals.) Open-borders Republicans like Brooks will therefore be increasingly isolated from the GOP mainstream during the Obama administration. ~Robert Stacy McCain
McCain is responding to Dan McCarthy’s post on the main blog, and has a long reflection on the future of the GOP and conservatism that is worth reading. He is, however, quite wrong when he says that foreign policy differences will fade in significance in the coming years. To the extent that Obama is relatively hawkish on most things except Iraq, which Republican hawks deny for electoral reasons now but will rediscover once he is in power, we will see exactly the same splits between the hawks who side with the Obama administration’s interventions in (name a few countries where we have no business being) and the conservatives who do not believe these interventions to be in the national interest. It will be very much like what we saw in the 1990s. Mainstream, “responsible” and “realist” conservatives and Republicans will support Obama’s actions, and a significant but largely uninfluential minority on the right will protest against them. All of the bogus arguments war supporters have trotted out for years to justify the Iraq debacle will be turned around on them, and most of them will end up backing the next intervention to halt a “genocide,” “liberate” another country or stop weapons proliferation. They will delight in the frustration of the antiwar left and praise the bipartisan consensus in favor of American hegemony.
The ’90s offer a good model for what is going to happen among conservatives during the next few years, as that was the only post-Cold War period under a Democratic President so far, and so we can already tell what the main lines of opposition to Obama will be: 1) he is not hawkish enough; 2) his interventions are too often related to conflicts that have no direct connection to U.S. interests; 3) he is associated with dubious characters and abuses his power. After years of describing the Iranian regime as a dire threat that must be stopped, hawks on the right are not going to discover prudence and the limits of American power when President Obama announces that military action has become the only remaining option. On the other hand, if Obama does not pursue such a course of action you can be sure that these same hawks will likewise be ready to frame the Obama administration as being far too weak and too unwilling to project power. Non-interventionists and more serious realists would oppose a strike on Iran and would cheer an Obama administration that avoided war. After declaring Russia to be a resurgent menace, Republican hawks are not going to become skeptics of NATO expansion and provocative anti-Russian moves. Should Obama be persuaded that bringing Ukraine and Georgia into NATO would be folly, expect these hawks to exploit this to show that Obama is willing to “sacrifice” fledgling democracies to Moscow. Again, non-interventionists and serious realists would be staunchly opposed to expansion and would cheer administration opposition to it. These divisions will persist and will likely harden, because these differences are not incidental or based solely on views about the invasion of Iraq, but go to the heart of what each camp believes the U.S. government should be doing overseas.
Certain things will be different from the ’90s, as they would have to be. First, Obama is genuinely more liberal than Clinton ever was, but he will be presiding over an economic downturn during at least the first two years of his administration instead of the beginning of a recovery, and this could undermine support for an ambitious domestic agenda very easily. Fiscal and economic realities will constrain his priorities in ways that they did not limit Clinton, but because of these realities his domestic agenda may end up being fairly modest. To the extent that the misleading claim that the current predicament has demonstrated the flaws of deregulation becomes the conventional wisdom, we are likely to see a large number of conservatives go along with this. As unpopular as the bailout was, expect to see a split between rank-and-file constituents and conservative elites over this and any additional measures taken by the government in response to the financial crisis. The base will rail against the expansion of government and betrayal of principle, and the elites will counsel pragmatism. As is almost always the case, the elites will ultimately prevail and the base will sullenly go along as they always do in the end.
Immigration policy probably will be one area where most conservatives will agree to some extent, but it may not matter. On account of the significant reliance on Blue Dogs in the House, it may not be possible for Democratic leaders to push for an immigration bill with any greater success in the future than they did in the past. Unlike with the bailout, the Speaker will probably not be able to blackmail and bludgeon the minority leadership into capitulating, and Pelosi will have serious problems with defections from conservative Democrats and other freshmen members in competitive districts. During difficult economic times, it will be especially hard to sell the public on anything remotely resembling an amnesty. We should also expect divisions among conservatives between supporters of guest-worker programs and thoroughgoing restrictionists. There will still be a significant number of conservative pundits who will insist that the GOP cannot afford to alienate anyone, and so they will argue against taking up anything resembling a restrictionist position.
There will be the ritual flagellation from mainstream conservatives, who will be decrying the alleged role of xenophobia and nativism in the ‘08 election. Never mind that there won’t be much evidence for this. Like the myth that Prop. 187 alienated Hispanics from the GOP in California, this will be widely accepted and propagated as the “smart” interpretation of what ails the GOP. Instead of concluding that the GOP needs to start actually serving the interests of its constituents, the “smart” conservatives will discover that the party has become too anti-urban and insist that it needs to reach out beyond its suburban and rural core, and they will use Palin as proof of the electoral weakness that comes from relying solely on the base. For good measure, the knives will be out for social conservatives, just as many tried to make them the scapegoats for the ‘06 defeat.
As the election campaign has already shown, the most powerful, widespread opposition to Obama from the right centers around his identity, his associations and what these are supposed to tell us about him. We can expect constant obsession with Obama’s biography and associations to preoccupy most mainstream conservatives for the next four years, so that the names Raila Odinga and Tony Rezko will become for another rising generation of conservatives what Paula Jones and Mochtar Riady were to mine, which is to say they will become the distractions that will consume most of Obama’s critics and keep them from focusing on more serious problems with his administration (whatever those might turn out to be).
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
14 Responses to “A Vision Of Our Possible Future”
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Dreher wrote on the scapegoating of the religious right/social conservatives: http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2008/10/up-next-blaming-the-religious.html
I say, they deserve it. They are the biggest enablers of the Bush presidency. They are the reason Sarah Palin was chosen, to fire up “the base.” Clearly, she was not chosen for governance reasons. She did her job and continues to do it, at the cost of the Independents and formerly angry PUMAs.
The culture war centers partially around the religious right. This group has a large overlap with the same folks who constitute the South and Appalachia that would not vote for Obama for racist/cultural reasons.
And one of the commenters there, JPL, has some good ideas as to why they deserve the blame - the tendency to follow without thinking, an insular Us vs. Them mentality, and the fact that so many of the RR leaders have sold their souls for political victory.
When you look at the people who supported GWB the most ardently, who were they? The religious right. It’s not scapegoating if it is actually true.
But this is not how the scapegoating will work. It’s not as if they’re going to be forced out and told not to vote GOP anymore. The people who will blame them for the defeat will still expect them to line up behind GOP candidates. Here’s what will probably happen: some conservatives, especially of the more secular variety for whom social issues have always been an annoying distraction, will insist that the party lost *because of* the influence of social conservatives and the supposed prominence of social issues. This isn’t true, and it’s a way for the more responsible factions to avoid responsibility. Social conservatives may have enabled the administration, but it is the people and the policies they have enabled that deserve the lion’s share of the blame.
I fully expect that they will be pressured to vote GOP. It will be another “nothingburger” vis-a-vis their political alignment, but in this case, look at Palin. (I am so tired of using her as an example but she is a gift that keeps on giving.) McCain had the experience angle all sewn up until he made a joke of it and himself with his obsequious pander to the religious right. He was pulling up in the polls but she alienated the independents once the buzz wore off. In a way you could blame the religious right, because instead of campaigning on the issues, he chose to campaign on identities and lined up with the religious right to stoke a culture war. It may seem a bit turned on its head, but had he chosen someone competent to begin with, it wouldn’t have scared people toward Obama.
Is it posible that with a flagging economy, immigration issues will drop from agenda as the immigrants stay (or return) home?
Yes, I think that’s possible. That could make it an even lower priority and it could then make for an even less compelling issue for conservatives to rally around. Another problem is that conservatives do not agree on what immigration policy should be, but they are mostly agreed as to what it shouldn’t be. The difficulty arises when restrictionists insist that guest-worker programs are not really much better than actual amnesties, and supporters of guest-worker programs find the idea of internal enforcement of immigration laws distressing.
Actually, that’s already starting to happen:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/02/BAGU139QIK.DTL
AJFeiges -
While I’ve seen some statistics suggesting that immigration from Mexico at least is indeed dropping a bit over recent times (last year or two) - and you should take those statistics with some fair amount of skepticism, like almost any statistic from either side - consider also that a major recession in the US is likely to hit the Mexican economy worse (as a fraction of GNP) than the US itself.
Shocking! Immigration is slowing with the economy, just like it has throughout modern history? Who would have thought? You would think that the party that is so in love with market forces would have figured this out at some point, but I am sure the Republican leadership believes that their “tough” attitude is what caused the immigration slowdown.
And by the way, the GOP’s attitude toward immigration is EXACTLY what alienates so many Latinos, especially the horrible 2006 congressional ads. Even Cubans are uncomfortable with the imagery and language that the Republicans use when talking about immigration, and if the GOP is alienating loyal Cuban voters, you can imagine how that is playing in Texas and California. I am very involved in South Texas politics and can say with certainty that Bush and his compassionate, pro-immigration, pro-NAFTA, pro-Mexico stances were what attracted so many Latinos to him. He seemed like a REASONABLE person, not a raving lunatic threatened by every brown skinned person in America. McCain might have had a chance to do something similar (Obama was polling very badly among South Texas Mexican Americans until his recent strong uptick - everybody loves a winner), but he refused to even acknowledge immigration as an issue since he began running for president.
So if Prop 187 didn’t drive Latinos in California away from the GOP, what did?
Is it really a myth that Prop 187 had nothing to do with alienating Hispanic voters from the GOP?
As far as I can tell, this is conventional wisdom in California, regardless of political affiliation.
I’ve spent most of my life in California, and this much is for certain: the GOP has never been less popular, among whites and blacks as well as Hispanics. Maybe Prop 187 is not “the” cause of his drop in popularity among Hispanics, but it’s surely “a” cause.
It’s fascinating to see how Gov. Schwarzenneger, who tacked to the right (with cuts to the car tax and attacks on Democratic backing groups like unions) early in his administration lost his footing with electorate. Since then he’s won it back by backing environmental initiatives, changes in disaster preparedness, and even tax hikes to support education and balance the budget. Don’t know if this will apply to the nation at large, which seems to regard CA as an outlier, but if it does, expect huge changes ahead for the GOP.
Obama is programatically pretty far to the left, but temperamentally he’s rather phlegmatic. He may try to build consensus rather than to tilt as far to the left as he’d like to do.
One can hope.
To the extent that the misleading claim that the current predicament has demonstrated the flaws of deregulation becomes the conventional wisdom, we are likely to see a large number of conservatives go along with this.
how is this not flaws of deregulation?
There were certain rules that were relaxed or changed (e.g., debt-to-capital ratios) that are an important part of the problem, but that is not the main reason for what we’re seeing. Even here we are talking about the failures or mistakes of regulatory agencies, and not a problem with deregulation as such. When I hear people blame deregulation, I wonder what it is that they mean.
They mean the fact that CDOs and CDSs were not permitted to be regulated, thanks to Sen. Gramm’s midnight legislation. I don’t really see it as a failure of regulators but the failure of legislation.
We relied heavily on the credit agencies to gauge the risk on individual entities, but they failed, because they didn’t understand what the risk was with these kinds of instruments. And the regulators weren’t even allowed to watch over them, under the law. So now this thing is viral, and CDOs/CDSs on mortgages have been sold worldwide, and there is no way to know if a batch is good or bad until after the year ends and the ARMs reset.
Granted, this is only part of it - Europeans and Asians also picked up some of our bad habits in underwriting loans and they had their own housing bubbles too. But ours is the worst of them, probably.
Indya, on October 14th, 2008 at 11:36 am Said:
“They mean the fact that CDOs and CDSs were not permitted to be regulated, thanks to Sen. Gramm’s midnight legislation. I don’t really see it as a failure of regulators but the failure of legislation. ”
In this case, the ‘failure of legislation’ was a failure to regulate, leaving it up to the free market, which failed spectacularly.
“We relied heavily on the credit agencies to gauge the risk on individual entities, but they failed, because they didn’t understand what the risk was with these kinds of instruments. ”
Note that this is a failure of the free market - the credit agencies didn’t understand them, but didn’t either (a) develop/buy the expertise, or (b) refrain from selling guarantees of something that they didn’t understand. The senior individuals of the credit rating agencies wanted the money, and so commited fraud - on a scale which was both breathtakingly deep and wide.
The other market participants accepted the guarantees of the credit agencies on brand-new, highly complex items, with no evidence whatsoever that the credit agencies understood them. They did so, of course, because the senior individuals stood to make more money - where ‘more money’ didn’t mean a comfortable living and retirement, but going from mere two-digit multimillionaire to three-digit.