Ross’ first New York Times column has appeared, and there are several interesting observations in it that I want to discuss over the course of the next day or two, but I thought I would start with this statement:

In the wake of two straight drubbings at the polls, much of the American right has comforted itself with the idea that conservatives lost the country primarily because the Bush-era Republican Party spent too much money on social programs. And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise.

As a description of the post-election rationalizations of “much of the American right,” I think this is exactly right, and this succinctly explains why “much of the American right” is utterly, hopelessly confused about how they came to be in their current political predicament. Think about this for a moment. It is undeniably true that most conservatives have blamed the political defeats of Republican candidates in ‘06 and ‘08 on excessive and “wasteful” spending, and they have obsessed over earmarks, and yet McCain, arch-enemy of earmarks and a Republican Senator who voted against the Medicare prescription drug program, was made part of the official pantheon of moderate squishes and someone whose nomination was regarded as a disaster and his defeat was taken as proof that fiscal austerity is a winning message. Clearly, this is incoherent on its own terms, to say nothing of the unfounded assumption that the elections in ‘06 and ‘08 turned on questions of spending.

There were issues on which McCain genuinely was a squish, so to speak, and chief among these were immigration and, to the extent that it alienated him from the bulk of rank-and-file Republicans, the torture regime. There is something quite bizarre about a party and movement that have crafted a self-serving narrative about their downfall because of spending that nonetheless try to use McCain’s alleged moderation as a scapegoat, when it was McCain, more than most of his major rivals, who was the most vehement, if not necessarily intelligent, critic and opponent of spending increases. Comparing McCain and Cheney and noting the very different responses to them from movement activists and rank-and-file partisans are useful for understanding the state of the mainstream right today, and this is one of the valuable things about Ross’ column.

In what way would Cheney, who necessarily backed (or at least did not publicly oppose) Medicare Part D, have been seen as substantively more “really conservative”? Indeed, according to the post-election rationalizations, Cheney would have to be regarded by default, because of his identification with the administration, as being to the “left” of McCain on spending and identical to McCain on immigration.

In other words, on the issue that most conservatives now use as their explanation for both election defeats, Cheney was worse on account of his identification with Bush, but it also seems hard to contest that most conservatives would have been happier with Cheney as the nominee than they were with McCain. Part of this would have been because they could concoct stories about what Cheney “really” believed but had not been allowed to say publicly (we saw this time and again with all those Palin defenders who hated McCain), which is the sort of storytelling that people often engage in about the would-be political heir apparent, who naturally agrees with them but must keep the “real” views under wraps. Had Cheney been the nominee and then lost by an even larger margin, we can also reasonably assume that the official explanation on the right would have remained the same as it had been in ‘06 (too much spending!), and torture and war would not be blamed for the GOP’s political woes, even though the contrast on both issues would have been even more stark in a Cheney vs. Obama race.

On immigration, Cheney would have been identified with Bush’s “comprehensive” reform, and he obviously made no public statements that would have created a different impression about his views on this subject. Somehow I feel confident in saying that had Cheney run his connections to Bush’s immigration policy would not have been made into much of an issue. Unlike McCain, who was the media darling, Cheney was almost universally despised by the media, which would have instantly made Cheney the much-preferred candidate according to the tribal rules that govern who counts as a “real conservative” in practice. Cheney also quite actively backed the bailouts and berated the House Republicans who resisted the creation of the TARP, which the tea party activists have denounced so vociferously. We can also be fairly sure that many of the same people who rallied around Palin’s pseudo-populist rhetoric while backing a candidate who embraced establishment policies, including all the bailouts, would have rallied to Cheney’s large doses of red-meat rhetoric and ignored the substance of the policies that he had endorsed. A Cheney nomination would have driven home how much of the “real conservatism” to which Ross refers is not anything substantive, but is instead a series of poses and gestures that validate the audience’s preferences and way of life.

The only issue on which Cheney was conceivably to McCain’s “right” was torture*. This is an important part of Ross’ argument, which I think Ross was not able to flesh out as much as he could have done if he had more space:

“Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation.

As I was suggesting yesterday, torture and war seem to be the non-negotiable policies for the mainstream right, and Cheney serves as the symbol and champion of this position.

* Of course, I don’t think one becomes more pro-torture the more one goes to “the right,” but as a shorthand this will have to do for now.

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