And none of this was resolved. Each side gives its reasons, but no one is reasoning with each other. Explaining things was useless, just as it was with everyone explaining those three days of arguments before the Supreme Court, all about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. The individual mandate – everyone has to buy healthcare insurance, or else pay a fine, to create a pool large enough to keep costs down and make this work for everyone, and so that no sneaky people get a free ride – was a reasonable exercise of the Commerce Claus for a reasonable outcome for the greatest good – or it was an assault on everyone’s basic freedom to buy only what they want to buy and be left alone, and an unconscionable overreach by the federal government. Millions of words were written about this, and each side gives its reasons, and offered examples and analogies. But no one is reasoning with each other. People had made up their minds about all this long ago, and then worked backwards from that, using reasoning to explain what they already believed, not to change anyone’s mind, even theirs. So, as usual, what each side likes to call reasoning turned out to be, once again, not that at all – it was just fancy and often quite clever after-the-fact attacks and sneers. We know what we know. Reasoning is just a way to slam what we know in someone’s face, hard.

But how do we know what we know? Chris Mooney in his new book The Republican Brain – a follow-up to his 2005 bestseller The Republican War on Science – has been looking into this, from his perch on the left. And he finds the whole idea of reason, on the other perch, is not even considered these days:

Political conservatives have placed themselves in direct conflict with modern scientific knowledge, which shows beyond serious question that global warming is real and caused by humans, and evolution is real and the cause of humans. If you don’t accept either claim, you cannot possibly understand the world or our place in it.

And in his 2005 book he argued there was an “environmental explanation” for this:

At least since the time of Ronald Reagan, but arcing back further, the modern American conservative movement has taken control of the Republican Party and aligned it with a key set of interest groups who have had bones to pick with various aspects of scientific reality – most notably, corporate anti-regulatory interests and religious conservatives. And so these interests fought back against the relevant facts – and Republican leaders, dependent on their votes, joined them, making science denial an increasingly important part of the conservative and Republican political identity… Meanwhile, party allegiances created a strange bedfellows effect. The enemy of one’s friend was also an enemy, so we saw conservative Christians denying climate science, and pharmaceutical companies donating heaps of money to a party whose Christian base regularly attacks biomedical research. Despite these contradictions, economic and social conservatives profited enough from their allegiance that it was in the interests of both to hold it together.

What he called right-wing science denial was political opportunism, somehow trying to blend religious impulses with corporate profit motives. And it worked well enough, but now he’s had time to think about it:

It isn’t wrong, exactly. There’s much truth to it. Yet it completely ignores what we now know about the psychology of our politics.

The environmental account ascribes Republican science denial (and for other forms of denial, the story would be similar) to the particular exigencies and alignments of American political history. That’s what the party did because it had to, to get ahead. And today, goes the thinking, this leaves us with a vast gulf between Democrats and Republicans in their acceptance of modern climate science and many other scientific conclusions, with conservatives increasingly distrustful of science, and with scientists and the highly educated moving steadily to the left.

But now he’s not happy with that explanation:

This account ignores the possibility that there might be real differences between liberals and conservatives that influence how they respond to scientific or factual information. It assumes we’re all blank slates – that we all want the same basic things – and then we respond to political forces not unlike air molecules inside a balloon. We get knocked this way and that, sure. And we start out in different places, thus ensuring different trajectories. But at the end of the day, we’re all just air molecules.

But what if we’re not all the same kind of molecule? What if we respond to political or factual collisions in different ways, with different spins or velocities? Today there’s considerable scientific evidence suggesting that this is the case.

And of course he reviews all the psychological studies, but there’s history too:

For instance, the historic political awakening of what we now call the Religious Right was nothing if not a defense of cultural traditionalism – which had been threatened by the 1960s counterculture, Roe v. Wade, and continued inroads by feminists, gay rights activists, and many others – and a more hierarchical social structure. It was a classic counter-reaction to too much change, too much pushing of equality, and too many attacks on traditional values – all occurring too fast. And it mobilized a strong strand of right-wing authoritarianism in US politics – one that had either been dormant previously, or at least more evenly distributed across the parties.

Perhaps it was cultural PTSD:

The rise of the Religious Right was thus the epitome of conservatism on a psychological level – clutching for something certain in a changing world; wanting to preserve one’s own ways in uncertain times, and one’s own group in the face of difference – and can’t be fully understood without putting this variable into play.

And yep, he does realize this comes close to shallow pop-psychology, and he knows that’s a minefield:

The problem is that people are deathly afraid of psychology, and never more so than when it is applied to political beliefs. Political journalists in particular almost uniformly avoid this kind of approach. They try to remain on the surface of things, telling endless stories of horse races and rivalries, strategies and interests, and key “turning points.” All of which are, of course, real. And conveniently, by sticking with them you never have to take the dangerous journey into anybody’s head.

But what if these only tell half the story?

He wants to tell the other half:

I found it impossible to ignore a mounting body of evidence – from political science, social psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics – that points to a key conclusion. Political conservatives seem to be very different from political liberals at the level of psychology and personality. And inevitably, this influences the way the two groups argue and process information.

Let’s be clear: This is not a claim about intelligence. Nor am I saying that conservatives are somehow worse people than liberals; the groups are just different. Liberals have their own weaknesses grounded in psychology, and conservatives are very aware of this.

Nevertheless, some of the differences between liberals and conservatives have clear implications for how they respond to evidence in political debates. Take, for instance, their divergence on a core personality measure called Openness to Experience (and the suite of characteristics that go along with it). The evidence here is quite strong: overall, liberals tend to be more open, flexible, curious and nuanced – and conservatives tend to be more closed, fixed and certain in their views.

So there may be a difference between average “liberal” and “conservative” brains, as there seem to be “deeper psychological and cognitive factors” that cause all the fights between the left and the right over basic reality:

Phenomena ranging from conservative brinksmanship over raising the debt ceiling to the old “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” problem – why do poor conservatives vote against their economic interests? – make vastly more sense when viewed through the lens of political psychology. …

We don’t understand everything there is to know yet about the underlying reasons why conservatives and liberals are different. We don’t know how all the puzzle pieces – cognitive styles, personality traits, psychological needs, moral intuitions, brain structures, and genes – fit together. And we know that the environment (or nurture) is at least as important as the genes (or nature). This means that what I’m saying applies at the level of large groups, but may founder in case of any particular individual.

Still, we know enough to begin pooling together all the scientific evidence. And when you do – even if you provide all the caveats – there’s a lot of consistency. And it all makes a lot of sense. Conservatism, after all, means nothing if not supporting political and social stability and resisting change. I’m merely tracing some of the appeal of this philosophy to psychology, and then discussing what this means for how we debate what is “true” in contested areas.

But he doesn’t let liberals off the hook:

Liberals aren’t always right, but that’s not the central problem. Our particular dysfunction is, typically, more complex and even paradoxical.

On the one hand, we’re absolutely outraged by partisan misinformation. Lies about “death panels.” People seriously thinking that President Obama is a Muslim. Climate change denial. Debt ceiling denial. These things drive us crazy, in large part because we can’t comprehend how such intellectual abominations could possibly exist. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a fellow liberal say, “I can’t believe the Republicans are so stupid they can believe X!”

And not only are we enraged by lies and misinformation; we want to refute them – to argue, argue, argue about why we’re right and Republicans are wrong. Indeed, we often act as though right-wing misinformation’s defeat is nigh, if we could only make people wiser and more educated (just like us) and get them the medicine that is correct information.

In this, we both underestimate conservatives, and we fail to understand them.

Arguing about why you’re right and Republicans are wrong is simply the wrong approach – this has nothing to do with any real intellectual give and take. Of a typical conservative Mooney says this:

He’s not arguing out of openness to changing his mind. He’s arguing to reaffirm what he already thinks (his “faith”), to defend the authorities he trusts, and to bolster the beliefs of his compatriots, his tribe, his team.

Liberals (and scientists) have too often tried to dodge the mounting evidence that this is how people work. Perhaps because it leads to a place that terrifies them: an anti-Enlightenment world in which evidence and argument don’t work to change people’s minds.

But that response, too, is a form of denial – liberal denial, a doctrine whose chief delusion is not so much the failure to accept facts, but rather, the failure to understand conservatives.

But then Kevin Drum sees some problems here:

Broadly speaking, I don’t really have any issue with this. I’ve long been sold on the idea that liberalism and conservatism are at least partly temperaments, and it’s those temperaments that lead us to different political conclusions rather than any kind of rational thinking process.

But the problem I have with Chris’s piece is this: temperament is universal, but Republicans are Americans. And it’s Republicans who deny global warming and evolution. European conservatives don’t. In fact, as near as I can tell, European conservatives don’t generally hold anti-science views any more strongly than European progressives.

So the problem is that Mooney doesn’t address the question of why “differences in brain-wiring have produced such extreme anti-science views in American conservatives but not in European conservatives.” Are American conservatives unique in some way, or American brains wired differently?

One way or another, though, it strikes me that international comparisons are critical here. If we’re talking about brains, we’re talking about the human race, not just our little chunk of North America.

And Julian Sanchez offers this:

Browsing a conservative news site the other day, I was struck by the sheer oddness of that familiar genre of political commentary that treats  liberals and conservatives, not just as groups of people with systematic disagreements on policy questions, but as something like distinct subspecies of humanity. The piece that triggered this was something along the lines of “Five Reasons Liberals Are Awful People,” and it had almost nothing to do with any concrete policy question, or ultimately even the broad-brush contours of liberal political thought: It was a string of assertions about broad types of character flaws purportedly shared by liberals, of which their policy views were only a symptom. …

Then just yesterday, my friend Conor Friedersdorf tweeted a request for good summaries of the liberal view of the right to privacy, and I was again struck by how odd it sounded: Scholars have advanced a whole array of views on the question, and while certainly liberals and conservatives would tend to find different ones more congenial, it seemed like an unhelpful way to map the terrain or illuminate the key points on which various thinkers diverge.

This makes no sense to him:

As libertarians never tire of pointing out, there is no particularly compelling philosophical reason that one’s views on abortion, foreign military intervention, environmental regulation, tax policy, and criminal justice should cluster in the particular pattern we find among Republican and Democratic partisans. So we ought to be awfully skeptical about the (growing?) tendency to treat this binary divide as reflecting some essential fact about human nature, or as providing a frame within which to understand all intellectual or cultural life.

So Sanchez sees a slightly different reason that reason itself is simply an illusion:

It starts to seem, as Albert Camus once put it, that we’ve made the mind into an armed camp – in which not only politicians and legislative proposals, but moral philosophies, artworks, even scientific theories, have to wear the insignia of one or the other army. This obviously oversimplifies – a taxonomy with two categories is not particularly rich – but also obscures the internal fault-lines within each domain in a way that’s guaranteed to undermine our understanding. We’re at the point where people are morally certain about the empirical facts of what happened between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman on the basis of their general political worldviews. This isn’t exactly surprising – we are tribal creatures who like master narratives – but it feels as though it’s gotten more pronounced recently, and it’s almost certainly making us all stupider.

When people are morally certain about empirical facts there’s bound to be trouble. Moral certainty and dispassionate empiricism are the opposite of each other – unless you’re stupid and think they’re the same thing. And we often do think that.

And as an example, one of Digby’s readers offers this:

If the Tea Partiers – to the extent that they believe they are not corporate shills – really think the healthcare battle is about freedom, why won’t they accord the rest of us the freedom they crave? In other words, if they don’t want government healthcare and the mandate to buy insurance, fine. Here’s the deal… we’ll eliminate the mandate in exchange for people being able to buy into Medicare for All.

Then they can choose to go without insurance – and be refused care they can’t pay for – or buy private insurance where 40% of their premiums will go to overhead and profit, while the rest of us can choose buy into a plan where only 3% goes to overhead and there is no profit. If you want to be “free” to choose, I should be too.

Digby:

Why shouldn’t I be allowed to choose Medicare if I want to? I feel that my freedom as an American is being infringed. How come these people are all forcing me to buy private insurance against my will? What is this, Communist China?

Sure, it’s a stretch. But of it infringes on someone’s freedom for insurance companies to make contraception part of a preventive care package, then it sure as hell infringes on my freedom to be denied the opportunity to buy insurance through Medicare.

Who are these people who would deny me the right to buy what I want to buy! This is America!

There’s a lot of bitter irony here, but that’s because reason, and reasoning, has become so debased – if it ever really existed in the first place. Political psychology is fine – Mooney explains things well – but there is the larger problem. It’s that tribalism Sanchez discusses. And beyond that, reason itself is almost always not at all what it seems.

And now are you convinced?

It’s best to listen politely. They have what they think are facts, and you have what you think are facts. No one is going to change their mind. And it’s been like that – the second father-in-law was an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, with the big office in the Pentagon and all, and he would go on about how Martin Luther King had been a communist, and clearly paid quite well by the Kremlin for all he did.

Right. In those discussions it was best to do that active-listening thing, where you go on autopilot and take the last few words said and repeat them as a question. You say he was paid by the Kremlin? It’s not hard, and you can almost do it in your sleep. That technique keeps the other party going, and keeps them happy, if you can manage to look interested. They eventually run down, and smile contentedly. Then you can talk about fast cars or fine wine or football, and no one gets hurt.

Is that cowardly? If you think something is true and right you should stand up and explain and defend it – and you tell the other party that they’re full of crap, and why they’re full of crap. At least that’s the idea.

But to what end – to pat yourself on the back? When what you say is perpetually dismissed out of hand, with a sad condescending smile at your foolishness – the one rule the other side plays by – the best outcome you can hope for is a renewed sense of your own smug self-righteousness, mixed with a bit of playing the noble and misunderstood victim, a martyr to the truth – the real truth. Yes, that’s an option, to make yourself feel better, but being that sort of self-important jerk is not very attractive. You don’t want to go there. So it’s a cost-benefits thing. Diplomacy – tricking them into running on and on until they run down – seems the best option, even if it seems like cowardice. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, they stop dead in their tracks, realizing they have somehow wandered off into the realm of nonsense. It happens. Not often, but it happens.

And along with diplomacy there is waiting. That would be waiting to see how things turn out. The Republicans had it all from 2000 through 2006 – the White House and both houses of Congress – and got to do what they said should be done, and created a hell of a mess. So sometimes, if you wait long enough, you won’t have to argue policy at all. You just point at the mess – enough said. Domestic, foreign and economic policy – those folks got their shot. There is empirical evidence out there about what happened, evidence that’s far more convincing than any elegant and impassioned argument. You just have to be willing to write off the lost years, and write off New Orleans.

But this is the summer of our discontent – the reverse of those words from Shakespeare’s Richard III – as the nation is ramping up for the midterm elections where the Republicans may well win back control of the House, and possibly the Senate. Summer of our discontent, winter of our discontent – the season doesn’t matter. People are unhappy. Things are still a mess. Maybe they’re worse than ever. And the Republicans are saying they were right all along – cut taxes on the wealthy, rid corporations and Wall Street of stifling regulation, shut down as much of the government as possible – don’t spend money on much of anything – and don’t bail out anyone or anything – let what should fail just fail. It’s the old argument. If the government does next to nothing, and collects no tax money as they’d not need to collect tax money, then the people, and the economy, suddenly unburdened and free, will thrive. They are essentially asking America to remember those obvious truths, after almost two years of the Obama nonsense.

The only problem is the steaming pile of empirical evidence sitting out there in the street for everyone to see, and smell. On Monday, August 2, Obama was in Atlanta speaking to Democratic fundraisers and said the obvious about what is being proposed by the Republicans – “They have not come up with a single, solitary, new idea to address the challenges of the American people. They don’t have a single idea that’s different from George Bush’s ideas – not one.”

This is the politics of pointing to the stinking turd in the street. And it’s not a matter of remembering, Obama told those Democratic fundraisers that Republicans are betting the farm on voters having “amnesia” in the midterm elections.

Of course there was a bit more:

In his Atlanta speech, Obama blasted GOP opposition to his small business tax cuts and loan bill, saying Republicans are opposing their own ideas in an effort to hurt Democrats.

“Republicans say they’re the pro-business party, isn’t that what they say?” Obama said. “You would think this is a bill that they would want to pass. And, yet, day after day, week after week, they keep on stalling this bill and stonewalling this bill and opposing this bill. Why? Pure politics.”

The president also criticized House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other Republicans for pledging to repeal healthcare reform if Republicans win back Congress. “They’re more interested in the next election than the next generation,” Obama said. “And that’s why they can’t have the keys back – because we need somebody who is driving with a vision to the future.”

But it is easy to long for the past in tough times. You miss the good old days, even if they weren’t that good. It happened at the Washington Post, where Fred Hyatt is working on transforming the op-ed page into something anti-Obama and pro-corporations and more Fox News than Fox. To the mix of George Will and Charles Krauthammer he has just added former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen, who in this item suggests the United States use “military assets” to arrest WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. And Eva Rodriguez is puzzled:

Does Thiessen think we’re going to send in Special Ops to pluck Assange from Iceland, Belgium or Sweden, where he’s known to hang out? Or is he thinking that a drone strike might be more effective or efficient?

Thiessen asserts that the United States does not need “permission to apprehend Assange or his co-conspirators anywhere in the world” and that the U.S. should act alone if allies won’t cooperate. I’m not sure this is legally accurate, but let’s assume it is. Is Thiessen suggesting it would be a good idea to disregard an ally’s sovereignty, perhaps do irreparable damage to our relationship with it and the international community just to get our hands on Assange?

Well, some people miss George Bush, and some miss Dick Cheney. Of course at the Post, as with the Wall Street Journal and most newspapers, the op-ed page is walled off from the news operation. You don’t want to mix the two. Reporters work on gathering and reporting empirical facts, while the op-ed writers are not burdened by those. The facts may inform their opinion, but they are being paid for their opinions, not for bare and cold facts. And consider how these things are called informed opinion. The adjective, the modifier – informed – is only a modifier, not the thing itself. It can get amusing, as if the guys writing the op-ed pieces don’t even read their own newspaper.

But that’s a minor matter. The real issue is selective amnesia, and self-respect, and the embarrassment of being a sane conservative – ask David Frum about that, or Andrew Sullivan. Their noses work just fine, and they smell the stink. And now add the big-gun conservative from out here, the famous UCLA law professor Steven Bainbridge, who says it really is getting embarrassing to be a conservative:

These days it’s getting increasingly embarrassing to publicly identify oneself as a conservative. It was bad enough when George Bush 43, the K Street Gang, and the neo-cons were running up spending, fighting an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq, incurring massive deficits, expanding entitlements, and all the rest of the nonsense I cataloged over the years in posts like Bush 43 has been a disaster for conservatives.

These days, however, the most prominent so-called conservatives are increasingly fit only to be cast for the next Dumb and Dumber sequel. They’re dumb and crazy.

And he says that conservative pundit David Klinghoffer nicely captures what has been bothering him:

Once, the iconic figures on the political right were urbane visionaries and builders of institutions – like William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol and Father Richard John Neuhaus, all dead now. Today, far more representative is potty-mouthed Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, whose news and opinion website, Breitbart.com, is read by millions. In his most recent triumph, Breitbart got a U.S. Department of Agriculture official pushed out of her job after he released a deceptively edited video clip of her supposedly endorsing racism against white people.

What has become of conservatism? … With its descent to baiting blacks, Mexicans and Muslims, its accommodation of conspiracy theories and an increasing nastiness and vulgarity, the conservative movement has undergone a shift toward demagoguery and hucksterism. Once the talk was of “neocons” versus “paleocons.” Now we observe the rule of the crazy-cons. …

Conservatism wasn’t just a policy agenda, a set of partisan gripes or a football team seeking victory on the electoral field. Above all, it was a satisfying, sophisticated critique of modern, materialist culture, pointing a way out and up from liberalism.

It was? Who knew? Glenn Beck is not ten times deeper and more insightful than William F. Buckley, and not far more influential than Edmund Burke? Don’t tell Roger Ailes.

But it’s not just that. Bainbridge has a list of ten things that make him, a life-long conservative, embarrassed by the modern conservative movement, starting with this:

A poorly educated ex-sportswriter who served half of one term of a minor state governorship is prominently featured as a – if not the – leading prospect for the GOP’s 2012 Presidential nomination.

And then there is Tom Tancredo saying President Obama is ”the greatest threat to the United States today” and arguing that Obama be impeached:

Bad public policy is not a high crime nor a misdemeanor, and the casual assertion that pursuing liberal policies – however misguided – is an impeachable offense is just nuts.

And then there are former Ford-Reagan treasury department officials Ernest Christian and Gary Robbins, in this Investors Business Day column suggesting states should secede from the union if Obama doesn’t change his ways. Bainbridge calls it “foaming at the mouth” and cites Doug Marconis here – “The GOP controlled Congress from 1994 to 2006: Combine neocon warfare spending with entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects and you end up with a GOP welfare/warfare state driving the federal spending machine.” And of course “when the GOP took control of Congress in 1994, and the White House in 2000, the desire to use the levers of power to create ‘compassionate conservatism’ won out over any semblance of fiscal conservatism. Instead of tax cuts and spending cuts, we got tax cuts along with a trillion dollar entitlement program, a massive expansion of the Federal Government’s role in education, and two wars. That’s not fiscal conservatism it is, as others have said, fiscal insanity.”

Bainbridge notes that today’s Republican Party “still has not articulated a message of real fiscal conservatism” – all you get are catchphrases.

And this made the list too:

Thanks to the Tea Party, the Nevada GOP has probably pissed away a historic chance to oust Harry Reid. See also Charlie Crist in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, and so on. Whatever happened to not letting perfection be the enemy of the good?

And Bainbridge also is not fond of the anti-science and anti-intellectualism crap, or of trying to pretend Afghanistan is Obama’s war. And there are the Birthers and assorted nativists. But what really bothers Bainbridge is this:

The substitution of mouth-foaming, spittle-blasting, rabble-rousing talk radio for reasoned debate. Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt, and even Rush Limbaugh are not exactly putting on Firing Line. Whatever happened to smart, well-read, articulate leaders like Buckley, Neuhaus, Kirk, Jack Kent, Goldwater, and, yes, even Ronald Reagan?

The professor is getting angry. But it’s not just him. There’s David Stockman, a director of the Office of Management and Budget under Reagan, unloading in the New York Times:

If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt – if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.

More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts – in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too.

Those days are gone. He explains it all. And Andrew Sullivan can relate to this:

It’s the kind of op-ed that has one sitting up straight with the sting of fresh memory. Back in the 1980s, I was a Thatcherite. I believed in low taxes but I also believed in – you know – balanced budgets as a core principle of – you remember – conservatism. It was odd coming to America to be told that here – for the first time in human history – you could cut taxes and raise revenue at the same time! It was triply odd, coming from green eye-shade Thatcher-land, to hear that “deficits don’t matter.” In his first term, of course, even Reagan felt it necessary to adjust from this madness – a madness that, far from “starving the beast”, simply made Americans believe that the beast never needed full funding. The first Bush, to his enormous credit, did the responsible thing – but was destroyed by his party for violating the no new taxes pledge. From that moment on, it became not policy but doctrine for the GOP. And the results of further tax cuts and further spending increases, mitigated by divided government in the 1990s, but unleashed in full force under Bush-Cheney, is what we face today…

And he cites Stockman:

By fiscal year 2009, the tax-cutters had reduced federal revenues to 15 percent of gross domestic product, lower than they had been since the 1940s. Then, after rarely vetoing a budget bill and engaging in two unfinanced foreign military adventures, George W. Bush surrendered on domestic spending cuts, too – signing into law $420 billion in non-defense appropriations, a 65 percent gain from the $260 billion he had inherited eight years earlier.

Sullivan:

No intellectually honest person can hold Barack Obama responsible for this long term sabotage of America’s fiscal health. The spending he has authorized has to be seen in the context of the massive financial crisis that nearly caused the second Great Depression and may well still cause a lost generation of output and jobs and productive lives.

But the central point Stockman makes is that all of this was not conservatism as it should be, but the degenerate mockery of conservatism that has come to dominate the GOP: a blend of fiscal abandon, politicized religion, lawless foreign policy and utter electoral cynicism. Until this is confronted, owned and refudiated [note: that's a Palin joke] we may have a Republican future ahead, but not a conservative one.

But they will probably win the House and maybe the Senate, due to what Slate’s foreign correspondent Anne Applebaum calls America’s Peculiar Amnesia:

Historical amnesia is at once the most endearing and the most frustrating of American qualities. On the one hand, it means that – F. Scott Fitzgerald to the contrary – there really are second acts in American lives. People can move somewhere else, reinvent themselves, start again.

On the other hand, our inability to remember what our policy was last week – never mind last decade – drives outsiders crazy. We forget that we supported the dictator before we decided to destroy him. Then we can’t understand why others, especially the dictator’s subjects, don’t always believe in the goodness of our intentions or the sincerity of our devotion to democracy.

Domestic policy is no different of course, and she had argued in a previous column that Americans on both the left and the right have, for the last decade, “consistently voted for high-spending members of Congress and consistently supported ever-higher levels of government intervention and regulation at all levels of public life.” And it is nonsense, as she noted in that column:

I’ve read up on the primary candidates who want to take back government, take down government, burn down Washington. I’ve seen it all, heard it all, and I don’t believe any of it. …

If you don’t live here all the time, and I don’t, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans – with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession, and above all their addiction to government spending programs – demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don’t just want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is either prevented or fully compensated. And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too.

So, coming home, she finds home strange:

Look around the world and we don’t seem as exceptional as we think. Chileans are willing to save for their own retirement. Most Europeans are reconciled to the idea that not everybody, at any age and in any condition, is entitled to the most expensive medical technology. A secretary of state or defense traveling with dozens of cars and armed security men would seem absurd in many countries, as would the notion that the government gives you a tax break if you buy a house, or that schools should close if there is ice on the roads. Yet we not only demand ludicrous levels of personal and political safety, we reserve the right to rant and rave against the vast bureaucracies we have created -democratically, constitutionally, openly -to deliver it.

And thus, in the follow-on column, she senses profound amnesia at play, as folks are under the impression that President Bush believed in small government and that recent Republican congressional leaders opposed federal spending:

Here is a more accurate assessment: “President Bush increased government spending more than any of the six presidents preceding him, including LBJ.” I didn’t write that; the astute libertarian economist Veronique de Rugy did. She also points out that, during his eight years in office, Bush’s “anti-government” Republican administration increased the federal budget by an extraordinary 104 percent. By comparison, the increase under President Bill Clinton’s watch was a relatively measly 11 percent (a rate, I might add, lower than Ronald Reagan’s). In his last term in office, Bush increased discretionary spending – that means non-Medicare, non-Social Security – by 48.6 percent. In his final year in office, fiscal year 2009, he spent more than $32,000 per American, up from $17,216.68 in fiscal year 2001.

But Bush is not the only culprit. After all, the federal government usually spends money in response to state demands. Look, for example, at the demands made by Alaska, a state that produces a disproportionate quantity of anti-government rhetoric, which has had Republican governors since 2002, and which has a congressional delegation dominated by Republicans. Nevertheless, for the last decade, Alaska has been among the top three largest state recipients of federal funding, per capita. Usually, Alaska is far ahead – sometimes three times as far ahead – of most other states in the union.

Largely, this is because of one famous Alaskan, Sen. Ted Stevens – a Republican – who devoted himself to securing federal funding for his state during more than four decades in the Senate. Not only were his efforts extremely popular among his Republican constituents – he was re-elected multiple times – they won him many, many imitators.

And she reminds us that Timothy Noah has pointed out that Sarah Palin, when mayor of Wasilla, hired Stevens’ former chief of staff as a Washington lobbyist – “As a result, the 6,700 inhabitants of Wasilla enjoyed $27 million in federal earmarks over a four-year period.”

It seems someone needs to learn and grow:

Of course, parties can change, politicians can see the light, lessons can be learned – and perhaps some Republicans have learned them. But you cannot start from scratch. You cannot forget history. You cannot pretend that the Republican Party has not supported big and wasteful spending programs – energy subsidies, farm subsidies, unnecessary homeland security projects, profligate defense contracts, you name it – for the last decade. Before the Republican Party can have any credibility on any spending issues whatsoever, Republican leaders need to speak frankly about the mistakes of the past.

And there’s the growing part:

They also must be extremely specific about which policies and which programs they are planning to cut in the future. What will it be? Social Security or the military budget? Medicare or the TSA?

Vague “anti-government” rhetoric just doesn’t cut it anymore: If you want a smaller government, you have to tell us how you will create one.

Yeah, yeah – but how can you argue with someone who has amnesia, and who has also lost their sense of smell? And why even argue? Sometime all you can do is point.

The same thing goes for political conservatives. Out here in Southern California, from the high security aerospace and electronics corporations clustered around LAX and down the coast, where you can’t even ask what they do, through Orange County down past all the Marines at Camp Pendleton, all the way to the giant naval operations in San Diego, with the nuclear aircraft carriers and all that, you get to know a lot of them. Of course, Top Gun – like in the movie – moved out of Miramar in San Diego – too loud and too dangerous. The Top Gun school is now out at China Lake, far beyond Barstow, in the middle of nowhere. And the babe in the movie, Kelly McGillis, just came out of the closet – she prefers girls to Tom Cruise. Oh well – the exception proves the rule. Southern California is chock full of military-minded hyper-patriotic conservatives.

Hollywood, with its really irritating sanctimonious left-wing liberals, is the exception, a small island in the middle of something else entirely. Hollywood just happens to control the levers of popular culture. That’s odd, considering Southern California is also the center of a certain kind of feel-good contemporary-Christian evangelical social conservatism. We gave America Rick Warren – born up in San Jose but with his massive Saddleback Church right here in Lake Forest, smack in the dead center of Orange County. Well, there may be a better way to put that, but these are the folks who fuel the Republican Party – the smiling, affable folks who are disgusted with gays and don’t want individual women to make decisions about abortion or even birth control, who don’t much care for Mexicans sneaking in to find a way to feed their families, and think our adventure in Iraq was a wonderful thing, as those folks needed a little Jesus. And of course they believe in personal responsibility and Tough Love – that is, they hate the whole concept of welfare and public services, and are pro-torture, as sometimes you just have to get tough. That’s how you show real love – what Jesus never said but obviously meant. George Bush, who, when asked before he was first elected who his favorite philosopher was, said Jesus, was and still is their hero. Bush may not have known much, or wanted to know much, but he was an alcoholic who found Jesus and was born again, and then just humbly did Jesus’ work here on earth. The wars didn’t go well and the rationale for the one in Iraq turned into a farce, then New Orleans was pretty much wiped out and not much was done to rescue the dying or do much repair, and then the economy catastrophically collapsed – but he’s a good man. He’s right with Jesus.

This is all very California. And after all, Charlton Heston was the soul of that everyone-should-be-heavily-armed National Rifle Association, and if you visit the Newport Bay Club there is that room where the John Birch Society used to meet with its John Wayne commemorative plaque, and the world headquarters of the Holocaust deniers is in Orange County, and Fontana used to have the largest coven of the Klan outside the South. Southern California isn’t all Barbara Streisand and Janeane Garofalo – we had our Tea Bag Parties too. And we gave you both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

This leads to some odd conversations – a few years ago the fellow, returning for the Sunday morning soft-rock service at his feel-good contemporary-Christian church with his family, saying he was fed up with how things were going in Iraq and that we should nuke them all and turn that part of the world into radioactive glass. He must have heard one hell of a sermon that Sunday. But that’s what he said. And some of us just don’t get it. Of course we live in Hollywood. What do we know?

But if you worked for almost twenty years at the fighter jet and then the spy satellite factory you’re used to such talk. Southern California is like that.

Maybe the whole thing is a matter of empathy – we on the left side think that’s a good thing, and those on the other side not so much. Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, put it nicely:

I’m thinking empathy is to a conservative what a mirror is to a vampire – they just can’t see themselves in it.

The truth is, of course, they’re really not sure what the word means, but I imagine they confuse it with the word “sympathy” (they sound so much alike, after all) and identify it with that whole set of namby-pamby postures that liberals are always trying to sell to the American people – attitudes that, were we all to buy into them, would have us taking just one more slide down that slippery slope toward the unraveling of the fabric of America. Or something.

In other words, to survive in a world full of terrorists “who hate us for our freedoms,” we need to remain tough, and “empathy” is just one of those words that remind us too much of a snoozing kitten on a fluffy pink pillow.

There’s much more, but you get the idea.

But then sometimes conservatives surprise you. Years ago – when the topic here was the death penalty – what didn’t make it to the site was some back and forth with a friend, an assistant attorney general from a Midwestern state who often had to argue that state’s position pretty high up, and it was always arguing that the guy should be put to death. We never did settle our disagreements, but this person made an interesting side comment. She found arguing in front of Antonin Scalia really irritating – he was snide and always trying to throw you off balance with off-topic sarcasm. But she found arguing in front of Richard Posner downright intimidating. He was too damned smart. He didn’t play mind games and cut to the core. He found any flaw in your argument and wouldn’t let go. Yes, he was a Reagan-appointed conservative – he famously opposed the right of privacy in 1981 – but he wasn’t stuck on stupid. In these appeals he should have been on your side, but he had an independent streak. He was no fool. He didn’t rule on any ideology you assumed he held – you had to make your case.

In short he was the kind of conservative that drives conservatives crazy. And now he’s gone off the reservation:

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

In short – these guys didn’t make their case. Using war to achieve foreign policy objectives always was a bit crude – and it didn’t work this time. He doesn’t go all hippie and say it never works, but you can see he wonders about that. And of course an appellate court judge would find trying to substitute will for intellect inane – any lawyers saying this that or the other thing is not so because that is how things should be would be cut to ribbons in his court. So just saying there is no global warming and that public officials should be right with Jesus, and that government never works so there’s no point in using it to do much of anything, as a matter of faith, or common knowledge, or just a given, like an axiom in geometry, doesn’t impress him. As for that preoccupation with abortion, Posner seems to see that as just odd. That’s the one defining issue? That’s narrow thinking – wearing blinders. And of course the last crew screwed the pooch with the economy, although his metaphor, incontinence, is amusing.

Where does that leave the Party? Not in a good place:

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

And then came the financial crash last September and the ensuing depression. These unanticipated and shocking events have exposed significant analytical weaknesses in core beliefs of conservative economists concerning the business cycle and the macro economy generally. Friedmanite monetarism and the efficient-market theory of finance have taken some sharp hits, and there is renewed respect for the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Keynes, a conservatives’ bête noire.

The judge sternly demands an answer. What were you thinking? Explain yourself. The lawyer before the bench has nothing to say, or laughs, or repeats nonsense, or gets angry. The judge is not impressed. You thought he was predisposed to rule in your favor. It doesn’t work that way.

And this is odd. Conservatives really are amazing creatures. You can learn all there is to know about their ways in a month, and yet after a hundred years they can still surprise you.

Matthew Yglesias comments:

I don’t agree with this in every detail. I don’t see a lot of evidence, for example, that the GOP’s opposition to abortion rights suddenly became a huge political loser starting in 2006. But Posner is unusual, even among the dissident camp in the conservative movement, in his willingness to acknowledge that (a) conservatism is as conservatism does and you can’t just wash your hands of George W. Bush, and (b) that the failures of conservatism-in-practice were really comprehensive across a whole swathe of different policy domains.

They didn’t make their case. And the current push – one day you’ll see we were right – is only mildly interesting.

And this gets even more interesting as we move into the debate about healthcare, as Yglesias explains:

Medicine is a complicated subject. And new treatments are devised fairly regularly. Also devised fairly regularly are new applications for old treatments, and new ways of doing old treatments. Meanwhile, the general idea is that a doctor will continue practicing for decades after leaving medical school and that patients won’t necessarily have advanced degrees that are directly relevant to their ailments. Under the circumstances, you can easily see how everyone’s decision-making might be improved by conducting and disseminating research on the comparative effectiveness of different treatment modalities. Such research could save lives and could also save money. But of course it’s bad for certain for-profit providers of medical services. If I’m in the business of making medical devices or pharmaceutical products, I don’t really want people to know what’s effective; I’d rather just rely on the power of my marketing apparatus.

Among other things, in the absence of real information, high prices and “newness” can act as a signal of quality. Which heart medicine do you want – this old cheap generic one that they give to Medicaid cases or my shiny new and much more expensive one reserved for prosperous patients like you? Well, what I’d really like is some credible research on the question. But the makers of the shiny new more expensive drug don’t like it.

This refers to articles on comparative effectiveness research in the New England Journal of Medicine, like this one by Jerry Avorn about the backlash against the whole idea:

The contested provisions were designed to support studies comparing the efficacy and safety (and, by extension, the cost-effectiveness) of alternative ways of addressing common clinical problems. Interventions to be evaluated will include pharmaceuticals, devices, procedures, and diagnostic approaches, such as imaging studies. This research will fill important information gaps facing clinicians, patients, and payers concerning what works best. Currently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) often approves new medications on the basis of modest-sized studies involving patients with relatively few coexisting conditions who are followed for brief periods. Sometimes the only efficacy requirement is a demonstration that a new product works better than placebo in improving a surrogate outcome measure, such as a laboratory-test result, rather than achievement of an actual clinical benefit. The bar is set even lower for medical devices such as pacemakers and implantable defibrillators, which may only have to be shown to be similar to previously approved products or simply not to be dangerous. For new surgical procedures or imaging studies, there may be almost no evidentiary bar at all.

Vigorous marketing of the costliest new approaches fills this informational vacuum, encouraging the widespread use of goods or services that may be no better, less safe, or more costly than usual care – or all of the above. Of course, many new interventions clearly are better in one or more of these domains, but we have no systematic way of collecting or disseminating such information. It is these lacunae that the funding for comparative-effectiveness studies was designed to help fill. At 1/20 of 1% of our $2 trillion annual health care expenditure, the CER funding amounts to a fraction of what any corporation would spend to find out whether it was getting its money’s worth from its purchases. It represents one of the best investments we can make to edge the health care system away from the fiscal catastrophe it faces, since such studies will help to reduce spending on poorer clinical decisions and to spare resources for expenditures that will help patients most (and most affordably). This research is a public good, like highways and clean air. The private sector is no more likely to identify badly mispriced or potentially toxic treatments than it was to spot badly mispriced or potentially toxic products of the banking industry.

That sounds good, but of course it isn’t good:

In calmer times, fiscal conservatives might have been expected to support a plan to generate information about treatment benefits, risks, and costs so that physicians, consumers, and payers could use this knowledge in making purchasing decisions. But these are not normal times. On January 23, Representative Tom Price (R-GA), a physician, sent out an “alert” through the Republican Study Committee, falsely warning that the CER legislation would create “a permanent government rationing board prescribing care instead of doctors and patients.” The true intent of the CER provision, Price warned, was “to enable the government to ration care.” “Every policy and standard will be decided by this board and would be the law of the land for every doctor, drug company, hospital, and health insurance plan.”

Parallel arguments appeared in a letter sent January 26 to several influential members of Congress, cosigned by more than 60 advocacy groups, and again in a January 29 editorial in the Wall Street Journal. In an op-ed by columnist George Will that appeared in the Washington Post the same day, CER had morphed from a form of research into an imaginary new federal body with broad powers. Will named the agency “the CER” and claimed that with such a system, “Congress could restrict the tax exclusion for private health insurance to ‘insurance that complies with the Board’s recommendation.’ The CER,” he went on, “which would dramatically advance government control – and rationing – of health care, should be thoroughly debated, not stealthily created in the name of ‘stimulus.’”

Posner by now would be weeping, but the Heritage Foundation knows what’s coming:

The type of information collected by CER could eventually be used inappropriately if a “Federal Health Board” was created to decide which types of treatment would be available to whom and when.

But judges are not fond of hypothetical-if arguments, of being asked to rule on an unlikely future alternative reality, or Yglesias says, points out, on this chain of sequential events:

First, we implement comparative effectiveness research.

Second, we create a Federal Health Board.

Third, we empower this board not only to decide what the federal government is prepared to pay for, but also what private individuals are allowed to buy on their own.

Fourth, the Federal Health Board starts using this research inappropriately.

So obviously you should not take step one. Which Yglesias thinks comes close to pure nonsense:

This is on a par with saying we shouldn’t build a steel plant because steel could be used to build AK-47s which could be used to murder innocent people. Sure, this dire sequence of events “could” play out, but the underlying assumption seems to be that the American public is loudly clamoring for inappropriately designed comprehensive health care rationing and the only thing stopping the congress from imposing it is a lack of sound research (never mind that you could ration inappropriately without research).

Clearly the thing to do is to try to stop this chain of events somewhere further down the line. I do know that something resembling step three is in effect in Canada, but I know of literally nobody in the United States of America who favors this idea. Indeed, my strong sense is that it’s only politically viable in Canada because it’s relatively easy for Canadians to travel to the United States if they want to pay out-of-pocket for medical services. To go to step two would be an extremely difficult political fight. And, frankly, you’d expect it to be a fight in which it was conservatives who were arguing for cuts in federal health spending and liberals arguing for a more generous program. But to try to stop the chain at step one is perverse.

But conservatives can surprise you. That may be why Posner is bailing out. You know the expression – Tell it to the judge!

They did. He wasn’t impressed. He’s the surprising conservative.

For March Madness one had to turn to ABC’s “This Week” and watch David Brooks – the mild-mannered house conservative at the New York Times decided that people on his side of the political divide were quite mad, actually, and he said so. In fact, he called the current crop of Republican leaders insane. That was his word:

The problem with them and the problem with Limbaugh in terms of intellectual philosophy is they are stuck with Reagan. They are stuck with the idea that government is always the problem. A lot of Republicans up in Capitol Hill right now are calling for a spending freeze in a middle of a recession/depression. That is insane. But they are thinking the way they thought in 1982, if we can only think that way again, that is just insane.

Steve Benen in the Washington Monthly thinks Brooks couldn’t be more correct, and is startled by Brooks’ candor:

…what I’m especially impressed with is his willingness, in this case, to lay it on the line. There’s no sugar-coating – what Republican leaders are proposing is “insane.” There’s no defense for such madness, and Brooks did the audience a service by saying so.

But Benen has a caveat:

GOP lawmakers are “stuck with Reagan” and a pre-recession mindset; this much is obvious. But what occasionally bears repeating is that they don’t even remember Reagan especially well. Reality may be blasphemous in some Republican circles but the inconvenient truth is Reagan raised taxes. He raised them several times. The conservative Republicans – with Gingrich and the WSJ editorial page, I mean that literally – who are whining incessantly about President Obama’s proposed tax increases on the wealthy are the same ones who complained bitterly about Reagan’s tax increases in 1982.

He links to a discussion of Reagan raising taxes and this same crew howling about it then, and adds this:

Brooks is right; conservative Republican lawmakers want desperately to turn back the clock to how they perceive the 1980s. But they’re not only wrong about today’s economy, they’re not even getting the ’80s right.

They were wrong about Reagan’s tax increases. They were wrong about Clinton’s tax increases. They were wrong about Bush’s tax cuts. And now, they’re wrong again about Obama’s tax policy while simultaneously pushing “insane” ideas.

If they could just let the grown-ups talk for a while, we’d all be better off.

Well, Benen is a partisan, but the facts are clear:

The top Republican in the House is seizing on the latest spike in unemployment to call for a freeze on government spending and to urge President Barack Obama to veto a $410 billion spending bill.

Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the jump in unemployment to 8.1 percent and the loss of 651,000 jobs in February is a sign of a worsening recession that demands better solutions from both parties.

Boehner criticized the spending bill as chocked full of wasteful, pork-barrel projects…. Boehner said he hoped Obama would veto the bill. He urged the president to work with House Republicans to impose a spending freeze until the end of this fiscal year.

The fiscal year runs October to October, by the way, and one way to look at this comes from Pat Garofalo here – “The economic stimulus package’s main purpose is to close the GDP gap and jumpstart the economy by spurring spending by households, government and the private sector. A spending freeze would act as an ‘anti-stimulus,’ cutting spending precisely when it’s too low and the economy is moving too slowly.”

That’s the conventional thinking, but John Boehner is, it seems, being bold – with a fresh, new idea, from how people think of Reagan, in spite of the evidence – shut down spending. That’ll fix things.

Josh Marshall doesn’t think so:

When the crisis is a rapid and catastrophic drop off in demand, you handcuff the one force that can create demand (i.e., the federal government) in the throes of the contraction. That’s insane. Levels of stimulus are a decent question. Intensifying the contraction is just insane and frankly a joke. It’s time to recognize that the only debate here is happening among Democrats and sundry non-affiliated sane people. The leaders of the GOP are simply not part of the conversation.

One does think of the tea party in Alice in Wonderland – or of Rick Santelli on CNBC holding up a tea bag calling for a new sort of Boston Tea Party where Americans rise up and demand an end to the war on the rich and successful and an end to any help for people facing foreclosure and whining for help, when the stock market is in a slow, steady collapse and the good guys who hold stock are getting hit hard. And there is now Michelle Malkin and her Tea Party USA Movement – it’s time to rise up and protect the rich from being punished for being successful. It’s a revolution to save the wealthy. What is it with tea parties and madness?

But Santelli and Malkin aren’t politicians. John Boehner is – House Minority Leader and the congressman from Ohio’s 8th district, Cincinnati and Dayton, mainly. As you know, Cincinnati gave us Doris Day and Larry Flynt and Jerry Springer, so you’d expect a little strangeness. But Boehner is a responsible person in a position of responsibility.

Steve Benen also thinks about that:

When I was a teenager, I had certain misconceptions about politics and government. I assumed, for example, that members of Congress, whether I agreed with their policies or not, were necessarily very bright. After all, these folks are educated and well read. They attend policy briefings, hear expert testimony at committee hearings, and have staffers who help keep them informed on everything from the economy to foreign policy to constitutional law. It’s not like voters would just send some misguided schmuck to serve as their voice in one of the most prestigious legislative bodies on the planet.

But, of course, Benen grew up. And he mulls over that California congressman, Kevin McCarthy, twittering about how much he’s enjoying “Atlas Shrugged.” And Benen agrees with what Matthew Yglesias says here:

Something I think most liberals don’t understand is exactly how stupid many conservative leaders are. There is, yes, a condescending tendency to believe that no smart person could be on the right ideologically at all. That’s dead wrong. There are plenty of bright people on the right. But the way their movement works, intelligence or understanding of politics and policy has no meaningful role in advancement. If anything, there’s something of a negative correlation between knowing what you’re talking about and being able to get ahead in right-wing politics.

So you get stuff like this. He’s not cocooning by reading Milton Friedman, he’s cocooning by reading Ayn Rand. It’s nuts, but it’s the way things work.

Benen says he would go further, as he thinks most of the media and the public also underestimate the scope of the foolishness:

If a member of Congress – not just some back-bencher, but a senator or a member of the House leadership – says something seemingly provocative, a lot of people are predisposed to take it seriously. After all, he/she is in a position of authority. He/she helps shape the policies of the federal government. His/her opinion must have some value; I’m seeing it on television.

The underlying assumption is the same one I had in high school.

So the House Minority Leader responds to an economic collapse by calling for a spending freeze, and you know what happens:

News outlets reported this straight – as if it were a serious recommendation from a credible public figure. Some Americans probably heard the news and thought there might be something to it. After all, Boehner’s the House Minority Leader. GOP lawmakers got together and picked him as their #1 guy. If Republicans re-claimed the majority, Boehner would be the Speaker of the House, and two heartbeats from the presidency.

Respectable figures are reluctant to say, out loud, “My God, what this man is saying is blisteringly stupid.” Indeed, leading Republican officials – Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl, Mike Pence – say all kinds of things that should be dismissed as transparent nonsense, but aren’t. There must be something coherent about their ideas, the conventional thinking goes, by virtue of their offices. Their recommendations warrant responses – and even deserve consideration at the negotiating table – because they maintain positions of influence in government.

Yglesias says – “Something I think most liberals don’t understand is exactly how stupid many conservative leaders are.” Benen says – “If only liberals weren’t the only ones.”

But these guys are on the left. That’s just one side of the story. Some believe Ayn Rand was the greatest thinker who ever lived, and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity the wisest men in America at this time, and others do not. David Brooks may just be a traitor to his side.

But there is also David Frum, well-known conservative thinker, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, the man who coined the phrase “axis of evil” and is now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Frum was born in Canada, but attended Yale and then Harvard Law School and proudly became an American citizen in 2007 – so he has some street cred on the right.

Brooks, in his Sunday morning comment on insanity, made passing reference to the Newsweek cover story that had just hit the stands, David Frum explaining Why Rush is Wrong. It is subtitled “A Conservative’s Lament.”

So it’s not just those on the left who see the March madness. “Rush knows what he is doing,” Frum writes, and says that’s the problem:

The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined. But do the rest of us understand what we are doing to ourselves by accepting this leadership?

He is worried that some on the left could use Limbaugh’s words “to misrepresent conservatives as clueless, indifferent or gleeful in the face of the most painful economic crisis in a generation.” The idea is that he and the conservatives he knows are none of those things, and the appeal of cluelessness, indifference and glee at things falling apart is limited:

Rush Limbaugh is a seriously unpopular figure among the voters that conservatives and Republicans need to reach. Forty-one percent of independents have an unfavorable opinion of him, according to the new NEWSWEEK Poll.

And he is not fond of inflexibility, with Rush saying that “conservatism is what it is, and it is forever.” Frum cites Newt Gingrich’s suggestion that “we are at the end of the Reagan era” – give it a rest. Frum says:

It’s inescapably obvious that the Republican Party needs to evolve. We need to put free-market health-care reform, not tax cuts, at the core of our economic message. … We need to modulate our social conservatism … especially on gay-rights issues. … We need an environmental message.

The party doesn’t seem to be with him on that. And he made the mistake of using the Darwin Word – evolve.

But Frum likes facts:

At the peak of the Bush boom in 2007, the typical American worker was earning barely more after inflation than the typical American worker had earned in 2000. … Political parties that do not deliver economic improvement for the typical person do not get reelected. We Republicans and conservatives were not delivering. …

Every day, Rush Limbaugh reassures millions of core Republican voters that no change is needed. He claims 20 million listeners per week, and that suffices to make him a very wealthy man. And if another 100 million people cannot stand him, what does he care? … It’s not as if they can vote against him. But they can vote against Republican candidates for Congress. They can vote against Republican nominees for president. And if we allow ourselves to be over-identified with somebody who earns his fortune by giving offense, they will vote against us.

Of course you know what happened next. Conservative columnist Noel Sheppard said it was a media plot and they bought off Frum – “We’ve entered the predictable phase of the media attack on Limbaugh: mainstream news outlets paying well-known conservatives to bash the talk show host.”

The posters at FreeRepublic.com piled on – “Don’t read Frum anymore. He’s an Eastern Elite and looks down on me.” And “Frum is a pathetic idiot.” And “If David Frum was set alight and put into a wheel barrow headed down towards the edge of the Grand Canyon, I must admit to being more concerned about the wheel barrow’s final allotment then Mr. Frum.”

Others just thought he was muddle-headed, not a clear thinker like Limbaugh.

But at the Reagan Conservatives Blog there was this:

Please stop telling us what is wrong with… well, US. Seriously, I just cannot take it anymore. … We all recognize the problems we face as a nation, and as a Party. You want a frigging medal because you, too, can read polls and recognize that we need to sort out the Hispanic-gap, the suburban-soccer-mom-gap, the generational gap, the new-young-Christian-gap or any other gap the numbers indicate? … I love being a conservative and am proud to call myself one – so please do us a favor… quit calling yourself conservative, moving the goalposts on us, and then complaining we are on a different field.

Someone has been driven mad.

But that Eastern Elite comment may be spot on, as Frum says this:

What attracted me to conservatism as a young person in the early 1980s was its challenge to engage and understand some real thinkers – Hayek, von Mises, Kirk, Buckley, Friedman, Chambers. You didn’t have to be an intellectual, but you needed to understand them. Reagan did. Now, instead of intellectuals, we have clowns like Joe the Plumber and Limbaugh getting all the attention. Conservatism is over-opinionated and undereducated, proudly intolerant and insular – populated by the type of Americans who (this happened) would spit on Darwin’s tomb in Westminster Abbey.

Sometimes you just cannot recapture the past. Things change over time, or as the conservative Andrew Sullivan says here:

Maybe, generationally, David and I are doomed to never experience again the intellectual thrill of our adolescence. Maybe when we retire and the looming liberal hegemony fades, as it, in turn, must.

But something is wrong now. Heather at Crooks and Liars offers an interesting video clip – D. L. Hughley on his CNN show, just cancelled, by the way, talks to the author Frank Schaeffer, whose father was one of the founders of the religious right, about Schaeffer’s Huffington Post item Why Are the Republicans Such Anti-Obama Liars?

Frank Schaeffer is rather blunt:

Today the Republican Party is rooting for doom. And since the Republicans are now anti-American members of an Obama-must-fail insurgency, lies become a self-fulfilling prophecy: talk doom, and keep the economy in a panic and we may get what we wish for.

Don’t conservative Republicans object to the lies? No, because the Republicans don’t have any actual and traditional conservative followers left. The Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative ideologues, and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of color or two up front on TV to obscure the all-white, all reactionary all backward – there-is-no-global-warming – rube reality. Actual conservatives, let alone the educated classes, have long since fled.

Frank Schaeffer may have been thinking about Brooks and Frum, and those two do not fit what Schaeffer says is the party now:

The Republican religious nuts are rooting for Jesus to “rapture” them, not for America, and the neoconservatives are rooting for war and the Israeli hard liners, not for America. Truth (and sanity) are out the window.

So, what is the problem with lying to our faces, say, claiming that all American’s taxes are going up when 95% of American’s taxes are going to go down? Why not claim Obama is a socialist, even if he’s not? Why not say anything at all to drive our country into a pit when losing is seen as winning? That, is all the Republicans have to offer America: more lies on a path to destruction from which the Republican “leadership” plans to resurrect themselves and “save” America from Obama.

Frank Schaeffer may be too angry, but there is Newt Gingrich:

You’ve got to want the president to succeed. You’re irrational if you don’t want the president to succeed. Because if he doesn’t succeed the country doesn’t succeed… I don’t think anyone should want the president of the United States to fail. I want some of his policies to be stopped. But I don’t want the president of the United States to fail. I want him to learn new policies.

Well, that was a Sunday statement – everyone was soon placing their bets on the number of hours that would pass before Gingrich would back down, and claim Rush is a great American and wise, and that he agrees with Rush and he too wants Obama to fail – he was just misunderstood. The usual is six to eight hours.

But there were many Sunday statements that seemed odd, like this:

John McCain and Richard C. Shelby, two high-profile Republican senators, said on Sunday that the government should allow a number of the biggest American banks to fail.

“Close them down, get them out of business,” Mr. Shelby, the senior Republican on the Banking Committee, told ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” “If they’re dead, they ought to be buried.”

While the Alabama senator did not say which banks to shutter, he suggested that Citigroup might be on that list, saying the bank has “always been a problem child.”

John Cole at Balloon Juice says it looks like Monday would be a good day to short Citigroup:

Seriously- the welfare queens on Wall Street keep asking what Obama can do to “regain the confidence of Wall Street” (and I really cannot describe how angry those statements make me – Obama needs to have you regain confidence in him? You were the rocket scientists who caused this mess.) He could start by sending Sen. Shelby to Gitmo every Friday through Monday so he can’t appear on any more weekend shows. There may be drastic steps that need to be taken shortly, but the last damned thing the jittery market needs right now is Senators running around publicly suggesting we need banks to die.

By the way- which member of the CNBC brain trust will blame Obama for Citigroup’s cliff dive tomorrow?

But Shelby said this, really:

I don’t want to nationalize them, I think we need to close them. Close them down, get them out of business. If they’re dead, they ought to be buried. We bury the small banks; we’ve got to bury some big ones and send a strong message to the market. And I believe that people will start investing [again] in banks.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo is just amazed:

Something like this is both heartening and insanely distressing at the same time – because what exactly does he think people are talking about when people talk about nationalization? They’re talking about some form of FDIC-like takeover, though probably one that would take longer and be much more complicated since you simply can’t find another bank that is going to buy up most or all of Citi’s assets at some knock-down price over the weekend – certainly not in the present climate. You either clean the bank up (which would require what amounts to a de facto bankruptcy proceeding) and sell it back into private hands or break it up and sell it off in individual pieces – likely some combination of the two.

It would be one thing if Shelby were just one more Fox News robot. But he’s the ranking member of the friggin’ Banking Committee.

Kevin Drum is more specific:

The FDIC is not set up to run distressed banks. It’s set up to either (a) sell them off immediately to another bank or (b) hold onto them just long enough to liquidate everything. And the FDIC is really, really not set up to run a big money center bank like Citigroup, which is both a normal depository institution plus a fantastic agglomeration of other financial entities, including derivatives underwriting, asset management, private equity portfolios, a staggering variety of trading operations spread all over the world, and one of the world’s biggest insurance companies. This is not FDIC territory.

McCain’s buddy Phil Gramm pushed through the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1990 – Citigroup isn’t really a bank, per se. We improved things so they could innovate. And Drum adds that selling off Citigroup is also not an option:

Who’s big enough to buy them? Nobody. What’s more, their stock is currently selling for about buck a share. There are thousands of rich investors who could buy the whole place, lock stock and barrel, anytime they wanted to. But no one wants to. There’s a reason, after all, that huge chunks of the stuff on Citi’s balance sheet is called toxic waste.

So we have a dilemma:

The FDIC can’t run Citigroup and nobody in their right mind wants to buy them. On the other hand, with Citi’s stock hovering around a dollar, their shareholders have already lost nearly their entire investment. Allowing Citi to fail would hardly cause them any more damage than they’ve already suffered. So why not just let them go under, as Shelby wants?

There’s only one problem with that:

This was the gamble Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson took last September when they allowed Lehman Brothers to fail – damn it, it’s time to enforce some market discipline on these guys! – and their gamble failed spectacularly. The global financial system nearly collapsed even though Lehman wasn’t all that big.

But hey – maybe Lehman taught everyone a lesson. Maybe all of Citgroup’s creditors and counterparties have already priced in the possibility of default. You never know. And maybe if Citigroup fails, and they all end up with a bunch of worthless notes, they’ll just shrug and go about their business.

Then again, maybe not. Maybe Citigroup really is too big to fail. And maybe if they fail, and all their creditors and note-holders and counterparties are stiffed, maybe they’ll all fail too. And then all of their creditors and note-holders and counterparties will also fail. Etc. And then it’s back to the dark ages for all of us.

So this could go either way, and no one knows which way. Drum says he doesn’t know. But it seems Shelby knows:

All I can say is: Richard Shelby has way bigger balls than I do. Call me a wuss if you must, but I’m really not willing to take the gamble and find out, especially since I think the odds are pretty strongly in favor of Citigroup having the ability to take all the rest of us down with them if they collapse. Shelby, however, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Banking Committee, guardian of the nation’s financial health, is apparently willing to just say “fuck it,” roll the dice, and hope against hope for snake eyes.

Of course, this is precisely the kind of imbecilic, high-stakes gambling that got us into this mess in the first place. Maybe Shelby ought to think twice before deciding that the hair of the dog might get us out.

What Benen said, about the foolishness of assuming these people in congress know what they are talking about, is clear now – or it’s just March madness.

But if you’re one of those who think Ayn Rand was the greatest thinker who ever lived, and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity the wisest men in America at this time, and attend your local Malkin Tea Party, to defend the wealthy to the death, then all this isn’t mad at all. As they say, your mileage may vary.

Sure, his presidency was fascinating – and some of us saw it from the inside, chatting with Carlucci at the Pentagon and trading quips with Doctor Koop at his Christmas parties at the National Institute of Health – but what Reagan had going was unsustainable, the Art Laffer voodoo economics (lower taxes and more tax money will come in), and the idea that government is not the solution to our problems but is the problem itself, when he ran the government and seemed to enjoy it, and thought he was doing some good. With that Laffer tax policy the inevitable happened – to cover the inevitable federal budget deficits, the United States borrowed rather heavily, raising the national debt from seven hundred billion dollars to three trillion. Oops, and Reagan said that was the “greatest disappointment” of his presidency.

Some say he won the Cold War by forcing the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he loved to call the Evil Empire, while others say he just happened to be around when it collapsed under its own weight and absurdity. Some say he was firm and never gave an inch, and that’s what did it – Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall! But there were the summits and the arms-reduction treaties – he talked to Gorbachev and worked things out, as détente was fine too.

So what they say about him now, and his no tax, kill the bad guys and don’t even talk to them ways, isn’t particularly true, particularly about the taxes:

It’s conservative lore that Reagan the icon cut taxes, while George H. W. Bush the renegade raised them. As [David] Stockman recalls, “No one was authorized to talk about tax increases on Ronald Reagan’s watch, no matter what kind of tax, no matter how justified it was.” Yet raising taxes is exactly what Reagan did. He did not always instigate those hikes or agree to them willingly – but he signed off on them. One year after his massive tax cut, Reagan agreed to a tax increase to reduce the deficit that restored fully one-third of the previous year’s reduction. (In a bizarre bit of self-deception, Reagan, who never came to terms with this episode of ideological apostasy, persuaded himself that the three-year, $100 billion tax hike – the largest since World War II – was actually “tax reform” that closed loopholes in his earlier cut and therefore didn’t count as raising taxes.)

Faced with looming deficits, Reagan raised taxes again in 1983 with a gasoline tax and once more in 1984, this time by $50 billion over three years, mainly through closing tax loopholes for business. Despite the fact that such increases were anathema to conservatives – and probably cost Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, reelection – Reagan raised taxes a grand total of four times, just between 1982-84.

But what isn’t particularly true can still be useful – he never talked to the bad guys (screw ‘em) and he made sure taxes always went down so America could prosper. That’s the line now, and he’s the hero who ran things just that way. The first President Bush followed him, and could pull off any of that stuff, and he lasted one term, followed by eight years of Bill Clinton, who had a far different agenda. When the second President Bush had his eight years, he couldn’t do Reagan either, or the Reagan everyone had come to imagine. But the myth still persists, and any given day you can see Larry Kudlow chatting with his old friend Art Laffer on CNBC – carrying on the wholly imaginary Reagan legacy.

Oh, the conservatives had their moments – they impeached Bill Clinton, but couldn’t convict him, and Newt Gingrich arranged for the whole government to shut down over a tax policy dispute, but managed to come off as someone who did something spiteful, destructive and irresponsible, when all he wanted to do was show everyone how principled and thoughtful his Republican congress was. The affable Reagan could manage things – his acolytes could not. And then came the second Bush – a disaster, and most Republicans and all conservatives seem to agree that he was no Reagan. He got his tax cuts, far deeper than Reagan would have ever dared, and he had his wars and effectively abolished the State Department, giving most of its tasks to Rumsfeld at Defense, things that Reagan, who pulled our guys out of Beirut when he realized their being there was pointless and just got them killed, would have never dared. But somehow it all fell apart – the wars mushroomed into endless occupations, the world for eight years came to understand we just don’t think things through and are quite dangerous – and then the economy, unregulated in a way that was supposed to fulfill Reagan’s dream of no government messing with anybody, collapsed. That sort of thing happens when we buy the hype, the myth, and don’t think about what really happened in the Reagan years. And add to that Bush spent money like there was no tomorrow – his folks saying deficits didn’t matter. Reagan may have been disappointed in that ballooning debt – but no one remembered that he said that until it was too late.

So Barack Obama was inevitable. If he didn’t exist someone would have to invent him. No one could do Reagan, although every Republican candidate invoked his name, endlessly. Certainly the old and angry old man, John McCain, couldn’t be Reagan. Actually, only Obama could – he’d be the affable pragmatist who’d inspire folks, provide a vision of how things could be, but just not the vision the conservatives usually embrace. There is a reason Obama admires Reagan – and wasn’t that impressed with Bill Clinton. It’s about knowing what the job is, and how to do it – not just marking time and following the instructions in the manual from decades ago, for a far different situation. Sure, you might get a pat on the head for that – your base, one way or the other, will say nice things. But that’s all bullshit.

So now what do the conservatives do? Well, on Thursday, February 26, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) met in Washington, as they do every year. And if you want to know what they said, the best place to turn would be the cable news network that streamed big chunks of the event live, Fox News. But in print, the headline was dire – Conservatives Search Their Souls for Return to Principles. They have souls?

Seriously, the idea here is that this group is struggling with the idea that maybe the majority – they did run things for many years – made Republicans their own worst enemies, “and now it’s time to learn the lessons that come from losing one’s principles.” The Republicans sent to Washington lost their way, and then they lost majorities in the House and Senate, and then they lost the White House. So now they have to find their way, whatever that is.

Now, this is interesting:

The problem is the corrupting influence of power, said Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., who ran for president under the anti-illegal immigration banner and has been hailed by supporters as an unwavering conservative. He told FOXNews.com in an interview at CPAC that Republicans who swept into the majority in 1994 went from revolutionaries to entrenched politicians because of the temptations of their offices.

“There are no two ways about it – the party has been more concerned about simply staying in power. That is the real lure,” Tancredo said.

He said power caused many Republicans to abandon their conservative impulses for what they thought would get them re-elected, and that was “to spend more money.”

Now wait – that makes no sense. Tancredo said too many Republicans did what people wanted, spending money on what people wanted money spent on, and got reelected again and again by the folks who saw them doing sensible things – and that’s a bad thing. Others might call that good government in a representative democracy. Tancredo seems to be saying it’s better to educate your constituents on why you’re doing things they don’t want you to do, so they admire you for your firm principles and your refusal to be anything they might have thought was sensible. But he couldn’t mean that. That’s only what he says. But he seems to believe it. It’s very odd.

The younger folks there have a different logic:

Up-and-comers like 27-year-old freshman Rep. Aaron Schock of Illinois said he believes he can help reverse the destructive trend. As the youngest member of Congress, he made national headlines when he rode on Air Force One with President Obama to the Caterpillar plant in his East Peoria district earlier this month. Schock ignored direct pressure by Obama to vote for the Democratic stimulus bill and joined his Republican colleagues in unanimously voting against it, twice.

Schock said Thursday that the first order of business for Republicans is to get better at being ambassadors of conservatism, whether it be in Washington or throughout the country, particularly in places where they have typically not succeeded before.

“We need to be troubadours of the Reagan message,” he said. Conservatives need to “show a little heart” and bring the values of the party down to a practical level.

“That doesn’t mean watering down our positions,” he added.

Good luck with that – troubadours are cool, as they made the High Middle Ages much more pleasant. But what’s the Reagan message, exactly? Everyone has been saying they are the “party of no” these days – what everyone else is for, they’re against, and will tell anyone who’s listening that everyone else is just stupid, and certainly without principles. The polling show most people find being called stupid and unprincipled, and in need of education, a bit unpleasant. And it doesn’t help that Obama has that respect thing going – asking for Republican input, asking what they think, not agreeing with their principles but assuming their intentions are honorable, as everyone want the best for the country. Whether that is a sham or not, it is far more pleasant. And it seems to befuddle the conservatives.

Another theme in this item is confidence. At least these folks have that:

“I’m not suffering a lack of confidence right now,” said Colleen Holmes, executive director of the anti-abortion Eagle Forum. “The liberals seem to be really far out to the left and that seems to be emboldening the Republican leadership these days. It helps when you don’t have a lot to lose. Maybe that’s what it took.”

Well, they were bold. There was the former UN Ambassador, John Bolton, the one who was never confirmed and had to leave the post, joking – maybe the bad guys should nuke Obama’s Chicago, to teach him a lesson. The crowd cheered. And a lot of talk about how Obama was really born in Kenya and the legitimacy his presidency was more than shaky. And Joe the Plumber suggested he’d be running for Congress soon. And there was Mike Huckabee with this:

I’m still convinced America wants to like us. They want to vote for us. It’s when we lose our competence that the American people lose their confidence.

Yes, he’s saying to his fellow Republicans that, gee, if we only weren’t so incompetent, we’d do really well. No, really – he said that. Perhaps he meant to say that he knows the county is anti-government, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-Hollywood, pro-gun, pro-war, pro-torture – almost everyone – and because we didn’t do those things well enough they all turned to Obama out of frustration. Of course that doesn’t make much sense either. It was a bad day at CPAC.

It’s little wonder all they have left to buck them up are the words of Rush Limbaugh. To protect him, the same day, Senate Republican Steering Committee Chairman Jim DeMint forced the house to add an amendment to the DC voting rights bill that would prohibit the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from reinstating the Fairness Doctrine – equal time for dissenting opinions – as that would decimate conservative talk radio. Read all about that here – the Democrats say sure, whatever. Obama already said he opposed reinstating the Fairness Doctrine – always has. DeMint just wanted to be sure, and to be able to tell the base he had stopped the plan to bring it back, even though he had to concede there was no such plan. Yeah, whatever floats his boat.

And here read all about Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, a staunch Republican, saying “Anybody who wants the president to fail is an idiot, because it means we’re all in trouble.” Rush said that, and keeps saying that, but forgives him:

I am told that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford called me an idiot, not by name. But he said, “Anybody who wants Obama to fail is an idiot.” Well, I don’t know anybody else who said it, so I guess he’s talking about me…. Politicians have different audiences than I do and they’ve got to say things in different ways. So, after he said, “Anybody who wants Obama to fail is an idiot,” then went on in his own way to say, “Gosh, I hope this doesn’t work.’”… He just had to say, “We don’t want the president to fail.”

Hell we don’t! We want something to blow up here politically. We want something to not go right…. We’re talking about freedom that is under assault!

But you have to forgive Mark Sanford – Rush knows what he really wanted to say.

All this is more than frustrating to John Derbyshire, who, in American Conservative, offers How Radio Wrecks the Right – and he’s dead serious. And he’s a contributing editor of National Review.

But he’s lots of things:

John Derbyshire (born June 3, 1945) is a British-American author and columnist. He writes for the magazines National Review Online and New English Review on a broad range of topics, including immigration, China, history, mathematics, culture, politics, and race. Derbyshire graduated from University College London, where he studied mathematics. His wife is originally from China and they have two children. While raised an Anglican, he no longer considers himself a Christian but rather a Mysterian.

If you drill down you’ll find that Mysterianism “is a philosophical position proposing that the hard problem of consciousness will never be explained; or at the least cannot be explained by the human mind at its current evolutionary stage.” So as for all that God stuff – you don’t talk about what you don’t know and can’t know, as all that is clearly nonsense, or non-sense. And, for a conservative, he’s quite contrarian, especially about Intelligent Design, which he says is “not just lousy science, but lousy religion.” And he didn’t have much use for Bush, and dismisses small-government conservatism as dreaming – the world doesn’t work that way. There’s much more at the link.

As for How Radio Wrecks the Right, he dives right in:

Taking the conservative project as a whole – limited government, fiscal prudence, equality under law, personal liberty, patriotism, realism abroad – has talk radio helped or hurt? All those good things are plainly off the table for the next four years at least, a prospect that conservatives can only view with anguish. Did the Limbaughs, Hannitys, Savages, and Ingrahams lead us to this sorry state of affairs?

They surely did. At the very least, 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.”

And there is the main villain:

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.

It does so by routinely descending into the ad hominem – Feminazis instead of feminism – and catering to reflex rather than thought. Where once conservatism had been about individualism, talk radio now rallies the mob. “Revolt against the masses?” asked Jeffrey Hart. “Limbaugh is the masses.”

In place of the permanent things, we get Happy Meal conservatism: cheap, childish, familiar. Gone are the internal tensions, the thought-provoking paradoxes, the ideological uneasiness that marked the early Right. But however much this dumbing-down has damaged the conservative brand, it appeals to millions of Americans. McDonald’s profits rose 80 percent last year.

So all the right has left – so to speak – is cheap populism:

There is a lowbrow liberalism, too, but the Left hasn’t learned how to market it. Consider again the failure of liberals at the talk-radio format, with the bankruptcy of Air America always put forward as an example. Yet in fact liberals are very successful at talk radio. They are just no good at the lowbrow sort. The “Rush Limbaugh Show” may be first in those current Talkers magazine rankings, but second and third are National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” with 13 million weekly listeners each. It is easy to mock the studied gentility, affectless voices, and reflexive liberalism of NPR, but these are very successful radio programs.

Liberals are getting rather good at talk TV, too. The key to this medium, they have discovered, is irony. I don’t take this political stuff seriously, I assure you, but really, these damn fool Republicans… Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert offer different styles of irony, but none leaves any shadow of doubt where his political sympathies lie. Liberals have done well to master this trick, but it depends too much on facial expressions and body language – the double-take, the arched eyebrow, the knowing smirk – to transfer to radio. It is, in any case, not quite populism, the target audience being mainly the ironic cohort—college-educated Stuff White People Like types.

If liberals can’t do populism, the converse is also true: conservatives are not much good at gentility. We don’t do affectless voices, it seems. … We don’t know how to speak to that vast segment of the American middle class that lives sensibly – indeed, conservatively – wishes to be thought generous and good, finds everyday politics boring, and has a horror of strong opinions. This untapped constituency might be receptive to interesting radio programs with a conservative slant.

Maybe that is what Huckabee meant to say. And there is this:

There is nothing wrong with lowbrow conservatism. Ideas must be marketed, and right-wing talk radio captures a big and useful market segment. However, if there is no thoughtful, rigorous presentation of conservative ideas, then conservatism by default becomes the raucous parochialism of Limbaugh, Savage, Hannity, and company. That loses us a market segment at least as useful, if perhaps not as big.

Conservatives have never had, and never should have, a problem with elitism. Why have we allowed carny barkers to run away with the Right?

That’s a good question. Do you want troubadours for Reagan instead? But really, the issue is the substance, isn’t it? And Reagan is long gone. There’s a photo up top that proves it.

And there is what the fellow says in that other movie – “I’m right, you’re wrong. I’m smart, you’re dumb. I’m big, you’re little. And there’s nothing you can do about it.” Of course he’s the bad guy, and gets his in the end, but we understand he is explaining to his daughter how the world works, or how he thinks it works. And we secretly agree with him – that movie is a fantasy, a comedy where, magically, those who say such things to others, to control others and get what they want from them, are foiled. That’s fun to watch, particularly because we know things never work out that way. The angry and the thoughtless always storm in and always get their way. Mindless ridicule and meanness triumph, except for the one hundred two minutes of this film.

So we’ve had eight years of George Bush and his crew doing their version of Howard Beal from the first movie and Harry Wormwood from the second. That sums up both foreign and domestic policy from those years – we were angry and self-righteously belligerent. We were not going to take crap from pipsqueaks and eggheads any longer. No one in the rest of the world much liked it, but we were angry and outraged, and no, we did not intend to think things through, and didn’t – thinking things through was for later, if ever, or for the cowardly French. And domestically, we were not going to listen to Harvard and Princeton economists and scientists and so-call experts, as all they did was make trouble, what with all their details and warnings. The common man knows better, viscerally, about global warming (don’t see it), evolution (not in the Bible and only a theory, really) and regulating the economy (punishes the go-getters who make this country thrive). The viscera – yes, the gut – ruled.

And then that changed – enough people decide all that wasn’t working out so well, and we elected that nice young man who talked about something call Smart Power, and seemed masterful at thinking things through, and never seemed angry at all. It was No-Drama Obama for us, not Proud and Angry Don’t-Talk-to-Me McCain. Enough people saw proud, angry and outraged wasn’t working out for us, or were just tired. Maintaining outrage is exhausting, and even watching from a distance is draining.

But you cannot erase a core component of what it is to be an American – the left had Keith Olbermann and the right Bill O’Reilly, and still does. Olbermann likes to pile up facts, incidents and nuggets from history, while O’Reilly is more in the Bush mode – all outage and arguing from his gut feeling for things. His big thing is identifying Pinheads and Patriots, and the criteria for which involves a sort of nativist populism – it’s us or them.

This leads to some odd places, as David Neiwert covers here – a discussion of Bill O’Reilly’s outrage over Sunday’s New York Times editorial. As Neiwert explains, that was a bit of calling out Republicans – “and particularly movement conservatives who have thoroughly embraced the nativist wing of the party, for the ugly racism they’ve indulged in recent years, driving what should be a rational debate over immigration into the fetid wastelands of hysterical fearmongering, bigotry, and scapegoating.”

There is extended discussion of O’Reilly’s new War on the New York Times – as he’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take and more, and he’s big, they’re small, and there’s nothing they can do about it. He says he’ll destroy them – no thoughtful analysis or any of that crap. It’s war. They called him out by name, along with a few others, and he’s not going to be called a racist.

Neiwert says that’s interesting, given this earlier video clip:

Bill O’Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you’ve got to cap with a number.

John McCain: In America today we’ve got a very strong economy and low unemployment, so we need addition farm workers, including, by the way, agriculture, but there may come a time where we have an economic downturn, and we don’t need so many.

O’Reilly: But in this bill, you guys have got to cap it. Because estimation is 12 million, there may be 20 [million]. You don’t know, I don’t know. We’ve got to cap it.

McCain: We do, we do. I agree with you.

Yes, that was about immigration reform legislation long ago, which failed, but you get where O’Reilly’s heart lies.

Neiwert points to more in Media Matters:

On the May 16, 2006, edition of The O’Reilly Factor, O’Reilly claimed that The New York Times and “many far-left thinkers believe the white power structure that controls America is bad, so a drastic change is needed.” O’Reilly continued: “According to the lefty zealots, the white Christians who hold power must be swept out by a new multicultural tide, a rainbow coalition, if you will.” O’Reilly’s comments came during a discussion of opposition by the Times and others to deploying the National Guard to help secure the border.

On the May 1, 2006, edition of Westwood One’s The Radio Factor, O’Reilly alleged that the “organizers” of nationwide pro-immigrant protests had a “hardcore militant agenda of ‘You stole our land, you bad gringos,’” and that the protest organizers were seeking to “take it back by massive, massive migration into the Southwest.’ “

On the April 12, 2006, broadcast of his radio show, O’Reilly claimed that on the April 11 edition of The O’Reilly Factor, guest Charles Barron, a New York City councilman, had revealed the “hidden agenda” behind the current immigration debate. O’Reilly told his listeners: “[T]he bottom line is Charles Barron said last night is there is a movement in this country to wipe out ‘white privilege’ and to have the browning of America.” O’Reilly suggested that this “hidden agenda” included plans to let “people who live in the Caribbean, people who live in Africa and Asia … walk in and become citizens immediately.”

There’s more, but you get the idea. Get angry and you get thoughtless – the one follows the other. You don’t think about what you’re saying, as you just don’t want to think about what you’re saying at all, because you’re too angry, and proud that you are. You want others to admire your anger, and be envious of its purity and righteousness. Many see this as quintessentially American.

The Republicans seem to argue that, or at least act on that assumption. The Republican strategy of 2009 is just that, or so McClatchy’s David Lightman says:

Has the Republican Party, whose presidential candidate and dozens of congressional hopefuls were rejected by voters in November, already been reinvigorated by its opposition to President Barack Obama?

Party officials think so. They proudly point to the fact that all the GOP members of the House of Representatives stuck together last week and voted against the Democrats’ $819 billion economic stimulus plan, and to how the Senate,

which is due to begin debate on the plan Monday, is full of similarly skeptical Republicans.

“We’ll look back to that (House) vote as one of the most significant votes Republicans cast. It gave them a very coherent voice,” said Michael Franc, a political analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The vote was a public demonstration of independence from Obama, who took the unusual step of meeting privately with congressional Republicans the day before the House vote. It also demonstrated what Republicans stand for, notably bigger tax cuts and less government spending.

Steve Benen says he has a little trouble wrapping his head around this:

Republicans got their mojo back by agreeing to reject the popular agenda of a popular president in a time of international crisis. This, oddly enough, fills them with “pride.” Got it.

But what seems bizarre is the notion that this gives the GOP a “coherent voice,” and makes clear that the party stands for “bigger tax cuts and less government spending.” First, we’ve known the Republican agenda on taxes and spending for several generations now. Was there ever any doubt that the Republican Party wants to cut more taxes and spend less money?

As for the “coherent” voice, I think that’s the wrong adjective. Republicans have a consistent voice – the party supports failed economic policies, unanimously, regardless of circumstances or evidence – but that doesn’t make their agenda “coherent.” We’ve heard the Republican voice on economic policy for quite a while now, and it’s anything but coherent.

Ultimately, congressional Republican leaders seem to believe their only shot at a comeback is opposing Obama at every turn, no matter the costs, or the risks, or the merit. We’ll see how that works out for them, but given his public support and theirs, it’s quite a gamble.

The gamble is that they can tap into some sort of common-man anger at thoughtfulness, expertise and calm – and perhaps they can.

They are lining up their forces, as was reported in Politico:

Fresh off his stint as a war correspondent in Gaza, Joe the Plumber is now doing political strategy with Republicans.

When GOP congressional aides gather Tuesday morning for a meeting of the Conservative Working Group, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher – more commonly known as Joe the Plumber – will be their featured guest. This group is an organization of conservative Capitol Hill staffers who meet regularly to chart GOP strategy for the week.

Wurzelbacher, who became a household name during the presidential election, will be focusing his talk on the proposed stimulus package. He’s apparently not a fan of the economic rescue package, according to members of the group.

The Democrats and the president have their economists and eggheads and CEO’s and all that, but the Republicans have the uneducated, unlicensed and unemployed plumber from Toledo. The bet is that will resonate with fed-up, angry Americans who think that thinking is stupid, and trusting your gut, smart. Who knows more about the economy, really?

You may have your own answer to that, but Steve Benen offers this:

This is what it’s come to for Republican staffers in Congress. In the midst of an economic crisis, and after balking at a stimulus package, the GOP is turning to an unlicensed plumber/campaign prop to discuss legislative strategy on economic policy.

The line between Republicans’ approach to governing and satirical performance art blurs just a little more.

No, they seem to be serious, and Benen says this:

One can only assume that the Conservative Working Group was dazzled by Wurzelbacher work as a pseudo-war correspondent for a right-wing website. He did, after all, insist that journalists shouldn’t be allowed to cover a war, in part because reporters “make a big deal” over events on the ground. Wurzelbacher added, “I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting.”

Why wouldn’t Republican staffers want to seek guidance on economic policy from a visionary of this stature?

Interestingly, Benen points to something Duncan Black said:

Conservatives persist with him because they wrongly believe he pisses liberals off. As with many such things, Joe the Plumber never pissed off liberals. What did piss off liberals was a mainstream news media who allowed some random dude who would benefit from Obama’s proposed economic plan to become some sort of stand in for the everyman who Obama would be keeping from achieving success somehow. Now? We’re just laughing at you, clowns.

That may, of course, be wishful thinking. The Republicans on the Hill seem to think that saying Joe the Plumber is their key political strategist on economic policy, while that may piss off liberals, if it does, sends an important message to all angry Americans – the common man and his instincts are what matters. Aren’t you fed up with experts saying how complicated everything is, and how dire it is? Sure you are.

Michael Steele makes it clear why he was the right choice to head the Republican National committee, telling Wolf Blitzer of CNN this about the stimulus package:

… the government doesn’t create jobs. Let’s get this notion out of our heads that the government creates jobs. Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job. Small business owners do, small enterprises do, not the government. When that government contract runs out, that job goes away. That’s what we’re talking about here. And those two to four million jobs that are projected won’t happen. Trust me.

Benen notes that Blitzer said nothing, but Benen adds this:

Maybe Blitzer had a few voices in his ear piece and didn’t really listen to Steele’s answer, but to sit back and not respond to a LIE that big is insane. Watching the crazy stock market shows all year, most of the time they said that because of government hiring, the job reports didn’t look as bad as they should have. We all know that FDR put people to work. Did the TSA get any work because of the federal government and the strict rules in airports? Steele is a clown and this is the type of lying that needs to be exposed always.

Well, Duncan Black also says this:

… we’re living in the Republican alternative universe where government spending isn’t stimulus. Stimulus is instead… well, no one really knows. You can argue about the effectiveness of various stimulus measures. You can argue about what spending priorities should be. But anything which involves buying stuff and paying wages or otherwise putting money into the pockets of people is stimulus.

The former House Speaker, Dennis Hastert seems to fully occupy that Republican alternative universe, saying this:

Basically, a big part of that (stimulus package) went for extending unemployment. It’s a nice thing to do, but when you extend unemployment, you take the incentive away from people to go out and get a job. So it almost has a counter negative effect.

Well, he used to be a high school wrestling coach, or perhaps in an earlier life he was Marie Antoinette, muttering things about who should eat cake.

At Salon, Joan Walsh has a few things to say about who seems to be running things on the Republican side, suggesting they may be leaderless:

Sorry, Michael Steele, but it’s going to be a while before you’re anything more than the figurehead frontman of a shipwrecked Republican National Committee. Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh remain the leaders of your party, and most Republicans are happy that way. A Rasmussen poll out today found that fully 55 percent of Republicans polled think their party should be “more like” Palin.

And don’t blame the Democrats:

Democrats have had almost nothing to do with the growing prominence of either GOP entertainer emerging from the Republican wilderness; Palin and Limbaugh are hogging the limelight themselves. Just in the last week we saw the launch of SarahPAC, Palin’s new fundraising vehicle; we saw her pallin’ around with elitists and stalking Barack Obama at the stuffy Alfalfa Dinner; and today she’s composed an Op-Ed backing (surprise!) drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Meanwhile, Limbaugh had his own Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, with a farcical approach to an “Obama-Limbaugh” stimulus proposal, and he’s continuing to use his radio show to campaign against the Democrats’ stimulus bill.

It is what it is – proudly thoughtless outrage. And she links to ABC’s “This Week” – when Senator Jim DeMint got stomped for that:

“We have to decide if we want to be a free market economy and let the money stay there or be a government-directed economy, which is where we’re headed with this plan,” DeMint argued. FedEx CEO Fred Smith countered: “No question about it, the infrastructure of the country has been underfunded for a long time … it certainly would be a wise thing to invest in all kinds of infrastructure,” while Google CEO Eric Schmidt came back with: “I’m worried that tax cuts alone won’t work because people are not paying any taxes because they’re not making any money.”

Joe the Plumber disagrees with these guys. Who will Americans listen to?

Josh Marshall wonders about that, if though the stimulus bill will eventually pass:

But there also shouldn’t be much question why Republicans are having such a field day spreading disinformation and simple nonsense about this bill. We’ve heard virtually nothing over the last couple weeks about the big issue, which is that the economy is in severe free-fall because of a once-in-a-century financial crisis. And because of that, the federal government needs to step in with big short term spending to create jobs to see us through the crisis. Those jobs are needed in the short-term to prevent unemployment from getting out of hand and in the longer term to reshape the economy so that we’re not dependent on recurrent bubbles to keep the economy afloat. This is an emergency jobs bill. And it costs a lot of money because we’re in a deep crisis. But this basic point has disappeared almost entirely from the public debate.

Of course this doesn’t help – the cable networks continue to tip the scales in favor of Republicans by booking like twice or even three times as many Republicans as Democrats to discuss the Stimulus Bill. But it comes down to this:

Look at what people are talking about and you wouldn’t get the sense that we’re actually in the midst of a major economic crisis that will likely send unemployment well into double digits if nothing is done quickly – and a crisis that is in large measure the result of the economic policies that the Boehners and Cantors and McConnells are telling us, all the evidence to the contrary, will now save us. Everyone who’s taking this situation seriously realizes that spending is the pivotal part of what the government needs to do to stabilize the economy in the face of this crisis. The multipliers for spending versus tax cuts simply leave no question about that. Ask McCain economic advisor Mark Zandi. The solid critiques from the right aren’t about whether spending is needed but which types are most efficient.

Without a clear argument about why this whole exercise is necessary, it’s inevitable that the debate will be ground down to the inconsequential minutiae which is the aim of its opponents. Big things need a president to argue for them.

Perhaps there does need to be more of that, or, as Digby says:

The bill is going to pass. The problem is that it is larded up with Republican tax cuts but has been painted as a Democratic “wish list,” thus starving the beast while feeding the tax and spend, fiscal responsibility shibboleths at the same time. There’s nothing we can do about that now. Unfortunately, the big battles to come are going to be much tougher because of it.

We’re still in the first round, but I would say the Republicans have already masterfully played it. After just having their asses handed to them in November, they managed to turn the crisis into an opportunity to shore up their base, weaken their opposition and misdirect the commentariat to the debt (which they created) rather than the crisis (which they also created) and narrow the options for the new president. All in the first two weeks.

Oh, and they have successfully portrayed the Democrats as crazed social engineers with a credit card and the President as a very nice young man who just isn’t strong enough to control the congress. It’s good stuff.

Again, it’s round one. The Dems will ultimately win it, but they are bloodied.

Well, that’s what happens when you tap into the true nature of the American people – angry, resentful and thoughtless. Who did Obama think we were?

But we weren’t snobs. We didn’t claim to be better than anyone else – only the tiresome militant assholes among us did that. We just wanted to know how things really worked, and why things were the way they were. We questioned everything, and probably questioned more than was necessary – which led to all sort of foolishness, seeing nefarious conspiracies where there was just the usual carelessness, thoughtlessness and incompetence. But that was who we were, or it was a product of the times. Those who were politically minded liked displaying their mantra here and there – Question Authority. The rest of us just quietly had our own manta – Question Everything. We just didn’t put the sign in the dorm window. It wasn’t necessary. It was just a way of being, and larger than politics. Don’t ever assume “that’s just the way it is” – look at the possible explanations, consider the merits of each, and then think it through yourself. Apply that to everything.

And that’s the curse of the sixties, always wondering about things. The conservatives on campus – frat boys (madras sports coats, khaki pants) and sorority girls (circle pins and big hair) – seemed to escape the curse. They were told, they accepted, they moved on – they approached their classes that way, thought about the business in Vietnam that way, and, now and then, one of them would pull you aside and say, you know, you really do think too much. That was gracious, as you knew they meant well – you saw it in that puzzled look on their face, concern mixed with fear – but you knew you had the curse. You smiled wanly – yeah, you’re probably right. But how do you stop thinking about things?

And down through all the years since then, forty years or more now, you find yourself still doing that – thinking too much. And you have had years of the same conversation, although often not as pleasant. Damn it, why can’t you just accept [fill in the issue here, as any will do] like a normal person! You shot back. Why don’t you ever just think about what you’re saying, and about what you’re doing, and consider what could happen here! And so it goes.

Of course, along with sounding like every marriage in America, that sounds like what just happened in the presidential campaign.

Actually, that sums up the whole conservative-liberal split. Conservatism might be summed up as that you’re told (received wisdom, the lessons of the past, meaningful rituals and traditions), you accept (so then, some things never change, they’re immutable truths), and you move on (you deal with it, as you’re a realist after all). Liberals aren’t wired that way – they’re always reexamining what they’re told, as the past can be seen in lots of different ways, they keep their list of immutable truths short, as they’ve been fooled before, and they don’t move on, as when something can be fixed they want to fix it.

No wonder the presidential campaign was so acrimonious – this all played out again. Iran – they’re evil, will never change, and don’t talk to them, just bomb the snot out of them – or sit down and talk with them, laying out what we want and can and cannot accept, and listen to the same from them, and figure out how we can manage to keep a lid on things. But there wasn’t much discussion in the campaign – just one side asking the other why they couldn’t accept the damned facts about pure evil, and the other side saying stop, just think about what you’re saying and where that leads. And of course all the issues lined up that way – tax policy, healthcare, Iraq and Afghanistan, abortion, the role of religion in public policy – all the rest. Some on the left said, and say, Republicans are anti-intellectual, but that’s wrong. It’s not even an issue – try a-intellectual. It was a mess.

But now it’s all better. Via Digby here, who says she doesn’t know whether it’s “due to enthusiastic support or a desperate hope (or some combination of the two)” the public is behind Obama in huge numbers:

President-elect Barack Obama gets soaring marks for his handling of the transition and his choices for the Cabinet, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, even at a time the public is downbeat over the economy.

More than three of four Americans, including a majority of Republicans, approve of the job Obama has done so far – broad-based support he’ll need as he faces tough decisions ahead.

By 69%-25%, those surveyed approve of his pick of New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, his former Democratic primary rival, as secretary of State.

By an even wider margin, 80%-14%, they favor his decision to ask President Bush’s Pentagon chief, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, to stay on the job. …

In the poll, Americans by more than 3-1 say they trust Obama more than Bush to handle the economy. By 58%-33%, they support Obama’s plan for a huge spending package to spur economic growth.

Digby goes on to discuss another matter, but those kinds of figures can stop you cold. How did that happen, after “that” campaign?

Ah, that leads to the science article of the day, Emily Yoffe in Slate, with Obama in Your Heart – the contention here that Obama tapped into a powerful human emotion called “elevation” that only now is being studied by the folks who study such things.

Yoffe says there are such people:

For researchers of emotions, creating them in the lab can be a problem. Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California-Berkeley, studies the emotions of uplift, and he has tried everything from showing subjects vistas of the Grand Canyon to reading them poetry – with little success. But just this week one of his postdocs came in with a great idea: Hook up the subjects, play Barack Obama’s victory speech, and record as their autonomic nervous systems go into a swoon.

Now there’s a really liberal sort of idea – let’s see what is really going on, and not just blow smoke. And here’s the underpinning:

In his forthcoming book, Born To Be Good (which is not a biography of Obama), Keltner writes that he believes when we experience transcendence, it stimulates our vagus nerve, causing “a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat.” For the 66 million Americans who voted for Obama, that experience was shared on Election Day, producing a collective case of an emotion that has only recently gotten research attention. It’s called “elevation.”

Elevation has always existed but has just moved out of the realm of philosophy and religion and been recognized as a distinct emotional state and a subject for psychological study. Psychology has long focused on what goes wrong, but in the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in “positive psychology” – what makes us feel good and why. University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who coined the term elevation, writes, “Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental ‘reset button,’ wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration.”

It seems there’s a lot of that going around these days, but there is historical precedent:

Haidt quotes first-century Greek philosopher Longinus on great oratory: “The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport.” Such feeling was once a part of our public discourse. After hearing Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, former slave Frederick Douglass said it was a “sacred effort.”

But uplifting rhetoric came to sound anachronistic, except as practiced by the occasional master like Martin Luther King Jr. or Ronald Reagan. And now Obama.

The concept is, however, very simple:

We come to elevation, Haidt writes, through observing others – their strength of character, virtue, or “moral beauty.” Elevation evokes in us “a desire to become a better person, or to lead a better life.” The 58 million McCain voters might say that the virtue and moral beauty displayed by Obama at his rallies was an airy promise of future virtue and moral beauty. And that the soaring feeling his voters had of having made the world a better place consisted of the act of placing their index fingers on a touch screen next to the words Barack Obama.

They might be on to something. Haidt’s research shows that elevation is good at provoking a desire to make a difference but not so good at motivating real action. But he says the elevation effect is powerful nonetheless. “It does appear to change people cognitively; it opens hearts and minds to new possibilities. This will be crucial for Obama.”

The rest is, among other things, a discussion of people who have high vagus nerve activity. As the doctor says – “They respond to stress with calmness and resilience, they build networks, break up conflicts, they’re more cooperative, they handle bereavement better.” Being around these people makes other people feel good, and the doctor want to get his hands on Obama to measure his vagus nerve activity. But of course Obama is busy at the moment. You can read the discussion of Thomas Jefferson being that sort of person, perhaps, and the fascinating research on women who watched Oprah Winfrey during breast-feeding (and the measured levels of “oxytocin, the hormone of connection”) – or not.

But here’s the key:

The researchers say elevation is part of a family of self-transcending emotions. Some others are awe, that sense of the vastness of the universe and smallness of self that is often invoked by nature; another is admiration, that goose-bump-making thrill that comes from seeing exceptional skill in action. Keltner says we most powerfully experience these in groups – no wonder people spontaneously ran into the street on election night, hugging strangers. “We had to evolve these emotions to devote ourselves into social collectives,” he says.

That’s what troubles people, of course:

When you start thinking about mass movements, all those upturned, glowing faces of true believers – be they the followers of Jim Jones or Adolf Hitler – you don’t always get a warm feeling about mankind. Instead, knowing where some of these “social collectives” end up, the sensation is a cold chill. Haidt acknowledges that in “calling the group to greatness,” elevation can be used for murderous ends. He says: “Anything that takes us out of ourselves and makes us feel we are listening to something larger is part of morality. It’s about pressing the buttons that turn off ‘I’ and turn on ‘we.’ ”

Even at its most benign, elevation can seem ridiculous to outsiders. Think of how Obama’s opponents love to mock his effect on people. During the campaign, if your chest was contracting while all about you chests were dilating, you may be a Republican. If you were unmoved by Obama, watching your fellow citizen get all tingly, even fall into a faint (too much vagus stimulation, and you’re going down), was maddening. “Other people’s reverence seems unctuous and sanctimonious,” says Keltner.

That’s why Obama dialed it back toward the end of the campaign, of course.

The interesting thing is that Yoffe, to be fair and balanced, mentions the opposite of elevation, disgust, and the work of University of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin, who she says “has been a leading theorist in the uses of disgust” (yes, academia can be strange at times). This is the deal with disgust:

He says it started as a survival strategy: Early humans needed to figure out when food was spoiled by contact with bacteria or parasites. From there disgust expanded to the social realm – people became repelled by the idea of contact with the defiled or by behaviors that seemed to belong to lower people. “Disgust is probably the most powerful emotion that separates your group from other groups,” says Keltner.

Haidt says disgust is the bottom floor of a vertical continuum of emotion; hit the up button, and you arrive at elevation. This could be why so many Obama supporters complained of being sickened and nauseated by the Republican campaign. Seeing a McCain ad or Palin video clip actually felt like being plunged from their Obama-lofted heights.

But this is most telling:

Disgust carries with it the notion of contamination, which helps to explain the Republicans’ obsession with Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, and Jeremiah Wright and their frustration that more voters didn’t have a visceral reaction that Obama had unforgivably sullied himself by association with these men. But this time, elevation won. …

It’s all very curious – the sort of thing those who suffer from the curse of the sixties love to think about. But any conservative who has made it this far down the page is saying, with a snort, piffle and poppycock, or something more vivid.

But all this is not just a matter on the left, which seems to be the middle now. The right is breaking up, over matters relating to what you accept – not any present “elevation” – they’ll have none of that nonsense – but the basics that everyone knows, that Jesus was a Republican, America is a Christian nation, and the founding fathers never said, or even implied anything about the separation of church and state.

See a defense of secular conservatism:

There are many people like us: people who cherish limited government, fiscal restraint, personal liberty, free enterprise, self-support, patriotic defense of the homeland and its borders, love of the Constitution, respect for established ways of doing things, pride in Western Civilization, etc., and yet who cannot swallow stories about the Sky Father and the Afterlife, miraculous births and revivifications. What does the one set of things have to do with the other? We are secular conservatives. What else are we? Figments of our own imaginations?

Geez, this sounds like someone is thinking, not accepting. And, if you know the players, see Razib Khan here:

A common sentiment I’ve heard, and seen in these comments even, is that by definition someone who does not believe in God is simply not a conservative. In which case, should Heather Mac Donald go work for Brookings? Should John Derbyshire write for The New Republic? Should AEI offload Charles Murray, who though sympathetic to Christianity, is not (last I checked, Charles evolves) a believer? Should conservative institutions perform the sort of “faith check” (i.e., you sign some document affirming your adherence to particular propositions) before hiring individuals which many Christian colleges do, so as to filter out those deluded non-believers who wish to forward the conservative cause?

Andrew Sullivan comments:

I don’t see how Republicanism, as it is now constructed, can tolerate atheists in its midst. The principles of today’s Christianist GOP are theological before they are political. And when you’re dealing with believers like these people, there is no arguing with revealed truths. Your job is to bow down or get out of the way.

Interesting – it seems some on the right are finally succumbing to the curse of the sixties. They’re questioning things they’ve been told not to question. After forty years… well guys, welcome to the club.

What are we going to do now that we’ve won? Who are we going to pick on? Maybe it will be Chinese – the times just got less “interesting.” Peace and goodwill to all. How boring!

Meanwhile, President Obama plastered on all front pages over here. The President! Sighs of relief all round. Congratulations America.

Yes – thank you. Sometimes things work out. But what are we going to do now?

The last eight years have been a long, strange ride, and as I have told Ric, for me that ride started in Paris – alone in the dead hours just before dawn on December 14, 2000, watching CNN International in my room at the hotel where Camus wrote L’Étranger (the Stranger), watching Al Gore concede to George Bush. Outside the window you could watch the old church across the street slowly emerge from the darkness – the tomb of René Descartes is in one of the church’s side chapels. The thinker was really dead now.

But dawn came along – a cold, bitter day at hand. It was off to the quite ordinary nearby Café Bonaparte to plow through the three morning papers – Figaro (right), Libération (left), and Le Monde (middle), smoking my pipe and doing too much coffee, and looking up now and then to see that the rest of the day would be heavy rain.

But even if it takes eight years, things change. See the front page of Libération this time around. Yes, the words are in English, not French. The French, and the rest of the world, seem to think we’ve come to our senses, and welcome us back. Descartes is resting easy now.

But maybe Ric is right. We’re in for a boring time – there’s no one to pick on at the moment, but for the Chinese, perhaps. Perhaps we’ll all obsess about something else – economic issues and the coming Great Depression 2.0 if that’s what it is. But it’s not for nothing they call economics the Dismal Science. Do you want do discuss deleveraging assets that were not really assets at all, and who the hell thought wheeling and dealing in credit default swaps – hypothetical insurance against real losses in hypothetical assets – was a good idea? Really, do you? You will of course obsess about such things, and much more, as millions more of us lose our jobs, and our homes, and as things shut down. When GM and maybe Ford go into bankruptcy there’ll be lots to obsess about – but not now. It’s too depressing. It can wait.

One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers is just relived by the promise of not having to be obsessed with politics:

It is unnatural, it seems to me, to have to care passionately every day about the workings of the central government: only in totalitarian societies, where a knock on the door may come at any time, or in authoritarian ones, where each sneeze of the King has to be analyzed for its potential consequence, does there exist a need to keep the government of the country forever in the forefront of your mind.

One of the blessings of liberal democracy, in theory, is that we delegate the common fate to the most able, intelligent and motivated people among us, and, though we keep an eye on them and make them subject to recall and revision, we can cede our trust to them to do a more or less decent and able job most of the time. We trust them.

For the first time in years, we can say now: the government is in the hands of skillful people with a sense of the real; we can live the lives in front of our eyes without worrying that some horror is happening behind our backs. It would be a mistake, I think, for us all to carry on past the election and into the New Year with the same level of obsessive attention that this year, and the years before, has forced on us. Good government gives us back our lives.

Sullivan adds this:

Another word for this is freedom. And as the constitution is quietly restored, and torture finally relinquished, it grows.

But such freedom can be boring. In New York Magazine, Dan Kois says Jon Stewart’s Daily Show may not survive:

…in one eventful day, the prototypical Daily Show viewer has been transformed: Once disaffected and angry at Washington’s power structure, he’s now delighted and hopeful about the new president and all that he symbolizes. And if you’re an Obama fan – eager to give Barack the benefit of the doubt, and proud and excited about the change you’ve helped bring the nation – do you really want Jon Stewart sitting on the sidelines, taking potshots at your hero?

Beyond the problem of audiences souring on Obama jokes is the question of whether Jon Stewart even wants to make Obama jokes.

Of course Stewart, and that Colbert fellow, will figure out how to play this now. They can still pick on the news folks and the pundits, and foolish politicians will not suddenly disappear from the face of the earth. You know the suddenly powerless Republicans will be foaming at the mouth, in outrage at this or that. And we’ll always have P. J. O’Rourke saying things like this:

Sensible adults are conservative in most aspects of their private lives. If this weren’t so, imagine driving on I-95: The majority of drivers are drunk, stoned, making out, or watching TV, while the rest are trying to calculate the size of their carbon footprints on the backs of Whole Foods receipts while negotiating lane changes.

People are even more conservative if they have children. Nobody with kids is a liberal, except maybe one pothead in Marin County. Everybody wants his or her children to respect freedom, exercise responsibility, be honest, get educated, have opportunities, and own a bunch of guns. (The last is optional and includes, but is not limited to, me, my friends in New Hampshire, and Sarah Palin.)

Such folks are not going away, and they will do what they can to claim relevance, and succeed at that now and then. Sarah Palin, a joke to some and the woman most Republicans want to run as the party’s candidate in 2012, certainly isn’t going away.

As for Stewart and Colbert, Joe Carter offers an extraordinarily bad suggestion:

…why doesn’t Comedy Central replace them with a hip, young right-leaning audience who would love to spend the next few years laughing at the foibles of the Obama administration? They could turn the reins over to Dennis Miller and let the current host go back to The Jon Stewart Show.

Okay, those of us born and raised in Pittsburgh should stick up for others who were also born and raised there – but there are limits. Dennis Miller is a snide, intensely mean little prick – arrogant without being insightful, Don Rickles without the charm, and unlike Stewart and Colbert, without a charitable bone in his body. They tossed Miller off Monday Night Football years ago – his color commentary was both nasty and incomprehensible. He has his four minutes on Bill O’Reilly’s show two or three times a week – let him stay there. That’s a good fit. And as for a hip, young right-leaning audience – what? Young right-leaning folks hate hip – that’s the whole point.

But maybe Stewart and Colbert have run their course. To think about that in a conceptual way, see Patrick Lee Miller:

Try to imagine Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dancing to a song of infinite length. Their technique would remain as dazzling as the talent of the resurrected Lou Gehrig, and it is just as tempting to fantasize about them dancing forever as it is to imagine him playing his last game one more inning, and then another… but what was most valuable in their art, as in his play, would then be lost. Without a sense of the end, and thus of the shape of their movements, the beauty and drama they achieved in finite time would become the infinite and thus meaningless repetition of technique; or, if eternity be imagined as all moments gathered together, this finite beauty and drama would become the absurdity of every move executed at once, and so on for every activity we know. Life itself, as the activity of activities, requires the finitude imposed on it ultimately by death to preserve its meaning.

Whoa – that’s way too deep. Let’s just say that all things end, and should end.

Of course, key Republicans disagree:

The Republican brand is still alive and well, Rep. Mike Pence said on Fox News Sunday.

When asked by Chris Wallace what “conservative solutions” the GOP would bring to their current minority-party status, Pence said social issues like “the sanctity of marriage” will remain the backbone of the Republican platform.

“You build those conservative solutions, Chris, on the same time-honored principles of limited government, a belief in free markets, in the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage,” Pence said.

Pence is the number three Republican in the House – the idea is that all they need to do is keep hammering away at the idea that free markets work, they do, they really do. And life is scared, and gays should not be allowed to marry each other. If you hammer away at that, all will be well. Fred and Ginger dance on, and that Irving Berlin tune will never end. Why does that seem like a nightmare or something from a surrealist horror film?

What are they thinking? Something is amiss. But maybe they’re not thinking. In the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof here says that Obama’s election, among other things, may just mark the end of “the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life.” Obama offers a way out of the rote, reflexive ideological claptrap – the music stops and the dancers can sit down and catch their breath.

Of course, in August, Paul Krugman had that piece identifying the Republican Party as “the party of stupid” – and he was clear enough:

What I mean … is that know-nothingism – the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise – has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

Kevin Drum brings that back to Sarah Palin here:

Palin’s problem isn’t that she’s a social conservative, or that she’s an airhead, or that she’s inexperienced. Her big problem is that prior to August 29, 2008, she quite plainly didn’t have the slightest interest in national or international policy issues of any sort. And no matter how much prepping she gets over the next four years, no matter how much better she gets at dealing with the press, no matter how much she does or doesn’t smooth off the rough edges of her social views, conservatives have to ask themselves this question: do we really want our standard bearer to be someone who didn’t become seriously interested in either domestic policy or foreign affairs until the age of 44? What does that say about how seriously we ourselves take this stuff?

In the end, I don’t imagine many of them will ask that question. But they should.

And they won’t ask that question, even if things have changed, as Frank Rich explains;

For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid – easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included. If I had a dollar for every Democrat who told me there was no way that Americans would ever turn against the war in Iraq or definitively reject Bush governance or elect a black man named Barack Hussein Obama president, I could almost start to recoup my 401(k). Few wanted to take yes for an answer.

So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.

There’s a great deal of detail, but this is the gist of it:

Bill Ayers proved a lame villain, scaring no one. Americans do not want to revisit Vietnam (including in Iraq). For all the attention paid by the news media and McCain-Palin to rancorous remembrances of things past, I sometimes wondered whether most Americans thought the Weather Underground was a reunion band and the Hanoi Hilton a chain hotel. Socialism, the evil empire and even Ronald Reagan may be half-forgotten blurs too.

If there were any doubts the 1960s are over, they were put to rest Tuesday night when our new first family won the hearts of the world as it emerged on that vast blue stage to join the celebration in Chicago’s Grant Park. The bloody skirmishes that took place on that same spot during the Democratic convention 40 years ago – young vs. old, students vs. cops, white vs. black – seemed as remote as the moon. This is another America – hardly a perfect or prejudice-free America, but a union that can change and does, aspiring to perfection even if it can never achieve it.

You just have to get with the times.

Of course it is not only the Republicans who have a problem with that. In the Los Angeles Times see Greg Braxton with Black Comedians in the Age of Obama:

Does the election sweep aside discrimination as a staple target of black comedy? Not likely, but topical humor won’t be the same.

Black comedians have traditionally made fun of a system they feel has shut them out and treated them unfairly, said Darnell Hunt, head of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA.

“It’s been a way to relieve the pain, the tension,” said Hunt. “Now, there’s this self-made black man, and they don’t want to undermine the possibility of hope. The Obamas represent a transcendence that brings everyone into the tent, and comics are now grappling with that. They want to treat it gingerly.”

Many black comics, whose humor has sprung from the pain or anger of dealing with a discriminatory society, are now wrestling with hope, cautious optimism and celebration.

Times are tough all over:

One comic, who goes by one name, Godfrey, teased the predominantly white Laugh Factory audience: “I bet you were afraid we were going to line [you] up against the wall.”

And Melanie Camacho said, “This is the first time in history that a black man beat a white man and didn’t get locked up for it.”

Everything has changed.

And some things haven’t. Also in the Los Angeles Times see James Rainey:

You have to give Rush Limbaugh a perverse kind of credit. At least when he is demonizing Barack Obama, fabricating Obama policies, blaming Obama for single-handedly causing the recession and the stock market crash, he doesn’t pretend to be fair. Opening his first post-election rant against the president-elect, Limbaugh launched in with a certain relish. “The game,” he told his radio listeners, “has begun.”

And so it has:

“The Obama recession is in full swing, ladies and gentlemen,” Limbaugh told his radio audience of 15 million to 20 million on Thursday. “Stocks are dying, which is a precursor of things to come. This is an Obama recession. Might turn into a depression.”

Apparently the tanking of the real estate market, record losses in the auto industry, and massive failures in the banking and investment industry have very little to do with our problems. The economic system is collapsing, Rush wants us to know, because it anticipates the tax increases Obama has pledged on capital gains and for the highest income earners.

But maybe that shouldn’t be so surprising, because radio’s Biggest Big Man also assures us that the Democrat welcomes “economic chaos” because it gives him “greater opportunity for expanded government.” In a time when the nation calls out for cool leadership and rational discussion, Limbaugh stirs the caldron, a tendency he proved in a particularly grotesque way last week when he accused Obama’s party of plotting a government takeover of 401(k) retirement plans.

“They’re going to take your 401(k), put it in the Social Security trust fund, whatever the hell that is,” Limbaugh woofed. “Trust fund, my rear end.”

A slight problem with Limbaugh’s report: Obama and the Democrats have proposed no such thing.

Yeah – as if that matters. But there is this:

Perhaps Hannity, Limbaugh and the rest of those intent on poisoning the soil before bipartisanship can take root might recall words of wisdom from Brit Hume, a veteran newsman who is close to leaving the Fox anchor desk for semi-retirement.

The problem with the accusations of Obama being “dangerous” and “radical,” Hume said on election night, “was that it just didn’t fit with the man you saw before your eyes.”

Oh yeah, reality, that stuff.

The world has indeed changed – or it hasn’t. You know what the French say – the more things change, the more they remain the same. That would be Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1908–1990) – Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (from Les Guêpes). But everyone is saying that now.

Jefferson and the founders only modified John Locke a tiny bit – Locke had the three inalienable rights as life, liberty and property. Modern Republicans wish the founders had not made that change, but that’s a matter for another day – and our government can seize your land in order to build a highway or military base, tossing you a few dollars for your trouble, and can assess taxes for the common good, which is sort of taking your property. Things do work better that way. Modern Republicans will eventually get over it. It’s just one of the details that need attention.

But the basic conflict has always been clear enough – we love those who do what no one else has done or can do, and do it well, while at the same time we are populists, telling ourselves those people are, really, just like us, or really, that we’re just like them. All men are created equal. You just forget the words that follow, saying this is only about the three rights listed – as they say in modern advertizing, certain conditions apply. We ignore that – all men really are created equal. It says so. So you see, if things had worked out differently, if we had made different choices here and there, we too could do whatever it is we those stars do – play basketball like Michael Jordan, become a rock star, invent a clever gizmo and retire to Tahiti, or grow up to be president.

Deep down we know that’s hogwash – you may want to sing opera and just not have the pipes, as the basic equipment you received genetically isn’t right for that career, and no amount of ambition and training and enthusiasm can make it right. You may be a kid who dreams of playing in the NBA, but trapped in the body of Danny DeVito, with slow reflexes you cannot seem to override, well, that’s just not going to happen. Some of us long ago dreamed of playing alongside Miles Davis or whatever, but finally figured out that we reached the limit of our talent with that pick-up band one night long ago in Newark, Ohio. You know a wall when you hit it. Living out here in Hollywood, in this apartment building just above the Sunset Strip, you are reminded of this every day – there’s the pleasant young man next door forever singing scales, doing his arpeggios, always off to another audition or American Idol open tryout. When the other neighbor’s cat hides in the shrubbery down by the pool, panting and panicked, you know heartache is coming for this fellow. And down by the pool there’s sometimes the sweet young thing in an amazingly small and carefully structured bikini with a photographer she’s hired – fancy camera on an expensive tripod, big flats and assorted lights – posing for those shots she’ll shop around trying to find an agent. And every third adult in Los Angeles is writing a screenplay. The idea that anyone can become anything they want to be, if they try hard, is an idea that persists. We all want to believe it.

And we really hate being told the truth – some people have more talent, more intelligence, better connections, or just better luck. There is an elite – even if we hate elitists, those who think they’re better than we are, those people are, really, better than we are.

Much of the recent presidential campaign centered on this – McCain and Palin were campaigning on the common man theme, the idea they were like the rest of us, impulsive, making decisions from instinct, but instinct that flowed from simple and obvious values no one need examine as, really, everyone shares those values. Neither of them claimed to be particularly smart or thoughtful – they were just common folks like us, with firm beliefs, ready to act on those beliefs. And Palin was clearly uninformed on a wide range of the issues – but just as clearly didn’t see that as much of a problem. Her supporters seem to agree on that – she was lively and exciting, and her heart was in the right place. She spoke for everyone who didn’t know much, but knew what was right – she was one of us. When you added Joe the Plumber to the mix you got the whole package – the one side of the conflict we all feel, that deep-seated idea we’re all equal and no one is any better than anyone else, nor should they claim to be. So a vote for them was a vote for yourself – and a vote for the American Dream, so to speak. That would be the dream where you can be what you dream of being, the most powerful person in the world, the president, if you wish – they’d pretty much do that for you, as your surrogates. To many, this was overwhelmingly compelling.

Obama and Biden went the other way, choosing to emphasize the exceptional over the common. Obama was always elegant, gentlemanly, and thoughtful – he did not hide the fact that he was pretty smart, superbly educated, informed on all the issues in great detail, and that he could explain things with clarity and passion in inspiring speeches he wrote himself. Over and over again his opponents called him an elitist – saying that he obviously thinks he’s better than us. But he just smiled and said, okay, I’ve thought about things – the issues we face these days – and chatted with some pretty big guns who know things – and then thought some more, and here’s what I think can be done and how we can do it. It was a non-response. Except for one unfortunate bit of bowling with the locals in Altoona, when Hillary Clinton was deep into her Annie Oakley and drink-beer-with-the-guys phase during the Pennsylvania primary, Obama didn’t take the bait. He didn’t dumb-down his campaign. He went for the other side of the equation – our admiration for the exceptional.

That was just a different calculation. Think about it this way – out here in Los Angeles you can pay a scalper seven or eight hundred bucks, or probably much more, for a ticket to a Lakers game so you can sit courtside just behind Jack Nicholson. But you want to see Kobe Bryant play, not Marvin, the pleasant kid who lives down the street and works at Home Depot. So, by extension, if you have to choose someone to be in administrative charge of most everything the government does, you might want someone who is not common, and is, in fact, exceptional. Yeah, you can sort of hear John McCain or Sarah Palin saying we all – or all real Americans – resent Kobe Bryant, this guy who thinks he can play basketball better than anyone else, who thinks he’s better than us. Who does Kobe Bryant think he is?

Of course that’s absurd. But sometimes people don’t get it – they need a visual example that has to do with the presidency, not basketball or bowling. And they got that in mid-September when the financial crises broke – if Congress didn’t pass a seven hundred billion dollar rescue package, within days, financial systems here and around the world would seize up and it would be the Great Depression again. This immediate rescue package was our only hope, and some folks were opposed to it.

Everyone saw what happened. It was classic. McCain announced he was suspending his campaign and would fly to Washington immediately, to butt heads or kick ass or something – he’d get everyone to agree and get this thing passed. And he said he wouldn’t get back to campaigning until this was settled, and he also had no intention to participate in the first presidential debate, as he’d be too busy saving the world. Obama said he wouldn’t butt in down in Washington, unless asked, and he’d work behind the scenes to do what he could. McCain called Obama irresponsible and not, like him, a leader – doing something dynamic and putting country before political considerations.

Then, by all accounts, McCain made a fool of himself – Republican opposition to the rescue plan increased, dramatically – and then, after Obama mentioned that presidents really do have to be able to do several things at once, McCain showed up for the debate. His campaign seemed to have decided it would look bad if Obama showed up – all calm, cool, and collected – and had those ninety minutes on stage all to himself. Of course that reversal was a bit embarrassing, but no more embarrassing than announcing, as the vote on the rescue package was finally underway, that he, John McCain, because of his selfless leadership, was solely responsible for the passage of this legislation that had saved us all – he did it, and Obama had nothing to do with it. And then the vote was extended a bit, and the legislation did not pass – the House Republicans he had worked on voted it down, and the markets crashed again.

It was like watching Marvin, the pleasant kid who lives down the street and works at Home Depot. McCain put himself in the game, he did his moves. He wasn’t very good – he actually was a disaster. But he kept saying that even with the unfortunate outcome, he at least had displayed real leadership. That might have been the turning point of the election.

And it seems to have been a turning point in another way. Perhaps this was the point where anyone-can-do-it became not-cool-at-all. Populism, with its no special talent and no special knowledge elements, may have started to seem both stupid and dangerous. Elitism started to look pretty good.

After the election there is evidence that kids now are getting into the idea that playing dumb surly is bullshit – knowing things and being thoughtful may be pretty cool after all. You get things like this – Obama as a Role Model: Students, Educators Share Excitement. Being smart and competent, and being successful, is becoming cool – the dropout Gangsta and the goofy star footballer become rather pathetic. And of course out here, in the Los Angeles Times, you get Obama’s Victory Will Help Inner-City Kids Look Beyond Sports:

“If Obama can be president, well, this gives us hope,” said Darius Turner, an astute senior defensive back who is said to have a future in big-time college football. “Kobe doesn’t have to be everybody’s role model anymore.”

No offense to Kobe, but that was music to my ears

This of course leaves conservatives in disarray.

Mark Lilla offers this item in the Wall Street Journal – there is no intellectual right any longer, thinking deep thoughts about public policy. Now it’s all Sarah Palin, the world of denial and contempt:

The Palin farce is already the stuff of legend. [But] John McCain’s choice was not a fluke, or a senior moment, or an act of desperation. It was the result of a long campaign by influential conservative intellectuals to find a young, populist leader to whom they might hitch their wagons in the future. And not just any intellectuals. It was the editors of National Review and the Weekly Standard, magazines that present themselves as heirs to the sophisticated conservatism of William F. Buckley and the bookish seriousness of the New York neoconservatives. After the campaign for Sarah Palin, those intellectual traditions may now be pronounced officially dead.

It’s all downhill from here:

Their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency; it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

They bet on the wrong side of the conflict. Things have changed. Being elite is cool again, as long as you’re cool about it.