Brad DeLong has been on fire of late. Without much context, I present to you my favorite paragraph of the week (from this very worthwhile post):

…if you had told any Republican in 1980 that 2008 would see (a) a Negro with an Arabic-Swahili name beating a veteran figher pilot in the presidential polls and (b) gay marriage as the big cultural issue of the day, said Republican would have blown several gaskets. And if you had said that this would have been the result of an “Age of Reagan” said Republican would have melted down completely.

Reagan-worship has always struck me as a strange thing. Though his presidency perhaps hastened the end of the Cold War, and though many people found his sunny bromides inspiring, my memories of the end of his administration are dominated by the disgrace over Iran-Contra, with the president coming off as either a senile grandparent or a mendacious schemer.

George Packer writes compellingly about the decline of conservatism by way of reviewing several new books. Great candid interview snippets from Pat Buchanan make this article a must-read.

Packer’s prognosis, in a nutshell, is that the coming re-emergence of a dominant Democratic Party will be due to the core liberal message being more appealing to large swaths of Americans than the essentially negative, reactionary, fear-mongering employed by the Republican Party since Nixon. He sees this as largely inevitable and systematic, and therefore somewhat misses what is really going on. For example, he writes a propos Ross Douthat and Reihan Salem’s new book:

Their ultimate purpose is political: to turn as much of the working class into Sam’s Club Republicans as possible. They don’t acknowledge the corporate interests that are at least as Republican as Sam’s Club shoppers, and that will put up a fight on many counts, potentially tearing the Party apart.

I’m not sure that’s entirely right. From what I can tell from reading Douthat and Salem’s web writing, they’re implicitly hoping to build a new, more logical coalition than the unwieldy one that currently dominates the conservative political landscape. It’s not that they don’t acknowledge corporate interests as a key constituency in today’s Republican party, but rather that they see Republicans drifting away from Big Business and embracing cultural conservatism as the sure path to electoral majorities in the future. If it were to come down to fighting for lower corporate taxes versus social welfare and a pro-life platform, there’s little doubt to where Douthat and Salem’s priorities would lie—they’re hoping to remake the Republicans into a European-style Christian Democratic party. They don’t feel any pressure to worry about any of these cleavages yet, however, as the Democrats are running too far to the left for now to pose any threat of peeling Big Business away from them.

Overall, Democrats should take note of Douthat and Salem: the future will be about building new political coalitions, not about extending the viability of current ones. The current Democratic coalition between urbanites and big labor is as untenable as the Republican coalition between corporate interests and social conservatives. Obama is a unique political phenomenon, a gifted orator who might be able to sell core liberal principles to unlikely voters in the fall. But Democrats had better start thinking about what kind of new winning coalitions they might want to build during an Obama reign. They ought to figure out how to become the party of modernity and liberty, one that is fundamentally pro-urban, pro-environment and internationalist. With energy prices on the rise, the very existence of the Sam’s Club suburbanite and the rural religious social conservative will be squeezed, marginalized and eventually urbanized, rendering the Salem/Douthat-envisaged coalition less attractive a constituency than they seem now.

Smile, Hill, it’s not so bad. Two or three more and you might actually like the taste!

Let me be the last person on the internet to heartily recommend Julian Sanchez’s excellent LA Times op-ed on the true dangers of unchecked government spying. Here’s the crux: spying on you and me doesn’t matter. Spying on political opposition is what we ought to be worried about.

It’s an especially salient read in light of the recent Obama flap.

Glenn Greenwald excerpts some noxious drivel from The Corner and goes on to complain:

And these are the high-minded, deeply Serious observations one finds in just one 24 hour period in the most respectable right-wing outlet in America. This is to say nothing of what one finds peddled by the lower levels of the right-wing noise machine: Rush Limbaugh, Instapundit, Bill O’Reilly, Drudge, right-wing blogs and the like. But this really is exactly the political faction that has exerted dominant political power in this country for the last 15 years, and has exclusively shaped America’s behavior for the last eight years. And, as a result, we have exactly the country one would expect would be produced when people who have these beliefs are empowered.

I’d like to extend the thesis to Mr. Greenwald that it’s not that we have the country we do today because of the fulminations of certain right-wing publications, but rather that these fulminations are an expression of the true beliefs and dark paranoias which haunt America’s psyche. Fighting the symptoms is no cure.

Matt, horrified at some Hillary campaign cheese, quips:

Every time I see something painfully lame done on Clinton’s behalf, I think she just might ultimately win this thing. At the end of the day, the United States is a pretty tacky middlebrow kind of country.

Not quite. This is more a problem with democracy. Good taste separates refined men from the great unwashed mass of ape which is humanity at large. Democracy elevates the ape, be it in the United States, Europe or Japan.

Via Eric Gordy, here’s a snippet from a recent Serbian cabinet meeting, as reported by Serbian weekly Blic:

Velimir Ilić (minister for infastructure): They have caused us much greater damage than broken windows. Those people at B92 and other media had better be careful how they talk about those young people.

Snežana Marković (minister for youth and sport): You are the last person who should tell people how to behave. Everyone knows what you have been advocating.

Ilić: Madam, you have been in sports for two months, and I have been for twenty years. Be careful, the sportspeople will come to you.

Dragan Šutanovac (minister of defence): What sportspeople, what are you talking about? I will stand in front of those wimps if somebody has to. Now, why was the police instructed to allow the hooligans to g wild on the one hand, and on the other hand to protect public order? That just endangers the police.

Ilić: You cannot call them hooligans just because they broke some windows and injured a few police officers.

Šutanovac: To be precise - 53 of them.

Vojislav Koštunica (prime minister): Those people, hooligans as you call them, were just reacting to the violation of international law.

Šutanovac: Oh please, if they had not been organised they would not have known what to do. What defence of international law are you talking about?

Bizarre personal threats aside, you can clearly see the machinations of Koštunica and his henchmen on display. Keep in mind that these deliberations were not meant for public dissemination, so what you’re reading here are unvarnished behind-closed-doors discussions. Šutanovac and Marković are from Tadić’s party (DS) and Ilić belongs to Koštunica’s DSS.

If you haven’t yet, go and read Marko Hoare’s essay on the situation in Serbia and what it all means.

I’ve always looked cockeyed at my Republican friends¹ who’d in good faith argue for a states’ rights approach to the abortion question. Roe is a bad idea, they’d say, because it imposes certain coastal urban mores on the heartland where the more pious folk chafe under them. “This is exactly the kind of decision that ought to be made at the state level.”

Fine, I’d say, but what happens next? States where abortion is already a rarity would ban abortions, and states where they’re readily available today would vote to continue allowing them. As such, do you really think your religious colleagues under that big Republican tent of yours, invested as they are in the sanctity of unborn human life, would be satisfied?

Well, my favorite social conservative intellectual, Ross Douthat, has quite candidly fleshed out some of his thinking on the issue. As the cliché goes, read the whole thing. It’s very thought-provoking—and quite revealing. It’s certainly reinvigorated my thinking on the issue.

Three things jumped right out at me in Ross’s post. First: banning abortions requires completely scuttling the Republican Party as we know it today.

But over the short term, there’s no question that it would require conservatives to temporarily table many of their longstanding policy goals - from cutting illegitimacy rates to reducing welfare dependency to limiting the size of government – in the name of the pro-life cause.

Small-government Republicans are not an easily expendable faction within the party, are they? The blurb at Amazon for Douthat’s upcoming book intimates that he’d attempt to keep these types under the tent by ensuring that government is kept small despite its newly activist nature. I’ll withhold judgment on the likeliness of such a thing coming to pass until I’ve read the book. Suffice it to say for now, though, that Douthat’s vision is at minimum highly disruptive to party unity.

Next: pro-lifers have a utopian bent to them which I’ve never properly appreciated before.

Over the long run, my assumption is that a ban on abortion, by changing the incentives of sexual behavior and family formation, would actually end up reducing out-of-wedlock births, welfare spending, and all the rest of it, and that a short-term investment in a pro-life welfare state (and an acceptance of the short term spike in illegitimacy, dependency and government spending that would presumably accompany it) would prove a boon to conservatism in the end.

I just don’t know where to even begin with this, except to say that I 100% disagree with the analysis. The fundamental error is, as far as I can discern, the assumption that abortion is the key to solving out-of-wedlock births, welfare spending, “and the rest of it”. It’s as if Ross thinks that abortion is the root cause of many societal ills—that people could be much better off if they’d only be relieved of the ability to screw indiscriminately.

As those who know me personally will attest, I’m the last person to advocate for limitless individual liberty.² But just like I don’t see the death penalty as a proper deterrent of violent crime, I don’t see “changing the incentives of sexual behavior” as a solution to promiscuity. Violent crime and illegitimacy are essential human realities. Not understanding this is pure utopianism—dangerous utopianism.

Which leads me to the final point: there’s a strain of Bolshevism in Ross’s pro-life stance which I’ve also not fully appreciated before.

And just as obviously, the scenario I just sketched out probably never come to pass; even if *Roe* disappears, I suspect that the country will settle into an equilibrium more pro-choice than pro-life, with more chances for experimentation with abortion policy but not all that many more. But if real opportunities do arise and the pro-life movement seizes them, I think it’s safe to say that the results will look, in policy and practice alike, unlike any abortion regime that now exists, or has ever existed before.

I agree that the country would opt for a pro-choice equilibrium if Roe were overturned—the ruling reflects a majority of the populace’s broad preferences. So what is Ross talking about with “opportunities arising” and the movement seizing them? Whatever he means, the end result would be a subversion of the popular will.³ This unexplored “abortion regime” is a chilling thing to ponder indeed.

Christ almighty! Elements of the right really are frighteningly unappealing sometimes. Mark Levin:

Now that Mitt Romney is giving a speech about faith, I’d like to hear speeches from all the candidates on faith. There seems to be general agreement here that a candidate’s faith is relevant to how they may govern, so we should encourage the other candidates to do the same.

There is no such general agreement. This Romney speech is an embarrassment for this country and an awful precedent.