The Free Thinker

Destroying Democratic Presidents (Salon)

Alex Pareene captured the craziness of conservatives and business leaders who demonize President Obama, the man most progressives, whether they like it or not, recognize as the conciliator in chief. Home Depot chairman Ken Langone is just the latest to become unhinged on the topic of Obama, blasting him on CNBC recently:

"He is not acting presidential. He is behaving in a way designed in my opinion to divide us, to make us look at each other with skepticism, with suspicion. That is the end of America as we know it," Langone fulminated. "The destruction he is inflicting by his behavior will carry on long after we settle the debt limit."

I don't know who Langone is describing, but it's not Obama. Sure, he's taken a jab or two at fat cats, and quickly retreated. Mostly he's reached out to Republicans time and again, only to be rebuffed and humiliated, from the earliest days of his term. On "Hardball" today we discussed the extreme reaction this conciliating president has triggered in the GOP, from the earliest moments of his presidency.

Obama does want to be conciliator-in-chief, but the way he passed Obamacare in the face of majority opposition from the American people shows why he can't be. The force of Obama's rhetoric, like a Jedi mind trick, has great power over the weak-minded, but and also, of course, he seems conciliatory to those who already agree with him. But he lacks real respect either for ordinary people or for his conservative opponents, and he will not compromise when it is for the good of the country, but only when he is forced to. He is habitually condescending, which is the more galling since most of those he condescends to are smarter and more sensible than he is, and he can get nasty when rebuffed.

In trying to debunk election year myths, Kevin Drum writes the following:

Obama should have focused like a laser on jobs instead of fiddling around with health care reform. To some extent, this is obviously a matter of opinion. If you're David Brooks and you think the health care bill was a lousy idea, then of course you think Obama should have spent less time on it. But the question is, would that have helped Democrats?

There's not much doubt that actually increasing employment would have helped. See No. 2. Employed people are people with disposable income, and people with disposable income are more likely to vote for the party in power.

But what could Obama have done to get more people working? Within a month of taking office, he had signed an $800 billion stimulus, 36 percent of which came in the form of tax cuts. Two months later, he announced a rescue plan (PDF) for GM and Chrysler, saving perhaps another million jobs. And later in the year, he proposed a further $200 billion jobs program, using unspent money from Bush's bank bailout.

By preventing health insurance companies from excluding people on the basis of pre-existing conditions, setting lifetime limits, and so forth, health care reform makes health care prospectively more expensive. Since employers pay for a lot of the health care in this country, that makes health care more expensive, a little bit now, a lot more in future. When employers hire, they are often or usually thinking about the long run, since there's usually a big expense involved in training a new employee and integrating them into a team. If employers know that (a) employee benefits are likely to be more expensive, and (b) nobody really knows how much more, naturally, they will be less eager to hire. So what could Obama have done in order to get more people working? Well, ... nothing would have been good.  In particular, not passing health care reform would probably have worked like a charm. Not raising the minimum wage would have been another clever idea.

It's worth noting that the view (a) that health care reform cost America jobs but was worth it anyway because it's more humane, is much more tenable than (b) that health care reform was a free lunch and didn't cost America jobs at all.  Yet no one seems to take position (a).

What the BP Spill Has to Do with Iran

A year ago the falsification of election results in Iran led to what seemed like the beginnings of a velvet revolution of the type that led to the overthrow of communism in eastern Europe. They called it the Green Revolution. McCain's immediate response of unmitigated condemnation showed the kind of "tear this down wall" freedom advocacy we might have expected from a McCain administration. Obama responded with words so measured that, coming from an American president who ought to be playing the role of freedom advocate, they sounded almost like an endorsement of the Ahmadinejad regime. Sober experts scolded McCain for his forthrightness and assured us that Obama's mealy-mouthed prevarication was actually the best thing Obama could do for Iranian freedom, because the support of the Great Satan would discredit the revolution in Iranians' eyes, even though polls show that most Iranians have a favorable attitude towards America.

I am too ignorant about the engineering problems of deepwater oil drilling to voice an opinion about whether the Obama administration has been incompetent or not. But it's pretty clear they haven't surprised us with their technocratic solutions. It's not very plausible, by now, to attribute to Obama superior technocratic intelligence, such that we can presume his decisions are wise even when we don't see how. And that makes it, in hindsight, a little harder to believe that Obama's conspicuous indifference to the Green Revolution was actually a shrewd tactic for empowering them by disassociating them from the Great Satan.

How Obama Can Save His Presidency

So the new conventional wisdom seems to be that Obama's presidency is on the road to, not disaster, but failure.  He has failed to persuade the country of the merits of his health care reform, and a decline in the polls and a series of setbacks at the ballot box now make it seem likelier than not that the reform will not pass, despite the huge preponderance the Democrats have enjoyed since 2008.  He and the Democratic Congress passed a bill usually mis-described as a "stimulus" bill, basically a big-government boondoggle that attempted to micromanage the economy back to health.  A year later we're still in the worst recession since World War II, and the public seems to be drawing the reasonable conclusion that the stimulus was a failure.  Of course, you can always claim, as Obama apologists must, that we would have been even worse off without the "stimulus," but an argument that depends on a counter-factual claim that something that hasn't happened in decades (an even worse recession) would have happened, is a weak argument.  Sometimes an appeal is made to historical analogy with the Great Depression, but the interpretation of the Great Depression which this historical analogy relies on-- the free-market economy spontaneously wrecked itself; Hoover the small-government free-marketeer let it plunge into depression; FDR the interventionist got us out of depression-- is a fantasy.  In the real world, the main damage in the 1930s was done by contractionary monetary policy; FDR helped put a floor under the fall with better bank regulation; but the interventionism of both Hoover and Roosevelt consistently made matters worse; and FDR didn't get us out of the depression, though there was a partial recovery from 1933-37 which was erased by a new crash in 1937-38; in fact, employment and GDP remained depressed until WWII.  Since fiscal stimulus didn't prevent, or get us out of, depression in the 1930s, the analogy provides no basis for the claim that the absence of fiscal stimulus would have led to depression today.  If policy has played a role in the limited recovery or at least stabilization which has occurred at all-- and it is tenable that the economy would have stabilized or even rebounded if politicians had done nothing-- the policies that have helped are (a) the TARP, the initiative by Bush, and Paulsen, that might have saved the banks, and (b) the Fed's expansion of the money supply.  (If Scott Sumner is correct that Fed policy has really been contractionary-- I'm inclined to think he is-- then with a better Fed we might have largely avoided this recession altogether; but that has little to do with Obama.)

Voters seem to have concluded that Obama's big-government push is hurting the economy, and they are probably right.  A vague agenda of "hope" and "change" may be smart politics (at a time when disillusionment with the Bush legacy was widespread, but the grounds for alienation are various and incompatible, so that only a "blank screen" for people to project their contradictory hopes onto is the only way that the alienated majority could be made into a transient electoral bloc) but it is bad macroeconomic management, because it creates gratuitous uncertainty.  It made sense for business to put off investment until they knew whether health care reform would raise the costs of employing people, or whether cap-and-trade would raise the costs of manufacturing stuff.  And it would be nice to get some idea how the US plans to close its gaping fiscal deficit, because if it's going to do so by confiscatory taxes on the rich, it doesn't make any sense for the people who are in a position to get the economy moving to work hard and take risks to be, sometime in the future, the rich who pay the confiscatory taxes.  Keynesianism has an inherent populist appeal: people need jobs, so the government should go out and make them.  It's Bastiat's broken-window fallacy writ large.  Some ordinary people, and lots of journalists, have fallen for the "stimulus" fallacy; under the label "jobs bill" a new round of stimulus may get more public support.  But it now looks as if the American people have seen through Obama's misguided economic policies and will sharply curtail or overthrow the Democratic majorities in Congress, thus killing most of Obama's agenda politically.  Clinton encountered a similar setback and responded by becoming a born-again Eisenhower Republican.  But this was easier for Clinton because he had really been a centrist all along.  Obama seems to be a genuine man of the left, even perhaps rather far left.  He is not a fanatic or a dogmatist-- he is too much of a lightweight for that-- but idealism is part of his character and part of his motive for holding public office.  He seems to regard the mere hurly-burly of politics with distaste, even if he engages in it. 

So here's my suggestion for how Obama can save his presidency.  Forget health care: dropping that would be a good way to signal to the American people that he's listening to them.  Forget stimulus: anything he does in the direction of more government spending will just confirm the growing negative image of him.  He needs to start with something new.  Something that is consistent with liberal right-mindedness, yet which is not a big-government boondoggle.  Something that will enable him to make an asset again of his appealing life story, and to translate his personal appeal into a political agenda.  Something that has a bipartisan appeal, which he can call on leading Republicans to support, and have a right to expect their cooperation.  Something that clearly expands freedom rather than narrows it.  Something that can revive the economy.  Something that can shore up our long-term fiscal position.  Something that is patriotic and in tune with America's deepest traditions.  Something that is important enough to shape America for decades, and to justify all the enthusiasm of Obama's supporters in 2008.  Something that can expand the base of the Democratic party.  Something that can repair America's tarnished image in the world.

That something is immigration reform.  It has the merit of being a complete change of subject, of leaving behind the ruins of Obama's first year in office and starting fresh.  Obama could hardly be accused of left-wing extremism, for he would be doing something Bush tried to do.  Moreover, he could probably count on the support of his old rival, John McCain.  If successful, an immigration reform enacted by Obama would probably win the loyalty of many Hispanics to the Democratic Party for years to come.  It would revive the economy by buoying housing prices with new demand.  It would also fuel investment, as immigrants are disproportionately entrepreneurial.  It would be very popular abroad, since its most immediate beneficiaries are foreigners.  Its egalitarianism would please liberals, its expansion of freedom would appeal to libertarians and conservatives of conscience.  It would be highly fitting for Obama, the first black president, the son of an immigrant himself, to enact it, and it would give him a way to make a virtue out of his habit of talking about himself all the time.  To nasty suggestions that immigration will lead to more crime or will somehow debase the culture, he could respond in a personal way by saying that he understood that some people felt threatened by people like himself who looked different and had roots in faraway places, but that he had learned from his own experience how people of all races and all faiths could participate in the American dream.  It would be not only relevant but humble, as he could put himslf on a level with the despised "illegal immigrant" of nativist legend, shifty-eyed and criminal and hostile to American culture, and be the incarnate refutation of it.  (The appeal would not be very compelling as a logical matter but I think it would work, and anyway he could back it up with plenty of hard facts as needed, as facts are always against the nativists in these disputes.)

I think it would work, even politically.  He'd renew vague idealists' support for him.  He'd alienate some constituencies, e.g., the unions, but engaging in fights with some parts of his coalition would make him look brave and principled and serious.  He'd give his fans abroad a reason to put his halo back on him.  He'd give Democrats a reason to hope for their future.  The Democrats might still lose in 2010, but after successful cooperation with, or an overreach by, a Republican Congress, voters might look favorably on Obama in 2012.  Even if he failed-- in passing immigration reform, or in getting re-elected-- he'd at least seem, in retrospect, a noble figure, rather than an inscrutable fad.

Obama's Nobel Speech

It's been getting good reviews.  I didn't read the whole thing but from what I did read I had the same impression.  It seemed morally serious, and thus very un-Obama-esque.  Usually with Obama's speeches the intelligence is only skin deep; the content, if any can be discerned at all, is either trivial-- though at the same time passive-aggressive because there are verbal cues that signal he is differentiating himself from a strawman version of Bush-- or else hopelessly confused.  The Nobel speech didn't seem to pretend to novelty: it seemed to be a thoughtful distillation of the views of others and of conventional wisdom.  More importantly, he had the courage to say something that not only the conservative bad guys, but those enlightened enough to admire him, might find unpleasant: he contrasted his own views with those of Martin Luther King and Gandhi and justified the use of force.  It was refreshingly non-narcissistic.  It didn't try to be all things to all people.

Combined with the Afghanistan speech before I think this does some of the inevitable work of vindicating the Bush foreign policy.  Bush won the argument on the Iraq War so thoroughly in the past few years that his critics tacitly conceded defeat on the ideology front by taking to calling themselves the "reality-based" community, as if doing the right thing had nothing to do with arguing about right and wrong.  There was an ideological answer to Bush: it was a strong doctrine of sovereignty, the Hobbesian notion that any clique or killer who seizes control of any of the arbitrary demarcations of territory we call countries has, somehow, an absolute right to do as he pleases with the lives and liberties of its inhabitants, such that outsiders, such as Bush's America and Blair's Britain, are wrong to interfere.  Few took that line: though it was and still to some extent is embedded in international law and normal international relations, a forthright defense of Saddam's rights over the Iraqi people, which would be required for a principled defense of sovereignty, would be so morally depraved, and so philosophically ill-grounded, that few if any were ready to stand up and make a principled defense of it.  Obama mentioned in his Nobel speech, approvingly, that we have come to believe that to use force against humanitarian abuses may be justified.  He meant Bosnia and Rwanda of course, maybe Darfur; but you can't really coherently justify them and draw the line at Iraq.  Except on pragmatic grounds, but that is to give the game away, for in that case you can't really say more than "the signs as I read them point to a strong possibility that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was, on balance, a bad decision," which falls so short of the "Bush is evil" to which so many have committed as to be virtually a defense of Bush, whether one likes it or not.

Liberals have avoided legitimizing Bush by largely dodging the issue of ideology altogether where foreign policy is concerned.  Obama's nonsensical Berlin speech last year was in this vein.  Now Obama has said something substantive and thoughtful, and since Bush and his allies are the only ones who have been saying substantive and thoughtful things about foreign affairs in the past few years, that makes him sound like Bush.  Hopefully this new, morally serious Obama sticks around.  Maybe he'll turn out to be an American Tony Blair in foreign policy.

Richard Epstein:

You can only improve labor markets by freeing them up. Scrap the talk about goofy ad hoc subsidies, and tell the president, for the first time in his life, to think hard about deregulation. Roll back the three recent minimum-wage increases that have blunted job creation for low-skilled workers in a stagnant labor market. Announce he will veto any effort by Congress to pass the Employer Free Choice Act, whose uncertain threat of compulsory unionization has prompted many businesses to shelve any plans for expansion. Abandon the monstrous health care bills winding through Congress, whose panoply of taxes, subsidies and regulations are job killers of the first magnitude. Put a halt on legislation for carbon caps and taxes until the science gets sorted out. Don't let the EPA make a hasty endangerment finding on carbon dioxide. 

Deregulation costs nothing to administer, increases jobs and adds to the tax base. It is only an added benefit that sound economics reduces presidential power.

Exactly right. What Obama could do to boost job creation is nothing more or less or other than to abandon and reverse his agenda and that of the Democratic Party. The health care bill will make employees more expensive: it's a job killer. Cap-and-trade raises the cost of doing business for many manufacturing industries: it's a job killer. Minimum wage hikes are the quintessential job killer; in a booming economy, when they're low enough, they may not matter, but if they bite they kill jobs. The Orwellianly-named Employee Free Choice Act would politicize the workplace in a disastrous way; unions are the enemies of the economy. The deficit, too, is a job killer: it soaks up capital that might otherwise go to businesses for investment. Most generally, Obama's grandiose yet noncommittal ethos of "hope" and "change," which is clever politics, is a terrible signal to send to business. It says, "Your old plans aren't going to play out the way you thought because things are going to change, but since I'm not going to say specifically what I believe in, what I want to do, what my priorities are, you can't make new ones either." It says: "Wait and see."

"We are the change we've been waiting for," said Obama. Now he is the problem he's trying to solve.

This seems classy:

Then, in early 2003, the decision was made to wage a second war in Iraq. The wrenching debate over the Iraq War is well-known and need not be repeated here. It is enough to say that for the next six years, the Iraq War drew the dominant share of our troops, our resources, our diplomacy, and our national attention — and that the decision to go into Iraq caused substantial rifts between America and much of the world.

Today, after extraordinary costs, we are bringing the Iraq war to a responsible end. We will remove our combat brigades from Iraq by the end of next summer, and all of our troops by the end of 2011. That we are doing so is a testament to the character of our men and women in uniform. Thanks to their courage, grit and perseverance, we have given Iraqis a chance to shape their future, and we are successfully leaving Iraq to its people.

But while we have achieved hard-earned milestones in Iraq...

Obama has used crude language in the past, calling Iraq "rash" and "dumb." Hopefully he's grown out of that for good. Of course, he later says:

I opposed the war in Iraq precisely because I believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force and always consider the long-term consequences of our actions.

But of course we did "exercise restraint in the use of military force" and "consider the long-term consequences of our actions" in the run-up to and throughout the Iraq war.  We waited over a year between Bush's first signals of possible war and the decision to invade, as we cultivated international support.  During the occupation our military adhered, with some minor lapses such as Abu Ghraib, to civilized norms of conduct.  And the Bush administration had a very clear and publicly proclaimed vision for what it hoped the "long-term consequences of our actions" would be, a vision which has since been vindicated by events.

This is an unfortunate line:

It is easy to forget that when this war began, we were united — bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack and by the determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear. I refuse to accept the notion that we cannot summon that unity again.

"I refuse to accept the notion..."  Too bad, because the evidence points that way.  That is, points to the country not uniting behind Obama's plan.  Obama should probably not refuse to accept "notions" that are obvious truths.  But also-- and this is important-- the post-9/11 unity was not a good thing.  Democracies are disputatious, full of debate and disagreement; we should not wish that away.  A sinister political correctness set in after 9/11, when Le Monde was writing "we are all Americans," which made it socially hazardous, for example, to admit that while the 9/11 hijackers were misguided, they probably deserve to be described as "brave."  We don't want that shell-shocked, self-defensive, censorious unity back.  And President Obama shouldn't feel the need for it, either.  He should do what he thinks is right, and not mind too much it provokes some fierce opposition.  I'm not convinced that he is right, but I'm willing to root for his Afghan strategy to work.  Just don't try to "summon" me to any "unity."

The Road to Serfdom

The chart below shows the real federal debt held by the public per capita US population.  The data are drawn from the Office of Management and Budget (federal debt) and the Census Bureau (population), with historical info up to 2008 and projections thereafter.  The CPI as published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is used to control for inflation (for future years I assumed that the CPI will follow its present trajectory).

 

So if present trends continue-- and I believe the OMB is if anything rather optimistic-- real federal debt per capita will double during Obama's first term in office.  Each American's share of this debt burden will be roughly equal to one year's per capita GDP.  Much of this is owned by foreigners, especially the Chinese, so assuming we keep paying and don't inflate our way out of it America will be channeling a large annual tribute to China.  Much of the debt, of course, is owned by Americans, so the common taxpayer will be compelled to make annual payments to a rentier class of T-bill owners.

There's an ominous precedent here.  The French Revolution began as a fiscal crisis.

Hope and Change?

"White House Plans on Immigration Include Legal Status" (NY Times):

The Obama administration will insist on measures to give legal status to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants as it pushes early next year for legislation to overhaul the immigration system, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Friday.

In her first major speech on the overhaul, Ms. Napolitano dispelled any suggestion that the administration — with health care, energy and other major issues crowding its agenda — would postpone the most contentious piece of immigration legislation until after midterm elections next November.

Laying out the administration’s bottom line, Ms. Napolitano said officials would argue for a “three-legged stool” that includes tougher enforcement laws against illegal immigrants and employers who hire them and a streamlined system for legal immigration, as well as a “tough and fair pathway to earned legal status.”

With unemployment surging over 10 percent and Congress still wrangling over health care, advocates on all sides of the immigration debate had begun to doubt that President Obama would keep his pledge to tackle the divisive illegal immigration issue in the first months of 2010.

Speaking at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group in Washington, Ms. Napolitano unveiled a double-barrel argument for a legalization program, saying it would enhance national security and, as the economy climbs out of recession, protect American workers from unfair competition from lower-paid, easily exploited illegal immigrants.

“Let me emphasize this: we will never have fully effective law enforcement or national security as long as so many millions remain in the shadows,” she said, adding that the recovering economy would be strengthened “as these immigrants become full-paying taxpayers.”

Under the administration’s plan, illegal immigrants who hope to gain legal status would have to register, pay fines and all taxes they owe, pass a criminal background check and learn English.

Drawing a contrast with 2007, when a bill with legalization provisions offered by President George W. Bush failed in Congress, Ms. Napolitano said the Obama administration had achieved a “fundamental change” in border security and enforcement against employers hiring illegal immigrants. She said a sharp reduction in the flow of illegal immigrants into the country created an opportunity to move ahead with a legalization program.

McCain would have had this done already, but still, this is great news if it pans out.  Good news for freedom, good news for the economy, good news for equality and justice.  Hopefully Obama rebrands himself.

First Time Tragedy, Second Time Farce

The elections yesterday show that Americans are waking up after the crisis-numbed sleepwalking into the polls in November 2008. Christie's and McDonnell's victories are a tangible sign of what the polls have been showing for months: the ideological dominance of conservatism (whatever that means), the shifting of independents from the Democrats towards the GOP, the unpopularity of Obama's policies and of the Democratic Congress (and a rapid fall in Obama's own approval rating, which I expect will be lower than Bush's at every corresponding stage of his presidency). The American people are probably not such idiots as to fail to return fewer Dems and more GOPs in 2010, and a GOP takeover of Congress, as in 1994, seems likely. This should really be a no-brainer. It was the formula of the famous 1990s: as Brothers Judd slyly put it, the ideal might be a Democratic resident and a GOP Congress. Of course this is one of the thousand reasons why Americans were such idiots to vote for Obama in 2008: there was obviously going to be a Democratic Congress, and a President McCain was needed to check it, even aside from his superior judgment, experience, integrity, and intelligence. But the sheeple were in shock from the crisis, and did what CNN told them. Now they are beginning to get their wits back.

Maybe we'll be spared the tax-spend-and-regulate health care bill. Harry Reid hinted that it might not pass this year, and it's hard to imagine it will be easier to do so in 2010, an election year. On the other hand, the defeats in Virginia and New Jersey might convince some Dems that their careers are ending anyway, so why not make history while they have the chance. Of course, this was always the reason the Democratic leadership was focusing on health care this year in particular. It's obvious that, while it's tenable that our health care system is sub-optimal, this has little or nothing to do with the 2008 crisis or the high unemployment that is our main problem right now. A leadership confident it enjoyed real majority support would have focused on fighting the crisis now, and saved big structural changes until the economy was recovering, to avoid dumping a huge, gratuitous burden of political risk on entrepreneurs and investors at just the time they were least able to bear it. But the Democrats knew that their getting majorities this big was a sort of mistake, afforded them by the crisis, by the national BDS pandemic, and by the donation of most of the MSM's dwindling reputational capital to the cause. President McCain and a Democratic Congress would have had to focus on bipartisan issues. We might even have got the one thing that would stimulate the economy more than any other policy: immigration reform. But the Democrats had to use the one-party-rule moment to plow through the paleoliberal dream.

I think Marx said that "history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce." The dictum expresses the relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama. Hoover-Roosevelt interventionism deepened and prolonged the Great Depression at home and worldwide, permanently altered America's economic constitution, largely discredited democratic capitalism in the eyes of the world, and opened a path for the rise of Hitler and the totalitarian Axis, culminating in World War II. Socialism, poverty, appeasement, retreat, war. Likewise, the comeback of Big Government under Obama has burdened business confidence, impeded recovery, and is altering the US economic constitution, while his weak, vacillating and cynical foreign policy has caused unease in allies from Poland to Israel to India to Japan to France while emboldening Putin-Medvedev and Ahmadinejad and the Taliban, and abetted the lethal blow to international law by letting Russia's thugocracy get away with the dismemberment of Georgia. But the difference of degree is so great as to be a difference of kind. America will not repeat the 1930s as France, to Marx's dismay, would not repeat the Revolution (the 1848 revolution, which led to a reaction and the rise of President-for-Life Napoleon III, was the "farce" to the "tragedy" of the 1789 revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte's world-historic career). Many of FDR's New Deal policies-- a top tax rate of 90%, show trials of leading industrialists and political opponents, an attempt to impose full-fledged planning on the economy-- amounted to very nearly an overthrow of the capitalist order. And it enjoyed strong public support as such. FDR was a formidable leader. By contrast, it is the essence of Obama to be the apotheosis of insubstantiality. "Hope and change" and "yes we can" succeeded not despite but because of their meaninglessness. How can meaninglessness be a virtue? To understand that, an interpretative glance at the past few years is needed.

George W. Bush ran on ideas in 2000, and many of them-- tax cuts, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the No Child Left Behind Act-- became law (Social Security reform didn't but Bush tried), while his foreign policy ideology, especially its liberationist side, seems to have been conceived in the wake of 9/11. Most importantly, Bush found a way to turn the illiberal imperatives of the War on Terror inside out. On domestic and foreign policy alike, Bush represented what might be called the radical center, and as such alienated the left especially, but also many on the right. He twisted America's ideological kaleidoscope. He ended up being unpopular, which is a rather less meaningful fact than might be thought. Suppose there are five issues, and person A is for B, for C, against D, against E, and for F, while person G expresses no views on B and C and leans in favor of D and E but is not sure and seems at various times to be both for and against F. A might be unpopular, if disagreement on one issue is reason enough to dislike him, for the set of people who agree on any position on all five issues is likely to be small, while G might be popular, managing by his vagueness and vacillation to leave a majority not antagonized, particularly if he has a pleasant face or manner. Of course, if G has to make decisions he must take stands and lose "popularity" or non-objectionableness. But the point is that A's unpopularity does not mean that a coherent coalition against him is possible. The Iraq War is a case in point. You can oppose the Iraq War because you are (a) totally pacifist, (b) a defend-the-borders-only type opposed to foreign entanglements, (c) a liberal internationalist of the kind that strongly believes in the "sovereignty" of other countries regardless of regime type, (d) a UN legitimist, (e) not opposed to overthrowing dictators in principle but unpersuaded that it's worth it in this case, (f) in favor of Saddam and other dictatorships for "primitive" non-Western peoples, (g) against all US intervention because you think the US is an incorrigible greedy capitalist imperialist hegemon. These seven groups (and others) might agree on opposing the Iraq War, but they wouldn't agree on any arguments against the Iraq War. So if they want to form a coalition, they'll need to be silent about their reasons for opposing Bush, since any discussion of reasons would shatter the coalition. How can they talk to each other then? By resorting to forms of communication that don't rise to the level of reason, i.e., sneering. If we want to claim we're the enlightened majority against the misguided Bush administration, we can't explain why Bush is wrong, lest we expose our own differences, but we can agree to call him dumb, over and over again. It takes a while to run out of epithets. And if we get tired of negativity, we can get some motivational-speakerish type to dress it up in language about "hope" and "change," by which we all know, however, that "not Bush," is meant. Thus Bush Derangement Syndrome metamorphosed into the Obama administration, and the intellectual poverty of the Obama administration is the intellectual poverty of the opposition to Bush. The word "disillusioned" seems too generous to apply to former Obama supporters; the promise of Obamism was so insubstantial as barely to qualify even as an illusion.

November 3, 2009 may mark the beginning of a return to commonsense, and the GOP takes Congress in 2010 and starts to clean up the mess (first order of business: the deficit), Great Depression II will be far shorter and less painful than Great Depression I. Nonetheless I think there is something irrevocable about America's lapse of judgment in 2008. At the end of the day, a nation capable of electing a man and a party so unfit to lead as Obama and the 2008 Democrats is unfit to lead the Free World.

Relative decline for America was always nearly inevitable and mostly desirable. The 5% of the world's population that are American citizens hold far more than their share of the wealth and power of mankind. This is not to say that Americans must become poorer: on the contrary, we can and may hope that the rest of the world will come closer to America's living standards, and this is not only feasible but will benefit America. A lot of people used to fulminated that the Bush administration was squandering America's moral standing in the world. I am not quite saying the opposite, namely that Obama is squandering the moral authority that the Bush administration won. Rather, as democracy spread, as foreign economies grew and developing countries grew more literate etc., America could no longer enjoy hegemony by virtue of its mere military and economic weight. If it were to lead at all-- and a group of people or nations can usually benefit from good leadership-- it had to articulate and champion an ideology with universal appeal that other nations could believe in and support. Democracy has, for the moment, just such a universal appeal. Under the Clinton administration the US was scandalously unwilling to risk the lives of US soldiers for the benefit of others: thus we pulled out of Somalia and relied wholly on air war in Kosovo and Iraq. The Bush administration broke this taboo, and showed how democracy could be spread not only passively and defensively, waiting for dictatorships to fall, but actively, and how dictators could be held accountable. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, though undertaken in support of UN resolutions and arguably essential to restore the UN's credibility in the face of Saddam's continued defiance and impunity, was at the same time a revolutionary strike against a notion of sovereignty that legitimized every thug who killed his way to the top. It was a risky yet potentially valuable precedent. Polls that showed a decline in favorable attitudes to the US and to Bush in the aftermath of the 2003 war belie the complexity of the world's attitude. Nowhere did a democratic electorate reject a government for supporting the Bush administration. On the contrary, Howard was re-elected, Blair was re-elected, Aznar's political heir Rajoy in Spain was on course for re-election until the Madrid bombings, while Bush adversaries Chirac of France, Schroeder of Germany, and Chretien of Canada lost elections in favor of leaders much more favorable to Bush and America. America's relations with Japan, India, and eastern Europe prospered; relations with western Europe recovered without any particular concessions on America's side. The war was a dangerous expedient; the world knew that and didn't particularly like it; but they didn't have a better alternative; and the fundamental presumption that America is uniquely trustworthy and beneficent which has defined the strategies of free nations since WWII was re-examined but was still, indeed was perhaps all the more, valid. The unholy alliance of Putin, Chirac and Schroeder that had tried to stop the war fell apart, with Chirac and Schroeder losing power and disgraced, while Putin withdrew his country into morbid paranoia. Diplomatically, the gambit succeeded. It seems to be succeeding on the ground in Iraq, too: elections were held, a constitution passed, Al Qaeda nearly sparked a civil war but was beaten back, and a new Iraqi democracy took shape, a development scarcely conceivable six years ago.

An America which exercised its power for the general good, to spread freedom and uphold international security, might be able to hold continued sway over the free world through moral suasion, initiative, and good example. Near the end of the Bush years this seemed to be taking place: al-Qaeda had been drawn into the trap of Iraq and self-defeated; no one questioned the legitimacy of the new Iraqi democracy; the bonds between the Western allies were being reforged with the Iraqi precedent unrepudiated; and the Free World alliance of the Cold War years had now been definitely expanded to eastern Europe and India, and was strengthened in Japan. A McCain administration might have made a cause celebre of Georgia as the Bush administration had done with Iraq, thus reaffirming the commitment to international law which the Iraq war had seemed to undermine-- but international law, please note, in the sense that democracies' borders are inviolable, not in the sense that tyrants are sacrosanct-- and immigration reform at home would have strengthened the foundations of American democracy from below, reaffirming America's egalitarian ideals and signalling its openness to the world. The scenario seems to have the force of destiny, but one can flunk one's destiny, one can miss one's moment.

I'm not sure that the moment can be recovered. Why should allies trust us again if we treat them as shabbily as the Obama administration has done to Poland and Georgia? Indeed, the Obama administration's manner of dismissing the war-- "a dumb war, a rash war"-- is an insulted to Tony Blair and all of America's most faithful allies. It would be an entirely different matter if he had limited himself to respectful disagreement. Obama's ignorant remarks about the impossibility of one nation imposing democracy on another have just enough of the flavor of a new false orthodoxy to make strategic thinking difficult going forward. The situation in Afghanistan is especially sad. The Democrats embraced Afghanistan as "the good war" opportunistically, as a means to outflank Bush's "war president" credentials, but Afghanistan never offered hopes of a conclusion as satisfactory as was possible in Iraq. Iraq is urban and literate and middle-class and densely populated and civilized modern enough to have a decent chance of making democracy work; moreover, Americans were in a position really to run the country for a while, and lay the foundations of a new politico-institutional matrix. In Afghanistan a democratic outcome always stretched the bounds of plausibility, which made objectives harder to define, since our ideology makes democracy obligatory. At this point, we should probably abandon objectives other than to avoid the disgrace of having the Afghans who allied with us be left at the mercy of the Taliban. Maybe we defend the cities; maybe we accept some Afghans as refugees in the US, as we did after Vietnam; maybe we try to negotiate some power-sharing federalist deal. But the Obama administration is far from having made it clear that they have a strategy and are determined to pursue it through to success. The contrast with the Bush administration in 2007 is striking. It seems likely to end in quagmire, attrition, retreat, compromises, a blot on our record.

We have ceased to be the comparative free-market paragon we were in the 1990s. It is not just that we've gotten worse; other countries have gotten better. Western European countries have been comparatively reformist; and now they almost all have right-leaning governments with an interest in fiscal discipline and/or market reform. Now our unemployment rates are above Europe's and may stay there for a while. Asia, not surprisingly, is showing a much more robust recovery from the 2008 recession. America is ceasing to be the cutting edge of prosperity. I think we'll recover, more quickly than in the 1930s, both economically and ideologically. There will be a shift back in the direction of supporting freedom abroad and limited government at home. But by that time the world will have begun to move on, to find ways to rely less on American leadership and example. We probably have decades of prosperity before us, and American ideas, not least the liberationist credo of the Bush administration which is now incarnate in Iraq, will continue to be influential, but the American people, the escapist rubes who voted for "hope" and "change," will cease to be the most important carriers of those ideas.