"Coalition of the Reality-Based"

That phrase, which I've included for the moment in the blog title line, is a James Galbraith take-off on an already-famous passage in the weekend article by Ron Suskind in the New York Times Magazine, Without a Doubt 10/17/04.   A number of bloggers have commented on that piece, including AOL-J'er eazyguy62 at American Crossroads.

The relevant passage of Suskind's article says (my emphasis):

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: ''Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you.'' When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ''Look, I'm not going to debate it with you.''

Galbraith's column, as it turns out, dovetails with Bob McElvaine's column in the previous guest post on conservatives especially disillusioned with Bush:  "You can't run the world on faith" by James Galbraith, Salon.com 10/18/04.  His concluding line is:

Welcome to the coalition of the reality-based.

The three conservative Bush critics Galbraith discusses are one-time stars of the so-called Reagan Revolution:  Bruce Bartlett, Paul Craig Roberts and Jude Wanniski.  He quotes Roberts as saying:  "Bush's conservative supporters want no debate. They want no facts, no analysis. They want to denounce and to demonize the enemies that the Hannitys, Limbaughs, and Savages of talk radio assure them are everywhere at work destroying their great and noble country."

And that's coming from someone (Roberts) I've always thought of as a dogmatic conservative twit!

At one level, columns like McElvaine's and Galbraith's are relying on a stock convention of political polemics, finding partisans from the Other Side who agree with Our Side on some points.

But the Iraq War in particular has created divisions that are likely to be long-lasting.  Aside from the more individual considerations of not wanting to be personally identified with a disaster like this war, conservative activists have good reason to be concerned that Bush's doctrine of preventive war and the crass practice of crony capitlalism (think Halliburton) have become so closely associated with their beloved nostrums of tax cuts for the wealthy and and a free hand for corporations on environmental regulations, wages and working conditions.

McElvaine's piece is polemical, sure, but it also address what many ordinary voters (as opposed to "movement conservatives") think of when they think "conservative."  For at least some signficant portion of voters, "conservative" conjures up notions like cautious, prudent, responsible, careful, businesslike, playing by the rules, respectful of tradition, decorous.  The general recklessness, blatant crony capitalism and high-risk foreign policy of the Bush administration are not particularly "conservative" in those senses.

Via TAPPED's Matt Yglesias, I came across this endorsement of John Kerry by Scott McConnell of Pat Buchanan's American Conservative magazine: Kerry's the One (11/08/04 issue; accessed 10/18/04).

Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. ...

In Europe and indeed all over the world, he has made the United States despised by people who used to be its friends, by businessmen and the middle classes, by moderate and sensible liberals. Never before have democratic foreign governments needed to demonstrate disdain for Washington to their own electorates in order to survive in office. The poll numbers are shocking. In countries like Norway, Germany, France, and Spain, Bush is liked by about seven percent of the populace. In Egypt, recipient of huge piles of American aid in the past two decades, some 98 percent have an unfavorable view of the United States. It’s the same throughout the Middle East. ...

Only the seriously deluded could fail to see that a policy so central to America’s survival as a free country as getting hold of loose nuclear materials and controlling nuclear proliferation requires the willingness of foreign countries to provide full, 100 percent co-operation. Making yourself into the world’s most hated country is not an obvious way to secure that help.

Such disdain for "the seriously deluded" is sometimes found in those who adhere to the "reality-based community."

Now, in Pat Buchanan's political neighborhood, I'm always on the lookout for displays of anti-Semitism, and I thought there I might be seeing a glimmer of it here:

The record, from published administration memoirs and in-depthreporting, is one of an administration with a very small group of six or eight real decision-makers, who were set on war from the beginning and who took great pains to shut out arguments from professionals in the CIA and State Department and the U.S. armed forces that contradicted their rosy scenarios about easy victory. Much has been written about the neoconservative hand guiding the Bush presidency—and it is peculiar that one who was fired from the National Security Council in the Reagan administration for suspicion of passing classified material to the Israeli embassy and another who has written position papers for an Israeli Likud Party leader have become key players in the making of American foreign policy.

Let's just say that that paragraph taken alone would not be incompatible with a Jewish-conspiracy theory view of the Iraq War.  However, the subsequent paragraph does put it into a more realistic context:

But neoconservatism now encompasses much more than Israel-obsessed intellectuals and policy insiders. The Bush foreign policy also surfs on deep currents within the Christian Right, some of which see unqualified support of Israel as part of a godly plan to bring about Armageddon and the future kingdom of Christ. These two strands of Jewish and Christian extremism build on one another in the Bush presidency—and President Bush has given not the slightest indication he would restrain either in a second term. With Colin Powell’s departure from the State Department looming, Bush is more than ever the “neoconian candidate.” The only way Americans will have a presidency in which neoconservatives and the Christian Armageddon set are not holding the reins of power is if Kerry is elected.

I'm not familiar with McConnell's other work, so I can't really "read between the lines" on the nuances of his particular angle is on this.  In general, I'm not much of an admirer of the foreign policy ideas of the self-described "paleo-conservatives" like Pat Buchanan.  Their isolationist, America-First-type ideology is potentially as belligerent and warlike as the "neoconservative" version.

And McConnell does say, "If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in opposition from Inauguration Day forward."  He proceeds to look forward to an ideological/factional struggle within the Republican Party in the event of a Kerry victory. So his endorsement of Kerry certainly sounds like a "rule-or-ruin" Republican Party malcontent.

But, for whatever reasons, some ideological conservatives are more than a little worried about Bush's foreign policy, as well as other aspects of his administration.

AOL-J'er RNantz of Think It Over has been trying mightily to come up with some Democrats who reject John Kerry.  He did find former New York Mayor Ed Koch.  More recently he's come across some woman who used to live in Britain that no one has ever heard of who's taking that position.  He was praising Zell Miller for a while.  But since Zell came out at the Republican convention as a stark, raving lunatic, RNantz's enthusiasm for him may have cooled.

I don't bring this up to say that it's meaningless, or that "both sides are alike" on this.  It's true that in every presidential election, you get some well-known members of one party endorsing the candidate of the other party, or refusing to endorse their own party's candidate.  But the divisions within the parties are not like they were even 30 years ago, when there were more prominent moderates and still the occasional liberal in the Republican Party, and notably more conservative (mostly Southern) Democrats, than we see today.

But the kind of conservative dissents we see against Bush are more likely to take on immediate importance than the parallel phenomenon on the Democratic side.  Take Zell Miller.  I mean, come on, the guy's more Republican than the Republicans.  His net influence in the Democratic Party is less than zero today.

On the other hand, if Bush loses, the factions in the Republican Party that don't want to line up behind a third (Jeb) installment of the Bush dynasty for 2008 will be looking to articulate alternative positions.  And they will find plenty of ways to knock Jeb by pointing out the disastrous failures and problems of Dubya's administration.