Via Mona, Brad at Sadly, No! takes the pulse of the Great Conservative Recriminations War, and finds … well, he finds exactly what I predicted we’d find:
Ross Douthat, Patrick Ruffini, Greg Mankiw and David Frum all ponder why so many of the young’uns (which technically still includes me, even though I’m at the very edge of the 18-29 crowd) voted for Barack Obama. Frum and Mankiw blame the social cons, while Douthat says that economic concerns were far more of a factor. Ruffini seems to think that young people are just stupid and should probably be prevented from voting all together, though I can’t really tell.
Here’s something none of them mentioned: our current foreign policy of starting wars for no reason. [...]
I don’t think you guys can begin to understand the sheer amount of damage [the Iraq war] did to conservatism’s reputation. Sending people to war for bogus or fictitious reasons is one of the most heinous things any government can do — after all, why should anyone agree to make the ultimate sacrifice if they can’t be sure that their government is telling them the truth? If an entire generation of voters holds this against the Republican Party for the foreseeable future, I can’t say I’ll blame them.
Exactly. And as I’ve said, while I agree with Ross and James that the GOP wasn’t going to do much to improve its chances in 2008 by changing its tune on Iraq, the fact is that the long-term damage that that fiasco has done to the Republican Party’s reputation among my demographic in particular may well last for decades if its leaders don’t come around to admitting where things went wrong on the foreign policy front. I hate to say it, but the stubborn refusal to acknowledge this reality is pretty much a death sentence for the present incarnation of American conservatism … and that is pretty much as it should be.
P.S. Speaking of recriminations, check out Ross’s broadside on Douglas Kmiec. Awesome.
UPDATE: Mark has more.
UPDATE 2: As does JL Wall.
I still love Doug Kmiec. He taught me Con Law at Notre Dame, and was outrageously fair and smart.
If he says it, even if it is wrong, you can be sure he believes it.
I’d like to believe that, Mona, and I will if you say so. But to switch on a moment’s notice from Romney to Obama???
One Ring to Bring Them All and in the Darkness Bin…
Some blame social conservatism, some blame insufficient social conservatism, while others blame Bush-style big-government conservatism and still others blame too much small-government conservatism. The thing is – there is one thing none of them are w…..
But to switch on a moment’s notice from Romney to Obama???
Well, it was not a moment, and cost him some friends. I can only speculate he and Romney had an understanding of what Mitt would do, v. what Mitt “had” to say.
But he is one of the very few profs — undergrad or post, left or right — for whom I had respect. Ideology didn’t get you one brownie point with him, and he was unsparingly fair in class with those who disagreed.
I’d certainly like to believe that about the Romney situation – what frustrated me the most about his endorsing Obama was the way that he tried to deal with the abortion issue; I think there were perfectly acceptable ways to frame the endorsement and address those concerns without going the route he did. But anyway …
As to the classroom, I had friends who knew him when he was the dean at Catholic U., and heard similar sorts of things.
[...] So while Iraq isn’t the whole story, and while John and I would probably have our differences on how the GOP ought to re-orient its foreign policy, I think he’s pretty much right when he says: [...]
As an Australian I would posit that any still reasonably sane person had had a gut-full of the wall to wall lies and sheer destructive nastiness of the neo-PSYCHOPATHS.
[...] edge and politicize it. Or rather ideologize it. Particularly in its current incarnation, like Schwenkler, it was the Iraq War that turned me off to Bush more than anything. It was the politicizing of the [...]
I agree with Kmiec, rather than Ross, that the pro-life strategy of overturning Roe through Supreme Court appointments was misguided, and in any event it is moot for at least the next 4-8 years. In the end, what this country needs on the issue is an exhaustive debate on the issue, in which partisans on each side actually try to talk to each other.
Admittedly, I am pro choice, but as I am sitting here, I realize that I don’t really understand the other side of the debate. Does it hinge on the proposition that human life begins at conception? If so, why is that proposition necessarily true? Or alternatively why can there be so little uncertainty about it that criminal restrictions on womens’ autonomy can be justified? My impression is that most pro-lifers ground their views in religious belief. Are there grounds for the pro-life position that does not depend on particular conceptions of religious faith?
I’m sure pro-lifers have good answers to these questions, but the point is I’ve seen no real exchange of views on abortion on the national scene in the last twenty years. And pro-lifers need to engage in such a debate if they ultimately want to prevail, given the polls. A concerted and sustained effort at a constitutional amendment, such a Kmiec proposes, would offer the best opportunity to do so.
Ed:
The reason that Roe – and the post-Roe jurisprudence – has been the focus is that it’s only by getting that out of place that it’s possible for there to be ANY changes in abortion law, even the sorts of late-term restrictions that overwhelming majorities of Americans support. (That’s part of the problem here: people’s attitudes on abortion are blatantly inconsistent, and supporters of abortion rights are able to exploit this by making Roe – which most people claim to support – the issue even while the actual content of what Roe is taken to guarantee is much more extreme than what the average person supports.)
But overturning Roe would ALSO make the sort of democratic/deliberative approach you’re advocating a lot more possible. The fact is that people have lots of different sorts of reasons – some religious, many not – for being opposed to abortion in various stages of development, but as it stands none of those reasons (nor the reasons that those who are pro-choice have for their positions, of course) can be heard and responded to because of the (again, I think necessarily) singular focus on a particularly horrible SCOTUS decision.
Saying that pro-lifers should pursue a constitutional amendment strategy instead would be like saying that the civil rights movement should never have turned to the courts – and indeed, should never have turned to the courts even if the courts explicitly prohibited anti-discrimination laws at the state and local levels, which is effectively what the current body of jurisprudence does for restrictions on abortion rights. I’ll happily agree that pro-lifers’ attitudes toward politics have been misguided – you can’t vote for someone just because of the justices he promises to support – but the suggestion that what they (we) should do is to abandon all other efforts and work to put together a two-thirds majority of senators to pass a constitutional amendment banning abortion is a recipe for irrelevancy. Indeed, one might argue that it’s precisely because a large segment of the pro-life movement has committed itself to pushing for a federal ban that the movement has become less popular: advocating for compromise positions like milder restrictions and state-level authority on the issue (which is actually what Ross desires) is likely to be a far more popular strategy.
Thanks for your comment, John.
I guess I agree that, ex ante, trying to overturn Roe by changing court personnel might have seemed like a better idea. But at 35 years after Roe, the pro-life movement is no closer to its goal. It seems like all of its effort might have been better directed at the political process.
Yes, Roe is bad constitutional law, but there it is, and the court has refused to back away. The constitution does not require Congressional consent for an amendment–2/3s of the states can agree to a convention (see Art. V)–and given that 34 states ban post-viability abortions, a limited convention on abortion seems like a doable feat. Moreover, debate over the shape of the amendment could take account of things like state-federal balance or other tradeoffs that might find a majoritarian consensus. Given Obama’s election, this seems like a more fruitful path for pro-lifers.
I don’t think that societal change through litigation is inappropriate, but that’s not what the pro-lifers have been advocating. Their approach is more like FDR’s court-packing plan than the civil rights litigation strategy. In any event the most significant advances in civil rights came through legislative deliberation: in the end, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been much more important (and effective) than Brown.