Anti-Climacus

REPLY TO DAVID: It will shock all five of my regular readers, but I actually agree with most of what he has to say. Bush screwed himself over by only making part of the case against Iraq (though Britain put out a white paper, I believe, on Hussein's human rights abuses this past week, which might be the precursor for more significant action). But this is still only a potentiality-- no one will know for sure how things will go on the 8th, when Iraq has to hand over a list of all of its relevant WMD programs, and no one knows what might happen after that. But, in general, he did screw something else up again, and quite badly, and it might be some time before we can recover our foreign-policy bearings.

And again, he's absolutely right that Democratic officials have been too slow in pointing this all out. There are a complex of reasons for this, all of which are cynical and political-- what moron's going to go against the President when someone like Max Cleland (who lost three limbs in Vietnam, for goodness' sake) can lose when he's even nominally opposed to the President's foreign policy. Further, there's the long-standing rift in the party between Radicals (who think inspections are just a precursor to war, which they'd oppose, so they don't do anything) and DLC/Blue Dog style Democrats, who are mostly characterized nowadays by having no positions on anything.

Where David is wrong is in assuming that what the people who write for political journals, etc, don't actually make a difference. Any good student of the early-80s Conservative revivial will tell you that it happened, in part, because of places like the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institute, the Cato Institute, etc etc spent the best part of a decade doing things like writing articles on policy options that were picked up by politicians. Same deal with the 90s Conservative revivial and The Spectator and The Weekly Standard. To use a more current example: anyone familiar with Robert Reich's recent syndicated column on potential Democratic tax strategy was not at all surprised to hear John Kerry advocate that same proposal last Sunday as part of his campaign kick-off. And it's also likely that people who follow these things weren't surprised, because temporary rollbacks of payroll taxes have been kicked around in Left policy circles for the last two years.

So to answer your question (what do you do when both parties have failed?) is to elect new people who share your ideas. But for those people to win, they need to have dynamic new ideas. And you don't get them those new ideas by sitting on the sidelines complaining about how neither party is any good. You have to, you know, write in magazines and journals and try and get the better ideas out.