The Fortunes of War
As many of you may be aware, President Bush recently appointed Harriet Miers to Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. With this decision I am afraid that the President just lost the Iraq War. As always, a lengthy explanation lurks below the cut.
American politics is a strange beast. Because of the way that politicians are elected (winner take all by geographic district) there are deep structural biases toward exactly two political parties. Unlike most other democratic systems, these parties are coalitions rather than unitary entities. They have to be; there's no way that you can get a majority or even a big plurality of Americans to all agree on a big list of issues. So instead what happens is that the parties have to bargain with blocs of voters. The party agrees to push the blocs' particular issue and the bloc agrees to support the party in other matters that don't concern the bloc as much. The party that wins is the one that gets the blocs that add up to more, counting resources and dedication as well as sheer numbers.
Right now American politics is in a moment of transition. As is the nature of transitions, in order to understand it we must understand what came before. So I will digress yet again to give a primer on modern American political history from the perspective of the ruling coalitions. I promise I will eventually return to the point.
During the Great Depression, FDR built the modern Democratic coalition out of the white working class (especially the "ethnic" and Catholic segments as opposed to the WASPs), intellectuals (especially Jews), technocrats, blacks and Southern populist conservatives. You'll notice that this coalition doesn't really make sense from an ideological perspective. The most obvious example is the blacks and the Southerners, who had been mortal enemies since the Civil War (and before, of course, but that didn't matter at the level of electoral politics since blacks couldn't vote then). But there were other fissures. The working class in America has pretty much always despised the intellectuals, and usually the intellectuals have returned the favor. And no American has ever really liked the technocrats as a group. Not like the Japanese worship their bureaucrats, anyway.
The glue, the unifying idea, that held this unwieldy coalition together was the Welfare State -- "tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect". Tax and tax meant to take money from wealthy Republicans. Spend and spend meant to give this money to the various blocs in ways that would make everyone happy: rural electrification for the South, labor laws and enforcement for the working classes, urban development money for the northern blacks, and always a large bureaucracy to administer the funds for the technocrats and intellectuals. And in return, the blocs would return Democrats with large majorities.
This worked for about 40 years. It fell apart during Vietnam, when Lyndon Johnson hit the limits of the tax and spend strategy by trying to fund both the War and the Great Society. During the chaos, the intellectuals and the blacks joined the newly powerful feminists and some other fringe minorities (gays, American Indians, Hispanics, etc.) to create the "Rainbow Coalition" of the New Left. This coalition promptly declared war on the Democratic establishment. When the dust settled in the 1970s, the New Left had conquered the party and ended the Vietnam War on their terms (as I described here) but in so doing had driven off the two biggest pillars of the old establishment, the working-class Catholics and the white Southerners.
Then came Reagan. In 1980 he took the defunct Republican coalition, merged it with the Democratic castoffs, and reorganized it into an explicitly conservative organization. Unlike the Left, which in both its Old and New forms was an unwieldy melange of different interest groups, Reagan's New Right was more cohesive. There were only three main blocs in his coalition.
The first, and most powerful, are the religious conservatives. These people want to undo what they see as the damage to society wrought by the Left over its 50 years of dominance. They are willing, sometimes even eager, to use the power of the State to check what they see as societal evils. But first and foremost, they want the State to stop sponsoring moral decay. Which is why they go ballistic over things like Federally-funded stem cell research, which they see as government-sponsored abortion.
The second group are the business conservatives. These are the people that hate high marginal tax rates, expensive business regulations, and trade restrictions on every industry but their own. Perhaps surprisingly, the hard-core of this group are not found in the boardrooms of the big businesses that the Left rail against. Those people are on average apolitical, tending from soft left to soft right. No, the real angry business conservatives are the small and medium-sized business owners who have to compete for access to government with the big corporations. Since the big boys can almost always buy favorable regulation, they get an inherent advantage over the smaller business types. Naturally, the smaller players hate that. Most of them respond by voting and donating hard-right Republican.
The third bloc is the right-libertarians. These are the types who hate pretty much everything the State does on principle, seeing it as an affront to the freedoms and dignity of the citizen. Most of the ones who have organized into politically potent forces have done so on single issues. The NRA is the best example of this, I think. They also have a nationalist streak a mile wide.
Now, despite its comparative simplicity, everything isn't all sweetness and light between the Republican factions. The religious conservatives have a deep tradition of distrusting businessmen (it's in the Bible!) and the libertarians are often seen as little better than libertines. Meanwhile, the businessmen think the libertarians and the social conservatives are both nuts. In the background, the libertarians scream that everyone's a sellout. Even most of the other libertarians. There's really only one policy that all of these groups can agree on: tax cuts. See, the common ideological thread between these groups is that they hate and fear the government in different ways, since they were forged as political forces in the years when a party hostile to all of their interests had a hammerlock on political power. So tax cuts are good because they reduce the ability of the government to do things that they don't like. Not to mention, being almost uniformly net taxpayers, they get checks!
OK. Fast forward to the year 2000. George W. Bush is elected President by a razor-thin margin on the strength of these three factions. Nobody really likes him too much. He became the Republican candidate instead of his rival John McCain because he was able to convince each of these groups individually that he was more like them than McCain, which was made easier by McCain's love of telling the press that he isn't a typical conservative. But he's not an inspiring public speaker. Worse, he's the son of a President that lost his reelection bid because he betrayed conservatives by supporting a tax increase. So there's bad history there. But his position has some strength, since he's got a tenuous party advantage in the Senate and a strong one in the House.
The President immediately moves to secure his base by cutting taxes. This works nicely, raising his approval rating amongst Republicans. Then the terrorists attack on September 11. As best as I can tell, Bush honestly decided then that the new highest priority of his government would be to fight those who struck that day. Almost everything else was negotiable. And so, he negotiated for the funds and authorization to fight the war. Federal spending jumped through the roof. But because Bush learned well the lessons of his father, tax rates continued to go down in order to placate the base.
Bush uses this support to fight the broadest war he thinks he can get away with. This starts with Afghanistan, where in the textbook example of an effective proxy war he deposes the Taliban government quickly and with very few casualties. Like all easy, fast, glorious wars, this action is quite popular. Even among members of the rival Democratic coalition. He rides the resulting popularity and the lingering concerns over national security to a surprise win in the 2002 midterm elections.
Then things get hairy. The President decides to preemptively declare war on Iraq. Traditionally, Americans don't like foreign wars. They especially don't like aggressive foreign wars. So the President can't publicly state the real rationale for the war, which is to defuse Arab Islamic hatred of modernity by forcibly introducing them to liberal democracy. Maybe 5% of the population (including yours truly) would support that. So he sells the war by using the WMD combined with terrorism angle. That's a real threat, but it doesn't explain why we have to occupy and rebuild Iraq afterward. When it turns out that the intelligence services overestimated Iraq's WMD programs, the President immediately loses the support of the nationalist Left. They believe they've been lied to, which is true but not in the way that they think. It's ironic, really, because they're the one bloc who should be the strongest supporters of the policy, ideologically.
Then the 2004 elections happen. And, now that I have some distance in time from it, I think that history will record that this election was one of the strangest on record. Instead of any real policy differences (there were some, but not many) the real issue in the election was "Who do you trust?" Do you trust the clumsy, religious President to somehow pull a good outcome out of what appears to be an increasingly messy Iraq occupation? Or do you trust John Kerry, the sober, smooth liberal, to come in and set things to rights? In my view, the election was as polarizing as it was precisely because it was so personal. And as we all know, the President won. It was close but solid, with the President picking up four seats in the Senate in addition to his own in the Oval Office.
It's been a year since the President won his election on an appeal to the American people to trust him. The war is going as well as could be expected. To map it to Vietnam, we're probably in late 1970 -- the Iraqi military is increasingly capable of fighting its own battles, but American ground forces are still required to crack the hardest enemy resistance. In another year or two, I figure that the Iraqis will be able to hold their country on their own if they so choose, provided we send generous amounts of material and technical aid. Even if the tempo of operations accelerates as we near the end, it is highly unlikely that the Iraq War will end up costing more than 4,000 lives (we're at just over 2,000 right now).
Looked at from the perspective of a wargamer going into the conflict, if you told me that we'd manage to conquer and rebuild Iraq with fewer than 4,000 dead, I'd have said that would be outstandingly good. To put this into context, the Union lost 3,155 men killed during the three days of Gettysburg. To get to the point where we had won Vietnam in a similar fashion, it cost the nation 58,000 dead. But from the perspective of our opinion elite (judging by the articles they write for the Web) this performance is intolerably bad. The war is all but lost, according to all but the President's most stalwart personal supporters. Despite being right, they are seen as either delusional or shills for a failed Administration.
At this point, the only way I can see that the President can win in Iraq is to hunker down, keep funding the war, and wait for the military to dribble home as "Iraqification" progresses. And this is clearly what he intends to do. The problem is that such an inchoate "stay the course" strategy relies heavily on him retaining enough support to maintain the war funding at a credible level to reassure the Iraqis that we won't abandon them. And the only argument he has left is "trust me", the one he drew upon so heavily to win the election.
Here's where recent events come into play. When Hurricane Katrina struck, the Democrats immediately seized upon it to try and damage the President's political standing. It worked. So the President responded the way he has done throughout his term: he promised massive amounts of Federal spending to buy off the opposition. There was just one problem. Remember the Republican party factions I described before? Well the libertarians were alienated pretty early on in the President's first term, by the emergency steel tariffs and the Federal spending. And the business conservatives had been grumbling for the same reasons. But the billions of dollars for hurricane relief appear to have been the last straw for the business conservatives.
Many of them are in open revolt. There are grassroots organizations springing up to fight pork barrel spending. Staunch conservatives are fostering primary challenges against incumbent Republicans in the next election. And most of them sound angry enough to throw what they see as a failed war overboard if that is the price the Left charges to prevent future tax increases. In any event, they no longer trust him as their champion against encroaching government.
So as of last week the President was down to the social/religious conservatives. I thought it possible, if not probable, that the President could ride them to political stability and victory in war. At least he could use their fierce support to limit the damage from the business conservative defections in the midterms while he desperately tries to make nice with the Republican insurgents.
And then the unthinkable happened. The President, in a fit of what I can describe only as insanity, appoints his flunky Harriet Miers to fill the second open slot on the Supreme Court. There is nothing, nothing, that religious Republicans care about more than Supreme Court nominations. Not even gay marriage, because they figure that they can win that fight in the legislature. When I was on the Nethercutt for Senate campaign answering the phones, I could always mollify the religious types by reciting Nethercutt's position on strict constructionist judges.
Roughly 80% of the religious conservative opinion I've read on the Internet since then is strongly against the nomination. Worse, from the President's perspective, is that they consider it a betrayal. They think that by offering up this cipher as a peace offering to the Left that he has broken faith with them. And to be honest, they're right. Even if this woman is as conservative as all of the religious types could hope for, by not nominating a well-known conservative luminary he has declared to the world that he doesn't believe that his forces are capable of winning in a straight fight. Since most social conservative organizations on the Federal level have been girding for this battle for a decade, it's a real kick in the teeth to surrender before the first shot is fired.
So now the President has alienated every politically active person in the country, give or take. There is no remaining constituency for war save momentum and a latent nationalist sentiment that refuses to countenance defeat. His reservoir of trust and goodwill is bone dry. And he doesn't have any substantive arguments left to make in order to refill it.
We are on the verge of squandering several years of sacrifice and bravery, as well as the hopes of freedom for hundreds of millions of people. And for what? A couple hundred billion dollars, a Supreme Court justice, and stupid pride.
God, I hate politics.
-Nick
American politics is a strange beast. Because of the way that politicians are elected (winner take all by geographic district) there are deep structural biases toward exactly two political parties. Unlike most other democratic systems, these parties are coalitions rather than unitary entities. They have to be; there's no way that you can get a majority or even a big plurality of Americans to all agree on a big list of issues. So instead what happens is that the parties have to bargain with blocs of voters. The party agrees to push the blocs' particular issue and the bloc agrees to support the party in other matters that don't concern the bloc as much. The party that wins is the one that gets the blocs that add up to more, counting resources and dedication as well as sheer numbers.
Right now American politics is in a moment of transition. As is the nature of transitions, in order to understand it we must understand what came before. So I will digress yet again to give a primer on modern American political history from the perspective of the ruling coalitions. I promise I will eventually return to the point.
During the Great Depression, FDR built the modern Democratic coalition out of the white working class (especially the "ethnic" and Catholic segments as opposed to the WASPs), intellectuals (especially Jews), technocrats, blacks and Southern populist conservatives. You'll notice that this coalition doesn't really make sense from an ideological perspective. The most obvious example is the blacks and the Southerners, who had been mortal enemies since the Civil War (and before, of course, but that didn't matter at the level of electoral politics since blacks couldn't vote then). But there were other fissures. The working class in America has pretty much always despised the intellectuals, and usually the intellectuals have returned the favor. And no American has ever really liked the technocrats as a group. Not like the Japanese worship their bureaucrats, anyway.
The glue, the unifying idea, that held this unwieldy coalition together was the Welfare State -- "tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect". Tax and tax meant to take money from wealthy Republicans. Spend and spend meant to give this money to the various blocs in ways that would make everyone happy: rural electrification for the South, labor laws and enforcement for the working classes, urban development money for the northern blacks, and always a large bureaucracy to administer the funds for the technocrats and intellectuals. And in return, the blocs would return Democrats with large majorities.
This worked for about 40 years. It fell apart during Vietnam, when Lyndon Johnson hit the limits of the tax and spend strategy by trying to fund both the War and the Great Society. During the chaos, the intellectuals and the blacks joined the newly powerful feminists and some other fringe minorities (gays, American Indians, Hispanics, etc.) to create the "Rainbow Coalition" of the New Left. This coalition promptly declared war on the Democratic establishment. When the dust settled in the 1970s, the New Left had conquered the party and ended the Vietnam War on their terms (as I described here) but in so doing had driven off the two biggest pillars of the old establishment, the working-class Catholics and the white Southerners.
Then came Reagan. In 1980 he took the defunct Republican coalition, merged it with the Democratic castoffs, and reorganized it into an explicitly conservative organization. Unlike the Left, which in both its Old and New forms was an unwieldy melange of different interest groups, Reagan's New Right was more cohesive. There were only three main blocs in his coalition.
The first, and most powerful, are the religious conservatives. These people want to undo what they see as the damage to society wrought by the Left over its 50 years of dominance. They are willing, sometimes even eager, to use the power of the State to check what they see as societal evils. But first and foremost, they want the State to stop sponsoring moral decay. Which is why they go ballistic over things like Federally-funded stem cell research, which they see as government-sponsored abortion.
The second group are the business conservatives. These are the people that hate high marginal tax rates, expensive business regulations, and trade restrictions on every industry but their own. Perhaps surprisingly, the hard-core of this group are not found in the boardrooms of the big businesses that the Left rail against. Those people are on average apolitical, tending from soft left to soft right. No, the real angry business conservatives are the small and medium-sized business owners who have to compete for access to government with the big corporations. Since the big boys can almost always buy favorable regulation, they get an inherent advantage over the smaller business types. Naturally, the smaller players hate that. Most of them respond by voting and donating hard-right Republican.
The third bloc is the right-libertarians. These are the types who hate pretty much everything the State does on principle, seeing it as an affront to the freedoms and dignity of the citizen. Most of the ones who have organized into politically potent forces have done so on single issues. The NRA is the best example of this, I think. They also have a nationalist streak a mile wide.
Now, despite its comparative simplicity, everything isn't all sweetness and light between the Republican factions. The religious conservatives have a deep tradition of distrusting businessmen (it's in the Bible!) and the libertarians are often seen as little better than libertines. Meanwhile, the businessmen think the libertarians and the social conservatives are both nuts. In the background, the libertarians scream that everyone's a sellout. Even most of the other libertarians. There's really only one policy that all of these groups can agree on: tax cuts. See, the common ideological thread between these groups is that they hate and fear the government in different ways, since they were forged as political forces in the years when a party hostile to all of their interests had a hammerlock on political power. So tax cuts are good because they reduce the ability of the government to do things that they don't like. Not to mention, being almost uniformly net taxpayers, they get checks!
OK. Fast forward to the year 2000. George W. Bush is elected President by a razor-thin margin on the strength of these three factions. Nobody really likes him too much. He became the Republican candidate instead of his rival John McCain because he was able to convince each of these groups individually that he was more like them than McCain, which was made easier by McCain's love of telling the press that he isn't a typical conservative. But he's not an inspiring public speaker. Worse, he's the son of a President that lost his reelection bid because he betrayed conservatives by supporting a tax increase. So there's bad history there. But his position has some strength, since he's got a tenuous party advantage in the Senate and a strong one in the House.
The President immediately moves to secure his base by cutting taxes. This works nicely, raising his approval rating amongst Republicans. Then the terrorists attack on September 11. As best as I can tell, Bush honestly decided then that the new highest priority of his government would be to fight those who struck that day. Almost everything else was negotiable. And so, he negotiated for the funds and authorization to fight the war. Federal spending jumped through the roof. But because Bush learned well the lessons of his father, tax rates continued to go down in order to placate the base.
Bush uses this support to fight the broadest war he thinks he can get away with. This starts with Afghanistan, where in the textbook example of an effective proxy war he deposes the Taliban government quickly and with very few casualties. Like all easy, fast, glorious wars, this action is quite popular. Even among members of the rival Democratic coalition. He rides the resulting popularity and the lingering concerns over national security to a surprise win in the 2002 midterm elections.
Then things get hairy. The President decides to preemptively declare war on Iraq. Traditionally, Americans don't like foreign wars. They especially don't like aggressive foreign wars. So the President can't publicly state the real rationale for the war, which is to defuse Arab Islamic hatred of modernity by forcibly introducing them to liberal democracy. Maybe 5% of the population (including yours truly) would support that. So he sells the war by using the WMD combined with terrorism angle. That's a real threat, but it doesn't explain why we have to occupy and rebuild Iraq afterward. When it turns out that the intelligence services overestimated Iraq's WMD programs, the President immediately loses the support of the nationalist Left. They believe they've been lied to, which is true but not in the way that they think. It's ironic, really, because they're the one bloc who should be the strongest supporters of the policy, ideologically.
Then the 2004 elections happen. And, now that I have some distance in time from it, I think that history will record that this election was one of the strangest on record. Instead of any real policy differences (there were some, but not many) the real issue in the election was "Who do you trust?" Do you trust the clumsy, religious President to somehow pull a good outcome out of what appears to be an increasingly messy Iraq occupation? Or do you trust John Kerry, the sober, smooth liberal, to come in and set things to rights? In my view, the election was as polarizing as it was precisely because it was so personal. And as we all know, the President won. It was close but solid, with the President picking up four seats in the Senate in addition to his own in the Oval Office.
It's been a year since the President won his election on an appeal to the American people to trust him. The war is going as well as could be expected. To map it to Vietnam, we're probably in late 1970 -- the Iraqi military is increasingly capable of fighting its own battles, but American ground forces are still required to crack the hardest enemy resistance. In another year or two, I figure that the Iraqis will be able to hold their country on their own if they so choose, provided we send generous amounts of material and technical aid. Even if the tempo of operations accelerates as we near the end, it is highly unlikely that the Iraq War will end up costing more than 4,000 lives (we're at just over 2,000 right now).
Looked at from the perspective of a wargamer going into the conflict, if you told me that we'd manage to conquer and rebuild Iraq with fewer than 4,000 dead, I'd have said that would be outstandingly good. To put this into context, the Union lost 3,155 men killed during the three days of Gettysburg. To get to the point where we had won Vietnam in a similar fashion, it cost the nation 58,000 dead. But from the perspective of our opinion elite (judging by the articles they write for the Web) this performance is intolerably bad. The war is all but lost, according to all but the President's most stalwart personal supporters. Despite being right, they are seen as either delusional or shills for a failed Administration.
At this point, the only way I can see that the President can win in Iraq is to hunker down, keep funding the war, and wait for the military to dribble home as "Iraqification" progresses. And this is clearly what he intends to do. The problem is that such an inchoate "stay the course" strategy relies heavily on him retaining enough support to maintain the war funding at a credible level to reassure the Iraqis that we won't abandon them. And the only argument he has left is "trust me", the one he drew upon so heavily to win the election.
Here's where recent events come into play. When Hurricane Katrina struck, the Democrats immediately seized upon it to try and damage the President's political standing. It worked. So the President responded the way he has done throughout his term: he promised massive amounts of Federal spending to buy off the opposition. There was just one problem. Remember the Republican party factions I described before? Well the libertarians were alienated pretty early on in the President's first term, by the emergency steel tariffs and the Federal spending. And the business conservatives had been grumbling for the same reasons. But the billions of dollars for hurricane relief appear to have been the last straw for the business conservatives.
Many of them are in open revolt. There are grassroots organizations springing up to fight pork barrel spending. Staunch conservatives are fostering primary challenges against incumbent Republicans in the next election. And most of them sound angry enough to throw what they see as a failed war overboard if that is the price the Left charges to prevent future tax increases. In any event, they no longer trust him as their champion against encroaching government.
So as of last week the President was down to the social/religious conservatives. I thought it possible, if not probable, that the President could ride them to political stability and victory in war. At least he could use their fierce support to limit the damage from the business conservative defections in the midterms while he desperately tries to make nice with the Republican insurgents.
And then the unthinkable happened. The President, in a fit of what I can describe only as insanity, appoints his flunky Harriet Miers to fill the second open slot on the Supreme Court. There is nothing, nothing, that religious Republicans care about more than Supreme Court nominations. Not even gay marriage, because they figure that they can win that fight in the legislature. When I was on the Nethercutt for Senate campaign answering the phones, I could always mollify the religious types by reciting Nethercutt's position on strict constructionist judges.
Roughly 80% of the religious conservative opinion I've read on the Internet since then is strongly against the nomination. Worse, from the President's perspective, is that they consider it a betrayal. They think that by offering up this cipher as a peace offering to the Left that he has broken faith with them. And to be honest, they're right. Even if this woman is as conservative as all of the religious types could hope for, by not nominating a well-known conservative luminary he has declared to the world that he doesn't believe that his forces are capable of winning in a straight fight. Since most social conservative organizations on the Federal level have been girding for this battle for a decade, it's a real kick in the teeth to surrender before the first shot is fired.
So now the President has alienated every politically active person in the country, give or take. There is no remaining constituency for war save momentum and a latent nationalist sentiment that refuses to countenance defeat. His reservoir of trust and goodwill is bone dry. And he doesn't have any substantive arguments left to make in order to refill it.
We are on the verge of squandering several years of sacrifice and bravery, as well as the hopes of freedom for hundreds of millions of people. And for what? A couple hundred billion dollars, a Supreme Court justice, and stupid pride.
God, I hate politics.
-Nick