Who did Iggy Pop vote for in the U.S. election?

"I've been waiting for someone who could communicate the joys of liberty as compared to the joys of equality", Iggy Pop in Zigzag magazine, on why he supported Ronald Reagan, quoted in Joe Ambrose, Gimme Danger: The Life and Times of Iggy Pop, Omnibus Books, 2004, p. 199.

James Osterhaus (Iggy Pop) may not be history's most unlikely Republican supporter. He gets stiff competition from Eldridge Cleaver, co-founder of the Black Panthers, exiled from the U.S. in Algeria and Cuba during the 1970s, and Republican convert from the late 1970s to his death in 1998.

But its a reminder of not only how powerful the Republican brand of conservatism was in the US, and how far its fallen now, to think that Ronald Reagan's political tent was big enough for both Iggy Pop and Eldridge Clever to get inside it.

A link sent to me by The Running Mule made it clear how Barack Obama's win last Tuesday marks the end point of a 40-year conservative dynasty that began with Nixon, peaked with Reagan, and ended with Bush the Second and the crazy gang of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, "Heck of a job Browny" (who was that guy who managed the Hurricane Katrina events?), and Henry "The Gravedigger" Paulsen. Interestingly, John McCain was always the enemy to these guys, but when he put forward Sarah Palin as his Vice-Presidential nominee and started going on and on about socialism, Bill Ayres, Joe the Plumber, Obama the Hollywood Celebrity, the Democratic threesome etc. etc. the gig was up.

The Running Mule provides a link to P.J. O'Rourke in The Weekly Standard. Well worth a look, although I feel that, like the Repubs, O'Rourke's humour ain't quite what it used to be back in the day. His line on why Iggy Pop and Eldridge Cleaver were attracted to Reagan-era conservatism is, however, a good one:

Conservatives generally tend to be funnier in their private lives because of the hypocrisy factor. I am of course a big fan of hypocrisy, because hypocrites at least know the difference between right and wrong--at any rate, know enough to lie about what they're doing. Liberals are not nearly as hypocritical as conservatives, because they don't know the difference between right and wrong. In public policy liberals are always much more hilarious. Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.

For O'Rourke's piece "We Blew It", read here.

Late news: apparently P. J. O'Rourke has cancer. It is the end of an era.

Rise of the Obamacons

This from The Economist. This trend was very much apparent when I was in the U.S., and John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as running mate and the nasty (and scatty) nature of the Republica campaign seems to have confirmed the trend of conservatives and libertarians shifting their support to Barack Obama.

IN “W.”, his biopic about his Yale classmate, Oliver Stone details Colin Powell’s agonies during George Bush’s first term. Throughout the film Mr Powell repeatedly raises doubts about the invasion of Iraq—and is repeatedly overruled by the ghoulish trio of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove. In one of the final scenes, with his direst warnings proving correct, Mr Powell turns to Mr Cheney and delivers a heartfelt “Fuck you”.

The real Colin Powell used more diplomatic language in endorsing Barack Obama on October 19th, but the impact was much the same. Mr Obama is a “transformational figure”, he mildly said, and his old friend John McCain had erred in choosing a neophyte as a running-mate. But you would have to be naive not to see the endorsement as a verdict on the Bush years.

Mr Powell is now a four-star general in America’s most surprising new army: the Obamacons. The army includes other big names such as Susan Eisenhower, Dwight’s granddaughter, who introduced Mr Obama at the Democratic National Convention and Christopher Buckley, the son of the conservative icon William Buckley, who complains that he has not left the Republican Party: the Republican Party has left him. Chuck Hagel, a Republican senator from Nebraska and one-time bosom buddy of Mr McCain has also flirted heavily with the movement, though he has refrained from issuing an official endorsement.

The biggest brigade in the Obamacon army consists of libertarians, furious with Mr Bush’s big-government conservatism, worried about his commitment to an open-ended “war on terror”, and disgusted by his cavalier way with civil rights. There are two competing “libertarians for Obama” web sites. CaféPress is even offering a “libertarian for Obama” lawn sign for $19.95. Larry Hunter, who helped to devise Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America in 1994, thinks that Mr Obama can free America from the grip of the “zombies” who now run the Republican Party.

But the army has many other brigades, too: repentant neocons such as Francis Fukuyama, legal scholars such as Douglas Kmiec, and conservative talk-show hosts such as Michael Smerconish. And it is picking up unexpected new recruits as the campaign approaches its denouement. Many disillusioned Republicans hoped that Mr McCain would provide a compass for a party that has lost its way, but now feel that the compass has gone haywire. Kenneth Adelman, who once described the invasion of Iraq as a “cakewalk”, decided this week to vote for Mr Obama mainly because he regards Sarah Palin as “not close to being acceptable in high office”.

The rise of the Obamacons is more than a reaction against Mr Bush’s remodelling of the Republican Party and Mr McCain’s desperation: there were plenty of disillusioned Republicans in 2004 who did not warm to John Kerry. It is also a positive verdict on Mr Obama. For many conservatives, Mr Obama embodies qualities that their party has abandoned: pragmatism, competence and respect for the head rather than the heart. Mr Obama’s calm and collected response to the turmoil on Wall Street contrasted sharply with Mr McCain’s grandstanding.

Much of Mr Obama’s rhetoric is strikingly conservative, even Reaganesque. He preaches the virtues of personal responsibility and family values, and practises them too. He talks in uplifting terms about the promise of American life. His story also appeals to conservatives: it holds the possibility of freeing America from its racial demons, proving that the country is a race-blind meritocracy and, in the process, bankrupting a race-grievance industry that has produced the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

Conservatives for Obama #2

In a previous post I drew attention to the interesting phenomenon in U.S. politics of prominent conservatives switching sides this election towards Barack Obama. Whether its due to dislike of John McCain, bitterness at the Bush legacy, or a genuine interest in the Illinois senator as a new type of Democrat, this phenomenon is getting picked up in a few places:

The "Obamacans" that Sen. Barack Obama used to joke about - Republican apostates who whispered their support for his candidacy - have morphed into a new phenomenon, or syndrome, as detractors like to call it: the Obamacons.

These are conservatives who have publicly endorsed the presumptive Democratic nominee, dissidents from the brain trust of think tanks, ex-officials and policy magazines that have fueled the Republican Party since the 1960s. Scratch the surface of this elite, and one finds a profound dismay that is far more damaging to the GOP than the usual 10 percent of registered Republicans expected to switch sides during a presidential election.

See more here.

Conservatives for Obama?

"If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism."
Ronald Reagan, interview with Reason magazine, 1975.

An intriguing article by Bruce Bartlett in The New Republic suggests that there may be more support among conservatives for Democrat presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama than might be first suspected.

This came via Andrew Sullivan, one of the more prominent bloggers to have gone from being a Republican supporter to an Obama supporter.

It is well known that there are a lot of conservatives unhappy with the Bush administration and the Republican Party, and their unhappiness remains with John McCain. These include supporters of the Libertarian Party led by former Republican Bob Barr, or those still supporting Ron Paul's ongoing campaign for the Republican nomination. The gist of this unhappiness is, as Bartlett observes, "they don't much care for the Iraq war or the federal government's vast expansion over the last seven-and-a-half years."

But Obama? He is criticised by some conservatives for being the most liberal senator in Washington, Jimmy Carter Mark II, a high taxer, an elitist etc.

The gist of the points made in Bartlett's article are:

• Withdrawing from Iraq and scaling back the PATRIOT Act are key goal of libertarian conservatives, and Barack Obama has always been the candidate most committed to the first and far more likely than McCain to do the latter;

• He comes across to some as the first Presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan to really believe in the independent capacity of Americans to initiate change for themselves. Whether this would in fact be true in an Obama presidency is another matter, but frankly people still debate that about Ronald Reagan, to decades after his presidency (see e.g. Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan). The point is that, like Reagan, he can rhetorically convey a faith in the better instincts of Americans that doesn't sound like calculated pandering to an interest group or particular constituency;

• His election could trigger a purge at the top of the Republican Party. It took the Democrats over a decade to move from where they were in the Jimmy Carter days to a more centrist and electable position with Bill Clinton. Conservatives like Larry Hunter believe that its time for the same thing to happen to the Republicans: Obama has the potential to "scramble the political deck, break up old alliances, and bring odd bedfellows together in a new coalition."

• From Hunter again (my favourite quote): he views the Republican Party as a "dead, rotting carcass with a few decrepit old leaders stumbling around like zombies in a horror version of Weekend at Bernie's, handcuffed to a corpse." Unless the Republican Party is thoroughly purged of its current leadership, Hunter fears that it "will pollute the political environment to toxic levels and create an epidemic that could damage the country for generations to come."

The parallel to Ronald Reagan is the most interesting one. Reagan's is the most electorally successful, yet enigmatic, presidency of the last three decades. The interest of libertarian conservatives in Obama may be emblematic of a new set of divides from those forged during the Reagan era (conservatives versus liberals), to ones between personal freedom and state control.

If Obama can get US troops out of Iraq, repeal some of the more obnoxious attacks on civil liberties over the last eight years, and actually get some control over the budget deficit, then there's a bit there that libertarian conservatives could like. If his Presidency was in fact 'Jimmy Carter Mark II', the Republicans may come back in 2012 with a better candidate. After all, both Obama and Hillary Clinton were better Democrat candidates than John Kerry was, and that's seen in the primary votes they were both able to attract.


Footnote

For those outside the U.S. who are unaware of just how much Barack Obama has moved from a Presidential candidate to a pop-culture phenomenon, check out this advertisement for a KIA car dealership:

The Age of Reagan

I have just completed reading Sean Wilentz's The Age of Reagan: A History 1974-2008. This was to be my flight back to Australia read, but I got impatient. I finished reading it as a huge storm blew over Bloomington, so there may be a poetic analogy between that storm and the conservative uprising in US politics that is the subject of Wilentz's book.

Wilentz's key point is that just as the period in US history from the Great Depression to 1968 was an era of liberal reform, where Democrats dominated the presidency and those Republican presidents there were, such as Dwight Eisenhower, accepted the underlying premised of New Deal liberalism, the period from the mid-1970s to the present was a conservative era, dominated by Republican presidents, where Democrat presidents such as Bill Clinton had to adjust to conservative rules.

At the centre of this is Ronald Reagan, US President from 1980-1988, who was the standard bearer for conservatism prior to election, and who was the most electorally successful president of his time. The book's structure is complex, as it is not a biography of Reagan but also only partially a history of the period.

I will post further on The Age of Reagan, but it is worth noting the point made by Wilentz, who is personally a liberal democrat by political affiliation, that Ronald Reagan and his era have not been well served by authors. For those on the left, including much of the academy, it is almost as if it is too awful an era to go back to, as it is clearly the period when American liberalism got its most severe caning in the popular mindset and the political sphere. The right, however, don't do honest appraisal of the period, and hence fail to note how some of the failing of Reagan had within them the seeds of today's troubles in American conservatism and the Republican Party.

Well worth a read.

John McCain and the future of the Republicans

Most attention in the U.S. Presidential elections has been given to the Democratic Party, and the wide schism revealed in its support base between supporters of Hillary Clinton (majority of women, Latinos, older voters, lower income, lower average levels of education) and Barack Obama (majority of African-Americans, younger voters, higher income, tertiary educated). It has been cast as “a standoff between the Dukes of Hazzard and the Huxtables” , but its fault lines are pretty clear. This cannot be said for the Republican Party going into the 2008 elections.

John McCain does not bring a strong hand to the election, although the ongoing saga of the Democrat nominee has helped somewhat. There is usually a change in the governing party after eight years of one President holding office. While this was not true in 1988, George Bush gained the presidency with Ronald Reagan having a personal approval rating of about 60%. George W. Bush has a personal approval rating below 30%, and sinking. Even if his approval figures were better, this would be no guarantee against change. Bill Clinton left office with personal approval ratings over 60%, but his Vice-President Al Gore could not defeat the Republicans in 2000.

The position of the Republicans as a party is far worse than that of John McCain as its presumptive Presidential nominee. Having lost control of both the Senate and the House in the 2006 mid-term primaries, they have recently experienced three major losses in special Congressional elections. The most recent loss was in a presumed safe seat in Mississippi, where there was a 20% swing to the Democrats. Several Republican analysts have warned that the Republican ‘brand’ is ‘dog food’, and if it were a product it would be taken off the shelf.

Reasons for this are many and varied, and go well beyond commitment to the War in Iraq. Basically, the Republicans in Congress have been sinking with the Bush presidency, and the sense of malaise and policy failure that surrounds it. The question is where John McCain goes in relation to it.

McCain has some distance from Bush, and has accentuated it in recent times with a speech in New Orleans condemning how Hurricane Katrina was handled in 2005, and a recent speech (sort of) acknowledging the threat of global warming. The question, however, is not simply one of personal style and belief, but goes to the heart of where America’s conservative party wants to be over the next decade.

The question revolves around two axes. One is economic. Conservatives view the fiscal profligacy of the Bush years with horror, as it has combined large and regressive tax cuts (which they would otherwise support) with a big increase in government spending, not just on the war in Iraq, but also on a wide range of social programs. They see that as reversing the ‘Reagan doctrine’ and recreating a culture that all social problems are addressed through more government spending, throwing fiscal conservatism out the window, ad denying them any real point of differentiation from the Democrats. Moreover, the groaning fiscal and trade deficits adversely impact on foreign policy. The recent tax cuts to avert economic recession were described a “Borrowing more money from the Chinese to pay for oil bought from the Saudis.”

The other axis is cultural, or what are also termed ‘faith and values’ issues. McCain has recognized the problems that arise from the Republicans being tied to the evangelical Christian right, particularly with younger voters – he has made thirteen appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which conservative pundits such as Bill O’Reilly would dismiss as a show for “stoned slackers”.

A move to the cultural centre would be to follow what might be termed the ‘Arnie strategy’. As Governor of California, the largest state in the U.S. in both population and economic terms, Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the nation’s most politically successful Republicans. Schwarzenegger e governs what is otherwise now a Democrat state – even though it is the home state of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan – by recognizing that the social liberalism of the state and aligning this with economic conservatism and pro-business policies.

The centrist ‘Arnie strategy’ appeals to McCain, and makes a lot of sense in an election where the Republicans now have a real opportunity in capturing the vote of Hillary Clinton supporters if Barack Obama is the Democrat nominee and they can position Obama as ‘too liberal’. The catch is that the support base of the Republicans – from Christian lobby groups to influential donors to the bevy of conservative columnists, radio talk show hosts and TV pundits – have run so long and hard on a conservative ‘culture wars’ position that they will feel let down by a Republican nominee who does not align to these values and positions on their favoured ‘hot button’ issues.

The silence of all sides (McCain, Obama, Clinton) on the California Supreme Court decision to overturn the ban on same-sex marriages indicates how tricky these issues are becoming. They are much more complex for the Republicans than the Democrats, since making a big issue of such decisions in order to mobilise the conservative base has been the sine qua non of Republican politics for decades.

McCain’s dilemma, and how he addresses it, will influence the shape of conservative politics worldwide for some time to come, just as the ‘Reagan revolution’ has been a defining influence globally for the last 30 years.


PS: To get a sense of how hard it may be to retrain Republican supporters from well-established habits, see conservative talk-show host Kevin James’s responses to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on whether talking to political enemies is the same as appeasement, which apparently ‘energized’ Hitler in 1939.

Noel Pearson and Barack Obama

Below is a copy of a post that I made on the Australian opinion and blog site Lavartus Prodeo in response to a discussion about an article that appeared in the Australian print publication The Monthly (see original article here)



I haven’t seen the Noel Pearson article, as The Monthly has a subscription-only policy for its online edition, but it would sound like he would be arguing that Barack Obama should be running as a Republican rather than as a Democrat. There is a well-established Black Republican and black conservative tradition in the U.S. that tends to define itself in opposition to the ‘identity politics’ agenda associated with Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton and (yes, him again!) Rev. Jeremiah Wright, emphasising instead individual responsibility, being tough on urban crime, and patriotism.

Writing from the U.S., this would seem to be the second attempt by Australian news media to understand the Barack Obama phenomenon here that has got it completely wrong. Chris Masters’ ABC Four Corners story missed the whole issue because (1) he went to the wrong city (New York rather than Chicago); and (2) he insisted on seeing the whole thing through the prism of the 60s civil rights struggle. As a result the show had endless and irrelevant waffle about white girls in Harlem bars and black people profiting from the gentrification of Harlem. I’m surprised that he didn’t find out that rappers own big houses and that white Americans watch Oprah!

For The Monthly, the question is why - aside from skin colour - would you assume that Noel Pearson would be an authority on Barack Obama. A much better starting point would have been to find someone who was knowledgeable about Jesse Jackson’s campaign in the Democratic Party primaries of 1984 and 1988 (and Jackson got 29% of the popular vote and the Democrat delegates in 1988), and consider how Obama’s campaign has differed from that of Jackson, and indeed how he is different to the better known black Democrats in the U.S., such as Jackson. This article in The New York Times is one place to start.