There's a "populist" consensus builiding in the U.S. that doesn't really seem to be represented by either of the major parties. If the right candidate emerged to articulate and advance this consensus, that person could have an advantage going into 2008. I get hints of this consensus from a perhaps unlikely source, The American Conservative magazine. Reading that biweekly publication often leaves me wondering whether progressives should try to reach the same audience and try to steer it away from the Conservative's less palatable positions, or whether there's room for collaboration with the body of opinion the Conservative represents.
It's probably well known that the magazine has opposed the Iraq war since before the beginning. It may be less well-known that the Conservative expresses a conservatism that is moving away from free-market fetishism and other aspects of Reagan-Bush Republicanism. Progressives could read much of any given issue and conclude that these writers are sort of on the right track.
Let's take a quick look at a recent issue, the September 10 number. The cover story by James Pinkerton is kind of off-putting, and has been dealt with amusingly elsewhere on DailyKos. It's worth noting amidst the Tolkienesque silliness that Pinkerton's ultimate goal is to achieve a state of peace, or at least truce, between the Muslim and non-Muslim world, not rollback, conversion, or worse.
Some say that the solution to the Middle Eastern problems is some sort of pre-emptive strike: get Them before they get Us. That, of course, is exactly the sort of bewitching that Tolkien warned most strongly against - the frenzy to solve a problem through one hubristic stroke, to grab the One Ring of power for oneself, even if that grabbing guarantees one's own fall into darkness.
I have major problems with Pinkerton's proposal to redefine the West as "Christendom," because he gives no hint of any accommodation to be made with atheism or secular humanism, but that's as much a point against Newsday, his actual base of operations, as against The American Conservative.
Now here's William Pfaff, in a column picked up from Tribune Media, on the failure of the volunteer army:
The plan hasn't worked. If public opinion does not support a war, not only do people vote against the politicians in office,but the all-volunteer Army loses its volunteers.The military now understands this, or it wouldn't talk about the draft. The politicians don't admit it. The Democrats say they are against the war but also say that the U.S. must stay on in the Middle East with a bigger Army. And the Repubicans, who share the administration's flagging belief in victory in Iraq, have yet to grasp that their electoral platforms can't be carried out without military conscription.
Elsewhere, Trita Parsi raises the alarm over neocon warmongering vs. Iran, criticizing Republicans and Democrats alike for viewing Iran "solely within a paradigm of enmity." Despite the belligerent rhetoric all around, Parsi believes that "negotiations do have a chance of achieving a win-win for America and the region." Meanwhile, Christopher Layne demolishes the Bushies' arguments for remaining in Iraq. The idea that the country would become an al-Qaeda base "doesn'thold water," while "bin Laden and the real al-Qaeda do not need bases in Iraq because they already enjoy a sanctuary in the region along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, where they are reconstituting their capabilities."
On the economic front, J.G. Collins riffs on Paul Krugman's recent realization that low-priced imports don't make up for lost purchasing power among low-skilled American workers. Collins explains that today's global realities don't fit classical economics formulae:
Writing 200 years before container ships, instantaneous electronic communications, 'just-in-time' inventory systems, and multinational corporations, Ricardo could not foresee that the wages of a press operator in Buffalo, New York would be determined by the cost of living for a press operator in Bangalore, India. Today's workers are simply cogs in a worldwide supply chain ... In a transnational economy that is permeated with open trade, wages spiral ever downward because a virtually unlimited supply of laborers from poor countries will accept lower wages for their work. Their cost of subsistence is simply less.
Worse, "Manufacturers who produce good in cheap labor markets overseas don't pass the cost reductions on to American consumers. Instead, they charge what the market will bear and keep the labor savings as profits."
In addition, Collins contends that globalization hinders innovation in the developing world because talented people are more likely to go to work for the multinationals than to start entrepreneurial experiments like Sony after World War II.
This isn't the sort of writing one expects to see in a "Conservative" magazine. Nor are book reviews that praise Joe Strummer and U.S. Senators who opposed the Vietnam War. At the same time, there are more predictable items like Steve Sailer's criticism of Carter-era alterations in civl service hiring practices, and pieces peculiar to the Conservative like Thomas E. Woods Jr.'s hosannas for the Pope's restoration of the Latin mass. Overall, though, you're left with the impression that these are people we might be able to work with.
Missing from this particular issue, for instance, are any diatribes on immigration. Like a lot of Americans, the Conservative opposes anything that could be described as "amnesty." Some writers go further in their anxiety over allegedly unassimilable populations. This is a problem area, since I think we have to acknowledge that opposition to "amnesty" is as much part of the abovementioned populist consensus as opposition to the war. The question is whether people really object to illegality only, or to immigration in general. In most cases, I think we have to give the benefit of the doubt to people who say the former and insist on a rule of law at the border.
If immigration isn't a deal-breaker, the culture war may be. This is still a magazine widely identified with Pat Buchanan, with all the baggage that entails. There are still occasional hints of sympathy with "southern culture," and of course there are eccentric articles like Pinkerton's, but they seem to recede into the background compared to the magazines's anti-war populism. While the burden of compromise might lie with progressives on immigration issues, on culture-war issues we should expect the AmCon populists to compromise. The idea is to get people's priorities in order, and there have been a few hints that these guys get it in articles that criticize the Christian Right for remaining gung-ho about the war. They may be approaching a point where they realize that corporate neocons are a more immediate threat to their way of life than the elite media or the secular humanists. Any alliance would require at least a truce in the culture war, perhaps on analogy with the truce some writers hope for with Islam.
Down the line, the likelihood of collaboration depends on everyone's priorities. If the main mission of 2008 is to end the war and redeem the American image abroad, then there's no reason why the American Conservative can't be part of the movement. To an extent, they'll be with us on trade issues if we advocate fair trade and defend American jobs. How much further they'd go with us depends on how much further we intend to go. In the best case, we could start to break down conventional liberal-conservative distinctions and create an inclusive populist movement. In the worst case, all sides will take an all-or-nothing approach that will, predictably, accomplish nothing.