Brad DeLong has been on fire of late. Without much context, I present to you my favorite paragraph of the week (from this very worthwhile post):

…if you had told any Republican in 1980 that 2008 would see (a) a Negro with an Arabic-Swahili name beating a veteran figher pilot in the presidential polls and (b) gay marriage as the big cultural issue of the day, said Republican would have blown several gaskets. And if you had said that this would have been the result of an “Age of Reagan” said Republican would have melted down completely.

Reagan-worship has always struck me as a strange thing. Though his presidency perhaps hastened the end of the Cold War, and though many people found his sunny bromides inspiring, my memories of the end of his administration are dominated by the disgrace over Iran-Contra, with the president coming off as either a sorry uninformed fool or a pathetic liar.¹

Brad DeLong goes back in time via Lexis to prove that there’s nothing particularly new or shocking about how things work in Washington today. This is not to say that we should just shrug off the excesses and lawlessness of the Bush administration as business as usual, but rather that we should try to keep perspective. I get the sense that 8 years of Bush and his media enablers is being seen as some sort of profound nadir, the depths of which will shake us awake to a new way of doing things. I very much doubt it will work like that.

There’s sometimes a correlation between authoritarian tendencies and extremely well functioning societies. The downside is you need a prescription to chew gum.

Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and author of the seminal history of oil, writes a thought-provoking piece in yesterday’s FT. It’s not that prices are soaring due to an increase in the demand, he argues, as much as that the oil companies are facing steeply increasing costs for bringing oil to market. He reasons, therefore, that

the impact of rising oilfield costs and the importance of encouraging investment need to be taken into account when considering a “windfall profits” tax or other new taxes. However attractive politically, the effect would be to constrain investment and to lead to lower production levels than would otherwise be the case.

Crude and blunt measures to help out the little guy at the expense of the big guy often bring more pain on for everybody. It’s an important lesson that never gets learned thoroughly enough.

If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like seconds before you’re destroyed by an air-to-air missile, check out today’s New York Times. The article summarizes a recent UN report which authoritatively declares that the plane photographed above firing at a Georgian spy drone was Russian, thus calling into questions Russia’s self-asserted neutrality in the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict. The UN report goes on to chastise the Russians for shooting down the drone while at the same time upbraiding the Georgians for stoking tensions by flying drones over Abkhazia in the first place.

This throws into sharp relief the near-absurd role the UN creates for itself in these kinds of conflicts. There are many UN staffers who think that an important part of the UN’s mandate is war-prevention, and who view a report such as the one described as the proper stance for the UN to take. “Both of you warring factions are culpable,” the thinking goes, “so please separate and let us guarantee the peace between you until you regain your senses and come to a peaceful settlement.” Unfortunately, such a position does anything but guarantee peace. One only need to consider the Georgian perspective in order to see why that is the case.

Georgians, like the much-aggrieved Serbs viz-a-vis Kosovo, don’t see Abkhazia’s independence as at all legitimate, and absent Russian military presence in the region would re-conquer the territory and put down the rebel leadership with traditionally excessive Caucasian violence. There is little reason to think Saakashvili would seek compromise with the rebels if Russia was not backing them to the hilt—indeed, one can easily see Georgia acting swiftly to retake what it feels is rightly its own territory as soon as the Russian military is removed from the region.

This is not to say that Russia’s role in the conflict has been at all honorable or praiseworthy, or that it is acting on anything more than selfish geo-strategic impulses. But it is important for UN types to recognize that the negotiated settlement they envision themselves able to broker can only come about if Abkhazia’s current territorial integrity is guaranteed by force of arms. Since the UN is not going to want to field a force which could very well get in a shooting war with the Georgian army, they ought to be working on ways to resolve the conflict with Russia constructively engaged on behalf of the Abkhaz. Any other strategy is folly and is more likely to lead to war rather than peace.

As Croatia’s genocide case against Serbia comes up for a hearing, the Serbs are trying to have the case thrown out of court.

Crimes were committed by both sides, [Tibor Varady, chief representative for Serbia] noted. “What happened cannot be reduced to a one dimensional picture,” he said. “The misdeeds of one side were matched by the misdeeds of the other.”

Quite wrong. It was a war of aggression masterminded by a genocidal maniac who held the Serbian nation in his thrall. Indeed, the Serbian defense is acknowledging as much by arguing that Belgrade is “not responsible for the government’s behavior during the Milošević years.”

The Germans were not allowed to make such specious arguments after World War II because the world powers understood that collective guilt was the only way to bring about the necessary catharsis for the modern German state of today to emerge. The mere fact that Belgrade feels comfortable airing such poison goes a long way to prove that the Serbian body politic has not adequately grappled with its recent history.

While I certainly don’t trust the International Court of Justice to come to a competent, honest judgment in this case, arguments such as the ones made by Serbia have to be answered consistently and methodically lest they succeed in muddying the historical record.

George Packer writes compellingly about the decline of conservatism by way of reviewing several new books. Great candid interview snippets from Pat Buchanan make this article a must-read.

Packer’s prognosis, in a nutshell, is that the coming re-emergence of a dominant Democratic Party will be due to the core liberal message being more appealing to large swaths of Americans than the essentially negative, reactionary, fear-mongering employed by the Republican Party since Nixon. He sees this as largely inevitable and systematic, and therefore somewhat misses what is really going on. For example, he writes a propos Ross Douthat and Reihan Salem’s new book:

Their ultimate purpose is political: to turn as much of the working class into Sam’s Club Republicans as possible. They don’t acknowledge the corporate interests that are at least as Republican as Sam’s Club shoppers, and that will put up a fight on many counts, potentially tearing the Party apart.

I’m not sure that’s entirely right. From what I can tell from reading Douthat and Salem’s web writing, they’re implicitly hoping to build a new, more logical coalition than the unwieldy one that currently dominates the conservative political landscape. It’s not that they don’t acknowledge corporate interests as a key constituency in today’s Republican party, but rather that they see Republicans drifting away from Big Business and embracing cultural conservatism as the sure path to electoral majorities in the future. If it were to come down to fighting for lower corporate taxes versus social welfare and a pro-life platform, there’s little doubt to where Douthat and Salem’s priorities would lie—they’re hoping to remake the Republicans into a European-style Christian Democratic party. They don’t feel any pressure to worry about any of these cleavages yet, however, as the Democrats are running too far to the left for now to pose any threat of peeling Big Business away from them.

Overall, Democrats should take note of Douthat and Salem: the future will be about building new political coalitions, not about extending the viability of current ones. The current Democratic coalition between urbanites and big labor is as untenable as the Republican coalition between corporate interests and social conservatives. Obama is a unique political phenomenon, a gifted orator who might be able to sell core liberal principles to unlikely voters in the fall. But Democrats had better start thinking about what kind of new winning coalitions they might want to build during an Obama reign. They ought to figure out how to become the party of modernity and liberty, one that is fundamentally pro-urban, pro-environment and internationalist. With energy prices on the rise, the very existence of the Sam’s Club suburbanite and the rural religious social conservative will be squeezed, marginalized and eventually urbanized, rendering the Salem/Douthat-envisaged coalition less attractive a constituency than they seem now.

NY Times: “Sunnis Agree to End Boycott, Rejoin Iraq Government”.

“Our conditions were very clear, and the government achieved some of them,” said Adnan al-Duleimi, the head of Tawafiq, the largest Sunni bloc in the government. Mr. Duleimi said the achievements included “the general amnesty, chasing down the militias and disbanding them and curbing the outlaws.”

…

The official government television channel, Iraqiya, appeared to confirm the deal, following a meeting between Mr. Maliki and David Miliband, the visiting foreign secretary of Britain. Iraqiya said the prime minister “said that reconciliation has proved a success and all political blocs will return to the government.”

If this does pan out, it’s not difficult to see that the Democrats are toast come November.

“Screw ‘em,” she said. Fucking white trash doesn’t know what’s good for it.

It’s not the sentiment, mind you. It’s the duplicity that rankles.