Gazing through Kristol's cracked crystal ball

At this point, picking a fight with Bill Kristol is a little like wrestling a dead tuna. He may be bigger than me, but he's easy to pin.

In his most recent column, and one of his last, Kristol argues that the future of "Liberalism" rests on the "shoulders" of Barack Obama. It's a vivid expression of the type of denialist dementia that much of the conservative camp has churned out since Obama's win. In their view, Obama's failure will clear the way for a reappraisal of conservative policies, and open the door for what Kristol calls "new conservative alternatives." He doesn't name these, or even hint at them, and we can be pretty certain these "new" alternatives will look a lot like the old ideas that, after all, in his opinion, "have on the whole worked." His sweeping claim is that conservative principles were tested and surpassed mamby-pamby liberal policies on the "most important issues of the day: about Communism and jihadism, crime and welfare, education and the family." So why have American voters rudely closed the book on the conservative era? Kristol can't seem to offer a guess. Keep in mind, this is the guy that bet everything he had on Sarah Palin because she charmed him during a port call in the middle of a Weekly Standard Alaskan cruise. So he doesn't always think things through thoroughly.

His argument about the failure of liberal thought is really more an attack on our manhood. It's not that our ideas are wrong, or our compassion for the poor misplaced, or our sense that government should work naive, it's that we are "limp" and "feckless" and "trembling."

Shortly after the election, I made the argument that Americans had rejected conservative thought sweepingly, with gains for Democrats across the map. What I said then was that Americans had risen up to overturn the idea "that government should do nothing when a quarter of the country can’t afford health care, when our schools are failing, when Wall Street recklessly gambles away our retirement savings and our kids’ college money." I believe this is true. Americans have realized that an ideology (and a party devoted to that ideology) that promises them nothing when they are struggling, that assumes poverty and misery are merely byproducts of the business cycle and must be endured so a few folks at the top can party is morally indefensible. If you can come up with a body of conservative thought that discards this tendency to dismiss suffering and reject the role of government in its alleviation, then maybe you're on to something. But I don't think it can be done.

I don't want to take time to pick off the ways Kristol is mistaken one by one. Well, okay, I do. But it really shouldn't be neccesary. It's a little like pointing out what was wrong with medieval medicine. Physicians in the Middle Ages used treacle the way conservatives use tax cuts. Neither cures anything.

Pause to reflect on the things Kristol believes conservatives got "right more often than not." Communism? Jeez, talk about an oldy but goody. OK, I'll admit it: no one got that one right, so he can at least claim Republicans were no worse than Democrats. To maintain the global balance of power against our communist adversaries, we supported despots, fought wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Grenada, armed proxies in El Salvador and Afghanistan, and built a nuclear arsenal that was at once more powerful than any force ever imagined by man, and utterly useless. Jihadism? I won't fold on that one. It is the utter refusal of conservatives to allow government to map out a fossil-fuel-free future that, among all other causes, most clearly makes us targets of muslim extremists. Our addiction to oil - and the profits it brings to many segments of the economy- requires us to opt for "stability" in the part of the world that spews out our sweet, black narcotic. That means supporting regimes that can keep the oil flowing, even if these regimes oppress their people, or bankroll extremists as part of a dysfunctional bargain to stay in power. No, Bill, you don't have the right answers there.

And why does he link "crime and welfare" when he is assembling the list of conservative successes? And how in the world does he imagine conservatives have either of those things figured out? Heckabagosh. We imprison more of our adults than any other nation in the world. One in every one hundred American adults is in prison. I guess if your friends are in the business of building prisons, or operating them for profit, then, hell, that's a great thing. But in any other universe, or by any other measure, that is a failure. And what about welfare? 13 million children in the U.S. live in poverty - that's nearly 20% of all children. By what measure is that a win for the conservative side? His last claim - that conservatives are right on issues related to "education and family" - is equally laughable. Children in poverty consistently perform less well in school, so if you push kids into poverty you also undermine their ability to succeed in the classroom. Bush policies have undermined creativity and innovation in the classroom, and conservatives continue to campaign to drive science from schools, in their efforts to replace biology with the Bible. And the party of family values has repeatedly tried to prevent loving non-traditional couples from sharing the enjoyment of family life. Americans are working more and spending less time at home. We can't afford medical insurance to protect the health of our kids and loved ones. How is that family friendly?

As Kristol rides off into the sunset, I can only hope his New York Times colleagues resist throwing him a good-bye party. Let the guy slip away without fanfare, then change the locks on the doors so he can never, ever come back.