I do worry that in chortling so soon, we miss a key element in the right's newest strategy. Even Krugman the other day, in simply pointing out that conservative attacks on Bush disguise their own past behavior, missed it. It's not just that they're distancing themselves from the consequences of past behavior, although that's certainly the case, and we may even welcome their newfound distance. Rather, it's that they're trying to create a history that falsely justifies a supposed true conservativism unlike Bush's.

It's perhaps most obvious with Bartlett, who claims to be describing a Reagan conservative, who'd cut spending and regulation, as opposed to a phony conservative like Bush who increases both, as with No Child Left Behind. One could argue that it mistakenly appeals to the aura surrounding Reagan, who in fact had to back off tax cuts and deal with Gorbachev. But again more important, it misses how much Bush's lunacy really does stick to the disastrous line of a Reagan conservative.

It's obvious in the foreign policy Fukuyama claims to critique, with the Neocons who crafted the invasion of Iraq ressurected after Iran Contra. Economically, Bush's deficit is not the result of a sudden liberal spending urge, but of a war and of tax cuts founded very much on Reagan's voodoo economics, benefitting the same corporate elite. Bartlett compares Bush to Nixon, who created the EPA, whereas Bush keeps gutting environmental protections. No Child Left Behind is a conservative attempt to seize the high ground on education without actually funding education, with the false appeal to testing in the hope that old right-wing mantras of values and competition alone can do the job.

I say all this only because they really are again "framing" things, even if it takes massive lying. Welcoming their contradictions, chaos, and similarity to liberalism masks how much we still have to fight for our vision and our frame. 

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

Vast majority? Evidence? Some non-negligable fraction of Democrats in the public at least are realists or isolationists.

 I for one as a realist consider liberal internationalism about as suspsect as neoconservatism.

Agreed, but one problem with articulating that common-sense liberal internationalist philosophy (to which you should add a commitment to international institutions and mutually beneficial treaties and international law) is that a philosophy needs to be articulated in opposition to something. Otherwise it comes off sounding like pablum. Who's against a commitment to promoting democracy? Even Bush claims to subscribe to this goal.

One way to describe the difference between the Democratic and the Bush Admin approaches to foreign policy would be to talk about the return to normalcy or sanity, or a commitment to expertise and competence. For example, check out the recent Rolling Stone piece on the Millennium Challenge Corporation. It's a pathetic failure for all the same reasons that all the other Bush foreign aid initiatives have been pathetic failures: they set up an all-new program, rather than working through established systems, hence creating wasteful duplication and pointless learning curves; they (under)staffed it with political cronies and people from the business sector with no relevant experience; and they refused to work with international or even other American organizations. What was supposed to be a $5 billion/year program has awarded $1.2 billion in 3 years. Exactly the same thing has happened with the President's Emergency Program to Fight AIDS (PEPFAR). It happens because these are essentially political patronage programs aimed at getting maximum PR credit for the President, not real programs designed to be effective. And the same kind of thing has been happening across the board in domestic programs as well - the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, DHS, Medicare Plan IV, and so on.

So while reiterating a classic liberal internationalist philosophy would be good, it needs to be done in a way that ties it in with a coherent critique of current US policy approaches. I think something along the lines of competence, integrity, experience, and keeping one's commitments might be a good place to start.

Thanks for the referral--that was one worthy read!