The Weekly Standard recently published an article on the need for the Republican Party to think about people who belong to "Sam's Club, not just the country club." The argument makes a number of interesting proposals about health care, family planning, social security and taxes. The funny thing is that none of them are at all definsible as neoliberal reforms on reducing the size of government. Perhaps I don't know enough about classical conservatism--or even the notions of it presented by Kirk or Kristol--but what I find interesting about these is that they are not trying to argue that we don't need healthcare or social security: in fact they are explicitly saying that it isn't possible for them to promote this position because they will lose. They see this as a policy problem rather than an ideological one. That is, in itself, refreshing.

It is also what I have noticed throughout the Bush presidency, and especially during the election: though he tries to promote conservative positions on social issues and market (i.e. corporate) friendly business policy, when push comes to shove, he has to use the rhetoric of the New Deal in order to discuss the role of the government. As the article points out, with the massive GM closures (mostly due to their astronomical costs for employee welfare, e.g. pensions and healthcare) recently, corporations are probably getting ready to accept some government intervention in that area as well. This is almost laughable considering the kind of agenda Bush said he'd be promoting and, as I am reading Harvey's "A Brief History of Neoliberalism," starkly different than the economic understandings promoted by his policy advisors. The irony of this ideology is that it has its own kind of Jacobin impulses, but instead of coming from below, it is an elite that is trying to increase its own power and the revolution is accomplished through fiscal starvation of the state rather than its overthrow. There is a sort of delusion of granduer to all of this which says that all they need to do is tell people that this way is better and they will accept it. Obviously this ideology, as deeply engrained as Harvey says that it is in the elite culture itself, is still shallow among most of the population. Thus the idea of effectively reforming these systems is much more popular than making them just window dressing on the free-market wilderness (to invoke Polanyi.) And the reason these guys are straying from the neo-liberal reservation in one of the journals its masterminds is because it simply isn't politically viable to do anything else. They warn, throughout, that all the Democrats have to do is beat the GOP to the punch on some of these issues.

This would be a good time to have an opposition party. But as Brooks, who cites the WS paper notes, despite the inept handling of everything existing on the part of the current administration, "liberals remain surpassingly effective at making themselves unelectable." This seems to be especially the case with the current batch who can't stop trying to exploit the war as their way of defeating Bush--which is only a useful strategy as long as he tries to win on that narrative. As soon as he changes his tune and they don't have a vaible alternative or anyone willing to say anything that isn't focus grouped and pollstered into pablum (see Lieberman's ass kissing on the war lately and the massive retreat from the very centrist notion that we should leave Iraq since we suck there, stated by Murtha and, earlier today, Dean) Bush will be leading the charge on the next issue--and this time he might choose wisely and have a plan. Their strategy of sitting back and waiting for him to shoot himself in the foot has worked for a few months, but even a faux cowboy can get some thicker boots.