When Foreign Policy Wonks Go Domestic Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Walter Russell Mead, a centrist/conservative who writes thought-provoking, even fun stuff from his perch at the Council on Foreign Relations, had a piece up on Politico about the supposed populist turning away from liberalism.  As a foreign policy wonk who actually worked in domestic policy at the White House, I feel eligible to comment:

 1.  The short-term poll movements he cites are probably most reflective a. of right-wing hyper-activity on the airwaves and b. the well-documented fact that attitudes become more conservative and closed in economic hard times -- the obverse of how much social reform tends to proceed in good times.  My response would be that people got too excited about the "wave" around Obama and are now too despairing about current polls.

2.  The frame he chooses to put on the discontent is highly problematic -- where institutions are failing to deliver, it's at least as much because they have been underresourced and undermiend by conservatives in government as because of some abstract failure of the "liberal" system.

3.  The one element of truth I see in this is that before the emergence of Obama, it seemed clear that mass alienation from government was growing to level unprecedented at least since the 1960s.  It was too optimistic to imagine that one man could reverse this.  But it is wrong and self-serving to see this as a rejection of liberalism.  And it is wishful thinking (just ask our communist friends) to see Americans as ready to dethrone the upper middle classes.  The potential for real populist revolts in America is always blunted by how desperately most of us aspire to the homes, schools and lifestyles of the pointy-heads.

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