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- The notion that there's a silver lining for liberals in a Republican-controlled Congress is not terribly convincing, but it's worth focusing on one aspect, highlighted by Ed Kilgore: "The real stakes this November are about which party will preside over congressional gridlock, and be held accountable for it." On the surface, it would seem to benefit Democrats if Republicans preside over congressional gridlock, but the message on Fox News for the next two years will be "government doesn't work, and only a President Romney (or whoever) can fix it."
- Chait: "It's not clear whether [AEI President Arthur] Brooks is engaged in conscious distortion, or if he's really unable to grasp that believing America is 'generally' a force for good is compatible with believing that America is capable of making mistakes." I'd say definitely the latter. The clearest trend in conservative thought since Obama took office is that he does not believe America is an exceptional nation, and that exceptional nations are self-evidently morally superior to everyone else.
- I generally agree with Kevin Drum's hunch that prognostications of America's decline appear more on the right than the left, but conservatives don't agree across-the-board on the source of our impending decline. On the one hand, you've got conservatives and libertarians who pinpoint the "radicalized, bureaucratized, and ideological" modern state and its imperialistic tendencies as the problem. On the other, you've got the "conservative" cast of the Niall Ferguson variety who warns we need to spend less on the poor and elderly so we can maintain our empire over the world.
- Remainders: Apropos yesterday's discussion of how conservatives view the poor, it makes sense to treat them like criminals as well; I've yet to encounter evidence to the contrary that Karl Rove is a reprehensible scumbag; and gee, maybe that whole WWII thing had an influence on Friedrich Hayek's thinking.
-- Mori Dinauer
