02/01/13 – Daniel Larison – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
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Okay, so introducing Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative Magazine.
He's here to talk about the Chuck Hagel hearings yesterday and what it all means.
Welcome back to the show.
Daniel, how are you?
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
I'm doing fine, thanks.
How are you?
That's good.
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us here today.
So Chuck Hagel, how would you describe his version of republicanism, first of all, here for the not-too-initiated?
Well, he comes out of a tradition in the Republican Party that he describes as principled realism.
He identifies himself with the tradition of Dwight Eisenhower, certainly a hawkish internationalist tradition, but one that's also averse to going to war unless it's absolutely necessary.
So in that way, he does differ a little bit from the more conventional or regular attitudes in the Republican Party about the use of force and about relations with other countries.
Well, now, I wonder, is even that a little bit overstated, or put another way, I've been telling the people in the audience here that the way to think of it is that Chuck Hagel basically is Colin Powell, and so the neocons would prefer Dick Cheney to the old kind of Rockefeller Republican, and he's just more of a centrist Rockefeller Republican type.
That doesn't necessarily make him anything, you know, even a cousin of a Ron Paulian or anything close to it, right?
Oh, sure.
No, I think that's a fair description.
He certainly has a lot more in common in terms of his outlook with someone like Colin Powell or, say, Dick Lugar, a former senator from Indiana.
So they're definitely coming out of a tradition of Republican internationalism that has a lot of things in common with the rest of the current Republican Party in terms of their attitudes towards foreign policy.
Where they do tend to differ, or where Hagel has differed in recent years, is that he has, I think, internalized some of the lessons of the war in Iraq and has started to apply those to some of these other cases, or at least he was before he was up for this nomination.
He was very skeptical about using force against Iran.
He was against going into Libya.
He was against going into Syria.
And so I think he's become much warier of those sorts of entanglements.
But unfortunately, now that he is up for this nomination, he's had to in some ways backtrack on a lot of that and align himself more closely with what the administration wants to do.
So that's one of the reasons why you saw so much confusion or hesitancy in the way that he was responding to some of these questions, because he took a series of positions over the last six years that were at least a little bit more amenable to a foreign policy restraint.
And in the last, let's say, six weeks, he's had to run away from a lot of those in order to be considered quote unquote mainstream.
So that's one of the unfortunate things that's come out this week.
Yeah, well, and it goes to show just how far, well, I don't really, it's oversimplification, especially because the neocons really seem like centrist to me rather than the far right, but they would say they've moved the foreign policy debate that far to the right.
Where now Colin Powell or Brent Scowcroft or George Bush Sr. and their point of view of the world is outside the mainstream way over on the the Buchananite fringe, I guess, compared to what the neocons would have, which is unending warfare against you name them.
Right.
I mean, there's certainly been an effort to try to define a lot of Hegel's views, a lot of the views of foreign policy realist as a sort of a fringe or as an extreme position.
One of the things I think has been really unfortunate is the way that neoconservatives and people who adhere to that very hard line view of foreign policy have managed to link themselves so closely to people who are otherwise quite conservative.
So you saw, for instance, yesterday, Ted Cruz, who on many domestic issues is quite good from my perspective, take a sort of maximalist, really awful line, I thought, in terms of U.S. relations with Israel, U.S. attitudes towards other countries, use of force abroad, that really errant in keeping with any of the message that Ted Cruz has on domestic issues.
But the neoconservatives have been so successful in sort of co-opting the conservative brand and identifying their foreign policy ideas with it that anybody who doesn't go along with those end up getting either pushed to one side and deemed moderate or they get pushed to another side and deemed extremist.
It's been, I think, ultimately to the detriment of conservative ideas overall.
Well, now, do you blame Karl Rove for that?
Because it always seemed to me that the prerequisite number one for the Bush years was they had to emphasize stupidity because no one thinking for a minute could possibly want to go along with their stupid, evil crap.
And so they focused on, well, basically dumbing every argument down to, well, you just hate Bush and that kind of idiocy where they don't really have anything left but belligerence.
They don't know.
I mean, I'd be happy to hear what issues Ted Cruz is good on.
I mean, if it means that he had to stop and think for a minute and come to a reasonable, correct conclusion about what ought to be done about something, I would be absolutely amazed.
No, indeed.
And it's unfortunate because, as you may remember, Ted Cruz was endorsed by Rand Paul and by Ron Paul, both of them, because he seemed to be the sort of limited government conservative in terms of domestic issues that they were interested in having in Congress.
But unfortunately, all along, his attitudes about national security have hewed much more towards this sort of pro-warfare state, pro-militarism posture that really isn't consistent with that view.
Yeah, I mean, maybe it's just because Buckley finally died or something, but it seemed like conservatism used to have this whole, we're the rich, rarefied, well-read tennis playing.
We're not just rich and powerful, but we're very cultured, too, and more cultured than you and that kind of thing.
And all that's gone now.
It seems like conservatism now is just a big USA-USA rally or a football game or some kind of stupidity.
Again, back to the Karl Rove thing, or I don't know.
Yeah, I think there is a lot of dumbing down of core ideas.
There is a lot of demagoguery that you see going on.
I think one of the biggest flaws in Republican campaigns last year and in recent years is that they have resorted to this constant invocation of nationalism or what they would call American exceptionalism as a way to try to browbeat people into agreeing with them.
And it's only had the effect of driving everybody who isn't already on board with that farther and farther away from them.
So even as a political strategy, it may have had its uses immediately after 9-11, but right now it's just a poison for them.
And now, as a real conservative, the anti-war kind, Daniel, would you agree with my assessment that the neocons are really kind of half-liberal still?
That they're really centrist?
They're extremists.
They're not moderates by any stretch.
But, you know, two cheers for capitalism and maybe we do need to go ahead and raise taxes and of course we need a national homeland security and education system and etc. etc. like that.
I mean, they're pretty damn democratic, those neoconservatives, aren't they?
Well, in terms of their domestic priorities, sure.
And you have to remember when they came into the Republican Party, that's where they were coming from.
They had no real gripe with the welfare state or the expansion of government.
What they were mainly concerned with was trying to make it run more efficiently or run in a manner more to their liking.
And so there's never been a strong or principled opposition to the growth of government either here or around the world in their particular persuasion.
And so in that way they're just doing what they've been doing all along, but now I think they emphasize the warfare state of that much more than they used to and they've become very much identified with that side of it.
But yes, certainly in terms of their domestic politics, they have much more in common with Washington establishment views than they have with rank-and-file people all over the country.
And it's strange to me really that the Ted Cruz's of the world even, that they don't find the American Conservative Magazine point of view so much more of a natural fit, right?
I mean, why should Bill Kristol, if Bill Kristol really doesn't line up with the conservatives, and maybe the conservatives in Congress are not the right example, but the conservatives in the American population, if they don't really line up on anything but war all the time, why should they line up on war all the time?
I mean, what is conservative about that?
You know nothing, right?
Well, I agree.
I don't think that it is conservative to be advocating constantly for new wars, as many of these folks do.
I think one of the reasons that it is, that it does keep happening, or that those that keep advocating for new wars are able to co-opt the conservative label, is that they very often do dress it up as a matter of national defense.
And of course, we at the American Conservative, and those of us who are anti-war conservatives, naturally believe in a strong national defense, but the emphasis on defense, and the emphasis on going to war as a last resort.
And I think those things have been lost over the last 10 years, because in the aftermath of 9-11, and in the years that followed with the invasion of Iraq, a lot of conservatives became very attached to the idea that all of these conflicts were ultimately, in some way, in the national interest.
And I think, over the course of the Iraq war, many people, both within the conservative movement and in the Republican Party, came to realize that that wasn't true anymore.
Or it was never true, I should say.
And so, over time, that seems to be having less and less of a grip on conservatives in the country, and I hope it has even less in the future.
Although, obviously, right now, the representation that they have in the Senate, and in the Congress as a whole, is not that good.
Well, you know, that's the thing.
You had this piece from the 31st, the failure of the anti-Hagel campaign at the week, but then all the reviews are, he did a really lousy job of backtracking yesterday, just, you know, telegenically and all that.
And so, is it possible that really he's blown his chance now?
In terms of being confirmed, I don't think he's blown his chance.
I think he's let down a lot of people who were hoping that he might bring a bit more sanity and restraint to running the Pentagon, because he did run away from so many of the positions that he had had before.
I think he will become Secretary of Defense, barring something extraordinary like a filibuster that I don't foresee happening.
But the question becomes, what does he do once he's there?
Will he end up disappointing even more in terms of what he does?
Certainly in terms of his hearing performance, he did, I think, admittedly, a very poor job, not only in defending himself against spurious attacks, but even defending basic concepts that he has affirmed throughout his career.
So, there were some exceptions to that.
He did defend the importance of international engagement as a very central part of conducting foreign policy.
But except for a few times like that, he was railroaded, and he allowed himself to be railroaded, I think, either through lack of preparation or not expecting the hostility that was coming his way, which is a little surprising considering how public and obvious the hostility was.
Yeah, I mean, I used to watch this guy on C-SPAN.
He usually seems to have, not that I would always agree with him or anything, but he always seemed to at least think he knew what he was talking about, have his act together and have something to say, and start at the beginning and finish at the end and that kind of thing.
And yesterday, he just seemed like, man, what, did you just wake up from last night's drunk?
Or what are you doing?
Yeah.
And he is in a bit of an odd position because he has to defend administration policy.
Of course, he's not the one making the policy.
He's executing it if he gets confirmed.
So, he's not able to come up with answers that might reflect his own ideal vision of what policy should be.
But we can make excuses for him, though.
He knew what administration policy was coming in.
He knew what he would have to say when he got up there, and he didn't do a very good job of articulating it.
Right.
Well, now, do you think that given the narrow margin of the actual debate or difference between even the neocons and the realists and how obvious it would be it was that he's going to end up walking back some of this stuff and how, as you're saying, as the Secretary of Defense, it's not really up to him to make all these decisions that he's being criticized about his opinions on those issues.
Anyway, that kind of thing.
Is it a mistake from the neocons' point of view, do you think, for Bill Kristol and friends to go on this rampage against this guy when, as you're saying, barring some real surprise, who's pretty much sure to be confirmed anyway?
I mean, what difference is his policy from Obama's?
And Kristol's comfortable calling Obama a born-again neocon at least some of the time.
It's not like Obama's some radical peacenik like we wish he was.
Right.
Now, of course, the differences in practical policy are often vanishingly small, and that's one of the problems we have to keep trying to fix.
But I think the political purpose or the goal of this campaign, I think in the beginning it was to try to derail the nomination, but as it became clear that that wasn't going to happen, then the purpose switched to trying to corral as many Republicans into the anti-Hagel camp as they could get to demonstrate that at least within the Republican Party, neoconservative ideas still prevail, they still hold sway, and all of these people in the Senate GOP will ultimately, or at least most of them will end up going along with what they want.
And I think it was also directed at people in the future to try to discourage them from taking even the mildly dissenting positions that Hagel sometimes took in the past.
As I said in my column, it's got a lot to do with policing what can be said about foreign policy as much as it has anything to do with who's going to serve in the Cabinet.
Right.
This is making a good example out of him.
Don't let this happen to you.
Keep your traps shut.
Well, yeah, unfortunately.
The other unfortunate thing is that this is almost certainly going to discourage people who have better instincts on foreign policy from going into government and into public service because it is such a thankless task, by all accounts, that it seems like it might not be worth doing.
Yeah.
What about the possibility that from now on, everybody's just going to laugh in Bill Kristol's face and no one will ever listen to the stupid things that he says ever again?
Well, I think you have seen in some of the reactions to the effort to get Hagel a lot of that sort of mockery and ridicule.
Unfortunately, it's come out almost entirely from outside the Republican Party and outside the conservative movement.
In those areas where Bill Kristol's influence is, I guess you'd say, most pernicious, it seems to be the least affected.
In the places where he was never taken that seriously, he's now taken even less so.
In that way, it's been useful to the discrediting of neoconservatism outside of that tent, but inside of it, unfortunately, it seems like very little has changed.
Yeah.
It's all just, and especially when the neoconservative movement is such a small movement.
I remember this great Jim Loeb piece called All in the Neocon Family, talking about when they all sit down for Thanksgiving, and they've got at least a good third of the neocons in the world in the room.
Whenever they get excited and they all start telling each other, yeah, I know, right, you're so right about that, then there's no stopping them because they each have an editorial page and a magazine and a think tank.
Yeah, it is sort of infestuous in the way that there are a lot of interrelationships between them and the way that they work together like that.
I think that does reflect, to an extent, how disconnected they are from the conservatives out in the rest of the country, because these are all people largely concentrated back east.
They're all working either for publications or in think tanks, and I think to a large extent they're oblivious to what a lot of people in the country think about these issues, which allows them to continue pressing ahead indifferent to the consequences of their ideas, both in terms of the real-world consequences for U.S. interests and also the political effects that their ideas are having on conservatism and the Republican Party.
Yeah, I mean, it really seems like bad policy just from a GOP politics sort of point of view.
I mean, that's the standard formula is you pretend to be the winner, the guy that gets the nomination is the guy who's good at pretending to be a real party, loyalist, ideological guy, but as soon as he gets the nomination he can turn right around and become the moderate, the guy who's more like the guy he's running against than himself and therefore win, right?
And so what they're doing is they're just turning their whole party into a bunch of what looks like a bunch of Paul Ryans or whatever to everybody else in the country, a bunch of know-nothing belligerents, when they really, like the next presidential election, this guy Hagel is really the kind of guy they ought to be running, you know?
Who can win that moderate center swing vote against Hillary Clinton or whatever.
But instead they want to nominate someone even more to the right, I guess.
They want their party to be nothing but the people who can't win.
Well, yeah, it seems to be a very much a self-defeating strategy over the long term.
You've seen in the last several election cycles, with the exception of 2010, that Republicans that won on the platform that these people are promoting for various reasons, but including foreign policy, cannot win over a majority because the majority has seen the results of what this sort of policy leads to and they're tired of it.
It's not that there's a great understanding of the policy issues necessarily, but there's a clear understanding of what the consequences of those policies are.
Right, yeah, the policy issue is, should we do what John McCain wants us to do?
Boy, he seems cranky, I don't know.
Probably we should do whatever it is that he does not want us to do.
The guy that was defeated for president four and a half years ago, because he is who he is, you know?
Because he wants what he wants and it turns people off.
He scares the hell out of people, you know?
Oh, absolutely, yes.
And if we had tried to avoid doing what McCain wanted over the last ten years, we would have been in at least two fewer wars and we wouldn't even be talking about pushing for this immigration amnesty that they're trying to push again now.
Yeah, well, you know, that's the funny thing, right?
It always seems like the people, they go along, well, I'll go along with your internationalism and acting like a Democrat all over the world, as long as you'll promise to, you know, vote my way on immigration or whatever.
They never get what they want.
Same thing for the abortion issue.
And I would actually probably disagree with you on both of those, but, for example, it seems like the Republicans really need the abortion issue and the immigration issue in order to flog those votes.
And so they never want to really change the policy.
They want to keep having something to argue about forever.
And the people who they fool into voting for them over and over again never get what they want.
They never seem to get too tired of not getting what they want.
But it seems like maybe that could, you know, wear thin after a while.
Well, yeah, I think in terms of keeping these things unresolved and always holding out the promise that something will be done later, you just have to stay on the same side of the issue or you have to stay on the same team, is one of the ways that Republican Party leaders try to mobilize their supporters.
And so, in a way, they have an incentive to fail.
They have a reason not to serve the interests of their constituents.
And, unfortunately, those constituents are so convinced of the even greater evils of the other party that they're sort of trapped or they're locked into their current voting.
Yep.
Well, it's a strange thing, I guess.
Well, here's the thing.
I guess with the gun issue the way it is, that's probably the best thing that the Republican Party has going for them because they don't seem to have much else going for them at all.
But the Democrats are so horrible on guns, you know, maybe they can use that.
But otherwise, I think Ron Paul is right that the Republican Party is a dinosaur and they're going to have trouble keeping up with the Democrats at all at this point.
Well, that's what it looks like right now.
And already the next generation of voters, they may not be lost permanently, but I think a lot of them have been driven so far away from the better ideas that are in the Republican Party as well as the worst ones because they simply identify the entire party with these catastrophes that have happened on their watch.
And the bigger problem is the Republicans won't take responsibility for what they did when they were in power.
If they started to do that, if they started to acknowledge where they went wrong, then there might be some chance of a revival.
But in the near term, I don't see that happening, unfortunately.
Yeah, it doesn't look like there's anybody prepared to replace them either.
So I don't know where that leaves us except Hillary Clinton in 2016, pal.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time, Dan.
It's great to talk to you again.
Thanks for having me back, Scott.
Really appreciate it.
Talk to you later.
Everybody, that's Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative Magazine.
Check out his great blog there.
And also he's got this piece at theweek.com.
He's got a regular column there.
I think it's pretty regular anyway.
It's The Failure of the Anti-Hagel Campaign.
Guess we'll see about that.
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