The (Conservative) World is Flat(land)

When I saw the graphic above the other day I thought, Jesus, what a creepily sterile Jello mold into which to pour the toxic contents of the massively failed and fatally deluded Republican foreign policy under George W. Bush.

And when I read the accompanying text, I couldn’t help but picture a clutch of desiccated conservatives crouching around a dying fire in a dim, filthy cave, doomed to play some moldering hybrid of "Trivial Pursuit" and "Stratego" on and on forever. People so completely alienated from the horror they had made that they hadn't bothered to notice they were dressed in rags of the soldiers their policies had senselessly killed.

That the dice they cast were carved from the knuckle bones of the hundreds of thousands who had perished in their rancid war.

From Ross Douthat at "The Atlantic" (which has been cut up shamelessly by me and which we begin in medias res):

The comments that originally accompanied it are from last June, in response to an earlier post of mine on right-wing realism, but they look pretty prescient now:

I think what the GOP is really missing is a particular kind of realist - a Hamiltonian. The pre-war GOP had two wings: Jeffersonian (isolationist) and Hamiltonian (internationalist). The "liberal internationalism" that dominated the Democratic Party and the nation from FDR to JFK was a marriage of Hamiltonianism and Wilsonianism…

The Vietnam War led to the emergence of a left-wing Jeffersonian wing in the Democratic Party, while the neo-conservatives brought Wilsonianism into the GOP so that, by the time of the Reagan Administration, the big tent enclosed Hamiltonians, Jacksonians and Wilsonians, while the Democratic Party was divided between Wilsonians and Jeffersonians….

The Bush Administration's foreign policy has been a blend of Jacksonian and Wilsonian impulses. Post-Fiasco, the divisions between these views…

But this is precious little sign of a revival of Hamiltonianism - a hard-headed realism that is internationalist in orientation.

At least, there is precious little sign within the GOP. Daniel Larison has mocked Senator Chuck Hagel for calling his colleagues "insulationist" - what he means to call them is "Jacksonian." They aren't "isolationists" (Jeffersonians) but they are introverted…

Hagel is a Hamiltonian; so is Lugar. And, as you might have noticed, they are being run off the reservation even though, as Larison notes, they have not actually repudiated interventionism at all (which, as internationalists, of course they cannot).

The more interesting question is whether Hamiltonianism will be revived within the Democratic Party. As a (mostly) Hamiltonian myself, I certainly hope it is revived somewhere, for the sake of, well, the national interest.
…

And so they have, it seems. Now the question is whether the GOP can endure as a Wilsonian-Jacksonian coalition, or whether it needs a strong infusion from another quadrant ...

One way to think about this is to imagine a variant on the Millman Chart that organizes the four tendencies by their relative hawkishness: In this division, the Wilsonians and Jacksonians would both fall on the hawkish side of the line, while the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians would…

…the Wilsonians or the Jacksonians. At the moment, then, the Hamiltonian shift toward the Democrats leaves the GOP dominated by two factions that both tend to err on the side of hawkishness,,,.

In theory, one could imagine this problem being solved by a revival of Ron Paul-style right-wing Jeffersonianism (which aspires, of course, to drive the Wilsonian neocons out of the party, and create a Jacksonian-Jeffersonian GOP)…

I still think that the congruence between the Jacksonian views of the GOP base and a Hamiltonian take on the world offers fertile ground for a right-realist revival.

Yes, they really do talk like that: prating wannabe Disraelis and bloodless dime-store Pattons drawing alchemist’s comfort from muttering empty incantations of luck and wisdom while dumping the bloody, shrieking, global mess they made out of chaos, fear and failure into a two-dimensional containment device built from cheerfully congruent angles and single, reassuringly-declarative nouns and adjectives.

A clean, square plate of Cartesian comfort food.

But however reassuring the Kings of this Conservative Flatland may find their lackluster, little map of their made-up little world, it was at a minimum at least one, full dimension short

of being anything approaching a proper tool for framing the fearful and failed symmetry of our nation’s stupidest foreign adventures.