A performer in the Opening Ceremonies. (Getty)

In the glare of the Opening Night Ceremony for the 2012 Olympiad, NBC’s custodians of sporting goodwill would occasionally suggest that the spectacle unfolding beneath their gaze would prove a boon to cash-strapped East London.

The event’s own labored narrative arc told a different story: If the receding industrial prosperity of the East End would ever return, it would only be in the tightly scripted precincts of imagineered spectacle. As a retinue of factory workers poured like so many Orcs out of the Glastonberry Tor erected at one corner of the facility, they hastened to a makeshift foundry to pretend-forge one of the Olympic rings. To Matt Lauer, this tableau was not merely a visual triumph, but an olfactory one: “Not only are you watching this ring being forged actually on the field, you’re now smelling it. They’ve found a way to pump that sulfur smell, that factory smell, out to 65,000 people.”

In all likelihood, the costly, cumbersome Olympiad, arriving as Britain’s economy continues to reel under the fallout from the 2008 financial meltdown, won’t produce any whiff of prosperity more genuine or enduring than that fleeting, simulated stench of the Victorian era’s dark mills. The $30 billion-and-counting that have so far lubricated the London Games will probably billow out of sight once the Olympic Village is vacated. “The typical pattern in host cities is steep cost overruns,” said Helen Lenskyj, an emeritus sociology professor at the University of Toronto who’s published many critical studies on the impact of the Games in host communities. “But the organizations sponsoring the event never learn from that experience.”

Olympics boosters like to point to the stimulative impact that the Games had for Barcelona in 1992. But a more instructive case study may be Greece in 2004. The Greek economy was already a basket case when Athens was gearing up to stage the summer Games; indeed, the event furnished a glittering adjunct PR drive at a precarious moment, when Greece was contracting yet more unstable debt in its misguided drive to enter the now-imploding Eurozone. But once Greek leaders had coughed up the standard 11-figure fees for sponsorship, security details, hospitality and the like, there would be little to do but watch their lovingly assembled Olympic infrastructure molder away in the shadows of the domestic economy’s broader collapse.

What’s puzzling is how civic leaders ever expect any other result from the mobbed-up oligarchy known as the modern Olympic Games. Even in hale economic circumstances, the governing body of the Games, the powerful and secretive International Olympics Committee, is not the sort of organization designed to lift all boats in a rising tide. Ever since the 1980s, when the Games came into their own as a cross-branded extravaganza of sponsorship, ad revenue and media market share, money is very much the performance-enhancing drug of choice at the upper reaches of Olympic power. The sitting head of the International Olympics Committee, Jacques Rogge, is a Belgian count and a retired competitive yachtsman—and that’s what passes for a crusading reformer in the money-blighted world of I.O.C. privilege.

Mr. Rogge was groomed as the successor to the Games’s long-running chieftain Don Juan Antonio Samaranch y Torelló, First Marquis of Samaranch, Grandee of Spain, a former sporting official with the fascist government of Francisco Franco who managed to reinvent himself as a global ambassador of sport with the large-scale financial backing of Adidas shoe mogul Horst Dassler. Mr. Samaranch oversaw a stunning litany of corruption in his two decades on the job—encouraging influence peddling, arranging sinecures for family members and cronies of committee members, and padding the I.O.C. board with fellow authoritarians and baksheesh impresarios. In his more expansive moments, Samaranch would also grace vicious dictators like Romania’s Nicolae Ceacescu with awards for their alleged contributions to international sport. When an HBO interviewer confronted Mr. Samaranch on this latter trespass, he curtly replied that he was “very proud” of Ceaucescu’s garland, adding that the I.O.C.’s judgment was not to be questioned because “we are more important than the Catholic religion.”

Since he came to power in 2001, Mr. Rogge has softened Samaranch’s air of thuggish self-regard, but otherwise little has changed about the Committee’s graft-friendly business model.  On Mr. Rogge’s watch, the BBC uncovered a 2004 scandal in which two reporters posing as East London businessmen persuaded Bulgarian I.O.C. member Ivan Svalkov to agree to sell his vote to site the Games in London outright for cash—just two years after the bribery-steeped Salt Lake City Games that Mitt Romney had putatively stepped in and “saved.”

Just last year, Joao Havelange,  the former head of the international soccer federation FIFA and a longtime Samaranch crony, was forced to resign the I.O.C. board in the midst of a multimillion dollar bribery scandal involving broadcasting rights doled out to ISL, the now-bankrupt sports-licensing franchise Mr. Dassler founded to coordinate marketing for the Olympics. Jeremy Hunt, the British government’s chief liaison to the I.O.C. for the 2012 Games, has been implicated in a vast Rupert Murdoch bribery scandal involving News International’s plans to catapult BskyB to the forefront of the Asian market. Strongman leaders are still permanent fixtures on the Committee; Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko was unable to travel to London with his country’s delegation because of EU sanctions against his ghastly human-rights record. Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, however, is on hand, despite his government’s routine detention of journalists and dissidents. Even Henry Kissinger sits on the Committee, presumably because it’s one of the only gatherings of global autocrats in which he looks comparatively unindictable.

The I.O.C., in short, specializes in the sort of workaday level of corruption that attends daily life in a strongman kleptocracy in Africa or South America—but on a much more lavish Old World scale. The difference is that the developing world’s tinpot dictators haven’t managed to leverage their marketing clout into flattering global media coverage. When NBC lavishes the Olympics with a $4.38 billion contract—and when the network's corporate parent, GE, has forked over a multimillion-dollar sponsorship fee for the games—detailed investigations of bribery charges and judging scandals don’t exactly abound. And when more stubborn journalists, such as the Scottish investigative reporter Andrew Jennings, are able to stir up some real trouble, the I.O.C. hits them with criminal lawsuits in its home jurisdiction of Switzerland.

Still, one can easily understand why economic forces well beyond East London are embracing the current festivities in a half-prayerful mien: The other great models of international market comity are shuddering and heaving in the wings. Just a few miles from the where the Industrial Revolution was being re-enacted on Friday night, the British Parliament has been investigating the rampant bank fraud committed in the LIBOR scandal, which reduced the very basis of the global credit economy into a fiction. Shortly after the Games wind down, the flailing Euro Zone faces fresh reckonings in the German courts and the Dutch polls while weighing more bailouts for the still wheezing Spanish and Italian economies.

In short, the only path forward for the great neoliberal sachems of our global market could well be the model pioneered by the I.O.C.: gauzy, soft-focus tales of heroic individual achievement for the masses, and coercive results-rigging and generous payoffs for the privileged few behind the scenes. After all, as the slickly produced montage celebrating the ineffable virtues of the Scepter’d Isle announced at the outset of Friday’s ceremony, Britain is a land “where fairy tales never end.”

Diamond of Barclays.

From outside the elite preserves of the financial industry, Britain’s LIBOR scandal follows a wearily familiar narrative arc: Yes, a leading investment bank has confessed to gaming a central borrowing index—the so-called London Interbank Offered Rate, which establishes how much banks charge each other to borrow money. And yes, that bank—Barclays of London—has coughed up 290 million pounds in fines to stave off the prospect of a criminal prosecution. But jaded consumers of financial news can be forgiven for thinking that this all amounts to the perennial status quo for the investment class, in the city and on Wall Street alike. Haven’t these characters always sought to live by their own self-seeking code—and haven’t fund managers long been little more than glorified corruptionists? If we systemically prosecute this sort of behavior, are we just futilely attempting to issue a restraining order against human nature?

In reality, the LIBOR dustup is a very big deal—and largely because of its very routine profile. Barclays has confessed to artificially deflating its LIBOR rate going back to 2005, in an effort to stave off jitters among investors in the bank’s sprawling derivatives portfolio. But the costs of marginal vanity upgrades to an institution’s profitability run very quickly into the billions in a market that covers hundreds of trillions in investments. LIBOR numbers govern just about every sort of borrowing done on a major scale, from bad mortgage bets to the credit default swaps used (delusionally, it turns out) to hedge against them. What’s more, the evidence suggests that conduct of Barclays—one of 16 banks now under investigation, on both sides of the Atlantic, for manipulating its LIBOR numbers—prolonged, in sweeping fashion, the ghastly derivatives bubble that collapsed in 2008. With much of world economy transacting its credit business on artificially swollen bottom lines during those wheezing boom years, the fallout from LIBOR fixing could run easily into the trillions.

The unprecedented scale of the LIBOR scam helps explain the alacrity that British lawmakers and regulators have so far shown in at least creating the appearance of a crackdown. The present drive across the pond to punish the lords of capital comes, we all know, athwart a long-standing culture of impunity in financial matters; the real outrage of jury-rigging the LIBOR is that it exposes the whole global credit system as an exercise in cronyist bad faith. And even symbolic shows of civil authority in the dealings of the city trigger large-scale cognitive dissonance at this point. Robert Diamond, the American head of Barclays, seemed a bit flummoxed to be so suddenly prevailed upon to resign; if Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein continue to reign securely atop their scandal-rocked investment fiefdoms, why should he be made an example of—especially with some 15 other banking chieftains potentially on the LIBOR make as well? And why should Paul Tucker—the presumptive incoming head of the Bank of England, who has sedulously groomed himself for the top slot since his arrival at the British equivalent of the Fed more than two decades ago—suddenly be dragged before Parliament to find his nomination in jeopardy for little reason beyond a vague impression that he should have done more to hunt down evidence of LIBOR-rigging back in 2007?

In truth, if British authorities were themselves more vigilant, the LIBOR mess wouldn’t have festered on for so long in the first place; a little-noted institutional side benefit of these nine-figure immunity deals that regulators so routinely cut with prosecution targets is that they insulate both the banks and their lax regulatory stewards from unwelcome public scrutiny. But even so, the public outrage stoking the British inquiries makes for an instructive contrast with America’s largely fatalist outlook on financial malfeasance. As Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osbourne announced in a recent speech on the LIBOR scandal before Parliament, “Fraud is a crime in ordinary business—why shouldn’t it be so in banking?”

Why, indeed? In the United States, the long-hapless Commodities Futures Trading Commission has been conducting its own years-long inquiry into LIBOR-fixing and has a grand jury reviewing potential criminal charges. But as Mr. Diamond well knows, these official investigations have a distinctly Potemkin feel in the States: At most, a fine is assessed, and a plea deal entered. Nothing as gauche  as an actual criminal prosecution ever dogs our scandal-plagued investment class, even though maximum-minimum sentences are standard fare in most jurisdictions when nonaffluent citizens commit their own repeat offenses, or run afoul of our draconian drug wars.

Even though England is a far more class-bound social order than ours is reputed to be, it’s clear at moments like this that the American polity has no real stomach for holding our financial overclass accountable to anyone. Indeed, our leaders have precious little real incentive to put the brakes on the stateside regime of banking impunity when financial titans can pull up stakes from their jurisdictions, taking both payrolls and donor rolls with them—even though the anemic condition of our credit and employment economies is largely the handiwork of that selfsame banking sector Better to shunt the whole business over to the largely captive regulatory system, which at least brokers its appointed fines and honors its appointed silence in somewhat decorous fashion. To really get to the bottom of something like the LIBOR cartel, you have to subject a whole culture of corruption to sustained scrutiny—and worse, to work out actual, enforceable measures to prevent it all from happening again. We have, it seems, gone in stunningly short time from a financial order deemed too big to fail to one that is simply too big to care about.

For collateral evidence of this trend, one need look no further than the wheezing machinery of the presidential race. Presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney clearly had banked (as it were) on widespread public indifference to financial niceties when he misleadingly claimed that his tenure as CEO at Bain Capital ended in 1999. So what if, as Mother Jones’ David Corn noted, SEC documents clearly listed him as CEO and 100 percent owner of the equity fund as late as 2002—well past the job-hemorrhaging Bain takeover of the GST steel mill in 2001, recently featured in a series of Obama attacks? Who reads SEC filings, let alone their supporting documentation? And until The Boston Globe sleuthed out the damning documentary record last week, Mr. Romney’s bet was bearing fruit; indeed, the same day The Globe story broke, Mr. Romney’s campaign released its own counterattack ad, seeking to refute the GST saga largely on the grounds that the entire deal went down at a time when Mr. Romney was no longer affiliated with Bain.

One little-noted casualty of the LIBOR scandal is Mr. Diamond’s public role as a Romney booster. Diamond had been a major overseas bundler of expat donations to the Romney campaign and was scheduled to host a July 27 fundraiser for Romney during the candidate’s trip to London for the 2012 Olympics. For obvious reasons, Diamond has had to relinquish that high-prestige gig as well. It’s a pity—the two men doubtless would have had a lot to talk about.

editorial@observer.com

Indeed, Newsroom, which Mr. Sorkin has tirelessly flogged in his own media interviews as a paean to the endangered idealism of the news business, comes bearing the none-too-subtle brief of reviving the apostles of the American intellect with fresh infusions of cultural and political power. The show’s opening set piece features Mr. Daniels delivering an unscripted jeremiad, in the great fictional tradition of Howard Beale, the “mad prophet of the airwaves” featured in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 news satire Network. Only where Peter Finch’s unhinged anchor offered a litany of searing political grievances, Mr. Daniels bemoans the passing of a genteel, high-achieving American meritocracy—a time when the idea of intelligence didn’t “make us feel inferior,” when the country went to war “for moral reasons,” and when it “cultivated the world greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy.” What’s more, he fulminates, “we were informed by great men, men who were revered.” Lest the show’s viewers forget this crucial point, the opening credits of Newsroom feature footage of the long-departed lions of the postwar network news scene: Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntley.

However, as is the case in most of Mr. Sorkin’s productions, these dazzlingly smart creatures fall into pat, pasteboard character arcs: They are either loyal or cunning, cynical or idealistic, clever or, well, cleverer. They are, in short, model American meritocrats—people who hew to the bedrock belief that an academic credential or a professional award is the most invaluable window into the human soul. In another of the show’s strangely lifeless confrontations, disgruntled senior producer Don (the cunning one!) seeks to discredit a distrusted incoming executive producer, bearing the echt-preppy name of McKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) with this curiously precise kiss-off: “She’s like a sophomore poli-sci major at Sarah Lawrence.” His rival senior producer Jim Harper (the loyal one!) one-ups him, though, by citing the two Peabody awards (and one battle wound) she earned covering the war in Afghanistan. It is without a doubt the whitest version of “the dozens” ever played—except, perhaps, for this priceless snatch of shouted dialogue from the bow-tied, dipsomaniacal network exec Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston): “I’m gonna beat the shit out of you; I don’t care how many protein bars you eat!”

Not even a grizzled on-the-job drunk is permitted to forget for a moment, in Sorkin-land, the American culture of self-disciplined high achievement.

With this kind of omnicompetent brilliance everywhere on display, it’s little wonder that Mr. Sorkin seems to think that the entire problem with TV news can be solved via a shift in format. Charlie Skinner believes that news can be great again if the network just gives it enough time and space to breathe, in an hourlong newsmagazine format, with gloriously exciting real-time reporting bringing it, just barely, in under deadline. “We just decided to,” he says of the media’s halcyon age of network news reporting, as though the wise men atop the Big Three’s news operations might just as easily have decided to cure cancer, or carry off a cup at Wimbledon.

Or, as Mr. Sorkin’s meritocratic fancy would have it, a more tightly focused, and properly motivated (idealistic!) body of valedictorians could report out the tangled, much-litigated saga of the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in, oh, 20 minutes or so. Mr. Sorkin shadowed several cable news organizations as part of his research, but not long enough to learn that the unglamorous work of investigative reporting involves much more than hanging up a prestigious credential and letting the plaudits roll serenely in. As news of the explosion on the BP rig comes across the wires, the savvy Harper—the loyal one, remember—works the phones and sizes up, in no time, the true environmental devastation in the offing. When McAvoy and McHale press him for his sources, he divulges that, yes, his former college roommate is a senior executive at BP, and his sister is placed in a sensitive spot high up on the Halliburton chain of command.

This is a risibly awful depiction of the activity of reporting, and not just because it conforms in every way to the smugly insulated social vision of Sorkinism. It so happens that throughout the BP spill crisis, I was a national news editor—at one of the online news outlets that Mr. Sorkin and his characters all gleefully despise on uninformed principle—and I can attest that family connections and school ties produced precisely zero worthwhile reporting on the catastrophe. (The only thing less plausible at that time would be turncoat executives at Halliburton and BP serving as primary sources on the disaster.) Indeed, for all the wall-to-wall coverage that TV news shops devoted to the BP-spun versions of the disaster, much of the best reporting came from unconnected, hard-working reporters on the ground, such as Mac McClelland with Mother Jones and (I am proud to say) Brett Michael Dykes, the spill reporter I supervised at Yahoo News.

But for Sorkin to grasp this essential point, he’d have to suspend, ever so briefly, his unquestioning allegiance to the world-changing excellence of the credentialed overclass. Much is made in the show of the inherent democratic value of newsgathering. “There’s nothing more important in a democracy than a well-informed electorate,” intones McHale—who was, of course, the daughter of Margaret Thatcher’s ambassador to the U.N. But in the sort of blinkered social order where citizen-viewers must be patiently tutored in the high-professional folkways of anchorman reverence, the struggle for democracy has already been waged and lost.

Meanwhile, progressive-minded commentators and political leaders drew obsessive attention to the first of these factors, noting that out-of-state Super PACs and national GOP organizations helped Governor Walker roll up more than a seven-fold funding advantage, pulling in nearly $30 million compared to something shy of $4 million for his opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. “If you have enough money, you can put out not only an alternate message,” lamented Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who chairs the Democratic Governors Association, “you can put out an alternate set of numbers, an alternate story, an alternate reality ... trying to convince everyone that the reason they’re not doing better is because school teachers have pensions.”

The influence of campaign cash is indeed a toxic and disfiguring force—but as Governor O’Malley himself went on to note, the recall vote faced other daunting obstacles, chief among them the procedural objection that Governor Walker shouldn’t have faced a recall in the first place. Even though his assault on public-sector unions was wildly unpopular—stoking dramatic mass protests outside the state Capitol the previous winter—some 60 percent of Wisconsin voters told pollsters that recall campaigns should be reserved for cases of ethical and/or criminal misconduct.

More fundamentally, though, doting on campaign cash or the strategic merits of the anti-Walker crusade changes the subject in the face of the true, distressing moral of the failed mobilization of a grassroots left in Wisconsin: the Potemkin façade of progressive politics in our age. National Democrats never really galvanized money or balloting power behind the recall, for the simple reason that the Democratic Party stopped serving as a persuasive advocate for wage-earning Americans about two decades ago. When unions bitterly contested Governor Walker’s ultimately successful bid to rein in collective bargaining among government employees, the Madison rallies had the look and feel of a bona fide economic uprising of the disenfranchised, akin to the spontaneous protests of the Occupy movement. So one might expect national Democrats to harness their wagon behind an energized corps of voters seeking to strike a blow for fundamental rights in the workplace—especially in a presidential election cycle providing precious little in the way of energizing economic progress. (For just the most recent current example, see President Obama’s stunning bid over the weekend to channel John McCain, circa September 2008, and pronounce that the American private sector is “doing fine”—news, certainly, to the 12.7 million or so Americans still unable to find work in it.)

Yet union campaigns and workplace representation count for very nearly nothing in the sanctums of national Democratic strategy. As early as 1992—the cycle in which Bill Clinton and his cohort of “third way” economic strategists shook off the alleged stigmas of the Democrats’ “anti-business” image—polled majorities began to identify the Democrats as the party of the rich. By the last presidential cycle, the evidence unambiguously supported that view: A 2009 USA Today analysis of Census data found that Democratic lawmakers represented 57 percent of households earning $200,000 or more in annual income; in 2005, the GOP had represented 55 percent of that income demographic. Small wonder that President Obama could rouse himself to back the Walker recall only long enough to send out a solitary, belated pro-Barrett tweet—a suitably distracted, digitized and managerial response to a historic material reversal in the cause of worker self-determination.

This shift simply punctuates the steady migration of the Democratic leadership class away from the party’s historic working-class base. Once he was in office, Clinton wasted little time in selling the interests of union Democrats down the river with the ratification of NAFTA and the erection of the executive branch’s current job-hemorrhaging protocols of free trade. Obama followed the same new Democratic bait-and-switch playbook in the early months of his presidency; after booking at least $200 million in union donations to his 2008 campaign, the president quietly shelved labor’s prime legislative goal: “card check” legislation to streamline organizing drives in workplaces, and thereby (so labor leaders hoped) to begin reversing the disastrous decades-long decline in private-sector union membership. Instead, Obama prioritized a health-care overhaul riddled with boondoggles for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries—a law that Democrats are now scared to highlight in their own campaign dossiers, even if the Supreme Court manages to uphold it later this month. Card check never even came up for a floor vote.

And in a political version of battered-spouse syndrome, unions largely played along with the strategy. Andy Stern, then the president of the 2.2-million-member Service Employees International Union, was the most frequent visitor to the White House during the height of the health-care battle in Congress. On one level, Mr. Stern made his own narrow political accommodation to the lobbyist-first ethos of the Democratic nomenklatura—the SEIU, which kicked in a cool $60 million to the 2008 Obama campaign all by itself, represents a good share of workers in the health-care industry. Still, it’s impossible to imagine, say, Charles and David Koch, the energy barons who’ve engineered their own multimillion-dollar backing for today’s conservative movement, sitting placidly by while Republican leaders announced that, while they very much appreciate the truckloads of coal and oil money the Kochs have backed into the loading docks, well, offshore drilling just can’t be a prime order of business before Congress these days.

Nevertheless, our commentariat, the Democratic Party elite and—most puzzling of all—organized labor itself continue faithfully reprising the pantomime fiction that the Democrats are the party of the toiling masses, arrayed against the expropriating classes. The real surprise in Wisconsin, in other words, wasn’t so much the magnitude of Governor Walker’s victory, or Mayor Barrett’s defeat; it was, rather, that at this late date, anyone expected the Democratic establishment to contribute anything more than a lousy Tweet to the cause.

Romney. (Getty)

It’s rare that the soulless machinery of the presidential campaign system emits a telltale creak, exposing the terrifying vacuity that lurks just beneath all the overheated  microprocessors on the motherboard. Yet on the eve of the holiday weekend, we were witness to just such a spectacle, in an interview that presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney granted to Time magazine’s politics correspondent Mark Halperin.

Early on in the proceedings, Mr. Halperin lobbed a simple procedural question Mr. Romney’s way: Why should a Romney administration tarry in its appointed mission to roll back the spending excesses of the Obama age? Why not, he wondered, “go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?”

But in his response, Mr. Romney gave away the whole sick game of Republican austerity-sloganeering: “Well, because, if you take a trillion dollars, for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5 percent. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.”

Got that? Mitt Romney, who is feverishly wooing the support of fiscal conservatives, conceded an obvious truth: that government spending stokes economic growth, in a broadly equitable fashion.

Mr. Romney’s reply drew no follow-up from Mr. Halperin, the most horse-race-addled and otiose member of our political press corps. But the candidate’s entirely sensible reply laid bare the great lie of the reigning economic consensus on the right. Deficit spending is not some mystically enervating drag on the American economy and, indeed, remains one of the surest stimulus measures on offer for the major slumps in demand and constrictions of credit that have kept growth so anemic over the past four grim years. Battered economies don’t much care where money comes from; money is fungible, as the economists like to say, and so a restorative jolt of the stuff needn’t claim any high-toned pedigree. The cash can be tapped from a federal agency or a drug cartel or a bloated hedge fund—so long as it courses through the weakened channels of commerce. Demonizing government spending during this sort of liquidity crisis is a bit like a hemorrhaging medical patient declining a blood transfusion because the original donor was blond.

And yet, that counter-empirical reflex continues to be the central creed of austerity-minded conservatives. For ready confirmation, look no further than the wearily familiar spectacle of the GOP House leadership threatening to revive the lunatic 2011 showdown over the debt ceiling—or the still more baroque and pointless showdown ahead over the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

All you really need to grasp the bankrupt logic behind the tax-slashing austerity program is a basic acquaintance with the modern history of the upper-bracket tax cut. The supply-side faithful routinely disclaim any fallout from tax cuts aimed at the upper brackets by citing a bastardized brand of Keynesianism that dare not speak its name (while, of course, also deriding anyone pointing out the innate unfairness of such giveaways as an un-American “class warrior”). A rising tide lifts all boats, the standard shibboleth here goes; create incentives for the heroic entrepreneurs who throng to the investing class, and presto: a broad-based prosperity inevitably ensues.

Even more inconveniently for the supply-siders, the modern history of the upper-class tax cut is a parable of Keynesian deficit spending run amok. When Ronald Reagan pushed through his first battery of upper-bracket tax cuts in 1981, they blew an entirely predictable gaping hole into the heart of the federal budget. So in the following year, the patron saint of the modern tax-cutting right signed legislation to raise taxes once more, so as to keep pumping money through the spiraling U.S. defense budget. Then he did it again.

The “Reagan revolution” in economic affairs represented, in pure structural terms, no kind of revolution at all: It was the classic Keynesian formula of raising marginal tax rates while sending massive outflows of government cash into the broader economy through the defense budget. Liberals during the Reagan years decried the expansion of the Cold War military, but the money didn’t care what agenda it was serving—and the on-again, off-again tax-slashing profile of the Reagan Treasury Department mattered even less.

Nevertheless, at nearly every Republican primary debate during this bleak primary season, Newt Gingrich would wind up his standard refrain of Reagan adoration, insisting that the Gipper had midwifed an unparalleled run of prosperity due to his heroic record of slashing away at taxes. All the other econo-cons on the debate stage would echo the same stock untruth—or else nod sagely in assent, together with assembled press worthies presiding over the proceedings, mini-Halperins all.

And the ironies don’t stop there. As Matt Yglesias and other commentators have noted, the economic advisers of the George W. Bush White House made the pitch for their 2001 package of upper-bracket tax cuts in explicitly Keynesian terms. Once the asset bubble of the tech sector met its long-overdue doom in 2001, the Bush team explained that their tax giveaways were the swiftest corrective on offer for the slumping investment economy—in other words, they were selling a structural formula of deficit spending as a way of tacking through a business downturn, in exactly the same terms that defenders of the 2009 Obama stimulus plan did. The Keynesian profile of the Bush program was forcefully multiplied with the addition of two wars on the federal budget line—along with the massive entitlement expansion known as the Medicare Part D plan.

Under the cover of its opportunistic exploitation of the Nasdaq collapse, the Bush White House was actually enacting a dramatic upward redistribution of wealth over the course of a decade—a program that, so far, the Obama White House has carelessly rubber-stamped for its own short-term political gain. Thus the cottage industry of Keynesian denialism has become a curious D.C.-based asset bubble of its own. Only this bubble seems likely to expand indefinitely, unless our myopic leadership class somehow summons the nerve to raise marginal tax rates.

The wizards of modern brand management have nothing on the obstreperous group of warrior intellectuals known as the neoconservatives. After all, the neocon movement is closing in on its fifth decade (its precise date of origin, like many of its core doctrines and streams of influence, remains maddeningly elusive)—but it still retains a prefix that signifies novelty. And like a good viral marketing campaign, the brand seems to have a knack for being simultaneously everywhere and nowhere: Here inveighing against the excesses of 60’s-era black nationalism and student radicalism, there cozying up to the culture-war broadsides of the Christian right—and of course, most notoriously, stage-managing the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, in smug defiance of reliable intelligence reports, international law and coherent policy making.

Jacob Heilbrunn, who began his own political odyssey as a neocon sympathizer and continues to work as an editor at the influential neoconservative foreign policy journal The National Interest, has sharply chronicled the movement’s curious saga in They Knew They Were Right. Unlike many overheated critiques, Mr. Heilbrunn’s study takes a long, nuanced measure of the neocon policy revolution. Which is not by any means to say his assessment of its political reflexes and disastrous legacies is subdued: “The neoconservatives have quite possibly not only destroyed conservatism as a political force for years to come,” he writes, “but also created an Iraq syndrome that tarnishes the idea of intervention for several decades”—much as an earlier circle of policy makers found their plans to project U.S. power abroad hamstrung by the “Vietnam syndrome,” a skittishness that the neocons of the Reagan era, ironically enough, did much to repeal.

This story abounds with ironies, beginning with the fact that many of the founding fathers of neoconservatism started out as fire-breathing Trotskyists, schooled in ideological brawling at New York’s City College in the 1930’s and 40’s. Both of the lions of the movement—National Interest founder Irving Kristol and former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz—share that birthright, as do many further-flung acolytes, from National Interest editor emeritus Owen Harries (a Welsh socialist back in the day), right up through the most celebrated recent recruit, former Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens.

The Trotskyist back story is one of the hoariest tales in modern American intellectual history—thanks in part to the self-admiring labors of Messrs. Podhoretz and Kristol. But as Mr. Heilbrunn rightly notes, the staying power of the neoconservative tendency arises from something deeper than the formative beliefs of its leading ideologues. At bottom, he argues, the neocon persuasion is less about ideology than mindset—“a mindset,” he writes, “that has been decisively shaped by the Jewish immigrant experience, by the Holocaust, and the twentieth-century struggle against totalitarianism.”

With this broader cultural outlook in mind, Mr. Heilbrunn relates the neocons’ erratic trek in and out of power as a variation on “the ancient biblical narrative: exodus, the wilderness years, and redemption, followed by a return to exile.” It’s an incisive approach, less steeped than previous studies in the prevailing terms of political combat (See Peter Steinfels’ The Neoconservatives and Sidney Blumenthal’s The Rise of the Counter-Establishment.)

Mr. Heilbrunn’s approach also allows him to engage directly one of the more incendiary questions about neoconservatism: its predominately Jewish identity, and its hard-line support of Israel. Conspiracy-mongers from Patrick Buchanan to Lyndon LaRouche have made much of this connection, which makes sober discussion of the Jewishness of neocon circles nearly impossible. Indeed, it’s an issue that neocon propagandists such as David Frum, Richard Perle and David Brooks have shamelessly exploited to tout their victimhood—particularly, Mr. Heilbrunn notes, as the messianic errand in Iraq grew evermore chaotic and deadly: “The neoconservatives tried to turn the anti-Semitic charge into a general brief on behalf of their cause. Like good prophets, they wanted to confirm their ‘rightness.’”

The Jewish profile of the neoconservative movement is significant, according to Mr. Heilbrunn, because it stokes fierce “status anxiety” as well as “ethnic resentment.” From the outset, when Podhoretz, Kristol & Co. stormed the battlements of WASP institutions such as the Ivy League and the Washington foreign policy elite, the neocons have been animated by a “sense of embattlement and loneliness, of foes and enemies everywhere,” directly fueling “the stridency and militancy” of movement rhetoric, Mr. Heilbrunn observes. At the same time, though, this confrontational style masks “a seething rage at the government bureaucracy and social elites.” It is, Mr. Heilbrunn argues, a Jewish intellectual “version of the anxiety of influence—or rather, the lack of it.”

It’s true you never have to look far in the sprawling neocon corpus to find this mind-set on belligerent display, from Mr. Podhoretz’s landmark memoir Making It (1967) to such unhinged war apologias as William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan’s The War Over Iraq (2003). The idea that they’re a prophetic remnant is also clearly part of what makes them so tenacious: Neocons view defeat and marginalization as virtual confirmation of their fidelity to the movement’s founding wisdom. What prophet, after all, is honored in his own country?

That founding wisdom proves fungible in changing circumstances. Neocon apparatchiks in the Ford and Reagan White Houses (Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams, among others) were able to harness the broad outlines of the neocon case for Israel—an embattled U.S. ally surrounded by enemies bent on its destruction—to the analysis of the Soviet threat (in the Ford White House’s so-called “Team B” effort to collect intelligence outside the channels of the CIA, a clear forerunner to similar Bush White House efforts to document a phantom Iraqi WMD stockpile) and to the illicit funding of anticommunist counterinsurgencies in Central America (which cost then Under Secretary of State Abrams a felony conviction for lying to Congress). A corollary of the victim-centric neoconservative worldview, it seems, is that movement adherents are always presumed to be more or less justified in making up the rules as they go along. Consider the career of Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, “the Oliver North of the second Bush administration.”

In the run-up to the Iraq war, all the trademark neocon convictions converged: belief in a special saving understanding of history’s true course; a utopian foreign policy “idealism”; a sweeping (though paradoxical) sense of privileged victimhood; and a reflex branding of dissenters as appeasers and worse. As post-9/11 chronicles show, internal White House debate over the Iraq invasion—promoted most conspicuously by Mr. Cheney and his many neocon henchmen—was cursory-to-nonexistent. Iraq had to be the next looming threat on the horizon, just as 70’s-era intelligence demonstrating a manageable Soviet arms threat had to be mistaken.

And so the neocon infrastruc
ture swung fatally into gear. Mr. Libby helped choreograph the Office of Special Plans and its fanciful efforts to end-run intelligence reports indicating no imminent WMD threat in Iraq. Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, captained a similarly delusional unit, called the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which uncritically rubber-stamped the ravings of the Chalabi-sponsored “Curveball” informant (who turned out to be a preposterous fake). Irving Kristol’s son William, at the helm of the influential Murdoch-published Weekly Standard, gave this hokum the imprimatur of journalistic fact, thanks to the endlessly credulous reporting of staff writer Stephen Hayes, who to this day insists that Saddam Hussein was complicit in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

After a decade of hunting for credible new enemies in the wake of the Soviet empire’s collapse (China had been the lackluster candidate throughout the 90’s), having acceded to its apex of power in the Bush White House, the neocon movement produced a fraudulent war, in the grand tradition of James Knox Polk and William Randolph Hearst.

Which, in Mr. Heilbrunn’s telling, has produced a crowning irony: Now that they have won the day, they’ve engineered their own political disgrace, the “return to exile.” Except that the movement being what it is—and Washington being what it is—the neocons’ fate is something less than biblical.

Indeed, Mr. Heilbrunn finds the absence of accountability “astonishing.” He ticks off the many careers that sail on unsullied through the open sewers of Bush-era Washington: Robert Kagan, one of the loudest cheerleaders for the war in Iraq, still columnizes in The Washington Post; Eliot Cohen, champion of the “World War IV” case for an attack on Iran, now serves as an adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Several of Mr. Heilbrunn’s subjects have recently failed even further upward: William Kristol, despite his deranged and truth-challenged track record as an editor and commentator, is now firmly atop the opinion-making food chain as a New York Times Op-Ed columnist; Norman Podhoretz, who has been perhaps more egregiously mistaken about a wider range of policy issues than any pundit in our time, is now in the terrifying foreign-policy brain trust of presidential hopeful Rudolph Giuliani; and John Podhoretz, Norman’s son, has his dad’s old post at the helm of Commentary. “Unlike the Vietnam-era generation of Democrats,” Mr. Heilbrunn marvels, “the necons show no signs of remorse for the disaster they’ve created.”

The great virtue of They Knew They Were Right is that Jacob Heilbrunn shows, in a persuasive, wide-ranging analysis, how this surreal brand of conservative self-deception has become the conventional wisdom of our political world. Now it’s up to us to heed Mr. Heilbrunn’s message, and ensure there are consequences when we know we’ve been lied to.

Chris Lehmann is a regular contributor to The Observer. He can be reached at clehmann@observer.com.

Bhutto’s death marks the most sobering setback for the U.S. policy elite because it points up the absence of any coherent policy in the critical majority-Muslim nation, now the third-leading recipient of U.S. military aid, behind Israel and Egypt.

Ever since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the Bush White House has let American policy chime in unison with the interests of Pakistan’s strongman leader Pervez Musharraf—whom candidate George W. Bush famously failed to name in a 2000 campaign pop quiz on world affairs shortly after Musharraf came to power in a bloodless coup. Indeed, the upcoming January Pakistan election—which may be delayed several weeks as Bhutto’s son and widower succeed her as joint leaders of the Pakistan Peoples Party—marked the first significant U.S. deviation from its no-strings-attached commitment to shoring up General Musharraf’s increasingly authoritarian regime. State Department representatives let General Musharraf know that he would be expected to minimize tampering with this month’s Pakistani presidential ballot—which even in the best of times falls significantly short of “free and fair” status—while also relinquishing his leadership position in the always influential Pakistani military.

These were modest policy departures. But even so, observers of the region note, it was a tough sell to White House hardliners.

“The decision to try to be the broker of a deal between Benazir and Pervez was a divisive question in the White House,” says Bruce Riedel, a 30-year C.I.A. veteran who served as a South Asian national security adviser to the administrations of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and now is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “The National Security Council and the vice president’s office had to be convinced under a lot of pressure to come around to this, and I suspect that their hearts were never fully in it.”

One stark measure of this lassitude was the clear alarm sounded by a pair of suicide-bomb attacks on pro-Bhutto crowds greeting the opposition candidate as she headed to the Karachi airport after a major rally in support of her candidacy. After the attack—which claimed the lives of more than 140 Pakistanis—Texas Democratic Representative Shelia Jackson Lee, who co-chairs the House Pakistan caucus, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice imploring the United States to pursue more active security measures in concert with the United Nations to ensure the safety of Bhutto, General Musharraf and other Pakistani political leaders. Senators Joseph Biden, Patrick Leahy and Joseph Lieberman sent a similar letter directly to General Musharraf—a legislative overture that wouldn’t be necessary if a more robust White House commitment to the security of Bhutto and other candidates were in place.

“Over the last two or three months, we’ve been crying ourselves hoarse to the United States and Musharraf to provide Madame Bhutto with more security,” says a U.S. representative of the P.P.P. who requested anonymity due to Pakistan’s volatile political state. “There were intimidation and harassment happening every night. In the middle of the night, I’d get an e-mail from one of her rallies saying there was full security on hand—and then, a few hours later, I’d hear that all the security was gone. These harassment tactics had been going on for months—and for God’s sake, this is a former prime minister we’re talking about.”

One can only hope that General Musharraf and his U.S. backers will step up security measures as Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, and son, Bilawal Zardari, succeed to the P.P.P. leadership for the coming elections.

“The chance that this wasn’t going to happen at some point was small,” said Patrick Lang, former head of Middle East and South Asian intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency. “Pakistan is a killing place. It was created out of an unstable mixture of people united by their varying ferocity over Islam.

“A great danger for Musharraf now comes from the fact that we insist that he be something—and that Pakistan be something—that they both are not,” Mr. Lang said. “I heard that idiot [Chris] Matthews say on his show the other night that the majority of Pakistanis are both moderate and secular. If we’re going to squeeze Musharraf hard to be something he isn’t, and can’t be, his position becomes ever more fragile. And an army coup or a successful assassination of Musharraf becomes, I think, a real possibility.”

While not all observers share Mr. Lang’s fatalism, there’s a growing sense that the country’s long-standing history of corruption and political violence may be veering past the point of no return.

“There never used to be any suicide bombings in Pakistan,” said the P.P.P. representative. “Yes, there’s been political violence, but it’s never been at this level, ever.”

Nor is the Pakistani Army—the source of General Musharraf’s now-waning legitimacy—immune from the spread of Islamist terrorism. Pakistan’s elite Inter-Services Intelligence have long collaborated with Taliban and Al Qaeda forces—the Taliban, indeed, owes its institutional origins to the I.S.I.’s early care and feeding. And now regular troops are starting to bow to the influence of extremists.

“What we’re seeing in the Pakistani army is unprecedented levels of desertion,” said Mr. Riedel. “You’ve got whole groups of Pakistani troops surrendering en masse when they come into contact with Taliban and Islamist forces.

“Pakistan is becoming a failed state,” Mr. Riedel said, “though it’s not yet there. A lot of the blame for that lies with the Pakistanis, but George W. Bush can’t escape some of that responsibility. We’ve been standing by this dictator for so long who has undermined civil society and supported extremists that we’ve left ourselves with few other choices.” As a result, he says, “the two most unpopular people in Pakistan today are General Musharraf and President Bush.”

That doesn’t exactly bode well for Bush’s successor, especially given the now lavish scale of American aid to the Musharraf regime—much of it scarcely tied to the fight against Islamic extremism. The United States “has been giving money for developing targets for the Pakistani Air Force and the Navy,” the P.P.P. representative says. “Well, the last time I looked, Al Qaeda had no air force or navy.”

Such lax oversight is all too characteristic, the representative says, of a White House seeking largely to wish away its own policy dilemmas and contradictions. “On the one hand, the U.S. says, ‘We don’t want to meddle ourselves in another country’s internal politics.’ But at the same time, they’ve sent this regime $10 billion over the past eight years. If you’ve bought the leverage, then why aren’t you using it?”

The Democrats now masterminding the 110th Congress, after all, stunned observers last November by sweeping into majorities in both the House and Senate on vows to end the dismal U.S. engagement in Iraq and bring desperately needed honesty and transparency to government. Little more than a year later, Nancy Pelosi’s House and Harry Reid’s Senate have, after much righteous huffing and puffing, rolled over on all the White House’s war-funding measures, failing to approve any timeline for a troop withdrawal from Iraq. The latest Congressional timeline appeared under the magisterial title, “The Orderly and Responsible Iraq Redeployment Appropriations Act.” But after the House passed it, the Senate proved neither orderly nor responsible enough to defeat a cloture motion. So after entertaining more than a dozen legislative proposals for exit strategies and timelines, the Democratic 110th has functioned in exactly the same fashion as its Republican predecessors—the only difference being that the G.O.P. majorities moved war-funding measures with the alacrity of short-order cooks, whereas Ms. Pelosi’s Democrats seem to favor the slow food movement.

By her own admission, Ms. Pelosi underestimated how deeply her Republican colleagues were invested in the continued occupation of Iraq. At a recent press conference, the speaker marveled that they hadn’t “shared the view of so many of our people that we needed a new direction in Iraq”; that in fact Republicans “like” the war, politically speaking—and so she’s reluctantly concluded “that this is not just George Bush’s war. This is the war of Republicans in Congress.”
As is typical of Beltway news cycles, Ms. Pelosi’s comments sparked a meaningless furor over the idea of her loyal opposition liking the war. And so—fortunately for her—she had to issue a mild clarification, permitting the whole thing to blow over before anyone gave much thought to how dunderheaded the substance of this appraisal was. Surely no other recent speaker assumed, coming into power, that the majority party would automatically win consent from the new minority party solely on the grounds that “so many of our people” would nudge them that way. How had Ms. Pelosi been occupying herself in 2002, when Karl Rove’s campaign machine used the mythic threat of a WMD-armed Iraq to cruise to historic pickups in a midterm cycle? Had she napped through the gruesome 9/11 mournography of the G.O.P.’s 2004 New York convention?

Of course “this is the war of Republicans in Congress”; it’s how many of them managed to hang on to their jobs. Expecting that dynamic to magically change based on the ’06 midterm results is tantamount to making the voters do the Democratic leadership’s job. Apparently, Ms. Pelosi thinks that the shiny ’06 mandate functions as a get-out-of-conference card that will spare them the hard work of arm-twisting and deal-brokering to win some progress toward a pullout—and facing up to the hard political consequences of getting an actual troop withdrawal on track. Even Dick Cheney, who for all his executive branch blood lust remains a close student of House power plays, recently told a trio of interviewers from the Politico that he’d been astonished at the failure of the Democrats to wield any “big stick” in the Iraq funding battles. “I’m frankly surprised at why, after all of the efforts they’ve made to try to hook up various provisions on Iraq to the spending bill, they’ve been unsuccessful.”

Meanwhile, as major party leaders have been professing all this surprise at each other, the all-too-familiar appropriations on the Hill grind on as they always have. Yes, Congress did enact ballyhooed new disclosure rules to bring more of the grisly practice of earmarking—i.e., the last-minute introduction of parochial spending projects likely to enhance an incumbent lawmaker’s reelection prospects into the parliamentary clusterfuck known as the appropriations process. But that’s done nothing to slow the brisk trade in earmarking—especially for appropriations subcommittee lords such as Pennsylvania Democrat Jack Murtha and Democrats who narrowly took seats from the G.O.P. side last cycle. As my CQ colleague Jonathan Allen has reported, the Appropriations Committee fielded more than 33,000 earmarks request from lawmakers this year. But even Congress can only sluice so much pork into awaiting home-district barrels; the Appropriations Committee only summoned the scratch for one-fifth of this year’s earmark requests. When the House Appropriations chairman made the impolitic suggestion of meeting the White House’s proposed discretionary spending cap of $933 billion by simply pulling the plug on all pending earmarks, he was all but hooted off the stage—by Congressional leaders of both parties. Indeed, just as the appropriations melee was heaving into its final phase, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell—a lawmaker who’s never met an industry PAC or special-interest boondoggle he didn’t adore—was already airing campaign ads in his home state of Kentucky touting his prowess in pulling down some $200 million in earmarks.

Mr. McConnell’s chief enforcer, the outgoing minority whip, Trent Lott, tried a bit more subtly to depict Obey’s proposal as an affront to singing-senator-style chamber decorum. “All it would do is make people mad and delay everything,” Mr. Lott pouted. And Ms. Pelosi is falling incoherently into line as it seems only she can. As Congress prepared on Monday to hit most every item on the White House’s wish list—including a likely Senate amendment for $70 billion in unconditional war funding, the speaker burbled that the appropriations package “will meet the standards we talked about, which is the president’s number, our priorities.” In other words: Whatever, we got the system juiced for the next election cycle, and put off any real fiscal reckonings into the next fiscal year.
And they say that bipartisanship is dead?

You’d make coy campaign overtures to religious denominations that couldn’t officially endorse you. Point at the lurid God-baiting work of a liberal pop culture, a liberal media and a liberal university scene. Hotly denounce the activist courts, and their bids to treat abortion and euthanasia as counterculture party favors, while de-Christianizing the schools and the public square. Introduce symbolic variations as needed: NEA-funded blasphemies in the museums, gay marriage as mortal threat to civilization, secular tolerance as coddling of “Islamofascists,” the special Congressional session on the Terri Schiavo case, the “war on Christmas,” etc.

Then, come election day, reel in the credulous ballots of evangelical voters, ignore most of their agenda while in office, only to rediscover it each fresh new election cycle. Repeat until you’ve achieved a near-permanent majority—or the rapture happens.

This time out, however, the procedure is much more dicey. The 2008 presidential field offers precious few viable standard-bearers for the religious right’s movement voters. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith is a huge obstacle for many evangelicals—a problem he hopes to dispel with a major speech on his faith later this week. And the mistress-chauffering, pro-choice, soft-on-gay-rights Rudy Giuliani is a nonstarter for most self-styled values voters, to put things mildly.

Hence former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s sudden lurch to the top of the polls in Iowa—a state so rife with conservative Christian voters that it went to certifiable lunatic Pat Robertson in the 1988 caucus season.

Recent polling in New Hampshire shows him closing fast on longtime Granite State poll leader Mr. Romney. And Huckabee campaign hands are increasingly sanguine about his chances in South Carolina—the big, evangelically rich portal to the Southern phase of the primaries, and the subsequent Super Tuesday blowout.

“The conservative Christian voters in South Carolina weren’t initially all that interested in Huckabee,” recalls former G.O.P. Governor David Beasley, speaking from behind the wheel of his pickup as he toured the back reaches of his farm. “They were still sitting on the sidelines; a few made commitments to Romney and other candidates.”

But now that Mr. Huckabee’s gaining serious ground, he says, “they see a candidate who shares their views, and they’ve moving over to him lock, stock and barrel.”

It’s true that Mr. Romney has long since locked up many of the state’s conservative consultants—“the good, the bad and the filthy” in Mr. Beasley’s estimation. But thanks to a wildly popular Web-based Chuck Norris endorsement and generally sympathetic media coverage of the campaign, “the governor’s message is now resonating through the Internet and the normal channels of the Christian political community,” Mr. Beasley says.

Like a growing number of evangelical leaders, Mr. Huckabee’s disposed to accept the idea—still bizarrely controversial on the right—that global warming stems from human activity, together with the corollary view that humans should play some role in reversing it. He’s a vocal critic of mandatory minimum drug sentencing, and other excesses of a “revenge-based corrections system.” He hasn’t revised that position rightward, even though his own Arkansas record has given him (or, more accurately, his opponents) a Willie Horton-style poster boy for soft-on-crime charges, convicted rapist Wayne DuMond.

And even though Mr. Huckabee is increasingly talking like a Tancredo-like immigration bully in the primaries, he also leavens that stand with McCain-style reminders that immigrants shouldn’t be punished for their honest aspirations—let alone see their children demonized for their parents’ alleged trespasses. He’s opposed President Bush’s veto of the Democratic Congress’s expanded State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and even called for an investigation of Mr. Bush and other senior White House officials based on Scott McClellan’s reported revelations that false information about the Valerie Plame case originated from the White House’s very highest echelons.

But where Mr. Huckabee appears to pose the greatest discomfort for the Republican establishment is on economic grounds. He is given to denouncing globalization’s hardships on the campaign stump, and raised taxes 21 times in Little Rock (while also, he’s quick to point out, cutting them more than 90 times)—lifting the state out of a deficit and into a surplus in the bargain. That record has earned him the undying enmity of the antitax Club for Growth; the libertarian Cato Institute has given him a “D” grade based on his Arkansas fiscal record.

Still, the party’s business wing can’t launch a preemptive anti-Huckabee strike because it, too, is largely decoupled from the old G.O.P. governing coalition.

Grover Norquist, who as head of Americans for Tax Reform is the de facto policy pope of the supply-side right, has pointedly refrained from joining in on the anti-Huckabee assaults mounted by the Club for Growth and allied columnists like Robert Novak and Jonah Goldberg. Mr. Norquist recently told David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network that he looked kindly upon Mr. Huckabee’s centerpiece tax reform—institution of the national retail “fair tax”—even though the plan is sketchy, likely regressive and scarcely the vehicle to overpower and replace the I.R.S., as Mr. Huckabee claims it to be.

True, Mr. Huckabee has been more accommodating of Mr. Norquist than the group he likes to call “the Club for Greed”—he’s lately signed on to the ATR pledge to introduce no new tax increases from the White House. But it’s at least as striking that Mr. Norquist—best known for his pledge to shrink the state until it could be drowned in a bathtub—seems barely to blanch at a recidivist tax hiker like Mr. Huckabee. That could well mean that the reigning orthodoxies in the G.O.P. coalition are poised to switch places.

“As long as you could depend on the big shots in the Christian right to drink the Kool-Aid on taxes and all the rest of it, did you really give a shit about abortion?” says Mark Silk, author of the landmark study Spiritual Politics and professor of religion and public life at Trinity College. “There’s been some chatter from the left on the shifting field” on the Republican side, Mr. Silk continues. “They say, ‘Well, this proves all along that it’s the money guys in the G.O.P. coalition who control the thing.’ But I think that deeply fails to understand the nature of the Republican coalition. Yeah, there are the money guys, but then there are the people who have the votes. You’re not talking about symmetrical coalition partners.” Put another way: Should Mike Huckabee continue gaining ground in this unsettled primary season, the disenchanted evangelical set could be dispensing a whole new brand of Koo
l-Aid.

For George W. Bush, “the speech was the thing,” writes Michael Gerson. “He used major speeches to push his own policy processes for new ideas; to clarify his thinking as he edited; to announce his commitments in serious detail; and to drive the news of the day.”

Like much of the fawning insider anecdotage collected in Mr. Gerson’s new book—indeed, like the book’s sonorous title—this sounds at first like an agreeable virtue, until you start to consider just what the writer is actually saying. What, for example, does it mean to “push … policy processes” in the hope of fleshing out new ideas? Shouldn’t the ideas be in place before policy processes are pushed, so that the pushers have a basic sense of what they’re up to? Shouldn’t the time for clear thinking come before a chief executive edits, not as he careens through the text with his blue pencil?

Sadly, there’s no reason to doubt the substance of Mr. Gerson’s rather mush-mouthed claim. Even casual observers of the Bush presidency know that it’s largely driven by sloganeering—not just the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, but all sorts of other glib formulations, from the catchphrase-masquerading-as-legislation known as “No Child Left Behind” (and its allied talking point, “the soft bigotry of low expectations”) to the White House’s “ABC” global AIDS prescription: “Abstinence, Be faithful, use Condoms.”

And Mr. Gerson, the former chief White House speechwriter lately employed as the 400th conservative political columnist for The Washington Post, is not about to let his readers forget about the many transporting passages in the many major speeches he drafted for Mr. Bush.

Heroic Conservatism is most strikingly a heroic act of self-promotion. It follows Mr. Gerson as he composes speech after speech, from the millennial “freedom”-based foreign policy agenda outlined in the president’s second Inaugural Address to the urgent post-9/11 address to both houses of Congress—“a heroic effort,” Mr. Gerson writes, before qualifying himself in a burst of unconvincing self-effacement: “if striking computer keys in a quiet room can ever be called heroic.”

In the midst of all this oratorical drama, Mr. Gerson pauses to admire the heroic lineage of his erstwhile boss. In adumbrating the tradition of foreign-policy idealism, George W. Bush is in the lineage of Truman, Kennedy and Reagan; in coordinating his Iraq war strategy with Tony Blair, he is a latter day F.D.R. (to, yet more absurdly, Blair’s Churchill); in advancing the Declaration of Independence’s pledge of universal equality, he’s an heir to Martin Luther King Jr.

Mainly, though, Mr. Bush is cut from the same cloth as the G.O.P.’s founding leader, Abraham Lincoln (conveniently pictured in statue form on the cover of Heroic Conservatism): His 2000 campaign position on abortion rights, stressing shifts in cultural attitudes over legal absolutism, was “sophisticated, Lincolnian.” And since Lincoln was attacked by waspish journalists for using explicit religious themes in his second inaugural, so, too, is our 43rd president. “This kind of controversy seems to be the fate of all moral principle expressed in public affairs,” Mr. Gerson sighs in stoic resignation.

THERE’S A POLITICAL a political argument of sorts buried under this heap of executive-wing self-regard, but it emerges fully only in the final chapter. He argues that the G.O.P., by turning away from high-minded interventionism and appearing to reject a passionate commitment to social justice and reform that “mainly comes from religious faith,” is in danger of undermining the heroic legacy that George Bush has erected for the conservative movement. (Too bad that the Declaration of Independence, the text Mr. Gerson most loves to cite in connection with Mr. Bush’s passion for social justice, is the work of a deist.)

Mr. Gerson’s account justly stresses initiatives for which the Bush White House hasn’t received sufficient credit—chiefly its Africa AIDS program and the broader aim of promoting democracy around the world (though the resurrection of this objective would be a long shot for either party, given the botched occupation of Iraq). In the main, however, Mr. Gerson can make his case only by setting it up against absurdly broad caricatures of the administration’s opponents. He grossly distorts, for example, the anti-foundationalist philosophy of the late neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty (his favorite straw man stand-in for “liberalism” and its hateful relativist cast of mind, even though Rorty represented a political persuasion accounting for perhaps one-quarter of the subscription base of Dissent magazine): Mr. Gerson wrongly contends that Rorty’s ideas amount to an outright rejection of social constraints derived from “truth or morality.” In an even more counter-empirical vein, Mr. Gerson insists—without producing even a shred of anecdotal evidence—that “students and faculty” at American universities reject the Declaration of Independence as “a text written by dead white males” and that “few” prestigious academics would “accept the existence of a moral truth that applies to all cultures.”

In other words, for all his righteous evocation of faith and idealism, Michael Gerson is flogging the long-dead horse of 90’s-era culture-war alarmism. In that respect—as in many others—Heroic Conservatism reads like a 300-page George Bush campaign speech. Let it go gently into the night, unmourned.