Shame and the New Politics of No Accountability

Most of the Republican Party’s behavior on the national stage (this includes the Trump phenomenon, though I’m going to try really hard not to make this piece about him) defies a conventional wisdom that is rooted not in politics, but in physics: Actions have reactions.

Once upon a time, politicians who did a thing—usually a bad thing—were subject to the consequences of doing that thing. That thing could be big—like perjury—or it could be small, like a verbal gaffe or a PR stunt gone wrong. Shame was a controlling mechanism in American politics: many people noticed the bad thing, and their unified reaction to it translated to consequences personal, professional, or electoral for the offender (and sometimes his or her allies, too).

But suddenly the shame mechanism appears to be all but broken. An improbable claim, in the age of the internet outrage machine and an unrelenting tide of (mostly bullshit) thinkpieces insisting that the new PC culture is coming to strangle us all. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that people don’t suffer consequence for actions—empirically, social media has accelerated our destruction of those we judge (just ask Dr. Palmer). But politicians—and particularly Republicans—appear to be paradoxically exempt from this weaponized societal guilt, and things as fundamental as our standard of governance are feeling the effects.

Three particular factors are driving this problem. The first is that politicians have increasingly narrow constituencies and media channels that amplify their version of events in a crisis. Alarmingly few congressional districts are truly in play because of how party affiliation is distributed across or concentrated between gerrymandered lines, and people are of course more likely to accept the commentary of an increasing number of ideological news sources and echo chambers that they already agree with. I posit that this trend is worse on the right than on the left, though what few friends I have on the other side of the aisle might reasonably argue it is at least on par for both parties.

Victimhood culture, by contrast, is not. There has been many a Trump piece written on the fundamental role that anger and resentment now play in the minds of so many Republican voters and elected officials. The majority sees itself as persecuted at every turn for fear of what they have left to lose, and these feelings express themselves in an outrageous range of activities to include cheering on outsider candidates, coming to the passionate defense of the faux-besieged, and insisting that the War on Christmas is a thing.

Lastly—and here’s where the liberals are surely guilty—is a fundamental disconnect between the thoughts and feelings of beltway insiders and the thoughts and feelings of people who vote. People within the system obsess over the process rather than the end result, and often times, folks can’t even be bothered to care much about the end result in the first place. I’m not arguing in favor of the low information voter theory here so much as suggesting that details as varied as ‘who’s to blame for x problem’ or ‘how did we arrive at y crisis’ are perceived very differently by folks inside and outside of DC.

Let’s take the last factor first, because an illustrative example is an issue near and dear to my heart. Once upon a time, the junior Senator from Arkansas decided that he and his party, rather than the president, should take the reins of U.S. foreign policy. Sen. Tom Cotton proceeded to pen the mullahs a letter explaining that “President” Obama’s negotiations were not the end-all be-all of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Iran (they were), and that any deal that he reached with them would surely be overturned by the next commander-in-chief (it won’t be).

Beltway insiders (here I include myself, charitably, among their numbers) clutched our pearls and gasped. The move was likened to treason by way of obscure 18^th century laws and declared “unprecedented” by no less than the Senate Historian. What we failed to consider in our calculus was that no one in the much-mythologized Real America gives a good god damn what the Senate Historian thinks. Cotton plugged along with his efforts to derail the deal—an effort we successfully denied only by moving beyond our own arcane concerns about the craft of diplomacy and trumpeting a different, and more effective, message. (Another post for another day.)

None is a more instructive lesson in victimhood culture than the case of Bill O’Reilly. As it came to pass, O’Reilly was, more or less, a liar; his tenure of war reporting and the danger it posed to his self was exaggerated. O’Reilly’s first response to the attack was machismo and vehement denial, but the victimhood complex soon took over for him. If the liberal media was attacking him and the liberal media was always wrong, the base reasoned, then O’Reilly must be right! A distrust of media, expert consensus, and elected officials only furthers a cause in the minds of the paranoid and angry when that sinister infrastructure unites to call out (read: persecute) one of their own.

You’ll notice, also, the conundrum that this leaves those on the left to face. Brian Williams also lied about being in danger during a war; his lie was objectively more egregious than O’Reilly’s, but the principle was the same. Yet for the sake of intellectual honesty, the media attacked him as well—to great (and I guess righteous?) effect. The filthy cynics among us wonder why we should eat our own if the other side won’t even touch theirs; someone, after all, must “get down in the mud with the fucking elephants.” But the prevailing tone, for the time being, remains one of accountability, while the party of personal responsibility rallies to the defense of their tribesmen in all but the most ridiculous instances.

How do constituencies and echo chambers contribute to the problem? The last government shutdown—and fears of another—show precisely what happens when the ideologue and nihilist caucuses within the House hit a critical mass. The congressmen and women who shut down the government made many people angry; unfortunately, those people were not the ones who voted them in—or could vote them out—of office. They (voters and elected alike, because that’s the point) wanted the government to fail because their entire intellectual foundation is built on the insistence that that is all the government does.

Throw in the other two factors here and you have a perfect storm where there were real consequences for real people, yet nothing happened to the perpetrators. The Republicans grabbed the narrative and gave it whiplash: Democrats, they insisted, were refusing to “compromise” (in much the way that one rarely compromises with hostage-takers, though hey, sequestration). Beltway commentators warned of lost revenue, derailed programs, and crippled capabilities, predicting catastrophic consequences at the poll for the “party of the shutdown.” But 13 months later, the GOP swept the midterms.

Here’s an odd sentence: Todd Akin can, perhaps, provide us some hope. Not even a conservative-leaning electorate and robust Fox News defense, the ever-present victimization feelings of a white male uncomfortable talking about the ladybits system in the first place, and the talking heads’ exaggerated reactions (do the talking heads know what or where Missouri is?) could save a man who coined the term “legitimate rape.”  Some things, it seems, are still too ludicrous to say or do without incurring the ire of your enemies and the self-preserving intuition to shun of your friends. But the pool of such behaviors seems to be shrinking rapidly.

The nice (?) thing about this theory is that it is more or less provable. Watch to see if Dr. Ben Carson gets a bump in the polls for denouncing a hypothetical Muslim president. Watch to see if GoFundMe donations in the name of “religious liberty” pour into the next mom and pop joint called out for discrimination. Most critically, watch to see if the government shuts down again. My prediction is that the right will continue to isolate itself from the consequences of its behavior, and the left will be unable to penetrate their internal discourse in a meaningful way. At the risk of sounding overly ominous, an entire half of the country left unable to feel shame may have worse consequence for the rest of us yet.

Donald Trump and the Art of the Pivot

Everyone has written so many things about Donald Trump that it seems for me to do so would be even more akin shouting into the metaphorical void than usual.

There have been smart takes on how Trump is ruining the Republican Party brand (especially for specific slices of the electorate), how Trump represents the nastiest elements (what some might call the base) of the Republican Party, and how Trump is really actually not so bad (from people who are, unsurprisingly, themselves ‘that bad’). There have even been takes on Trump layered on top of one another in some sort of repugnant, self-perpetuating club sandwich of awfulness.

To me, thinking about Trump (ugh) is less interesting than thinking about his supporters and tactics. Trump proponents, in every focus group, thinkpiece, and tweet I’ve found so far, consistently hit the buzzwords used by those who are least familiar yet most irritated with the political process. They are “fed up with Washington” and “politics as usual.” They want a “straight-shooter” who “isn’t afraid to speak his mind” and won’t be constrained by “political correctness.” Their ideal leader is a “businessman, not a career politician.”

These are people who want something, damnit, but they can’t tell you exactly what it is. They like being angry about politics, but not proposing solutions; they have no time, patience, or sympathy for the complexity of public policy. These are the kinds of people who know exactly what dogwhistle-y bullshit a phrase like “Make America Great Again” means, but only at their subconscious level, expressed via Facebook memes showing soldiers braver than Caitlyn Jenner, Twitter declarations of war against radical Islam on an individual basis, and private conversations among friends that start with “I’m not racist, but…”.

Trump demonstrated both what endears him to his core supporters and how he appeals to a wider base of Republicans with his answer to Megyn Kelly’s debate question about his past misogyny. His response was equally brilliant and despicable. Listing off the nasty things Trump had said to women on live TV, social media, and in person, Kelly appeared to have Trump on the ropes—until he (inevitably) interrupted her. First, disarm: Trump cracked a “joke” at the expense of a figure who was maligned enough by nearly everyone in the audience to disrupt the seriousness and momentum of Kelly’s accusations.

And then, the pivot. No atonement, no remorse, no acknowledgement of guilt; Trump immediately claimed that, in the grand scheme of things, the way he may or may not have treated other people in the past was of little consequence. There is simply no time, he argues, for us to worry about trifles of political correctness or hurt feelings in days gone by. He hit two of the audiences’ rawest nerves in a single touch: the hatred (subliminal or explicit) of the notion that other people might get to define what respectful discourse means, and the impending sense of doom that Bigger, More Urgent Problems are threatening America. It was a masterful stroke.

This one-two deflection is, by the way, not unique to Trump’s campaign messaging. Political correctness is a shield for conservatives of all stripes—the ultimate non-apology, expressing not just “I’m sorry that you were upset by what I said” but rather “You are in fact wrong to be upset by what I said.” It can be used to shrug off any critique that a speaker does not share with his audience—clearly, Trump demonstrates this liberally—and Amanda Taub over at Vox made a damn good case that it as a defined concept doesn’t even really exist.

And the notion of Bigger, More Urgent Problems is equally prevalent in the GOP field. And why shouldn’t it be? It’s a great way to divert attention from an issue you aren’t comfortable with or confident on to one that you are. Consider the Confederate flag juxtaposed with that of ISIL, Cecil the Lion and Planned Parenthood, and discrimination against homosexuals at home versus their criminalization abroad. Indeed it at one point looked like Sen. Marco Rubio was planning an entire presidential campaign around the idea with the slogan “Nothing matters if we aren’t safe.”—the same rhetorical trick on an even grander ideological scale.

So there is the ‘Trump as reflective of the political system we operate in today’ statement: Capitalizing on a base with ill-defined wants and highly charged emotions can get you far in today’s Republican Party. It remains to be seen how long until the more mainstream GOP can force Trump out of the field. In the meantime though, the way he relates to his supporters may prove instructive to candidates looking to channel the malcontent masses in a more defined direction.

Why Snake People Should Care About the Iran Deal

Brace for a popular-unpopular opinion:  I don’t like to be reminded of the fact that I’m a “millennial.” 

For one thing, generational monikers are a weird rhetorical device in that they force a common identity across diverse demographic swathes. But the term ‘millennial’ in particular has a singular laziness, a dogwhistle that implies self-congratulatory savvy and tolerance when used by the young, and frivolousness, entitlement, and narcisissm when uttered (invariably in a chiding tone) by the old. To avoid the term, I’ve even downloaded a Chrome extension to automatically replace the word itself wherever I come across it in terrible thinkpieces (my coworker opted for one that uses “pesky whipper-snappers”; I prefer “snake people”).

As such, I’ve been very hesitant to undertake the task of putting pen to paper both ‘as a millennial’ and ‘to fellow millennials,’ especially given our collective apathy, frustration, and confusion about the political process. But I do feel compelled to write today as a member of my generation on what I see as a historic event: The recently announced diplomatic agreement between Iran and the P5+1 world powers.

At face value, the agreement is a big deal because it accomplishes a foreign policy problem that has vexed the United States and the world for decades—the prevention of an Iranian nuclear weapon. By trading gradual sanctions relief for meaningful and verifiable concessions in the Iranian civil nuclear program, our diplomats in the State Department have brought home a big win for America and made the emergence of a new nuclear power in our lifetime less likely. And most impressively, they did it all without firing a single shot. You don’t get that kind of success in the Middle East very often these days.

But for a generation coming into our own on the world stage, the agreement with Iran is bigger than the security question—it also opens a window into what could be. All our lives, we’ve been told by a relatively small technocracy of old, white men who and what we need to be afraid of. This narrative of fear began with September 11^th, 2001 for many of us, evolving into an Axis of Evil abroad and a war on terrorism at home. The world is, we are constantly reminded by politicians and pundits alike, a scary and shrinking place wherein many people hate Americans and the values for which our country stands.

Nowhere is this demand that we be afraid more apparent than in the case of the Iranian regime. We are constantly told that the Iranian military is ‘on the march’ across the Middle East, though this often implies a gross overestimation of their capabilities. We are casually assured that military action to stop the Iranian nuclear program is a preferable and simple option, when it clearly is not. And perhaps most fundamentally, we are repeatedly bludgeoned with the idea that the Iranian regime is simply ‘too evil’ to be trusted, much less negotiated with—despite the fact that a nation of over 77 million people, many of whom are young, educated, and eager to engage with the world, almost assuredly don’t all share the attitudes of a handful of hardliner clerics.

Our grandparents’ and parents’ views of Iran were shaped by the 1953 coup and 1979 hostage crisis, both of which fostered a deep sense of resentment between our two countries. Old Iranians see their counterparts in the United States as arrogant, imperialist aggressors; old Americans in turn suspect all Iranians are radical, hostile theocrats. But we didn’t grow up with these shared caustic experiences, so why cling to the negative emotions they engendered? We are a generation that is seeing the world, and it is time that we start making our own calls about who we’re willing to extend a hand to and open a dialogue with.

The youth of Iran seem less interested in clinging to grudges from days past. People under 30 make up around 60% of their country’s population, and they are—in a way that only standoffish, post-colonialist reporting can convey—purportedly curious about and indulging in ‘Western’ culture. By some accounts, they are even wearing jeans and listening to music. For what it’s worth, none of this is meant to imply that young Iranians are ‘just like us,’ yearning for M1 Abrams tanks full of American Democracy™ to come rolling into Tehran. Instead, I’m merely suggesting that there is a generational opening with much more common ground than our respective hardliner old dudes would otherwise have us believe.

This is the part where someone from that aforementioned old guard tells me that I’m naïve. To be sure, every American—young and old—has reason to be concerned about the behavior of the Iranian regime; it perpetrates terrorism and commits human rights abuses. But again, the evidence is mounting that our demographic counterparts in Iran are growing weary of, or at least disenchanted with, the regime’s pariah-state behavior. What better way is there for us to forge a way forward than by supporting this new effort at diplomacy and leveraging any chance we get to build a new relationship between not just our countries, but our peoples?

So the ask here, to my fellow snake people, is twofold. On the one hand, embrace this shot at diplomacy with Iran—call your Representatives and Senators, and urge them (or their staffers, who are closer to your age) to give the deal a fair shake as they prepare to review it in Congress. But more broadly, start thinking about global affairs on a level that transcends keeping up with friends across the pond on Instagram or penning squishy pieces for your travel blog. It’s time for us to start taking the reins of American leadership in the world; let’s get to work at translating our experiences, our friendships, and our connectivity into a version of that leadership that makes sense to us.

The Democratic Achilles Heel: Uncoordinated Messaging on Defense

 As an overt and almost always unapologetic partisan, I spend most of my time angry with Republicans—ask the people who sit next to me at work. Yet anyone who has spoken with me for more than a few minutes about domestic politics knows that, deep down, there is only one thing I hate more than fools I disagree with most of the time, and that’s fools I agree with most of the time.

The recent kerfuffle regarding the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY2016 is case in point regarding what drives me mad about my own party. The situation is a Democratic perfect storm: a nasty combination of fear, misinformation, and failure to get in line on messaging and votes will leave the party open to rhetorical cheap shots on one side and the country open to bad, Republican-driven policies on the other.

Let’s discuss.

The NDAA is a yearly bill that funds the Department of Defense, and there are two parallel versions making their way through the legislative branch right now. The House passed its version on 15 May (269-151), and the Senate began considering its own iteration on 03 June after moving it out of SASC (22-4) fairly recently. Before I go any further, let’s acknowledge a basic truth: the NDAA is a must-pass bill. We obviously need to fund our national security, and any party or person suggesting that other parties or persons aren’t on that same page is being incredibly disingenuous. (Spoiler alert: John Boehner is doing that.)

The primary problem with both versions of the NDAA as they stand in the House and Senate, however, is that they overstep the president’s defense budget by about $38 billion each. This massive chunk of money is being poured into the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account, often called the Pentagon’s “slush fund.” Originally conceived as an accounting shortcut for quick reallocation of funding needed for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the OCO has devolved into an ad hoc account for any number of operations and partnerships abroad, none of which include homeland security measures, base repair and maintenance, or veterans care. The stock far-left fear—that OCO is just a massive accumulation of defense monies with no supervision or clear end goal—is not entirely correct, but the account does raise many questions worth considering.

From a legislative perspective, the tricky thing about the OCO is that it is a workaround of the limitations put in place by the Budget Control Act of 2011—better known to the lay voter as the sequester. Dumping money into the OCO is now a effective way for Republican hawks to overfund not just national defense but in fact the specific kind of national defense that they like: kinetic operations in and around the Middle East, primarily geared towards counterterrorism efforts. This sets up a problematic messaging frame for Democrats to counter, but we’ll tackle that in a moment.

Far more important than these political considerations, though, is the fact that the OCO is bad for defense policymaking in and of itself. Put simply, funding should follow strategic planning rather than vice versa. The precise reason that the DoD has (and follows) a budget is so that policymakers can make smart choices about where to invest in defense both at home and abroad. A failure to invest in military and military-tangent infrastructure (the abovementioned homeland security, base improvements, and veterans care) risks the creation of a hollow force with dangerous shortfalls; undue monies and attention diverted to intractable Middle Eastern conflicts leaves us unprepared in regions that deserve our long-term attention like the Asia-Pacific.

Moreover, prioritizing the OCO is the wrong move for American foreign policy today because all of the tools of national power—defense, diplomacy, development, and democracy promotion—are essential for engaging the world in a productive way. Not every problem in the world is a nail simply because Republicans only want to fund the development of our (albeit mighty) hammer. Specifically in the counterterrorism department, a surge of money for hard defense without the appropriate supplementary funds to the Department of State risks diluting efforts to get what military leaders call “left of boom.” America’s frontline civilians do an incredible amount of critical work in public diplomacy, humanitarian work, and general stabilization of fragile states; how can we not fund this with equal urgency?

And finally, defense in the 21^st century is fundamentally bigger than answering kinetic threats with bombs and rockets. Stopping the next pandemic disease requires investment in the CDC and NIH. Combatting the second and third order effects of climate change means more research money in meteorological studies, adaptive measures, and alternative fuels. And computer viruses or data thefts can only be countered by infrastructure investments and advanced cybersecurity measures. None of these new challenges can be answered by ludicrous amounts of OCO money, and a failure to invest in solutions to them as well as the conventional threats is shortsighted.

All this to say, it isn’t incredibly difficult to see why Republicans like the OCO-centric approach. It allows the sequester-supporting nihilists within the party a modicum of political cover (“Well, we had to provide for the common defense!”) that will protect them from all but the most frothing at the mouth of primary voters. And for the less ideologically rigid, it is an easy win to claim some action in the ongoing fight against ISIL—one can easily imagine campaign adds heralding “$40 billion dollars to stop the march of radical Islam” among other dubiously framed achievements. The bottom line is that OCO spending fits with the very narrow, conventional conflict-obsessed worldview held near and dear by many hawks and even moderates.

Meanwhile, faced with a conundrum that relates to messaging as much as it does to defense policy, Democrats have reacted predictably with disarray and confusion. The White House has threatened to veto the bill, and House leadership including Pelosi and Hoyer opposed its passage; the Senate, however, seems less inclined to put up a fight. The reason, per usual, is political cowardice; Democrats are afraid to vote down anything with the word “defense” in the title, and John Boehner’s office is leading a messaging campaign that paints them as more eager to fund the EPA and the IRS than the troops (and blames President Obama for the sequester too because, eh, why the hell not). This is a cheap shot given that Boehner himself voted against the NDAA in 2009 and 2010, ostensibly proving that people can disagree about budgeting priorities without hating America.

And I get why this is a scary and difficult thing for Democrats to counter! There is already a disastrous security gap between the parties—it trounced us in 2004 and is poised to do so again in 2016 (more on that in later posts). On top of that, no lawmaker wants to go on record as ‘voting against the troops.’ But allowing the Republicans to set that narrative is a huge part of what causes the security gap in the first place! Conventional wisdom of “if you’re explainin’, you’re losin’” aside, it is incumbent upon the Democratic Party to stand up and back their president’s budget for a smarter national defense that leaves the nation more secure in the long run.

Just to prove that the Democrats could, if they had the political will and substantive knowledge, pull my admittedly convoluted list of complaints about the NDAA/OCO alphabet soup into an effective messaging frame, I’ll do it for them: the United States military is the most powerful fighting force the world has ever seen, and maintaining that supremacy requires better support from the civilian government than cheap funding gimmicks. Voting against a piecemeal, ill-conceived budget is the opposite of unpatriotic—it’s the only responsible course of action.

I’m not trying to be overly cute and suggest that the fight to fix the NDAA would be that easy. But budget battles over the big issues—and is there an issue bigger than national security?—should, perhaps, not always be easy. Our defense apparatus has always been superior precisely because it has always looked forward to new challenges, and our nation has been at its best when we engage with the world not just by the threat of force, but with a comprehensive, whole-of-government approach. It’s time for one party to stand up and make that case to the American people.

Until the Democrats can organize to do so, however, I’ll be muttering grumpily in the corner and watching the NDAA drama unfold. 

“Some Other Way”: The Grace Period for Foreign Policy Vagueness in the Republican Party

In my previous post discussing the nation’s latest conversation vis-à-vis the Iraq War, I mentioned that Dr. Ben Carson’s answer to the “knowing what you know now” question merits an entire analysis in and of itself.  Thus, challenge accepted.

The new Iraq narrative that pins the failure of governance and the rise of ISIS on the GOP’s favorite feckless punching bag (whilst conveniently absolving President Bush of any wrongdoing) is for the candidates who are relatively smart and savvy with respect to foreign policy. And in this big of a field, you can bet that not all contenders fit that description.

Dr. Ben Carson is an excellent reminder that being brilliant and accomplished in one field doesn’t necessarily make your commentary in another worth a damn. He has already low key fumbled on foreign policy thus far, most notably by appearing confused on topics ranging from this history of sectarianism in Middle East to NATO membership on the Hugh Hewitt show in mid-March. Without the intervention of a few top-notch foreign affairs advisors, it seems he’s headed for a disastrous public misstep in one of the GOP debates or a facepalm-worthy sound bite in response to a ‘gotcha’ question from the media.

Dr. Carson’s answer to the Iraq question, however, was more illuminating than one might expect at first glance. He told The Hill "I've said definitively that I was never in favor of going into Iraq," and then explained that he “would have gotten rid of the problem of Saddam Hussein some other way.” The interviewers published no follow-up explanation for that “some other way.”

Extrapolating Dr. Carson’s answer to the entire GOP realm of foreign policy is a useful exercise, because it’s the bottom line of their kicking and screaming about President Obama’s foreign policy: it is very hard to come up with alternatives that are both palatable and specific. The only options left, then, are to dodge the question a la Carson or speak in impressive yet ultimately vague and repetitive platitudes about American Strength (a phrase that Sen. Marco Rubio has actually repeatedly capitalized).

Iraq is a case in point. Obama’s strategy of troop training and advising, American airstrikes where most impactful, and coalition-building among critical partners on the ground is the best conceivable set of policy options for the situation. These tactics are not without their frustrations, best exemplified by the recent fall of Ramadi. But what are the alternatives? Former Governor Jeb Bush’s response to ISIS in February (pre-Iraq answer kerfuffle) was to “take them out.” Senator Lindsey Graham’s at the same time, by contrast, was to recommend deploying 10,000 U.S. ground troops.

Bush was palatable, but no more specific than his brother’s cowboy braggadocio; Sen. Graham was specific, but not palatable to a) a large swath of Americans who still oppose that level of reengagement in the region and b) politicians that would presumably vote on an AUMF for the conflict but continue to be plagued by their original Iraq War votes.

The neoconservatives (best exemplified in the 2016 field thus far by Sen. Graham and, increasingly, Sen. Rubio) have no problem making the unpalatable call. The Kagan-Kristol thesis was and remains that American military prowess, applied with significant will and in overwhelming quantity, can answer any challenge in international affairs. This is, publically, a very uncomfortable thing for politicians to disagree with, because even the most nuanced of answers leaves one open to an attack of not believing in the strength of our armed forces.

Dr. Carson, however, is not a neoconservative by any measure. He is a creature of far right populism, trying to cobble together a coalition of Republican primary voters consisting of evangelical conservatives, those equally distrustful of big business and bigger government, and folks who embrace a candidate who preaches (if not practices) their conceptualization of “common sense.” To put it succinctly, no conservative (or for that matter, general election voter) who prioritizes issues of foreign affairs is naturally going to gravitate towards him.

Thus, for Dr. Carson and many candidates who occupy a similar space in the GOP market share, pivoting away from constructive foreign policy solutions and back to Obama criticism is both easy and essential. What remains to be seen, however, is how the neoconservatives will influence the foreign policy conversation in 2016. With the exception of Sen. Rand Paul, most candidates in a crowded field are likely to be dragged rightward on questions of military engagement just as they would be with any issue in a primary election. This will only become more likely if more Americans—most of them Republicans—continue to swing public opinion in favor of “boots on the ground” in Iraq.

For now, though, Dr. Carson can get away with such a non-answer to the question of Saddam Hussein. Asking voters to believe that he could have used some yet unknown means to whisk one of the Middle East’s most survivable dictators away without crushing military defeat may be a laughable idea to students of Iraqi history, but it is actually preferable to the average American who dislikes both totalitarianism and American casualties abroad. The clock may be running short for such simpleton views, though; as things heat up, we’re likely to see just how tightly the tentacles of neoconservatism are wrapped around foreign policy thinking in the Republican Party.