Steve Benen discusses why various right-wing "scandals" haven't really hurt Obama's approval ratings. The reasons he gives are pretty persuasive: conservatives have gone to the "OMG Obama needs the teleprompters! BAD!!!!!" well one too many times, and Obama is largely doing what he said he was going to do when he was running for president. He elides the crucial point, which is that people who are losing their house don't really care about Obama shaking Hugo Chavez's hand. Even under normal circumstances, they probably wouldn't. Nixon shook Mao's hand, Kennedy shook Krushchev's, Reagan shook Gorbachev's. And yet America stood. In fact, these are often regarded as high points in all three of these men's presidencies, and rightly so. Most Americans, unlike most Republican pundits, are fairly confident in America's power and standing such that saying hello to an autocrat isn't in and of enough to end American prestige. Then again, it must be said that Republican pundits do know a thing or two about ending American prestige, so I suppose their opinions can't be completely dismissed. If they were approving of Obama's diplomatic maneuvers I'd be a bit worried.
Getting back to the notorious handshake, the shake gets back to one of Niebuhr's main points, which was that American foreign policy was and is mostly a continuation of the same domestic arguments we've been having in this country forever. I think this is true to some extent, but I do think one cannot underestimate the extent to which the conservative politics of resentment have seeped into their foreign policy views. Both the left and right have alike absorbed the reality of the decline of American power and influence globally, and reacted in different ways. The left has largely accepted globalization, though there is a palpable anti-trade element to the party, and while they tend to be too timid in working to unwind American Empire and putting forward bolder proposals for a strong safety net to deal with the vagaries of globalization, the left has not taken brash action to try to halt the decline. The right has basically been driven insane by the reality that American exceptionalism isn't going to last forever, and I think that the rise of neoconservatism during the 1990s can be viewed through this prism. Conservatism has always had more than a small tendency to worship how much better things were in the old days, which is something I find silly, as every time has its good and bad elements, and there's the natural tendency to forget things like, I don't know, waking up every day with the fear of getting nuked by the Russkies. One sees in conservatism today a desperate effort to avoid facing the reality that things have changed, and that much of their America is gone, obsolete, and hated when not treated with bored contempt. The right often likes to accuse the left of using "the politics of meaning" but like most conservative critiques of the left it is really nothing more than projection, as to many conservatives the notion of America as the preeminent superpower is a part of their political identity and something that they have long taken for granted. To many of these folks, and I don't mean this in a racist or any other way, the notion that America is not going to be a country of white married folks frightens the hell out of them, as this is a fundamental part of their identity, and they're worried that their importance and significance will invariably decline.
In short, what one sees in the conservative movement today is a pathological fear of change, which is probably related to the demographic facts of the Republican Party's septuagenarian talk radio base. The public doesn't share this, so expressions of it, be they by protesters or Newt Gingrich on Fox News Sunday, don't really have much of an effect. One sees, in the tea parties and elsewhere, a desperate pushback against any hint that things have fundamentally changed in America. I don't think that stuff like the tea parties and Rush and Glenn Beck are helping the right at this point, as Obama and his agenda are actually quite popular and in the absence of a compelling argument from the right he's likely to stay that way. I suspect the right isn't going to be able to recover some sanity for about a decade when the party's demographics shift.
