Michael Lind: Relax, Liberals. You've Already Won. Subtitle isn't very relaxing: "No matter who prevails at the ballot box in November, John McCain or Barack Obama, the four-decade-long counterrevolution is over." The text doesn't assume that McCain is making a break from the conservative movement. Rather, Lind argues that conservative political ideas are so widely viewed as bankrupt that even if McCain were elected he could do little damage with them. That's more optimism than I think is warranted. (He goes so far as to argue that a couple of McCain Supreme Court appointments still wouldn't be able to revoke Roe v Wade.) At least in my part of the country, the credulity for conservative rhetoric seems bottomless, even if many people are cautiously inching away from the thing. Some conservative shibboleths have no traction at all, but other memes are still very much with us, especially on the most critical matters of war and terrorism. And there's another thing to worry about: knee-jerk anger. We're in for a whole lot of it no matter who wins in November, and the right is built on the right to throw bloody tantrums.

Lind's status as an ex-conservative gives the article an appealing distance from the liberals he addresses. He styles himself as some kind of radical centrist -- his main specialty is foreign relations, where he tries to combine pragmatic nationalism with liberal ideals (still defending the US in Vietnam, but not in Iraq). I don't regard him as very trustworthy, although his 2004 book on GW Bush, Made in Texas, was one of the best on the subject, and his 1996 book, Up From Conservatism, looks to have been ahead of the learning curve.