I thought I knew where E.J. Dionne was going this morning in his "No Labels" column -- roughly the same place I was vaguely, indirectly headed yesterday: The No Labels group might well be authentic conservatism's primal scream; we could be witnessing a political embryo preparing to organizationally grow and mature and ultimately supplant its Mad King Ludwig of a GOP ancestor.
But while I stopped short, Dionne took a sudden turn. He concluded, "The No Labelers can yet be a constructive force if they remind us of how extreme the right has become and help broker an alliance between the center and the left, the only coalition that can realistically stop an ever more zealous brand of conservatism."
But Mr. Dionne, American politics already has an alliance between the center and the left. It's called the Democratic Party. What it needs is an alliance between the center and the old rational right, because, as Dionne also noted with near understatement, "The truth is that the [contemporary] American right is much farther from anything that can fairly be described as 'the center' than is the left."
The "right" in America has transcended mere conservatism, as I wrote yesterday. It has bullied and bluffed and demagogued its way into a depraved pathology of politically radical gangsterism. The essential truth of that statement is affirmed not only by the lack of objections one would expect to hear from the floor, but by the actual pride taken in it by the right's various consiglieres and button men.
No Labels is a refugee camp, or, if you will, more accurately a witness protection program. It's overflowing with reasonable folk on the mostly non-ideological lam -- David Frum, Mike Castle, Bob Inglis, Charlie Crist, Mike Bloomberg, Tom Davis, as Dionne itemizes them, just some of the escapees or exiles who are looking for a sane alternative.
Yet these are sentimental voices of some authentic conservatism -- voices indeed willing to work and compromise with the left, but scarcely to create "an alliance" with it. The fate of that marriage would be doomed; one less of non-ideology than just plain mush.
My general impression of No Labels, as is, is similar to Dionne's whimsical and ingenious riff: "moderately supportive and moderately critical - accented by a moderate touch of cynicism." Who (besides the aforementioned gangsters) doesn't yearn, for example, for the setting aside of "petty partisanship" and wholly faith-based humbug and the like? The No Labels guys have a long way to go before achieving a coherence of some practical use.
Parenthetically, I would also observe that the Keith Olbermann brand of childish ridicule of No Labels, which I heard last night, is immensely unhelpful in meeting the very goal of a reasonable American politics, which in fact the Keith Olbermanns of the progressive airwaves so doggedly insist they desire.