Brad DeLong, who is smarter (and probably better-looking) than I am, launches on the ‘rhino neoliberals’ who, he says, are bridging over to the neoconservative side.

Kaus has thus passed through the third of the four stages of becoming a Rhinoceros… excuse me, a neoconservative.
The first stage is to hold that the flaws–the mighty flaws–of the center-left in American politics are important enough to more-or-less balance the flaws of the right. The second stage is to start making desperate and implausible excuses for Republican politicians and functionaries. The third stage is to lose contact with the substance of public policy issues, and focus instead on intellectual and rhetorical “errors” made by those left of center. And the fourth stage is to start acclaiming right-wing political hacks as noble thinkers, and right-wing office holders as bold and far-sighted leaders with a plan to guide us to utopia.

It was a little frightening to me to read this…kind of like one of the “you may be an alcoholic if…” articles where you start recognizing some of your own behavior.
Then I thought about it a bit.
Here’s the deal: I think Brad is conflating two different sets of issues, which are rooted in our political ecology.
One set are substantive, and have to do with policy, governance, and what exactly we want the government to do…in my case, offer great day care, have a moderately progressive tax code, etc. etc. … the other set are procedural, and have to do with how the government makes decisions and constitutes itself.
Substantively, I stand with the liberal side of the house (with a few wrinkles on guns and foreign policy).
But procedurally, I think that the mainstream liberal and conservative actors are indistinguishable, and I have a huge problem with them and with the process that maintains them.
Let’s take California for an example. I’ll take a wild-ass guess and say there are 3,000 jobs that will change hands over a two-year period if Republican Simon is elected over Democrat Davis. Officially, I’ll bet there are something like 500 – 1,000 exempt jobs…jobs that are exempt from civil service and are truly ‘political appointees’. But an additional few thousand jobs will shift as the new bosses hire and promote folks who they are more comfortable with, have more experience with, and who look at the world in the same way they do.
Brian Linse focuses on the importance of these jobs:

…But I still maintain that having the State in the hands of the Dems is more important for the ’04 nationals than having a better man in the job up in Sacramento. Riordan would be a better man, but it now seems certain that Simon would not, so the BadDude endorsement stays with Davis.

So what we have is a revolving pool of five or six thousand political operatives, variously liberal and conservative, Democratic and Republican, who do a large dosi-do when elections change the party in power.
The ones out of power become lobbyists, columnists, professors, political campaign advisors, go into private practice of law or other professions, and bide their time.
But they remain a part of an insular political class, and as that class gets more and more reified, elections become essentially contests between two branches of the same bureaucratic organism.
The first problem this presents is that it has been almost impossible for a true outsider (Riordan) to come in and play on a big level. Simon was wealthy, the ranks of attractive Republicans in California is thin, and from the talks I’ve had with the Republicans I know, no one thought Davis was beatable.
(Jesse Ventura will come up later in the argument).
The second problem is that the views of the ‘operative class’ become more and more insular and parochial as they increasingly interact with and talk to themselves. They are upper-middle class, educated, and articulate. They are my kind of people, they are fun to hang around with and chat about political gossip. But they live in the better bobo suburbs and have the option of sending their kids to private schools, because they can afford it.
The third, and to me biggest, problem is that the rest of us…the folks outside the political process…begin to get increasingly alienated from both the process and the people in it. See my discussion on legitimacy below, and the two books on legitimacy in the ‘must read’ section below. The average voter (or more realistically, the average non-voter) really doesn’t give a damn about the politicians, the laws they pass, or, increasingly, about the polity that we are all part of.
Why? Because instead of any effort to engage the broader population in discussion or debate, politics has become entirely tactical. What matters is how I can get positive coverage for my team, and negative coverage for theirs. And the metaphor of teams holds up, as we start talking about whether the Democrats will draft Gore as their QB in ’04, or if the plucky understudy Lieberman, will get the nod.
The people aren’t stupid, they get it, they see that it’s MLB and that the best they can do is but a ticket in the cheap seats (the SkyBoxes are already filled with the patrons of the game). And when presented with an attractive option, the non-voters (who Ventura singled out as his base) come out.
For me, I have to say that the broader issue of the isolation and alienation absolutely trumps the narrower issues which divide the electable left and right. Because I believe that if we don’t begin to deal with those, it really won’t matter who we elect.