Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"
Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -
"Double Indemnity" (1944)
Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of
the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are
rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the
political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a
presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be
competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to
corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a
budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank
capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order
to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven
surrender to Big Pharma.
But both parties are not rotten in quite the
same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians,
careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however,
quite matches the modern GOP.
To those millions of Americans who have
finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation
the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a
shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the
party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of
crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the
crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today:
Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as
well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen
West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.
It was this cast of characters and the
pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year
career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of
months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that
the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine
legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of
World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis.
Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by
literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.
The debt ceiling extension is not the only
example of this sort of political terrorism.
Republicans were willing to
lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000
private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without
pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel -
how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting
provisions into the FAA reauthorization.
Everyone knows that in a hostage situation,
the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the
cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned
about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This
fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among
the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob
Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein
wrote
of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans
essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently
dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they
might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default
was "bring it on!"
It should have been evident to clear-eyed
observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a
traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming
more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological
authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several
implications, none of them pleasant.
In his Manual of Parliamentary Practice,
Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important that every rule and
custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a theoretical
sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored by
all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that
lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively
civilized procedure. The US Senate has more complex procedural rules
than any other legislative body in the world; many of these rules are
contradictory, and on any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may
issue a ruling that contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.
The only thing that can keep the Senate
functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political
consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the
Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and
the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the
current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme
Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.
Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill,
every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural
motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the
circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked:
legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could
have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As
Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use
the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.
John P. Judis
sums up the modern GOP this way:
"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from
a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law
when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the
minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the
government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there
is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the
antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to
nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who
later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me
candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and
disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from
doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability
rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an
institution of government, the party that is programmatically against
government would come out the relative winner.
A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a
psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the
voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of
low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch
of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular
legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows
them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that
"government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on
both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard."
This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the
long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking
place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by
Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared
Ronald Reagan in 1980).
The media are also complicit in this
phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more
or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk
radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media
have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew
to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has
skewered
this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he
says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines
would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"
Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza
merely proves Krugman right in his
Washington Post analysis of "winners
and losers" in the debt ceiling impasse. He
wrote
that the institution of Congress was a big loser in the fracas, which
is, of course, correct, but then he opined: "Lawmakers - bless their
hearts - seem entirely unaware of just how bad they looked during this
fight and will almost certainly spend the next few weeks (or months)
congratulating themselves on their tremendous magnanimity." Note how the
pundit's ironic deprecation falls like the rain on the just and unjust
alike, on those who precipitated the needless crisis and those who
despaired of it. He seems oblivious that one side - or a sizable faction
of one side - has deliberately attempted to damage the reputation of
Congress to achieve its political objectives.
This constant drizzle of "there the two
parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the
hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term
Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic
institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has
nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this,
again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government
institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same,
why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases
the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a
lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were
only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but
they effectively canceled the political results of the election of
President Obama by 69 million voters.
This tactic of inducing public distrust of
government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who
profess to revere the
Constitution, it is strange that they so
caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material
expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to
say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or
intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such
limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican
officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of
Fourth Amendment protections by the
Patriot Act, the weakening of
habeas
corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria
following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the
United States has the
largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything,
they would probably opt for
more incarcerated persons, as
imprisonment
is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is
itself a growth center for
political contributions to these same
politicians.[1]
Instead, they prefer to
rail against those government programs that
actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack
directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it
by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit.
That concern, as we
shall see, is largely fictitious.
Undermining Americans' belief in their own
institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy.
But if this technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30
years of unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always
fall short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New
Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to
fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of
state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to
make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in
Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously
shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic
constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation
of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration
periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise
university students.
This legislative assault is moving in a
diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when
the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by
more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously
lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting
democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a
signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they
don't want those people voting.
You can probably guess who
those people
are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin
would imply, the people who are not
Real Americans. Racial minorities.
Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't
look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to
some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President
Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that
Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black.
[2]
Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some
"other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought
subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful:
Subversives. Commies.
Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The
list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always
seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.
It is not clear to me how many GOP
officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would
bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of
their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a
wink. During the disgraceful circus of the "birther" issue, Republican
politicians subtly stoked the fires of paranoia by being suggestively
equivocal - "I take the president at his word" - while never
unambiguously slapping down the myth. John Huntsman was the first major
GOP figure forthrightly to refute the birther calumny - albeit after release of the birth certificate.
I do not mean to place too much emphasis on
racial animus in the GOP. While it surely exists, it is also a fact that
Republicans think that no Democratic president could conceivably be
legitimate. Republicans also regarded Bill Clinton as somehow, in some
manner, twice fraudulently elected (well do I remember the elaborate
conspiracy theories that Republicans traded among themselves). Had it
been Hillary Clinton, rather than Barack Obama, who had been elected in
2008, I am certain we would now be hearing, in lieu of the birther
myths, conspiracy theories about Vince Foster's alleged murder.
The reader may think that I am attributing
Svengali-like powers to GOP operatives able to manipulate a zombie base
to do their bidding. It is more complicated than that. Historical
circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and
financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly
downscale white middle class - without job security (or even without
jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their
principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their
fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking.
What do the Democrats offer these people?
Essentially nothing. Democratic Leadership Council-style
"centrist"
Democrats were among the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in
the 1990s that outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization,
permanent most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the
identity politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a
too illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.
[3]
While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed
the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans
went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party
consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of
sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But
the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental
compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played
on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on
scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of
raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border
(then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of
predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil
abortionists.
How do they manage to do this? Because
Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language.
Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even
remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast
that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you?
Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is
supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and
keep pounding on that theme?
You know that Social Security and Medicare are
in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements.
"Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who
is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why
not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all
contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the
Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on
message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven
forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its
$86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that
unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and
that politicians be kept on a short leash.
It was not always thus. It would have been
hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who
did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic
interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932
would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons.
But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of
unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors'
looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer
of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is
the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At
"Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide
unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those
economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or
the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death
panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which
stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.
Thus far, I have concentrated on Republican
tactics, rather than Republican beliefs, but the tactics themselves are
important indicators of an absolutist, authoritarian mindset that is
increasingly hostile to the democratic values of reason, compromise and
conciliation. Rather, this mindset seeks polarizing division (Karl Rove
has been very explicit that this is his principal campaign strategy),
conflict and the crushing of opposition.
As for what they really believe, the
Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid
out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window
dressing:
1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors.
The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further
enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and
debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President
Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are
highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform
the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP refused,
because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent
increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers,
much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire
hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than
cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that had far less
deficit reduction - and even less spending reduction! - than Obama's
offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all costs our
society's overclass.
Republicans have attempted to camouflage their
amorous solicitude for billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric.
John Boehner is fond of saying, "we won't raise anyone's taxes," as if
the take-home pay of an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up
with whether Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income
or at a lower rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and
billionaires are "job creators." US corporations have just had their
most profitable quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76
billion in cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the
jobs?
Another smokescreen is the "small business"
meme, since standing up for Mom's and Pop's corner store is politically
more attractive than to be seen shilling for a megacorporation. Raising
taxes on the wealthy will kill small business' ability to hire; that is
the GOP dirge every time Bernie Sanders or some Democrat offers an
amendment to increase taxes on incomes above $1 million. But the number
of small businesses that have a net annual income over a million dollars
is de minimis, if not by definition impossible (as they would no longer
be small businesses). And as data from the Center for Economic and
Policy Research have shown, small businesses account for only 7.2
percent of total US employment, a significantly smaller share of total
employment than in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) countries.
Likewise, Republicans have assiduously spread
the myth that Americans are conspicuously overtaxed. But compared to
other OECD countries, the effective rates of US taxation are among the
lowest. In particular, they point to the top corporate income rate of 35
percent as being confiscatory Bolshevism. But again, the effective rate
is much lower. Did GE pay 35 percent on 2010 profits of $14 billion?
No, it paid zero.
When pressed, Republicans make up misleading
statistics to "prove" that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by
the rich and the rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate
that fact. "Half of Americans don't pay taxes" is a perennial meme. But
what they leave out is that that statement refers to federal income
taxes. There are millions of people who don't pay income taxes, but do
contribute payroll taxes - among the most regressive forms of taxation.
But according to GOP fiscal theology, payroll taxes don't count.
Somehow, they have convinced themselves that since payroll taxes go into
trust funds, they're not real taxes. Likewise, state and local sales
taxes apparently don't count, although their effect on a poor person
buying necessities like foodstuffs is far more regressive than on a
millionaire.
All of these half truths and outright lies
have seeped into popular culture via the corporate-owned business press.
Just listen to CNBC for a few hours and you will hear most of them in
one form or another. More important politically, Republicans' myths
about taxation have been internalized by millions of economically
downscale "values voters," who may have been attracted to the GOP for
other reasons (which I will explain later), but who now accept this
misinformation as dogma.
And when misinformation isn't enough to
sustain popular support for the GOP's agenda, concealment is needed. One
fairly innocuous provision in the
Dodd-Frank financial reform bill
requires public companies to make a more transparent disclosure of CEO
compensation, including bonuses. Note that it would not limit the
compensation, only require full disclosure. Republicans are hell-bent on
repealing this provision. Of course;
it would not serve Wall Street
interests if the public took an unhealthy interest in the disparity of
their own incomes as against that of a bank CEO. As Spencer Bachus, the
Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee,
says,
"In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated and my
view is that
Washington and the regulators are there to serve the
banks."
2. They worship at the altar of Mars.
While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up
with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP
stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer,
libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries.
McCain wanted to mix
it up with Russia - a nuclear-armed state - during the latter's
conflict with Georgia in 2008 (remember? - "we are all Georgians now," a
slogan that did not, fortunately, catch on), while
Graham has been
persistently agitating for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria.
And these are not fringe elements of the party; they are the leading
"defense experts," who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows.
About a month before Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the
credit markets to get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same
Republicans passed a defense appropriations bill that
increased spending by $17 billion over the prior year's defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges'
formulation,
war is the force that gives meaning to their lives.
A cynic might conclude that this militaristic
enthusiasm is no more complicated than the fact that Pentagon
contractors spread a lot of bribery money around Capitol Hill. That is
true, but there is more to it than that. It is not necessarily even the
fact that members of Congress feel they are protecting constituents'
jobs. The wildly uneven concentration of defense contracts and military
bases nationally means that some areas, like Washington, DC, and San
Diego, are heavily dependent on Department of Defense (DOD) spending.
But there are many more areas of the country whose net balance is
negative: the citizenry pays more in taxes to support the Pentagon than
it receives back in local contracts.
And the economic justification for Pentagon
spending is even more fallacious when one considers that the $700
billion annual DOD budget creates comparatively few jobs. The days of
Rosie the Riveter are long gone; most weapons projects now require very
little touch labor. Instead, a disproportionate share is siphoned off
into high-cost research and development (from which the civilian economy
benefits little); exorbitant management expenditures, overhead and
out-and-out padding; and, of course, the money that flows back into the
coffers of political campaigns. A million dollars appropriated for
highway construction would create two to three times as many jobs as a
million dollars appropriated for Pentagon weapons procurement, so the
jobs argument is ultimately specious.
Take away the cash nexus and there still
remains a psychological predisposition toward war and militarism on the
part of the GOP. This undoubtedly arises from a neurotic need to
demonstrate toughness and dovetails perfectly with the belligerent
tough-guy pose one constantly hears on right-wing talk radio. Militarism
springs from the same psychological deficit that requires an endless
series of enemies, both foreign and domestic.
The results of the last decade of unbridled militarism and
the Democrats' cowardly refusal to reverse it [4],
have been disastrous both strategically and fiscally.
It has made the
United States less prosperous, less secure and less free. Unfortunately,
the militarism and the promiscuous intervention it gives rise to are
only likely to abate when the Treasury is exhausted, just as it happened
to the Dutch Republic and the British Empire.
3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP.
Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor
public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the
Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988
Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the
party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more
like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of
evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of
angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the
religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican
Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint
beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and
hostility to science; it is this group that defines "low-information
voter" - or, perhaps, "misinformation voter."
The Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, there is now a de
facto religious test for the presidency: major candidates are encouraged
(or coerced) to "share their feelings" about their "faith" in a
revelatory speech; or, some televangelist like Rick Warren dragoons the
candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer
points of Christology, with Warren himself, of course, as the arbiter.
Politicized religion is also the sheet anchor of the culture wars. But
how did the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs - economic royalism,
militarism and culture wars cum fundamentalism - come completely to
displace an erstwhile civilized Eisenhower Republicanism?
It is my view that the rise of politicized
religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational
problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the
takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a
substrate of beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of
followers - all three of the GOP's main tenets.
Televangelists have long espoused the
health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it is
a sign of God's favor. If not, too bad! But don't forget to tithe in
any case. This rationale may explain why some economically downscale
whites defend the prerogatives of billionaires.
The GOP's fascination with war is also connected with the
fundamentalist mindset. The
Old Testament abounds in
tales of slaughter -
God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and enslavement
of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired genocide of the
Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the jawbone of an ass
- and since American religious fundamentalist seem to prefer the
Old
Testament to the
New (particularly that portion of the
New Testament
known as the
Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short step to
approving
war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of thinking has led,
inexorably, to such phenomena as
Jerry Falwell once writing that God is Pro-War.
It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their
belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them
to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some
evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a suitable
target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of domestic political
controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most adamant proponent of
the view that there was no debt ceiling problem was Michele Bachmann,
the darling of the fundamentalist right. What does it matter, anyway, if
the country defaults? - we shall presently abide in the bosom of the
Lord.
Some liberal writers have opined that the different socio-economic
perspectives separating the "business" wing of the GOP and the religious
right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure.
There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction the two
factions want to take the country, merely how far in that direction they
want to take it.
The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age,
the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. In any case, those consummate
plutocrats,
the Koch brothers, are pumping
large sums of money into Michele Bachman's presidential campaign, so
one ought not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.
Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican could have written the following:
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security,
unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you
would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a
tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things.
Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few
other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business
man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
(That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.)
It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional
Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a
Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is not
in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of self-immolation, or
to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in the manner of
David Brock. And I will leave a more detailed dissection of failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate
Bruce Bartlett.
I left because I was appalled at the headlong
rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are
deeply damaging to this country's future; and contemptuous of the
feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted
attempts to stop them. And, in truth, I left as an act of rational
self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits
as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and
"shareholder value," the GOP now thinks it is only fair that
public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence
the intensification of the GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against
government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a
current retiree rather than a prospective one.
If you think
Paul Ryan and his
Ayn
Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and
Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté.
[5]
They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so
starve the government of revenue that they will be "forced" to make
"hard choices" - and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax
cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked.
During the week that this piece was written,
the debt ceiling fiasco reached its conclusion. The economy was already
weak, but the GOP's disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even
further. Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy
political actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the
dollar. Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars
worth of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have
stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global
reserve currency - a move as consequential and disastrous for US
interests as any that can be imagined.
If Republicans have perfected a new form of
politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it
unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the
democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power.
Footnotes:
[1] I am not exaggerating
for effect. A law passed in 2010 by the Arizona legislature mandating
arrest and incarceration of suspected illegal aliens was actually
drafted by the
American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative
business front group that drafts "model" legislation on behalf of its
corporate sponsors. The draft legislation in question was written for
the private prison lobby, which sensed a growth opportunity in
imprisoning more people.
[2] I am not a
supporter of Obama and object to a number of his foreign and domestic
policies. But when he took office amid the greatest financial collapse
in 80 years, I wanted him to succeed, so that the country I served did
not fail. But already in 2009, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican
leader, declared that his greatest legislative priority was - jobs for
Americans? Rescuing the financial system? Solving the housing collapse? -
no, none of those things. His top priority was to ensure that Obama
should be a one-term president. Evidently Senator McConnell hates Obama
more than he loves his country. Note that the mainstream media have
lately been hailing McConnell as "the adult in the room," presumably
because he is less visibly unstable than the Tea Party freshmen
[3] This is not a venue for
immigrant bashing. It remains a fact that
outsourcing jobs overseas,
while insourcing sub-minimum wage immigrant labor, will exert downward
pressure on US wages. The consequence will be popular anger, and failure
to address that anger will result in a
downward wage spiral and a
breech of the social compact, not to mention a rise in nativism and
other reactionary impulses. It does no good to claim that these economic
consequences are an inevitable result of globalization;
Germany has
somehow managed to maintain a high-wage economy and a vigorous
industrial base.
[4] The cowardice is not
merely political. During the past ten years, I have observed that
Democrats are actually growing afraid of Republicans. In a quirky and
flawed, but insightful, little book,
Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, John Lukacs concludes that
the left fears, the right hates.
[5] The GOP cult of Ayn Rand
is both revealing and mystifying. On the one hand, Rand's tough guy,
every-man-for-himself posturing is a natural fit because
it puts a
philosophical gloss on the latent sociopathy so prevalent among the hard
right. On the other, Rand exclaimed at every opportunity that she was
a
militant atheist who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity.
Apparently, the
ignorance of most
fundamentalist "values voters" means
that GOP candidates who enthuse over Rand at the same time they thump
their Bibles
never have to explain this stark contradiction.
And I
imagine a Democratic officeholder would have a harder time explaining
why he named his offspring "Marx" than a GOP incumbent would in
rationalizing naming his kid "Rand."
