| By @TedFrier
Recently, a curious pattern of behavior has been observable among our governing class, one that can almost be called pathological and demented.
In their moments of clarity, leading conservatives readily agree that the Republican Party has gone nuts. But then, almost as readily, conservatives blame Democrats in general and President Obama in particular for the ensuing polarization whenever Democrats refuse to bend over backwards (even further) to play nice with these people.
Thus, when Republicans walked away from a budget deal last summer with President Obama that would have provided what he called the "astonishing concession" of three dollars in spending cuts for every one dollar raised in new taxes, an incredulous David Brooks declared the GOP "may no longer be a normal party."
Instead, the New York Times conservative called Republicans an odd protest movement that "has separated itself from normal governance, the normal rules of evidence and the ancient habits of our nation." Only such a movement could have turned down the "mother of all no-brainers" Democrats were offering.
From its curious behavior during the deficit negotiations, Brooks could only conclude that Republicans "do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms."
Neither do they accept "the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities" if their findings conflict with Republican's own received orthodoxy. Nor do the members of this conservative movement have a sense of "moral decency" if they can so easily walk away from their obligations and "talk blandly" of a default that would stain "their nation's honor."
More recently, Washington Post conservative Kathleen Parker shook her head at "the Palinization" of a Republican Party "in which the least informed earn the loudest applause."
In place of the "the Big Tent fashioned by Ronald Reagan," Parker says the GOP "has become bilious with the hot air of religious fervor." How a party thinks is more important than what it thinks. And instead of embracing as the foundation of their party human reason and a fact-based science that "propels intellectual inquiry," Parker laments that the dominant Republican worldview is one that combines "skepticism of science" with a "religious certitude" that creates an intolerable situation for Republican office-holders who are forced "into a corner where science and religion can't coexist."
Republican failure to meet Democrats half way has also drawn fire from Republican defense industry hawks, like former Defense Secretary William Cohen. Writing in the New York Times about the hardly surprising inability of the super-committee to reach compromise on a budget, Cohen points the finger of blame squarely at Republicans.
"I have long been concerned that my party's rigid anti-tax ideology is harming the fiscal health of our nation," says Cohen. "Now it is harming our national security as well. Congressional Republicans need to look back at this sad episode and decide: Do they care more about keeping 'a no tax pledge' or giving our troops the tools they need to protect the nation?"
And in a New York magazine essay titled, "When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?" former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum says, "some of my Republican friends ask if I've gone crazy. I say: Look in the mirror."
Frum is a loyal Republican who says "America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration's path of bigger government at higher cost."
Yet, he notes that just since last summer the GOP has: One, nearly forced America into default "just to score a point in a budget debate;" Two, demanded massive budget cuts during the worst budget crisis since the Great Depression;" and three, "in the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages," have "dusted off the economics of Ayn Rand" in order to propose an economic program consisting entirely of tax cuts for the very highest earners.
While Republicans offer a "disastrously wrong" political program, Frum says the changes in the GOP over the past 10 years are less about politics than psychology.
Yes, the shocks of the past 10 years have "radicalized the political system," says Frum, starting with "a second Pearl Harbor and ending with a second Great Crash." But conservatives "have been driven to these fevered anxieties as much by their own trauma as by external events," he says.
Writing about a phenomenon eerily similar to the one Eric Hoffer noted in the rise of right wing fascist movements in mid-century Europe, Frum says Republicans harbor an irrational and virulent hatred against those they've wronged with their failed conservative governance. That is because Republicans are psychologically incapable of acknowledging those failures to themselves and so are furious with anyone whose very presence reminds them of their repressed transgressions.
In the first decade of this century, Frum says Republicans "held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties." And the result was the weakest economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump. Along the way, the GOP suffered two defeats, in 2006 and 2008.
So, Frum asks readers to "imagine yourself a rank-and-file Republican in 2009. If you have not lost your job or your home, your savings have been sliced and your children cannot find work. Your retirement prospects have dimmed. Most of all, your neighbors blame you for all that has gone wrong in the country. There's one thing you know for sure: None of this is your fault! And when the new president fails to deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone's accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage, what a relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief."
But beware, says Frum. All of that crazy talk you hear on Fox News and from Newt Gingrich about Barack Obama being the most radical president in American history is no pose. For reasons that only Sigmund Freud could explain, right wing Republicans really believe this.
"Some liberals suspect that the conservative changes of mind since 2008 are opportunistic and cynical," says Frum. "Yet conscious cynicism is much rarer than you might suppose. Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don't usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves."
The most frightening insight for me in Frum's 4,000-word essay was his insistence that some of the smartest and most sophisticated people he knows -- canny investors, erudite authors - "sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism."
Measured against the actual record of American history this charge is utterly preposterous. But within the confines of a conservative movement that has wandered off the far right wing edge of the American political spectrum the accusation is entirely plausible. So, it's understandable why Frum would say that "no counter-evidence will dissuade" Republicans from their belief in the radicalism of this President -- "not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration."
And so it is difficult to square these honest admissions by conservatives like Frum, Brooks and Parker about the demented state of their party with the almost regular claims conservatives also make that whatever gridlock exists in Washington today is the fault of either both parties equally or President Obama alone.
Just a few weeks before declaring the GOP a party of religious right, bible-thumping country bumpkins, Kathleen Parker took serious umbrage with the President's more confrontational approach with Republicans.
After admitting that "intensity polling" shows Republicans "far more fired up than Democrats as we approach the 2012 election," Parker nevertheless says it's the President calling out Republicans for their rank partisanship and unwillingness to get along that is "an ugly gamble that could backfire."
Parker backs away from the implications of her own GOP analysis when she blames Obama for the poor state of inter-party relations in Washington, saying voters "can sustain anger and resentment for only so long, especially when these emotions are fundamentally at odds with the better angels of their identity."
Americans, she says, "are an optimistic, generous lot, confident in their ability to weather difficulties and invent solutions. In the end, they tend to prefer the candidate who can tap into the American reservoir of good will and can-do-ness. The next president won't likely be the angriest man standing."
But given what we know about the Republican Party, that sounds an awful lot like a recipe for unconditional surrender.
As Politico reported in its postmortem of the the failure of the debt-reduction super-committee, after all, Democrats wanted a deficit reduction deal in which tax increases made up about a third of the package while, as Ezra Klein reports, Republicans wanted their entire wish list: repeal the Affordable Care Act, block-grant Medicaid, privatize and voucherize Medicare - as well as pass everything else in Paul Ryan's budget. They also wanted to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which amounts to a $3.8 trillion tax cut hidden behind the $300 billion in "revenue enhancements" they were offering in order to strike a pose as reasonable negotiators.
"Political scientists have a term for when one party is more extreme than the other," says Klein. "'Asymmetrical polarization.' And this is what it looks like."
The capitulation to right wing intractability reached ludicrous proportions in the suggestion by two "Fox News Democrats" that President Obama should announce, tomorrow, he will not seek re-election since he's been unable to find common ground with Republicans.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week, former Carter pollster Pat Caddell and Clinton aide Doug Schoen wrote that President Obama should simply "accept the reality" he cannot "effectively govern the nation" and abandon his campaign for a second term in favor of clearing the way for a Hillary for President campaign in 2012.
Obama could certainly win re-election in 2012, they say. "But the kind of campaign required for the President's political survival would make it almost impossible for him to govern -- not only during the campaign, but throughout a second term."
The President cannot run on his record, they say, "so his only chance is to make the case that the Republicans, who have garnered even lower ratings in the polls for their unwillingness to compromise and settle for gridlock, represent a more risky and dangerous choice than the current administration."
By going down this "overly partisan road," say Caddell and Shoen, America would be "guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it."
By confronting Republicans instead of capitulating to them, Caddell and Shoen say "the President has effectively guaranteed that the remainder of his term will be marred by the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity, common purpose, and most of all, our economic strength."
What makes this piece interesting is not so much that it is spectacularly bad political advice, which is given in bad faith since both men pine for some imagined Clinton Restoration. Nor, is the piece of primary interest because it is evidence of what Andrew Sullivan calls "the post-traumatic stress disorder of 1990s Democrats" who are convinced that Democrats can never again win based on what they really believe in and so must always capitulate "either to Republican orthodoxy or to Republican will-power."
No, what makes this attack on the President by two nominal Democrats so interesting is that it captures so well the impulses of the conservative mind that sees an America in which everyone is content with their station in life because everyone subscribes to the basic right wing conservative belief about the supremacy of white Christian conservatives in economics, politics and culture.
This status quo is what makes America the proud and peaceful place it is. Radicals are those who don't subscribe to this happy conservative utopia. And "partisanship" is just another word for refusal to conform or obey.
What conservatives like Parker do not yet appreciate is that the fundamentalist streak they deplore in the Republican Party is not about religion at all. It's a mindset, a personality trait, a worldview. And so it has a political and ideological side to it as well.
The Republican Party's refusal to compromise is not simply a hardball tactic by seasoned political professionals trying to get the best deal possible in a tough negotiation after they've sized up the opposition and found its weak spot. The GOP's refusal to compromise is a symptom of something far deeper, a manifestation of the right wing mind that dominates the GOP itself.
As David Brooks suggested earlier, in a very real sense, Republicans can't compromise because they live in another world and don't want to leave. Outside the conservative alternative reality, says Frum, America is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. But within the right wing bubble, Christians are a persecuted minority. In the real world, President Obama, whatever you might think of his policies, is "a figure of imposing intellect and dignity." But in Republican-land, Obama is "a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action phony doomed to inevitable defeat."
Outside the right wing "informational enclave" created by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, "social scientists worry that the US is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world" and where children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. But among the candidates running for the Republican nomination for president, the US remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) "the only place in the world where it doesn't matter who your parents were or where you came from."
In their own minds right wing conservatives are not being hypocritical or disingenuous when they claim to be doing the work of the American people while at the same time disregarding polls showing substantial majorities disapprove of precisely those actions Republicans are taking. That is because to right wing conservatives other conservatives are the only Americans who matter.
So, as you can imagine, in such a world concepts like negotiation, compromise and politics itself lose all meaning. In this right wing mentality the ends of a happy right wing republic fully justify whatever means are needed to bring one about. Is this why, then, we have seen in recent weeks established conservatives like George F. Will take such pains to remind us that the First Amendment protects lying and deception as well as truthful speech? Is this why former RNC Chairman Michael Steele so strongly defended the outrageous and easily disprovable falsehoods in Republican advertising as nothing more than "hardball politics" and "business as usual?"
What we have here is a failure to communicate. The word "compromise" has two entirely different meanings. The first is "to reach agreement." This is how liberals understand the meaning of the word as they work with other groups to build consensus and agreements that everyone can live with.
This is also what conservatives find most repulsive about liberals, who they accuse of being moral "relativists" lacking firm "principles."
The other meaning of compromise is "to abandon, to undermine." This is the definition which conservatives subscribe to when they wear their rigidity as a badge of honor announcing they will never, ever compromise their "conservative principles."
And so we have an American politics in which liberals look to compromise in order to "reach agreement" with conservatives on the other side who in turn demand that liberals "abandon" their principles in favor of conservative ones -- and in the "spirit of compromise."
And then when there is is a failure by the two parties to "compromise," as there was this week among Republicans and Democrats on the deficit super-committee, an utterly confused Beltway conventional wisdom declares that both parties are equally at fault for a stalemate brought on by an unwillingness to "compromise." |
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