Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Reflections of a GOP operative

Here's an interesting article in Truthout by a former Republican staff member in Congress. I'll pick out some of the juicy bits, but the whole thing is well worth your time.
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 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. ...

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.'"

Remember, this is a Republican saying this (admittedly, not until he retired). This is a bit like my previous post about Chuck Hagel. But far too few Republicans are saying these things, and none seem to have the courage to do so when they have anything left to lose. "Profiles in Courage" this ain't.

Still, it needs to be said, over and over again. If this were my political party, I'd be standing up and making my objections known. It is my country, and so I'm still trying to do that. But it has less impact from the outside.

The column continues:
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.

Note that there are 312 million American citizens, more than three-quarters of whom are of voting age. The fact that only 44 million Republican fanatics could decide the fate of our government last November is absolutely disgraceful.
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.

And yeah, I just blogged about that, too (here). And who are "those people"? Well, you know exactly who they are:
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. 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. ...

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

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.

That's what's so infuriating about the Democrats. Yes, they completely ceded the field. They can't turn a phrase if their life depended on it. They can't describe Democratic values and Democratic policies clearly, plainly, and - especially - boldly. They're way too timid, apparently so worried about angering somebody that they anger everybody. Heck, they even adopt Republican talking points! Honestly, I have to wonder how Democrats ever get elected.

Of course, since they haven't fought back hard enough against what the Republicans have been doing to our country, they're faced with the need to raise huge sums of money for re-election. And that tends to put them competing with Republicans for the favor of corporations and the wealthy, which means that they simply can't afford to be too different from their rivals.

Still, don't get me wrong. Democrats may be infuriating, but they're not actually evil and they're not actually insane. That means they look pretty darn good these days!
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.

Yeah, good stuff, isn't it? And this is from someone who was on their side. Well, I don't want to post too much of this commentary. (I really do encourage you to read the whole thing.) So I'll end with this final excerpt, which describes why he retired:
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. 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.

Note how Republicans often claim that they won't make changes which will affect people 55 and older. For one thing, of course, that's a complete lie. If it doesn't affect those people now, it certainly will ten or twenty or thirty years down the road, when that crop of seniors gets small enough that the political implications don't scare them off. See how your special treatment holds up then!

But also, they blithely assume that none of us cares about anyone else. Yeah, if it doesn't harm me personally, you can do anything you like. After all, why should I care? Is that how people think? Is that how our seniors think? Are the Republicans right about this?

Because the only reason they're promising to exempt the elderly is because they're scared to do otherwise. Those people vote!  True, they tend to vote Republican, because they're easy to scare - or to distract with "culture war" issues - but Republicans are still cautious enough around active voters to watch their step. If only young people would recognize that! And learn from it.

PS. My thanks to Jim Harris for the tip. And yeah, for all of them. He's sent me some great links!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great stuff.
Jesus - these nutters are simply a sick, sick bunch of @##&s!

How is it possible such a large swath of the Amurrican populace is so GD ignorant as not to be aware of the total lunacy that has taken over their party?!

Although your list was extensive, it left out the nefarious Grand Master of Tea Party Klan on the Senate side - Jim DeMint, who over the weekend:

"Jim DeMint (R-SC) foreshadowed the Republican argument in the coming debate, boasting that he spent August "visiting a lot of businesses," who told him they "are actually afraid to hire people because of what the government will do to them" and "what they want is less regulation."
....
"I have talked to a lot of businesses in South Carolina who can't get employees to come back to work because they are getting unemployment and they're getting food stamps and they say call me when unemployment runs out. [...]

...we need to do better than we have done with just extending benefits, there have to be incentives for people to get back to work. These have to phase out in a way that we haven't done it before."

http://politicalcorrection.org/blog/201109060004

GDammit!
You absolutely know, deep in your core, this man is GD liar. NO ONE who's been offered their job back has chosen to stay at home, basking in the opulent luxuries and inherent pride accorded by unemployment and FOOD STAMPS!

YOU LIE.. JIM DEMINT!

These idiots have become truly infuriating!
Aren't there some sort of universal laws that dictate that at a certain point within the colossal arc of massive degradation, The Stupid simply HAS TO to collapse in on itself and implode!

beets

Bill Garthright said...

Well, I'm glad to see someone who's almost as angry about this stuff as I am. :)

Jim Harris said...

Are we on the Titanic?

What if this really is representative democracy?

Anonymous said...

Well, if this is representative democracy, the following breaking headline would be much more common in Rick Perry's Amurrica:

"National Guard Members Among Four Dead in Carson City Nevada IHOP Shooting Rampage"
A gunman opened fire at a Carson City, Nev., IHOP restaurant, killing three people -- including two National Guard members -- and wounding nine others before he ended the carnage by shooting himself, police said.
The gunman, whom police have not identified, shot himself in the head with an automatic rifle at the the restaurant."
http://abcnews.go.com/US/ihop-shooting-nevada-leaves-dead/story?id=14457713


Cause in Rick Perry's Amurrica, you JUST CAN'T HAVE ENOUGH GUNS!

As witnessed by:
"Texas Poised To Pass Bill Allowing Guns On Campus"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/20/texas-guns-campus-colleges_n_825718.html

Bill Garthright said...

Sure, Anonymous, but if everyone at that IHOP had been carrying a weapon, so that they all could have started blasting away as soon as the first person raised a gun, just think of how much safer that would have been!

Yeah, I know. This isn't funny, not at all. But that's exactly how the right-wing thinks about these things.

Anonymous said...

I know, for a fact, that is indeed the exact response.
I've lived it, and still have to suffer it. Both my father and brother are hard core NRA lifers, 2nd Amendment voters and of course, both hate President Obama.

I'm not sure how I escaped the insanity... not old enough to have had home delivery of milk, but, I do recall as a child the occasional door to door salesman?

Bill Garthright said...

My dad, too, was convinced that the Democrats were going to take away his guns. And he just knew that he'd never get Social Security, because the Democrats would spend it all. (In reality, he did quite well out of it and had a happy retirement, if not as long as I would have wished.)

Oddly enough, my dad had been a Democrat. He and his whole family had pretty well worshiped Franklin D. Roosevelt, and I remember him telling me that he was voting for John F. Kennedy. That's hard to imagine, as right-wing as he became in later years.

Jim Harris said...

I wonder when we get older will we become right-wing fanatics?