Skip navigation

Monthly Archives: May 2009

The Loyal Opposition

“Nuke the whales?  You don’t really believe that do you?” – Lisa Simpson

Since January serious “security conservatives” have attacked the changes Barack Obama has made to his predecessor’s hideous and disastrous national security policies.  The main charge is that those policies were what prevented another serious terrorist attack for seven and a half years.  It is tempting to dismiss these charges as merely political gamesmanship, but whatever the political theater looks like it’s good to remember that they are motivated by a comprehensive worldview.  Understanding that worldview is important if you want to place the attacks that result from it in their proper context.

Consider Rush Limbaugh’s infamous “I hope he fails” comment.  He’s openly rooting for greater harm to befall America because he views the acquisition and maintenance of political power by conservatives as the ultimate goal.  But should the need for self examination ever penetrate his fiery intellectual defenses one presumes he comforts himself with the notion that even greater harm is the inevitable result of pussy liberal policies.  Within this worldview people’s pain and suffering (caused by, among other things, disastrous wars of choice) are a tincture necessary to cure the public of its liberal affect.

Cheney and the roughly 20% of the country that supports him are twisted fundamentalists.  They have a warped and fact free conception of what it means to Protect America.  These are the people who take Chuck Norris and Jack Bauer seriously and, despite the omnipresent wreckage that resulted from their maniacal grip on power, still believe that their way is the only way.  Real life horror and suffering are inconsequential to them because their imaginations can always produce something worse.  To weigh the real against the fantastical never occurs to them because they view their terrible fever dreams as inevitable.

While these sorts of arguments have grown less successful as the 2001 attacks begin to fade into history they will never fully cease.  After all, imaginary staw men of this template are easy to conjure, all you have to do plug in the names and places and then say “America is in danger!” as loud as you can.  It’s political theater, sure, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a relatively honest representation of their true opinions.  By all accounts Cheney really believes that America is in dire peril and that most people just aren’t attenuated to the danger.  Saying so as often as possible not only serves his short term political interests, it also helps raise an issue he cares about.

That dismal outlook on life and political affairs is what motivates the drive for right wing purity.  It’s a powerful force, but it’s noticeably on the wane.  Let’s hope it keeps going in that direction, however many colorful ways it finds to express itself.

The Third Act

“I checked on the internet, Kyle, and getting Butters to put my wiener in his my mouth wouldn’t make me not gay like you said.” – Eric Cartman
“You figured that out, huh?” – Kyle Broflovski

Most good movies have a third act and the ruling upholding Proposition 8 issued by the California Supreme Court yesterday set up a doozy.  The court set the stage last year when it legalized marriage for everyone.  As if on cue, ranting villains (straight out of central casting for angry, ignorant conservatives) materialized and brought things down with a stealth ballot initiative that was largely ignored in the widely expected coronation of Barack Obama.  A doomed court challenge was mounted, seemingly out of little more than pique, and yesterday it died.  But ballot initiatives are easy in California and there will almost certainly be another one in November of 2010, this time enshrining same sex marriage in the state constitution.  Now that we have our third act scripted out, all that remains is lights, camera, action.

Prior to last November most political observers assumed that Proposition 8 would go down to defeat because, c’mon it’s California.  But with massive financial support and less than honest arguments (preachers would be forced to marry fags!) it passed.  That narrow passage replaced Proposition 8’s previous obscurity with nationwide attention and now it’s become the Plessy vs. Ferguson of homosexual rights.  It even comes with a catchy nickname, “Prop H8”.

This is the greatest thing that could’ve possibly happened for supporters of equal access to marriage; it’s the clarion call that the issue had previously lacked.  The 2003 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court was national news, but it just isn’t that exciting from a storytelling standpoint.  First of all, it’s a court decision and those are inherently dry, they lack the democratic panache and easily understood arithmetic of ballot initiatives.

More importantly, it was in boring old Massachusetts.  Let’s face it, nobody west of the Hudson River gives a fuck about the state that produced Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.  California, though, is a place everybody cares about; it gave us Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, it’s where movies and teevee come from, its governor is a multi-millionaire movie star.  Nobody in one of the flyover states ever shopped at Mervyn’s Massachusetts, did they?

Not only does this thing already have a compelling plot and a sexy location, but it’s going to happen in a non-presidential election year.  Without the bright spectacle of a presidential contest media types are going to be hungry for stories and the California vote on same sex marriage will be easy pickings.  It’s obviously not a national referendum, but it might feel like one and in terms of the larger national battle over same sex marriage that’s important.

Once Proposition Whatever passes, and while surprises can happen the odds have to be heavily in its favor, the idea of same sex marriage as a rolling fait accompli will be pretty much cemented in the national consciousness.  Of course, if one speculates a bit further one can ask what happens after 2010.  Will another initiative opposing marriage, with newer and cleverer wording, be on the ballot in 2012?  Will the cycle repeat itself?  Of course not, the forces supporting ye olde tyme marriage know that theirs is a losing cause.  Licked at the ballot box they’ll likely not rise again.

Yesterday’s ruling and the passage of Proposition 8 in general have set the stage for a monumental battle over same sex marriage.  Since that battle is going to take place on friendly ground and on national television it’s ultimately to the benefit of those who would see the various joys and miseries of marriage extended to homosexual couples.  Just since last November’s vote, a mere six months ago, three more states have legalized same sex marriage and New Hampshire is right on the brink.  That’s a pretty rapid advance for an issue that was considered politically radioactive as recently as 2004.  There’s no reason to expect anything except further progress and this week’s little setback is only going to make the eventual victory bigger and more legitimate.

A Problem of Priority

“Dad, that’s a gag paper we got at the carnival.” – Lisa Simpson
“Oh, no wonder I didn’t hear about Bart being elected World’s Greatest Sex Machine.” – Homer Simpson

I am generally a defender of The New York Times.  Even during the heights of the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller fiascos I was always telling anyone who would listen that the Times is still an American newsgathering organization without peer.  The daily A section remains a marvel, with datelines and photographs from around the world and across the country.  Their website is also in a league of its own in terms of available information and breadth and depth of coverage.  There isn’t another newspaper (or group of newspapers), to say nothing of television channels, that even comes close to reporting that much news.

So while there are, and always will be, a lot of legitimate complains to be leveled at the Times, too many of them take the newsgathering for granted.  That doesn’t lessen the validity of complains over vacuous “trend” articles, the frequent relegation of female oriented news stories to the Style section, or the rather strange group that makes up the op-ed columnists.  (Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman treat their Times columns with the kind of yawning indifference usually seen only amongst the most checked out of tenured faculty.)  But it’s worth recalling that the reason so many different people complain about the Times is because so many different people read the Times.  And so many people read the Times because it’s head and shoulders above every other newspaper in the country.

That lengthy intro concluded; I have a complaint to make.  The image below is from the www.nytimes.com, it’s the above the fold portion of Thursday’s front page.

Real news in blue, useless partisan hackery in red.

Real news in blue, useless partisan hackery in red.

The lead story is outlined in red; it was written by Elisabeth Bumiller (one of the least informative Times bylines) and carried a dateline of Washington, D.C.  It was essentially a write-up of an “unreleased Pentagon report” stating that one in seven of prisoners who’ve been freed or transferred from Guantanamo have taken up arms again.  Setting aside the fact that there are probably unreleased Pentagon reports that deal with alien landings and Soviet weather control, it’s a transparently news-less article.  Even an unsophisticated provincial like me saw it as little more than pre-emptive media spin in advance of the Obama speech on Guantanamo.

In fact, it was so breathlessly and carelessly put together that the Times subsequently changed the story and the headline after complaints that it was misleading about whether or not prisoners who may have not been terrorists before they got to Guantanamo could be said to be “returning” to terrorism if they became terrorists (itself a fuzzy term) after being released.  They then had to defend the changes as well as the original story; all in all, not a proud day.

The other story I’ve highlighted, outlined in blue, was not the lead in that day’s paper, but probably should’ve been.  It reported on very quiet negotiations between the Afghan government and at least some of its various opponents.  The basic outline would be a withdrawal of American forces in exchange for peace; and these negotiations are occurring with the tacit support of the US Government.  The State Department issued a rote denial, but the men interviewed for the story said that they had indeed met with American officials about the negotiations.  If true, this has the potential to be a huge development in the course of the American war in Afghanistan.

Comparing those two stories and their relative placement in the Times is an exercise in head scratching.  The lead story was a naked attempt at media-cycle spin that was so news-less it required subsequent revisitation and revision, the other contained actual news and is the very definition of diligent journalism, ferreting out new information (in a war zone) that could be very important in determining how the war eventually ends.  The former was a partisan leak that could’ve been given to any organization with a significant media profile; the latter was serious and immeasurably valuable foreign reporting that is done by only a tiny handful of outfits.  I love The New York Times, but this wasn’t them putting their best foot forward.

A Simple Story

“That story isn’t suitable for children.” – Lisa Simpson
“Really?  I keep my pants on in this version.” – Chief Wiggum

I have a theory about why Dick Cheney has been all over television since he left office.  He, more than any other person, knows about the darkest secrets of the Bush Administration; he knows all the wet and bloody details and his newfound fondness for interviews and public speeches is a kind of preemptive defense of those awful things.  He’s selling a catchall defense (we did what was necessary/doing these things kept America safe/I would do them again) that can be applied no matter what kind of twisted evil shenanigans come out next.  I doubt very much that I’m the first person to think of this theory and I have no real evidence to support it, it just fits the facts.

On Friday, McClatchy added new weight to the simple and explosive allegation that Cheney ordered prisoners tortured to try and bolster the case for invading Iraq:

The head of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantanamo from 2002-2005 confirmed to McClatchy that in late 2002 and early 2003, intelligence officials were tasked to find, among other things, Iraq-al Qaida ties, which were a central pillar of the Bush administration’s case for its March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“I’m aware of the fact that in late 2002, early 2003, that (the alleged al Qaida-Iraq link) was an interest on the intelligence side,” said retired Army Lt. Col. Brittain Mallow, a former military criminal investigator. “That was something they were tasked to look at.”

But wait, there’s more.  Not only did they torture guys to get them to confess to something that didn’t exist, Cheney then cited those torture induced false confessions in an interview in early 2004 (when he was running for office):

The Rocky Mountain News asked Cheney in a Jan. 9, 2004, interview if he stood by his claims that Saddam’s regime had maintained a “relationship” with al Qaida, raising the danger that Iraq might give the group chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to attack the U.S.

“Absolutely. Absolutely,” Cheney replied.

[…]

“The (al Qaida-Iraq) links go back,” he said. “We know for example from interrogating detainees in Guantanamo that al Qaida sent individuals to Baghdad to be trained in C.W. and B.W. technology, chemical and biological weapons technology. These are all matters that are there for anybody who wants to look at it.”

That’s a devastatingly open and shut case.  No relationship ever existed and even if it had there were neither chemical nor biological weapons in Iraq with which to be trained.

What this and other stories like it are cementing is the easy to understand idea that torture and the Iraq invasion are intimately linked.  It’s a simple story, the Bush Administration needed to justify their war of choice, they tortured some guys to help produce evidence, and then they cited their in-house bullshit in public.  It’s easy to understand, it’s becoming increasingly easy to prove, and it’s the kind of simple narrative that can be quickly explained to the distracted public.

Cheney, of course, knows all of this.  (He probably also knows about even more horrible stuff that hasn’t yet become public.)  Whatever else may be said about him, Cheney isn’t stupid, and he’s certainly aware that without the full power of the Executive Branch trying to keep a lid on things even more vile deeds are going to see the light of day.  In short, Dick Cheney knows he did a bunch of illegal things, he knows that proof exists, and he knows that he is very indictable.  Television is the best place for him because the torture story is now so simple that anyone can understand it.  Muddying the waters by crowing about national security is the only line of defense he has left.

End note:

You know who looks increasingly better the more we find out about the Bush Administration?  John Kerry.  2004 was never going to be an easy election for the Democrats, for a whole host of reasons, but I don’t think Kerry, or anyone else for that matter, understood or even suspected just what they were up against.  I mean, Cheney, whose name was on all the bumper stickers, was ordering men tortured to produce false information which he ended up using against Kerry and company.  Political tricks are one thing, but nobody was prepared to combat that kind of ferociousness.

Play in Dirt You Get Dirty

“Would the world judge me harshly if I threw away the key?” – Principal Skinner
“No, but the PTA would tear ya a new arse.” – Groundskeeper Willie

There is no denying that the Obama Administration’s decision to make use of the Bush Administration’s sham military tribunals, announced like many embarrassing policies in the Friday news hole, is a serious disappointment.  (For the gory details it’s best, as always, to read Glenn Greenwald.)  Candidate Obama spoke unflinchingly against this type of thing, and yet here he is, barely four months into a four year term, nervously embracing some of the stupidest of his predecessor’s policies.  More broadly, it fits into a sad pattern of political expediency which has hitherto gone relatively unremarked upon.  And make no mistake, this is a political decision.

The safeguards within our legal system (chains of evidence, presumptions of innocence, trials by jury) exist in no small part to keep the authorities in line.  The only threat that has any chance of keeping the people in charge following the rules is that of a guilty man going free.  When it comes to the prisoners of Bush the Younger’s failed War on Terror, however, those safeguards were arbitrarily removed for more than seven years.  The one constant of all the Bush Administration’s legal wrangling over prisoners was their absolute assertion, contra all previous American legal history, that they could hold these men indefinitely.  Because they were operating without any fear of acquittals everything else got short shrift, from the messy realities of humanely treating prisoners to the simple bureaucratic necessity of maintaining coherent case files.

That is the mess with which the Obama Administration must contend.  Our legal system isn’t set up to have seven year gaps where anything goes followed by a complete return to normalcy and the quagmire bequeathed to them when it comes to Guantanamo is too messy and too complex to be cleaned up without significant political costs.  As a result the new Administration is faced with two unpleasant alternatives.

On the side of the angles they can bite the bullet and remand everyone over to civilian courts or regular military trials under the UCMJ.  That runs the very real risk that guilty prisoners will go free.  Should that happen the fault will lie with the Bush Administration, which in its long and lawless detention created conditions that resulted in the release of guilty men; but the blame will sit squarely on Obama (this is a familiar dynamic for our new President).

The other choice is to try and ram some of these men through the newfangled military tribunal system, where convictions can either be assured or significantly advantaged.  This is seen as having a higher likelihood of keeping these men behind lock and key, but it comes at an enormous cost to America’s long term reputation.  Obama appears to be betting that he has so much credibility and goodwill right now that no one, save a few cranks in his party and on-line, will really hold it against him.  He is probably correct.

Obama has shown a willingness to place political expediency above principal before, witness his naked flip-flop on the FISA bill last summer.  It’s a side of his personality which, despite all the scrutiny he has endured the last couple of years, remains widely underappreciated: beneath everything else he is a consummate and masterful politician.  All the “Hope” shirts and Shepard Fairey posters in the world cannot change the fact that Obama is a ruthlessly clear eyed political animal.

The principled course of action would be to take these trials back to existing courts, and if there are acquittals then the acquitted should be set free.  That is a chance we should be willing to take because, in theory at least, we cannot put a price on our values and our principals; and sticking by them has always benefitted us in the long term.  However, an acquittal of someone implicated in American deaths, especially if those deaths occurred in September of 2001, would be a public relations nightmare at the very least.  It would also have every opportunity to turn into a full blown political catastrophe for Obama specifically and Democrats in general.

Obama weighed American legal tradition and the human rights of these men against all else that he hopes to accomplish and found the former wanting.  It’s as simple as it is sad.  One can hope that when he’s got some of his signature proposals behind him, when he feels more secure politically, he’ll remember them.  But there are a lot of conditionals in that sentence and it seems a thin hope.

Shuckin’ and Jivin’

“I’m getting sick of your stereotypes.” – Token Black
“Be as sick as you want just give me a goddamn bass line!” – Eric Cartman

We’re now three columns in to Ross Douthat’s residence in the opinion section of The New York Times (I say “section” because his columns haven’t yet made it to the printed page, though one assumes that’s coming).  His first effort used a hypothetical “Cheney ’08” campaign to lament Republican unwillingness to confront the ugly reasons they’ve lost power.  The second was a dismissal of Arlen Specter and a call for more “centrists” in the Republican Party.  The third, yesterday’s, was an attempt to paint an optimistic face on the anti-abortion movement.  This is an admittedly small body of opinion work from which to draw any conclusions, but it appears that Douthat is acclimating himself well to the role of conservative minstrel.

Provided you’re willing to be ostracized by your own kind it’s a pretty sweet gig.  You can’t ask for a higher profile, the pay is quite nice and all kinds of people will take your phone calls and invite you to parties.  Look at David Brooks, he’s been doing this for years and as much scorn as he has had heaped on him (and as incoherent as many of his columns are), he’s recently been singled out for attention by the President of the United States.  Constructing grammatically correct sentences that pick at liberal arguments in a Reasonable Conservative way has its perks.

There is, of course, a downside to this (after all, any real conservative will tell you that there’s no such thing as a free lunch).  The Reasonable Conservative can’t just go gallivanting around the airwaves, best seller lists and op-ed pages making outrageous statements in a fact free environment like the Limbaughs, Coulters and Krauthammers of the world.  That’s more fun and more crowd pleasing, but it will never get Serious people to think of you Seriously.  Rather, the Reasonable Conservative has to recognize the existence of facts and reality (and their well known liberal bias), and then still say conservative things.  That is not an easy thing to do, and it leads to intellectual train wrecks like yesterday’s column.

Titled “Faking Left” Douthat starts by arguing that conservatives are inherently fucked in the debate over gay marriage because they’re arguing against freedom, in this case the freedom to marry whomever you please:

Thus gay marriage opponents’ persistent disadvantage. They can argue from tradition, custom and Christianity — as Obama himself does, albeit with dubious sincerity, to explain why he backs civil unions but not full-fledged marriage. They can note the perils of formally severing the link between marriage and childbearing in a society where far too many children are born outside of wedlock as it is. But supporters of gay marriage are the only ones making an argument from personal liberty — the freedom to marry, the right to marry — and that has made all the difference.

This is Reasonable Conservative argumentation at its finest.  He’s agreeing with the liberal position (that’s nice!) but he’s doing so within a serious intellectual framework, so it’s okay for him (the conservative) to do so.  He deploys words like “freedom” and “right” which everyone can endorse and while there is a whiff of lament about the increasing liberalness of the world, he seems okay with it on account of that rigorous intellectual framework.  Unfortunately it’s at this very moment, when the Reasonable Conservative line of argumentation has built up a good head of steam, that it begins to jump the rails.  What’s really fascinating about this is that you can actually watch it happen, sentence by sentence.  Here’s the very next paragraph:

On abortion, though, the picture is very different. The pro-life movement is arguably more comfortable with the language of rights and liberties than its opponents. Abortion foes are defending a right to life grounded in the Declaration of Independence, after all, whereas pro-choicers are defending more nebulous rights (privacy, autonomy, etc.) supposedly grounded in “penumbras” and “emanations” from the Constitution.

There’s a lot going on there, so let’s fisk it line by line:

On abortion, though, the picture is very different.

Did you agree with what I said in the paragraph about gay marriage?  Remember how Reasonable I was?  Well hold tight because I’m about to blow your liberal mind.

The pro-life movement is arguably more comfortable with the language of rights and liberties than its opponents.

Mind.  Blown.  You like “rights” and “liberties”, don’t you?  And when it comes to abortion you’re not used to thinking of pro-lifers as people with a high regard for “rights” and “liberties” because to you a woman’s “rights” and “liberties” should take precedence over the pre-born person you don’t even care about.  Oh yeah, and nevermind that the hypothetical woman in question is a breathing autonomous person, I deftly skipped that part and you didn’t even notice.

Abortion foes are defending a right to life grounded in the Declaration of Independence, after all,

See what I did there?  “Right to life”, “grounded”, “Declaration of Independence”, I’m arguing from first principals which are unassailable because they hearken back to our most hallowed traditions.

whereas pro-choicers are defending more nebulous rights (privacy, autonomy, etc.) supposedly grounded in “penumbras” and “emanations” from the Constitution.

Ah, there’s privacy and autonomy, thought I was going to ignore them, didn’t you?  Instead I’ve minimized them by using quote marks and weak-kneed words like “nebulous” and “supposedly”.  Your position now looks mushy and weak whereas mine is straight edged and solid.

That is a tightly crafted paragraph (transition in the first sentence, statement in the second, and support in the third) written by someone who probably got a lot of “A”s in English classes over the years.  It has all the marks of the clean, unassailable logic that is supposed to be the Reasonable Conservative’s calling card.  Unfortunately it’s an intellectual house of cards because the whole thing is constructed on a premise, all but unstated, that is neither clean nor logical.  It rests on the hoary idea, easily dismantled by anyone with a passing knowledge of biology, that Life Begins at Conception.  Douthat ignores that entirely because engaging it would spoil the mood; instead he blows right past that gaping logical hole and keeps on moving so that the finished product looks nice and sounds Reasonable; and that’s good enough for minstrel work.

No opinions are likely to be changed, and anyone who feels the urge can take it apart without too much effort, but Douthat accomplished his purpose: he amused the liberal majority with easily defeated arguments and gave the Times’ opinion space the veneer of ideological balance.  If he keeps it up for a decade or more he too can dine with a liberal president as a show of tokenism.

We Have Ways of Making You Eat

“You can’t take our donuts!” – Homer Simpson

Towards the end of Barry Glassner’s The Gospel of Food he describes the rather convoluted process the federal government uses to come up with its official dietary guidelines.  Competing interests lobby for their particular foods, the dietary restrictions and limitations of specific groups are weighed and considered, supposedly impartial contributors are often anything but.  The resulting suggestions and guidelines are woefully ill crafted and widely ignored by pretty much everyone.  Nevertheless, the need to create an official dietary recommendation that sounds both scientific and definitive exists and must be served, no matter the stupidity of the underlying logic.

Glassner gets to this topic only after having dismantled most of the commentary and generally accepted theories out there about how Americans eat; but the official “scientific” guidelines highlight something that is central to a healthy and skeptical understanding of food.  Namely, that there are no panacea foods, nor is there one supreme dietary philosophy, nor is there a way to eat which can honestly be described as universally “healthy”, “right” or “correct”.  There are, quite simply, too many varieties of people, too many varieties of food, and too many different contexts (income, lifestyle, family situations, etcetera) to create the One True Diet.

That, of course, doesn’t stop nutritionists, doctors of various stripes and anyone else confident enough to append the word “expert” to their names from attempting to do so.  The results are all around us, in newspapers, magazines, on television and on-line: a hodgepodge of conflicting advice, competing best sellers and other assorted nonsense that has made eating a self-aware act with cultural, social and even political implications.  It’s exhausting and it’s completely unnecessary.

Glassner’s main point is that the idea that one’s food intake must be strictly monitored with an eye towards some nebulous and ill defined concept of “healthy” is at best a red herring and at worst genuinely stressful.  He calls it the “gospel of naught” and it’s a very apt coinage.  Modern nutritional language is replete with spooky terminology that would fit right in with the worst fear mongering of any organized religion, “anti-oxidants”, “beta blockers”, “miracle foods”, the list goes to infinity and it has the same purpose as religious dogma: change your behavior . . . Or Else (oh, and you’ll need to lighten your wallet a bit too).

Glassner isn’t the first person to point out that the public is, for the most part, woefully ill informed when it comes to food and that newspaper and television reports about food and eating don’t help matters.  (Even people who conscientiously try to eat smart often have only the foggiest of foggy ideas about what they’re actually purchasing.)  But what sets The Gospel of Food apart is that unlike many other food commentators he works without certainty.  Glassner makes no claim to unquestionable correctness and his own refreshing uncertainty is on display on every page.  He’s not advocating a specific list of things one should and should not eat, nor is he trumpeting any particular philosophy about how one should eat.  Rather he’s pointing out that eating is something we all do and that given the choice between it being enjoyable or stressful, the former is vastly better.

Food demagoguery is nothing new and fears about trans-fats and fast foods, prescriptions of organics or veganism, proscriptions of bread or chocolate, and even the myth that families that eat dinner together are more harmonious*, is just its modern form.  In 228 conversational and breezy pages Glassner takes them apart and reveals them to be little more than silliness.

(And no it doesn’t matter that the book came out two years ago, all of the shit Glassner describes is still chugging right along.)

*Rates of immediate families dining together are relatively unchanged in at least five decades and that study that purported to show that kids from families that eat dinner together x times per week do better in school doesn’t even exist.  I’ve seen that canard in more places and heard it from more people than I care to remember.

2009 Is Not 2003

“Marge, I agree with you in theory.  In theory communism works . . . in theory.” – Homer Simpson

Something’s been bothering me about last Sunday’s post about the newfound leaderless-ness of the Republican Party.  There is a pretty obvious rebuttal to that piece which I didn’t even attempt to address; namely that many of the analyses of the Red’s dim future, mine included, share a lot of similarities with the equally dire prognostications being aimed at the Blues circa 2003.  I think most of the similarities are superficial, but that doesn’t mean they can simply go unaddressed.

Broadly speaking, the criticisms being applied to the Reds today (They’re leaderless!  The extreme fringe of their Party is excluding their “moderates”!) were applied almost verbatim to the Blues circa 2003-2005.  They had no one who could counter the towering political and media presence of Bush the Younger and those dirty fucking anti-war hippies made them unpalatable to non-nutjobs.  All of that turned out to be bullshit, so, what’s different this time around?

I’d say that there are two big differences, one of which has been extensively covered and the other which is so obvious that it’s underappreciated.  The well covered factor is the demographic and party identification trends that look far worse for the Republicans than they ever did for the Democrats.  Long story short, even at the heights of Bush the Younger’s power the Democrat’s party identification numbers never plummeted the way the Republicans have.  And as bleak as those numbers are, the future looks even worse because the most solidly Republican segment of the population, working class conservative white people, is shrinking as a percentage of the total American electorate every year.

The underappreciated but obvious reason is that Republican policies have themselves failed.  This is so simple it barely qualifies as a third grade civics lesson: if the party in power screws up and does things people don’t like, it gets tossed out.  They lost power because the policies they implemented were disastrous.  There’s really nothing more to it than that.

If the Iraq War had been won quickly, and the tax cuts had caused the federal coffers to overflow, and the economy went off and created millions of new jobs, then the White House and Congress would still be held by the Reds.  But there was never any chance of those things happening, not because the policies were implemented poorly but because the theories upon which they were based are completely wrong.  The theories and policies to which the Reds are inextricably linked, things like preventative war and supply-side nonsense, are simply unworkable in the real world.

It’s certainly possible that the policies of Obama and the rest of the Blues won’t work either.  Heath care reform could cause grief for millions of middle class Americans and see them toss him out over it in 2012; the financial mess could drag the economy for years to come; really, anything’s possible.  But the policies they’re pursuing aren’t based on wishful thinking like “tax cuts increase revenue” and “war is a good way to reform other countries policies”.  That is the crucial distinction between the depths of Democratic despair in 2003-05 and the current Republican despair.

Like a Chicken with Its Head Cut Off

“Grrrrrrr.” – Headless Body of Agnew

Before David Souter announced that he was handing in his badge and gavel the big story of the week was the defection of Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter from the Reds to the Blues.  Specter’s motive appears to be little more than self-preservation, he likes being a senator and his chances of keeping his job were a lot better on the Blue team.  The tone for analysis of his move was set by Olympia Snowe’s mournful op-ed piece in the New York Times, “We can’t continue to fold our philosophical tent into an umbrella under which only a select few are worthy to stand.”

That is an easy way to think about this, but it’s also too simple.  Nate Silver calls it the “Republican Death Spiral”:

Thus the Republicans, arguably, are in something of a death spiral. The more conservative, partisan, and strident their message becomes, the more they alienate non-base Republicans. But the more they alienate non-base Republicans, the fewer of them are left to worry about appeasing. Thus, their message becomes continually more appealing to the base — but more conservative, partisan, and strident to the rest of us. And the process loops back upon itself.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it misses something fundamental: the breakdown of discipline in what was once a very disciplined party.  There are a lot of factors contributing to that, including the shrinking tent phenomenon that Snowe and Silver invoke, but perhaps the most glaring new development is what’s missing: a strong leader.

Pretty much since Ronald Reagan the Republican Party has had a clear leader, able to keep the troops’ raging passions focused and in check.  Bush the Younger was in charge for almost ten years, particularly from the summer of 1999 (when he became the presumptive nominee) until the debacle in 2006 (when he was undeniably exposed as being out of touch).  That was seven years and change as the unquestioned lord and master of the party and then a further two years and change as the nominal head of the party.  Before him there was Gingrich, and before him there was Bush the Elder and before him there was Reagan.  Three decades, four guys, and that’s it.

The critical difference between the current Republican Party and the one that spent the last thirty years winning elections is the lack of leadership.  The party has two main constituencies, social conservatives and financial conservatives (a term that has, unfortunately, lost its connection to a preference for balanced budgets and come to mean strict adherence to disastrous supply-side orthodoxy).  It takes an iron fist to rule such an organization (this is the downside of being the more organized and disciplined party) and right now nobody is up to the job.

After eight years of Bush the Younger, most of which was spent with Republican majorities on both sides of Capitol Hill, neither the fiscal conservatives nor the social conservatives feel any better off.  Sure, trickle down blows were struck in 2001 and 2003, but Grover Norquist and his ilk saw those as merely first steps in a long campaign.  Then Social Security privatization failed to get off the ground and now those hard won upper class tax cuts are either going to be allowed to expire or outright overturned.

The social conservatives are in even worse shape as liberal social mores continue their popular ascendance.  Abortion is not meaningfully closer to being outlawed than it was in 2001, nor have swearing and sex been removed from television.  Bristol Palin dealt a public, “jump the shark” level blow to abstinence only sex education.  Even worse, homosexuals began legally marrying each other the last few years, despite the fact that Bush the Younger campaigned on a constitutional amendment outlawing the practice in 2004.  So while John Roberts and Samuel Alito are powerful consolation prizes, the social conservatives, like their fiscal counterparts, saw their dream president come and go with little to show for it.  That frustration, combined with two consecutive electoral disasters, has put the Republican rank and file in an even fouler mood than usual.

This is where Arlen Specter comes in.  In 2004 he faced a nearly fatal primary challenge backed by fundamentalist supply-siders.  He was able to turn it away, by the slimmest of margins, only with the full pressure of a Republican White House bearing down on the Pennsylvania insurgents.  Given their druthers the Republican brain trust would’ve rather had a more conservative Republican senator from Pennsylvania, but they recognized that if Pat Toomey had won the primary he probably would’ve lost the general.  Protecting Specter was a calculated, strategic decision that helped the Republican Party as a whole, but something like it couldn’t happen right now.  No one possesses the kind of intraparty power necessary to shield red legislators in blue parts of the country.

This disintegration began after the 2006 election, but the continued presence of Bush the Younger in the White House (and the need for at least some defense to keep him from being impeached), kept things relatively calm.  The first demonstration of the new rancor came in the Republican presidential primary last year when the Lexus conservatives went for Mitt Romney, the Bible conservatives went for Mike Huckabee and John McCain fell into the nomination as the least objectionable choice.  That was a sign of things to come and the Specter defection is only the next step.

The structural problem here is that no one will be able to claim the Republican throne for at least three more years.  The 2010 election is a mere eighteen months away and short of a nuclear bomb going off in an American city it’s tough to imagine a political catastrophe that would cost the Democrats either house of Congress.  That means no national leader until 2011 at the earliest, and that’s if someone jumps out to a Bush-like presumptive nominee status very early, which, given the current list of interested candidates, seems unlikely.  Of course, if Barack Obama is re-elected in 2012 the cycle starts again and a party that has long relied on strict discipline will continue without the means to enforce it.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.