Month: November 2006

Adding to Spencer’s Questions

by tristero

Indeed, Spencer Ackerman is quite right:

“Faced with a disastrous war, the most important consideration is not ‘Were we wrong?’ but ‘Why were we wrong?’ and ‘How can we avoid being so wrong in the future?”

In fact, I said the same thing on October 18, 2003:

Bush’s foreign policy, the too-late-to-save-us release of “America Unbound” and the bamboozling of Joshua Micah Marshall just before the war point to a very serious crisis. It is an intellectual crisis that gives credence to obviously terrible and self-destructive ideas. It makes them seem fit not only for academic debate, and not only for public discussion, but – incredibly -also fit for adoption as policy by the most militarily powerful country the world has ever known. It is an intellectual crisis that permits such long-discredited siren calls as America’s “manifest destiny” to sing out once again and seduce nearly every class in this country into believing the clearly delusional notion that by prosecuting a clearly unnecessary war we could ensure peace.

How could this crisis have happened? I don’t have a clue. I don’t know how anyone could have heard what Josh heard and not think that the person who said them was a candidate for involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. I don’t know how anyone as smart and eloquent as Nicholas Lemann could understand the neo-con fairy tale so well and claim it was “breathtakingly ambitious” instead of screaming yellow bonkers.

But we are going to have to find out how it happened. Not to punish Wolfowitz, Perle and the rest of the self-described Cabal (although what they did was surely criminal) and certainly not to punish the media which, to be kind, fucked up royally for two years. No, we must figure out how this crisis happened so that we can prevent it ever happening again.

And now I’d like to add some questions to that list Spencer Ackerman has for The New Republic to address:

1. How come I, along with most of the world I might add, got it so right? Not only, “What did we see that that the official grand poohbahs missed” but also, “How did we know enough, and what did we know, to judge that Bush/Iraq would without doubt be a total disaster so clearly in the spring of ’02?*

2. How can we hear from more people who got it right in the mainstream media? I don’t mean me, duh, I mean the Jessica Tuchman Mathews of the world.

I think the second question really requires not only an immediate answer, but immediate action. The very same clowns are still in place for the most part, making a total hash of our national discourse. I’m not saying merely that we need knowledgeable liberals appearing regularly on tv, although heaven knows we need them. We also need real moderates, real conservatives, and real leftists – we got plenty already of real rightwingers, thank you very much.

Furthermore, we need the ignorant lunatics – I’m talking Bill o’Reilly and Robert Novak and Sean Hannity here, among others – marginalized. It is inexcusable that a president of the United States would give interviews to such people. It is outrageous that a man as morally bankrupt as William Bennett can still appear as a responsible spokesman on a so-called mainstream network like CNN. Etc. Etc.

* It’s worth repeating again, as the “good idea to invade Iraq, too bad Bush was the one who did it” line has become the CW:

In 2002, when I first started to hear about the planned invasion, I was convinced that only a damn fool would take anything like that seriously. There was no chance in hell that good would come out of it. And let me be clear. It was not because the Bush administration was incompetent at implementing an invasion and conquest of Iraq that could have worked, although there was their incompetence to deal with, of course. It never could have worked. (And in fact, one would expect an incompetent government to take just such an incompetent idea seriously.) And of course, most importantly it was immoral and completely illegal.

The Pence of Darkness And God’s Mighty Government

by poputonian

Today’s Indy Star puffs up Mike — I’m “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order” — Pence, but acknowledges he is an underdog in the race for House minority leader. The article also notes Laura Ingraham on Tuesday saying of Pence: “If there is a God in heaven, he will be the next House minority leader.”

Laura longs for someone to lead her from darkness, that place in the wilderness as can only be understood by “church-people,” as Chris Matthews has been calling them lately .

The article also provides this quote from Pence: “We didn’t just lose our majority. We lost our way.”

As any good conservative will tell you — and as Pence explained in his vision statement to House Republicans — ‘losing your way’ means you end up in that “otherplace.” You know where I mean:

We are in the wilderness because we walked away from the principles that brought us our governing Majority.

Yes, it’s that place again … the wilderness.

As interpreted by the minister’s sermon, even the natural world – the storms, the wolves in the wilderness, and the catastrophes at sea – spoke of the war of good and evil and of God’s mighty government. Social institutions, conscience, and the forces of nature meshed in the communal experience to restrain rebellious dispositions.
…
The combined force of so many institutions invested law and authority with immense power. In nearly every dimension of life – family, church, the social hierarchy, and religion – a [citizen] encountered unanimous reinforcement of governing authority. The total impact was immense, because each institution was an integral part of a monolithic whole. In each community the agencies of law and authority merged so that the individual felt himself confined within a unified governing structure. The preacher’s exhortation to submit to domestic government reinforced the father’s dominion in his family. Church discipline carried added terrors because censures were delivered before the neighbors and the town’s most prominent families, and the assignment of pews in the meetinghouse according to social rank reminded everyone of the distinctions among individuals and of the deference due superiors. The total environment enjoined obedience: the stately figure of minister or commissioner as he rode through town, the leading inhabitants’ imposing two-storied houses standing near the meetinghouse at its center, the austere graves of the dead in its shadow.

Only Mike Pence can restore fear of wilderness to puritan governance.

Bushman again:

Election of these officials, even the highest, did not diminish their authority or make them responsible to the people. Democracy, in the Puritan view, was nongovernment, or anarchy, and rulers had to constrain [themselves] not to obey a corrupt popular will. Election was a device for implementing divine intentions rather than for transmitting power from the people to their rulers.

And a contemporaneous quote from the day of Puritan rule:

“In elective states, where persons are advanced by the suffrage of others to places of rule, and vested with Civil Power, the persons choosing give not the power, but GOD. They are but the instruments of conveyance.”

I hope Mike hangs in there. Someday he’ll convince enough people of the invisible darkness that enfolds them, the one they can’t see but which he knows is there. Eventually, the incredible lightness of movement conservatism will save them from it.

The Voice Of Unreason

by tristero

Blogger ate an earlier post I did on David Klinghoffer’s Jerusalem Post article in which he attempts to align “intelligent design” creationism with Orthodox Judaism.* So, I will just quickly note that among other “goodies,” David’s article features a tactic common to the right when they lie or argue for a particularly awful idea, namely the adoption of a facade of sober-minded, above-the-fray thoughtfulness. In this case, David Klingoffer does both. He lies about a particularly awful idea:

Yet more than a few people on the traditional side of the religious divide are vocal critics of intelligent design (ID), the scientific framework in which doubts about Darwinism are currently being expressed and worked out.

The lie, of course, is that David knows that in Kitzmiller v. Dover, Judge Jones ruled that “intelligent design” is nothing more than the religious doctrinee of creationism and that there is nothing scientific about “intelligent design” creationism in the slightest. And David well knows that the vast majority of mainstream scientists concur.

And the bad idea here? Why, evangelizing to Israel for “intelligent design” creationism, of course. Doesn’t Israel have enough troubles as it is?

I’ll leave it to you to marvel at the incredible density of deceit packed into David’s column, not to mention his sheer ignorance of science. My favorite: ID belief is an “increasingly confident minority view among scientists.” Not that “a vanishingly small minority of scientists” have anything good to say about ID, but that it is a minority view. Not that the small minority (out of which David can muster up not a single scientist trained in the specialized areas of evolution, genetics and species formation) is increasing, but rather that their confidence is.

My interest in David Klinghoffer is not because I think he is a particularly influential or effective writer. Rather, it is because his efforts to disguise his far-right political agenda as religion are so crude as to make it obvious what he is really up to. By the time you’re slick enough to lead a mega-church, as Ted Haggard did, you’ve managed to bury the political implications underneath all the hosannas and praise the Lords so that casual outside observers who don’t know where the action lies will mistake it for non-political and therefore harmless religious observance.

With David, it’s always about far-right politics. The lengths he will go to to advance extremist memes are genuinely astonishing, if not downright revolting. Here, for instance:

It would be a presumption to assert that God caused the Holocaust, or allowed it to happen, in order to punish European Jewry for their increasingly widespread devotion to secularism. In any given historical event, we can never know God’s true intention. But it would also be a presumption, and a worse one, to assert that such a punishment was not what He had in mind. It is that latter presumption of which most Jews, including many religiously observant ones, are guilty today. Anyway, if He did intend that event as a punishment, a warning, or a lesson, it would fit the Bible’s pattern neatly. The Jews liquidated by Nazi Germany were not only, or even mostly, Reformers and secularists. Many deeply pious Jews perished as well, for they were often the last to seek escape from rising Nazi power.

You read that correctly. David here is arguing that maybe the Holocaust happened because God was punishing the Jews, all Jews, because some Jews were too “secular.” And he skirts quite close to saying that the Jews he thinks are too “secular” deserved the gas camps. His message is unmistakeable: if Jews want to be absolutely certain to avoid another Holocaust, they better do something about the deadly “secularists.”

To say the least, a few people begged to differ. Klinghoffer’s reply to them is also worth a read; just be sure that you haven’t eaten anything for at least two hours before you try.

Again, the issue is not so much David himself as it is how his blatantly obvious attempts to disguise his loopy politics as religion provide us with insight into how the slicker boys and girls go about it. Still, that Klinghoffer would try to export “intelligent design” creationism to Israel is truly unforgivable.

*Klinghoffer is employed by the Discovery Institute which should surprise no one. Where else could he work, after all?

Right On Time

by digby

November 26, 2005:

Movement conservatives are getting ready to write the history of this era as liberalism once again failing the people. Typically, the conservatives were screwed, as they always are. They must regroup and fight for conservatism, real conservatism, once again. Viva la revolucion!

There is no such thing as a bad conservative. “Conservative” is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives’ good graces. Until they aren’t. At which point they are liberals.

Today:

Reluctantly, we may finally have to admit that President George W. Bush has governed more like a liberal Democrat than the true moral conservative we all wanted to believe he was. If Richard Viguerie is right, more bad things will continue to happen to the Republican Party as long as conservatives remain unhappy.

They are so utterly predictable it’s as if we are living in some sort of conservative Zombie Day from which we cannot escape.

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The Oracle Speaks

by digby

With his trademark prescience, the man who wrote “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq” is now advising us not to withdraw from Iraq because to do so would lead to civil war:

Kenneth M. Pollack, an expert at the Brookings Institution who served on the staff of the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, also argued that a push for troop reductions would backfire by contributing to the disorder in Iraq.

“If we start pulling out troops and the violence gets worse and the control of the militias increases and people become confirmed in their suspicion that the United States is not going to be there to prevent civil war, they are to going to start making decisions today to prepare for the eventuality of civil war tomorrow,” he said. “That is how civil wars start.”

I guess Pollack’s been busy analyzing the gathering threat of the Mayan Empire or something because he seems to have missed the latest:

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Suckers

by digby

I just saw this on a conservative site and I couldn’t help but be arrested by the, shall-we-say unrealistic little fantasy this ad represents.

Right

Garbage Out, Garbage In

by digby

I’m sure others have noted this already, but Trent Lott’s resurrection among the Republican leadership can’t help but remind all of us of a time when the GOP elites passionately cast aside poor old Trent as nothing more than a piece of garbage. Remember this one, where the crazy dolphin lady held a little dialog with one of the other crazy dolphin ladies inside her head?

Q: Why are you conservative pundit-writer-chatterer types so passionate about this?

A: Lots of reasons. One is that we’re tired of being embarrassed by people who aren’t sensitive to the reality of race in America. We’re tired of being humiliated by politicians who otherwise see many things as we do but who seem to have an inability to be constructive and understanding about race. We’re tired to being associated with hate mongering. We care about our country, and we think patriotism demands a constructive attitude in this big area.

Some of us have put our reputations in jeopardy by supporting programs like the school liberation movement because we want to help people who don’t have much and need a break. Or we’ve put ourselves in jeopardy by opposing racial preferences, or any number of other programs, for the very reason that we believe completely in our hearts and minds that all races are equal and no one should be judged by the color of his skin. And then some guy comes along and speaks the old code of yesteryear and seems to reinforce the idea that those who hold conservative positions are really, at heart, racist. We are indignant, and we have been for a long time.

In the Lott scandal our indignation reached critical mass. A lot of conservatives, many of them 50 and under, decided enough is enough, let’s end this, let a new party be born. And by the way, in the particular case of Trent Lott, it didn’t start yesterday. Stanley Crouch just surprised me by sending me a column he wrote almost four years ago for the New York Daily News. It was about a Lott appearance before the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white-supremacist group. I said it was springtime and it’s time to throw out the garbage, and Mr. Lott should go. Go to the archives of conservative journals and see what they’ve been writing and thinking for a long time about race. This is a good time to get real conservative thinking out there and known for what it is.

So guess it must be liberals who have just elected him again to be the face of a major political party. How embarrassing for us.

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Deep Bench

by digby

Here’s an interesting post-mortem from John Judis on how the parties fared in the state legislatures in which he rightly points out:

Not only do they provide a rough measure of party loyalty, which reflects national politics, but they can also determine the overall success or failure of a party for years to come.

The overall results in this year’s state legislative races show a dramatic swing toward the Democrats. In races for state Senate, which usually undercount urban areas, the Democrats went from a 48 percent minority to a 51 percent majority; in state House races, they went from 49 to 55 percent of all seats. Prior to the election, Republicans controlled 20 state legislatures, the Democrats 19, and ten were split between House and Senate (Nebraska’s legislature is non-partisan). After the election, Democrats controlled 23, Republicans 15, and eleven were split.

Even more striking, however, are the trends in individual states. They show which states and regions are becoming solidly Democratic or solidly Republican, and which have become or remain contestable. Here’s a summary of where the two parties stand around the country:

The Northeast
Republicans not only didn’t make significant gains in any Northeastern state, they suffered significant losses in states where the party still had residual strength. New Hampshire, for example, now appears to be in the Democrats’ corner. Democrats there picked up six seats in the Senate, giving them a 14 to 10 advantage; in the House, where they were down 150 to 242 seats, nearly one hundred seats switched hands, giving Democrats a 239 to 161 majority. Democrats also made very large gains in Connecticut, Maine, and Maryland (which Republicans had hoped to win back after Republican Robert Ehrlich won the governorship in 2002).

Border states and the Upper South
Republicans made no gains in these states and suffered significant losses in West Virginia, Missouri, Kentucky and Arkansas, where Democrats won the governorship and picked up three legislative seats. They have a huge 27 to eight majority in the Arkansas Senate and a 75 to 25 majority in the House. Democrats now enjoy a clear advantage in Arkansas and West Virginia, and Missouri and Virginia are up for grabs. Kentucky still leans Republican, but Democrats picked up five House seats.

The Midwest
Republicans lost legislative seats throughout the Midwest, including Indiana. Iowa and Minnesota, which have teetered between Republican and Democratic control, appear to have become solidly Democratic. In Minnesota, Democrats won six Senate seats and 19 House seats, and in Iowa five Senate and five House seats. Republicans still enjoy majorities in both chambers in Ohio, though Democrats picked up one Senate seat and seven House seats there. But legislative majorities in Ohio depend on redistricting, which a Democratic governor will now control.

The South
The deep South remains Republican, as the party won two Senate seats and a House seat in Alabama, gained a House seat in South Carolina, and maintained its huge advantage in Georgia, which it won in 2004 when Republicans went from a six-to-five disadvantage to a seven-to-five advantage in the state legislature. Democrats made significant gains, however, in North Carolina and Florida, which are now contestable.

The Great Plains
Republican subordination to the religious right cost the party in the Dakotas and Kansas. In Kansas, with the wounds from a controversy over evolution still fresh, the Democrats picked up six House seats; in South Dakota (where a draconian anti-abortion initiative failed) five Senate seats and one House seat; and in North Dakota six Senate seats and six House seats. A Democratic presidential candidate may not carry these states, but it is now imaginable that a Democrat could be elected senator from Kansas.

Rocky Mountain states
Utah remains solidly Republican. Montana has a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators in Congress, but by losing two Senate seats, Democrats lost control of the Senate. Democrats picked up three Senate seats in Wyoming. These states have become competitive, but no means Democratic. But the big change is in Colorado, where Democrats solidified their victories in 2004, winning two more Senate seats and four more House seats. Colorado, like New Hampshire, may have turned blue this year.

The Southwest
Despite Republican Representative Heather Wilson’s re-election in Albuquerque (due to a disastrous debate performance by her opponent at the campaign’s end), New Mexico remains Democratic, as Democrats maintained their almost three-to-two margin in the state legislature. In Arizona, Republicans still control the legislature, but Democrats picked up seven seats in the House, narrowing the Republican margin to only 32 to 28. In Oklahoma and Texas, Republicans remain in command, although Democrats picked up five House seats in Texas despite Tom DeLay’s rigging of district lines.

The Pacific Coast
Democrats held their own in California, as expected. Yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger is governor, but he won re-election by firing the Pete Wilson protégés who initially ran the House and replacing them with Democrats. The Democrats picked up four seats in Oregon and 13 seats in Washington. After a gubernatorial cliff-hanger in 2004, Washington has become dependably Democratic.

Unlike the congressional or presidential elections, state races are not tied directly to national political issues. A candidate for the California Assembly, for example, doesn’t run on a platform of withdrawing from Iraq. But, while they don’t show whether a particular state will support a Democrat or Republican for president in 2008– presidential contests are still shaped too much by the candidates’ political skills–they do provide a good indication of which party a state or region will favor, on average, over the next four or five elections.

By this measure, Democrats should dominate the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Far West; make serious inroads in the Rockies, Plains states, and Southwest; and win a good share of seats in the border states and Upper South. The Republicans will maintain their hold over the Deep South, Utah, and, perhaps, Idaho. But they will have to work to win elections everywhere else. In short, if these trends hold up, the Republicans are in trouble. So much for Karl Rove’s math.

So much for Karl Rove.

One other thing that’s not mentioned very often, but which I find astonishing. I think we all sort of saw this as a “throw the bums out” election. The public might hate all incumbents, but the majority is likely to lose more so it’s bad news for them and good news for the minority party. What’s significant in this election is that the Democrats didn’t lose any seats at all. It wasn’t just disgust with “Washington” as Karl Rove wants people to believe. It was a very specific national rebuke of the Republican Party in all but its most solid strongholds in the deep South and a few western states.

Update: Bowers crunched these numbers too and makes this great point:

We have now almost entirely restocked our bench following the 1994 elections. Our list of potential candidates for higher office at every level is now much longer than it was only six years ago. We also are in a position to favorably remake electoral maps in than we were six years ago. Also, by taking a substantial lead in trifectas, now we can govern for the first time in a long time, shifting the national policy debate decidedly in our favor. The trend for us at the state level has been pretty much straight upward from 2004-2006. As the backbone of our national coalition, this makes our majorities and influence in Washington, D.C. all the greater.

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The Conservative Consensus

by digby

As I read about all the intermural jockeying for power and the discussions of a progressive agenda for the next congress, I can’t help but feel a little bit overwhelmed by the challenge we are going to face in the next few years.

Jonathan Cohn spells it out:

No, Bush hasn’t enacted a conservative version of the New Deal. But, even though some of his most grandiose proposals failed, he has still managed to leave a lasting mark on economic policy–and, through it, the economy. His tax cuts have shifted wealth in this country from the poor and middle-class to the rich. At the same time, they have destroyed the balanced budgets of the Clinton era, creating large liabilities that future governments will have to pay off. If you don’t think that’s a large impact, ask Bill Clinton himself: The large deficits he inherited forced him to shelve many of his early economic plans in 1993. Even if a Democrat is elected president in 2008, he will similarly spend much of his early time in office cleaning up this fiscal mess.

Less high-profile, but no less important, have been the administration’s actions on regulation. Substantially more skeptical of regulation–and regulators–than the Clinton administration, the Bush administration has gutted agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, rejecting proposed new rules on everything from ergonomics standards to tuberculosis protections that were already in the pipeline, while failing to propose new ones. This, too, is the kind of shift that a new president, let alone a new Congress, will find difficult to undo quickly. The regulatory process takes time. And seeing proposed changes through to completion requires sustained political will, particularly when the changes rankle well-connected business groups (as they so often do).

The Bush administration’s impact on the judiciary could be even longer-lasting. The conservatives Bush has appointed to the Supreme Court–where they enjoy lifetime tenure–could easily tip the balance on issues like abortion, privacy, and the limits of executive authority, the latter two being of particular concern given the war on terror. And, speaking of war, look at what the administration has done on foreign policy: It has toppled regimes in two countries, set off a civil war in one of them, committed a large chunk of our Armed Forces to action, and basically redefined the premises of U.S. foreign policy.

These and other such changes will affect Americans–and, in some respects, the entire world–for years to come. And while the voters rejected Bush’s divisive political strategy, it was exactly that strategy–much like FDR’s–that likely made these changes feasible. Imagine that Bush had governed as an accommodator rather than an agitator, as he promised to do as a candidate in 2000. Would he be more popular now? Probably. But would the rich still have their fabulous tax breaks? Would former industry lobbyists be running around the bureaucracy, destroying regulatory agencies from the inside out? Would U.S. troops still be in Baghdad? Probably not.

As Cohn says elsewhere in the piece, “[f]or the last few years, we’ve been in a conservative political period that arguably extended all the way back to the late 1960s, when Kevin Phillips wrote of an “emerging Republican majority.”

This is the fundamental problem we face and I don’t think we have all quite grasped the enormity of that because the Republicans ran and governed during the last 40 years as if the liberals were in control and they were the angry insurgents trying to knock them off. Everyone during this period, including the Democrats, fell for it and believed that underneath it all a liberal consensus existed. But to a remarkable extent, we have had a conservative consensus for some time.

Let’s look at economics. A reader sent me this excerpt from The Economist View‘s Tim Duy, talking about Hayek, in which he excerpts some choice quotes from The Road to Serfdom and explains that even the free market God of the right understood that government was necessary to mitigate at least some of the risk of a dynamic capitalist society. Here’s what I found most interesting about this post, however:

Speaking of Keynes, Robert Skidelsky’s masterful biography includes Keynes’s thoughts on Hayek:

Keynes’s response was unexpected. Hayek’s was a “grand book,” he wrote, and “we all have the greatest reason to be grateful to you for saying so well what needs so much to be said.Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement, but in deeply moved agreement.”

Keynes did note, however, that Hayek, by admitting to the need for government to serve a social function, recognized that there was in fact need for a middle ground, but could not determine where to draw it.

The difference between the intellectuals, you see, isn’t really so stark. But for the last 40 years that line has been drawn far over to the right as a function of politics rather than real economic philosophy. The public economic debate has been turned into a simplistic argument over who can provide the best tax cuts and the least regulation because that’s the candy the southern strategy Republicans sold to their conservative base as the best way to defund a government which they claim always spent hard-earned tax dollars on the “wrong” people. (You know what I’m talking about…)

But it didn’t stop with them. I think I wrote before about an earnest young woman I worked with a few years back who was a compassionate liberal, voted for Democrats and even contributed time and money to the cause. One day she came into my office and breathlessly told me, “Finally, I saw someone last night on TV who knows what he’s talking about. Maybe you’ve heard of him. He’s an economist and his name is Milton Friedman.” To her, Friedman “made sense” because he reaffirmed what she’d been hearing since she was old enough to vaguely pay attention, not because she agreed with his laissez-faire theories. She didn’t even know that’s what they were. It just sounded so reasonable to her (and as Dr. Atrios pointed out here, that little bit of freshman economics can be a dangerous thing.)

The Republicans may have finally jumped the shark, after failing so dramatically at governance, but they have inculcated their thinking so thoroughly into people’s minds that many people don’t even know it. The way most people think about government, and the vocabulary they all use, comes from the Republican playbook. It’s going to take a huge effort to get people thinking about it in new ways. (There are a lot of smart people working on that, thank goodness.)

But right now, we are stuck in the same old groove:

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said reviving several popular business and middle-class tax breaks that expired at the end of 2005 will be at the top of his party’s agenda when Congress returns next week for a postelection session.

It’s not that I don’t want to see middle class families and small businesses have some more money in their pockets. I do. I haven’t looked at the economic implication of these tax reductions and maybe they even make sense. But I’m pretty sure this is simple politics (and undoubtedly good politics) in which the Democrats prove their tax-cutting bonafides to the constituency both parties need — the middle class. In today’s political climate, you aren’t delivering, if you aren’t delivering “tax relief.”

That’s as true blue Republican as you can get. And at some point Democrats are going to have to start rolling this back and making the case that delivering for the middle class means providing the safety net and provision for the less fortunate that allows average Americans the freedom to take risks and fuel our dynamic economy — like taking new jobs or starting a new business. Tax cuts are like candy — they taste good, but the individual middle class worker and her family doesn’t get nearly the nutritious bang for the buck that the safety net and government programs do. Liberals and progressives need to start changing the political dialog in ways that talk about risk management and security and fair trade and wage growth — things we really believe in and which can make an affirmative, lasting difference in people’s lives.

There are so many great economists in the blogosphere who are much smarter than I am about these things and who can speak in great detail about policy, so I will leave them to it. But before we get to that I think we are going to have to start thinking about how to make our argument in new terms and talk to people about their relationship to their government in new ways.

My first suggestion for this new vocabulary isn’t really mine, but a reader’s from some time back who pointed out my use of the term “tax burden” was an example of unthinking adoption of conservative rhetoric. He was right. He suggested that we start talking about it as “paying the bills” something that everyone understands. I think that makes sense. You can’t blow smoke in people’s faces by trying to tell them that taxes are “good.” That’s dreaming. But everyone knows that we have to pay the bills and our bill for the services we get — national defense, social security for the disabled and elderly, medical research, roads and bridges,air traffic control, clean air and water, veterans benefits and on and on and on aren’t free. It’s a bill that has to be paid for both the individual and common good. We need the insurance it provides, the pension, the health care (universal someday, old age right now) the health and safety, the security. And there is no free lunch on that stuff, it’s the price we pay to live in a first world, thriving democracy in the 21st century. If you don’t want to pay those bills, move to a third world country and see what not having to pay them gets an average person.

Right now, we are going to have to deal with some rich kids who stole the car, blew the inheritance and ran up a bunch of debt and we are going to have to make them pay it back. Their bills are going to be high for a while. They have plenty of money. They won’t suffer much, even though they should.

The conservative consensus says that low taxes, limited government, individual rights, strong national defense and family values equals a better life. Many people, including many liberals, have absorbed that message into their worldview and it’s going to take some work to unravel it. It won’t happen through issue advocacy. People already favor all the government programs they depend on (and some they that don’t even exist, yet.) But they have been disconnected from government itself — their ownership of it and their obligation to keep it working. Until we successfully challenge the conservative consensus with new language and new ways of thinking about government and politics, it’s going to remain in place. And it’s going to be very difficult to successfully advance the progressive agenda until that changes.

Update: As DB reminds me in the comments, here’s the post I wrote about Bill Sher’s book on this very topic.

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Quiverfull of Kooks

by digby

Following up tristero’s post below, I think the single most disturbing part of the article he discusses, is this:

Meanwhile, Phillip Longman hardly offers a left-wing counterpoint. Instead, he’s searching–at the request of the Democratic Leadership Council, which published his policy proposals in its Blueprint magazine–for a way to appeal to the same voters Carlson is organizing: a typically “radical middle” quest to figure out how Democrats can make nice with Kansas.

“Who are these evangelicals?” asks Longman. “Is there anything about them that makes them inherently prowar and for tax cuts for the rich?” No, he concludes. “What’s irreducible about these religious voters is that they’re for the family.” Asked whether the absolutist position Quiverfull takes on birth control, let alone abortion, might interfere with his strategy, Longman admits that abortion rights would have to take a back seat but that, in politics, “nobody ever gets everything they need.”

Aside from the centrist tax policies Longman is crafting to rival Carlson’s, he urges a return to patriarchy–properly understood, he is careful to note, as not just male domination but also increased male responsibility as husbands and fathers–on more universal grounds. Taking a long view as unsettling in its way as Pastor Bartly Heneghan’s rapture talk, Longman says that no society can survive to reproduce itself without following patriarchy. “As secular and libertarian elements in society fail to reproduce, people adhering to more traditional, patriarchal values inherit society by default,” Longman argues, pointing to cyclical demographic upheavals from ancient Greece and Rome to the present day, when falling birthrates have consistently augured conservative, even reactionary comebacks, marked by increased nationalism, religious fundamentalism and deep societal conservatism. Presenting a thinly veiled ultimatum to moderates and liberals, Longman cites the political sea change in the Netherlands in recent years, where, he charges, a population decline led to a vacuum that “Muslim extremists came in to fill.” Though individual, nonpatriarchal elements of society may die out, he says, societies as a whole will survive and, “through a process of cultural evolution, a set of values and norms that can roughly be described as patriarchy reemerge.”

Longman’s answer to this threat is for progressives to beat conservatives by joining them, emulating the large patriarchal families that conservatives promote in order not to be overrun by a reactionary baby boom. Any mention of social good occurring in regions with low birthrates is swept away by the escalating rhetoric of a “birth dearth,” a “baby bust,” a dying hemisphere undone by its own progressive politics.

Holy fuck, indeed. This kind of thinking has finally gone mainstream and is fully integrated into the debate among influential Democrats. Granted, Longman’s advice to the DLC was to embrace “family friendly” policy but as you can see from his comments, in order to truly embrace these undereducated “Quiverfull” nuts whom everyone thinks need to be part of the Big Tent (birthing and cleaning after everyone apparently)the agenda is going to have to expand significantly. We are already seeing the argument going beyond abortion and extending into the birth control realm.

Let me put it this way: if the Democrats insist on racing the Republicans into the dark ages with this kind of racist, misogynist, anti-intellectual, enlightenment destroying bullshit, we won’t have to worry about “staying on top.” Americans will be soon be living atop a gigantic garbage dump picking through the remnants of their former civilization for enough to eat. It isn’t 1956 anymore and it sure as hell isn’t 1856 anymore. If the US wants to take a trip back to the 18th century that’s fine. I’m sure Europe, China and India would be more than happy to pick up the slack.

This stuff is very thinly veiled Bell Curve nonsense re-packaged to appeal to sexists and homophobes as well as racists. After all, folks, if it was just the aging population everyone was so worried about, there would be no immigration debate, would there?

Here’s David Brooks on the subject a few months back:

I suspect that if more people had the chance to focus exclusively on child-rearing before training for and launching a career, fertility rates would rise. That would be good for the country, for as Phillip Longman, author of “The Empty Cradle,” has argued, we are consuming more human capital than we are producing – or to put it another way, we don’t have enough young people to support our old people.

Plenty of young people want to come to America and would be more than happy to pay into social security to support all of us old codgers. They just aren’t the “right kind” of people, if you know what I mean. So get to breeding, white bitches. You’ve got work to do.

I am all for having a big tent. But there is no political party on earth that is big enough for me and people who believe that liberalism’s great hope is to create policies that encourage women to have 14 children so we can “outbreed” the competition and make sure the wrong people don’t come in and ruin the place. That’s where I head for the exit.

Update:
Here’s an interesting article by Michele Goldberg, of “The Rise Of Christian Nationalism” fame on the subject of childlessness and happiness (as in “the pursuit of” — another one of those bedrock American values people seem to think are fungible these days.) For a great many of us, the pursuit of happiness is not possible unless life offers freedom to choose how we will live our lives.

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