Republicans tend to view any expansion of government as an existential threat to liberty, explains Jonathan Chait. (Or to freedom, however defined.) “The New Deal was communistic, the enactment of Medicare a twilight struggle to preserve the dying embers of American freedom, Bill Clinton’s upper-bracket tax hike a terrifying exercise in class warfare, Obamacare a socialist plot.”
Conservative reaction to Joe Biden’s Buld Back Better plan is no different. See Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) from Saturday night’s Trump rally in Perry, Georgia.
Greene might have said she “can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”
It’s always been this way. These days there are memes.
One would think there are some things in Joe Biden’s massive Build Back Better agenda that Republicans might support. “Letting Medicare bargain with big pharma would, after all, allow the federal government to spend less money,” Chait observes:
But instead, the reality is that conservatives regard every one of these proposals as categorically verboten. Because conservative thought treats any expansion of the welfare state as a disastrous and irreversible slide, catastrophism becomes a kind of reflex. Dan McLaughlin casually suggests the defeat of Biden’s bill would “save America from ruin.” Charles C.W. Cooke cannot understand why people haven’t taken to the streets en masse to stop a plan that “would be nothing short of a catastrophe.”
One fascinating aspect of this habit is that conservatives never reconsider their previous predictions. They continue to revere Ronald Reagan’s diatribe against the establishment of Medicare, yet rarely seem to ask themselves whether it was actually true that, as Reagan foresaw, subsidizing medical care for the elderly would automatically lead to the government telling doctors where they must live and what sort of medicine they could practice.
The failure of the catastrophe to occur simply moves back its date.
Just as Donald Trump’s anticipated reinstatement to the Oval Office gets pushed back a month, and then another month. Proof that the 2020 election was stolen is as undeniable to his followers as it is invisible. The faithful know it exists because they’ve been told it does. Somewhere.
Chait’s short survey of the Republican Party’s reflexive catastrophism should evoke Richard Hofstadter. Instead, the behavior of its recent stars from Donald Trump to Sen. Lindsey Graham to Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio), Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Marjorie Taylor Green (Ga.) and Lauren Boebert (Colo.) bring to mind another condition.
The Merck Maunal adds that while “diagnosed more often in women … this finding may reflect only a greater prevalence among women in clinical settings, where the data were obtained. In some studies, prevalence in women and men was similar.”
See any appearance by Jordan or Gaetz. Or Greene’s WWE-style heckling of Democrats on the Capitol steps during a Friday press event.
Or the need to display firearms. See again Greene and Boebert.
Or Trump himself.
Perhaps it is more than paranoid style or narcissism.