Moral Hazard

by digby

There is an interesting back and forth going on between Jonathan Chait and Peter Wood who has written a book about “The New Anger” which is apparently a manifestation of a leftwing unhinged by Jimi Hendrix.

I wrote about Staney Kurtz’s review of Wood’s book last week in some detail, tracing the actual genesis of the “New Anger” — and let’s just say that it wasn’t the Democrats who invented it. In fact, it was once celebrated on the cover of national magazines as a righteous Republican emotion:

After writing that post I got some very interesting correspondence from two different people who had been working in the congress during the 80’s when Newtie and the boyz were starting their jihad and they both said that I didn’t know the half of it.

This rightwing anthropologist’s thesis about leftwing “anger” is part of the resurgence of the rightwing victimization theme which as been around, but somewhat ridiculous, during the years in which they held power in all three branches of government. In this case they are saying that the left is irrational — much as certain cloddish men are prone to tellling women to “calm down” when they get righteously pissed at their poor behavior, the right is trying to marginalize liberal anger.

In a different line of attack, as with this new book “Applebee’s America”, they are pushing the idea that there is no such thing as partisanship in the first place. The whole red-blue divide is now deemed ridiculous as we are all members of discrete tribes, most of which are composed of swing voters.

“Applebee’s America” is perfectly designed to appeal to the lukewarm punditocrisy who are desperate to believe that the needs and desires of average Americans are exactly like their own and to that end a book written by a Republican strategist, a Democratic strategist and a reporter is their idea of analytical nirvana. (It’s juuuuust right.)

This is awfully convenient for the Republicans who must shift gears and say “why, oh why, can’t we all get along?” now that they no longer hold the institutional levers of power. That whole “elections have consequences” thing is so 2004. And it’s extremely convenient that one of the authors of “Applebee’s America”, Bush’s former pollster Matthew Dowd, has changed course and finds that the country is one vast land of swing voters who want nothing more than for the parties to all get along. He’s the guy who famously gathered the data that proved to Rove after the Republicans controlled all branches of government that there was no longer any such thing as a swing voter. But let’s not let that get in the way of a soothing new meme for the DC courtiers to embrace.

(Go on over to the book’s site and take the fun test “what’s your tribe?” I’m apparently in the “tipping tribe” which makes me a swing voter. Seriously.)

I don’t know if there’s going to be any stopping this. But I think it would be best for the Democrats to keep a smile on their faces and just do what needs to be done. It is a very serious moral hazard to allow the Republicans to continute to get away with this stuff:

In insurance theory, moral hazard is the name given to the increased risk of problematic (immoral) behavior, and thus a negative outcome (“hazard”), because the person who caused the problem doesn’t suffer the full (or any) consequences, or may actually benefit.

That practically defines the Republican party since 1974.

This has been going on almost as long as I can remember, from Nixon’s crimes to Reagan/Bush and the Savings and Loan scandals and Iran Contra and now Bush Jr and well… everything. Every time they did it, the establishment watched these people rape the nation and then got all misty eyed for civility and healing and forced the Democrats to not only clean up the mess, but take unbelievable abuse while they did it. This has got to stop.

Update: Jesus H. Christ. You just can’t win with these people. John Boehner asks the Democrats to let him go to the Ohio State game today along with a bunch of other politicians and in the spirit of comity, the Democrats said yes. Now they are being slammed for being hypocrites because they have gone back on their pledge to work five days a week. Had they said no to Boehner, they would have been slammed for not allowing him to cheer on his team in the big game.

Meanwhile we had 12 years of the nastiest, unethical behavior in modern American history and the press treated it as if it was simply good old fashioned harball politics.

Moral hazards everywhere, my friends.

Update II: I should also point out that as Atrios and Yglesias mention, Jonathan Chait sometimes exhibits the exact same tendency as the Republicans to say that the liberal blogosphere is shockingly and inappropriately angry. The truth is that he’s righteously angry, we’re righteously angry and the only difference is that we work in a medium that is much more conversational and informal than he does. Whatever. Believe me, the right sees no difference between us and it probably behooves the liberal punditocrisy to stop worrying about our profane vitriol and start loooking at the bigger picture. We’re all in this together whether they like it or not.

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