Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of
the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are
rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the
political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a
presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be
competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to
corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will
be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank
capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order
to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven
surrender to Big Pharma.
But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats
have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen,
egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
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 was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent
that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional
staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I
could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would
use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure
that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to
concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use
that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the
US and global economies as hostages.
The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of
political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction
workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact,
forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is
that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the
FAA reauthorization.
Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral
actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible
actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the
hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be
obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional
pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms
of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement
over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt
ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they
might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of
many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"
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.
In his "Manual of Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that
it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be
absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should
be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include
unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative
machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US
Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative
body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any
given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that
contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.
The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality
and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance,
the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high
functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was
legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current
Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet
having legislated the Bill of Rights.
Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for
Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject
to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder
that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus
the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the
Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a
disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of
democratic government to undermine democracy itself.
John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:
"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from
a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law
when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the
minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of
the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If
there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party,
it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened
to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who
later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."
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.'"
Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza merely proves Krugman right
in his Washington Post analysis of "winners and losers" in the debt
ceiling impasse. He wrote that the institution of Congress was a big
loser in the fracas, which is, of course, correct, but then he opined:
"Lawmakers - bless their hearts - seem entirely unaware of just how
bad they looked during this fight and will almost certainly spend the
next few weeks (or months) congratulating themselves on their
tremendous magnanimity." Note how the pundit's ironic deprecation
falls like the rain on the just and unjust alike, on those who
precipitated the needless crisis and those who despaired of it. He
seems oblivious that one side - or a sizable faction of one side - has
deliberately attempted to damage the reputation of Congress to achieve
its political objectives.
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.
This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only
cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the
Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the
very federal government that is the material expression of the
principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is
not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government;
I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and
Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely
uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections
by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and
self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11
or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest
incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they
would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a
profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a
growth center for political contributions to these same
politicians.[1] Instead, they prefer to rail against those government
programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular
to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to
undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That
concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.
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.
You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not
likely to vote Republican. 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.[2] 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.
It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this
reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But
they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry
low-information political base with a nod and a wink. During the
disgraceful circus of the "birther" issue, Republican politicians
subtly stoked the fires of paranoia by being suggestively equivocal -
"I take the president at his word" - while never unambiguously
slapping down the myth. John Huntsman was the first major GOP figure
forthrightly to refute the birther calumny - albeit after release of
the birth certificate.
I do not mean to place too much emphasis on racial animus in the GOP.
While it surely exists, it is also a fact that Republicans think that
no Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate. Republicans
also regarded Bill Clinton as somehow, in some manner, twice
fraudulently elected (well do I remember the elaborate conspiracy
theories that Republicans traded among themselves). Had it been
Hillary Clinton, rather than Barack Obama, who had been elected in
2008, I am certain we would now be hearing, in lieu of the birther
myths, conspiracy theories about Vince Foster's alleged murder.
The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP
operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is
more complicated than that. 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.[3]
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. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept
out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that
politicians be kept on a short leash.
It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated
farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very
accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting
him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt
little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not
the case in the present economic crisis. 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. Rather, this mindset seeks polarizing division (Karl
Rove has been very explicit that this is his principal campaign
strategy), conflict and the crushing of opposition.
As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes
in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their
platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:
1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors.
The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further
enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit
and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President
Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are
highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform
the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP
refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one
percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch
brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits
billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective
rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that
had far less deficit reduction - and even less spending reduction! -
than Obama's offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all
costs our society's overclass.
Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for
billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. John Boehner is fond
of saying, "we won't raise anyone's taxes," as if the take-home pay of
an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether
Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower
rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are "job
creators." US corporations have just had their most profitable
quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in
cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs?
Another smokescreen is the "small business" meme, since standing up
for Mom's and Pop's corner store is politically more attractive than
to be seen shilling for a megacorporation. Raising taxes on the
wealthy will kill small business' ability to hire; that is the GOP
dirge every time Bernie Sanders or some Democrat offers an amendment
to increase taxes on incomes above $1 million. But the number of small
businesses that have a net annual income over a million dollars is de
minimis, if not by definition impossible (as they would no longer be
small businesses). And as data from the Center for Economic and Policy
Research have shown, small businesses account for only 7.2 percent of
total US employment, a significantly smaller share of total employment
than in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) countries.
Likewise, Republicans have assiduously spread the myth that Americans
are conspicuously overtaxed. But compared to other OECD countries, the
effective rates of US taxation are among the lowest. In particular,
they point to the top corporate income rate of 35 percent as being
confiscatory Bolshevism. But again, the effective rate is much lower.
Did GE pay 35 percent on 2010 profits of $14 billion? No, it paid
zero.
When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to "prove"
that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the
rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate that fact. "Half
of Americans don't pay taxes" is a perennial meme. But what they leave
out is that that statement refers to federal income taxes. There are
millions of people who don't pay income taxes, but do contribute
payroll taxes - among the most regressive forms of taxation. But
according to GOP fiscal theology, payroll taxes don't count. Somehow,
they have convinced themselves that since payroll taxes go into trust
funds, they're not real taxes. Likewise, state and local sales taxes
apparently don't count, although their effect on a poor person buying
necessities like foodstuffs is far more regressive than on a
millionaire.
All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular
culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC
for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another.
More important politically, Republicans' myths about taxation have
been internalized by millions of economically downscale "values
voters," who may have been attracted to the GOP for other reasons
(which I will explain later), but who now accept this misinformation
as dogma.
And when misinformation isn't enough to sustain popular support for
the GOP's agenda, concealment is needed. One fairly innocuous
provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires public
companies to make a more transparent disclosure of CEO compensation,
including bonuses. Note that it would not limit the compensation, only
require full disclosure. Republicans are hell-bent on repealing this
provision. Of course; it would not serve Wall Street interests if the
public took an unhealthy interest in the disparity of their own
incomes as against that of a bank CEO. As Spencer Bachus, the
Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says,
"In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated and my
view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the
banks."
2. They worship at the altar of Mars. While the me-too Democrats have
set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to
waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or
Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading
other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia - a
nuclear-armed state - during the latter's conflict with Georgia in
2008 (remember? - "we are all Georgians now," a slogan that did not,
fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating
for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not
fringe elements of the party; they are the leading "defense experts,"
who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows. About a month before
Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the credit markets to
get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same Republicans passed a
defense appropriations bill that increased spending by $17 billion
over the prior year's defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges'
formulation, war is the force that gives meaning to their lives.
A cynic might conclude that this militaristic enthusiasm is no more
complicated than the fact that Pentagon contractors spread a lot of
bribery money around Capitol Hill. That is true, but there is more to
it than that. It is not necessarily even the fact that members of
Congress feel they are protecting constituents' jobs. The wildly
uneven concentration of defense contracts and military bases
nationally means that some areas, like Washington, DC, and San Diego,
are heavily dependent on Department of Defense (DOD) spending. But
there are many more areas of the country whose net balance is
negative: the citizenry pays more in taxes to support the Pentagon
than it receives back in local contracts.
And the economic justification for Pentagon spending is even more
fallacious when one considers that the $700 billion annual DOD budget
creates comparatively few jobs. The days of Rosie the Riveter are long
gone; most weapons projects now require very little touch labor.
Instead, a disproportionate share is siphoned off into high-cost
research and development (from which the civilian economy benefits
little); exorbitant management expenditures, overhead and out-and-out
padding; and, of course, the money that flows back into the coffers of
political campaigns. A million dollars appropriated for highway
construction would create two to three times as many jobs as a million
dollars appropriated for Pentagon weapons procurement, so the jobs
argument is ultimately specious.
Take away the cash nexus and there still remains a psychological
predisposition toward war and militarism on the part of the GOP. This
undoubtedly arises from a neurotic need to demonstrate toughness and
dovetails perfectly with the belligerent tough-guy pose one constantly
hears on right-wing talk radio. Militarism springs from the same
psychological deficit that requires an endless series of enemies, both
foreign and domestic.
The results of the last decade of unbridled militarism and the
Democrats' cowardly refusal to reverse it[4], have been disastrous
both strategically and fiscally. It has made the United States less
prosperous, less secure and less free. Unfortunately, the militarism
and the promiscuous intervention it gives rise to are only likely to
abate when the Treasury is exhausted, just as it happened to the Dutch
Republic and the British Empire.
3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a
full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious
cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and
grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat
Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the
gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are
all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or
Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus
creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons,
and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right,
its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the
consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also
around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to
science; it is this group that defines "low-information voter" - or,
perhaps, "misinformation voter."
The Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, there is now a de
facto religious test for the presidency: major candidates are
encouraged (or coerced) to "share their feelings" about their "faith"
in a revelatory speech; or, some televangelist like Rick Warren
dragoons the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to
debate the finer points of Christology, with Warren himself, of
course, as the arbiter. Politicized religion is also the sheet anchor
of the culture wars. But how did the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs -
economic royalism, militarism and culture wars cum fundamentalism -
come completely to displace an erstwhile civilized Eisenhower
Republicanism?
It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism
(which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in
America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the
Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of
beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all
three of the GOP's main tenets.
Televangelists have long espoused the
health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it
is a sign of God's favor. If not, too bad! But don't forget to tithe
in any case. This rationale may explain why some economically
downscale whites defend the prerogatives of billionaires.
The GOP's fascination with war is also connected with the
fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of
slaughter - God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and
enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired
genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the
jawbone of an ass - and since American religious fundamentalist seem
to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of
the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short
step to approving war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of
thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell once
writing that God is Pro-War.
It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their
belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them
to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some
evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a
suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of
domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most
adamant proponent of the view that there was no debt ceiling problem
was Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What
does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? - we shall presently
abide in the bosom of the Lord.
Some liberal writers have opined that the different socio-economic
perspectives separating the "business" wing of the GOP and the
religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am
not so sure. There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction
the two factions want to take the country, merely how far in that
direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to
the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. In any case,
those consummate plutocrats, the Koch brothers, are pumping large sums
of money into Michele Bachman's presidential campaign, so one ought
not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.
Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican
could have written the following:
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security,
unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you
would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is
a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these
things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background),
a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or
business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are
stupid." (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar
in 1954.)
It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional
Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a
Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is
not in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of
self-immolation, or to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in
the manner of David Brock. And I will leave a more detailed dissection
of failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate Bruce
Bartlett.
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.[5] 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.
During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco
reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's
disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further.
Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political
actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar.
Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of
assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped
up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve
currency - a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as
any that can be imagined.
If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is
successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy
disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and
America's status as the world's leading power.
Footnotes:
[1] I am not exaggerating for effect. A law passed in 2010 by the
Arizona legislature mandating arrest and incarceration of suspected
illegal aliens was actually drafted by the American Legislative
Exchange Council, a conservative business front group that drafts
"model" legislation on behalf of its corporate sponsors. The draft
legislation in question was written for the private prison lobby,
which sensed a growth opportunity in imprisoning more people.
[2] I am not a supporter of Obama and object to a number of his
foreign and domestic policies. But when he took office amid the
greatest financial collapse in 80 years, I wanted him to succeed, so
that the country I served did not fail. But already in 2009, Mitch
McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, declared that his greatest
legislative priority was - jobs for Americans? Rescuing the financial
system? Solving the housing collapse? - no, none of those things. His
top priority was to ensure that Obama should be a one-term president.
Evidently Senator McConnell hates Obama more than he loves his
country. Note that the mainstream media have lately been hailing
McConnell as "the adult in the room," presumably because he is less
visibly unstable than the Tea Party freshmen
[3] This is not a venue for immigrant bashing. It remains a fact that
outsourcing jobs overseas, while insourcing sub-minimum wage immigrant
labor, will exert downward pressure on US wages. The consequence will
be popular anger, and failure to address that anger will result in a
downward wage spiral and a breech of the social compact, not to
mention a rise in nativism and other reactionary impulses. It does no
good to claim that these economic consequences are an inevitable
result of globalization; Germany has somehow managed to maintain a
high-wage economy and a vigorous industrial base.
[4] The cowardice is not merely political. During the past ten years,
I have observed that Democrats are actually growing afraid of
Republicans. In a quirky and flawed, but insightful, little book,
"Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred," John Lukacs concludes that
the left fears, the right hates.
[5] The GOP cult of Ayn Rand is both revealing and mystifying. On the
one hand, Rand's tough guy, every-man-for-himself posturing is a
natural fit because it puts a philosophical gloss on the latent
sociopathy so prevalent among the hard right. On the other, Rand
exclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who
felt nothing but contempt for Christianity. Apparently, the ignorance
of most fundamentalist "values voters" means that GOP candidates who
enthuse over Rand at the same time they thump their Bibles never have
to explain this stark contradiction. And I imagine a Democratic
officeholder would have a harder time explaining why he named his
offspring "Marx" than a GOP incumbent would in rationalizing naming
his kid "Rand."
the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are
rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the
political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a
presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be
competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to
corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will
be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank
capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order
to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven
surrender to Big Pharma.
But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats
have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen,
egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
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 was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent
that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional
staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I
could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would
use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure
that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to
concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use
that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the
US and global economies as hostages.
The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of
political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction
workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact,
forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is
that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the
FAA reauthorization.
Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral
actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible
actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the
hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be
obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional
pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms
of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement
over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt
ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they
might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of
many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"
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.
In his "Manual of Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that
it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be
absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should
be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include
unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative
machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US
Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative
body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any
given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that
contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.
The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality
and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance,
the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high
functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was
legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current
Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet
having legislated the Bill of Rights.
Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for
Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject
to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder
that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus
the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the
Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a
disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of
democratic government to undermine democracy itself.
John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:
"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from
a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law
when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the
minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of
the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If
there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party,
it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened
to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who
later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."
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.'"
Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza merely proves Krugman right
in his Washington Post analysis of "winners and losers" in the debt
ceiling impasse. He wrote that the institution of Congress was a big
loser in the fracas, which is, of course, correct, but then he opined:
"Lawmakers - bless their hearts - seem entirely unaware of just how
bad they looked during this fight and will almost certainly spend the
next few weeks (or months) congratulating themselves on their
tremendous magnanimity." Note how the pundit's ironic deprecation
falls like the rain on the just and unjust alike, on those who
precipitated the needless crisis and those who despaired of it. He
seems oblivious that one side - or a sizable faction of one side - has
deliberately attempted to damage the reputation of Congress to achieve
its political objectives.
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.
This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only
cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the
Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the
very federal government that is the material expression of the
principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is
not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government;
I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and
Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely
uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections
by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and
self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11
or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest
incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they
would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a
profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a
growth center for political contributions to these same
politicians.[1] Instead, they prefer to rail against those government
programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular
to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to
undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That
concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.
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.
You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not
likely to vote Republican. 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.[2] 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.
It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this
reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But
they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry
low-information political base with a nod and a wink. During the
disgraceful circus of the "birther" issue, Republican politicians
subtly stoked the fires of paranoia by being suggestively equivocal -
"I take the president at his word" - while never unambiguously
slapping down the myth. John Huntsman was the first major GOP figure
forthrightly to refute the birther calumny - albeit after release of
the birth certificate.
I do not mean to place too much emphasis on racial animus in the GOP.
While it surely exists, it is also a fact that Republicans think that
no Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate. Republicans
also regarded Bill Clinton as somehow, in some manner, twice
fraudulently elected (well do I remember the elaborate conspiracy
theories that Republicans traded among themselves). Had it been
Hillary Clinton, rather than Barack Obama, who had been elected in
2008, I am certain we would now be hearing, in lieu of the birther
myths, conspiracy theories about Vince Foster's alleged murder.
The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP
operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is
more complicated than that. 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.[3]
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. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept
out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that
politicians be kept on a short leash.
It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated
farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very
accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting
him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt
little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not
the case in the present economic crisis. 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. Rather, this mindset seeks polarizing division (Karl
Rove has been very explicit that this is his principal campaign
strategy), conflict and the crushing of opposition.
As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes
in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their
platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:
1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors.
The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further
enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit
and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President
Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are
highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform
the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP
refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one
percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch
brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits
billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective
rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that
had far less deficit reduction - and even less spending reduction! -
than Obama's offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all
costs our society's overclass.
Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for
billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. John Boehner is fond
of saying, "we won't raise anyone's taxes," as if the take-home pay of
an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether
Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower
rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are "job
creators." US corporations have just had their most profitable
quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in
cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs?
Another smokescreen is the "small business" meme, since standing up
for Mom's and Pop's corner store is politically more attractive than
to be seen shilling for a megacorporation. Raising taxes on the
wealthy will kill small business' ability to hire; that is the GOP
dirge every time Bernie Sanders or some Democrat offers an amendment
to increase taxes on incomes above $1 million. But the number of small
businesses that have a net annual income over a million dollars is de
minimis, if not by definition impossible (as they would no longer be
small businesses). And as data from the Center for Economic and Policy
Research have shown, small businesses account for only 7.2 percent of
total US employment, a significantly smaller share of total employment
than in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) countries.
Likewise, Republicans have assiduously spread the myth that Americans
are conspicuously overtaxed. But compared to other OECD countries, the
effective rates of US taxation are among the lowest. In particular,
they point to the top corporate income rate of 35 percent as being
confiscatory Bolshevism. But again, the effective rate is much lower.
Did GE pay 35 percent on 2010 profits of $14 billion? No, it paid
zero.
When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to "prove"
that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the
rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate that fact. "Half
of Americans don't pay taxes" is a perennial meme. But what they leave
out is that that statement refers to federal income taxes. There are
millions of people who don't pay income taxes, but do contribute
payroll taxes - among the most regressive forms of taxation. But
according to GOP fiscal theology, payroll taxes don't count. Somehow,
they have convinced themselves that since payroll taxes go into trust
funds, they're not real taxes. Likewise, state and local sales taxes
apparently don't count, although their effect on a poor person buying
necessities like foodstuffs is far more regressive than on a
millionaire.
All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular
culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC
for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another.
More important politically, Republicans' myths about taxation have
been internalized by millions of economically downscale "values
voters," who may have been attracted to the GOP for other reasons
(which I will explain later), but who now accept this misinformation
as dogma.
And when misinformation isn't enough to sustain popular support for
the GOP's agenda, concealment is needed. One fairly innocuous
provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires public
companies to make a more transparent disclosure of CEO compensation,
including bonuses. Note that it would not limit the compensation, only
require full disclosure. Republicans are hell-bent on repealing this
provision. Of course; it would not serve Wall Street interests if the
public took an unhealthy interest in the disparity of their own
incomes as against that of a bank CEO. As Spencer Bachus, the
Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says,
"In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated and my
view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the
banks."
2. They worship at the altar of Mars. While the me-too Democrats have
set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to
waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or
Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading
other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia - a
nuclear-armed state - during the latter's conflict with Georgia in
2008 (remember? - "we are all Georgians now," a slogan that did not,
fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating
for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not
fringe elements of the party; they are the leading "defense experts,"
who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows. About a month before
Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the credit markets to
get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same Republicans passed a
defense appropriations bill that increased spending by $17 billion
over the prior year's defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges'
formulation, war is the force that gives meaning to their lives.
A cynic might conclude that this militaristic enthusiasm is no more
complicated than the fact that Pentagon contractors spread a lot of
bribery money around Capitol Hill. That is true, but there is more to
it than that. It is not necessarily even the fact that members of
Congress feel they are protecting constituents' jobs. The wildly
uneven concentration of defense contracts and military bases
nationally means that some areas, like Washington, DC, and San Diego,
are heavily dependent on Department of Defense (DOD) spending. But
there are many more areas of the country whose net balance is
negative: the citizenry pays more in taxes to support the Pentagon
than it receives back in local contracts.
And the economic justification for Pentagon spending is even more
fallacious when one considers that the $700 billion annual DOD budget
creates comparatively few jobs. The days of Rosie the Riveter are long
gone; most weapons projects now require very little touch labor.
Instead, a disproportionate share is siphoned off into high-cost
research and development (from which the civilian economy benefits
little); exorbitant management expenditures, overhead and out-and-out
padding; and, of course, the money that flows back into the coffers of
political campaigns. A million dollars appropriated for highway
construction would create two to three times as many jobs as a million
dollars appropriated for Pentagon weapons procurement, so the jobs
argument is ultimately specious.
Take away the cash nexus and there still remains a psychological
predisposition toward war and militarism on the part of the GOP. This
undoubtedly arises from a neurotic need to demonstrate toughness and
dovetails perfectly with the belligerent tough-guy pose one constantly
hears on right-wing talk radio. Militarism springs from the same
psychological deficit that requires an endless series of enemies, both
foreign and domestic.
The results of the last decade of unbridled militarism and the
Democrats' cowardly refusal to reverse it[4], have been disastrous
both strategically and fiscally. It has made the United States less
prosperous, less secure and less free. Unfortunately, the militarism
and the promiscuous intervention it gives rise to are only likely to
abate when the Treasury is exhausted, just as it happened to the Dutch
Republic and the British Empire.
3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a
full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious
cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and
grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat
Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the
gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are
all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or
Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus
creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons,
and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right,
its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the
consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also
around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to
science; it is this group that defines "low-information voter" - or,
perhaps, "misinformation voter."
The Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, there is now a de
facto religious test for the presidency: major candidates are
encouraged (or coerced) to "share their feelings" about their "faith"
in a revelatory speech; or, some televangelist like Rick Warren
dragoons the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to
debate the finer points of Christology, with Warren himself, of
course, as the arbiter. Politicized religion is also the sheet anchor
of the culture wars. But how did the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs -
economic royalism, militarism and culture wars cum fundamentalism -
come completely to displace an erstwhile civilized Eisenhower
Republicanism?
It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism
(which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in
America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the
Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of
beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all
three of the GOP's main tenets.
Televangelists have long espoused the
health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it
is a sign of God's favor. If not, too bad! But don't forget to tithe
in any case. This rationale may explain why some economically
downscale whites defend the prerogatives of billionaires.
The GOP's fascination with war is also connected with the
fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of
slaughter - God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and
enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired
genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the
jawbone of an ass - and since American religious fundamentalist seem
to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of
the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short
step to approving war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of
thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell once
writing that God is Pro-War.
It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their
belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them
to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some
evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a
suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of
domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most
adamant proponent of the view that there was no debt ceiling problem
was Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What
does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? - we shall presently
abide in the bosom of the Lord.
Some liberal writers have opined that the different socio-economic
perspectives separating the "business" wing of the GOP and the
religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am
not so sure. There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction
the two factions want to take the country, merely how far in that
direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to
the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. In any case,
those consummate plutocrats, the Koch brothers, are pumping large sums
of money into Michele Bachman's presidential campaign, so one ought
not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.
Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican
could have written the following:
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security,
unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you
would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is
a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these
things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background),
a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or
business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are
stupid." (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar
in 1954.)
It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional
Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a
Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is
not in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of
self-immolation, or to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in
the manner of David Brock. And I will leave a more detailed dissection
of failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate Bruce
Bartlett.
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.[5] 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.
During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco
reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's
disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further.
Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political
actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar.
Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of
assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped
up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve
currency - a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as
any that can be imagined.
If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is
successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy
disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and
America's status as the world's leading power.
Footnotes:
[1] I am not exaggerating for effect. A law passed in 2010 by the
Arizona legislature mandating arrest and incarceration of suspected
illegal aliens was actually drafted by the American Legislative
Exchange Council, a conservative business front group that drafts
"model" legislation on behalf of its corporate sponsors. The draft
legislation in question was written for the private prison lobby,
which sensed a growth opportunity in imprisoning more people.
[2] I am not a supporter of Obama and object to a number of his
foreign and domestic policies. But when he took office amid the
greatest financial collapse in 80 years, I wanted him to succeed, so
that the country I served did not fail. But already in 2009, Mitch
McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, declared that his greatest
legislative priority was - jobs for Americans? Rescuing the financial
system? Solving the housing collapse? - no, none of those things. His
top priority was to ensure that Obama should be a one-term president.
Evidently Senator McConnell hates Obama more than he loves his
country. Note that the mainstream media have lately been hailing
McConnell as "the adult in the room," presumably because he is less
visibly unstable than the Tea Party freshmen
[3] This is not a venue for immigrant bashing. It remains a fact that
outsourcing jobs overseas, while insourcing sub-minimum wage immigrant
labor, will exert downward pressure on US wages. The consequence will
be popular anger, and failure to address that anger will result in a
downward wage spiral and a breech of the social compact, not to
mention a rise in nativism and other reactionary impulses. It does no
good to claim that these economic consequences are an inevitable
result of globalization; Germany has somehow managed to maintain a
high-wage economy and a vigorous industrial base.
[4] The cowardice is not merely political. During the past ten years,
I have observed that Democrats are actually growing afraid of
Republicans. In a quirky and flawed, but insightful, little book,
"Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred," John Lukacs concludes that
the left fears, the right hates.
[5] The GOP cult of Ayn Rand is both revealing and mystifying. On the
one hand, Rand's tough guy, every-man-for-himself posturing is a
natural fit because it puts a philosophical gloss on the latent
sociopathy so prevalent among the hard right. On the other, Rand
exclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who
felt nothing but contempt for Christianity. Apparently, the ignorance
of most fundamentalist "values voters" means that GOP candidates who
enthuse over Rand at the same time they thump their Bibles never have
to explain this stark contradiction. And I imagine a Democratic
officeholder would have a harder time explaining why he named his
offspring "Marx" than a GOP incumbent would in rationalizing naming
his kid "Rand."
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