The Witch Doctor Understanding of Language

As you probably already know, Eric Cantor appeared on 60 Minutes over the weekend.  Here is the full interview, which clocks in at about 12:30 minutes:

Of course, it is the bit at about 10:50 that has drawn the most attention.  At that point Leslie Stahl asked about Cantor’s assertion that no one should ever compromise their principles in politics, and pointed out that Cantor’s hero – Ronald Reagan – did in fact compromise his own principles by raising taxes numerous times during his two-term presidency.

STAHL:          And at that point, Cantor’s press secretary interrupted, yelling from off camera that what I was saying wasn’t true.

                        [Plays videotape of Ronald Reagan announcing a tax increase.]

STAHL:          There seemed to be some difficulty accepting the fact that even though Ronald Reagan cut taxes, he also pushed through several tax increases, including one in 1982 during a recession.

Over at DKos yesterday, Hunter pointed out that this shouldn’t be a “difficulty” at all.  We have videotape, like the one Stahl ran, showing Ronald Reagan sitting in the Oval Office and announcing a tax increase – which he explicitly described as “a compromise.”  Hunter speculatively explains what happens as follows:

Conservatives vowed they would not raise any tax by any amount of money, ever, because it would make Reagan and the Conservative Baby Jesus cry.  Democrats and others began to rightly point out that this was, historically, simply an untenable position to have, and that even the most conservative conservative who ever conservatived, Ronald Reagan, raised some taxes on some things in order to not have government auger itself into the ground.  This caused a bout of cognitive dissonance within the conservative hive mind, first manifesting itself as profound irritation that anyone would ever bring up such a thing, then transforming into a full-fledged demand that anyone saying such things shut up already, and finally morphing into the rather impressive psychological feat of simply denying that any such thing ever happened.  History itself, apparently, had to be changed to accommodate the grand conservative need to believe unambiguously in the absolute truth of their own ideological pronouncements.

That sounds about right, but I would go even further.  I’ve been watching Movement Conservatism for a while now, and the True Believers exhibit what I’ve come to think of as the “Witch Doctor Understanding of Language.”

Book Review: The Reactionary Mind

So over the weekend I read Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind:  Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.  I finished it Sunday morning and have allowed a few days to go by to get my thoughts about it in order.

So as not to spoil the book for anyone thinking about reading it for oneself, those thoughts are below the fold.

The GOP’s Mythic Quest for Purity

Just an open question, throwing it out there for others to ponder, but what is it about the Conservative mindset that drives them to such extremes?  Is it a need for intellectual simplicity, a basic unwillingness to grapple with the complexity of the world around them?  Is it a desire to reduce all issues to a single Manichean moral vision, with a clear distinction always and easily drawn between good/bad, right/wrong?  Is it fundamentally an authoritarian drive, a need to identify an “other, an ideologically impure group” against which they can rally themselves as members of the “true faith”? 

I’ve begun thinking the modern GOP’s radicalism is systemic in nature.  That is, Conservatives seem to think it a virtue to take extremist positions solely for the sake of taking extremist positions.  As George Bush famously said, they “don’t do nuance.”  For modern Conservatives extremism is a feature, not a bug.

And so in the last GOP presidential debate Herman Cain was asked about his recent statement that he would consider negotiating with terrorists if necessary to win back captured American soldiers.  Almost the entirety of the field jumped all over him for this, because as everyone knows “you don’t negotiate with terrorists” – and there cannot possibly be any exceptions to this rule or any extraneous circumstances in which it might not apply.  

And then Ron Paul delighted many of us watching when he asked if that didn’t mean Ronald Reagan was wrong when he sold arms to Iran in part to secure the release of American hostages?  The rest of the field was fairly well gobsmacked as to how to respond.  

More below the fold.

The 1% Needs to Keep Americans Demoralized

I’ve complained before that the Conservative vision of America is one of deep pessimism, that Conservatives are forever arguing that America simply no longer can afford to maintain its infrastructure, or improve its health insurance industry or its education system, or really do anything to improve at all.  And then earlier this week Republican congressman Cliff Stearns (FL) flat out told National Public Radio that:

“[The United States] can’t compete with China to make solar panels and wind turbines” . . . .  Stearns [went on to say that] . . . . where solar is concerned, it makes more sense to invest in research and development on a technology where the U.S. still has a chance of winning.  (emphasis added)

Did you get that?  An American congressman is telling the American people that when it comes to developing the new, cutting-edge technology that can lead us to a brighter and greener future we might as well pack it up and go home because America already has lost that game.  This Republican congressman is telling us that America is and always will be, at most, second-best when it comes to this advanced technology.

But in a sick and extremely cynical way, it makes sense to me that a GOP congressman would make this kind of a statement.  Because it seems to me that Conservative apologists for the 1% have decided that their real constituents – the extremely wealthy – have a vested interest in keeping the American people as pessimistic and demoralized about their future as possible.

I, For One, Do Not Welcome Our New Corporate Overlords

Some years ago, when stories first began to surface about how corporations were tracking people’s on-line interests and then selling that information to others, I read an interesting article contrasting the different view Americans and Europeans had of the practice. 

Essentially, polling on the issue showed that Europeans were relatively unconcerned that their government might have access to their on-line histories, but were much more wary of private corporations having the same.  Americans essentially subscribed to the opposite viewpoint; the poll showed that Americans didn’t very much mind corporations tracking their on-line activities, but Americans were worried that their information might wind up in a government database somewhere.

A Football Analogy

Over at ThinkProgress, Scott Keyes has an article up entitled "Top Seven Progressive Policies that Strengthen the National Football League." Among the policies singled out by Keyes are:

(i) TV and radio revenue sharing contracts that allow small market teams like the Packers and the Vikings to remain competitive with big market teams like the Cowboys and the Giants;

(ii) The team salary cap, which prevents deep pocket teams from simply purchasing all the best players in the league; and

(iii) The progressive draft system, under which the team with the worst record has first pick in the next year's draft, the team with the second worst record gets the next pick, etc.

What struck me when I read this short article is that these rules were put in place 50 years ago after legendary NFL Commissioner Pete Rozell persuaded the team owners themselves to adopt them.

The League's ultimate goal in enacting these rules, of course, was to maintain football's popularity with the fans, and the strategy hit upon for doing so was to make sure all the teams could remain competitive over the long run. The rules agreed to by the team owners -- including the richest and most powerful owners at the time -- were simply the specific way this strategy was deployed. In the absence of these rules, a small number of teams could quickly dominate the league to the detriment of all the other players. This would either (i) make football season incredibly boring or, more likely, (ii) kill off the other teams and thus doom the NFL itself.

These NFL rules provide a useful analogy for understanding the way in which our government's constitutional mandate to promote "the General Welfare" can only be fulfilled by placing some restrictions on the free market system with which we are so enthralled. There is a difference between the overall system and the individual actors in that system, and sometimes in order to promote the general system one has to restrict the profiteering of the individual actors.

From a certain perspective, one could say that the team salary cap, the draft system, and the revenue sharing contracts in the NFL all "punish" richer, more successful teams by providing assistance to the poorer, less successful teams. But another, more accurate way of looking at the situation is to focus on the rules' effect on the league and not their effect on the separate teams. Viewed through this lens, the necessity for these rules is apparent: they are what maintain a healthy, vibrant system under which everybody prospers.

The same thing applies to the intersection of the government and our economy. The government's charge to promote "the General Welfare" means that its focus has to be on the economic system -- not the economic actors. To that end, we enacted redistributive taxes like the estate tax and the progressive income tax in an effort to prevent wealth from becoming concentrated in the hands of a few rich families. We enacted myriad government regulations to prevent companies selling us goods and services from ripping us off or poisoning us. We enacted collective bargaining rights so the negotiating imbalance between a large employer and an individual worker could be redressed. And on and on and on.

Conservatives and - especially - Libertarians point to all these instances in which the government has acted to prevent the already rich and successful from simply dominating the economy to the detriment of everybody else and complain that the rich and successful are being "punished." But that isn't it at all. These policies were adopted for the same reason the NFL adopted its own rules: because in order to maintain a healthy system, some minimal amount of parity between all parties needs to be maintained. Complaints by Conservatives and Libertarians about these rules miss the fact that these rules are the price that is paid for not having the system collapse. And not having the system collapse, ultimately, benefits us all.

Even the people complaining about the rules.

I'm Dumb, Like Everybody Else

Looking over the specific proposals contained in President Obama's Jobs Plan last night, I noticed he proposes spending $25 billion to renovate and repair the nation's schools. "That's a really good idea," I thought immediately. And then I stopped myself to wonder why I thought that, and why that was my immediate reaction.

After all, I don't really know if it is a good idea or not; I don't know how many people will be put back to work if this is done, or how much of a stimulative effect it will have on the economy, or whether that $25 billion could be put to better use elsewhere. Nevertheless, after reading about the proposal I immediately formed a very positive and strong belief that this was a good idea.

And then I recalled that only a few weeks ago I had been talking with a friend of mine and he had told me about a guest he had seen on The Rachel Maddow Show who had proposed doing the same thing. The guest had argued in favor of this proposition because (i) our schools need it, (ii) it can be done immediately, (iii) unlike a lot of other construction projects, this type of work is fairly labor intensive and thus employs a lot of people, and (iv) at a bare minimum it at least gets funds pumping through the economy again.

Now, all of that may be true and it certainly sounds right, but the fact remains that I really don't know enough about the situation to definitely say I know what I'm talking about. But even though I recognize that fact, that recognition still doesn't dampen my enthusiasm for the project.

Are Republicans Simply Incapable of Agreeing on the Debt Ceiling?

We're getting down to the short strokes now on the debt ceiling negotiations, and I'm trying to put together a fairly longish post about those negotiations for publication sometime later today (hopefully).

In the meantime, I just read Nate Silver's New York Times article Why the Republicans Resist Compromise and I urge everyone else to do so as well.

Although focused mostly on the GOP's political chances in next year's presidential election, Silver has crunched the numbers and discovered -- unsurprisingly -- that the Republican party has been thoroughly taken over by its most conservative (read Tea Bagger) members. In addition to discussing what this means for Michele Bachmann's likelihood of winning the Republican nomination, Silver's article has this chilling passage that relates to the ongoing debt ceiling negotations:

This is why Republicans find it difficult to compromise on something like the debt ceiling, even when it might seem they have substantial incentive to do so. Republicans are still fairly unpopoular -- only about 40 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the party, which is barely better than their standing in 2006 or 2008, (although Democrats have become significantly less popular since then). As long as conservative Republicans are much more likely to vote than anyone else, the party can fare well despite that unpopularity, as it obviously did in 2010. But it means that Republican members of Congress have a mandate to remain steadfast to the conservatives who are responsible for electing them.

(emphasis added)

I've long believed that the Big Money Boyz would eventually call the Republicans onto the carpet and explain the facts of life to them: the debt ceiling absolutely has to be raised, or interest rates will skyrocket and the Creditor Class (the Big Money Boyz) will find the value of their bond portfolios dropping like a stone. I kind of assumed that all this Republican posturing over the debt ceiling and demanding huge spending cuts in entitlement programs was just a show for the rubes back home.

But Silver's article has got me wondering whether the Republican Congress Critters -- whom I've never thought to be very bright -- can be reasoned with or even threatened by the Big Money Boyz. Most people can't conceive of causal relationships more intricate than 1 cause = 1 effect. If the Republican freshmen understand in their bones that it was the ultra-conservative Tea Baggers who put them into office, then they may not be able to also comprehend that crashing the economy could be much, much worse for them personally than disappointing their lobotomized supporters will be.

And if they can't understand that, then their willingness to do the reasonable thing goes out the window.

And the deadline looms nearer.

GOP and African-Americans: Is This a Joke?

UPDATED BELOW

It's no secret that Republicans have an extremely difficult time connecting with African-American voters. Probably this has to do with the fact that starting with Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in the late 1960's, continuing through George Bush I's infamous Willie Horton ad until today with Fox News suggesting that President Obama has a problem with white women, the Republicans have made a habit out of sowing racial division to scoop up more white votes.

But they want you to know that they're decent people and, as this tea partier puts it, "[T]he worst thing you can call a decent person is a racist."

That's true, and so you have to understand that if there's two things that Conservatives really, really hate it's being called a racist, and black people.

Sorry, but -- seriously -- the Republicans and the interest groups to which they kowtow certainly seem to go out of their way to make jokes like that easier.

For example, there is an evangelical group out of Iowa called Family Leader that has put together yet another pledge it is demanding all the GOP Presidential aspirants sign. The pledge largely consists of your run-of-the-mill "pro-family" language -- stay faithful to your spouse, don't divorce, affirm that sexual orientation is a choice and not genetically determined -- but there is one aspect of it that seems batshit insane: acknowledge that black people were better off being kept as slaves.

Well, okay . . . that might be a slight exaggeration. So I'll let the National Journal describe it:

In arguing that the institution of marriage is under assault, Family Leader contends that by one measure African-American families were in better shape during slavery than now: African-American children were more likely to be raised in a two-parent household in 1860 than if they were born today, as the group put it, "after the election of USA's first African-American president."

Just . . . Wow. The mind boggles. Family Leader is insisting that all Republican presidential candidates sign a pledge acknowledging that African-American children were better off being raised in two-parent households as slaves.

Needless to say, Michele Bachmann signed it immediately.

UPDATE: Well that didn't take along. Amid all the furor about this "misconstrued lanugage," Family Leader has dropped the pro-slavery language from its pledge. Michele Bachmann claims -- and this is not a joke -- that she signed the pledge without reading it. So, y'know . . . vote for her.

Thomas Jefferson vs. Lazarus Long

A great deal has been written both in the blogosphere and in the mainstream press about the GOP’s recent adventures in restricting American citizens from exercising their fundamental right to vote.  Of course, the GOP has for years raised phantom charges of “voter fraud” to justify things like requiring voters to present photo IDs before voting . . . despite the fact no evidence of any significant (or even insignificant) voter fraud has ever been presented.  As Bill Maher once pointed out, “We’re America, we don’t vote.  What’s next, you’re gonna pass a law to prevent people from wrongfully showing up for jury duty?”

 

But with the Republican tsunami of 2010 – especially in state races – and as very nicely summarized in this diary by The Troubadour, they’ve since cranked their efforts to restrict voting rights up to Eleven.  And all of these efforts, of course, work to the Republicans’ electoral advantage because all of these measures tend to have the most restrictive impact on minorities, the poor, and college students – you know, groups most likely to vote for a Democrat.

But I’m fairly convinced that this isn’t the only reason the GOP has embraced these vote restriction measures as fervently as they have.  Oh sure, obtaining an electoral advantage by denying your opponent’s supporters the right to vote is nice, but it’s especially nice for the GOP because the Conservative mindset doesn’t believe in democracy.  Instead, the Conservative mindset holds that only the “right sort of people” should be allowed to vote and – coincidentally enough – if you are someone who doesn’t feel like voting for the Conservatives then you, my friend, are not the “right sort of people.”