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Help with a catchphrase

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I’ve been thinking for a while that the discussion of the deficit reminds me of the pre-war discussion of Iraq. Krugman spells it out:

To me — and I’m not alone in this — the sudden outbreak of deficit hysteria brings back memories of the groupthink that took hold during the run-up to the Iraq war. Now, as then, dubious allegations, not backed by hard evidence, are being reported as if they have been established beyond a shadow of a doubt. Now, as then, much of the political and media establishments have bought into the notion that we must take drastic action quickly, even though there hasn’t been any new information to justify this sudden urgency. Now, as then, those who challenge the prevailing narrative, no matter how strong their case and no matter how solid their background, are being marginalized.

This sort of thing happens every so often in the Village — the Clinton impeachment is another good example and I’m sure there are lots of others.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand how this happens, but maybe we could think of a good catchphrase to describe it, something we could add to the lexicon. Any ideas?

Reader Interactions

166Comments

  7. 7.

    drew42

    Early in 2005, this was also the case with the “Social Security is Doomed!” media theme. We (the collective liberal politicians, pundits, and bloggers) successfully pushed back on that.

    Point being, is there currently any effort to push back on this one?

  10. 10.

    Joey Maloney

    I don’t have my copy handy of Blue Champagne by John Varley, but he has a character explaining how “hip” works, how trends break out suddenly without warning. Basically everyone is eating at the same trough of pop culture, and thus they all get creative diarrhea simultaneously, shitting out next season’s IT together.

    Mutatis mutandis, ladies and gentlemen, I give you: The Village.

  11. 11.

    beltane

    There must be a Russian word for this kind of abject subservience to cliched thinking.

    Are people fleeing a sinking ship usually this worried about balancing their checkbooks?

  13. 13.

    geemoney

    On second thought, perhaps “Bill Fristing” would be more appropriate.

    I couldn’t edit my comment in Opera, so this second post will have to suffice.

  24. 24.

    DanF

    This one is easy: Neoconimists.

    It brings all the bad connotations of Neocons and they’re all largely the same people. Neocons, hiring neoconomists to bring you a neo-economy…

  26. 26.

    patrick

    Slightly OT, but I have been looking for a word also. Or maybe how to assign negative connotation for a word that already exists.
    During his “discussion’ with John Stewart the other night, Bill O’Reilly said that because Obama favored redistribution of wealth, the he was therefore a socialist. Which isn’t exactly true, since if you are a socialist you favor redistribution of wealth, but, in this country, if you favor some redistribution of wealth you are not necessarily a socialist.
    Anyhow, you can’t respond by saying Bush was a “fascist” without seeming to go overboard, and if you call him a ‘capitalist” no one would care. I would like a word for the uncompromising, I don’t care if everyone starves to death, version of capitalism that so many on the right seem in favor of. I have too many discussions where someone says “let the markets work” followed by me saying “but if you do that, the system will crash and many people will be out of work, and some will die” followed by — “it is the market at work and it will smooth out”.
    They get to say I am a socialist. I want a word — not fascist since that evokes Hitler and I am trying to avoid that– that evokes the opposite kind of attitude I see in O’Reilly and so many others. Like Obama is a socialist — no he isn’t, but Bush is a ….. Does that word exist? Can we make one up?

  28. 28.

    Osprey

    @Comrade Mary: I like the lemmings idea. These morons latch onto an idea and just don’t know when to stop (qed Iraq), and are now onto the deficits. They must have figured that most sane Americans finally stopped wetting themselves every time they mentioned those scary cave-dwelling Moozlins *gasp* so they had to dig up a new boogieman.

    Now, as then, those who challenge the prevailing narrative, no matter how strong their case and no matter how solid their background, are being marginalized.

    And the villagers will probably call people like K-Thug non-serious people, so I’m gonna go with
    “Stampede of the Serious Lemmings” borrowing from the original.

  32. 32.

    ItAintEazy

    I vote for “Labor Day Sale” in honor of this quote from Andy Card during those heady days in late 2002

    ”From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

  35. 35.

    patrick

    That should read “–not fascist since it evokes Hitler and I am trying to avoid doing that–

  36. 36.

    J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford

    @patrick:

    I would like a word for the uncompromising, I don’t care if everyone starves to death, version of capitalism that so many on the right seem in favor of. Too many discussions of “let the markets work” followed by me saying “but if you do that, the system will crash and many people will be out of work, and some will die” followed by—“it is the market at work and it will smooth out”.

    Free Market Glibertarians?

  38. 38.

    4tehlulz

    >Any ideas?

    “Fucking retarded” seems appropriate.

    How about Capitol Gangrene? Once the infection starts, the rest of the body is doomed.

  40. 40.

    J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford

    I don’t think I’ll ever understand how this happens, but maybe we could think of a good catchphrase to describe it, something we could add to the lexicon. Any ideas?

    It’s like we’ve been invaded by Skrulls.

  45. 45.

    demo woman

    Since Paulson and Greenspan will be on Meet The Press this Sunday, maybe we can learn from them.

  48. 48.

    Fwiffo

    I actually think shark attack hysteria in the summer of 2001 (which had a normal number of shark attacks) is another, non-political example.

    I’d call it SwampThink.

  49. 49.

    Comrade Mary

    @Osprey: “Serious Lemmings” definitely works. Hmm … “March” speaks to their self-importance while “Stampede” is more frantic.

    Or hell, go all 2007 and try “WE R SERIOUS LEMMINGS”.

  55. 55.

    JGabriel

    The more I think about it, the more I like Potemkin Hysteria.

    Potemkin Hysteria — a false problem raised to the level of hysteria by the corporate/finance/pundit class, to distract the masses from real problems and the real solutions that might involve regulating the business behavior of said corporate/finance/pundit class.

    A bit awkward, could maybe use a little work, but it gets the idea across.

    .

  56. 56.

    Ash Can

    One of the many wags around here recently used the expression “Pearl Clutching Harbor.” That seems to fit well here.

  57. 57.

    geg6

    It’s no different than the NYT and “traditional media” glomming on to O’Keefe’s drummed up hysteria over ACORN or that the Dems are DOOMED this fall because the Teabaggers are teh awesome! No facts required. Screaming headlines that make Dems look like losers. Talking bobbleheads opining over the unpopularity of the preznit and the complete failure of his administration in every possible way. Say whatever the Beltway wants to hear and always remember that the Beltway is wired for the GOP.

    I don’t know what phrase to use for this in the lexicon. Without going in and looking, I’m going to guess there is already a handy catchphrase that encompasses this phenomenon.

  58. 58.

    racrecir

    @J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:

    I would like a word for the uncompromising, I don’t care if everyone starves to death, version of capitalism that so many on the right seem in favor of.

    Donner party conservatism:

    The thing that makes capitalism good, apparently, is not that it generates wealth more efficiently than other known economic engines. No, the thing that makes capitalism good is that, by forcing people to live precarious lives, it causes them to live in fear of losing everything and therefore to adopt – as fearful people will – a cowed and subservient posture: in a word, they behave ‘conservatively’.
    . . .
    “Contemporary conservatives still value that old American character. William Bennett in his lectures reads admiringly from an account of the Donner party written by a survivor that tells the story in spare, stoic style. He puts the letter down and asks incredulously, “Where did those people go?”

  59. 59.

    Kennedy

    I like the lemmings references…what about “We Are All Lemmings Now”

    Also, Circular Pants-Wetting Squad, or Critics/Dissenters are Shrill

  67. 67.

    Xenos

    These freakouts, coming out of nowhere, propogated by corporate media outlets and coordinated by right-wing think tankers and propagandists need to be denounced as the misinformation campaigns they are.

    Plutocratic push?
    Media putsch?
    Lumpen-Limbaugh-Limbo?

    I am lousy at this sort of cleverness.

  72. 72.

    jwb

    I can only conclude that for whatever reason our corporate overlords wanted war then just as now they don’t want an expansion of government. Oddly, it seems that in both cases our overlords don’t really recognize their own long-term self-interests. Which suggests that it is not just we, the people—perhaps not even mostly we, the people—that suffer from false consciousness, and it makes me wonder about the social mechanism at work, which can’t be explained by calculating the self-interest of our overlords.

    I might add that overlord self-deception is far more dangerous politically (because from that perspective the fascist short-circuit always looks so tempting) than is the false consciousness of we, the people, which on its own tends toward the production of stupidity and distraction rather than inadvertent social transformation.

  77. 77.

    p.a.

    I like Potemkin Hysteria, and humbly submit something along the lines of ‘Conservative Meme Convergence’, ‘Cretin Convergence’, ‘PsychoSynchronicity’…

  79. 79.

    Chad N Freude

    Why Not Potemkin Village? It’s a real cultural term, it plays off “Village”, and it implies deliberate lying.

    Potemkin Village – Term used to describe the inside-the-beltway crowd and their perverse creation of panic-inducing scenarios. (Adapted from the Official BJ Definition of “Village”.)

  81. 81.

    PTirebiter


    Smoking Mushroom Cloud Syndrome    – somethingblue
    Choral Panic– curious
    Acute Broderitis– greg b
    ClusterThunk– wood buster

    Perhaps punctuated with a spastic colon:

  83. 83.

    MarkJ

    @ Patrick. They used to call free market apologists social Darwinists. This may still work as those folks who think the “market at work” magically solves all problems without any pain to anyone who is willing to work (in their world you are to blame if you get laid off because a) you are earning too much money and b) are too lazy to be productive enough to earn your keep) probably believe other fantasies like God literally created the world in 7 days. Associating them with Darwin should therefore piss them off.

    I like Swampthink.

  89. 89.

    bcinaz

    Luntzspeak and Luntzthink.

    intentionally deceiving the American People by using the argument of fear to acualize the thing they really fear.

  96. 96.

    patrick

    Thanks for suggestions. I think “free market Darwinists” is as close as I am going to get for my purposes. “Laissez-faire”, though accurate doesn’t carry the negative connotation (without going overboard) that I am looking for.
    Darwinism implies a ruthless determinism that is exactly the attitude I see in these people. Although if I could fit “self-serving’ in there somewhere it would make me happy, the phrase would get too long.

  104. 104.

    aimai

    I love “pearl clutching harbor.” I think without reading Digby regularly, however, I wouldn’t have grasped how very programmed this whole hysterical outbreak of deficit hawkery was going to be. She was predicting it from deep inside the Bush years. We need some massive pushback, but I think we can see from the mishandling of the Health Care debate that the democrats simply are incapable of thinking programatically about what is in their interests as a party, or our interests as a country. I think its clear that Obama and Biden and some dems have a very good understanding of what we need to do. But no ability to seize or construct the levers of communication with ordinary voters. So the interested parties in the mass media and corporate mouthpieces will continue to spout this stuff, Democrats and republicans will continue to say deficits are scary, and everyone will continue to hammer away at deficits as though you couldn’t *tax your way out of them* by taxing the rich.

    aimai

  107. 107.

    scav

    Somebody keep track of this one. I think we’re going to need many of these in the time units (I’m not even brave enough to suggest a specific unit) to come. It’s of no use to anyone, but now I want the recipe for a lemming meringue pie. BoB?

  108. 108.

    Comrade Dread

    I think your existing Bring on the Brawndo tag qualifies nicely as a catchphrase on group stupidity.

    It’s got electrolytes.

  109. 109.

    The Republic of Stupidity

    @aimai:

    … and everyone will continue to hammer away at deficits as though you couldn’t tax your way out of them by taxing the rich.

    What… did you say? Something… something about…

    ***hand to ear…***

    … TAXING the rich? The very same people who so benefited ENORMOUSLY from the tax cuts that got us into this mess?

    Like they did during the Eisenhower Years, when the highest tax brackets were at 90%? Like that?

    Oh Noooooooooes… those poor, poor rich… we CAIN’T do that to them…

  111. 111.

    Martin

    @racrecir:

    No, the thing that makes capitalism good is that, by forcing people to live precarious lives, it causes them to live in fear of losing everything and therefore to adopt – as fearful people will – a cowed and subservient posture: in a word, they behave ‘conservatively’.

    Ah, so the pro-capitalism set should support a 100% income tax over a certain amount to keep those executives living in fear of losing everything. Since I’m already in the description above, I say the more the merrier – count me in!

  114. 114.

    vwcat

    St. Vitus.
    spontaeous dancing broke out in some village eons ago and it was named as a phenomenon of St. Vitus.
    St. Vitus dance is what they called it.
    The village does St. Vitus

  115. 115.

    patrick

    In 1840 Charles Mackay wrote “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” pretty much on this topic.
    From Wiki: The book chronicles its subjects in three parts: “National Delusions”, “Peculiar Follies”, and “Philosophical Delusions”.

    And various subcategories.

  117. 117.

    SRW1

    Herdentrieb (herd instinct)

    The herd is right to go where it goes, because that is where the herd goes. Even if nobody knows why the herd goes where it goes, or if somebody who knows the place warns against going there, the herd is still right to go there, because that’s where the herd goes.

  118. 118.

    Hawes

    As tbogg had it: “Follow that lemming, he looks like he knows where he’s going.”

    Very Serious Lemming (VSL).

    Lemmington, DC.

    Meet the Lemmings with David Lemming.

    Lemmington Post Op-Ed page

    Although I also like Dupont Circle Jerk.

  119. 119.

    MarkJ

    Whatever you want to call it, the important question is why does this phenomenon only happen when it is Republicans doing the concern trolling?

  122. 122.

    Osprey

    Can we get DougJ to pick like 10 of the ones recommended here and put it to a vote or something?

    @Hawes: I love that TBogg quote. Kinda long, but the whole lemming narative perfectly describes how the groupthinkers latch to an idea and follow each other over the cliff about it, no matter how stupid it may be.

  123. 123.

    racrecir

    I finally got around to watching “FRONTLINE: from jesus to christ”. In part II, they tell how the four Gospels were written to reflect the times — from the aftermath of the 1st Revolt to John tossing out some serious trash talkin’ to the Jews.

    I’ll just quote this from the transcript:

    Prof. JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN: For somebody who thinks that the four Gospels are like four witnesses in a court trying to tell exactly how the accident happened, as it were, this is extremely troubling. It is not at all troubling to me because they told me, quite honestly, that they were Gospels. And a Gospel is good news – “good” and “news” – updated interpretation, so I did not expect journalism.

    I hadn’t given much thought to all this “Good News for Republicans’ etc. beyond mere spin. But now I see deeper cultural predispositions continuing the faith-based tradition of narrative and myth.

    A few years ago, Jonah Goldberg responded to charges of conservative hypocrisy by claiming that “hypocrisy is the great insight of conservatism” relating it to Original Sin. I think what he was really saying is that conservative hypocrisy is just like the Gospels — updated interpretations to changing times.

    “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” But times change calling for updated interpretations and a new Gospel.

    Americans don’t expect journalism, they expect evangelism.

  133. 133.

    bemused

    @Xenos:
    Thanks. Feels nice to have a modest contribution be noticed amongst the numerous snark artistes here…excluding bob & 28 percent.

  135. 135.

    p.a.

    Democratic centralism is the name given to the principles of internal organization used by Leninist political parties, and the term is sometimes used as a synonym for any Leninist policy inside a political party. The democratic aspect of this organizational method describes the freedom of members of the political party to discuss and debate matters of policy and direction, but once the decision of the party is made by majority vote, all members are expected to uphold that decision. This latter aspect represents the centralism. As Lenin described it, democratic centralism consisted of “freedom of discussion, unity of action.”[1]

    wikipedia

    How ’bout ‘Village Centralism’, ‘Beltway Centralism’, ‘Serious People Centralism’.

  136. 136.

    Comrade Mary

    Let me be pushy and suggest a portmanteau of what Osprey and I suggested: March of the Serious Lemmings.

  138. 138.

    BW Smith

    @aimai:

    This.

    What amazes me about all the talk of families cutting back on expenses to make their budgets work; no one ever discusses the fact that families also seek extra revenue. The stay-at-home mom goes back to work, dad gets a second job, or the working mom takes on her third job. Obviously, the answer is to adjust spending and raise taxes. B-b-ut, the American people cannot handle that, so no politician ever dares to speak those words. How dare we ask the rich to pay more! I may be rich someday, right?

  140. 140.

    Interrobang, Shooter of Zombie Memes

    Will people stop with the fucking lemming thing already? Lemmings don’t actually jump off cliffs and drown themselves; that bullshit was invented by Disney to make a documentary about the Arctic more interesting. They paid Inuit kids fifty cents a head to gather lemmings (which are otherwise about as suicidal and herd-oriented as chipmunks) and then filmed them on a carousel soundstage, with technicians flinging them into the ocean by the handfuls.

    If you want to use an example of self-destructive herd behaviour, use a real example of self-destructive herd behaviour. (There’s a place in Alberta called “Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump,” for example, because it’s damn easy to frighten buffalo into charging right off cliffs.)

    Darwinism implies a ruthless determinism that is exactly the attitude I see in these people.

    Actually, that just shows you don’t understand evolution. Evolution is a consequence, and it doesn’t have any “ruthlessness” about it, because it’s not goal-oriented or teleological. Evolution is a consequense of an environment, not some kind of avatar of nature roaming the landscape seeking out the sick, weak, and non-beneficially-mutated.

    Social Darwinism, which is the misnomer people use to describe that laissez-faire attitude, on the other hand, is ruthlessly deterministic, and usually ruthlessly determined by the wealthy…

  141. 141.

    ChrisB

    I just heard Krugman’s piece being ridiculed on CNBC. And ridiculed is the right word. It was really pretty remarkable. There were five of them, three hosts and two guests, talking about the problem of sovereign debt. One of them started to criticize Krugman and like a tidal wave the other four immediately jumped in, completely drowning out the first speaker.

  144. 144.

    anticontrarian

    Surepes (pron. sher-pees)

    After all, they’re all in bed together, and it seems that all it takes is for one person to have an outbreak, and then suddenly everybody’s rockin’ the same red festering chancre on their lips.

  146. 146.

    Mike G

    Not exactly a catchphrase, but Atrios’ “Six-year olds playing soccer” is an apt analogy. Corps/Stink Tanks/Repigs kick the ball, and all the little media dumbasses chase it around the field.

  147. 147.

    Kyle

    The stay-at-home mom goes back to work, dad gets a second job, or the working mom takes on her third job.

    Remember when Bush was questioned at one of his Potemkin clownhall stage shows by a woman in such a situation, and replied, “You got three jobs? That’s great! A real ‘Murkan story!”

    This from a lazy fratboy fucktard who barely bothered to show up for his one job.

  148. 148.

    SarahLoving

    defi-shits: when the Village and other Very Important People collectively lose the contents of their bowels over some new “CW” turd that is suddenly everywhere and therefore True.

  149. 149.

    moja31

    Guy44:

    I like “Group Stop-Think.”
    I think it’s appropriate for these moments

    This gets my vote, it perfectly describes what happens with these village memes.

  150. 150.

    jl

    socially engineered mass fear and ignorance by powerful interest groups (SEMFIPIG).

    Pronounced ‘semfi-pig’

  151. 151.

    CMcD

    @Fwiffo:
    Another vote for SwampThink. It’s short and sweet, plays on DC’s past (and present! and future!) as an honest-to-goodness swamp.

  154. 154.

    de stijl

    @JGabriel:

    @CalD:

    Why reinvent the wheel? Some variation of Chicken Little is the way to go. People know what it means already.

    The problem with neologisms is that you have to educate people as what it means – especially if it’s an inside baseball derivation of “Village” which makes the average Joe / Jo go “Huh?!?”

  155. 155.

    patrick

    @ Interrobang, Shooter of Own Foot

    Actually, that just shows you don’t understand evolution. Evolution is a consequence, and it doesn’t have any “ruthlessness” about it, because it’s not goal-oriented or teleological.

    Your assuming God doesn’t have a goal. That is something that you may assert but not, despite your presumptiousness, know.

    In the context of which I am speaking that confusion is exactly part of the problem. Conservatives have, as a basic tenant of their philosophy, the idea of “natural order”, which absolves them of making choices. For conservatives, or in this more specific economic context I will call them “free market Darwinists”, when someone dies because they have no health care, it is because of the natural order of the free market, it is something they pretend they can do nothing about. I don’t believe that. I believe that, because we are knowing thinking beings, we have choices about how our society dispenses value. Ignoring those choices is ruthlessness hiding behind inevitibility.

  160. 160.

    pee_decay

    @SarahLoving:

    Not to be confused with “DiFi-shits”: Californians unrepresented by a senator who is busy bringing home defense pork for her husband

  161. 161.

    electricgrendel

    Swamp Fever: an inexplicable and all consuming passion for idiocy that often rises to seize all of Washington before fading into humiliation and weakened national stature; see: Clinton Impeachment, Iraq War, 2010 Fiscal Hawk Attacks.

  162. 162.

    electricgrendel

    Swamp Fever: an inexplicable and all consuming passion for idiocy that often rises to seize all of Washington before fading into humiliation and weakened national stature; see: Clinton Impeachment, Iraq War, 2010 Fiscal Hawk Attacks.

  164. 164.

    Platonicspoof

    @jwb:

    Which suggests that it is not just we, the people—perhaps not even mostly we, the people—that suffer from false consciousness, . . .

    In living color.
    False, from ignorance of how incomplete our consciousness is.

    Oddly, it seems that in both cases our overlords don’t really recognize their own long-term self-interests.

    Although it doesn’t appear to be sustainable for an overlord class (at least at a certain extreme level), individuals at that level can make their millions in the short term where, e.g., a CEO’s success is judged by a business’s (sp?) quarterly performance and stock price gains.
    Long term for the class vs. short term for some individuals.

  165. 165.

    Platonicspoof

    . . . but maybe we could think of a good catch phrase to describe it . . .

    Since “it” sounds like the delusions of mass hysteria, I got nothing for a new general label, but a catch phrase I ran across at Pensito Review specifically for people who vote against their own well-being is
    Turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.
    (The first paragraph of the BBC story is only marginally correct).

    Maybe a catch phrase specific for misplaced deficit reduction ideas could be
    Deficit Delirium Tremens.
    (However, I wish they would look at all the things causing the trade deficit, and the consequences.)

    And almost all sources spell it as two words – catch phrase.

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