Krugman states what I did the other night, but without flinging F-bombs:
Lack of self-awareness can be fatal. The haplessness of the Republican establishment in the face of Trumpism is a case in point.
As many have noted, it’s remarkable how shocked — shocked! — that establishment has been at the success of Donald Trump’s racist, xenophobic campaign. Who knew that this kind of thing would appeal to the party’s base? Isn’t the G.O.P. the party of Ronald Reagan, who sold conservatism with high-minded philosophical messages, like talking about a “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks?
Seriously, Republican political strategy has been exploiting racial antagonism, getting working-class whites to despise government because it dares to help Those People, for almost half a century. So it’s amazing to see the party’s elite utterly astonished by the success of a candidate who is just saying outright what they have consistently tried to convey with dog whistles.
***So what’s the source of this obliviousness? The answer, I’d suggest, is that in recent years — and, in fact, for the past couple of decades — becoming a conservative activist has actually been a low-risk, comfortable career choice. Most Republican officeholders hold safe seats, which they can count on keeping if they are sufficiently orthodox. Moreover, if they should stumble, they can fall back on “wingnut welfare,” the array of positions at right-wing media organizations, think tanks and so on that are always there for loyal spear carriers.
And loyalty is almost the only thing that matters. Does an economist at a right-wing think tank have a remarkable record of embarrassing mistakes? Does a pundit have an almost surreal history of bad calls? No matter, as long as they hew to the orthodox line.
Like I said, Republicans. Y’all built this.
DesertFriar
Y’all built this.
But Donald is going to build it 10 feet higher.
WarMunchkin
I don’t understand any of this, at all. I have never seen a conservative who didn’t get that he or she was a racist – they just didn’t like the word racism. They wanted to be free to be racist – this always included elite conservatives. The freakout isn’t from conservatives, it’s from elite Democrats, who didn’t understand that the Republicans beat the shit of the New Deal coalition by weaponizing racism.
Observe, from one of John Cole’s old posts mocking Instapunk:
This is who they are. It is what they want. When they aren’t explicitly racist, they are complaining that the opinion corridor prevents them from being who they are, which is what they actually mean when they say they don’t have freedom of speech. They. have. always. done. this.
Emma
In many ways I like yours better.
Paul in KY
I think Mr. Krugman underestimates the Republican cornering of the ‘single issue voter’. Other than that, great writeup.
Waldo
@DesertFriar: Heh-heh. Well played, sir.
Belafon
@WarMunchkin: You’re thinking in terms of the little people. You’re not thinking in terms of the business class, of the pundits, who wanted to ride the wave built on racism but be free of its consequences. These are the people who got too comfortable, and are now freaking out over the monster getting loose.
Calouste
@WarMunchkin: It’s pretty much the same with the anti-gay stuff. If you are a religious asshole and you don’t want to sell cake for a gay wedding, say you are booked for that day, or that you will be out of town. If you really want to be an asshole about it, take their order and call in sick on the wedding day. But no, they want to be public assholes about it.
Steve in the ATL
@Paul in KY: Single issue voters, of any political stripe, are just as stupid and deluded as sovereign citizens
RareSanity
Understanding the obliviousness of the “GOP Establishment” seems pretty clear to me.
When the Southern Strategy was first being put in place, all of the actual elected Republicans knew that this was a strategy, not an ethos like it is to the current Republicans.
Now you have elected Republicans that don’t know that the dog whistles, xenophobia, and homophobia were just supposed to be a means to an end, not a natural state of being.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
Racism is everything. It’s the alpha and the omega of politics and policy and the way everything is organized in society. Every single one of us needs to call it out, because it can only thrive in complicit silence. The point everyone seems to miss is that dog whistles are used because being a racist is/was supposed to be shameful – a mark of ignorance – hence it was a thing for the down low. Trump makes it OK to be out and loud. This can’t be allowed. What’s the most shameful is how much punditry happens, dancing around the elephant in the room. It continually amazes me how many words they use, instead of just saying “Trump’s followers are all racists”.
schrodinger's cat
Its not just the conservatives either. What price have the neocon warmongers of the MSM paid? They are on my TV everyday baying for a land war in Syria.
geg6
@RareSanity:
This.
Archon
Obama’s election (and re-election) made a mockery of everything the GOP is been feeding their base for 40 years. Their electorate strategy, shit the entire organizing principle of the modern day Republican party should have made the election of a black liberal like Obama IMPOSSIBLE. Even when given Congressional majorities they couldn’t even bring Obama to heel. Their party has lied and betrayed them and now it’s time for something different.
Steve in the ATL
@RareSanity:
Well said. I know a few of these guys at work. They are 40-ish or younger and grew up on the coded messages, having missed all the outspoken stuff. Their indoctrination is one of the true evils or the GOP; God only knows how many generations it will take to stamp that out, made more difficult by the lack of an equivalent Democratic messaging machine.
Villago Delenda Est
@Calouste: They want to be open assholes, not closeted assholes. It doesn’t count unless they get the visceral thrill of calling someone a ni*CLANG*, a fag, whatever.
The demographics are doing them in. They don’t have the foresight to realize that their survival depends on embracing diversity.
So be it. Winter is coming, motherfuckers.
dedc79
Earlier today I asked an anti-trump republican what he thought it meant that 40% of the people in his party support Trump? His responded that it means Republicans “have our own Obama Phone Lady’s, who’ve placed self-interest ahead of what is right for America.”
The party is so far gone, there’s not even any self-reflection going on.
Members of the press love to remind us that a majority of Republican primary voters are supporting someone other than Trump. The thing is, it’s not Trump’s racism that the Rubio and Cruz supporters find so off putting. It’s that they think he’s faking it.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Archon:
President Black Ninja fucked them all up. What we’re witnessing on the Republican side is a psychotic break from having their understanding of the world as they’ve known it, blown all to pieces.
raven
Rubio. “Love it or leave it motherfuckers”!
Villago Delenda Est
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: On one hand, Obama is a Muslim Tyrant, on the other hand, he’s blah, he can’t possibly be outsmarting us at every turn…
Roger Moore
I think the big thing is that the Republican establishment has let their electoral success convince them that the base agrees with them on all the issues. They don’t get that the main issue is white male privilege and the rest of the stuff is either window dressing or unpopular but tolerated as part of preserving privilege.
pluege
Krugman is of course correct that republicans built their party on a foundation of dog whistle racism, but he misses why the establishment republicans are upset at trump. They’re not upset at trump for being exactly who today’s republicans are – racists, xenophobes, ignorant, violent, all the rest; they’re upset at trump for not being fundamentally dishonest about it like they are.
You could accurately say trump is the first honest republican since before reagan.
mark
Love seeing the blog terms “wingnut welfare” in the NY Times. The “shock” is total BS which Krugman alludes to a la “Casablanca”. Living in the south like I do and being white, I hear this stuff unvarnished all the time until I call them on it. Then, its back to code when I join them for lunch….which I eventually quit doing. There is no common ground with these evil fucks.
WaterGirl
@RareSanity: Wow, excellent point, well said!
RareSanity
@Steve in the ATL: I’m beginning to think that there is no antidote for the GOP as a whole. The past 4 or 5 decades have lead to a party filled to the brim with sociopaths. Without self awareness, there can be no emotional growth, and with only 30% of the population (and dropping) supporting that party, they will have to be banished to the proverbial forest of an extended minority party status before new people can come in and try to change things.
The problem is that they’ve rigged the system in their favor so much, it delays the needed move to that status. It’s the political equivalent of “too big to fail”.
So who knows how long it will take for the GOP to really start getting itself together.
@WaterGirl: You are too kind. :-)
Kylroy
@dedc79: “…who’ve placed self-interest ahead of what is right for America.”
At which point he might as well have put in a goddamn monocle and continued with “What nerve! How dare these peasants think of their own well being! Why do they no longer understand that their suffering is good because it enables greater suffering in the lesser races?”
raven
Here’s a code. I have this fucking cuban telling me to leave this country .
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@pluege:
Unlike all of the other candidates that have come before, he’s actually not trying to grift his followers. Every other candidate tries to fundraise off of the rubes by promising them things they can’t deliver by using race as bait. Trump just wants their admiration. It’s a completely new dynamic.
Brachiator
Kthug doesn’t quite go far enough. The GOP mainstream and pundits were in a comfortable bubble here, and stoked the fears of the GOP base. But they failed to deliver. And when they came back to the base and expected these people to be complacent and accepting of the standard bullshit, they instead were shocked to discover that the anger that had previously been turned towards the Democrats was now turned towards them.
Some reporter (trying to find the story again) went to New Hampshire and spoke to Republican party officials. None of them knew anyone who was a Trump supporter. They were in a bubble and believed their own bullshit. None of them apparently knew how to step outside to look to see the real world or to take the political temperature.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
They also conveniently forget that their electoral success was built on cheating and gaming the system. It’s like going into the Super Bowl with underinflated footballs without a second thought because you cheat like that in all of your games anyway.
Miss Bianca
@RareSanity:
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.
RareSanity
@raven: LOL…that perfectly sums up just about everything wrong with the GOP.
Trentrunner
OT, but this NYTimes story about Melissa Harris-Perry’s show being taken away from her is cray.
The Other Bob
I am expecting that the so-called moderate Republicans (In office and media) will soon have some reason why H. Clinton is so horrible that she made them support Trump.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Here’s the thing: The people who run the Republican Party are bolsheviks, and the voters are fascists. I mean that as it has to do with tactics rather than beliefs. If you read anything about Stalin and the weird bunch of asskissers he gathered around him, you’ll find that they were obsessed with ideological purity. Whatever the orthodoxy was at any time, they all had to outdo each other in telling everybody how true it was. This is just like people like Kristol and the losers at the National Review, where following whatever the conservative line is means everything. Within a group like this, there’s no loyalty to any person, only to the beliefs. If somebody questions the orthodoxy, however faithful he’s been (and, as Krugman says, these guys are almost all guys), he’s out on his ass, cast from the movement.
The voters are fascists. Fascists on’t really care about beliefs. They care about personalities, and about groups, or tribes. You can say whatever you want (within reason) if you’re a fascist, without worry, as long as you belong to the tribe. Look at Hitler’s Germany, as compared with Stalin’s U.S.S.R. Can anybody imagin nazis sitting around in a party congress for a week arguing over nitpicky little differences in party theory. the way Stalinists did? They hardly had an ideology, other than that we are good, and those people are bad, and need to be taken care of. In contrast to the bolsheviks, personal loyalty was far more important than following the right line.
Anyway, I thought of this a long time ago, and wrote about it to a friend, how weird this coalition of doctrinaire, dogmatic ideologues and visceral, tribal brownshirts is. Somehow, they always found a way to hold it together; there was always somebody around like Bush, who was a true believer, but could talk the tribal talk, too. True, there have been, now and again, Pat Buchanans, who threatened to give the finger to Kristol and his cronies, but they could overwhelm those guys with money. They’ve enver had to deal with a brownshirt who could buy his way to the nomination.
jl
@srv: need to up your troll
Brachiator
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
They don’t say it because it is insufficient.
Trump scapegoats Latinos and Muslims, but he at least recognizes that the country has a problem. His followers have been kicked around and lied to. The economy and the masters of finance have let them down.
People’s problems are real, even if Trump’s solutions are bullshit.
MattF
The only inconvenience in wingnut welfare is that sometimes you have to do what your paymaster orders you to do. Y’know, poison the water, let sick people die in the streets, kill random coloreds. It’s hard, but everyone has to make sacrifices– and, to be honest, Junior isn’t gonna get a scholarship to private school.
Calouste
@srv:
The Great Wall of China is both bigger and more recent than the Pyramids, and, dare I say it, a more appropriate comparison. But hey, facts, they are in a different universe than you anyway.
And btw, the Great Wall of China is about as long as the US-Canada border, so Trump is admitting that USA!USA!USA! can’t do what the Chinese could already do 700 years ago.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
This is why Sanders’s offer of significant redistribution to struggling working class whites has failed and why they’re flocking to Trump.
Maybe if Trump wasn’t running on full metal racism they would have given Sanders a chance. But given the choice between hating brown people and food on the table, they’ll take hate every time.
Belafon
@RareSanity: They need to spend their 40 years in the forest. To do that, though, Democrats will have to vote.
bupalos
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Several amendments I might make to that, but one is that Trump hasn’t bought his way to the nomination, he’s acted his way there. In the political realm, his coin is just celebrity and showmanship.
I basically agree with the idea that it’s been a naturally brittle alliance. What’s the matter with Kansas? Nothing that Donald Trump can’t “fix.”
I also think Trump’s racism is subtly different from Ronald Reagan’s. It’s actually amazing how little “young bucks and t-bones” Trump himself does. As opposed to his enthusiasts. This may be what is most threatening to the establishment. He isn’t attacking through the social safety net at all, just questioning who it should catch.
muddy
They have a really strong propaganda ability with people that don’t have a lot of money, especially in rural areas. You can hardly tune in any radio stations. But there are a lot of AM radio wingnuts that you can have on in the background working in the shop. Fox News is on basic cable, you can’t get tv without Fox News I don’t think. You have to go up about 3 steps to get MSNBC (not that that is great but it’s something).
I know a lot of people in this group. They heard their information “on the news”. Their families “have always been Republican”. They have had this constant drumbeat in their ears night and day, in the house, the shop, the truck. They don’t have the time or ability online or the interest to look for dissenting views. It’s their “team”.
The background noise of much of America is this poisonous tripe.
Weaselone
@Trentrunner: .
I particularly like that the article feels the need to say that the network is moving away from liberal to “hard news”
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Rubio dumps on Trump. It’s actually pretty good. If they had treated him like the buffoon he is from the start they would be in a differenct place today.
Jeffro
@Steve in the ATL:
Seconded. My fellow GenXers, Reagan babies, whatever you want to call them…they don’t know anything but their own entitlement, and they’re not interested in learning anything, either.
Jeffro
@RareSanity:
Ok, so you put it more eloquently to Steve in the ATL than I did…(hangs head)
But seriously, the lack of self-awareness, the disinterest in learning something new, challenging their own assumptions…that is definitely oh so true of this cohort.
jl
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: I heard much of that on the radio this morning. The delivery stunk. Rubio is a lazy pet of the money bags, and I doubt any of his scripted acts, which he is nervously rushing through again, will do much to change things. But we will see. I guess the question is whether he outperforms his polling on Super Tuesday, and he ‘loses better’ than expected.
Edit: But, I do hope Rubio and Cruz hang on for a long time, and they manage to do well enough to create as much mess as they can for the GOP primary. I would dearly like a mess for the GOP convention, so even though I think Rubio is a lazy little creep who lives off of groveling and preening for his money bag sugar daddies, I hope the little brat does better than expected.
Betty Cracker
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: I sincerely hope he’s too late since I think Trump is more beatable by Hillary than Rubio. (In a sane world, she’d beat either in a 50-state landslide. But we don’t live in a sane world.)
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@bupalos: I think that’s right. He’s acted his way into this. Yet another parallel with the fascists, who were always putting on a good show. They understood, as trump does, that a lot of people will follow a good showman. When I said he was buying his way in, what I meant more was that they couldn’t, the party couldn’t, overwhelm him with money they way they could to somebody like Buchanan.
Going even further along this road, bolsheviks never put on a show. They had utter contempt for the people they were ruling over, and couldn’t have cared less what they thought. The leaders said what was what, and by God, if the little people knew what was good for ’em, they’d damned well better go along with it. If they didn’t, they just slaughtered them. In the same way, people like Kristol, the thinkers [sic] don’t really give a shit about voters. They expect the dumb voters to do what they’re told and keep their mouths shut. We’re just lucky we live in a country where people like Kristol can’t kill their rabble when they ask too many questions.
I don’t know; maybe I should write a book about this…
Malovich
Oh look. Bobo Brooks has woken up and smelled what He, Trump has been cooking.
jl
@Betty Cracker: I have decided that I will be a cheerful, rather than a standard issue small frightened mammal, type of Democrat, just for this one day.
On the upside, we may be pleasantly surprised by the general election. The GOP primary is mess, a disaster, on many counts that do matter for the general election. Look at the fantasy crap the GOP, their lousy presidential contestants, and their debates, and their moderators, and their media fan reporters, waste their time on. All carefully designed to keep their dwindling party faithful of vicious dingbats engaged. I just don’t see how what is going on there is related to the real world.
Both HRC and Sanders should be able to chew up and spit out Trump, Cruz or Rubio in their sleep. As I said in last thread, Trump was satisfyingly flat footed, slow and clumsy in responding to what there, when it comes down to it, cheesy debate gimmicks that Cruz and Rubio offered last night. Trump had to resort to insults. I think both HRC and Sanders could have easily dispatched them. And Trump too. And not only wrt to debates, which probably only have marginal importance (though margins are important for elections) but in general campaign back and forth.
Substance will mean something in the general election. It means absolutely nothing in this year’s GOP primary. It is a hothouse mess.
Bill E Pilgrim
A little reminder from Robert Reich that Rubio as President would in a lot of ways be worse than Trump. The good part is that either one of them will get demolished in November. That’s me, not him saying that.
Rubio would fail in a general mostly from the style and creepiness issues that dogged him so far in the primaries, looking like Richie Rich without the blonde hair doesn’t help, but overall he’s just too inexperienced and awkward appearing next to someone like Hillary.
Trump is primary red meat for the base crazies but will be rancid week-old stew in a general, he’d probably energize the Democrats enough to get enough votes out to take the House.
The bad part is that there’s still eight months of this before we know, and of course, I might be wrong.
Turgidson
@Archon:
Agreed that this was their expectation until 2008. Ironically, it was their own calamitous incompetence and willingness to follow a mad fool off a cliff that allowed for Barack HUSSEIN Obama to get elected. And their response to all this has been to bury the needle on the crazy. And that shit still works in low turnout elections. Hopefully it backfires when the presidential electorate turns out and Obama isn’t heading the ticket for his side.
petesh
Memo to staff: Kthug unperson, stat!
We have always distrusted his attitude to healthcare reform and banking, and his position on the Euro is wishy when it’s not washy. Also, his beard is not chic and we suspect he is not sound on dogs.
Chris
@WarMunchkin:
I’ve rarely met a conservative who wasn’t racist to the core and absolutely obsessed with identity politics, but I’ve also never met one who would admit to being a racist. A stupendous amount of their political conversations go into reassuring themselves and each other that they’re not racist, while constructing elaborate justifications for why it’s okay and/or not really racist to have their beliefs and prejudices, actually. They’ll pore over black-on-white-violence statistics to convince themselves that they’re the real victimized race and their enemies are the racists, talk at length about how it’s not about race, it’s about culture (“it’s software not hardware!”), and think they’ve hit the peak of rhetorical brilliance when they point out that Islam is a religion not a race. They give each other wounded commiserations about how “the liberals think I’m saying all this because I’m a racist. You know me. You know I’m not a racist, right?” They talk about how they don’t harbor any hate for anyone deep in their hearts, and they’d totally welcome a hypothetical black man or gay man into their house if they needed help, which is how they know they’re not racist/homophobic. It goes on, and on, and on. I’ve seen it from family and acquaintances, overheard it from people on the metro, read it on wingnut conversations from social media to the blogosphere. “Let’s all hold hands and talk about how not racist we are” is an art form with these people. So yeah, I can totally see how the notion of a conservative breaking the veil would upset a lot of these guys, and make them react with the kind of furious “he’s not one of us!” assertions we’re now seeing from all the non-Trump-voting conservatives.
KH
“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”
MLK Jr, Letter from a Birmingham Jail
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
Rotating tag line if ever I read one.
No, no we don’t. Thank bog for delicious Duff.
mark
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Outstanding post. The “Red” states stuff fits perfectly doesn’t it? The only thing I like about Trump is how he blows up their “doctrines” on health care and blood suckers like Big Insurance. I guarantee both my dad and brother who are RW ideologues and insurance men to the core, will find a way to vote for Trump. Like David Koch says, they will take hate every time
Gindy51
@Brachiator: They wouldn’t know a thermometer if it was shoved up their asses sideways.
Steve in the ATL
@raven:
That’s got to be a finalist for Post of the Day.
Turgidson
@dedc79:
The dipshit brigades were apparently trained from birth to turn any legitimate criticism into some form of “but [Obama/libtards/Hitlery/etc.] did [something they think is pure evil but is either made up or innocuous]”
And even the ones who seem to come to their senses can’t help but append that shit to almost all their work. David “Axis of Evil” Frum only recently kicked the habit of adding anti-Obama stupidity unrelated to the topic at hand to his articles. For Andrew Sullivan it was always Hillary who was, axiomatically, worse than anyone else, no matter the topic. The “reformicon” frauds reflexively note that somethingsomething Obamacare tyranny somethingsomething before proposing their warmed-over trickle down turds (but with fresh coat of polish!).
So, of fucking course Trump is just like “ZOMG Obamaphones” to these people. For their entire lives they’ve been taught to make these comparisons and for the past seven years, the made-up Obama they believe exists has been the benchmark comparison for anything they consider to be bad.
Cacti
In today’s news of Antonin Scalia is still dead:
Yep, you read that right.
Dow is settling because there are no longer 5 reliable handmaidens for big business on the SCOTUS bench.
Already Tony has done more good postmortem than he did in life.
jl
@efgoldman: I only ask for enough slender rationale to exist for the leading trio of toxic clowns to stay in the race and make as much of a mess as possible for the GOP in the general election.
I don’t care about the actual arithmetic. I care about the fantasy arithmetic that the GOpers will do in their heads that leads to mess for GOP.
bemused
@KH:
Horrifying that it is just as true today.
raven
@Steve in the ATL: Thank you, thank you very much.
Archon
@Turgidson:
I will say this, for the few conservative “intellectuals” that feel their paycheck isn’t at stake for telling the truth (pretty much the New York Times) we are getting some progression in truth telling regarding gridlock in Washington during the Obama era. First, it was, “Everything is Obama’s fault”, then it was, “It’s dually Obama and the Republicans fault”, then it became, “It’s mostly on Republicans but Obama was a big ole meanie about it”. Now we are FINALLY at the truth, “The Republican party is the problem”.
It only took 7+plus years, unprecedented obstruction and Donald Trump as GOP front runner but were here.
Turgidson
@The Other Bob:
They’ve been fed bullshit reasons to believe this since 1992.
The NYC and Beltway GOP elites probably know full well that they have nothing to fear from a Hillary Clinton presidency, but they’ve told everyone, including themselves, that she is the worst person in history for so long that they’ll latch on to some stupid excuse to vote for a proudly know-nothing racist carnival barker who identifies as (R) over her. They’ll probably just say they’re voting Trump because Hillary should be in jail for her email server or some shit, and probably convince themselves that actually makes sense.
Van Buren
@jl: Agreed. A wall in the middle of nowhere does not qualify as infrastructure.
The Ancient Randonneur
Trump is just as beatable in 2016 as Bush was in 2000.
Iowa Old Lady
@efgoldman: IMHO, it’s too late for the fluffing to do any good. I don’t know what they’ve been thinking to delay like this if Trump’s defeat really mattered to them.
danielx
@Malovich:
Right.
Conspicuously absent from my man Dave’s cri de coeur (one of several he has penned lately) was any mention of his own role in the process, of course. Because pundits are never responsible for anything.
“All I said was that building was unattractive and should be done away with! I never told anybody to burn the motherfucker down!”
jl
@Van Buren: I was unfair to srv. I didn’t get the joke immediately.
Betty Cracker
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
I almost wish I thought that way, depressing as it would be, because it would make life a lot simpler to have one grand, unifying theory that explains everything. But I don’t think anything as complex as a society of 300 million-plus people (let alone a planet with 8 billion-plus inhabitants) is that simple.
Wealth distribution doesn’t explain everything. Religious nutbaggery doesn’t explain everything. The patriarchy doesn’t explain everything. Racism doesn’t explain everything. All are important factors that intersect, and there are many others, of course, too. But I don’t believe in a single organizing principle.
Turgidson
@Archon:
I agree progress has been made, but I don’t think they’ve actually come around to the truth. David f’ing Brooks are finally admitting in fairly plain terms that the GOP is losing its mind, but he still flings “both sides” shitballs around to muddle the point as much as he thinks he can get away with and carefully sidesteps any self-reflection of his own. So he conflates Bernie with Trump. He claims that the electorate’s thirst for “outsiders” is the fault of the establishment and institutions in general (an implicit “both sides” dodge) rather than the GOP’s careful cultivation and exploitation of race and class-based fear and resentment for the past 40+ years. And, as driftglass notes, Brooks refers to the GOP as “they,” so as to sidestep any personal responsibility for egging on the blood-gargling psychopathy that has consumed HIS party.
I’ll acknowledge that Brooks and other supposedly reasonable GOP-aligned pundits are edging closer to saying what Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann were ostentatiously ignored for saying only a couple years ago – the GOP has lost its fucking mind and is responsible for the shitshow. But Brooks and his ilk are nowhere near cured and will latch on to ANYTHING they possibly can to deny the reality that’s in front of all of us in favor of the comforting and lucrative “both sides, but really it’s the fucking hippies!” lie they’ve been telling us and themselves for so long.
The Pale Scot
@muddy:
Doctor Who The Sound Of Drums
The Ten Hour Version
Brachiator
@Cacti:
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
This is damn good news.
Somebody should tell the Republicans, “keep on delaying, delaying, delaying.”
Shit it looks like the best deal they could have made was to accept Obama’s offer of that moderate Republican governor as a Supreme Court Justice.
The dumbass Republicans once again do not seem to realize that the business of the United States, including the courts, continues even if they play their obstructionist games.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@pluege: Eisenhower. The name you’re looking for is Eisenhower. And yes, that was just about 70 years ago, you gotta go back a ways.
superpredators4hillary
@KH: Republican talking points ain’t taken kindly to in these parts.
boatboy_srq
@Belafon: They just hide their racism and bigotry behind a bigger vocabulary.
JPL
@Cacti: Time to celebrate. Thanks for letting me know.
Chris
@dedc79:
What could potentially be fascinating is the number of Republicans – good Republicans, “real conservatives” that various Trump-haters have approvingly pointed out as paragons of awesomeness – who are endorsing Trump, and how their Trump-hating supporters square that circle.
I got an “I have no words…” text a couple hours ago from my East Coast “Moderate” Republican friend who worships the ground Chris Christie waddles on while loathing Trump with every fiber of her being, in re Christie’s endorsement earlier this afternoon. No further word. Curious to see how that progresses as more and more conservatives endorse the dude.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
Yes, this.
boatboy_srq
@Chris: I’ve also run into those people.
And I’ve run into people who are told they’re conservative, who belong to conservative groups/churches/organizations, and who mouth conservative rhetoric – but when you dig below that layer they’re surprisingly moderate/liberal, and all they need is a gentle push to get them where their community matches their inclinations. There’s power in belonging, and a lot of Reichwing talking points are about belonging – to a particular faith/denomination, a particular race/ethnicity, a particular community and most of all to a particular idealised Conservatism (that really no longer exists).
schrodinger's cat
@Turgidson: David Brooks is not a reasonable Republican, just plays one on TV.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Jeffro: Thirded. I’m so glad that the Boomers and Millennials suck up all the media oxygen, because my generation (X) is the absolute worst. They are mean, entitled, willfully ignorant and much to my surprise (thanks, Obama, I really didn’t know) racist as fuck. And we are disasters as parents. My wife teaches Gen X kids, I see shit that blows my mind every day. The kids are awful – miniature versions of their vicious, dishonest, spiteful parents – but the parents are usually ten times worse.
I’ll shut up now but damn, GenX has got a lot to answer for and we won’t ever be called to account for it.
jl
@efgoldman:
” And [Eisenhower] wasn’t really a partisan Republiklown; he had his choice of which party. ”
And he chose the GOP in order to try to stomp out the reactionary BS we have seen them pump out nonstop over the last 20 or 30 years.
Chris
@Brachiator:
I think they didn’t even realize how much they were supposed to deliver.
I mean, they saturate their base with messages of how Barack Obama is an usurper, who isn’t even qualified to be President of the United States in the most basic legal terms, whose every action is a blatant violation of the constitution, and who’s clearly a Muslim Socialist radical with an agenda to enslave the United States with death panels and gun control…
… and it honestly doesn’t occur to them that when your base believes all that, it creates the expectation that you’re going to, well, impeach the bastard. It’s not like you don’t have cause, after all; birth certificate, death panels, Fast And Furious… Impeach him, or maybe even organize a coup d’etat like those good guys in Latin America do whenever there’s a communist threat. No? Why not? The very survival of the republic is in danger! Why on earth would you refuse to… Oh my God, you’re part of it too, aren’t you?
Kay
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:
Little late for that.
It was fun watching the crack up but I’m already sick of their inter-Party struggle, partly because it doesn’t matter which side wins. It doesn’t matter to me if conservatives “genuinely believe” what they say and do – I don’t care about noble intentions and I don’t care about the “movement”. Makes not a bit of difference to me if Trump is the person putting the crap in or a True Believer, not that Rubio “believes” any of the stuff he’s repeating either.
Just bring out the nominee and let’s go.
raven
So MSNBC hired Rick Tyler.
Turgidson
@schrodinger’s cat:
Agreed, that’s why I said “supposedly” reasonable.
I think BoBo would be capable of reasonableness if his livelihood didn’t depend on making utterly demented insanity seem reasonable to people not paying attention. But, here we are.
Gin & Tonic
In other news, some dude shot and killed four people in Washington (state) today, then himself. Not to be confused with the guy who shot and killed four people in Kansas yesterday.
You really can’t tell the players without a scorecard.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@raven: thank god, I’ve been worried about only Michael Medved correcting the leftist drift they’ve been showing by ramming Michael Steele down my throat twice an hour.
dedc79
So, according to Mona Charen, this election is A Man for All Seasons, Christie is Richard Rich and Rubio is Thomas More. Seriously.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@dedc79: I read Wolf Hall, I’m voting for Thomas Cromwell.
dedc79
@Chris: Yeah, I’m originally from NJ, and some of my friends who still live there and were Christie supporters (for reasons, by the way, that i have never and will never understand) are just plain speechless.
Petorado
What’s changed with the R’s this election is that their veil of civility, nobility, or wisdom has now completely vanished. All the things they do as legislators and leaders that used to be the product of “hard decisions”, “tough choices” and “doing what’s best for the country” has dissolved into a pool of plain old hatred and spite. They are pretty nakedly just petty and nasty people who think the problem with America is their fellow Americans.
Their tribal brand of politics has grown outside the bounds of identity and community to outright hatred of their fellow countrymen. There is no longer an American public in their eyes. They see Hutus among the Tutsis, Croats among the Serbs, Sunni among the Shiite: they see civil war all around them. Republicans can no longer claim to want to govern this nation, they just want to take it over and divide the spoils among their fellow tribesmen.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Gin & Tonic: 2016 is going to be a fucking bloodbath. A lot of people getting near the end of their ropes are finally there, and they all bought guns over the last 8 years.
Turgidson
@Chris:
Exactly. But then the GOPers come back with “well you libtards wanted to impeach Bush, didn’t you?” to shut down the conversation with some old fashioned both siderist false equivalence. Bush was committing war crimes in broad daylight with a shit-eating grin on his face the whole time, so fuck yeah, a lot of us would have liked to see him impeached. But aside from the DailyKos comment section, few of us actually thought it would happen and our party leadership shut down that talk at every turn.
The GOP, on the other hand, has elected officials and prominent media personalities saying, daily if not fucking hourly, that Obama’s every single fucking move is an unconstitutional outrage, and getting out in front of every possible controversy before knowing fuck-all about what they’re talking about saying Obama MUST have committed high crimes and misdemeanors, because shut up he’s a tyrant.
But as DougJ is fond of noting, GOP presidential candidates saying Obama is committing treason is the same thing as an anonymous DailyKos commenter calling Bush a Nazi in 2004 so both sides do it. End o’ story.
Steve in the ATL
@Petorado:
This is inspired posting
Mike J
@raven:
Too dishonest for the Cruz campaign, a perfect fit for NBC.
Elizabelle
@Gin & Tonic: Jeez. Victims this time included children, too. Belfair, WA, about 35 miles west of Seattle.
And then, once house was surrounded, the man came outside and shot himself.
As you say, this mass shooting (four or more dead, not including the shooter, per FBI definition) is not last night’s “rampage” in Kansas, which did not rise to mass shooting status because only 3 victim fatalities and one dead gunman there.
Kent
Well, I finally got to go vote today. Voted early in the Texas primary.
For a while I thought hard about how best to rat-fuck the Republicans. Does one vote for Trump or Cruz if one wants to do that? It seems that the biggest fiasco would be Cruz winning Texas and keeping it a 3-way race for longer and longer. But I just couldn’t bring myself to actually vote for Cruz. That would have burned my fingers too much.
So in the end I got the Dem ballot and voted for Hillary and a whole bunch of unknown folks running for judgeships and other statewide offices that will get crushed in November by all the lizard brains voting straight-party R.
Hillary got my vote because after all that has gone on since 1992 when the Clinton’s first won, it is clear that we need the absolute biggest badass in the White House to hold the line against every attempted Republican incursion, from replacing Scalia to voting rights to immigration. Sanders is a nice old guy but he’s basically a single-issue gadfly, and I’m not convinced he has the attention span to hold every inch of the line that will need holding over the next 8 years. Hillary is just way more of a badass and after 25 years of Republican attacks has no fucks left to give so to speak when it comes to coddling and humoring Republican venality. She is clearly the smartest of the bunch by far and after working in two administrations knows more than anyone else in the country how to wield the levers of executive power to keep the Republican nonsense at bay.
khead
@Turgidson:
The pundits may be inching towards Ornstein and Mann – I’ve seen a bunch of pieces this week on Trump – but they are not even close to there yet. Brooks wrote an entire paragraph that perfectly describes the GOP and he still couldn’t say it outright. Kagan had a piece in the Wash Post today in which he said he would vote for Clinton over Trump – yet he still dropped this shit in there about Obama:
trollhattan
@Elizabelle:
So, add in Kalamazoo and there are three within a six-day span—not even a full week separating them.
Elizabelle
@trollhattan: People are losing their shit. All this craziness and anxiety in the air can’t be good for anyone on the edge.
mclaren
The hardcore movement conservative Robert Kagan has an op-ed in the New York Times in which he urges fellow Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton.
I have never seen anything like this before in my life. Not even in the catastrophic Goldwater election of 1964 or the even bigger Nixon-Humphrey trainwreck of 1968, where mass numbers of liberals abandoned the party to sit the election out.
Source: “Trump is the GOP’s Frankenstein monster. Now he’s strong enough to destroy the party,” Robert Kagan, The Washington Post, 25 February 2016.
The Republican and the Democratic party have both been prematurely diagnosed dead before. But there’s a sense of a real tipping point in this election. The Sheer fanaticism of the republican obstructionism in the senate now, and the extreme doubts about it even from Fox News, suggests that the electorate will not tolerate a continuation of the status quo.
Just listening to the chaos and little-kiddie insults and screaming over one another that typified this latest GOP debate gives even the most objective observer a feeling that we’ve reached some sort of endpoint. To go beyond this stage means something dramatic…a crackup of the Republican party, some kind of basic shattering of the conservative coalition, a wholesale repudiation of the big-money ideologies getting pushed on the party by its billionaire wing.
In the end, the billionaires have lots of cash, but they only account for a handful of votes in and of themselves. Voters control the direction of the Republican party. At the same time, Bernie Sanders has so much cash from small donations that he can stay in the Democratic race and push Hillary to the left right up to the last primary. Meanwhile, with Trump abandoning most of the conservatives’ favored policies, Republicans are starting to bail out on their own party in panic.
Are we witnessing the historic breakdown of one of the two major political parties in America? Is this a repeat of the disintegration of the Whig Party after the election of 1856?
Time will tell.
D58826
When the clown car was forming last year the beltway VSP’s seemed to divide the clowns into 3 groups 1. the serious candidates (Bush, Christie, Walker, Kaisch, Rubio, Cruz and maybe Perry), 2. the fringe/niche candidates (Hucklee, Santorium, Gilmorer, Fiorina) and 3. the comic relief (Carson and Trump). I just wonder what Trump had in mind when he announced his candidacy? Did he think this would just be a summer/fall reality show where he said a few outrageous things and got to take part in a few debates before he went back to counting his money and his hair. Or did he really think and plan that he had a real shot at making a race of it? Has he beeen laying the groundwork for this since he dabbled in the 2012 campaign?.
Turgidson
@khead:
Yep, exactly what I was talking about. I mean, at least Kagan’s criticism was minimally substantive and perhaps even defensible to a point – which is better than most can manage, but it still comes off like “well I’m criticizing a Republican here, so I need to make sure I fill my ‘but Obama still sucks the most amirite?’ quota to stay in the tent.” Frum has finally stopped doing this every single fucking time he speaks or writes. It took most of Obama’s presidency. He must finally be at peace with the fact that the Wurlitzer won’t be taking him back.
Johnny Coelacanth
@srv: “What is the left building?” Your mom.
Brachiator
@Chris:
Yep. But it wasn’t just about Obama.
You had a lot of people who would watch the Congress obstruct and do nothing. And some of the few bills that did get out didn’t help anyone who was not a special interest plutocrat.
So, people have lost jobs, lost wages, lost hope, and see the fools in Congress debate over BS and talk about how they are the defenders of conservative values and all things American. Meanwhile back in the real world, people with bills to pay and mouths to feed realize that even hating Obama like a real American should, ain’t getting the job done.
Elizabelle
@Kent: Proud of you, son.
I voted Hillary too, much as I appreciate Bernie being in the race.
mclaren
@Petorado:
Exactamundo.
It’s the ripping off of the mask of humanity that has covered the poisonous Republican reptile.
You saw it occasionally with Ronald Reagan. Every once in a while, a reporter would ask Reagan a serious question, like “Didn’t you trade arms for hostages?” and Reagan’s genial mask of civility would disappear…and you’d be left staring at a rictus of mindless hate. At that point, you realized that Ronald Reagan was not charming or genial or charismatic — he was a dull stupid lizard. A poisonous reptile filled with rage, and drooling envenomed bigotry.
It’s like that scene in the 1983 TV movie V, where someone tears the human flesh mask off the alien leader John and reveals him as a reptilian monster on live television.
Now it’s happened to the entire Republican party.
Hard to see how they come back from this.
Chris
@boatboy_srq:
Yeah, I’ve always found it interesting that there’s a fair amount of conservatives whom, if you can get them away from the talking points and the liberal/conservative duality and just ask “what do you want politicians to do,” the answers often lean pretty liberal. But if you think that’ll ever overrun their basic instinct to vote Republican, you’ve got another thought coming.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Betty Cracker:
It explains an awful lot. The world would look entirely different if we didn’t have to live with the legacy of colonialism and slavery.
Anoniminous
@efgoldman:
The younger Confederate males voted Wallace, enough that he was able to take Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas ensuring Humphrey’s defeat.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: That doesn’t surprise me.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mike J: Rachel was talking him up after he got canned from the Cruz campaign, so I’m not surprised that MSNBC hired him.
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
I agree with you. I think it’s the combination of everything you’ve mentioned, like a perfect storm.
I’m not sure the GOP is oblivious so much as they’ve become overly overconfident. The overconfident people I’ve known have no ability to acknowledge any viewpoints other than their own or those that jibe with theirs. It never occurs to them to step back and see what other people’s reactions might be.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Kent:
You’re expressing my thoughts exactly about what Hillary brings to the table. If she’s elected, Obama will basically be handing over a turnkey operation if that’s helpful to her – handing her the keys to a sweet sweet ride, while Bernie all by himself with virtually no party support, will be the dog that caught the car.
patrick II
@Miss Bianca:
Kurt Vonnegut
BillinGlendaleCA
@mclaren: SNL covered that in 1986.
piratedan
while I have hope for the future, my mind sometimes turns to the question…. how the fuck do we fix this?
by THIS… I mean the following:
1) Getting people to understand that supporting your southern heritage is code for supporting slavery or at a minimum, white privilege.
2) being upset about Abortion doesn’t mean you get to kill abortion doctors and harass women who seek to have an abortion or force them to go thru a Goldbergian maze of logistics to obtain one.
3) Just because you have faith in a divine entity doesn’t mean that I am a lesser person because I don’t share the same beliefs or have different ones
4) just because you’re poor, doesn’t mean that you’re lazy
5) the American dream is about opportunity and equality, not IGMFY
While I hope that we can elect a Democrat this fall and supply that person with a legislative body that is not essentially as bugfuck crazy as the majority of the last three congressional representatives have proven themselves to be; there’s a lot of work to be done still.
The best thing I can think of is to start working locally and socially to try and bring these people back to sanity. Either that or start putting guys like Murdoch and Todd into tumbrels… sigh….
Kathleen
@Cacti: Alas, the good he did in life presents a very low bar.
jl
@D58826: As I typed in a previous thread, I heard a clip from Trump interview on the radio that he claimed that he had everything planned out: oafish clown in primary to get enough attention to beat a crowded field, go more statesmanlike for general when the audience is different and his elevated status (as nominee) demands more gravitas.
Trump thinks he can change into whatever he wants ‘very easily’. I have serious doubts about that, and last night’s debate when he finally had to face what passes for substantive debate in the GOP primary, didn’t do anything to lessen my doubts.
Trump had to resort to insults to fend off, incompletely and somewhat ineffectively, cheap debating gambits from Cruz and Trump that HRC and Sanders would have shut down (edit: more like stomped into the ground while humiliating those two goofs) in their sleep, IMHO.
evodevo
@efgoldman: Well, they’ve been “Republican” since the ’60’s, when racism and hatred of the hippies and anti-war protesters overwhelmed any union sentiments they had. I taught school in two rural counties in that era, and those attitudes were held by ~99% of the populace. It hasn’t changed very much in Ky, or rural Ohio. The brutal lessons of the Depression and the fight for union representation in coal country were forgotten by those who grew up in the 50’s.
chopper
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
exactly. this, a thousand times.
Kathleen
@mclaren: That article was brilliant. He articulates perfectly what the Rethuglican party is, including the racism. And he’s a conservative. Wow. Thanks for sharing that.
I think the last time we’ve seen anything close to that level of honesty is when Republicans spoke out against Nixon during Watergate.
Anoniminous
@Betty Cracker:
It’s a combination of bigotry, ignorance, and ressentiment.
Bigotry: intolerance toward those who hold different opinions, have different cultures, or look different from oneself
Ignorance: lack of and disinterest in knowledge or information
Ressentiment: a sense of hostility and assignment of blame directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration
Mike J
@piratedan:
They already understand it. I’ve seen the “confederate” flag in Massachusetts. Nobody gives a shit about their “southern heritage.” Their heritage is supporting a slave owners rebellion that was crushed at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
Kay
These emails in the Flint situation are just wild. If you said “write me an email after the fact that will clearly lay out the basic problem with this approach to government” you really couldn’t get better than these:
Since we’re in charge….
Gerald
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
These pundits are mostly white and live “white privilege” which allows them to be part of the collective amnesia regarding the reality of systemic racism in every aspect of American life.
An example of how this collective amnesia works IS how WE talk about the GOP/Republican governance 2000-2008 WITH Bush/Cheney.
Who can argue that that period of governance IS the most disastrous and damaging presidency of any in the past 200+ years!
Everyone can list the failures:
Squandered surplus
Largest transfer of wealth from middle-class to 1-2% in US history
Worst attack on US soil
The longest running war in US history
1st invasion of a country by US.
Destabilized the entire Middle East
Mismanaged economy …800,000 job losses per month
Executive mismanagement of government services …Katrina
Nearly crash US economy
Multi-Billions of dollar give away to those that orchestrated the crash on the way out the door.
No Party’s governance left this Nation in such a mess …and their follow up …Party of NO!
THE MOST obstructionist Party to a sitting POTUS since run up to The Civil War!
Miss Bianca
@patrick II:
ee? eh? OK
BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: Whoever the Dem nominee is, they should look at the debate between Handsome Joe and the granny starver. That’s the tactic to take tRump on, humor with facts.
If the Hilbeast is the nominee, the orange man with opossum on his head will have to very careful with his habit of interrupting. That will not go over well with most of the lady folk, even those leaning towards Herr Trump. I don’t think tRump will be intelligent enough to look at the debate between Handsome Joe and the Half Term Governor as a guide.
DCF
Sen. Lindsey Graham roasts Republicans. Mostly Hysterical!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017333558
LG appears slightly toasted at this Washington Press Club Foundation event, but what he says will floor you….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKDbt6pmC-g
Chris
@Brachiator:
That, too.
I mean, it’s basically a combination of two trends; one, the reality based problems (people realizing that hating Obama isn’t putting food on the table – what you said). Two, the problems they create themselves – painting a terrifying world in which only drastic action can save the republic, but then refusing to do anything about it (what I was saying with the Obama example).
No wonder the base has concluded they’re all as useless as a bottle of dried glue.
Germy
http://crooksandliars.com/2016/02/donald-trump-im-going-open-our-libel-law
If he succeeds, what does this mean for all talkers on faux nooz? Because some seriously untrue stuff comes out of their mouths when they talk about teh librul politicians.
Germy
@DCF: Are we sure Lindsey Graham isn’t a balloon-juice commenter? Has anyone seen him at any of the meet ups?
debbie
@mclaren:
Actually, this was in the Post. And here’s the link. The whole thing is worth reading.
singfoom
@Germy: Naturally IOKIYAR will be written into the bill. We can’t have pesky facts and reality bother the “commentators” on the idiot tube.
Germy
@singfoom: Ah, I thought so. Because that libel law would put Murdoch and Ailes right out of business.
Mike J
Trump really has a glass jaw. He loses his shit when somebody hits back, or worse yet, laughs at him. His solution?
People have asked why Trump is running. I think this is it. He want’s to shut up anybody who says one word against him.
mclaren
Excellent and substantive and very tough response to the Sanders policy proposals that claim we can get to 4.5% GDP growth by 2026 by Mike Konczal here.
Konczal points out that there are a bunch of arguments that can be made against Sanders’ plan as further detailed by Gerald Friedman’s analysis, but in each case the anti-Sanders arguments are either speculative or simplyimplausible.
But this requires assumptions without basis in economic fact — viz., that the demand surge won’t raise aggregate demand and thus push up GDP growth. That has typically happened with past stimulus — why wouldn’t it happen with Sanders’ plan? The critics don’t have an explanation.
Maybe — but that’s not an economic argument, it’s a political one, and not a very good political argument at that. It boils down to mere defeatism, as Betty Cracker has pointed out. Curling up into a foetal position in the corner and mumbling “It’s hopeless, we’re all doomed” is not a convincing rebuttal to an economic policy.
Why? To believe that, we’d have to do something more radical than Sanders’ policies — namely, throwing the Solow growth model overboard. It’s not credible. There’s no economic evidence that something magical was happening up to 2007 to cause high GDP growth and is now equally magically absent from the U.S. economy.
So this claim is not convincing either.
This counter-argument to Sanders’ policies requires a version of hysteresis that no one has ever seen before. We would have to believe not only that businesses stopped investing and plant & equipment and workers out of work lost skills, but that businesses can never invest in plant & equipment again, and that workers can never regain their skills. That’s bizarre. It runs counter to the entire history of economics. Ultimately, this is just an economic version of the “It’s hopeless, we’re all doomed!” defeatism so fashionable among liberals right now.
This counter-argument is so preposterous that it needs little rebuttal. The data overwhelmingly show that younger workers are not voluntarily unemployed and that older workers are not mainly out of work because they have decided to retire early. An analysis of the post-2009 recovery shows that only a small percentage of the unemployment is demographic in nature, because we see mass unemployment across the board in all professions and across all age groups, except in the elite professions like doctors and lawyers that require licenses (and thus protect those professions against unemployment by protecting them against competition in the marketplace).
This too is preposterous and it’s easy to prove it’s wrong by showing that the profits at the remaining Wall Street firms are just as high as they were during the heyday of financial fraud. The bonuses handed out at places like Godman Sachs haven’t gotten any smaller. Wall Street firms aren’t going out of business because they can’t make enough profit to keep their doors open. So we can dismiss this counter-argument as well.
Easily the most ridiculous of all counter-arguments to Sanders’ policies. If this were true, we’d see employment plummeting across the board — instead, we see high unemployment among new college grads and among workers older than 50. Why? Because businesses are eager to shed older workers to avoid paying them a lot, and businesses don’t need to hire younger workers because there’s a simple lack of overall demand. The economy stinks, quite frankly — the problem is the economy, not the workers, and the data shows it. So we can safely dismiss this argument against Sanders’ policies.
The real argument we should be having is whether the Obama presidency ever actually had a real economic recovery. Obama’s stimulus program prevented the patient from flatlining of a heart attack, but the patient (the economy) still isn’t out of bed and still can’t walk around the block. That’s the real issue Sanders has been hammering away at, and criticisms of Sanders’ policies don’t seem to deal with that issue.
The big problem with the economy now is that the Fed and the CBO keep lowering their GDP growth estimates. Every year they make predictions that are way too rosy, then they have to drop them. We started this year with a 3% GDP growth estimate but it’s pellucidly clear at best the economy will eke out 2% growth at best this year, and maybe less than that — maybe only 1.5% or something in that ballpark. The big question is why. Sanders has an explanation, while Obama’s economists don’t. Sanders’ explanation is that the U.S. economy is so riddled with corruption and fraud and giant monopolies extracting rent that we’ve hobbled GDP growth. Get rid of the fraud and the giant monopolies and strip out all the legislative garbage paid for by billionaires’ lobbyists to restrict competition, and you’ll unleash serious economic growth.
That’s a credible argument. It might or might not be correct, but one thing you can’t do is dismiss Sanders’ argument out of hand by calling it “cuckoo” or “crazy.” We have the example of the Peccora Commission and the regulations put in place after the Great Depression, after all. Those weren’t “cuckoo” or ‘crazy.” And GDP growth did take off sharply after those reforms to the financial system. That’s reality, not fantasy.
So Konczal concludes that the popular counter-arguments to Sanders’ policies are basically substance-free. They have no factual or logical basis.
Instead, the real arguments against Sanders’ economic numbers come from deeper considerations.
This sounds right. I’ve made the same criticisms. Sanders’ policies represent a start on reducing America’s absurdly punitive prison-industrial system, but we need reform that goes much deeper than Bernie Sanders could accomplish by issuing some executive orders.
I’m doubtful of this criticism. A committed president with full control of the DOJ could order prosecutions that would in effect break up most of the big banks. The larger issue here is that most of the funny money in financial bubbles today comes from the shadow banking system, not banks themselves. That involves a lot of unregulated hedge funds that act like banks, but which our current legislation has not yet caught up with regulating.
This is also correct. Profit must be squeezed out of the entire U.S. healthcare system from top to bottom — greedy corrupt medical devicemakers must be shut down and their profits sharply reduced, but greedy corrupt doctors who prescribe insanely overpriced medicines and order treatments that the evidence shows do very little good and are very expensive need to be shut down and their profits need to be drastically reduced. Greedy corrupt hospitals that make vast amounts of lucre from unnecessary operations and insanely overpriced medical imaging scans must also be shut down and their profits curtailed massively. Outside imaging and blood work and path labs also need to get their profits hugely cut. All of this will have the effect of reducing incomes across the board for doctors, nurses, lab workers, and so on.
Finally, Konczal points out why it’s so important for Bernie Sanders and other liberal candidates to get their policy analysis right and produce numbers that are credible:
Source: “In Praise of the Wonk: Dissecting the CEA Letter and Sanders’s Other Proposals,” Mike Konczal, Rortybomb.com, 19 February 2016.
jl
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I was surprised that Trump had such trouble shutting down the Rubio and Cruz attacks on his health care plan. I mean, Cruz was very open to the accusation of wanting to allow people to die in the streets, and Trump seemed befuddled on how to answer Cruz’s accusation that Trump would actually spend any government money at all to keep people from falling over and rotting on the sidewalks. There are plenty of reactionary government money spending schemes that would have shut Cruz up, state bloc grants for emergency health care, for example (which would result, in some states, with people dying on the streets in droves, but no matter, this is a GOP debate after all).
And I think any ad lib challenge to Rubio’s canned bafflegab on health savings accounts would have had him stammering and in flop sweat, but Trump seemed stumped.
And I went into the debates thinking that if Cruz attacked Trump, Trump again have destroyed Cruz, and force Cruz to applaud his demolition. Trump seemed stumped by the attacks and finally resorted to insults. I didn’t see any sign that Trump’s conceit that he can change himself into anything he wants to be is true at all, let alone ‘very quickly’.
Germy
Off topic, but record voter turnout for the Iranian election.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Cause, you know, the idea that cops can’t shoot black citizens for no reason is humiliating, even threatening. Makes sense.
Chris
@jl:
Maybe he had a moment of doubt because he wasn’t sure he could out-douchebag Cruz on that one. I mean, Trump knows how sociopathic the Republican base is – he’s gotten where he is largely by playing on that. Maybe he was afraid he’d come off as a big softie if he made a full throated argument against People Dying In The Street For Lack Of Health Care.
BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: I agree.
cmorenc
@mclaren: Please tell us how you really feel, and give a long enough explanation so we can understand what you’re trying to tell us, instead of just a few terse words.
:=)
SFAW
@efgoldman:
You need to get your glasses fixed — you’re seeing double.
mark
@Mike J: Easy: megalomania
jl
@BillinGlendaleCA: Rubio was vulnerable when he made a cheap crack about Trump wanting to erase state lines. He was wide open to ridicule, and Trump was speechless. He just stood there for a few seconds and then made a blank assertion that his (BS and lousy) ‘plan’ would work.
BillinGlendaleCA
@cmorenc: Unpossible.
Germy
@mark:
Is that his wife’s name?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mike J: r the Washington Post, which is there for other reasons
That’s interesting. I wonder if he meant it to be? What other reasons?
Mike in NC
After crushing his opponents on Super Tuesday, master showman Trump should stage a suitable humiliation for them. Force Cruz and Rubio to come onstage on their hands and knees, then kiss The Donald’s yoooouge gold pinkie ring before he drops his trousers and invites them to kiss his fat pasty ass.
khead
@mclaren:
When Kagan writes the same article without the bullshit on Obama I mentioned earlier I will be convinced the fever has broken in the GOP. Til then? Uh, no. At least on the GOP side. But I am rooting like hell for that disintegration you described while the fun lasts.
Aleta
Le Paige has endorsed Trump (not a big surprise). I believe he will try to run for Congress when his term is up.
Bill_D
@Gerald:
The first foreign invasion by the post-independence U.S. was of Canada (at that point a British colony) in the War of 1812. The second, and the first of a sizable fully sovereign nation-state, was of Mexico in the Mexican-American War ending in 1848. ( Of course there were also the invasions of the comparatively smaller Native American nations such as the Cherokee). Anyway, at that point we were just getting warmed up…
Linnaeus
@mclaren:
With respect to Konczal’s last point about the asymmetry between Democrats and Republicans regarding the necessity of offering credible policy analysis, I agree, but I also thought of this essay in Democracy by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Theda Skocpol. Most of the essay is a comparison and contrast between right and left wing institution building in the states, but they make a point toward the end that I think is often overlooked:
I think there’s something to this observation. I often get the impression – perhaps wrongly – that a lot of American liberals see the connection between politics and policy as going in one direction: you do the politics to get to be able to do the policy. That’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete, because policies can create political opportunities and I think the right has done a better job of understanding that than the left has.
Mandalay
@Trentrunner:
Priceless.
Davis X. Machina
@Aleta: The coveted endorsements of Shifty, Smoothie and D-Money go along with this…
Davis X. Machina
@Mike J: The right justices appointed, Times v. Sullivan goes out the window.
Of course, that’d happen with anybody HRC would appoint as well…
cokane
@Gerald: first invasion by the US? Son…
Jeffro
@debbie:
I agree with all of that in a different order…people who can only deal with/who only seek like-minded opinions get pulled into that Fox/Rush bubble…they’re constantly reaffirmed that they’re right and everyone else is stupid (or worse) and that there is One True Explanation for everything…then they get overconfident, because they now feel both right AND smart…and then they’re just unbearably, unredeemably overconfident.
And then Obama gets elected, and re-elected, and their whole world crumbles.
Yay Obama!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
the hotels?
Aleta
(Hunter S. T., Fear/Loathing Campaign Trail ’72
Mike J
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: When you visit our mother, I want to know three days in advance so I won’t be there.
Mandalay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: google is your friend
Aleta
(Hunter Thompson, Campaign Trail ’72)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/timewarp-campaign-72-19730705
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Demented squirrel finds nut
and how many of us have thought of what a tough day this has been for the Man Who Would Be Veep? He spent three years slobbering over Christie, the last few months slobbering over Trump. Where can he turn his ambitious delusion now?
$100 says Bloomberg is the new hero of the Morning Joseph crew. Ed Rendell should go to bed early Sunday night, Joe and Mika are gonna want him on set for the whole show.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mike J: good god, J Rube making a Godfather reference? Who woulda thunk it
BillinGlendaleCA
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Ed’s a Clinton guy from way back.
Jay C
@Germy:
Not really OT: just another reminder that the citizens of
many(sorry, make that MOST) foreign countries – even those where the exercise of “democracy” is a good deal more hollow than even here in the US – get out to the polls in significantly larger numbers than we do.pseudonymous in nc
@Jay C:
I’m not going to defend the fucking Iranian police-torture state, but at least it pretends to value free and fair elections, which is not something you can say about lots of US states.
Helen
@Germy: Today is the Irish election, too. Campaigning began February 2nd.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@BillinGlendaleCA: True. Even an understatement.
I was thinking of this
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Gerald:
White America is running a racist operating system. Collective amnesia is the feature not the bug.
Anne Laurie
@Kent:
Thank you for that!
liberal
@mclaren: IMHO an import point here is that Kagan is a neoconservative, not a far right ultra type. His main concern is the US doing Israel’s bidding.
Joel
@Brachiator: Plenty of well-heeled people are all-aboard on the Trump express. Being an asshole holds a lot of appeal for people, rich or poor.
liberal
@Anne Laurie: She’s also really good at preparing North African nations for ISIS incursions.
Steve in the ATL
@Helen:
Ah–that explains why my wife is guzzling Jameson tonight. Or it could just be that it’s a day that ends in “Y.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Anne Laurie: did you read Jon Favreau’s piece today?
Princess
Jennifer Rubin and Ross Douthat are completely losing their sh*t on twitter. Jennifer quoting Godfather; Ross quoting Tolkein and Springsteen. Good times.
Anne Laurie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
During the brief Christie Bubble, there was much talk of the guy running up his expense accounts to feed his addiction to nice hotel rooms, private plane flights, and top-dollar dining. All the ‘rich life experiences’ he can now resume enjoying (he hopes) while he campaigns for Mr. Trump.
rikyrah
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
You speak the truth.
Culture of Truth
“I learned it by watching you, okay?! I learned it by watching you!!”
Bill_D
@efgoldman: That was the period when McCarthyism was running rampant, mainly among Republicans.
Booda
@mark: exactly right. When you live in the south and especially when you lurk as an anonymous liberal among conservatives (which is occasionally necessary for self-preservation) you hear the unvarnished racism and naked contempt for the poors. It is spoken without reservation and with pride. The general understanding is that they are the smart ones who understand how the world really works. All of “those people” are lazy, ignorant moochers who need to be ruled and controlled by their betters. This sounds like exaggeration. It is not. I hear it all the time.
Austin Loomis
@Turgidson:
I’ve had a similar thought, and even considered writing it i na letter to my local papers (Public Opinion and the Herald-Mail, if that helps you locate me), pointing out that their worries about “the Democrat Party” fall into four broad categories:
1) things that simply are not happening, no more than if they were worried about his plan to blow up the Moon and destroy the Farm Belt with a rain of green cheese meteors (or about something even more blatantly ridiculous, like the Amero);
2) things that are in fact happening, but do not constitute the existential threat to the One True White Male God and His Holy Free Market that you’d think if you got all your news (as one of my local yokels not long ago said he does) from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, WorldNet Daily and South Park*;
3) things that are happening and are in fact bad, but are literally things he opposes and Republicans support;
4) things that are happening, are bad and are his fault for continuing them, but which never seemed to bother these people when George W. Bush started them and which they express, at every opportunity, their opposition to Obama’s attempts to end.
Unfortunately, I’ve never sent that letter, because the good people of my area make it clear that, whatever the situation may have been when William Blake wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, these days, truth can in fact be told so as to be understood and not believed, and moreover, if they heard and understood it, they would immediately hang me to the nearest and tallest vertical object.
(* He later said he was joking. The only thing that made me think he might be is the very real possibility that watching South Park would give him some actual awareness of what’s really going on.)