Jamelle Bouelle had a good post at American Prospect (the links to Kevin Drum and to First Read through Kevin Drum are worth reading too):
Republicans have an astounding level of ideological unity and a keen understanding of the political dynamics at work. Most Republicans agree on the big things — tax cuts are always good, regulation is always bad, and the more belligerent the better — and those that don’t are still able to see the utility in being a team player; if Democrats lose, the party wins, and the potential naysayers gain (or at least, avoid losing, in the form of a primary challenge or poor committee assignment).
[…]Unfortunately, I’m not sure that there’s anything you can do about this. Part of what makes the Democratic Party a “natural” governing party is that it is broad-based; there is room for virtually anyone who wears the label.
I agree that the Democratic party is a better governing party than the Republican party. But what makes it a better governing party (and in some ways a worse purely political agent) is not that it is broad-based, it’s the thing that causes it to be broad-based. And that thing is a modicum of belief in empiricism and reason.
Republicans all agree on the “big things”, because they accept the big things as givens in a way that Democrats can’t accept much of anything as a given. The Democratic approach to taxation is that if we keep taxes at 0% for income under 30K and 43% for over 250K and so on then we can have a good economy where middle class people can get by; taxation itself is neither good nor bad, it’s something that we need to fund the government and you can jigger with this or that to make the rates as optimal as possible, using different metrics. The Republican approach is taxes are bad, that’s what the original Tea Party was about, Milton Friedman opposed all taxation (not true), and if we proceed from Hayekian principles….
It’s easy to be cohesive when your ideas are reductionist, and difficult when you are haggling about decimal points. Furthermore, the very act of haggling about decimal points (which to me is *exactly* the basis for all sound government) can be easily attacked from various pseudo-intellectual viewpoints: Bobo says it is hubris to think we can estimate things so well, etc.
Contemporary Democratism/liberalism is empirical/pragmatic and therefore fussy/complicated, contemporary Repblicanism/conservatism is reductionist and therefore simple. Conservative would-be intellectuals — Andrew Sullivan (corrected, he’s actually good about this), Bobo, David Frum — are perfectly happy to wank about some dumb thing some teatard said on CNN, but they’re completely unwilling to admit that contemporary American conservatism makes no attempt to base itself in any kind of independently verifiable reality.
Pundits like to talk about courage of conviction, but what the hell does that mean when the convictions are no more than superstitions?
carlos the dwarf
Yes, because Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, and Blanche Lincoln are renowned for their commitment to rational debate and empirical studies.
Don
Do you even read Andrew Sullivan? Your description of him is way off.
Davis X. Machina
Piecemeal social engineering.
arguingwithsignposts
@Don:
Yes, DougJ thinks he has some kind of brains or something, when he’s actually a huge douchebag.
The Dangerman
Worse, conservative “convictions” have been proven wrong on a consistent and regular basis. Sufferage, integrating the arms services, interracial marriage, birth control (I’m talking Griswold here, not Roe), civil rights…
…and on and on and on.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the Right, rather than worry about right and wrong, just gets off on being mean mother fuckers (see McCain, John, who went from a moderately reasonable fellow to a snarling prick) and could give a shit how history will remember them.
slag
Why would you when you can just wank on about the laws of unintended consequences and free market fairies? And still win elections! That’s the fucked-up-est part. The election-winning. It’d be one thing if these people were relegated to the corner of our public sphere that governs little more than what shows end up on teevee. But as it stands, they’re a product of our democracy. A self-reinforcing cycle of faith-based negligence.
General Stuck
I don’t know, wingers definitely have broad internal agreements on some big issues like taxes, and maybe quantitatively greater agreement on issues in general. But there are some glaring and diametricaly opposed chasms as well. Such as racism and xenophobia, in particular, between country club wingnuts and the teatarders. I think dems likely have more disagreements in number, often fighting over what color the drapes should be, but there really aren’t the deep divisions the GOP has, that come out in the open sometimes.
For example, the neocons and their warmongering ways, where I don’t believe a high percentage of rank and file goopers are really with that. They will accept about any explanation for getting a war on, but will turn later on, like they did with Bush on Iraq.
And there is the major chasm of NE republicans in particular, that don’t much like the strict repressive social issue values of southern religionists. These are fundamental differences in philosophy, that dems don’t have to deal with, by and large.
It should be obvious to anyone pragmatic and sane that governing by ideology to a high degree, like the wingnuts, just doesn’t work very well for all concerned. But tribal, cultural, and racial affinities are some powerful engines for rationalization against one’s own interests.
J
I’m not so sure the Republicans couldn’t get behind some kind of tax regime, something really, really regressive, say taxes levied on infant formula and children’s clothing (would make the lower orders think twice before going at it in the way we know they all do (see Hogarth: http://echostains.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/hogarth-gin-lane-sm.jpg).
Or a simple head tax. Maybe a poll tax (with the rates rising in inverse proportion the average income of the area).
Or the surplus generated by sales of products made by indigents committed to the poor house?
Or the receipts from the sale of organs harvested from debtors.
Or gate receipts and liquor sales at public hangings?
Just a few modest proposals
Comrade Luke
I don’t really agree with this, because if you talk to conservatives, they think they’re the ones operating on reason, and they use people like Friedman, Hayek, etc as the basis of their reasoning.
From the Mother Jones article you link to:
We’re just wired different.
Mnemosyne
@carlos the dwarf:
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think that they believe that taxation is inherently evil with the same religious fervor as a Republican. They don’t like taxes, and they want to keep rich people like themselves and their friends from having to pay them, but that’s not the same thing as the Republican belief that a progressive tax system is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust.
bozack
Republicans have no ideological beliefs. “Gov’t revenue should be reduced regardless of context,” maybe. Beyond that: nothing. What else have they been consistent about in the past 5, 10, 15 years?
Nick
Today, a coworker of mine said he would not vote for Obama again because he shut down WikiLeaks. Another coworker said she won’t vote for Obama again if he allows Julian Assange to “get away with his crime”
How is it possible to hold this coalition together?
carlos the dwarf
@Mnemosyne: They sure haven’t acted that way.
General Stuck
@Nick:
Maybe we need a Soros News Channel
Nick
@Comrade Luke:
This is very true
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Luke:
It is a common failing of white dudes to insist that they’re acting on pure reason and anyone who disagrees with them is reacting emotionally. They will make this claim even when they’re screaming at the top of their lungs.
mk3872
Careful, Doug, you are close to violating the well-entrenched conventional wisdom that Dems are all liberal, causing the MSM to blow a gasket and scream “Dems in Disarray” at every policy disagreement.
This week was a great example of that where Mark Halperin went nuts-o because MoveOn dared to challenge Obama and Congressional Dems did not agree with him.
That’s natural.
The GOP is un-natural in the way they mind-meld and work in unison, never challenging their entrenched beliefs, right or wrong.
Remember: CW says that Repubs are principled and Dems are wishy-washy.
You are perilously close to breaking conventional wisdom here …
fasteddie9318
@Nick:
It’s not, and probably never was. Every “new voter” he brought out in 2008 was bound to feel burned and decide never to love again as soon as he failed to deliver the pony on time, or gave them a sad, or whatever.
Comrade Luke
@Mnemosyne:
Not white dudes. Human beings.
Nick
@General Stuck: Well obviously, but first we need to have groupthink to survive.
Can Democrats, even progressive, have groupthink. The same coworker who said he won’t vote for Obama because of WikiLeaks also complained that he would give in on tax cuts, while yet another one of our leftie newspaper employees, who voted for Nader twice, said she wouldn’t vote for him if he raised taxes on the rich (her family is rich) because “he’d be taking our money for wars”
All over the place
Mnemosyne
@carlos the dwarf:
I haven’t seen much evidence that they’ve bought into the supply side/trickle down bullshit and actually believe that lower taxes will magically lead to more prosperity. Simple greed and selfishness more than suffices as an explanation for their actions.
The Dangerman
@Nick:
Sure, since right now the groupthink, downright fashionable even, is to diss Obama (see DailyKos for evidence); nonetheless, I suspect if you track approval ratings, Obama is ahead of where Reagan was at this point in his first term. Recall, 1982 wasn’t the best for Reagan, either.
carlos the dwarf
@Mnemosyne:
But isn’t the effective result the same?
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Luke:
Only white dudes have been given the social privilege of insisting that they’re always coldly logical in the face of all evidence and having people believe them. Women and minorities are always assumed to be acting out of sheer emotion no matter how many facts and figures they bring to the table.
Look at the totally irrational bullshit that comes out of so many Republican mouths that the media just nods along to because, hey, this white dude couldn’t be acting out of irrational emotion! Just look at him!
Suffern ACE
@Comrade Luke: Nah. Lots of human beings in both parties. It couldn’t be. Actually, I kind of think that our politics is driven by widespread neurosis and reason is just employed as one of many coping mechanisms.
Mnemosyne
@carlos the dwarf:
Selfishness and greed can be argued with. Fanatical belief can’t. So there is always the (slight) chance that you could get Lincoln, Landrieu and/or Lincoln to go along with a tax hike if you use the right appeal. There is zero chance that you will ever convince Paul Ryan, because he believes as an article of faith that taxation is inherently evil.
The effect may be the same, but with Blue Dogs there is at least a chance you could appeal to reason.
Andrew
Um, from Andrew Sullivan:
The post, from this past Wednesday, is probably the closest Sully has ever come at fully repudiating the American right. The post is a refutation of Ross Douthat’s Tuesday column marking the equivalence of the two parties’ bases. Sullivan uses the post to argue that, no, the left is MUCH more willing to confront and disagree with Obama than the right was ever willing to do with Bush.
Comrade Luke
@Nick:
My gut reaction is to say “I’d rather have a smaller, tighter coalition than the loose coalition we have now”, but I don’t even know what coalition we have now.
Using the exercise of a couple posts ago, what the equivalent of the 27% number we give the Republican base?
I don’t think there’s a question you can get 27% of Democrats to agree upon unless one of the answers is “It depends”.
Yutsano
@Comrade Luke:
The problem is this is somehow regarded as a weakness. It’s not. There are very few easy or simple solutions for a society of 300 million people, the vast majority of whom have chosen to live here for one reason or another. We have dynamics and societal differences that would (and have) rip apart other countries. But we somehow manage to have solved all of them rather peacefully since 1865. The fact that we recognize there are still more solutions to be had should be embraced instead of a source of shame.
LikeableInMyOwnWay
Great post. As for the closing question ….
It means that the future is trapped in a contest between the superstitious and the fact-based. Or as we like to say around here, between the morons, and us. More or less.
So the question is not what it means. We all know what it means. It means the difference between shit government, and government that has a chance to be competent. But the real question is, how do we prevail in that contest?
I think the answer is that we first decide that prevailing is paramount. Not a winning-is-everything approach, but a winning-is-necessary in a democracy, in order to govern. And then understand what that takes and what that means.
And then do the things that are indicated. Get involved, work, contribute, get out the vote, put up yard signs, just find a way to get involved and get involved.
Just remember that one reason the idiot right has the cohesiveness and clout that it has is that it painstakingly learned how to do these things years ago, and set about doing them. And continues to do do them. Politics abhors a vacuum. If we sit back and cluck our tongues, they win.
If we get off our butts, work, vote, and participate in numbers, we win. Not every time but most of the time.
This is not a sport for navelgazers.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: That’s why I say that these days the Democrats are the Policy Party and Republicans are the Nothing Party. Democrats believe in using the government to advance causes — content to be determined. Republicans don’t believe in using the government to advance conservative causes, they believe in not using the government. If you believe in using the government to advance conservative causes, you’re probably a conservative Democrat. Try asking a Republican politician what his or her priorities and principles are, and see if there’s anything deeper than “lower taxes” or “lower spending.” OK, two exceptions: preventing abortions and smiting America’s enemies.
Nick
@Comrade Luke:
I mentioned a while back that I’ve been to Democratic club meetings all over Queens, New York.
If you go to one in Astoria (mostly yuppies), Bayside (upper middle class social liberals), St. Albans (middle class African Americans/Immigrants, socially conservative) and Howard Beach (upper middle class union workers, socially conservative), you’ll find four different Democratic Parties with little to no resemblence to each other. Until 2008, the only thing they had in common was that they hated Bush.
I mean Bayside doesn’t want their taxes raised (many make over $250k), St. Albans wants nothing to do with gay rights and for Howard Beach, you better be torturing terrorists and racially profiling. You can’t piss off Howard Beach without pissing off St. Albans. They’re all over the place
fasteddie9318
The truly sad thing is that a dialogue between Andrew Sullivan and Ross Douthat, which in any other time in history would have taken place at some village idiots’ convention somewhere, is about the highest level of conservative intellectual discourse that can be found in this country.
Chuck Butcher
@Comrade Luke:
Oh hell, you could go with something simple like “social and economic justice” and get a nice big number – the problem is the nust and bolts. The GOPers do this with their shrink govt and bad taxes bullshit, the nuts and bolts just get ignored. Like how to make an actual dent in deficits or what gets to go bye-bye that is meaningful in the equation. The loyal half of the GOP doesn’t give a fuck if the slashed program is 0.1% of the problem and their sacred cow is 50% of the problem it is the simplicity that matters and especially if the undeserving get whacked in the process.
Democrats in general do actually give a shit about the nuts and bolts. That’s not a real wide endorsement, now…
Martin
I don’t know, I think these comments are missing some important evidence. The debt commission proposal got a number of republican votes – and Coburn is hardly a moderate. The tax provisions in that proposal included an increase on cap gains from 15% to 28%, and an increase in overall taxation by 25% (as a function of GDP), and an increase in payroll taxes.
The problem appears to not so much be that Republicans are adamantly opposed to increased taxation in principle. It’s that once politics gets included as a variable, it’ll ALWAYS trump conviction. Even though these Republicans were willing to raise the effective tax rate significantly on the wealthy in the commission, they were unwilling to do so in the House or the Senate.
Comrade Luke
@Yutsano:
I agree, but doesn’t fly in an environment where you’re only given thirty seconds to present your argument, or provide a rebuttal.
I think the main problem when dealing with republicans is that even if they might have a basis for their ideas, they’re completely intolerant of anything other than complete acceptance of those ideas, in totality.
Sure, some conservatives arrived at their ideology by learning about Friedman or Hayek. Some, not all or even most. And certainly not people like Michelle Bachmann. But when would they ever have a discussion where someone could present an opinion along the lines of “Yea, we could cut all taxes, but that doesn’t make sense given current economic conditions, so let’s just cut some.” It never happens.
It’s not the absence of an ideology that’s the problem. It’s the totalitarianism within the party. And I don’t see it getting better any time soon; if anything, it’s getting worse.
Nick
@Yutsano:
A country in which this is a weakness is one that is ungovernable.
Comrade Luke
@Martin:
Which is another reason why I don’t trust that report :)
Seriously, isn’t voting for this report like voting for a bill in committee and then against it when the bill is finally presented? Aren’t these votes like Olympia Snowe’s “I’m voting for this now, but don’t take that to mean I’m going to actually vote when it matters” stance?
This all makes my brain hurt.
Comrade Luke
@Nick:
U-S-A!
U-S-A!
arguingwithsignposts
@Andrew:
Until he comes out as a full-on liberal, you can get to me later. Fuck Sully. See previous evidence at my blog.
Suffern ACE
@FlipYrWhig: But the Dems haven’t been able to deliver on policy, either. At least in terms of the economy. I mean, lets remember that the reason we have 99ers instead of 104ers or 150ers is that there was resistance to the idea of running unemployment into triple digits among democrats. How rational was that? There were quite a few ideas floating around as to what we could spend “stimulus” on, but there hasn’t been much discussion. Sure, the government needs to spend, the market says spend, the private sector indicates that spending would increase demand…but it is as if none of the bright ones can come up with a set of programs targeted to low skilled jobs that would put a few thousand laborers back to work for a bit. Either they are looking for the one big program, or nothing.
JWL
“Never attempt to reason with fanatics” is sound advice.
Then try to explain that to Obama.
And good luck trying.
Yutsano
@arguingwithsignposts: Sully is a wanker of the highest order. Full stop.
Karen
Unity wins over perfection.
Republicans fight. What they used to have was what they called “Rockefeller Republicans” vs “Conservative”. Socially libreral and fiscally conservative vs. the Religious RIght.
What exists is the Republican party in name when everyone knows it’s really the Tea Party.
They have all these differences, where populism often doesn’t mix with big business, some may not be as religious and have moderate social views (or did.)
But the reason the GOP always wins is because they see the big picture where the Democrats never do.
Look at all the back biting with Obama. The Dems are so busy trying to please the left and right that they don’t see the big picture which is, better Obama (or whoever is the Dem candidate is) than the alternative.
If you think Obama isn’t doing enough to make you happy or supporting what you want and doing what you don’t, then you really will love what a GOP President and Congress will do. Only this one will make W look like a liberal.
GOP wins because they are united in their message and the Dems eat their young.
Martin
@Nick: Astoria is yuppies now? I used to live on 21st street a million years ago. It was way too shitty for yuppies back then. Mostly old greek families in the nicer areas.
AnotherBruce
Unfortunately, I’m not sure that there’s anything you can do about this.
Oh fuck, I think that this is a huge blind spot. What do you mean there is nothing you can do about this? Every time I hear this I wonder how can we be so obtuse. Seriously this pisses me off to no end. I’ll lay it out.
What the Republicans are doing now is not one fucking milligram different from what they were doing 30 years ago. They have a very simple gameplan. Yes they are all about politics instead of governing. Can anyone tell me something new? To use a crude sports metaphor they’re still running the wing T instead of a modern spread offense, and the Democrats are scared of them because they have a bunch of 300 lb. oafs on their side. Jesus if I hear one more fucking Democrat or purported liberal tell me how shocked they are at the Republican’s Woody Hayes style of politics I am going to strangle them with their own entrails.
At this point, I’m not very confident that the Democrats that are very thinly theoretically in charge (including Obama) are not magnitudes of more stupid than the Republicans at least politically. I’ve gone over the edge to believing all of this is some kind of elaborate shell game to rip the last available dollar out of our porous pockets.
What a stupid herd of farm animals we’ve become.
Nick
@JWL:
He doesn’t have a choice, he has to reason with fanatics or nothing gets done, and I don’t know why you would want to be President if you just get nothing done.
Comrade Luke
@Karen:
good one.
Karen
@Nick:
I lived in Bayside til I was 11 then lived on the Island for 12 more years. It must have really gone upscale because there wasn’t money like that when I lived there.
Chuck Butcher
Nothing useful is going to come out of the House for the next two years. If the Senate actually came up with something useful on its own, the House wouldn’t agree. For the next while Democratic legislative competence is an immaterial subject.
It might be more productive to persuade the Party that moving Right is not a good response.
Nick
@Martin:
Yeah, it’s the new West Village. Many of the Greek Families are still there, some left for…Bayside lol
Astoria used to be arch-conservative, right-wing Dems, now it’s basically an eclectic mix of tea party Democrats and left-wing nuts, with the latter holding the stronger position.
ruemara
@JWL:
Then good luck governing when those fanatics make up over 40% of your government. Whether you like it or not, he has to deal with them.
Nick
@Karen:
It costs a lot more to live in the City nowadays, even the outer boroughs. Parts of Bayside, around Crocheron Park, Bay Terrace, and surrounding areas like Whitestone, Malba, and Douglaston (which often get lumped into “Bayside” politically nowadays) have incomes way over $250,000 a year.
I live on the Brooklyn/Queens border and barely scrape by on a salary twice the national average.
Nick
@Karen:
Far be it from me to defend the firebagger types, but i think the problem is their choice is between ‘meh” and “supersuck” and that’s annoying.
I think what progressives want is a golden age of progressivism in the country, where they enact policies they can be proud of and trump to the world. That having not occurred, they want war with the other side.
The problem I have is that, there is no such thing as a golden age of progressivism and all those heroes of the left they point to, from FDR through LBJ, weren’t heroes in their day, they were considered weak sellouts too.
Suffern ACE
@Nick: There is a reason why I am Suffern ACE and no longer ACE of LIC. The rent really was too damn high.
Mnemosyne
@Chuck Butcher:
You’d think that the huge losses by the Blue Dogs in this last election might give them a little hint, but apparently not.
AnotherBruce
@Nick:
Horseshit, he has every opportunity to ridicule these fools. I just think that he’s afraid of being seen as an aggressive and scary black man. He has to let that go at some point.
Being a President is not necessarily about getting stuff done, it’s also about preventing bad shit from happening. That’s a role that Obama is going to have to play at least for a couple of years.
Ripley
Good post, great thread. BJ: Not a Full-Time Circle Jerk!
For what it’s worth, Sully does see what the conservative movement & the Republican realty have become and writes about it, often bluntly. His fatal flaw seems very Brit to me: the Queen may be an empty shell, but she is still the Queen after all.
There are so many unintended puns in that sentence that I believe I’ll quit now.
+whatever
Yutsano
@AnotherBruce:
Just out of curiosity, why?
Martin
@Nick: Cool. I really liked living there, even though our place was shitty. And I don’t mean that as in SoCal shitty, I mean that as in Newark crack-house shitty – holes in the walls, no heat, rats, waking up with cockroaches in your bed, the whole megillah. But the 70s wasn’t kind to anyone or anything in NY.
Chuck Butcher
@Nick:
Maybe it has escaped your notice that what would have passed as moderation thirty years ago is now soshalizm of the highest degree. Maybe it has escaped your notice that things have gotten rather bad as a result. It really scares me a bit to think that Pres Palin and good large GOPer majority Congress might cure some of that thinking you’ve got going, along with a shit load of the rest of the citizenry.
If the result of the selling out is becoming the “them” of a decade or so ago, you’ve built a real problem for yourselves. Fuck a whole bunch of the self-promoting Hamsher style idjits, actual politics is what I’m talking about. FDR gave a lot of what he wanted away, tis true, but the contrast between what he achieved and the previous is way too stark for your bullshit read of it in relation to today.
slag
@fasteddie9318: Agreed.
Karen
@Nick:
The GOP FDR and LBJ had to work with was not the Tealaban that is in place now. Congress was tilted rightward but not like this. Also, for the zillionth time and I’m not using the race card but whoever says that’s not a factor in all this is either lying or dumb as toast.
Obama is the guinea pig so he’s already in a position where he has to compensate. Hillary would be a guinea pig, in the same position.
LBJ and FDR didn’t have zombie insanity in Congress to deal with.
Mogden
The idea that one’s own partisans are governed by logic and reason, while the other side is drowning in a cesspool of idiocy and emotion, may be comforting until one realizes that the other side is possessed by exactly the same delusion.
FlipYrWhig
@Suffern ACE: That’s because they all believe in using the government to make policy, they just have no agreement about the nature of what that policy should be.
Martin
@Mogden: Welcome to the Cold War.
Bhall35
Am I the last person to see Bernie Sanders kicking all kinds of ass the other day ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5OtB298fHY&feature=player_embedded#!
Chuck Butcher
@Karen:
That’s being very generous to the players of the day, so much so that as accuracy goes … well, not so much. Despite Nick’s assertions regarding what got given away, what got done was unprecedented – something entirely new was put in place, flawed yes, but new.
That cannot be said of anything in regards to the last two years. I’m not saying that HCR does nothing, but it simply re-jiggers the status quo and you can follow that on down the line. I never expected Obama to be anything more than slightly left of center in practice, but I did expect a bit of a struggle with the GOP cretins.
Karen
@Nick:
I lived in the Alley Pond Apartments right near Alley Pond Park. I know they’re condos now.
I remember going to Douglaston when Hills Supermarket and Korvettes was there. Yes, I’m dating myself.
mbss
fuck democrats.
green party motherfuckers.
Dollared
@Karen
FDR and LBJ did have zombie insanity to deal with. In spades. But the Rich Fuckers FDR is a A Traitor to His Class crowd was Republican, and the Don”t Educate the Niggers ‘Cause My Boy Can’t Keep Up crowd was Democratic.
Read Nixonland. The real genius of the southern strategy was merging money from the North and bigotry from the South and Middle. Uniting the two Crazies really has been the key to the last 50 years.
JWL
“Contemporary Democratism/liberalism is empirical/pragmatic and therefore fussy/complicated..”.
To say that you are full/shit would simply be rude.
However, you are mistaken.
People aren’t just angry. The rank-and-file of the democratic party is growing righteously furious.
And the Tea Baggers think they’re pissed?
superdestroyer
All factions of the Democratic Party are consistent is two beliefs:
1. That the government should tax others and give the money to them. From the public service workers, academics, CBC, CHC, 20-somethings, all factions are consistent in believing that the government should tax Republicans and give the money to Democrats.
2. Democrats are consistent in believing that the government should enable their lifestyle. Whether a no-show government job, professional students, one-class a semester college professor, welfare mother, all Democrats want the government to enable their lifestyle while asking nothing in return.
JWL
SuperShirleyDestroyer:
That’s not even half-hearted, clever bullshit.
Surely you can do better.
Calouste
@JWL:
It would be so easy to rewrite that for the Republicans. Except of course, Republican can’t use the T-word, so instead of actually generating an internal revenue stream, they just borrow from Japan/Saudi Arabia/China/whoever has spare cash without a plan how to actually pay it back, because “deficits don’t matter”.
WereBear
Jiminy, that is so true.
To me, that sums up the core of Republican irrationality (it’s not just for unaware white dudes!) which is that they deny any emotional content to their decision making process.
When it is ALL wishes and beliefs, and very little thought.
El Cid
@Karen: FDR was not considered a weak sellout among the large labor unions, much of the soshullist movements and press, rural and agrarian remainders of ‘populist’ movements or among most liberal-left intellectuals. This doesn’t mean there was no bitching and moaning or disagreement.
Stalin-linked groups did follow along labeling the administration as “social fascist” given that it was reformist and not revolutionary.
Svensker
@Suffern ACE:
Yes, but do you pronounce it Suff-ern or Suff-ren?
It’s a really nice town, either way. Great library, too!
PR
I would agree, with this twist: while the Right’s approach may not be rooted in current reality, they have said more than once that they are determined to remake reality in the image of their ideology. Further, they believe this new reality is the “original” reality we somehow got away from…during the Depression years. (Logical conclusion, I suppose: they want to return us to the good old days of the Depression.)
DougJ
@Don:
That was an editing mistake, I corrected it.
matoko_chan
what both parties furiously ignore, is that conservatism is doomed to extinction. the reason liberals ignore it is that liberals desparately want to be…..well……liberal. They are egalitarians, and need to believe in egality, of men AND genes and memes.
there are no more “good” conservative ideas. Dead white guy philosophy has been PROVEN to not work. The econopalypse that ate americas jobs, foreign interventionism, american exceptionalism, unipolar power hegemony are all epic disasters. That is why ED is here– Cole is giving him a chance to demonstrate some “good” conservative ideas. But he cant. we have all seen that.
the reason that conservatives ignore it is that the majority of conservatives are too stupid to see it, and the profound dishonesty of the conservative elite. A half century of IQbaiting and racebaiting has left the base impermeable to anything but demagoguery.
People like Ross Douthat and David Brooks understand what is happening perfectly, and they do their level best to cover it up and obfusticate it.
conservatism is protection of the status quo. that is all they do, is justify the status quo and fight tooth and nail against change.
but change is coming.
it cannot be stopped. Salam-Douthat stratification on cognitive ability (even tho they wont talk about it), the demographic timer, increasing secularization of the once protestant nation, the emergent IQ gap and the widening culture gap all point to the conservative party being doomed to forever defeat for the next half century. Not to mention Assanges closed information system killer, if it works.
Conservatism is itself a closed information system. Wikileaks is simply the death of conservatism if Assanges paranoia frag bomb works. Wikileaks is not the death of America, however. The enlightment ideals of the founders and framers have been subverted by judeo-christianity– the idea that people somehow have the right to believe in stupid and ignorant memes, and also to impose those memes as law on minority citizens in a democratic meritocracy. Wikileaks only threatens CONSERVATIVE America. The America of Jefferson and Lincoln will survive.
In 2010 55 dem house seats were up for grabs. In 2012 55 rep house seats will be up for grabs. 2012 is simply one of the last times there will be enough older white males in the electorate to possibly take back the WH.
If they fail, I dont think they will ever take the WH again.
in 2021 the demographic timer starts to go off as the first of the 2008 event children begin to age into the electorate.
the new arms race is human capital. as long as conservatism is pure white, it is doomed as a philosophy.
WyldPirate
@Mnemosyne:
This is perhaps the stupidest statement ever written on this board.
Please tell me you don’t think that everyone who is not a “white dude” is less likely to think this way just by virtue of not being a “white dude”.
Talk about blatant, and unjustifiable racist and sexist statements…
Nick
@AnotherBruce:
and he has on occasion
matoko_chan
hmmm….that should have been the profound intellectual dishonesty of the conservative elite.
that is why i rage against Douthat so much. he knows better.
he is actually bright enough to understand the implications of what Assange is attempting, but he is just throwing radar chaff to spoof Cole and Sully and the rest of the supersapients.
in Islam we would say Douthat is a maftoon…..it means charmed in arabic. it is like a gunga or an uncle tom.
he is an IQ traitor.
WyldPirate
@Andrew:
This is a pretty accurate statement I think. However, the left certainly has their subset of people that won’t ever disagree with Obama. They are just a vanishingly small minority of “the left” despite what we see here on BJ and other lefty blogs like the GOS.
Nick
@Karen:
Scobee Diner ring a bell? just closed
celticdragonchick
@arguingwithsignposts:
Your comment reveals more about you than it does about Andrew Sullivan.
celticdragonchick
@Andrew:
Sully has been smashing at the GOP with a rhetorical sledgehammer for sevral years, and he has gotten angrier as time progresses.
sparky
@WyldPirate: i disagree. the great thing about being a pundit like those two is that yesterday never happened, apparently. [i generally refuse to read Sullivan so i am not going to go there, but if he’s making the argument that Bush’s base always fell in line he’s full of it.]
NYT 2005”
….
Dave
I dislike this story Democrats tell themselves. “We’re worse at politics because we’re better people.” Go do some experiments if you’re so into empiricism.
russell
As an aside, you need to add one of those “(not true)” disclaimers after the “what the original Tea Party was about” thing.
The broad context for the Tea Party was anger about taxation without representation. Not taxes per se.
The specific impetus for the Tea Party itself was the UK government’s plan to dump tea on colonial markets below cost in order to clear East India Company inventory. This would reinforce the East India Company’s monopoly, and undermine (by underselling) small, independent tea merchants in the colonies.
WyldPirate
@sparky:
I guess what I’m getting at is that that the Bush supporters are much more vehement and much more willing to brand those that disagree with Bush as traitors. This was obviously the case with “libruls”, but it is true with the moderates within the Rethug ranks that have been purged.
I think that the Rethugs are much more vicious about “eating their own” and meaning it, than the Dems are. We will do it and let ehm back in the tent when we are done. The Rethugs don’t much anymore. In a way, that has caused a lot of problems for Dems and makes it even more difficult for them to reach any sort of consensus or cohesiveness. That gives us the Blue Dogs. They are the only alternative in highly righ-wing leaning districts. They have to be more moderate to get enough votes from across the spectrum of people who range from center-right to the vastly outnumbered true “libruls” in those districts. The result? Your Ben Nelsons and your Blanche Lincolns.
Chris
@Dollared:
This.
We passed the New Deal reforms by allying with the racists against the elitists. We passed the civil rights reforms by allying with the elitists against the racists.
But we haven’t been able to split them apart since they merged in the 1970s, or set up a coalition that could take them on.
Chris
@russell:
Sounds like the original Tea Party was a revolution against the WalMarting of its day and age.
jcricket
I think DougJ is basically right – that most Democrats are empiricists and pragmatists (to some degree) and that means we spend all our time arguing about nuanced political discussion out in the open.
We need to realize that the first order of business is getting elected. Put on a united front, make it seem like all the factions agree (this is what the Republicans do – believe me, there are factions). Argue about this shit later.
I’m not one of those “it’s all about the message” types, but we get hammered time and again. “Tax and spend” liberal, “coastal elitists”, “Real America…”.
Fuck that – make it clear this isn’t their America. It’s all of ours. And that kind of talk is Un-American. Obama did an excellent job of this during the election (I refuse to believe the argument that government has no part in the solution). Pelosi and the House Dems did a pretty good job of this – passed plenty of bills. Maybe lost the messaging war, but I only think that’s because Senate Dems didn’t follow-through. If we had found a way (filibuster reform?) to pass more of the shit that was on the Dem agenda I think we could have lost less seats. Or even if we didn’t, we could at least point to our accomplishments and Republicans would be forced to try and undo them.
I think the problem is the same as our general society’s problem – too many stuck-in-their-ways old people. I hate to be ageist, but when the older Dem Senators are replaced by younger ones who understand how politics is played these days, it’ll be better. When there’s no more Broder and Will and there’s just dirty partisan bloggers, I’ll actually be happy. Just like what it’ll really take for it to be better for gays is for the older generation that really opposes gay rights/marriage to die off.
Again – not arguing we should immediately rush out and tell all the old Dems to go away. Just keep up the pressure, elect better Dems along the way, so that our bench is deep and wide when the demography catches up. I esp. think keeping up the pressure on social and racial issues will benefit us. Republicans can’t contain their backwards racist elements (see California’s GOP) and so they get their gay, Latino, muslim, etc. hate out in full force. Besides us being on the right side of history, it’ll be good to cleave off the minorities from the GOP.
Dollared
@jcricket, @matoko,
I really don’t believe there’s a demographic wave that will solve everything.
You’re forgetting the money. There is now enough money on the side of the elites that they have been able to split any coalition, to buy complete compliance from the media, to turn any lie into truth, and to rewrite history and economics.
Democrats, liberals, progressives and socialists need to understand that this is a long, deadly, no holds barred war. And act accordingly. We do need to be unified, but behind stronger leaders. We do need to stick to empiricism, but with a stronger narrative thread about Keynesian economics and the dangers of rampant inequality of income, wealth and opportunity.
We need to declare open war on the corporate media, AND engage in relentless sucking up to the talking heads.
And we need to throw in our $20 every month, because we will need money to do this.
We are getting outspent, outthought and (let’s be honest) outworked. We can turn it around, but only through work. If demographics were destiny, Mexico would be another Germany.
DougJ
@Dave:
Not better people, better at governing. They doesn’t make Democrats better people. I don’t know what “better people” means, in general.
Dave
@DougJ: Granted, Democrats are “better” at governing, but that is saying very, very little.
As for empiricism and reason being the cause of Democrats’ better governance, I fail to see the connection. Governing isn’t done in a laboratory. As for empiricism and reason accounting for Democrats’ diversity, again I don’t see it. Verifiable, empirical reality does not intuitively brook dissent, and yet, there are Democrats, all over the place.
Alternate story: Democrats fail to govern effectively because they lack ideology.
Dean Booth
Republicans can speak with one voice because they only have one voice.