And the hits just keep on coming.
Massachusetts replaces Ted Kennedy with a Republican who plans to be the 41st vote to block everything. The Bush Supreme Court proves that activism isn't a problem when conservative judges do it by throwing open the floodgates for corporations to spend as much money as they want to buy elections. (Unions too - but how many unions are sitting on billions of dollars?) President Obama makes belated noises about reigning in the financial markets - and his secretary of the Treasury (AIG BFF) rolls his eyes.
It's becoming clearer every day that the big problem for President Obama and the DC Democrats is that they really haven't put together a convincing framework to support or sell real Democratic policies. Fortunately, we now have the materials to craft one - but first we have to drive a stake through Ronald Reagan.
Abandoning the Field to the Enemy
Bob Herbert calls out the feckless Democratic leadership as clearly as anyone. (teacherken does a great riff off of it.) As Herbert notes:
While the nation was suffering through the worst economy since the Depression, the Democrats wasted a year squabbling like unruly toddlers over health insurance legislation. No one in his or her right mind could have believed that a workable, efficient, cost-effective system could come out of the monstrously ugly plan that finally emerged from the Senate after long months of shady alliances, disgraceful back-room deals, outlandish payoffs and abject capitulation to the insurance companies and giant pharmaceutical outfits.
The public interest? Forget about it.
Frank Rich piles on too.
Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.
That’s no place for any politician of any party or ideology to be. There’s a reason why the otherwise antithetical Leno and Conan camps are united in their derision of NBC’s titans. A TV network has become a handy proxy for every mismanaged, greedy, disloyal and unaccountable corporation in our dysfunctional economy. It’s a business culture where the rich and well-connected get richer while the employees, shareholders and customers get the shaft. And the conviction that the game is fixed is nonpartisan. If the tea party right and populist left agree on anything, it’s that big bailed-out banks have and will get away with murder while we pay the bill on credit cards — with ever-rising fees.
Politically, no other issue counts. In last weekend’s Washington Post/ABC News poll, 42 percent of Americans chose the economy as the country’s most pressing concern. Only 5 percent picked terrorism, and 2 percent Afghanistan. Obama’s highest approval ratings are now on foreign policy and national security issues — despite the relentless hammering from the Cheney right — but voters don’t care.
emphasis added
IF the Democrats had moved quickly to get a health care bill with real reform on the President's desk ASAP, instead of worrying about the insurance companies, the drug companies, and the Republicans, Americans would be in a lot better shape now. Health care is a populist issue after all, and if it had been done right the Republicans would be tearing out their hair now. But, scared to go out all alone on something as game changing as real health care reform and in the absence of any urgency from the White House, the Democrats turned timid while they tried to get someone - anyone - across the aisle to give them some cover. In doing so they played right into the hands of the Republicans and squandered the hopes and good will that had been invested in them by the voters. Devilstower wrote up a sobering historic parallel that should be required reading for the DC Democrats who appear to be channeling McClellan.
The Futility of Bipartisanship
And so what started out already compromised got worse as the Liebermans and the Stupaks used the power of their votes to hold any reform hostage to their egos. Meanwhile, as thousands of Americans continued to lose everything to medical bills, as they died without insurance, the Republicans used the delay to systematically target every group that supported the bill and scared the living daylights out of them. Scroll down through this post I put up the other day, and read Dick Morris boasting about how he worked to torpedo reform - even while the Dems were desperately hoping for a helping hand from the GOP.
When the League [of American Voters - an astroturf group] entered the fray, we quickly built a firewall around Obama’s support.
We then systematically targeted key groups backing his plan.
After studying polls, I saw that Seniors overwhelming backed Obamacare.
I had the League begin a national TV ad campaign exposing how Obamacare hurts Seniors, will lead to rationing and massive cuts in Medicare.
Within months, Seniors’ support for Obama collapsed. Seniors today OPPOSE Obamacare by 2:1.
The League conducted another poll and we found that almost every key group opposed Obamacare except young voters, who backed it overwhelmingly.
I immediately had the League begin a TV ad campaign and online effort targeting young voters to expose the dangers of Obamacare.
We put together a funny ad using the Mac commercial format. We explained how Obama wanted to tax old people for Medicare (young people oppose this) and that youth who don’t buy Obamacare insurance would be fined or even jailed under the Democratic plan.
Need to say, support among the young for Obamacare has also collapsed.
The only folks supporting Obamacare are the out-of-touch Democrats in Washington!
And there you have it: a textbook demonstration of how the Republicans play the game. When Democrats fearfully try to use the potential power of government to help the American people, they sabotage it. They really have no choice - because the last 8 years proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can't govern, they won't govern, and they dare not let anyone else govern because their ideas don't work. They have extirpated the idea of Public Good from the political sphere, and made private gain the only criteria to rule by -like all thugs throughout history.
The Great Conservative Scam Job
How did they do it? They found a genial old snake oil salesman to front for them, and they've been cramming that snake oil down our throats ever since, to the point that people have forgotten what real government Of, By and For the People tastes like. It was not quite thirty years ago that these words sealed our doom:
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.
The Reagan Revolution rolled over decades of Democratic strengths, and turned them to vulnerabilities. "Tax and Spend", "Big Government", "Entitlements", "Liberal" all became curse words with the power to destroy anyone tarred with them. Taxes always have to be cut and government made smaller, if the country is to be made free and prosper.
It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.
And that's been taken as gospel ever since.
It doesn't matter if you go back to Reagan's Inaugural address today, take it apart sentence by sentence, and find it's just a collection of high-sounding words that Republicans have turned into shibboleths. It doesn't matter that they worship a Reagan who never was. It doesn't matter that they have failed the great promise in that speech -
We shall reflect the compassion that is so much a part of your makeup. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen; and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they're sick, and provide opportunity to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory?
It doesn't matter, because the Republican party never meant those words to apply to them - they were meant to box in the Democrats, and they still do. They didn't prescribe a course of smaller government and tax cuts just because they thought that was the answer for America's problems. Those are ends in themselves for conservatives. That's why tax cuts and smaller government are ALWAYS the conservative answer to every problem.
How did they package up the snake oil? Thom Hartman in Two Santa Clauses or How The Republican Party Has Conned America for Thirty Years explains what they did and why.
In Hoover's world (and virtually all the Republicans since reconstruction with the exception of Teddy Roosevelt), market fundamentalism was a virtual religion. Economists from Ludwig von Mises to Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman had preached that government could only make a mess of things economic, and the world of finance should be left to the Big Boys – the Masters of the Universe, as they sometimes called themselves – who ruled Wall Street and international finance.
Hoover enthusiastically followed the advice of his Treasury Secretary, multimillionaire Andrew Mellon, who said in 1931: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down... enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people."
Thus, the Republican mantra was: "Lower taxes, reduce the size of government, and balance the budget."
The only problem with this ideology from the Hooverite perspective was that the Democrats always seemed like the bestowers of gifts, while the Republicans were seen by the American people as the stingy Scrooges, bent on making the lives of working people harder all the while making richer the very richest. This, Republican strategists since 1930 knew, was no way to win elections.
emphasis added
The Republicans have never abandoned those goals - they can't - so they came up with a Plan B. They put together a package of superficially plausible ideas (Supply-side economics, the Laffer Curve) once derisively referred to as voodoo economics - by George H.W. Bush in fact. They wrapped it in a sugar coating of sweet lies, that people knew better than government how to spend their own money, that as the economy grew, the benefits would trickle down from the top to benefit everybody, that opening our markets to cheap goods from overseas would allow everyone to live better, and so on.
They took a leaf from Richard Nixon's book too, and threw the politics of division into the mix. They spoke about 'elitists' trying to run people's lives. (Ignorant ideologues do that so much better.) They demonized unions for being greedy and crippling the efforts of brilliant industrialists already struggling to compete against the rest of the world under burdensome government regulations. (Right, and when those industrialists were set free, they immediately shared all of the economic gains with their workers.) They appealed to Faith to replace government in looking after the needs of the people. (And they cut those preachers in for a share of the profits and power.)
Plus, they continue to play the fear card. Where once International Communism was the deadly threat to America, now the threat of Global Terrorism trumps everything. (Except when it has to play second fiddle to the deadly threat of the dreaded Liberal Agenda.) Classic scammer strategies - distract the rubes with shiny objects, get 'em angry and afraid so they stop thinking and start reacting by instinct.
Thom Hartman points out that Republicans did not always believe taxes were evil:
"...the most successful Republican of the 20th century up to that time, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been quite happy with a top income tax rate on millionaires of 91 percent. As he wrote to his brother Edgar Eisenhower in a personal letter on November 8, 1954:
"[T]o attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything--even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon 'moderation' in government.
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt [you possibly know his background], a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
emphasis added
If Eisenhower was alive today, the GOP economic mullahs would issue a Fatwah against him for those words. That tiny splinter group he dismissed is now Large and In Charge. Abolishing social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminating labor laws is well on the way to being accomplished; farm programs are safe because we're now talking about Monsanto and Archer-Daniels-Midland, not the struggling farmer family trying to survive on a hundred acres. And, the Republicans have managed to fool the American people into going along with this - and getting them to blame the Democrats for the toxic results!
Jude Waninski was the evil genius who put it all together.
In 1976, he rolled out to the hard-right insiders in the Republican Party his "Two Santa Clauses" theory, which would enable the Republicans to take power in America for the next thirty years.
Democrats, he said, had been able to be "Santa Clauses" by giving people things from the largesse of the federal government. Republicans could do that, too – spending could actually increase. Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting people's taxes! For working people it would only be a small token – a few hundred dollars a year on average – but would be heavily marketed. And for the rich it would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. The rich, in turn, would use that money to import or build more stuff to market, thus increasing supply and stimulating the economy. And that growth in the economy would mean that the people still paying taxes would pay more because they were earning more.
There was no way, Wanniski said, that the Democrats could ever win again. They'd have to be anti-Santas by raising taxes, or anti-Santas by cutting spending. Either one would lose them elections.
SNIP
The Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski's work. They held power for thirty years, made themselves trillions of dollars, cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around 25 percent when Reagan came into office to around 8 of the non-governmental workforce today, and left such a massive deficit that some misguided "conservative" Democrats are again clamoring to shoot Santa with working-class tax hikes and entitlement program cuts.
Bingo. (emphasis added)
Core Values
Republicans at the core do not believe in the idea of government as a tool to make lives better for people; they take the Hobbesian view that government's sole role is to keep order among a humanity mostly brutish and not worthy of trust or real freedom. It is a tool for those that have to keep what they have - and to make sure they stay in charge. And that's when they are on their good behavior. (As it happens, Hobbes is not entirely wrong, just incomplete; there is a lot more known about human nature today than Hobbes ever dreamed of. More on that later.)
In practice, government is one more tool they use to advance their own interests at the expense of everyone else. Looting the public treasury is not a crime, it's a virtue according to a world view which starts with the assumption that everyone acts from their own self interest and nothing more. It's a wonderful racket. When they are in control of government, they are free to abuse it as much as they like - and when people complain, they just say it proves that government doesn't work. When they are out of power, they are free to actively sabotage government; in fact they must.
They dare not let anyone see that government can work for everyone, not just the few, or their scam would be blown wide open. The genius of Ronald Reagan is that he erected a beautiful facade over this sordid secret and convinced everyone it was the true American Way. And the Democrats have been forced to abide by it ever since. The fact that it's all bullshit and fails every time it's put into practice doesn't matter. It was never based on facts; it's always been a belief system.
Reagan's election and 'Revolution' really wasn't anything new; it was standard conservative dogma with better marketing. It was an early example of the "Shock Doctrine" at work; Reagan rode to victory on the basis of a horrible economy with high inflation, the effects of the Arab oil embargo, and of course President Carter's Iran Hostage Crisis (which people are still wondering just how much Reagan operative Bill Casey had a hand in.) He used the national 'malaise' as an excuse to radically remake the country. For the benefit of the GOP, not the American People.
The End Game and the Death Spiral
We have now reached the point at which the Reagan Revolution's toll on the country can no longer be ignored. If it seems like a person has to be crazy to be a Republican these days, that's because that is exactly the case. None of the things Reagan promised the country have come true - but no Republican will admit it or do anything to step back from the Revolution. That leaves them with three strategies: denial, irrationality - and scapegoating the Democrats for the problems they have created.
If you are wondering why the Republicans attacked Bill Clinton with so much hatred, and why they are even more hostile to Obama, it is because their policies have left them and the country no more room to maneuver. They know the cliff they've been marching the country over is growing closer by the second, but they neither dare to step back from the course they've chosen nor admit there is any other direction to go. And as long as the Democrats try to play by Reagan Rules, they are going to go right over the cliff with them..
So, what are those rules? Here's my attempt at summarizing them:
- Taxes are always bad and always too high.
- Government spending is always a waste of taxpayer money.
- The Free Market is always right; the government never.
- Spending on social programs is ineffective, too expensive, and bad because it makes people dependent on government.
- Government regulation cripples the economy, stifles freedom, and makes people poorer.
- Constant growth and the accumulation of wealth are the key indicators of a healthy society.
- Meeting Rule six has priority over anything else (the environment, social justice, the rule of law, etc.) because it is the only measure of success that matters.
- Government is always too big.
- Americans are most free when they stand alone.
- Democrats are always wrong.
- Take care of the Rich, and everyone else will do well.
- Question any of these rules at your peril.
It's possible to quibble about the order, but I think that captures most of them. Laid out like that they seem pretty brutal - which is why Republicans spout so much sanctimonious bullshit to dress them up pretty. Several generations of Americans have grown up knowing nothing else, which is why so many can't even imagine things being different. (Including too many Democrats.) They are the implicit assumptions every political debate begins with, the internalized guide most of the media uses to evaluate the world and frame the stories they cover. They are the tools by which a lot of wealthy and ambitious people maintain their hold on power at the expense of the vast majority of Americans. (Look at the big favor the Supreme Court they bought just did them after all.) Make no mistake. They are killing us as a country.
The majority of Americans know something is seriously wrong. They WANT change - but they haven't seen it yet. The instincts of Obama, his staff, and the Democrats in Congress to seek accommodation and conciliation with the Republicans make as much sense as trying to pet a rabid dog to calm it down in this current climate. Now is the time to throw the Reagan Rules out and turn to real Democratic policies - but with this difference.
We now have two things on our side that we didn't before:
- The last 30 years provide a lot of convincing evidence that Reagan Rules Don't Work. They were based on a scam to begin with, and the scam is falling apart around us. (Along with the country.) The Democrats can and must create a narrative to get that message across to the American People and connect with them at an emotional level if they really want to convince them. That was how Reagan sold them his snake oil in the first place.
- The discredited policies of the Democrats - comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable - are now in season again, because there are damn few comfortable Americans left out there. What's more, we now have a far better understanding of the way humans and the world work. That means that we can address our problems as a nation more effectively, more comprehensively, and in a way that benefits everyone, from the top to the bottom. It's not just based on faith and emotional convictions - it's based on things that can be measured, tested, and proven. Where Republicans have only blind faith to support their policies, we can counter with faith and facts.
I'll have more on that second part as a means of accomplishing the first in a follow up diary Real Soon Now. For now I'm going to close by repeating something I said in a comment the other day:
Democrats will win when they stop trying to make Republicans happy, and start trying to make Americans happy.