Why the "Overton Window" has continuously shifted to the right since Ronald Reagan has continued to mystify and divide liberals, but I think I've hit upon a solid - and what's more important, correctable - model of the phenomenon and what to do about it. In short, it isn't the media or the Republican Party that has dragged America to the right: The 2008 election proved that they can both go as batshit as they please and the public will simply ignore them if conditions fail to resonate with their message. My surprising conclusion is that it's our own attention to the radical right that has degeneratively reinforced its place in mainstream politics while solidifying the position of the overall GOP.
[This is a republish of a diary from October 2010, which apparently fell through the cracks. Its ideas remain, IMHO, some of my strongest and therefore deserve to be repeated.]
In martial arts, it is very important to stay focused on your opponent, and not become distracted by the motions of their weapons (i.e., hands and feet): Those are just extensions of their core, and their entire purpose is to create both a barrier and a distraction away from that core. If you allow yourself to become overly focused on the opponent's weapons, then they are safe while you are left desperately moving your core in response to movements that are trivial for them. This quickly becomes exhausting and unsustainable, and you either get knocked down or are forced to take a step backward to increase your safety zone. Pretty soon, all you're doing is retreating.
This is more than an apt analogy for the various radical "movements" that have defined Republican politics since Reagan - it's practically an identical phenomenon. From Reagan himself, to the emergence of Hate Radio, to the bellicose Gingrich Congress, to the Buscists, and now teabaggers, they are essentially all convenient tentacles of the main body whose purpose is to grab our attention and divert our actions away from the GOP core. And so far, they have succeeded completely: They cause the energetic, activist left to become obsessed with debunking irrelevant noise-makers; mainstream Democrats to become afraid of being targeted by them; and the two halves of the Democratic community to become estranged and mutually suspicious as a result. Those of us who remain focused on achieving substantive results are thereby diminished in number, and our efforts dampened rather than magnified by the rest.
Now, for those of us tempted to believe in comic book fantasies of diabolical Republican super-villains, I should tell you this is not a conscious policy of GOP politics so much as a natural convergence of predatory instinct on their part and lack of same on ours. Karl Rove may have witnessed the phenomenon in action in its early years and exploited it to some degree, but he neither invented nor perfected it: His strategies are a cheap pastiche of banana republic dirty tricks, character assassination, dimestore hatemongering, and Propaganda 101 principles like "repeat a lie often enough and it becomes true."
It is true that Rove has stated the principle I'm talking about - "attack their strengths" - but unfortunately for Republicans, our strength is that we're right, so the only way they've been able to implement this strategic advice is to completely abandon reality and manufacture fictional opponents. Perhaps I shouldn't belittle the cleverness of such a strategy, considering how often it works against us, but the only reason that happens is the phenomenon described above: We become fixated on debunking the fictional portrayals made of us - in other words, fighting the opponent's shadow puppets - rather than fighting the opponent. Because they have nothing to offer the American people, their only hope is to convince the public that neither do we.
The process works like this: Imagine two candidates debating taxes - one is advocating a tax increase to build schools, and the other opposes raising taxes on the grounds that the money can be found in the existing budget. Notice how this debate is structured - spending on schools is conceded to be not only a legitimate goal, but an uncontested one: The candidates are merely arguing over the proper method, and the conservative candidate is implicitly conceding that a tax increase would be legitimate for the stated purpose if the money were not available in the budget.
This is what tax debates had once been in America: The liberal saying that tax increases are needed for budget priorities, and the conservative saying that those priorities could be met entirely through efficiency and improved fiscal planning. In other words, they are arguing whether or not to increase taxes on the basis of what extent doing so would benefit the American people's budget priorities - a discussion whose underlying assumptions are completely reality-based, and thereby much more favorable to liberal politics.
Now suppose the conservative candidate takes it a step further, and argues that not only should taxes not be increased, they should be cut. At first the debate is still centered on how to achieve common budget priorities, so the argument - possibly legitimate, but probably specious - is that under the given circumstances, a lower tax rate would serve to increase revenue and thereby achieve the same results at lower cost to individual taxpayers. This corresponds to the popularization of Laffer curves and trickle-down ideology in the political debate: So far still a more or less reasoned argument, although the other side is embracing sophistry to advance pretty wild bottom-line conclusions.
Ignoring what looked like a new idea would have seemed dangerous without a potent new idea of our own to counter, and our intellectual honesty - and let's face it, vanity - makes us love to tear apart specious logic. So the liberal candidates and commentariat of the age - still focused on substance, and not yet perverted into the 1-dimensional punditocracy of today - shine a spotlight on the conservative's claims, and utterly tear them apart down to the very roots of their assumptions.
Unfortunately, logic is not the underlying principle of politics: The attention paid to the newly extreme conservative position and its foundational ideology legitimized them, so that the electorate now saw the debate as being between increasing or cutting taxes, not between increasing them or keeping them the same. Meanwhile, the platitudes of trickle-down advocates assured people still concerned about budget priorities that they would not be harmed, so they were able to paint a picture of getting more for less - a fantasy against which there is little defense once it's allowed to take hold.
Suddenly the debate has lurched to the right, and the liberal candidate is no longer able to politically sustain arguments for raising taxes: Instead, he is forced to argue against cutting them - the debate has gone through the looking glass, and gravity is now on the side of the conservative. It happened mainly because we find it difficult to resist debating honestly even with arguments that are plainly dishonest, and that are designed to sabotage the very purpose of discussion.
Making a logically specious argument to a liberal - especially when it's dressed up in the shallow accoutrements of intellectual theorizing - is like waving a red cape in front of a bull, and we just cannot help ourselves: We must correct it, dissect its fallacies, and illustrate in detail how it fails to validly reflect reality. But all the public sees is that both sides are talking about this "new idea," and that means - regardless of the content of one side's arguments - it has become "debatable" rather than the plainly false kookery of some fringe headcase.
Win or lose, once the debate becomes a referendum on cutting rather than increasing taxes, every cycle merely reinforces the assumption that a tax at all (and not merely an increase) is some monumentally grave and sinister imposition rather than simply an economic process to fund public priorities. Once this impression is cemented, and liberals are preoccupied just trying to stop the budgetary hemmorhaging - rather than remaining focused on the core of the problem - the right takes the next step and exploits their villainous straw-man image of taxes to attack the funding priorities we support: Priorities that, until this point, had been an uncontested matter of common sense.
For most of the post-Depression era before Reagan, anyone who debased the poor, or who claimed that the free market would provide public services would have just been dismissed as a nut or a selfish idiot who would say any old crazy nonsense to avoid paying taxes. But liberals are now feeling vulnerable from the sudden inversion of the tax debate, and the appearance of this newly menacing attitude toward hard-won budget priorities made people on the left very nervous and defensive. So when conservatives who had first claimed the same priorities could be funded at lower tax rates began attacking those priorities as immoral, demonizing people who benefit from them, and promulgating tried-and-failed market "solutions," we did not say "You're insane" - we argued with them as if they were making real points in a real debate, and once again allowed indefensible claims to become debatable talking points.
Our generic, multi-decadal liberal candidate is now in dire straits: Rather than remaining focused on the core of the matter, he has simply reacted to every new craziness from the other side, focusing on it, legitimizing it, and thereby pulling the electorate to the right. At this point, he is no longer even mounting coherent arguments against cutting taxes, so much as trying to defend impoverished minorities against demonization - which is laudable enough, but means little to voters outside those communities - and minimize the size of resulting budget cuts. He is no longer building or sustainably maintaining anything, just sticking chewing gum on an ever-growing number of holes and cracks in the dam.
After many recurrent cycles of this process, taxes are no longer even the grave imposition once articulated by conservatives - they are now portrayed by the right as an ultimate expression of evil from straight out of Satan's asshole, and merely being against cutting them - never mind proposing to increase them on any significant level - marks one as a rapacious, tyrannical, mustache-twirling Kommunist thug against whom acts of murder and terrorism are "on the table." In a nation where millions of people can barely afford basic necessities, these maniacs insist that deficit spending caused by their own tax-cut cultism is the gravest threat to the economy, and that we must eliminate the last remaining vestiges of rational public budget priorities. And the craziness, I'm sorry to say, is all our fault. We indulged these people too long, rewarded craziness, dishonesty, and bellicosity with our attention, and now it's time to change that.
This farce ends beginning now, regardless of how the current election shapes up [apparently it didn't end in time to stop the GOP seizing the House]. Taxes are too low for the top quintile, too low for corporations, and way too low for the top 1%: They need to be increased to reduce the deficit and increase funding of public priorities, and most of those priorities are not up for debate - they are common sense, and anyone who is against them is just an irrelevant nutcase who does not deserve to be taken seriously, listened to, or argued with in public (though if you know some personally, feel free to persuade them in private discussion). No longer can we permit Republicans to treat the term "tax-increase" as a negative in itself, and if they use it that way, they're fringe nuts and should be treated accordingly. These people, believe it or not, depend on our cooperation for their legitimacy, and if they're denied it, they become far less consequential.
I realize that it's very entertaining to just react to craziness: It's such an easy, satisfying target for mockery and intellectual dissection. But ultimately there comes a point where self-discipline is necessary, and where you have to decide that your attention is more responsibly employed generating and proposing real solutions to real problems rather than arguing with lunatics. This was one of the biggest reasons for the success of the Obama campaign: While some pundits on the left insisted that he was "losing the message war," and that he was being weak on the hard right, in fact he was consciously ignoring the GOP's meat-puppet crazies and instead attacked the core of the Republican edifice.
Here is the truly amazing thing: If we employ this principle on a broad, grass-roots basis, we have a real chance to restore the window of public perception toward reasoned debate and sane priorities. The media would resist tooth-and-nail, but its efforts would be in vain: People just stop paying attention to what it says when coverage loses touch with them, and they end up losing viewer share, ad revenue, and everything else that supports them as an institution.
Sooner or later, much as happened toward the right after Reagan, the media must follow the public, even if only in the most superficial ways - it cannot do otherwise and remain viable as a business. So ignore them too: They are merely echoes, and it does not matter whether they portray a newfound Eisenhower-era liberalism as Kommunist Radikalism - direct experience of it will immediately debunk such lunatic portrayals without ever having to legitimize them by arguing with them.
Here then is a hypothetical process for how to reverse the long degeneration described above: We begin with a now commonplace scenario - two candidates, liberal and wingnut, and the wingnut is railing against "socialism." Does our liberal answer defensively that he actually favors oh-so-precious tax cuts, and opposes oh-so-evil public spending? Hell no: He might as well just endorse his lunatic opponent if he's going to do that. Instead, our liberal says something dismissive - "Listening to my opponent's tirade, I was suddenly reminded of a character in Dr. Strangelove...yeah, you know who I'm talking about. But rather than focus on that craziness (dismissive wave at opponent), let's just talk about solving problems..." And then our liberal candidate goes on to advocate, matter-of-factly, massive tax increases on people who can afford it, and massive budget increases to both reduce the deficit and increase spending.
But rather than focusing on selling it divisively, by saying "Most people won't have to pay more" - which would implicitly reinforce the taxes=evil meme - just say "Everybody should do their part for this country," and let people who are self-interested look at how it impacts them personally; let people who are civic-oriented be persuaded by the call to duty; and let people who resent the rich recognize that it's a good way to hold them to their responsibilities. Now imagine that our candidates do this routinely, in all races, in all parts of the country, just like Republicans insist on tax cuts and demonize spending even in the bluest blue states. We would have to be willing to lose battles to win the war, but win it we would - utterly and totally. With a single decision and dismissive wave of your hand, you can wipe out three decades of right-wing brainwashing: An unintended benefit of the public's short attention span.
There would be backlash from the right and centrist media commentators - who would, BTW, ultimately be dragged back to the left as the plankton they are - but it would merely be an impotent reaction, and a strong indicator of the power of what is being done. Granted, some of the reactions would be violent: I can't imagine the rage such tyrannical bastards would experience seeing thirty years of cumulative manipulation disappear at the drop of a hat. But that too would merely be validation of the principle, and further reinforce their own continual drift into the inconsequential fringe. The hard right will find itself unconsciously persuaded to step back, because otherwise they're deprived of the energy they get from our attention - and people like that are not smart enough to know this about themselves.
The whole point of political extremism is to get public attention, so rationally the way to deal with it is to deny public attention while dealing with the phenomenon on a grass-roots level (i.e., by talking to individuals). By doing this, you treat political craziness as what it is: Not something to be argued with, persuaded, or even really opposed, just dismissed and people not closely affiliated with it made to understand that it's illegitimate and will cause them to be ostracized in the public space.
This is basically how societies function: Common values and common perceptions are upheld because deviating too greatly from them will cause you to be viewed as a weirdo who doesn't belong. We need to reassert the fact that Republicans as they currently are don't belong in politics, and not by stating so - but by treating them accordingly in how we advocate our positions and address theirs. In this way we essentially negate everything they've done to change politics since the Reagan revolution, and all the energy they pour into noise-making that depends on its premises is completely wasted.
Now, that doesn't mean it's instantaneous - the sudden, hard bifurcation of the electorate would cause the formation of an epistemically-closed social minority (i.e., basically the teabaggers) that is completely impervious to the direct influence of society. But they are not, and cannot be, impervious to indirect influences - ultimately they will end up withering away to nothing or moderating, just as every other truly crazy movement does when finally confronted with a reality-focused public that will not yield.
Republicans can say "socialist" all they please, and it may quicken some pulses among centrists, but it's nonsense and most people don't care about it. However, when you say the word "crazy" and point at a Republican who promulgates sheer nonsense, people will generally recognize that it's true, and it completely delegitimizes everything they say. Crazy. Not sane. Not connected to reality. People begin to see the things they're saying in the light of that portrayal, and more likely than not it will fit like a glove with some of the positions they've taken.
So don't argue with the loons in the three-piece suits, just pat them on the head when they say something crazy, tell them "Uhhh, that's nice Bob," and move on to speaking with the mentally healthy grownups that you will imply make up the electorate. It doesn't matter if what they're saying is more dumb than crazy, or more evil than crazy - if it carries even a tinge of Crazy, it's Crazy, and don't qualify it with anything else. Their word for you is "socialist," and your word for them is "Crazy" - so while you are advocating a bold new progressive agenda, they are spewing lunatic nonsense completely unintelligible to any sane mind. But, of course, you are happy to respond to sane points and comments - such as arguments (see above) that the same budget priorities could be better met without increasing taxes as much as you're proposing. Tehehe. :-)
[I realize my own failures to remember and heed the ideas in this diary. Making sport of wingnuts is so much fun that it's a powerful temptation to shine a spotlight on them, even with the nagging realization that doing so ultimately increases their numbers and social power by making them seem like part of a real debate. But insofar as I am capable of self-control in such matters, I'll try from now on to be cognizant of the principle that Crazy is not to be argued with - simply dismissed and ostracized.]