Republican Representative Steve King (Iowa) has offered up what may be a sneak-peek into at least part of the Republican playbook for 2012.
In his diary entitled Steve King: 'Social moderation' is a jobs-killing menace, Jed Lewison tells us that Rep. King has added to his long list of controversial comments.
I will focus on only two and suggest that they may reveal an intergal part of the Republican's underlying strategy for 2012 and shine a light on their biggest vulnerability for that uncoming election.
First:
“If we get the culture right,” I stated, “the economy will be right eventually.”
Another rallying cry to the Religous Right and Single Social Issue Voters. Ho hum.
Second:
While America’s staggering job loss, spending and debt are crucial components of any candidate’s platform, it does not mean that their position on family issues and freedom are inconsequential — or even separate. In fact, social moderation has certainly contributed to the $14 trillion in national debt.
It is impractical to believe that there is no social issue component of any of the problems facing America — from education to national security, up to and including the overall economy.
Really?
So, at least according to this broadside by Rep. King against the Platonic virtue of "moderation in all things", the Republicans are staking out a bold new (or bald old) spot on the political continuum that might be summed up with a slight variation on the famous rallying cry of the late Senator Barry Goldwater:
Moderation in the pursuit of social issues is no virtue.
Extremism in the pursuit of your own re-election is no vice.
Moderation is now a bad thing, according to the Republicans. Not just bad in itself, but also newly bad because of it's alleged impact on Jobs, Jobs, Jobs and on the supposedly crushing burden of the national debt.
From what we can tell, Republicans have tied their captive "moderation" to a post, offered it a blindfold and last cigarette and doomed it to follow the very public fate of "compromise" and the more covert, but no less final fate, of bipartisanship.
Social Moderation.
What is at the root of this Republican declaration of war on moderation?
First, we must always recognize and celebrate the birth of a new bit of Luntzianese. Every time the Republicans' block writing machine comes up with a new term or phrase for their Luntzian Dictionary of Words That Will Work To Fool People For Votes, it is well to take note because before long it will likely be tripping off Republican tongues from sea to shining sea. The Republicans' systematic use of this Luntzian language in ways divorced from its literal meaning allows them to effetively define the debate. It's what they do and they do it very well.
Meanwhile, the hapless Democrats continue to appear genetically unable to resist the urge to accept each new entry at face value and adopt it as their own even as it poisons the debate against them.
While in most instances you see "Social Moderation" used in a neutral or even positive way, Rep. King shamelessly attempts to implicate the term as a suspect in the demise of both Jobs and our National Debt.
If that's all it was, a feeble attempt to link liberal social issues with the negative impact of the recession, it would be a fairly pedestrian gambit. It is more than that. It is also more than a red herring intended to lure liberal Democrats to respond with great derission and scorn. Although as ususal it's effectiveness in that role is unquestioned.
To understand how depth-of-the-seas deep this gambit goes, we need to examine not just what they have said, but how they are saying it.
From that it may be possible to discern why they have said it.
In order to illustrate how they are saying "it" in a broader sense, I'll use the contrast of a quick and dirty reverse-take on King's message:
Mr. Peasant addressed the assembled convention saying, :Representative King advocates a program of radicalized, ultra-conservative, job-killing extremism, morally abhorant to enduring American values, persistently disconnected from deeply-held American principles of balance, egalatarianism and fairness in economic goals, and fundamentally inconsistent with the high level of common sense and mutual respect for others possessed by Americans from across the political and economic spectrum.
(Yes, I know. Runny word soup. Intentional. )
Do you see how the use of multiple describers ("radicalized, ultra-conservative") on the first level paves the way for the more potent ("job-killing") describer and how all three describers mask the final concept ("extremism") and protect it from both scrutiny and challenge? For many readers this kind of masked assumption (often the most controversial aspect of the statement) sails right under the radar as if it were a natural geographic formation made up of generally accepted thought and rock-solid logic to plant in their subconcious as immutable truth. Thereafter, it stands as a guard and sentinel against offending inconsistent facts of ideas. It's one of the reasons why so many people who disagreed with almost every thing George Bush did, and man who realized he had lied us into Iraq, still voted for him in 2004.
Turning back to King's recent blabfest, the real issue is not whether moderation really costs us money and jobs.
Rep. King is wrong and in all likelihood he knows full well that he is wrong; something that applies to a host of other Domestic Errorists hiding within the Republican Party.
The persistently perplexing dilema for Democrats is that being wrong does not seem to hurt these Republicans. Why? Why? Why? {Cue liberal gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.}
Here's the not-so-secret: Being wrong does not hurt them because what they are wrong about is not what they care about.
They really don't care about jobs. They really, really don't care about the national debt. So we cannot and should not analyze their statements as if they did.
So why do they say all these outrageous things?
They say these things to cloak the more insideous assumptions buried within their statements that are masked by the outrageousness of their surface claims.
Look back at my doppleganger version of King's statement. They are doing the very same thing in a much more broad and systematic way.
They start by making outrageous claims that defy both fact and logic and by doing so they intentionaly invite the Democrats to focus on the surface facts and too-obvious flaws in logic.
But while we are busy crushing their feint attack, their real attack slips by nearly unnoticed and often unchallenged.
We know that Rep. King and the rest of his travelling performers are shills and snake-oil salesmen. We may even know they are not here just to sell us snake oil. What we must come to grips with is that their true purpose in speeches like King's is to convince us that snake oil is all there is to buy.
And in this case that snake-oil is a cure-all tonic named "extremism".
And what is the the enemy of "extremism? That Satan's-Spell: "moderation".
Why Declare War on Social Moderation?
The short answer is that they'd lose a war against "moderates". But the longer answer has to do with the Republican party itself and the devil's bargain they made in the 2010 election - the mortgage on which they are slowly sinking beneath.
In the 2012 political calculation, the Republicans know that their biggest challenge will be to hold together their increasingly fractious coalition of the shilling while somehow managing to placate each extremist-group's uncompromising desire to enthone their particular radial policy at the head of the Wall Street/Republican/Conservative/Tea Party/Religious Right Agenda.
The price of even attempting to meet that challenge is to shun concepts like "bipartisanship", "compromise" and yes, even "moderation", because embracing any of these would be like spending a night in the tender company of Mistress Kryptonite for these Republicans dreaming they could be Supermen.
Lying between these Republicans and a 2012 victory are a number of sizeable potholes that could upset this rickety and sputtering coalition before it can carry a Republican Presidential candidate over the finish line. One of the biggest potholes is the perception that the Republicans embody a far-reaching, over-reaching, radical strain of social conservatism and a growing realization of their anti-union and anti-worker bias.
Now if these were Democrats faced with this kind of public rejection of their underlying principles, they would be busy triangulating into a more reasonable and less demanding version of themselves, proud of their earnest bipartisanship and oblivious to the real-power-politic being practiced by the other party.
But these are not Democrats. They are the party that after losing so badly in 2006 and 2008 that many in their own ranks expected a decade of Democratic ascendency, chose to double down on a long-shot bet and much to everyone's surprise, the bet came in. (The true reasons for the outcome of the 2010 election are irrelevant. Like Bin Laden in his belief that he brought down the Soviet Union, as an article of faith, the Republicans believe that 2010 was a public referendum on and resounding mandate for their proposal to head into the righwing extremist horizon and never look back.)
Nothing will convince the Republicans' to doubt their belief in their "high rate of return" from the 2010 election and based on that certainty beginning the day after the 2010 election they chose to go double or nothing with the very same bet in 2012.
Which forces them to confront that lingering weakness - what do they do with the social moderates that helped elect Obama in 2008 and a Democratic Congress in 2006?
They cannot move towards the middle, because both by inclination and charcter of their factions' membership, they are stuck like cement in their hardening positions on the right. They also think that by "compromising" they would lose more of those who worship extremism than they would gain by a shift towards moderation.
In that canyon, trapped between a rock and a hard place, with only a pocket knife as a tool, the only thing they can do is cut themselves off from moderation by doing what they believe is consistent with their political investement portfolio: Buy naked shorts on moderation and then do everything in their power to bring it's value down.
It is a tried and true strategy that worked so effectively with "liberal", that they have decided to put the hunt o larger game.
But since "moderate" is too closely tied to the deep emotional yearnings of most Americans to not be too different or 'extreme', they've created a stand-in figure that lies just outside the uncanny valley and yet retains all the appearances and gestures necessary for political identification. It will be this manufactured demon against which they will rally and rage.
Social Moderation: A term densely stacked with connotation and yet essentially devoid of meaning. But that's ok, straw men are not supposed to have anything on the inside.
The will try to make "social moderation" into the pariah that "liberal" has become among many who unknowingly believe in the "liberal" agenda.
If I'm right, King's speach will not be the last time you hear the full-throated demonization of the new John Barleycorn of "Social Moderation".
And when you hear those disturbingly familiar echoes emanating from the mechanized block writers of the radicalized Rightwing extremes, take comfort that this too shall pass and contemplate words that will last for centuries beyond those of the small and petty natterings of Rep. Steve King:
"Moderation, which consists in an indifference about little things, and in a prudent and well-proportioned zeal about things of importance, can proceed from nothing but true knowledge, which has its foundation in self-acquaintance."
- Plato
The measure of a man is what he does with power.
Plato
Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.
Plato
There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.
Plato