Mitt Romney has a gift for words — self-destructive words.
So begins
this Paul Krugman column that is simply devastating to the current Republican field. Using Romney's infelicitious phrase of being "severely Conservative." He notes that linguist Mark Liberman of Penn list of the top five words usually following the mofidier "severely"
in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured.
As Krugman opines, whether or not Romney's words were a Freudian slip,
something has clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism.
After listing some of Santorum's stranger ideas, he opines
You may say that such conspiracy-theorizing is hardly unique to Mr. Santorum, but that’s the point: tinfoil hats have become a common, if not mandatory, G.O.P. fashion accessory.
He says of Ron Paul's rabid following
Clearly, a large segment of his party’s base is comfortable with views one might have thought were on the extreme fringe.
And while Gingrich, despite his fantasies of Moon colonies escapes ridicule, Romney is slammed with this:
Instead, his stump speeches rely almost entirely on fantasies and fabrications designed to appeal to the delusions of the conservative base. No, President Obama isn’t someone who “began his presidency by apologizing for America,” as Mr. Romney declared, yet again, a week ago. But this “Four-Pinocchio Falsehood,” as the Washington Post Fact Checker puts it, is at the heart of the Romney campaign.
Please keep reading.
By now I hope I have convinced you Krugman is definitely worth reading. But it is not just the candidates he slams, but modern "conservatism" itself. He asks how it became
so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality?
Two paragraphs from the end he provides this answer:
My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.
Let's step back a moment.
It is a pattern that Southern Democrats of the past - you know, some of those who after the 1964 Civil Rights Act became Republicans on matters of race - used to use: pit the poor whites against the Blacks while the richer whites ripped off everyone.
gay married terrorists - actually, that sounds remarkably like something Santorum might say, doesn't it?
Krugman offers the thought that this process created a party base that believed all the "hokum' but which the party elite can no longer control. I read this to mean the wealthy and their minions may well believe that the inmates of the tea party movement are now running the asylum of what claims to be the conservative movement in this country. Surely anyone who paid attention to the rhetoric as CPAC - not just from like of Peter Brimelow, but also elected officials ranging from the Kansas Secretary of State who is responsible for the "show me your Hispanic papers" bill in Arizona through Senate Minority Leader McConnell to the Presidential candidates, with side orders of Anne Coulter and Sarah Palin, anyone who also paid attention to what got cheers and what got boos, knows that this goes much further than the palpable anger of the people whose anger at being screwed got manipulated by the likes of Dick Armey and the Koch brothers.
Krugman concludes his piece by noting
today’s dismal G.O.P. field — is there anyone who doesn’t consider it dismal? — is no accident. Economic conservatives played a cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers from “severe” conservatism in the worst way. And the malady may take many years to cure.
I have said for quite some time that I did not see any of the Republican field beating Obama in the electoral college. Romney has been considered by pundits the most electable, but the more the American people see him the less they like him. His approval rating continues to drop the more he has to appeal to the somewhat crazier parts of the base. His percentage compared to 4 years ago has been lower in every state except Florida. The Republican turnout has been dropping.
But here's a problem not addressed in this Krugman piece. In the process of being as negative as they have been in their obstructionism in Washington and states like Wisconsin and Ohio and their attacks on the campaign trail, these "conservatives" have been destroying not only the safety nets for individuals (social programs) and the economy (regulation and taxation), they have been destroying the American people's belief that they matter, and thus also the functioning of our political and economic systems. They seem to be Samson 'Eyeless in Gaza" as Aldous Huxley titled one of his novels, willing to pull down the edifice on all of us, somehow believing that they and their can survive and thrive in the chaos that will follow.
The approval rating of our now dysfunctional Congress is lower than that of the nadir experienced by our last Vice President. People who believed in "Hope" and "Change" were turned off enough in 2010 that the crazies took over the House and too many states.
For me one striking part of CPAC was listening to Tony Fabrizio announce that of the write-ins for Vice President, the strong favorite was Allen West. Another was that the noxious Steve King was well-received. Still another was the audible booing when Romney was announced as the winner of the straw poll.
While I expect that Obama will be reelected, I am not sure that the nation will be governable. The President is increasingly lucky in his enemies. But that does not mean the real needs of the world, the nation, the people will even be seriously considered.
One more point. I see nothing "conservative" about the modern Conservative movement. I try to find good in my fellow human beings. As a Quaker I try to answer that of God in each person even if I do not perceive it.
Were I more traditionally religious, I would be remarking on how well the rhetoric of hate and fear that they spew has a remarkable propensity to achieve results that could easily be described as demonic.
I know politics involves emotion perhaps more than it does intellect. Appealing only to base instincts and fear does not sustain the idea of a republic very well. One cannot truly argue for a Republic my dear Republicans when what one is doing is fomenting the kind of mob mentality that so worried some of those at the Constitutional Convention after the experience of Shays' Rebellion.
But those are my worries.
Krugman has properly exposed the Republican field and the "Conservative" movement for the fakers they really are. If they use rhetoric they don't believe to achieve power - as clearly seems the case with Romney - then they are dishonest. If like the others they do believe it, then I want to return to the list of words by that Penn linguist, because to be "severely conservative" is also to be severely ill in your thinking, severely limited in your capacity to reach out to your fellow American; if we follow your prescriptions on taxing and spending our economy will be severely depressed, leaving most Americans severely injured and what used to be our political system severely disabled.
We just have to hope enough Americans understand all this so that these "severely conservative" actors do not leave the rest of us severely devastated and bereft of a future.