Michael Fumento has had a run of the mill right-wing career. He's explained why FDR is responsible for the Depression being so bad: "Unemployment from 1923 to 1929 averaged a mere 3.3%. In FDR’s first year, 1933, it hit its high point of 24.9%." He's assailed the film industry for failing to present Arabs in a negative enough light: "By cooperating with organizations like CAIR, Hollywood kowtows to groups that aid and abet terrorists." His slightly-too-enthusiastic embrace of free-market principles cost him his position at the more mainstream Scripps Howard.
This fair-mindedness and commitment to rigorous empirical thinking has earned Fumento positions at the Hudson Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and articles published in the Weekly Standard, National Review, Reason, and all the rest.
But even he's had enough:
I find myself linked not only with the Unabomber, but also Charles Manson and Fidel Castro. Or so says the Chicago-based think tank the Heartland Institute, for which I’ve done work. Heartland erected billboards depicting the above three declaring: “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” Climate scientists now, evidently, share something in common with dictators and mass murderers. Reportedly bin Laden was scheduled to make such an appearance, too. ...
The last thing hysteria promoters want is calm, reasoned argument backed by facts. And I’m horrified that these people have co-opted the name “conservative” to scream their messages of hate and anger. ...
All of today’s right-wing darlings got there by mastering what Burke feared most: screaming “J’accuse! J’accuse!” ...
President Obama is regularly referred to as a Marxist/Socialist, Nazi, tyrant, Muslim terrorist supporter and – let me look this up, but I’ll bet probably the antichrist, too. Yup, there it is! Over 5 million Google references. ...
No, I’m not cherry-picking. When I say “regularly referred to,” interpret literally. Polls show that about half of voting Republican buy into the birther nonsense (one of the more prominent hysterias within the hysteria). Only about a fourth seem truly sure that Obama was actually born here. ...
[The right-wing commentariat] cashed in their reputations, as well as their ideology, for lucre. Those who didn’t – because conservatism runs against screaming, extremism and sensationalism – began disappearing from the talk shows, magazines and store shelves. They were replaced by pod people.
Conservatism, RIP
You cannot be identified by what you oppose, only by what you stand for. But this curious creature’s main claim to the title of “conservative” is that it hates liberals – as do liberals and lots of others on many points of the political spectrum. Obama is routinely bashed in such places as the Nation. The right-wing Nation? ...
But while the new right screams the most about big government, it nonetheless supported President George W. Bush as he presided over the largest expansion of government spending since uber-liberal FDR and left us with a massive debt before President Obama was sworn in. Why? Silly rabbit! Because the left opposed him.
The same has been said for the right’s otherwise seemingly unfathomable enchantment with Sarah Palin; it’s a defense of their damsel in distress. The veracity of the left’s claims about her are irrelevant. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” ...
Apart from gaining fame and fortune for a select few, all the new right is accomplishing is turning Bismarck’s words upside down, making politics the art of the impossible. It demonizes the opposition even as it brutally enforces “team loyalty.” So nothing gets done, and bad trends just get worse.
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- Drastic action is required now, nay yesterday, to start bringing expenditures in line with income. About half our government spending is fueled by borrowing, and that spending accounts for a fourth of GDP. Without borrowing, then, our GDP would drop 12 percent or more – well into depression range.
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- Entitlement spending, that which requires no new legislation, is en route to consuming all tax revenue.
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- Excluding the very top earners, household incomes have been declining for a decade.
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- The real employment level has been trending downward since the mid-1980s. Unemployment for a year or more, the kind that just sucks the heart and soul out of people, is about double what it was in late 2009 – and yet in the 1960s it was essentially nonexistent.
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- Income inequality is the highest since before the Great Depression, understandably fostering resentment.
For many, the American dream became a nightmare long ago. It’s little wonder that Americans are afraid and angry. ...
The right didn’t create this reservoir of fear, anger and hate. But it has both tapped into it and roiled it. Indeed, the right-wing mass hysteria is what sociologists call a “moral panic.” It occurs when a society is undergoing a wrenching transformation. Somebody then comes along and creates a “folk devil” both to provide an explanation for bad conditions, real or imagined, and a target. Kill the devil; eliminate the bad conditions. But the right has no serious incentive to help solve or ameliorate these problems. Indeed, as with the reelection of Obama, it will benefit from their continuation or worsening. ...
Obviously, he's right about the right-wing punditry; his explanation for why no Republican politicians care about the issues facing the country would have been more complete had he noted the primary challenges of
Bob Bennett, Bob Inglis, and
Richard Lugar. Every single elected and outside leader of the GOP is terrified to propose anything that might run afoul of the GOP's three-clause credo: "The government sucks, unless it's targeting out groups like gays or prisoners or foreigners, in which case it's infallible." (In my view, this is the result of the creeping logic of
the Southern Strategy). No Republican leader anywhere-- not even aging pro-America Republicans with nothing to lose such as Bob Dole and George Bush Sr.-- has had the patriotism to stand up and call the GOP back from the brink.
Now, there's a lot more in Fumento's original article, including a lot of stuff that doesn't make much sense. (Of the bit that I've excerpted, I think the most important factual correction is that our long-term debt problem is largely health care costs, not some quality innate to "entitlements"). But as dedc pointed out to me over email, that's kind of the point of this defection. Fumento never styled himself an intellectual, like Andrew Sullivan or David Frum, or a policy wonk like Bruce Bartlett. He was a pretty standard-issue right-wing writer, albeit one with some interest in data. (His look at the data had led him to question whether AIDS was that big a deal for heterosexuals, and whether climate change was caused by human activity).
But even Fumento just can't deal with today's GOP anymore.
You can't simultaneously like America, care about reality, and support Republicans.