Years ago, in the heady Pro-USA days of Ronald Reagan's first term, we were introduced to a new kind of political term: Supply-Side Economics. According to this theory: lowering marginal taxes would improve private sector incentives, spur productivity, and jack up the economy. In the immortal words of Big Ron Reagan, cutting taxes on the highest earners would spur the economy to such a degree that the rest of us would, eventually, benefit through being "trickled down on." Take the bonds off of the top two percent and they would, in turn, reinvest their new-found wealth in Amerika. Years and years later, the Common Man would reap the benefits because . . . well, the economy would be robust. Or something.
Big Ron has nearly been canonized in Amerika these days, but it's interesting to note:
The supply-side idea is a simple one, and makes a popular political message. However, it is interesting to note that mainstream economists -- even conservative ones -- almost universally reject supply-side theory. In the early 80s, the influential and multi-partisan American Economics Association had 18,000 members. Only 12 called themselves supply-side economists.1 In American universities, there is no major department that could be called "supply-side," and there is no supply-side economist at any major department.2 This is significant, because academia in the 70s was dominated by conservative economic theory, and conservative economists normally welcome any ideas that make the case against government intervention. The fact that they scrutinized supply-side theory and rejected it wholesale gives eloquent testimony to the theory's bankruptcy. When candidate George Bush called it "voodoo economics" in the 1980 presidential campaign, he was doing so with the full backing of America's economic community.
Where does this leave our Tea Party? Because it seems to me that what they desperately want to do is return us to the Ronnie Reagan Years of blind Supply Side economics: cut taxes on the wealthiest, reduce funding to enough government agencies that they wither away, yet continue to outspend the rest of the world combined on military gadgetry and hardware. In other words: take in fewer tax dollars, but continue to spend like crazy to fund the military.
I'm constantly amused by these emails that I receive from concerned conservative friends, the ones that feature a phony dollar with Obama's face on it and multiple, multiple zeros indicating the growth of the deficit - this from the same people who laud Ronald Reagan - the man who jacked our deficit higher than any previous president due to his Supply Side economics, Voodoo economics. The problem with Obama, as I see it, is that the Supply Side Tea Partiers stepped in just in time to short circuit a key part of the President's economic plan: raise taxes on the top two percent of earners in the US, while keeping Bush era tax cuts for the Middle Class. This massive amount of money would have gone a long way towards paying for . . . well, a whole helluva lot of things.
Because we want our services in this country, dammit: education, police, street lights, etc. We just don't want to have to pay for them. In that - as in so many things - we're a population that is collectively and permanently pre-pubescent. We want! We want! We just don't want to pay. And so currently we pay less in taxes than any other industrialized nation on earth and yet we worry that our education system is in the shitter. We're constantly decrying the need for taxes at all! Let's do away with taxes, the hard-liners tell us, or let's introduce something like the Fair Tax or the Flat Tax - systems that have proven their worth in . . . well, really only in Russia, the world's largest mafia state. And the success they've had there is merely in regaining taxes that were owed.
Are my taxes too high? I'm a lower middle class teacher. I own a home and two cars. It's a complicated question. I pay less in taxes than anyone in Sweden or England or Canada. At the same time, I watch the education system to which I have hitched my wagon, crumble helplessly: less funding, larger classrooms, poor pay. Not that I want to pay more in taxes, mind you - but, seeing as how my tax rate is much, much lower than any where else in the civilized world, I'm constantly aware of how poorly my tax dollars are being utilized. And this is the crux of the matter.
Currently, out of every dollar I pay in taxes sixty-seven cents goes towards the military. It is the vast, blood sucking Big Government Nightmare that the Libertarians and Tea Partiers rail on about. All that money! And why? Are we Israel, surrounded by hostile nations who want to destroy us? Do we fear an invasion by the Canadians who want to over-run us and enforce their Canadian Way of Life upon us? Are we at war in two hemispheres like we were during WWII? Are we On The Brink? No.
This vast arsenal of ours did not keep us safe on 9/11. This massive war machine, geared towards mechanized warfare on an outdated European battlefield, has been ineffective in stopping insurgents everywhere we run into them. All the money we invest in Nato and our Asian alliances has not endeared us to them in any way whatsoever, nor has it been money well spent in terms of addressing a pressing need. We subsidize their defense so they can invest in their economy and schools and whatever they want to. Investment in Nato is ridiculous. The Soviet Union is no more. Europe is a Big Boy now, somewhat unified and capable of spending plenty of Euros on protecting themselves. The people there have not appreciated our sacrifices on their behalf. All those doubloons spent on nothing.
Supply Side Economics did not work under Reagan's mantle. The deficit ballooned enormously. Yes, many people will point out that the economy recovered in the eighties, but was that due to Reagan's economic policies? Most economists say no, it was not. This from Princeton professor Paul Krugman:
the rapid growth after 1982 proves nothing: a severe recession is usually followed by a period of fast growth, as unemployed workers and factories are brought back on line. The test of tax cuts as a spur to economic growth is whether they produced more than an ordinary business cycle recovery. Once the economy was back to full employment, was it bigger than you would otherwise have expected? And there Reagan fails the test: between 1979, when the big slump began, and 1989, when the economy finally achieved more or less full employment again, the growth rate was 3 percent, the same as the growth rate between the two previous business cycle peaks in 1973 and 1979. Or to put it another way, by the late 1980's the U.S. economy was about where you would have expected it to be, given the trend in the 1970's. Nothing in the data suggests a supply-side revolution.
At what point in contemporary American history was our economy at its most robust? During the Clinton years when Big Bill raised taxes on the rich. Period. It didn't hurt me, it didn't hurt you - though the conservatives waited confidently for the Other Shoe to Drop. You'll see, they said. Raise taxes on the Rich? The economy will collapse!
They waited and it never happened.In fact, the economy grew at a reasonable pace through Clinton's first term, while the deficit and the unemployment rate went steadily down. And then the news got even better: unemployment fell to its lowest level in decades without causing inflation, while productivity growth accelerated to rates not seen since the 1960's. And the budget deficit turned into an impressive surplus.
So what are we going to do? Obama's plan, following the Clinton pattern, was to pay for investment in America through raising taxes on the top two percent of earners. This would still put them at a lower tax rate than anywhere else, other than Russian - and I don't think anyone wants to emulate Russia's economy. This would go a long ways towards shrinking the deficit. And the rest? Well, the Tea Party wants to shrink the Big Government, but the they won't touch the biggest part of our government: like many Arab nations we have a ridiculous sentimentality attached to our military. We'll starve every other aspect of our infrastructure but we love the Big Dick of having stealth fighters and main battle tanks and air craft carriers. Reminds me of the rednecks that live all around me here in Chicken City. They live in shithole houses but drive fantastic trucks. The best investment for their money would be to buy a home and at least make money on simple appreciation. Instead they rent a shit-hole and push their dollars towards a zero sum investment - in fact, no investment whatsoever. That big 4X4 is depreciating the minute you drive it away.
That's where we are. The Redneck nation. Don't invest in infrastructure, invest in Big Dick items. That truck with its chrome and big tires and jacked up suspension is ridiculous. Your trailer home is a shambles.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Let's Give the Working Man What He Wants!
Friday, October 22, 2010
The Tea Party Doesn't Know Shit About the Constitution.
Keep in mind, you Fundamentalists, the Constitution was designed to tell us what is legal and illegal not what is right and wrong. The Constitution does not delineate morality.
Also, the only mention it makes vis-a-vis God/Religion is prohibitory - it tells us what those things can't do in terms of our society. Thus Glenn Beck's belief that Liberals want to "separate us from our Constitution and God" is in fact combining two things as if they are always in tandem, like peanut butter and jelly and salt and pepper. They are not. They are not mutually exclusive but to suggest that they naturally go together is to be guilty of what is referred to in Logical Fallacies as an illegal use of the "And Operator" - commonly known as the "Complex Question".
Beck believes that certain shithead progressives forsook the "faithful Christian Founders" and forced the country to adopt a slew of unconstitutional measures that triggered our long decline into Obama-era totalitarianism. If the Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution were, in fact, Christians, I might be less inclined to choke on Beck's stupidity.
In fact there's a lot of strange mingling of biblical phrases and preachy sermon language when these Tea Partiers get together. Sarah Palin says that our country has entered into a season of "constitutional repentance". It seems to me that their frame of reference is essential Christian Fundamentalism. Like those folks, they seek a Sacred Text that is faultless and changeless and which represents a Golden Age. Like any Fundamentalist, they see in their good book, only what they want to see: confirmation of their preexisting beliefs. Like other fundamentalists, they don't sweat the details and they ignore all the ambiguities. And of course, in the long tradition of Christian Fundamentalists, they demonize and scathe those who disagree with their doctrine.
If these people were at all conversant in the way the Constitution works, there might be some room to negotiate with them. But, like all Fundamentalists - Christian, Muslim, Jewish - they see things only their way and ignore whatever exists that contradicts their purity of thought.
Thus we can have someone like Tea Partier Sharon Angle can assert that "Separation of church and state is an unconstitutional doctrine." Of course it's clearly stated in the Constitution that the opposite is true, but that doesn't matter.
Ms. Angle also tells us that "Government isn't what our Founding Fathers put into the Constitution." Which seems a bit odd when the Sacred Document itself establishes the power "to lay and collect taxes" in a Federal Government, and to "provide for the common defense and the general welfare" of the people. I don't know what Constitution Ms. Angle is reading. Perhaps she has a special one.
Nevertheless, the Tea Party movement has been extremely clear about one thing: the Constitution should be followed exactly, and it should always regulate our nation. Except when it doesn't work out the way they want it to. Then they begin to customize.
Ron Paul: America should stop automatically granting citizenship to "native born children of illegal immigrants". Which would violate the 14th Amendment.
Also by Paul: he would like to prevent federal contractors from lobbying Congress - a likely violation of their First Amendment right to redress.
Sarah Palin, when asked about Roe vs. Wade, was quoted as saying that the Constitution does, in fact, guarantee "an inherent right to privacy" but then she suggested that such a thing would be better handled at the state level - which clearly violates Amendment 14.
The Tea Party are Constitutional purists, all right. Like the Christian and Muslim Fundamentalists they oppose any change or modernized viewing of their Sacred Texts as being sacreligious. They decry modern additions to the Constitution as "progressive" and thus evil - as if the Constitution itself did not enshrine the very concept of the Amendment process because the Founding Fathers knew that time goes on and things change. But then they go about and begin lobbying for their own self serving amendments that do, in fact, violate the Constitution. Michell Bachhmann has suggested more than forty additions to the Constitution, including:
1. an amendment to ban flag burning, which violates the First Amendment.
2. a balanced budget amendment
3. a parents' rights amendment
4. a supermajority to raise the taxes amendment
5. an antiabortion amendment
6. an anti gay marriage amendment
etc. etc. etc. Most of these attempt to legitimize her own personal morality instead of understanding that the Constitution is a legal document that was meant only to create a Governmental Philosophy and Legal Document to frame what shall be "legal" vs. what shall be "illegal".
They need to go back to school or drop the idea that they're in any way riding on the coat tails of our Founding Fathers. They are not.
Also, the only mention it makes vis-a-vis God/Religion is prohibitory - it tells us what those things can't do in terms of our society. Thus Glenn Beck's belief that Liberals want to "separate us from our Constitution and God" is in fact combining two things as if they are always in tandem, like peanut butter and jelly and salt and pepper. They are not. They are not mutually exclusive but to suggest that they naturally go together is to be guilty of what is referred to in Logical Fallacies as an illegal use of the "And Operator" - commonly known as the "Complex Question".
Beck believes that certain shithead progressives forsook the "faithful Christian Founders" and forced the country to adopt a slew of unconstitutional measures that triggered our long decline into Obama-era totalitarianism. If the Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution were, in fact, Christians, I might be less inclined to choke on Beck's stupidity.
In fact there's a lot of strange mingling of biblical phrases and preachy sermon language when these Tea Partiers get together. Sarah Palin says that our country has entered into a season of "constitutional repentance". It seems to me that their frame of reference is essential Christian Fundamentalism. Like those folks, they seek a Sacred Text that is faultless and changeless and which represents a Golden Age. Like any Fundamentalist, they see in their good book, only what they want to see: confirmation of their preexisting beliefs. Like other fundamentalists, they don't sweat the details and they ignore all the ambiguities. And of course, in the long tradition of Christian Fundamentalists, they demonize and scathe those who disagree with their doctrine.
If these people were at all conversant in the way the Constitution works, there might be some room to negotiate with them. But, like all Fundamentalists - Christian, Muslim, Jewish - they see things only their way and ignore whatever exists that contradicts their purity of thought.
Thus we can have someone like Tea Partier Sharon Angle can assert that "Separation of church and state is an unconstitutional doctrine." Of course it's clearly stated in the Constitution that the opposite is true, but that doesn't matter.
Ms. Angle also tells us that "Government isn't what our Founding Fathers put into the Constitution." Which seems a bit odd when the Sacred Document itself establishes the power "to lay and collect taxes" in a Federal Government, and to "provide for the common defense and the general welfare" of the people. I don't know what Constitution Ms. Angle is reading. Perhaps she has a special one.
Nevertheless, the Tea Party movement has been extremely clear about one thing: the Constitution should be followed exactly, and it should always regulate our nation. Except when it doesn't work out the way they want it to. Then they begin to customize.
Ron Paul: America should stop automatically granting citizenship to "native born children of illegal immigrants". Which would violate the 14th Amendment.
Also by Paul: he would like to prevent federal contractors from lobbying Congress - a likely violation of their First Amendment right to redress.
Sarah Palin, when asked about Roe vs. Wade, was quoted as saying that the Constitution does, in fact, guarantee "an inherent right to privacy" but then she suggested that such a thing would be better handled at the state level - which clearly violates Amendment 14.
The Tea Party are Constitutional purists, all right. Like the Christian and Muslim Fundamentalists they oppose any change or modernized viewing of their Sacred Texts as being sacreligious. They decry modern additions to the Constitution as "progressive" and thus evil - as if the Constitution itself did not enshrine the very concept of the Amendment process because the Founding Fathers knew that time goes on and things change. But then they go about and begin lobbying for their own self serving amendments that do, in fact, violate the Constitution. Michell Bachhmann has suggested more than forty additions to the Constitution, including:
1. an amendment to ban flag burning, which violates the First Amendment.
2. a balanced budget amendment
3. a parents' rights amendment
4. a supermajority to raise the taxes amendment
5. an antiabortion amendment
6. an anti gay marriage amendment
etc. etc. etc. Most of these attempt to legitimize her own personal morality instead of understanding that the Constitution is a legal document that was meant only to create a Governmental Philosophy and Legal Document to frame what shall be "legal" vs. what shall be "illegal".
They need to go back to school or drop the idea that they're in any way riding on the coat tails of our Founding Fathers. They are not.
An Open Letter to the Tea Party
Whatever other failings you have, can you all please stop referring to the Founding Fathers, the framers of the Constitution, as God Fearing Christians? Because nothing could be further from the truth. Those who were not abject atheists were at best Deists: people who believe that there's probably a divine power and creator, but that it's no way concerned with humanity.
James Madison:
"Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects."
John Adams:
"As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?"
"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved-- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!"
-letter to Thomas Jefferson
-letter to Thomas Jefferson
.
"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole cartloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity."
"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it."
Thomas Jefferson:
Thomas Jefferson:
"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced an inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."
- "Notes on Virginia"
- "Notes on Virginia"
"On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind."
- to Carey, 1816
"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."
"We discover in the gospels a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication ."
George Washington: while President Washington was a deeply private man, still those who knew him best said he was No Christian -
"Gouverneur Morris had often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system (Christianity) than did he himself."
-Thomas Jefferson, in his private journal, Feb. 1800
-Thomas Jefferson, in his private journal, Feb. 1800
Benjamin Franklin:
"I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works ... I mean real good works ... not holy-day keeping, sermon-hearing ... or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity."
- Works, Vol. VII, p. 75
- Works, Vol. VII, p. 75
"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."
"In the affairs of the world, men are saved, not by faith, but by the lack of it."
Thomas Paine:
"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half of the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind. "
"Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies."
.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Jesus: There's Plenty of Him to Go Around
In my brief forty-six years of existence I have found my way into many a Christian church, most of which contain a multiplicity of pictures of Jesus H. Christ. We have him in many action poses and with a variety of facial expressions, most of them of the Why the Fuck did You Do That variety. Some are a bit alarming in His interaction with children - this is not a good time for Church Leaders to be seen frolicking with the young.
One of the best things about Jesus is how amorphous he is. Since no one has actually seen him in the flesh - or no one I know - we can make Jesus be whatever we want him to be - although most historians are pretty much in agreement that he was a Jew, and thus of a certain pallor and hair color.
Nevertheless, Jesus becomes what you want him to be, in a way that you feel comfortable . . .
. . . Thus, the Jesus one finds in Baptist churches makes him look like a Country singer from the seventies - the kind of guy who likes his fried chicken and is not out of place at a NASCAR event, or wearing a large belt buckle with a bull on it.
Now clearly, the blond hair and blue eyes look is distinctly Anglo-Irish. There's no way that Mr. Christ looked this way - but then look at the people who go to these churches. This is how they want him to look.
Catholic churches have differing Jesii based on what ethnic group makes up their congregations: the catholic church I grew up in was made up mostly of Italians and Portuguese and Basques. Thus, the Jesii in that church looked like someone you might find bussing tables at a local spaghetti house. He loves ya, of course, but don't fuck with him.
The Irish in my town went to a different Catholic church. Whenever i went there, as a youth, I was disconcerted to see that their Jesus was whiter and more Irish looking than our Dago Jesus. It caused a great spiritual angst in me. It was one of my first moments of doubt.
Several years later I found myself in the unenviable position of waiting in a bus station in Indiana, waiting for a connecting bus to Atlanta. A young black male sat next to me and preached his own angry version of the gospel, one that included a brutal Black Jesus that was gon' kick yer white ass, boi.This was the kinda Jesus you can imagine goin' ape-shit in the temple.
Over time I've seen Native-American Jesii and Latino Jesii - he's everywhere, and he's always one of us!
One of the best things about Jesus is how amorphous he is. Since no one has actually seen him in the flesh - or no one I know - we can make Jesus be whatever we want him to be - although most historians are pretty much in agreement that he was a Jew, and thus of a certain pallor and hair color.
Nevertheless, Jesus becomes what you want him to be, in a way that you feel comfortable . . .
. . . Thus, the Jesus one finds in Baptist churches makes him look like a Country singer from the seventies - the kind of guy who likes his fried chicken and is not out of place at a NASCAR event, or wearing a large belt buckle with a bull on it.
Catholic churches have differing Jesii based on what ethnic group makes up their congregations: the catholic church I grew up in was made up mostly of Italians and Portuguese and Basques. Thus, the Jesii in that church looked like someone you might find bussing tables at a local spaghetti house. He loves ya, of course, but don't fuck with him.
The Irish in my town went to a different Catholic church. Whenever i went there, as a youth, I was disconcerted to see that their Jesus was whiter and more Irish looking than our Dago Jesus. It caused a great spiritual angst in me. It was one of my first moments of doubt.
Over time I've seen Native-American Jesii and Latino Jesii - he's everywhere, and he's always one of us!
Friday, September 17, 2010
File Under: Stupid White People
When I published an unflattering assessment of the tea party movement, I anticipated a spirited response. In every form I've encountered, the rhetoric of the far right prizes belligerence and sneers at diplomacy. I never expected an invitation to share a pot of Earl Grey's best and talk things over. But considering the advanced age of the average tea-bagger—half of them must be even older than I am—I suppose I expected a certain gruff courtesy. We graying generations weren't raised to snarl and threaten and hurl epithets like tomahawks. What would our mothers say? It was a later generation of shock jocks and bellicose bloggers that reduced political discourse to tantrums and toxic drivel.
I admit they surprised me, these old guys who've enlisted in the geezer rebellion. Their prostates may be compromised but their bile is potent. The first e-mail message I opened accused me of committing sex acts with Bill Moyers and with several domestic animals. One gentleman interrupted his tirade every third sentence or so, interjecting "Answer me, damn you!" as if he were shaking me by the shirt collar to force a confession. Alarming stuff. Another rabid individual accused me of ignoring left-wing atrocities (pregnant women attacked in their cars for displaying George Bush bumper stickers?) and concluded that I was "a hypocritical little bitch." Betraying a certain lack of media sophistication, some assumed that I lived in the city where they happened to read my essay, and threatened to pay a visit to my house. Most of them signed their names, too.
My memory doesn't extend back to anything quite like this, nothing so animated by rage yet devoid of content. As a friend of mine wrote several years ago, everything's like pro wrestling now: taunts and scowls, fantastic narratives and pantomimes of violence, empty conflict aimed at inflaming an audience of oafs. And of course we're aware that the wife of the founder of World Wrestling Entertainment, herself a participant in some of those preposterous ringside narratives, is spending a fortune to win a U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut. One key difference is that most tea party combatants come armed with deadly weapons, engineered to shed real blood. Dialogue, as I learned dramatically, is not their style. But what sort of dialogue can we imagine with a fierce minority virtually lobotomized by its gullibility, a minority of bubble-dwelling reactionaries whose every "fact" has been distorted or manufactured? The assaults on the pregnant women—is that something available in the right-wing blogosphere, something Michael Savage or Hal Turner was selling on the radio? Nearly every city has its own instigator, its mini-Limbaugh peddling bizarre conspiracy theories and assuring eager racists that Barack Obama is a Muslim/ communist/ antichrist born in Kenya and educated by terrorist mullahs in an Indonesian madrasah.
Most tea party mythology is so ridiculous that reasonable people will grin and ignore it. Sometimes they do so at their peril. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who passes for a moderate conservative in her home state of Alaska, lost the Republican primary to a Wild Right challenger because—observers theorize—she failed to respond to a fusillade of savage attack ads from the Tea Party Express (the same kamikaze group supposedly expelled from the party for posting a grotesquely racist "satire" of the NAACP on its blog). "They literally accused her of almost everything imaginable," one pollster reported. No doubt Murkowski thought that answering them was like trying to answer monkeys who scream and throw nuts and excrement from the treetops. In the shadow of Sarah Palin, she should have known better than to overestimate the intelligence of Alaska's Republicans. In this age of reality-proof information bubbles, lies and labels become deadly weapons.
The tea party's "Restoring Honor" rally on Aug. 28 in Washington was sponsored by the media demagogue Glenn Beck, self-anointed messiah of America's meanest morons. It was staged inappropriately—some say obscenely—at the site and on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous plea for civil rights, the speech remembered as "I Have a Dream." A throng of grizzled white insurgents cheered and whistled as Beck and Palin, an odd couple of vulgarians waxing very rich on their admirers' simplicity, appealed America's fate to a Higher Power. They exhorted us to pray on our knees for deliverance from socialism and recycled the apocalyptic language of the tent revival. "For too long, this country has wandered in darkness," preached Beck, prophet of a lurking new darkness that would make our old one look like a tropical sunrise. A T-shirt favored by his audience read "Babies, Guns, Jesus."
Compromise with such countrymen seems remote. For want of a leader they've embraced Beck, an evil clown whose classic megalomania is metastasizing before our eyes and cameras. Yet for all their dreadful manners and gross taste in role models, I can't help feeling a twinge of compassion for my contemporaries who fall into traps like the tea party. At an age when answering e-mail or mowing the lawn can be a critical drain on our energies, these seniors are out marching and waving banners. For some it may be a last stand, a final surge of adrenaline before the finish line looms. Those of us who disparage Americans for apathy feel obliged to applaud the physical and emotional energy tea-baggers bring to their cause. And it's such a terrible waste. Because, of course, they're clueless pawns who've been co-opted from the start and sent marching in the wrong direction.
It was the late fuhrer himself, a poor general but a supremely successful demagogue, who wrote, "The great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one." "Big government" is the big lie that our tea party has swallowed whole, with a hogwash chaser. An overripe canard from the conservative Chamber of Horrors, "big government" still works wonders with the logically impaired. (Hitler also wrote "All propaganda has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.") Did they notice that during the let-the-fat cats-feast administrations of George W. Bush, there was never a word about big government from the Glenn Beck section? Not even when deficits soared, hopeless wars drained the treasury and the White House expanded its powers in flat defiance of the Constitution.
If there's one firm truth, one persuasive image that might change the lives of hypnotized tea-baggers—I know, I'm dreaming—it would be this one, to wit: The relationship between corporate, special-interest America and our government is exactly the same as the relationship between a rider and a well-broken saddle horse; the horse is only cursed and kicked on the rare occasions when it bucks or bridles. Barack Obama saw health care reform and emergency regulation of the financial industry as self-evident necessities, but to the big riders who hold the reins in this country they registered as the kind of high-spirited fractiousness that's punished with whips and spurs. We never hear the words "socialist" and "communist" unless someone tries to dilute the absolute economic power of white men. Take a course in American history. Movements to abolish slavery (free labor), liberate women (free labor) and unionize workers (cheap labor) were all attacked tooth and claw by white men whose power and profits were threatened, who suddenly saw Bolsheviks behind every bush.
The current "big government" wave of right-wing rhetoric is about as populist, at heart, as a string of polo ponies. It's the latest attempt by the plutocrats to restore discipline to their stable of safe politicians—an uglier correction in this case because the new president is not white. Where does the tea party fit in? Old white men they may be, but everyone knows that white men of the ruling class don't wear T-shirts that say "Babies, Guns, Jesus." Past their prime, lower-middle class but not entirely uneducated, tea party soldiers may in some cases even understand that the gap between America's richest 1 percent and the rest of us has widened scandalously since 1980, and even more radically since the Bush tax cuts and the market crash of 2008.
The United States of America has become a cruel, winner-take-all society. What sets it apart from every other developed country (aside from its psychotic fetish for firearms) is the huge number of Americans who support that arrangement because they believe—against all evidence—that they are, or could be, among the winners. Ignorant and frustrating these losers may be, but almost touching in their hopeless hopefulness. They're the engine that drives the Republican Party, a fantastical coalition of wealthy cynics and gullible proletarians.
Tea party patriots belong to this sad class of manipulated stooges, marching in chains even as they proclaim their freedom. Unwittingly for the most part (their racism, too, has been excused as unwitting), they provide a populist smokescreen for corporate revenge. Even the lamest, tamest captive media might balk at parades of angry investment bankers in pinstriped Armani suits. Enter Joe the Plumber and Sarah the Hockey Mom. And it isn't rhetoric only that Big Business supplies for this "grassroots" movement of disgruntled Americans. Jane Mayer revealed in The New Yorker that the tea party's principal angels are the mega-billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles. The Koch family, one of America's half-dozen wealthiest, has been bankrolling the far right at least since the brothers' late father committed his oil money to the John Birch Society back in the 1950s. The Kochs' reactionary royalty control foundations and energy-industry political action committees that have lavished several hundred million dollars on the tea party and other right-wing causes in the past decade alone. Theirs are not the only corporate treasure chests available to the armies of the right. The New York Times recently exposed the personal largesse and fund-raising genius of Paul Singer, the hedge-fund ($17 billion) tycoon whose pet projects have included the appalling "Swift boat" attacks on John Kerry in 2004.
All intelligent Americans, the ones who deplore it and the ones who profit from it, are well aware of this populist scam. Everyone except the aging warriors out marching in the uniforms of the Continental Army. Their blindness is a greater shame, as I see it, because the tea party gets one very important thing right: The system is broken. Awash in money and mendacity, America's democracy is like a big animal that can't swim, floundering and drowning in 2 feet of water. Cash and slander rule—huge wallets, huge lies. If you won't lie and can't pay, you have no future in American politics. If you aspire to public service, try to find a country with a Supreme Court majority that doesn't spell "free $peech" with a dollar sign. The court's Citizens United decision last January, one that the Koch brothers must have toasted with Champagne, simply legitimized and institutionalized everything that's most disgusting about our system. To grasp the absurdity and obscenity of equating free corporate spending with free speech, visualize an actual political gathering, and put it to the bullhorn test. The crowd is huge, row after row, as far as the eye can see. One candidate has a huge bullhorn that reaches the back rows easily; his opponent has such a tiny bullhorn that his voice is inaudible beyond the 20th row. When he asks why he can't use a big bullhorn, too, they tell him, "Because you can't afford it." Think that's unfair, un-American? Tell it to the Supreme Court.
"We either get the money out of politics or we lose the democracy," Molly Ivins warned shortly before her death in 2007. In the brief span since, Michael Bloomberg spent more than $100 million to be re-elected mayor of New York, sinister players like the Koch brothers poured uncounted millions into the tea party's puppet theater, and the price of high office in important states rose into the tens of millions, with more and more billionaires and corporate titans prepared to pay it. No midterm election cycle has seen as many reckless big spenders as this one. Candidates had spent $400 million before the end of August, including unprecedented price tags on the campaigns of Meg Whitman ($104 million to date) and Carly Fiorina in California. Linda McMahon, the wrestling mogul, pledged to spend up to $50 million, if necessary, for Connecticut's Senate seat. This is a woman who once kicked her husband in the testicles on TV, as part of a phony McMahon family feud that had their Cro-Magnon wrestling fans in stitches. Remember when money was associated with class?
The right loves to talk about the Founders and original intent. Do they think the Founders meant to auction off the highest offices to the highest bidder? The Constitution never had a fighting chance against billionaires' egos or the Koch brothers' brand of checkbook democracy, which has frozen favored incumbents in office and swallowed up both Democrats and Republicans. They flip-flop in and out of power, regardless of their failures, because voters have no memory and no real options; third parties can never raise enough money to stop the revolving door. What's left of the two-party system is contemptible. The Democrats are reliably gutless, corrupt, selfish and indecisive—and perpetually the lesser of two evils since the Republican Party sold its meager soul to a thousand howling devils.
Epitomized by its recent standard-bearer, John McCain, the 21st-century GOP has renounced every constraint of integrity or responsibility and now fits snugly into H.L. Mencken's definition of a politician, regarded as humorous exaggeration when he wrote it in 1926: "A man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of the boot-polish ... He is willing to embrace any issue, however idiotic, that will get him votes, and he is willing to sacrifice any principal, however sound, that will lose them for him ..."
Republicans exist only to keep cash-and-power channels open for the richest and mightiest of America's invincible special interests. To achieve that they bond with any bigot, fanatic or neo-fascist extremist who can promise them votes. Most Republican congressmen now refuse even to work at their jobs. They live off our tax money, serve only to obstruct legislation and turn savagely on any colleagues who try to take part in the patient compromise that creates laws.
Expelling incumbents is nearly always a good idea, but with what do you replace them? Replacing the unappetizing Harry Reid with the unspeakable Sharron Angle is like treating your arthritis by cutting off your hand; replacing Barack Obama with Sarah Palin is like curing your gout by stepping on a land mine. Are the voters that stupid? A great many, I'm sure, and most of them drink Tea. "Larry, the people stink," the comic/ commentator Bill Maher said on Larry King Live, impressing me by ignoring the prime media taboo against bad-mouthing the sacred "American people."
The conventional wisdom is that America's sick economy and emotional discontent will benefit Republicans this fall, which is outrageously unfair; it was their ill-conceived wars and tax cuts and regulatory negligence that caused all the pain President Obama is struggling desperately to alleviate. Worse than unfair, it's plain crazy. But when were politics fair or rational? We all knew Bush's sins would be the ruin of Obama.
Throw the bums out, by all means. How many bums would we miss? But beware of what might come after. The right is not monolithic. All its serious money comes from the same sources, but the reactionary bestiary houses a variety of strange creatures with strange dreams. Tea party grandfathers dream of a 50-foot fence around Mexico, penal colonies for gays and abortionists, a warm gun in every holster and Fox News in every nursing-home dayroom. Rank-and-file Republicans dream only of regaining power, of Dick Cheney's Halliburton foreign policy once more set loose in the world. The Koches dream of a tiny, toothless government about the size of a cherry pit. As for Glenn Beck, don't let those bursts of tears and piety fool you. He's a refugee from a nightmare, he's fresh blood on the staircase. On a recent radio show, Beck recommended a book (The Red Network: A "Who's Who" and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots) written in 1934 by Elizabeth Dilling (1894–1966), the notorious anti-Semite, racist and Nazi sympathizer who called President Eisenhower "Ike the Kike" and JFK's New Frontier "the Jew Frontier." In her day, most people thought Dilling's deadly venom damaged right-wing causes. Will the same be true of her pop-eyed disciple?
A frightening array of opportunists, egomaniacs and amateur entertainers have stepped forward to exploit the national discontent, this supposed Thunder on the Right. Freed from the straitjackets of dignity or proportion, the scramble for office resembles a "reality" TV show—America's Got Candidates?—aimed at an audience that loves Jersey Shore. (Sarah Palin, her daughter Bristol and Bristol's loose-cannon ex, Levi Johnston, are all currently shooting reality shows.) But out of the swirling, often incoherent dreams of the American right, a sterner, more dignified figure emerges and commands attention. This is the libertarian, and, before you dismiss him as a fossil crackpot, note that it was the libertarian high priest, Ron Paul, who rebuked the whole chorus of conservative demagogues for their rabble-rousing protests against the Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero.
Unlike most of his fellow travelers on the right, a real libertarian does not pander. He has principles he actually understands and follows conscientiously. Libertarians blend the highest ideals with a holy sort of innocence and an unfortunate adolescent narcissism. Unlike most of us, they actually identify with Ayn Rand's supermen, those will-powered would-be masters of the universe whose destiny is impeded by lesser mortals and their silly laws. (Ayn Rand was by all accounts a repugnant personality, so self-important as to be the next thing to an idiot.) You may or may not be surprised to learn that I was a deep-dyed baby libertarian, allergic to all authority and infatuated with Barry Goldwater. Libertarianism appeals not only to free-market fundamentalists like the Koches, who dream of commercial rape and pillage, but also to the nonconformist and self-reliant. Most intelligent people have flirted with it. This stark dichotomy between small-government conservatives and regulation-loving socialists is a Fox News creation. Who honestly loves bureaucrats and laws that curb personal freedom? No one I've ever met.
The problem, of course, is that libertarians are supernaturally naive. They operate in neurotic denial of human nature. Like most ideologies—communism, laissez-faire capitalism, anarchism—libertarianism is based on the belief or disingenuous claim that human beings will naturally behave well. All evidence cries out to the contrary. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow, perhaps, but certainly the business editors of The New York Times. If you read the business pages every day, as I do, you understand that no government on earth could afford enough regulators to police the avaricious who take unfair and criminal advantage. From Bernie Madoff and the Ponzi industry to recalls of shoddy pacemakers to insurance companies (Prudential) who steal from the survivors of dead soldiers, the parade of greed and deceit would make a sneering cynic of Winnie the Pooh. And still deregulation is a passionate religion. The free-market right raged against regulators and environmentalists for decades, while the government babied the oil industry with incestuous concessions. Then came the disastrous BP oil spill, right on schedule. Naturally the bastards apologized and took it all back, right? Right.
The limits of libertarianism were dramatized when Ron Paul's son Rand (named after you-know-who?), Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, suggested that we were being much too hard on British Petroleum. Further limits were displayed when Rand Paul declared that civil rights laws should not apply to private businesses, causing one journalist I know to declare Paul "crazy as a tick" and another, an African-American, to suggest that in Rand Paul's America, he could drive from West Texas to Pennsylvania without finding a welcoming restroom.
The late Molly Ivins made a critical distinction between the right libertarian, who, like a spoiled child, pursues only his id, his Randian "I want," and a left libertarian, a category in which Ivins included herself and where I also feel comfortable. A left libertarian wants to be left alone, too, but he doesn't think that what he wants is more important than what other people need.
This spreading national narcissism, this petulant demand to have one's way, is infecting liberals as well. Many of them refused to vote for Obama, or have already given up on him, because they wanted a liberal messiah and got a pragmatic centrist who shies from confrontation. (At least liberals don't threaten to overturn election results by force of arms, the "Second Amendment Solution" favored by some treasonous tea party maniacs.) For a successful democracy of sane adults, it's never what we want but what we can reasonably expect, and achieve, in a communal context. And a sovereign nation is nothing if not a communal context.
I admit they surprised me, these old guys who've enlisted in the geezer rebellion. Their prostates may be compromised but their bile is potent. The first e-mail message I opened accused me of committing sex acts with Bill Moyers and with several domestic animals. One gentleman interrupted his tirade every third sentence or so, interjecting "Answer me, damn you!" as if he were shaking me by the shirt collar to force a confession. Alarming stuff. Another rabid individual accused me of ignoring left-wing atrocities (pregnant women attacked in their cars for displaying George Bush bumper stickers?) and concluded that I was "a hypocritical little bitch." Betraying a certain lack of media sophistication, some assumed that I lived in the city where they happened to read my essay, and threatened to pay a visit to my house. Most of them signed their names, too.
My memory doesn't extend back to anything quite like this, nothing so animated by rage yet devoid of content. As a friend of mine wrote several years ago, everything's like pro wrestling now: taunts and scowls, fantastic narratives and pantomimes of violence, empty conflict aimed at inflaming an audience of oafs. And of course we're aware that the wife of the founder of World Wrestling Entertainment, herself a participant in some of those preposterous ringside narratives, is spending a fortune to win a U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut. One key difference is that most tea party combatants come armed with deadly weapons, engineered to shed real blood. Dialogue, as I learned dramatically, is not their style. But what sort of dialogue can we imagine with a fierce minority virtually lobotomized by its gullibility, a minority of bubble-dwelling reactionaries whose every "fact" has been distorted or manufactured? The assaults on the pregnant women—is that something available in the right-wing blogosphere, something Michael Savage or Hal Turner was selling on the radio? Nearly every city has its own instigator, its mini-Limbaugh peddling bizarre conspiracy theories and assuring eager racists that Barack Obama is a Muslim/ communist/ antichrist born in Kenya and educated by terrorist mullahs in an Indonesian madrasah.
Most tea party mythology is so ridiculous that reasonable people will grin and ignore it. Sometimes they do so at their peril. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who passes for a moderate conservative in her home state of Alaska, lost the Republican primary to a Wild Right challenger because—observers theorize—she failed to respond to a fusillade of savage attack ads from the Tea Party Express (the same kamikaze group supposedly expelled from the party for posting a grotesquely racist "satire" of the NAACP on its blog). "They literally accused her of almost everything imaginable," one pollster reported. No doubt Murkowski thought that answering them was like trying to answer monkeys who scream and throw nuts and excrement from the treetops. In the shadow of Sarah Palin, she should have known better than to overestimate the intelligence of Alaska's Republicans. In this age of reality-proof information bubbles, lies and labels become deadly weapons.
The tea party's "Restoring Honor" rally on Aug. 28 in Washington was sponsored by the media demagogue Glenn Beck, self-anointed messiah of America's meanest morons. It was staged inappropriately—some say obscenely—at the site and on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous plea for civil rights, the speech remembered as "I Have a Dream." A throng of grizzled white insurgents cheered and whistled as Beck and Palin, an odd couple of vulgarians waxing very rich on their admirers' simplicity, appealed America's fate to a Higher Power. They exhorted us to pray on our knees for deliverance from socialism and recycled the apocalyptic language of the tent revival. "For too long, this country has wandered in darkness," preached Beck, prophet of a lurking new darkness that would make our old one look like a tropical sunrise. A T-shirt favored by his audience read "Babies, Guns, Jesus."
Compromise with such countrymen seems remote. For want of a leader they've embraced Beck, an evil clown whose classic megalomania is metastasizing before our eyes and cameras. Yet for all their dreadful manners and gross taste in role models, I can't help feeling a twinge of compassion for my contemporaries who fall into traps like the tea party. At an age when answering e-mail or mowing the lawn can be a critical drain on our energies, these seniors are out marching and waving banners. For some it may be a last stand, a final surge of adrenaline before the finish line looms. Those of us who disparage Americans for apathy feel obliged to applaud the physical and emotional energy tea-baggers bring to their cause. And it's such a terrible waste. Because, of course, they're clueless pawns who've been co-opted from the start and sent marching in the wrong direction.
It was the late fuhrer himself, a poor general but a supremely successful demagogue, who wrote, "The great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one." "Big government" is the big lie that our tea party has swallowed whole, with a hogwash chaser. An overripe canard from the conservative Chamber of Horrors, "big government" still works wonders with the logically impaired. (Hitler also wrote "All propaganda has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.") Did they notice that during the let-the-fat cats-feast administrations of George W. Bush, there was never a word about big government from the Glenn Beck section? Not even when deficits soared, hopeless wars drained the treasury and the White House expanded its powers in flat defiance of the Constitution.
If there's one firm truth, one persuasive image that might change the lives of hypnotized tea-baggers—I know, I'm dreaming—it would be this one, to wit: The relationship between corporate, special-interest America and our government is exactly the same as the relationship between a rider and a well-broken saddle horse; the horse is only cursed and kicked on the rare occasions when it bucks or bridles. Barack Obama saw health care reform and emergency regulation of the financial industry as self-evident necessities, but to the big riders who hold the reins in this country they registered as the kind of high-spirited fractiousness that's punished with whips and spurs. We never hear the words "socialist" and "communist" unless someone tries to dilute the absolute economic power of white men. Take a course in American history. Movements to abolish slavery (free labor), liberate women (free labor) and unionize workers (cheap labor) were all attacked tooth and claw by white men whose power and profits were threatened, who suddenly saw Bolsheviks behind every bush.
The current "big government" wave of right-wing rhetoric is about as populist, at heart, as a string of polo ponies. It's the latest attempt by the plutocrats to restore discipline to their stable of safe politicians—an uglier correction in this case because the new president is not white. Where does the tea party fit in? Old white men they may be, but everyone knows that white men of the ruling class don't wear T-shirts that say "Babies, Guns, Jesus." Past their prime, lower-middle class but not entirely uneducated, tea party soldiers may in some cases even understand that the gap between America's richest 1 percent and the rest of us has widened scandalously since 1980, and even more radically since the Bush tax cuts and the market crash of 2008.
The United States of America has become a cruel, winner-take-all society. What sets it apart from every other developed country (aside from its psychotic fetish for firearms) is the huge number of Americans who support that arrangement because they believe—against all evidence—that they are, or could be, among the winners. Ignorant and frustrating these losers may be, but almost touching in their hopeless hopefulness. They're the engine that drives the Republican Party, a fantastical coalition of wealthy cynics and gullible proletarians.
Tea party patriots belong to this sad class of manipulated stooges, marching in chains even as they proclaim their freedom. Unwittingly for the most part (their racism, too, has been excused as unwitting), they provide a populist smokescreen for corporate revenge. Even the lamest, tamest captive media might balk at parades of angry investment bankers in pinstriped Armani suits. Enter Joe the Plumber and Sarah the Hockey Mom. And it isn't rhetoric only that Big Business supplies for this "grassroots" movement of disgruntled Americans. Jane Mayer revealed in The New Yorker that the tea party's principal angels are the mega-billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles. The Koch family, one of America's half-dozen wealthiest, has been bankrolling the far right at least since the brothers' late father committed his oil money to the John Birch Society back in the 1950s. The Kochs' reactionary royalty control foundations and energy-industry political action committees that have lavished several hundred million dollars on the tea party and other right-wing causes in the past decade alone. Theirs are not the only corporate treasure chests available to the armies of the right. The New York Times recently exposed the personal largesse and fund-raising genius of Paul Singer, the hedge-fund ($17 billion) tycoon whose pet projects have included the appalling "Swift boat" attacks on John Kerry in 2004.
All intelligent Americans, the ones who deplore it and the ones who profit from it, are well aware of this populist scam. Everyone except the aging warriors out marching in the uniforms of the Continental Army. Their blindness is a greater shame, as I see it, because the tea party gets one very important thing right: The system is broken. Awash in money and mendacity, America's democracy is like a big animal that can't swim, floundering and drowning in 2 feet of water. Cash and slander rule—huge wallets, huge lies. If you won't lie and can't pay, you have no future in American politics. If you aspire to public service, try to find a country with a Supreme Court majority that doesn't spell "free $peech" with a dollar sign. The court's Citizens United decision last January, one that the Koch brothers must have toasted with Champagne, simply legitimized and institutionalized everything that's most disgusting about our system. To grasp the absurdity and obscenity of equating free corporate spending with free speech, visualize an actual political gathering, and put it to the bullhorn test. The crowd is huge, row after row, as far as the eye can see. One candidate has a huge bullhorn that reaches the back rows easily; his opponent has such a tiny bullhorn that his voice is inaudible beyond the 20th row. When he asks why he can't use a big bullhorn, too, they tell him, "Because you can't afford it." Think that's unfair, un-American? Tell it to the Supreme Court.
"We either get the money out of politics or we lose the democracy," Molly Ivins warned shortly before her death in 2007. In the brief span since, Michael Bloomberg spent more than $100 million to be re-elected mayor of New York, sinister players like the Koch brothers poured uncounted millions into the tea party's puppet theater, and the price of high office in important states rose into the tens of millions, with more and more billionaires and corporate titans prepared to pay it. No midterm election cycle has seen as many reckless big spenders as this one. Candidates had spent $400 million before the end of August, including unprecedented price tags on the campaigns of Meg Whitman ($104 million to date) and Carly Fiorina in California. Linda McMahon, the wrestling mogul, pledged to spend up to $50 million, if necessary, for Connecticut's Senate seat. This is a woman who once kicked her husband in the testicles on TV, as part of a phony McMahon family feud that had their Cro-Magnon wrestling fans in stitches. Remember when money was associated with class?
The right loves to talk about the Founders and original intent. Do they think the Founders meant to auction off the highest offices to the highest bidder? The Constitution never had a fighting chance against billionaires' egos or the Koch brothers' brand of checkbook democracy, which has frozen favored incumbents in office and swallowed up both Democrats and Republicans. They flip-flop in and out of power, regardless of their failures, because voters have no memory and no real options; third parties can never raise enough money to stop the revolving door. What's left of the two-party system is contemptible. The Democrats are reliably gutless, corrupt, selfish and indecisive—and perpetually the lesser of two evils since the Republican Party sold its meager soul to a thousand howling devils.
Epitomized by its recent standard-bearer, John McCain, the 21st-century GOP has renounced every constraint of integrity or responsibility and now fits snugly into H.L. Mencken's definition of a politician, regarded as humorous exaggeration when he wrote it in 1926: "A man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of the boot-polish ... He is willing to embrace any issue, however idiotic, that will get him votes, and he is willing to sacrifice any principal, however sound, that will lose them for him ..."
Republicans exist only to keep cash-and-power channels open for the richest and mightiest of America's invincible special interests. To achieve that they bond with any bigot, fanatic or neo-fascist extremist who can promise them votes. Most Republican congressmen now refuse even to work at their jobs. They live off our tax money, serve only to obstruct legislation and turn savagely on any colleagues who try to take part in the patient compromise that creates laws.
Expelling incumbents is nearly always a good idea, but with what do you replace them? Replacing the unappetizing Harry Reid with the unspeakable Sharron Angle is like treating your arthritis by cutting off your hand; replacing Barack Obama with Sarah Palin is like curing your gout by stepping on a land mine. Are the voters that stupid? A great many, I'm sure, and most of them drink Tea. "Larry, the people stink," the comic/ commentator Bill Maher said on Larry King Live, impressing me by ignoring the prime media taboo against bad-mouthing the sacred "American people."
The conventional wisdom is that America's sick economy and emotional discontent will benefit Republicans this fall, which is outrageously unfair; it was their ill-conceived wars and tax cuts and regulatory negligence that caused all the pain President Obama is struggling desperately to alleviate. Worse than unfair, it's plain crazy. But when were politics fair or rational? We all knew Bush's sins would be the ruin of Obama.
Throw the bums out, by all means. How many bums would we miss? But beware of what might come after. The right is not monolithic. All its serious money comes from the same sources, but the reactionary bestiary houses a variety of strange creatures with strange dreams. Tea party grandfathers dream of a 50-foot fence around Mexico, penal colonies for gays and abortionists, a warm gun in every holster and Fox News in every nursing-home dayroom. Rank-and-file Republicans dream only of regaining power, of Dick Cheney's Halliburton foreign policy once more set loose in the world. The Koches dream of a tiny, toothless government about the size of a cherry pit. As for Glenn Beck, don't let those bursts of tears and piety fool you. He's a refugee from a nightmare, he's fresh blood on the staircase. On a recent radio show, Beck recommended a book (The Red Network: A "Who's Who" and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots) written in 1934 by Elizabeth Dilling (1894–1966), the notorious anti-Semite, racist and Nazi sympathizer who called President Eisenhower "Ike the Kike" and JFK's New Frontier "the Jew Frontier." In her day, most people thought Dilling's deadly venom damaged right-wing causes. Will the same be true of her pop-eyed disciple?
A frightening array of opportunists, egomaniacs and amateur entertainers have stepped forward to exploit the national discontent, this supposed Thunder on the Right. Freed from the straitjackets of dignity or proportion, the scramble for office resembles a "reality" TV show—America's Got Candidates?—aimed at an audience that loves Jersey Shore. (Sarah Palin, her daughter Bristol and Bristol's loose-cannon ex, Levi Johnston, are all currently shooting reality shows.) But out of the swirling, often incoherent dreams of the American right, a sterner, more dignified figure emerges and commands attention. This is the libertarian, and, before you dismiss him as a fossil crackpot, note that it was the libertarian high priest, Ron Paul, who rebuked the whole chorus of conservative demagogues for their rabble-rousing protests against the Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero.
Unlike most of his fellow travelers on the right, a real libertarian does not pander. He has principles he actually understands and follows conscientiously. Libertarians blend the highest ideals with a holy sort of innocence and an unfortunate adolescent narcissism. Unlike most of us, they actually identify with Ayn Rand's supermen, those will-powered would-be masters of the universe whose destiny is impeded by lesser mortals and their silly laws. (Ayn Rand was by all accounts a repugnant personality, so self-important as to be the next thing to an idiot.) You may or may not be surprised to learn that I was a deep-dyed baby libertarian, allergic to all authority and infatuated with Barry Goldwater. Libertarianism appeals not only to free-market fundamentalists like the Koches, who dream of commercial rape and pillage, but also to the nonconformist and self-reliant. Most intelligent people have flirted with it. This stark dichotomy between small-government conservatives and regulation-loving socialists is a Fox News creation. Who honestly loves bureaucrats and laws that curb personal freedom? No one I've ever met.
The problem, of course, is that libertarians are supernaturally naive. They operate in neurotic denial of human nature. Like most ideologies—communism, laissez-faire capitalism, anarchism—libertarianism is based on the belief or disingenuous claim that human beings will naturally behave well. All evidence cries out to the contrary. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow, perhaps, but certainly the business editors of The New York Times. If you read the business pages every day, as I do, you understand that no government on earth could afford enough regulators to police the avaricious who take unfair and criminal advantage. From Bernie Madoff and the Ponzi industry to recalls of shoddy pacemakers to insurance companies (Prudential) who steal from the survivors of dead soldiers, the parade of greed and deceit would make a sneering cynic of Winnie the Pooh. And still deregulation is a passionate religion. The free-market right raged against regulators and environmentalists for decades, while the government babied the oil industry with incestuous concessions. Then came the disastrous BP oil spill, right on schedule. Naturally the bastards apologized and took it all back, right? Right.
The limits of libertarianism were dramatized when Ron Paul's son Rand (named after you-know-who?), Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, suggested that we were being much too hard on British Petroleum. Further limits were displayed when Rand Paul declared that civil rights laws should not apply to private businesses, causing one journalist I know to declare Paul "crazy as a tick" and another, an African-American, to suggest that in Rand Paul's America, he could drive from West Texas to Pennsylvania without finding a welcoming restroom.
The late Molly Ivins made a critical distinction between the right libertarian, who, like a spoiled child, pursues only his id, his Randian "I want," and a left libertarian, a category in which Ivins included herself and where I also feel comfortable. A left libertarian wants to be left alone, too, but he doesn't think that what he wants is more important than what other people need.
This spreading national narcissism, this petulant demand to have one's way, is infecting liberals as well. Many of them refused to vote for Obama, or have already given up on him, because they wanted a liberal messiah and got a pragmatic centrist who shies from confrontation. (At least liberals don't threaten to overturn election results by force of arms, the "Second Amendment Solution" favored by some treasonous tea party maniacs.) For a successful democracy of sane adults, it's never what we want but what we can reasonably expect, and achieve, in a communal context. And a sovereign nation is nothing if not a communal context.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Please Read This
Republicans and the Middle Class
Published: September 13, 2010
But it was refreshing to hear a Republican leader say that he could conceivably vote for any bill supported by President Obama. Perhaps the man the Republicans hope will be speaker of the House felt some pressure from Mr. Obama’s recent efforts to remind Americans that the Republicans were proposing to sacrifice the middle-class Americans, yet again, in the name of failed trickle-down economics.
For months, Republican leaders have been uniform in their insistence that they would allow everyone’s taxes to rise if the rich did not get to keep their Bush-era tax breaks. Mr. Obama has proposed continuing the tax cut for the 98 percent of taxpaying families earning less than $250,000 while allowing the tax rates for the top 2 percent to return to their levels prior to the Bush administration. Republicans have demanded tax cuts for all, and, so far, not a single Republican leader has lined up behind Mr. Boehner’s concession.
Even his deputy, Eric Cantor, the House Republican whip, issued a no-compromise statement on Monday demanding a “clean bill,” which means one that would make no distinction between tax cuts for the rich and for everyone else. Anything short of that, he said, is a “nonstarter.” Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, introduced a bill on Monday that would extend the tax cuts indefinitely for everyone, including the wealthiest Americans. He may well be joined by Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut independent, and a few conservative Democrats.
But we hope Mr. Boehner would not be the only Republican to refuse to allow middle-class tax rates to rise, as they are scheduled to do at the end of this year. Even if it gave Democrats something to crow about, cutting those rates makes economic sense during a recession (though we disagree with Mr. Obama’s plan to cut the rates permanently). Holding the middle-class cuts hostage to those for the wealthy would pose both a political danger to Republicans and an economic danger to the nation.
Ultimately, the case for the top-level tax cuts is increasingly shaky. If Republicans are the least bit serious about reducing the deficit, they have to acknowledge that doing so requires additional revenues, $700 billion of which would be lost to the top 2 percent of earners in the next decade if their taxes do not rise. Handing out those revenues to the rich would have little stimulative effect on the economy because those taxpayers tend to save rather than spend their marginal income.
Mr. Cantor and other hard-line tax-cutters like to claim that the high-end cuts would go to small businesses and other “job creators.” But they should listen carefully to another of Mr. Boehner’s surprising acknowledgments on Sunday. Under sharp questioning from Bob Schieffer on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Mr. Boehner admitted that only 3 percent of small businesses would pay higher taxes under Mr. Obama’s proposal. As the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation recently reported, 97 percent of the taxpayers with business income would get a cut under Mr. Obama’s plan.
That is something that Republicans simply do not say out loud; it would add inconvenient facts to a battle that they prefer to wage at a purely emotional level. But Mr. Obama’s efforts to enact a reasonable tax policy are not just good politics. They make good sense.
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