There may have been a time when Republican ideology mattered, but that was when Republicans still cared about the integrity of their ideas. Now Republicans use ideas as smoke bombs, to impede and destroy and subvert discourse. They have no rational attachment to the ideas they espouse, they just toss them out to give cover to their true agenda, which is the unbridled pursuit of power and money.

As one small example, let's compare the supposedly defining Republican ideal of small gov't. with Republican policies under Bush. There is simply no correspondence between the idea and the policy. The Baer Stearns/Fanny-Freddie bailouts are not just poorly crafted policies but they run completely counter to the rationale Republicans offer in sinking other policy initiatives. And the bailouts represent a tiny fraction of gov't. profligacy under Bush.

Debating Republican ideology is like plotting a new course for the Titanic as it founders in the North Sea. Democracy doesn't work with only one party interested in a sincere debate about issues, and Republicans have abandoned all interest in sincere debate, in their ideals, in democracy itself. Before any new ideas can bring new life to the Republican enterprise, Republicans need to get a lesson in civics. They need to find the integrity of their principles, and as elitist and effete as it may seem to them, bring their ideas to the table and hammer out policies through democratic discourse. America will continue to suffer while we wait for Republicans to take responsibility for their role in making democracy work.

TB

Posted at July 17, 2008 10:47 AM in response to Ross Is Right!

Okay, Max.
At least I wasn't condescending to you.

- Mr. Bucklin

Posted at May 27, 2008 11:02 PM in response to Taking the Adversary Seriously: History and Condescension

I appreciate Mr. Sawicky’s comments and would like to add:

The condescension claim by the right was merely a branch of the overall anti-intellectual strategy (remember the eggheads) conservatives used to garner support of blue-collar voters, playing on their insecurities and fears while the clever (and well-educated) conservatives dreamed of, and now have succeeded in, screwing them by “unshackling” corporate power while retarding the power of workers in the marketplace. Another branch of the anti-intellectual strategy was to label the news media “liberal”, opening the door to more mass appeal (blue collar) news outlets like Fox, and now reaching its apotheosis, anti-intellectualism of the right undermines the very notions of “fact” and “truth,” confusing opinion with reason-based (intellectually determined) analysis. As seen under Bush, we now have policies that are utterly unmoored from reason, fact and truth, with disastrous results across the board, from Iraq to Enron and the mortgage meltdown to No Child Left Behind to the EPA.

Three things come to mind; first, it’s remarkable how successful this strategy (in concert with despicable efforts like the Southern Strategy and its evil spawn, exploiting and exacerbating racial/class/religious tensions and hatred for political gain) has been in keeping blue collar voters in the conservative fold. Liberals were condescending to conservatives because they could not believe the electorate would be swayed by such transparently base and “un-American” values. The conservative departure from and disavowal of essential principles of American democracy seemed foolish and reckless, and certainly deserved no respect until it was shown to be politically successful, but of course by then it was too late. In order for liberals to truly meet conservatives on the political battlefield and compete, they would have to jettison their intellectual baggage, their effete democratic principles, and go mano a mano with conservatives who had long since given up democratic principles in the interest of winning elections and power. Clinton-style triangulation was the first “liberal” attempt to meet the conservatives in their ruts. I do not think it was a smashing success, though it had its moments. Sadly, I think it muddied rather than clarified differences between the two parties.

Second of all, while conservatives have seized the victim role (and thus the high ground) by claiming that liberals are/were condescending to them, condescending might not be the right word. Thus, I would caution Mr. Perelstein from unabashedly admitting condescension by liberals without at least examining what liberals were really feeling about the new conservative strategies, because I would say that there is absolutely good reason for any reasonable person, liberal or otherwise, to feel such strong feelings as disgust and betrayal and incredulity at the trajectory of conservative power politics over the past decades. Condescension is a polite way of expressing disdain, and if you look at what 30 years of conservative strategy has gotten us, especially as expressed in the final distillation of it of the Bush Administration, I would say that disdain is a far too tepid response. In addition to apologizing for hurting those poor conservatives by being condescending to their cutthroat democracy-destroying movement, we might also show how what they have done has by now almost irreversibly moved us beyond democracy into some hybrid fascist corporatocracy.

Finally, it is often said in this discussion of conservative history, by Mr. Perelstein, George Packer in his review in the New Yorker, and commenters, as well as conservatives themselves, that conservatism is an ideology. While there may be a few ideas tossed in for flavor, what has made the conservative movement successful over the past decades is a rejection of ideology for strategy. After all, ideology is nothing if it is not intellectual - strains of academic thought and philosophy woven into a cohesive fabric. Gradually over the past 30 years, conservatism has abandoned ideology as it rejected intellectualism in favor of bare-knuckles power politics.

While one might for a moment be duped into thinking that say, Reagan’s notion of the federal government as corrupt, inept and a waste of your hard-earned tax dollars was an ideology, you’d be wrong on two counts. First, to the extent that it was ideological, it was an idea in service of a strategy to disenfranchise the electorate from their democratic stake in the government, with the added advantage that it left power in the hands of those who actually were running the government, as public faith and involvement in government dropped off. Secondly, if it were truly an ideology in service to democratic principles, conservatives, after discrediting government as it is, would have been pushing a discussion about what was the function of government and to what end should our tax monies be spent. You’ve heard Reagan and his sycophants railing for decades against the federal government, but you hardly ever hear conservatives say something about what good it can serve. Ideologies are discussed and debated and they exist in the context of other ideologies. Conservatives would never be so weak as to actually accord credence to anyone else’s ideology.

Eventually conservatives, around the time of the Gingrich ascendancy I suppose, dropped all pretense of collegiality, and declared all out war on liberalism and in effect, democracy. From a strategic point of view what this meant was that conservatives no longer had to maintain the pretense of legislation, they just went ahead and rammed through their programs and failing that, forced the opposition to swallow poison pills for any resistance they might offer. Every move was made in light of its political power ramifications, without consideration of larger social consequences. In declaring war, conservatives claimed a mantle of righteous certainty they didn’t deserve and which cut against the very fabric (woven of lofty, intellectually-derived, philosophically-based ideas) of democracy.

To conservatives I say, Condescension? Get over it! When you cultivate anti-intellectualism, when you reject reason, fact and truth in favor of race-baiting and intolerance and selfishness, when you declare war on your fellow citizens because they don’t agree with your narrow viewpoint, you look kind of stupid and small-minded. Exactly the kind of person who should be condescended to.

Ted Bucklin

Posted at May 27, 2008 1:29 PM in response to Taking the Adversary Seriously: History and Condescension

First of all, Ignatief's rambling, non-specific maybe-culpa was a very sorry excuse for an epiphany. This guy was a professor of political science? I guess today political science is essentially the science of saying nothing in as many words as possible. That part about intellectual life vs political life reminded me of Rumsfeld-speak: known-knowns and unknown-knowns and such. Drivel.

As an influential and supposedly intellectual person, Ignatieff participated in bringing to pass this nightmare of the Iraq War, with all its glaring immoralities and disastrous outcomes, and he bares responsibility for it. Yet he could barely bring himself to say he was sorry, much less articulate clearly how he came to make the mistakes. Perhaps in a moment of bad conscience (and why try to explain your mistakes if you don't feel bad about them?), he felt the need to talk about it, but when pen met paper he lost his courage and started kerfluffeling with intellectual mumbo jumbo having almost nothing to do with his ultimate realization that he'd been wrong and the result is horrific.

I think Ignatieff should rewrite his essay using a few expository writing rules, a little Strunk&White action, and see if he can make it clear and simple.

Maybe he could explain how he forgot how horrific war is, how unpredictable, how expensive, what a lousy instrument of policy, how completely antithetical war is to the principles of humane, democratic ideals, how stupid and cruel and unjust it is, how good intentions in war are inevitably vaporized by bombs and bullets no matter who sets them off.

Reed ticks off a long list of historical reasons why the war was ill-fated. I'd like to hear Mr. Ignatieff explain by what process he ignored all that, what blinded him in spite of his intellectual prowess and knowledge of history.

Ignatieff's article was bunk, like Tenet's autobiography, self-serving and utterly without remorse, gauze meant to cover the wound, not expose it. True remorse requires a full divestiture of one's errors, down to the bone. Sorry Mr. I., but "listening too much to Iraqi exiles" barely scratches the surface.

TB

Posted at August 7, 2007 2:41 PM in response to Arrrgghh

I feel like I’ve been watching this oncoming train for years now, but it’s been so long and now I’m stuck on the tracks, I can’t get out of the way and it’s going to roll on over me, over all of us.

For all the crimes and destruction wrought by the Bush administration, and I won’t even try to list them, the worst by far was invading Iraq. Everything else has been mere confirmation of their duplicity, their fundamental antipathy toward the most basic principles of good governance and democratic principles. Revealed to the public at first in dribs and drabs, a fake mushroom cloud here, a Geneva- dismissing torture memo there, an outed CIA agent working undercover, every few weeks a new outrage, we still thought there would be a day of reckoning for the perpetrators.

By now the daily offenses astound us not so much in the depth of their depravities but in their breadth. Not a single arena of government remains uncorrupted by the touch of King George. And yet, as long as he pretends there is no problem, Bush remains unbowed and unresponsive to the public’s clamor for truth. It is hard to imagine how there will ever be a day of reckoning for this gang.

So after being slapped in the face a thousand times, maybe, as polls suggest is happening, America finally decides its time to wake up and impeach the bastards. Well, sorry, but it’s way too late. The time to draw a line was back then in 2003 or 04 when it first became obvious they were beyond the pale, beyond shame. Congress, the nation, we folded when it really mattered, and it’s all been downhill since then.

Of course Americans are right to think that short of impeachment, there is great danger that the crimes of this administration will become precedent for the next. But it’s really too late for that too. This is a new reality and we will never return to the innocence of before. Anyone ambitious enough to seek the presidency will keep in mind the tricks of the Bush years, how easy it is to subvert democracy in the interest of power and money.

And of course there’s no way Congress will impeach. That’s just one measure of how paralyzed we are as a nation. There really is nothing we can do through normal channels, the entire process of citizen-directed government is thwarted by an administration that has the gall to ignore utterly the will of the governed, the rule of law, the Constitution, or any other inconvenient source of disagreement. Tony Snow’s (and Alberto G’s) little performances yesterday (see TPMmedia) highlight the administration’s contempt for any standard of accountability. Snow actually seems to taunt those of us who would be foolish enough to think we’ll ever get any concrete evidence of their malfeasance, as if their stonewalling and the consequent lack of actionable evidence acquits them fully of wrongdoing.

The American public is paralyzed, confused by the tragic situation in Iraq, all options bad and worse, no possibility of an equable resolution, baffled by a media that would paint a smiley face on a pig’s ass and call it good news, hypnotized by an economy that sways back and forth like a cobra preparing to strike, and ill-served by a Congress held hostage by Republican Roadblockers who hope to put off their day of reckoning long enough that we’ll forget they were responsible for this mess.

There is only one way to wake up out of this nightmare before January 20th, 2009, and it requires unconventional action, whether by Congress or the public at large. Congress must challenge the president with exactly the same disdain for his version of that office that he has shown for theirs. Rather than pulling all the same levers that have been pulled before, to no avail, it’s time to look for a new way to get Bush administration to change course. Impeachment, censure, any of the normal constitutional avenues are compromised by the administration’s intransigence and the Roadblockers’ perfidy. Subpoenas, contempt of Congress citations, threats of perjury and obstruction of justice citations, even lawful convictions are scoffed at by Tony Snow and thwarted by the Bush administration. Congress must think outside the confines of norms and precedents to find a way to get the president’s attention.

And if Congress lacks the will to call the president’s bluff, that means it’s up to us. It’s time to wake up America. It’s time to act. It’s time to make some noise. It’s time to push back. We’ve had enough of the Bush Demockery.

Posted at July 26, 2007 2:33 PM in response to Impeachment Open Thread

Indeed, "choice" is often a cover for racism, as well as for general distaste for government run programs, which tend to try to pull diverse (racial) communities together on principle. Conservatives have been sowing the seeds of mistrust since the '50s certainly, demanding that "choice" to not send kids to public school and not pay for it is a public right.

America has been arguing about choice for decades when what we should be discussing is how to make our public schools an embarrassment of riches. Imagine if we had the attitude toward schools and the kids who attend them that we have toward our defense budget. Every hare-brained 25-billion school program would get funded, then we'd say nothing as the costs balloon toward a hundred billion, we'd just be happy we were throwing our money away into the education industry.

What do you prefer, a bloated defense industry that uses tax monies to build weapons no one in their right mind would ever want to use, or which are so poorly designed no one would ever risk using them, or a bloated education industry, where schools are overstuffed with hardware, books, food, lovely facilities, well-paid staff, gardens and support programs?

I mean really, let's talk about choosing between weapons and education, not between underfunded public schools and private schools.

Posted at July 10, 2007 7:22 AM in response to In Which I Outsource to Prof. Martin Carnoy

(I just have to say how impressive it is to read the comments on this and many other TPMCafe threads. I am heartened by the thoughtful intelligent discussion where ideas are considered for their merit, veracity is valued, and even the occasional silly neocon trope is given a brief moment before it is mercifully snuffed out. It's precious because it is so rare.)

As for education, for all the ostensible (paltry) merits of vouchers, I think they function as a Trojan Horse for conservatives hoping to strike a blow to government-run social welfare programs, including public education. The performance of voucher programs is a minor concern to voucher supporters. It makes them happy to see a program that weakens the state's monopoly on education.

So, no matter the effectiveness of vouchers, the government-haters support them. And it seems that policymaking and governance across the board has now been brought to this level of argument (which is why it's so heartening to read this thread).

I would argue that given the sad state of the entire public education infrastructure all this hair-splitting on how to ration out limited resources is a waste of time. What we really need is a national campaign that highlights the principles of good husbandry of our children, and redirects generous government resources toward that priority.

1) Public education is an expression of our national commitment to all our children. Our public schools need to demonstrate to our children that they are of primary importance to us as a nation as they are to us as parents. A country that spends nearly half its budget on military adventure but whines when it's time to pony up for schools needs to learn a lesson.

2) Teachers need to be affirmed as some of the most important members of society. They need to be paid well and they need to be supported in their Herculean efforts on our children's behalf.

3) The idea that schools can do anything to better a child's performance without the full support of parents is ludicrous. One of the most despicable ways that government-haters undermine parents' faith in public schools is to insist that the schools should cure what are societal ills that afflict the entire family. No child will thrive in school without adequate food, shelter, security, without a parent or two cultivating love of learning at home. Parents must be involved in their children's education. The greatest policy challenge for educators is to find a way to engage parental assistance in the noble endeavor of their children's education. Without parents school becomes a babysitter, with no possible hope of education, and that's what we have now. We as a nation need to decide between babysitting and education.

4) Make television, video games, and other mind numbing (and thus infinitely popular, addictive) activities contingent on, or subservient to, education. I know this sounds proto-fascist or prohibitionary, but while study after study tries to establish a link between violence, bad morals, etc. and TV, the real problem is how spending so much time in video-land diminishes children's appetite and aptitude for learning. TV is the equivalent of prenatal alcohol syndrome for the postnatal set. It quashes childhood development and displaces educational (and relational) experience.

Nuff said.

Posted at July 9, 2007 8:42 AM in response to In Which I Outsource to Prof. Martin Carnoy

Thank you Dan K,

I've always felt queasy about patriotic fervor. Every time I see a bumper sticker that says "Proud to be an American" I wonder what's to be proud about. Yes, there's some good stuff, but how can anyone feel proud when there's torture and war and lawlessness at the highest levels?

And yes, I think AnnMarie and many other would-be centrists are trying to cook up a progressive burrito wrapped in a red, white and blue tortilla, looking for some way to appeal to the red meat people.

In my view this is a hopeless task. What is the probability that patriotism-addled right wingers, who use reason as perhaps the last consideration in forming an opinion, will even enter a discussion of reasoned discourse, even if it has been given a mild patriotic flavor? It's just not how they operate. The entire right wing/neocon discourse has been designed to reject any and all ideas that do not correspond to their world view with a vehemence that precludes even a cursory consideration of alternative ideas, Ann Marie's (and America's) included. For "patriots" patriotism is used to prevent thoughtful consideration, not engage in it.

Thus, Ann Marie and other centrists seeking dialogue with the red meat people, hope they can bring them to the table by pretending to be one of them, a patriotic 'Merican. But no matter what it comes wrapped in, a vegetarian burrito is a vegetarian burrito.

Ted B.

Posted at June 22, 2007 7:57 AM in response to More on that Idea

“Abu Ghraib is just the price of defending democracy.”

From Sidney Blumenthal's "Imperial Presidency Declared Null and Void" on salon.com:

"The President," the [US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit] said, "claims power that far exceeds that granted him by the Constitution."

"Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them "enemy combatants" ... Of course, this does not mean that the President lacks power to protect our national interests and defend our people, only that in doing so he must abide by the Constitution."

So it seems public opinion, much of Congress, the courts, the law, all agree that the Bush Administration is destroying the American Idea. Yet the destruction continues unabated.

What's a citizen to do?

If Bush & Co won't listen, if repubs in Congress continue to enable these abominations because they would rather protect their political fortunes than face the truth of Constitutional demolition by their fellows, I fear the barn doors are open and our lovely American Idea has galloped off to the next country.

Is this still a democracy?

- Ted Bucklin

Posted at June 21, 2007 7:01 AM in response to More on that Idea

I think Ms. Warren raises the most important political question of the past 25 years with “The 'R' Word.” Going back to Reagan, the first chief executive to trash the entire enterprise of governance (and why wouldn’t we lowly plebians believe the guy who sits atop the heap and sees everything?), regulation has become an almost universally reviled word, on a par with the term “liberal.” If there were a single concept that governs the conservative mind, it would have to be aversion to regulation. Sadly, much of the American public has bought into the utterly immature notion that no one should have to submit to the humiliation of regulation, America is about is freedom (from regulation).

The sheer mindless idiocy of this aversion to regulation has yet to be examined seriously in public. Government is entirely about regulation, and the determination of which regulations yield the most benefit for the most people is in fact the most basic democratic function. Aversion to regulation is equivalent to aversion to government, and conservative antipathy toward both regulation and government has climaxed with the current nightmare (for representative democracy) of the Bush Administration. And it’s not just Bush, but his legions of doctrinaire fools in office throughout the federal bureaucracy who think regulation is a curse.

It is a human tendency to highlight aversive consequences of governance (ie taxes, speed limits, costly environmental regs, tort laws) while downplaying the benefits that directly and indirectly accrue from submitting to governance (such as moderately functional institutions of society that are created, financed and run under government regulations incorporating certain societal values such as fairness, safety, openness, uniformity and dependability into policy). Ronald Reagan and his conservative heirs have made a political movement out of denigrating government, promoting a childish fantasy that freedom means we don’t have to worry about anyone else. Meanwhile they have eviscerated the ideal of the common good while sucking dry the institutional reservoirs that have been slowly filled over generations and maintained in the public interest.

I see regulation as a personal civic responsibility. As a concerned and participating citizen of our democracy, it as my civic duty to regulate my behaviors for the common good. I largely abide by laws and regulations in part because I see them as an affirmation of the democratic process. Sure there are some that chap my hide, but does it make sense to trash the entire enterprise of democratic governance because there are some regs I don’t like? As long as regulations are forged in the public interest, I willingly, perhaps even enthusiastically, submit to them.

Democracy is a process by which the concerns of all citizens are taken into consideration and hammered into policy, law and regulation. Concern for all is the defining principle of democracy, and regulation is the expression of that concern. Perhaps the day will come when the American public re-evaluates its commitment to the common good and re-engages with the imperfect, often frustrating and ponderously slow process of democracy. For now, we seem unconcerned about the drastic changes wrought by the government-hating conservatives who have been busily disabling the instruments of regulation, and in the process redirecting our institutions away from the principles of democracy.

While it is important to evaluate the particulars of such regulations as lending rules, etc. as seen in posts above, at this point such fine-grained analysis is a distraction from a much more important issue. It is urgent that we now debate the essential function of regulation and government before conservatives have so thoroughly undermined them that we are unable to re-establish a credible democratic system.

Americans need to decide whether they are willing to participate in the work of democracy, deciding which rules (regulations) are appropriate for maintaining a civil society dedicated to the principles of democracy and public welfare. Simply demonizing regulation, as conservatives love to do, is both childishly simplistic and profoundly damaging to our democracy.

-Ted Bucklin

Posted at June 12, 2007 10:26 AM in response to The "R" Word