Friday Blognado: The downward spiral
Today marks the end of blognado proper. While I do hope to put up a post on Saturday and Sunday, they will be much shorter than my customary door-stopper length as I will be otherwise engaged for much of the weekend.
Today I’m going to write a much more political post than I normally do. Specifically, I’d like to discuss what I see as a troubling trend in the Republican party, and why I think people of all political persuasions should be concerned by it. Now before I get started, let me just say that naturally as a foreigner there are limits as to how clued-in I can be about your politics. I pay attention of course, but I don’t know anyone personally who is a member of the Republican party (any more than I personally know any members of the Democratic party, both are pretty rare down here as I’m sure you can imagine). So what I am about to say is a lot more speculative than, say the post on taxes I did on Tuesday, and it should be regarded in that light.
Also politics is notoriously changeable. Popular sentiments twist and reverse for reasons I often find unintelligible. So it may well be that what I see as the thin end of the wedge is just an anomaly and nothing will come of it. If so I will be happy to have been wrong.
So, with those caveats in mind let me describe what I see as a disturbing trend in the Republican party – namely an increasing insistence on a narrow orthodoxy that I feel is corrosive to the Republican party, and more broadly to American democracy.
It seems to me that the Republican party has been drifting ever more conservative in recent years. In particular, it seems that on a plethora of issues (gay rights, immigration, taxes) there is now only one correct stance, and any dissent is seen as a deal-breaker. Note that John McCain and Mitt Romney had to reverse themselves on significant policy positions they held (immigration and healthcare respectively) just to be taken seriously as Republican candidates. How well would even Reagan fare today with his views on immigration? There’s nothing wrong with conservative voters preferring politicians with conservative policies, but it seems like there is an increasingly long list of deal-breakers.
But even more disturbing than that is the insistence on certain factual positions. Climate change in particular. Look at the trouble Huntsman had because he did what any president should do – based his policies on the consensus of experts. You don’t have to follow expert recommendations, because it’s up to the politicians to make a decision. But second-guessing the factual statements of your expert advisors is a sign of a poor candidate for the Presidency. So while it would be legitimate to argue that climate change is real but we shouldn’t use invasive policy responses to deal with it, arguing that climate change isn’t real isn’t a legitimate position for a politician to take (unless they happen to be an expert in climatology in their own right).
Finally there seems to be a double-standard that I find confusing. Take Newt Gingrich, he trades is wife in for a new model every decade or so, and yet he can talk about the sanctity of marriage without being laughed off stage. Then you have people like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain who are clearly incompetent to hold any government office, but both looked like serious contenders at some point. And now the non-Romney du jour is Santorum, who seems to think contraception is the big issue of the day. Now I know it’s easy to forgive the shortcomings of people you affiliate with, but this seems to be taking it to extremes.
Taken together, these trends suggest that the primary metric which Republican voters are judging candidates by is their ability to signal affiliation with republican voters. That’s a problem because independent voters are unlikely to react to those signals the same way Republicans do. For that matter not all Republicans will react to them the same way, which creates the potential for a serious problem.
A few years ago the inestimable Eliezer Yudkowsky postulated an Evaporative Cooling model of group dynamics whereby a group start to drive out it’s more moderate members. This increases the average fanaticism of the remaining members leading to another round of purging moderates. The result is a downward spiral leading to a cult-like group of fanatical adherents with no mainstream support. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, but I fear that what I’m seeing in the Republican primary is the first signs of a Republican collapse.
Assuming you’re still with me at this point, you might be inclined to accuse me of concern trolling. After all, I’ve never indicated any affiliation for conservatives, and I can see how me saying “Hey Republicans, be less conservative!” could be obnoxious. First let me assure you that I’m not not say be less conservative (sure I’d prefer it if you were, but I don’t actually expect you to do it on my account). What I am saying is that Republican voters should care about conservative policy more than conservative buzzwords. Candidates like Huntsam, who seemed genuinely conservative (even if he’s not an ideal conservative candidate) get overlooked in favour of Gingrich (who clearly doesn’t understand what “sanctity of marriage” means) and Santorum (who apparently thinks the small in small government refers to micromanagement). That doesn’t seem conservative to me.
The other reason why I don’t think I’m concern trolling is that I do have a reason to care, and so do Democrats. Democratic politics is premised on the idea of competitive checks on power. If one party abuses government power, the voters can rein them in by voting for the other party. But if the other party has gone off the reservation, what’s the alternative? Obama has engaged in a number of policies that should be of concern to anyone on the left, but how can the left act against Obama, when doing so might be seen as an endorsement of Republicans? Without a strong Republican party to challenge them the Democrats will become increasingly corrupt and self-serving secure in the knowledge that their voters have nowhere else to turn.
You may suggest that if this turn of events were to come about, another party would rise up and replace the Republicans, just as the Federalists and Whigs were replaced. My concern is that this is no longer possible. The US seems to have very restrictive rules about ballot access, apparently the Libertarians still find it very difficult to get onto the presidential ballot in every state, and that combined with gerrymandering might make it impossible for a new party to gain a foothold. Not to mention how much money it costs to mount an electoral campaign and how do you get that money without an established party machine? Now I understand why the presidency is a 2-horse race, Duverger’s Law and all that. But what about all those congressional races that are 1-horse races? Why don’t we see the Green Party contesting blue seats where the Republicans have no shot? Equally you’d expect some uber conservative party to be contesting the reddest seats. I’m of the opinion that you won’t see a monopoly in most markets in the absence of large barriers to entry, and that makes me concerned that a 3rd party would be blocked form entry.
Now as I said at the start of the post, I may very well be wrong about all of this, I’m not an expert in this field. I may be overstating the strength of the trend, misreading the motives of Republican voters or underestimating the dynamism of American politics. But the US government is going to have to make some very hard decision in the next 20 years, decisions which will affect the whole world. I’m nervous enough about the outcomes of those decisions as it is, without adding extra worries about American democracy going to seed.
I think part of the issue with single-horse races is the rampant gerrymandering. Take a look at Texas (if you can do so without puking); the Republican party is somewhere between 35-40% of population, depending on numbers, but having managed to control their legislature in 2000, they managed through multiple rounds of gerrymandering (including the infamous Tom DeLay shenanigans) to lock up 2/3 of the texas house and senate and roughly 2/3 of the congressional delegation too.
The only way to even contest these assholes is to go after them in the Republican Primary rather than the general election… and the only way to beat them in a primary, where only registered Republicans can vote, is to play it even more “conservative” than the guy in office.
Thus you get the predecessor to all the GOP-sponsored rape bills, the “texas sonogram bill”, introduced and championed by Dan “smaller government except I get to decide what women do with their hoo-hah, oh and fuck education spending the kids can just work the fields” Patrick himself – a man who NEVER would have managed to get elected if it weren’t for gerrymandered safe districts and a bribe to his opponent to agree to drop out of the race in exchange for part ownership of Patrick’s right-wing talk radio station.Report
Ok wtf? I tried to post, it vanished, then I tried to post again and it says I already posted?Report
I think your original post came in but ya didn’t see it. Browser hiccup?Report
James K another excellent Blognado (BTW did you make up that term? If so let’s follow it and see if it gets legs).
Jeff Bell has some interesting thoughts and apparently stats to back up the /lean/ in Republican politics in this country. It is like the problem with mudslinger ads here, everyone criticizes them but the stats prove they work and work well, unfortunately. Ocamb‘s razor is right here, since the average person (correctly IMO) believes all politicians are corrupt it is much easier to think the worst of them than the best.
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I did, though it is also a reference to a short-lived TV show called The Middleman.Report
Greens run as a second party in San Francisco, occasionally getting elected.
Down in texas, it’s libertarian versus republican.
Thing is? Republicans are different everywhere, as are democrats. We have PRO-LIFE democrats in my state (a US senator!)
And you’re missing an entire dynamic — the shadow leadership of a party.
My prediction is that once Koch (and company) is done running the Republicans into a ditch, there’s going to be a saner conservative party. I dunno if they’ll call it republican or not, but it won’t be this social conservative nutjob place it is now. It will Definitely be more environmentally friendly (can’t HELP that, people been pumping oil stocks so they can get out of them, and the whole “no global warming” is another ploy to get people to invest…)Report
I wouldn’t be too–pardon me–concerned about the direction of the Republican party or for that matter the concept that “the Democrats will become increasingly corrupt and self-serving secure in the knowledge that their voters have nowhere else to turn” because of the purity climate this election cycle. The tactics and talking points haven’t changed as long as I can remember between the two parties. It might calm your fears a bit to go back and see what the two parties were saying to and about eachother both in ’80 and ’84 (or any General election cycle for that matter). Trust me, the talk now PALES in comparison, and I can still get the pill, I can still drink the water, and, oh yeah, we haven’t been destroyed by nuclear holocaust. Perspective helps.Report
We’ve come a long way from Ike. We’ve come a long way from our last liberal president (Nixon). And yes, ’84 was whack, very different from now.
The democrats now own the center (and a touch of the right, courtesy of Obamacare). In ’84 it was the other way around.
But let me put it this way — it took the democrats 40 years to become corrupt in power. And it took the Republicans about six.Report
It’s not the attitude of Republican voters toward Democratic candidates that concerns me, it’s the attitude of Republican voters toward Republican candidates.Report
I had written a magnum opus of a comment on this thread, hit submit, and the whole site went down. It detailed the fracturing of the Democratic Party coalition, and the polarization of the political parties. So my pungent insights are, regrettably, stuck to the inside of a router somewhere in Kansas city.
Nevertheless, I am surprised that this blognado is not quickly filling up with outrage and despair. I certainly find nothing to fault with James K’s framing of the issue, and share his despair, but being American, it’s all a little less abstract to me. I’ve been thinking about this for years, and I ultimately have to place the blame for the current situation firmly at the feet of the Democrats.
To review the gist of the lost post, as the Democrats lost important parts of their FDR-created coalition–most importantly the South and blue-collar whites–they broadened ideologically in compensation, to encompass more of the “center.” This allowed the Republicans to keep moving right, and rendered the Democrats progressively less able to craft a moral narrative that bound all of its members.
At some point, the Democrats more or less gave up on trying to sell a coherent moral / ethical point of view. Meanwhile, the conservative movement–which has the will and discipline to be brutally effective politically, went about making “liberal” into a dirty word. Instead of defending liberalism, and pointing to its proud history in creating the fundaments of our current society, “liberal” politicians abandoned the word, as well. When, sometime around the Kerry presidential candidacy, some people started using “progressive” instead of liberal (progressivism was a rather distinct strain of political thought in American history), conservatives started to demonize that word as well.
Democratic politicians don’t understand the conservative success, and are freaked out by it. The seemingly unassailable virtues of technocratic incrementalism, scientific progress, and traditional liberal policy reformism are no longer accepted. Instead of defending them, or standing for something consistent, the Democrats simply react to conservative framing. The result, of course, is that conservative framing rules the day. So somehow, in the midst of the largest banking crisis and depression in 80 years, we are talking about imposing austerity measures and deregulating the banking sector.
So, to the observer, it appears that the conservatives are principled, and the liberals are not. The conservatives strive to frame their issues to bring in more people, and the liberals don’t. If you are able to watch Democratic politicians when they stumble into controversy, you would want to hang your head in shame: they distract, they prevaricate, they throw sops to all parties, but the one thing they seem incapable of doing is taking a strong and principled stand that may cost them votes.
I do not like at all the America that the conservative movement is trying to create. But the Democratic party will not be the vehicle to oppose it. Liberals often dream of the Republican party disintegrating under the weight of its own extremism, and being replaced by a more “rational” conservative party–much as the Republicans replace the Whigs before the civil war. But I am convinced that it is the Democratic party that needs to be replaced: one that does not spend most of its efforts trying to resurrect a coalition that is long dead and not coming back.Report
I had written a magnum opus of a comment on this thread, hit submit, and the whole site went down. It detailed the fracturing of the Democratic Party coalition, and the polarization of the political parties. So my pungent insights are, regrettably, stuck to the inside of a router somewhere in Kansas city.
Nevertheless, I am surprised that this blognado is not quickly filling up with outrage and despair. I certainly find nothing to fault with James K’s framing of the issue, and share his despair, but being American, it’s all a little less abstract to me. I’ve been thinking about this for years, and I ultimately have to place the blame for the current situation firmly at the feet of the Democrats.
To review the gist of the lost post, as the Democrats lost important parts of their FDR-created coalition–most importantly the South and blue-collar whites–they broadened ideologically in compensation, to encompass more of the “center.” This allowed the Republicans to keep moving right, and rendered the Democrats progressively less able to craft a moral narrative that bound all of its members.
At some point, the Democrats more or less gave up on trying to sell a coherent moral / ethical point of view. Meanwhile, the conservative movement–which has the will and discipline to be brutally effective politically, went about making “liberal” into a dirty word. Instead of defending liberalism, and pointing to its proud history in creating the fundaments of our current society, “liberal” politicians abandoned the word, as well. When, sometime around the Kerry presidential candidacy, some people started using “progressive” instead of liberal (progressivism was a rather distinct strain of political thought in American history), conservatives started to demonize that word as well.
Democratic politicians don’t understand the conservative success, and are freaked out by it. The seemingly unassailable virtues of technocratic incrementalism, scientific progress, and traditional liberal policy reformism are no longer accepted. Instead of defending them, or standing for something consistent, the Democrats simply react to conservative framing. The result, of course, is that conservative framing rules the day. So somehow, in the midst of the largest banking crisis and depression in 80 years, we are talking about imposing austerity measures and deregulating the banking sector.
So, to the observer, it appears that the conservatives are principled, and the liberals are not. The conservatives strive to frame their issues to bring in more people, and the liberals don’t. If you are able to watch Democratic politicians when they stumble into controversy, you would want to hang your head in shame: they distract, they prevaricate, they throw sops to all parties, but the one thing they seem incapable of doing is taking a strong and principled stand that may cost them votes.
I do not like at all the America that the conservative movement is trying to create. But the Democratic party will not be the vehicle to oppose it. Liberals often dream of the Republican party disintegrating under the weight of its own extremism, and being replaced by a more “rational” conservative party–much as the Republicans replace the Whigs before the civil war. But I am convinced that it is the Democratic party that needs to be replaced: one that does not spend most of its efforts trying to resurrect a coalition that is long dead and not coming back.Report
You leave out the role of the media. This was thrust upon me in the 2000 election. Rove and Company would throw out lies and half-truths (“I was instrumental in starting the internet” is NOT the same as “I invented the internet”) and the press would print them as fact. (Even the “Dean Scream” wasn’t — it was taken out of context to sound wacky.) When anyone tried to correct them, they were “tsk tsk”ed into silence.
The only reason the Tea Party holds such power today is because the media printed their ignorant prattle (“Death Panels!”) as truth. They play up Evangelicals as if they were anything but a “special interest group” akin to unions or Hindus.
How can any party deal with that?
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” Look at the trouble Huntsman had because he did what any president should do – based his policies on the consensus of experts. ”
This begs the question.
That’s really what a president ought to do? Why have a presidency? Just have a journal for experts to expound on things, then have them vote. Quick: What’s that vote look like when all the US military and intelligence experts vote on whether Iraq has WMD?Report
Thanks for bringing this up Sam, I also wondered what would have happened in Iraq once Bush was told by all and sundry that it had failed so he went /against/ advice and ordered the surge. General “Betray us” came through, the surge was a resounding success and we all got to watch Obama (dutiful lapdog to experts everywhere) eat some humble pie as he pretended he was really in favor of it even though his lips kept saying the opposite.Report
One counter-example proves little. Even if the surge was implemented against advice (and to be clear it would have to be against the advice of his military experts to qualify as a counter-example) that doesn’t refute the point that more often than not the experts know better than the President. After all, they’ve spent their lives understanding an issue while the President’s primary skill is being appealing to voters.Report
Read the title of this piece for example. A salient quote from the article:
Bush’s tendency to defer to commanders in the field and his defense secretary had delayed a new approach to Iraq until the situation bordered on anarchy and “civil war,” as a late 2006 CIA analysis termed it, the Times reported. At that point the Pentagon was in favor of moving responsibility to Iraqi forces, facilitating U.S. troop reductions.
Sam’s point was perfect, the consensus of the EXPERTS at the time was the Iraq had WMD, and it is specious argumentation and partisanship that denies this was the case, thousands of quotes from Democrats such as Clinton saying precisely the same thing carry about as much weight with the partisan crowd as as lead balloons. In fact it was precisely the president’s willingness to follow “expert opinion” that led him by the nose into Iraq and the mess that followed.
You know from our interactions over these many months that I am an iconoclast through and through. While technocrats are 99.9% in favor of technocrats running things (behind the scenes naturally) my counter arguments include well-intentioned but dismal failures such as the housing projects, War on Poverty, the “new math” etc. Well intentioned all, but ultimate failures.
I don’t agree the president should just “politic” and rubber-stamp blue ribbon committee recommendations. We have that president now, but when push comes to shove he is incapable of making a decision that he can’t walk back from, or blame on a subordinate. I thought Seal Team 6 was an exemplar of some backbone, but my military contacts have told me different. Yes he made the final call to go forward but he also was busy with contingency cover including his rushed announcement immediately following the operation, which negated the intelligence they had captured including where the other bad guys were (or do you believe his lieutenants were unaware that all that intel had been captured?)Report
99
(Just so TVD doesn’t feel so alone)Report
The consensus may have been that they had WMD, but there were experts, including every single one of the experts on the ground in Iraq who believed that they didn’t, because they weren’t finding them. Even more damning is the fact that they weren’t finding them even when using the intelligence that we were using to build the consensus that Iraq had WMD. Even before the invasion, much of the consensus’ case had begun to crumble (Reuters, at the time, was doing great reporting). I don’t think anyone has ever denied that most people thought Iraq had WMD, but that doesn’t mean that they were right, or even tha the evidence was in their favor. As a global warming denialist, I’m sure you can understand that.Report
I don’t agree the president should just “politic” and rubber-stamp blue ribbon committee recommendations. We have that president now, but when push comes to shove he is incapable of making a decision that he can’t walk back from, or blame on a subordinate.
Nor do I. The President should listen to his advisors and make a decision. Listening to advisors is not the same as rubber-stamping their recommendations.Report
the consensus of the EXPERTS at the time was the Iraq had WMD, and it is specious argumentation and partisanship that denies this was the case
Sorry, but that’s just not true. The CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate said they were all pretty sure that Hussein was pursuing WMD, but that they just didn’t have any solid intel to demonstrate that. Cheney put the pressure on the CIA Director and ultimately the CIA rewrote the executive summary to make a stronger case than any of the evidence within it supported. (A rare succumbing to political pressure by the CIA that is still haunting them to this day.)
Did some experts believe Iraq had WMD? Yes. Consensus? Not by a long shot. Had the President actually listened to what the experts in the CIA were really saying, he’d have concluded that we didn’t have any actual evidence for WMD.Report
The CIA’s national intelligence estimate isn’t worth the toilet paper it should be written on. Or should I remind you of their recent (completely erroneous) estimate concerning Iran? That document is purely political, the first thing the CIA does is calculate who the next party in power will be and then craft the “estimate” accordingly. There are and were other experts. No point in re-hashing all this old news I can post so many links the spam filter for this site will cough up a fur ball. I’m not interested in the specifics however, but the more intelligent and larger pictures, which is whether presidents should completely defer to the “experts”.
For instance Obama’s economics experts were Keynesian and super-Keynesian there was a Mises in the bunch. Did he even get the best advice? The stimulus failed but we got a new thread in the vernacular, jobs saved, a statistically meaningless proposition if there ever was one. I give /that/ a 99Report
geez.
if you were on calculated risk with this shit, I’d swear you were a troll.
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KinOne, yet another content-less post from you. From a bot it makes sense but from a human… why bother? Just to get your post count higher?Report
Ward,
I have to vigorously disagree with you here. First, the original NIE on Iraq was correct. In fact none of the data or supporting documentation in it was changed; it was solely the executive summary that changed, and that was because they succumbed to political pressure in a way they generally just do not do.
And it’s wrong to say NIE’s are purely political. The analysts at the CIA do their best to avoid being political in that sense. They see their job as to make the best inferences from the data available, not to write something that satisfies a particular group. This–” the first thing the CIA does is calculate who the next party in power will be and then craft the “estimate” accordingly”–is fundamentally wrong, and doesn’t even make sense in the context of understanding bureaucratic politics (where permanent bureaucracies perpetually piss off elected officials for not being responsive to them).
Do they get it wrong sometimes? Of course, they’re trying to figure out things that other people are trying to hide from them! And the U.S. and its allies have shit for sources in Iran, so we’re making inferences off next to nothing.
And given that Obama ignored the findings of the 2007 Iran NIE, that’s some pretty dubious support for the claim the CIA writes it to make the administration happy.Report
James, I happen to know a few people at “the Farm” so I have my own opinion on the subject, much of which I’ll never state in any kind of public forum. “Permanent bureaucracies” do their level best to stay entrenched. They get along fine with politicians as long as they keep getting their budgets approved.
The 2007 NIE report got PLENTY of play in the media and had a major influence on the election and it wasn’t political? Sorry doesn’t fly. Like all bloated bureaucracies, the CIA suffers from the worst kind of politics, internal. Yes I’ve previously said it is virtually impossible to fire someone who works for the federal gov’t, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a bureaucratic hell, no budget and no staff for your dept. There are an ungodly number of cul de sac positions in the federal bureaucracy, which is why they are reluctant to publish org charts. Cross the wrong higher-up and you’re relegated to bureaucratic purgatory as a warning, hell follows further offense.Report
Ward,
Your connections are apparently not my connections. 😉Report
Ward,
To riff off James K, was Bush in fact getting advice from, say, his Joint Chiefs of Staff against a surge? My vague impression was the opposite, but I honestly don’t know (and don’t remember what I might once have known).Report
Your misunderstand my point. There are two types of questions government deal with – factual questions and policy questions. Think of them as “what’s going on?” questions and “what should be do about it?” questions. My point is that when it comes to factual questions a President should heed their advisers and believe what they say. When it comes to policy questions they should listen to their advisers, but not necessarily do what they say – the decision is theirs.
So the point of the presidency is to make decisions, but not to try and create their own facts.Report
Any true group of experts will disagree on certain issues — it would be the President’s job to listen, ask questions (just as Obama did during the Bail-Out Summit) and make an informed decision.Report
Yes.Report
James, I don’t have quite the fear you do. My own, admittedly amateur, read of American politics suggests that the GOP may be due for some time out of power. Maybe a really resounding loss is all they need. Obama could have been that loss but perhaps because he was so unusual (his race and especially his soaring overinflated post partisan rhetoric) gave them an excuse to double down and refuse to accept the electoral slap on the wrists. Then of course came 2008 and the recession beat down losses Dems suffered reinforced the GOP’s extremist drift.
My own guess: at some point (possibly as soon as 2012) the GOP is going to have themselves a Goldwater or Mondale style landslide loss and that’s going to precipitate much pondering and reprioritizing within their party. One reason I hope against hope for a Santorum nomination is he strikes me as the perfect figure to lead the GOP to such a shellacking that’ll really make the right rethink their strategies and positions. I desire this not only because it hopefully will make the right saner but also because having more moderated sensible opponents should help snap the Dems out of their lazy swanning all over the middle of the spectrum.Report
Oddly enough Cato made the same suggestion recently on their podcast. It’ll probably be the closest thing Santorum ever gets to a libertarian endorsement.
Hopefully you’re right, I like your scenario a lot more than mine.Report
I find myself wishing for this, too. As Snarky McSnarksnark says above, the Dems need a strong opposition if only to force them to make strong stands themselves.Report