Pushed Too Far

Grace under pressure – keeping your cool – John Wayne to Steve McQueen to James Bond – Hemingway to Kerouac to Miles to Brian Eno – never let them see you sweat – no fear and no big whoop about anything. Just be cool. Let others run about with their hair on fire, or stew in the own anger until they explode and do something really stupid, or leap for joy until they realize that one wonderful thing, whatever it was, will be followed by the usual long stretch of nothing much. And not every issue that comes up in the buzz and whirl of what passes for political discourse in this country merits a comment. People did get excited when Donald Trump said he was seriously thinking of running for president – and he did say some startling things – but he was gone soon enough. Does Herman Cain deserve consideration? Should anyone really think about Newt Gingrich – politically, or even generally? A lot of politics is a Nothing Sandwich.

But now and then something shifts. Realignments do happen. And this year’s Fourth of July weekend brought a bit of that – and it should be noted. Of course there is Richard Cohen, the center-left columnist for the Washington Post, who says he believes Republicans have abandoned reason altogether. There may be not much new there – that seems so to many on the left – but Cohen does get dramatic:

Someone ought to study the Republican Party. I am not referring to yet another political scientist but to a mental health professional, preferably a specialist in the power of fixations, obsessions and the like. The GOP needs an intervention. It has become a cult. … The hallmark of a cult is to replace reason with feverish belief…. This intellectual rigidity has produced a GOP presidential field that’s a virtual political Jonestown. The Grand Old Party, so named when it really did evoke America, has so narrowed its base that it has become a political cult. It is a redoubt of certainty over reason and in itself significantly responsible for the government deficit that matters most: leadership.

And he trots out his examples – their approach to taxes, social issues, economic growth, climate change and all the rest. And he mentions the cult-like pledges they all must take – the Norquist No New Taxes Ever in Any Way pledge, and the new anti-abortion pledge – with no exception for rape or incest or the health of the mother or anything else. But he does move on:

Excuse me if I skip over other pledges and move to other matters. The hallmark of a cult is to replace reason with feverish belief. This the GOP has done when it comes to the government’s ability to stimulate the economy. History proves this works – it’s how the Great Depression ended – but Republicans will not acknowledge it.

The Depression in fact deepened in 1937 when Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to balance the budget and was ended entirely by World War II, which, besides being a noble cause, was also a huge stimulus program. Here, though, is Sen. Richard Shelby mouthing GOP dogma: Stimulus programs “did not bring us out of the Depression,” he recently told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour, but “the war did.” In other words, a really huge stimulus program hugely worked. Might not a more modest one succeed modestly? Shelby ought to follow his own logic.

And John Cole adds this:

Here is the problem with wingnuts. If we convinced them that the simulative effect of war did bring us out of the depression, they would then agitate for invading Russia or China. Not for job creation.

We’ll maybe so. But this is singing to the choir, as they say. There may be not much new here, however provocatively put. But then there is center-right columnist for the New York Times, David Brooks, who believes today’s Republican Party “has separated itself from normal governance” and may no longer be “fit to govern.” This is not singing to the choir – he basically calls the Republican Party quite nuts for its unwillingness to accept a debt ceiling compromise that’s weighted 5:1 or 6:1 in favor of spending cuts, and doesn’t raise marginal tax rates even one penny to generate its rather small revenue increases. He says they should grab a deal like this with both hands:

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise…. The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities…. The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency…. The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name. …

If the debt ceiling talks fail, independents voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.

And they will be right.

Someone has been pushed too far. Brooks is a man of the right, and this is unexpected, although Kevin Drum keeps his cool:

I’ll believe that Brooks has seen the light when he actually keeps this up for a few consecutive weeks. I’ve never been a Brooks-hater, but the fact is that he occasionally writes columns like this. Normally, though, having done it, he then devotes his next five or six columns to nitpicking at Democrats and pretending that they are, when all’s said and done, just as bad as Republicans after all.

They aren’t, of course. They’re just a normal party with all the virtues and all the pathologies of any broad-based political party. That means it’s easy to find a laundry list of things to criticize and then add them up to make it seem as if everyone’s equally to blame for the insanity of our current political impasses.

So Drum wants what he calls non-insane-conservatives to give up on this kind of standing above it all and saying both parties are really just alike:

As Brooks says, the GOP is no longer a normal political party and they are not fit to govern. The question is, will Brooks still believe that in a couple of weeks when – and it’s bound to happen – Democrats do something he dislikes? I’ll wait and see.

But Brooks is pretty clear:

The Democrats have agreed to tie budget cuts to the debt ceiling bill. They have agreed not to raise tax rates. They have agreed to a roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an astonishing concession.

Moreover, many important Democrats are open to a truly large budget deal. President Obama has a strong incentive to reach a deal so he can campaign in 2012 as a moderate. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, has talked about supporting a debt reduction measure of $3 trillion or even $4 trillion if the Republicans meet him part way. There are Democrats in the White House and elsewhere who would be willing to accept Medicare cuts if the Republicans would be willing to increase revenues.

If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred million dollars of revenue increases.

But they won’t take the deal:

A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth of government. It would seize the opportunity to put the country on a sound fiscal footing. It would seize the opportunity to do these things without putting any real crimp in economic growth.

The party is not being asked to raise marginal tax rates in a way that might pervert incentives. On the contrary, Republicans are merely being asked to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures that are themselves distortionary.

This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.

And can Brooks walk this back?

The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no. The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.

Steve Benen wonders if the Republican Party has pushed the mainstream columnists too far this time:

In general, this political establishment is “wired” in Republicans’ favor. It’s the GOP ideas that get attention; it’s the GOP talking points that get internalized; it’s the GOP voices that get aired. But when it comes to the debt ceiling and debt-reduction talks, and the fact that Democrats are the only ones willing to compromise, I can’t help but wonder if the tide of elite opinion is starting to turn against Republicans. If so, it’s pretty late in the game – Brooks and Cohen should have picked up on this, months if not years ago – but here’s hoping the circumstances and radical tactics have left Villagers with no other choice.

But the Brooks column has now been called remarkable by Jonathan Bernstein, who says it’s a very big deal for THIS columnist to criticize fellow Republicans so harshly. And the conservative Megan McArdle agrees with Brooks – that revenue increases are a necessary part of any bipartisan agreement to avoid the obviously cataclysmic default. And David Frum calls the column “a manifesto for our times” – but he does say “The Obama program can (and in large measure should) be repealed” – all of what Obama has been up to. Frum just argues that default on our debts “is not an acceptable tool of politics.”

And the quite conservative Conor Friedersdorf comments:

The column and the reactions to it are significant partly because one faction on the right, the establishment moderates, is sending a signal to Tea Party candidates and their supporters. They’re saying, “We want you to win this game of chicken – but whereas a faction on the right would rather crash than be first to swerve, that isn’t the way we feel, and we’ll blame you if there’s an accident.”

It’s a useful signal to send, both because it accurately reflects reality, and because it may decrease the likelihood of default just a little bit, a good outcome.

Okay, this is news. It seems that a dam burst. That deserves mention. Something is finally shifting.

But Friedersdorf argues the Brooks column is hardly a guiding manifesto. And nothing will be solved “by urging more willingness to sign onto bipartisan compromises or defer to expert opinion” – and he doesn’t think much of Brooks framing this legislative fight as some sort of defining moral moment:

Better to address the fundamental problem: the Republican Party has failed to persuade the American people that the small government vision it claims to favor is the right way forward. The failure spans many decades. In fact, almost every pathology on the right is explained partly by the refusal to acknowledge this, and thus the inability to either find a remedy or to adopt an alternative vision of conservatism.

The vision they’re selling, about the right way forward, just never caught on, really. They just pretend it has, and say it has, and tell each other it has. And Friedersdorf suggests three reasons it has come to this, starting with that Starve the Beast silliness:

In the 1970s, the Republican mainstream became convinced that by starving the government of revenue, it would force spending reductions, resulting in a smaller federal government. “The only effective way to restrain government spending,” Milton Friedman wrote in a 1978 issue of Newsweek, “is by limiting government’s explicit tax revenue – just as a limited income is the only effective restraint on any individual’s or family’s spending.” The short story: the strategy failed, deficits skyrocketed, and despite decades of empirical confirmation, the right has yet to accept that “starve the beast” doesn’t work. But in hindsight it’s easy to see why. Had taxes increased every time the federal government got bigger, voters would have resisted its growth sooner. But the Republicans were complicit in a strategy that made bigger government appear much cheaper than was in fact the case.

That whole thing was an absurd idea, and then there’s this:

The deficit has seldom been priority one on the right. Ronald Reagan was willing to run it up to outspend the Soviet Union and otherwise get his way on national security policy. George H. W. Bush angered many in the GOP when he broke his “no new taxes” pledge to avoid increasing the deficit. George W. Bush cut taxes, launched expensive wars of choice, and passed a huge increase in entitlement spending simultaneously, and no grassroots protest movement arose to object. Even now, as the Tea Party movement demands that spending be cut radically, it is represented by a Congress composed partly of Republicans who dinged Obama for cutting Medicare. And many Republicans are insisting that it’s vital for us to increase defense spending, wage a war of choice against Libya, keep our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for even longer than president Obama wants, and to cut marginal tax rates at the same time.

Who cares about the deficit? These guys don’t. They love what makes it worse.

And finally there is this:

Rather than participating in public discourse, whether in the media, academia, or entertainment, the right reacted to its sometimes unfair treatment in those realms by ceding them to the left and creating their own alternative institutions. On the whole, these endeavors have been great at generating revenue for their owners. Unfortunately, they’ve contributed to slovenly thought on the right by encouraging its intellectuals to “preach to the choir.” The incentive system at work just doesn’t reward making converts nearly so much as firing up the base.

So that might be what led Brooks to say this:

The Republicans have changed American politics since they took control of the House of Representatives. They have put spending restraint and debt reduction at the top of the national agenda. They have sparked a discussion on entitlement reform. They have turned a bill to raise the debt limit into an opportunity to put the U.S. on a stable fiscal course. Republican leaders have also proved to be effective negotiators. They have been tough and inflexible and forced the Democrats to come to them.

And what led Democracy in America at The Economist to say this – “The irony is that this inflexible negotiating position has gotten Republicans ‘the deal of the century,’ as Mr Brooks says. It also means they are unable to take it.”

They boxed themselves in, and that conservative Megan McArdle puts it nicely:

The political logic is infantile. The American public does not want you to cut Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. There is no mono-partisan substitute for persuading people to agree with you. Just as the Democrats spent way too much time reading their own press releases on ObamaCare, only to find that their cherished legislation was instantly at risk of dismemberment by legislative and court challenges. Imagine that the GOP forces through an all-cuts deal – or forces the country into default? What’s the next logical step? Why, probably that an angry nation sends more Democrats to Congress (and Obama back to the White House), where they happily “restore” the programs that “brutal” Republicans tried to “gut” with “draconian” cuts. Those Democrats will probably get elected to office by lying about the possibilities for closing the budget deficit via nothing but tax increases on the “rich”. So what? Their GOP predecessors got there by spinning fairy tales about the massive dynamic effects of changes in tax policy.

This is why the budget deals that have succeeded generally had bipartisan support. If one party tries to do things all their own way, well, the other party will promptly be elected to undo some of those changes. I can admire someone who’s willing to be a one-term congressman in order to do something big and important. But what’s the point if your big, important legislation doesn’t live much longer than your political career?

Friedersdorf:

Here’s a manifesto for the GOP: however the current negotiations play out, stop imagining that you can shrink the size of the federal government in the long term without first winning over more voters – enough, for example, that you can win a legislative battle on spending and revenue without holding the economy hostage.

And these are all long-standing establishment conservatives saying this sort of thing now. Something has changed. Someone has been pushed too far – and so noted.

But see Jonathan Chait explaining how the definition of “reasonable” changes over time:

The GOP’s willingness to undermine the full faith and credit of the Treasury in pursuit of anti-tax fundamentalism is shocking now, but eventually it will come to be seen as simply part of the process.

And there is Kevin Drum:

Yep. In the same way that Wall Street hoovering up a third of all corporate profits is the new normal. Or that 9% unemployment is the new normal. Or that obstruction, rather than legislation, is the new normal for Congress. Or that massive spending cuts during a recession is the new normal. Or that conducting three overseas wars at the same time is the new normal.

The new normal kind of sucks, doesn’t it?

Yep – so noted.

About Alan

The editor is a former systems manager for a large California-based HMO, and a former senior systems manager for Northrop, Hughes-Raytheon, Computer Sciences Corporation, Perot Systems and other such organizations. One position was managing the financial and payroll systems for a large hospital chain. And somewhere in there was a two-year stint in Canada running the systems shop at a General Motors locomotive factory - in London, Ontario. That explains Canadian matters scattered through these pages. Otherwise, think large-scale HR, payroll, financial and manufacturing systems. A résumé is available if you wish. The editor has a graduate degree in Eighteenth-Century British Literature from Duke University where he was a National Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and taught English and music in upstate New York in the seventies, and then in the early eighties moved to California and left teaching. The editor currently resides in Hollywood California, a block north of the Sunset Strip.
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