GOP: Out of Gas, Out of Ideas, Over a Cliff
Dec 22nd, 2009 | 19 responses
Jonathan Chait at The New Republic:
In reality, both parties have plenty of ideas that they would like to implement if given the political power to do so. Republicans’ policy ideas primarily involve cutting marginal tax rates and regulations. The question isn’t whether the Republican Party has any ideas. The question is whether the party has any relevant ideas.
In the days following the 2008 election, some Republicans predicted that the party would retool itself in response to reality–not just political reality but the actuality of policy challenges. “Republicans,” wrote conservative Ramesh Ponnuru in Time, “will have to devise an agenda that speaks to a country where more people feel the bite of payroll taxes than income taxes, where health-care costs eat up raises even in good times, where the length of the daily commute is a bigger irritant than are earmarks.” Nothing like that rethinking has happened or will happen.
Whatever the merits of President Obama’s agenda, it is clearly a response to objectively large problems facing the country. The administration has selected three main issues as the focus of its domestic agenda: the economic crisis, climate change, and health care reform. The issues themselves offer a stark contrast with Bush’s 2005 crusade to reshape Social Security. While sold as a response to the program’s long-term deficit, the privatization campaign was actually motivated by ideological opposition to Social Security’s redistributive role. (Bush refused Democratic offers to negotiate a fix to the program’s solvency without altering its social-insurance character.) By contrast, it is impossible to dismiss the problems Obama has chosen to address. In all three areas, the Republican Party has adopted a stance of total opposition, not merely because it disagrees with aspects of Obama’s solutions, but because it cannot come to grips with the very nature of the problems of modern American politics.
Yahtzee!
I would take issue with Chait over the reason for Social Security reform – something the Democrats will now have to face in the coming years if, as I fully expect, they maintain their majority for a decade or so. Yes, my liberal friends, there is an unfunded mandate for social security that works out to about $17.5 trillion by 2050. By that time, the entire federal budget could be comprised of payments for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Don’t sit there and tell me that the only reason Bush wanted to reform Social Security by privatizing some of it was due to “ideological opposition” to the program. It was Republicans, I will remind Chait, who reformed SS in 1986 while he and his Democratic friends took potshots from the sidelines. Democrats have always, shamelessly, used Social Security fear mongering with seniors as an electoral club. And Chait is proving that nothing has changed.
As for the rest of Chait’s thesis, he is spot on. The GOP cannot meet the basic definition of a political party; a repository for ideas and principles that advance a particular political philosophy. Cutting taxes when we’re staring at a deficit of $1.5 trillion a year is not only irrelevant, it is reckless, suicidal, irresponsible policy. Claiming that government spending would be cut an equal amount as any tax breaks is ludicrous, not to mention a horrible idea in the midst of a deep recession. The cuts that would be necessary in discretionary spending – only about 28% of the budget (most of that in the defense sector) – would gash programs that benefit the poor and the middle class. It won’t happen so why discuss it? Any tax cuts enacted would add to the deficit substantially.
So much for “fiscal responsibility.”
Tax cuts aren’t the only idea that the GOP wants to implement but it seems that way sometimes. Cutting spending is another basic notion being pushed by the GOP, but so far, specifics have been lacking. Not so with the base of the party who not only can’t “come to grips with the very nature of the problems of modern American politics,” but would have trouble “coming to grips” with 19th century American problems. This is where Chait’s ideological animus by the GOP to government truly resides (although eliminating Social Security and Medicare are ideas relegated to the fringe right). Entire swaths of the government would be on the chopping block if many in the base got their way. And I am not talking about some kind of “super-federalism” where many programs would be “transferred to the states.” There is a belief that much of what the federal government does, individuals should be able to do for themselves. I am not unsympathetic to this basic premise, but the scope and breadth of what many on the right would like to see eliminated are several bridges too far for most rational conservatives.
And this points up the major reason why the GOP is in the barren intellectual state that it is in; a stubborn, (I would say hysterical) refusal to see the world as it is and develop counter-proposals and ideas that reflect the realities of 21st century America.
What’s so hard about that? Well, for starters, perhaps admitting you have a problem dealing with reality in the first place might help:
The writers of The Daily Show, Colbert Report, and Saturday Night Live (although I’m not convinced they’ve even had writers lately) can have February 18-20, 2010, off. The hosts can handle it themselves. On those dates, the jokes will practically write themselves as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) takes place — co-sponsored by the John Birch Society. Every liberal commentator needs to send a thank-you note to CPAC’s organizers for that monumentally stupid decision.
By having the John Birch Society sponsor it, CPAC can guarantee that 90% of the coverage regarding the conference will relate to JBS’ oh-my-god-look-a-conspiracy attitude rather than the heavy-hitters and rising stars of conservatism and libertarianism that speak there. Instead of focusing on politics, reporters will ask attendees for their response to the JBS controversy and will ask organizers whether they are in such financial distress that they had to embrace a fringe group for support.
This is beyond the “nihilism” Chait writes about with regard to what the GOP has become. I think a more technical term is in order to describe what is happening with the base and hence, with much of the Republican party.
Loony tunes.
You have to live in a different reality (or perhaps spend most of your time on another planet) to accept the notion that the John Birch Society today is much different than the bunch who questioned whether General Dwight David Eisenhower – American hero – wasn’t “pink.” Or that John Foster Dulles wasn’t deliberately hiding Communists in the State Department. (Yes, there were commies at state and defense but the idea that Dulles knew they were there is lunacy).
The JBS “core principles” include this gem:
The Society also labors to warn against and expose the forces that seek to abolish U.S. independence, build a world government, or otherwise undermine our personal liberties and national independence.
The problem as I see it isn’t necessarily that the John Birch Society is filled with kooks who think Obama is part of an international conspiracy to enslave America to the Communist ideal, it’s that they are a perfect fit for CPAC and the paranoid righties who are pursuing the birther matter, believe the president and the Democrats are out to “destroy the country,” believe there’s nothing much wrong with our health care system, and are not sure if Obama isn’t the antichrist.
Yes, that last is hyperbole but it’s easy to go over the top when you are trying to describe people who have tossed aside reason and embraced a kind of collective madness that is being promoted on talk radio, and some venues on Fox News. The world – the country – simply is not as it is described by Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the cotton candy conservatives who are cleaning up by playing to the fears of the ignorant and uninformed.
And then there are those who ape the worst of these:
It isn’t too much to ask for Byrd to step off for that great klavern in the sky before the Senate vote that may force this nation to accept government-rationed health care. Even a nice coma would do.
Without his frail, Gollum-like body being wheeled into the Senate’s chambers to cast the deciding vote, the Senate cannot curse our children and grandchildren with crushing debt and rationed, substandard healthcare.
I suppose some will be shocked and appalled that I’d wish for the former kleagle to die on command. I’d remind them that the party wheeling in a near invalid to vote in favor of this unread monstrosity of a bill is the one that should feel shame.
Yes, the health care bill as it has been so cynically and maliciously drawn up by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Democrats might easily be termed a “monstrosity.”
But it is grotesque, deformed thinking to wish for another human being to die for political gain. And not seeing that is a reflection not so much of Bob Owens, but of the casual, anti-reason, anti-rational thinking that has gripped the Republican party and made it an irrelevancy.
Can you govern without believing in the efficacy of government? I find it hard to imagine that, even if the Democrats and Obama screw things up so royally that the GOP wins a smashing victory and overturns both houses of Congress next year, that the Republicans are capable of doing anything to address the problems of 21st century America. Trying to reconstitute a nation that doesn’t exist anymore – a pastoral place where everyone was self-sufficient, went to church on Sunday, and dreamed the same dreams – does not equip a party or its members to deal with the complex, urbanized, less homogeneous country America has become.
To do that, one must actually live in the present rather than some ill-defined, half-imagined past that perhaps never was, but certainly will never be again.
19 Responses to “GOP: Out of Gas, Out of Ideas, Over a Cliff”
The hallmark of the old GOP was closed-minded thinking, greed [let's be honest] masquerading as “good christian values”. If you don't accept that, stop reading right here, the rest will be meaningless to you.
Their gig relied on whipping their base into line with cookies and fear alternately, depending on the situation of which of their leaders wanted what and ciphered which motivator would work best. This system served them well for many many years since they controlled information via most media outlets. Newspapers, magazines and broadcasting stations were so predominantly GOP-owned and operated that it's silly to discuss the thumnail of those that weren't. They just didn't stand a chance of impact. The GOP literally [and I mean this LITERALLY] controlled what we know as our description of reality.
Ergo, anyone against “reality” was deemed “crazy” [liberal]. And so those people who most benefitted by this situation kept an iron fist on business as usual….
Then along came the GOP's arch-enemy, the internets. Free-flow of information took one decade to turn sheep into goats, those stubborn more intelligent creatures with minds of their own and a penchant for testing fencing on a regular basis.
Oh sure. You've got remnants of the old sheep population around stomping their hooves at change, wanting their old, dwindling overgrazed green pastures of contentment and no need to think outside their paddock. But within one generation now even they will be gone. Sheep are mortal creatures after all..
And all that will be left is one whacky, wild and amazing herd of goats all with minds of their own. They will scramble on the rocks way above all the old “realities” and strike out new ones of their own. It was coming. Everyone knew it was. The internet sealed the deal.
Republicans call me a saint when I donate to the poor, but they call me a Communist when I ask why there are poor people to begin with…..(to steal a phrase).
Though Republicans hate and fear Communists, they rush to do business with them. It is their irrational fear that caused America’s ill fated involvement in the Vietnam war, but their uncontrollable greed and undisciplined lack of morality that leads them into dealings with those that will, without a doubt, destroy them. They do it, over the dead bodies of those young American’s they demanded be sent to fight the very Communism they fear.
Republican ideology is ignorant, short term, and, horribly unpatriotic, though they try ever so hard to lead people into believing otherwise.
Though Republicans hate and fear Communists, they rush to do business with them. It is their irrational fear that caused America’s ill fated involvement in the Vietnam war,
Wow….Kennedy and Johnson were Republicans, huh?
I'd be careful as to whom you label ignorant.
Study history dummy.
It was the republicans that wanted the escalation of Vietnam. It was Eisenhower that first sent troops as “advisors”. Kennedy wanted to limit our involvement . LBJ, well you are right, but he did the right thing and refused to run another term because of his failure. No republican has ever had that much integrity.
Wow.
I'm phoning the police. Who are you and what have you done with Rick Moran?
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Truman, a Democrat, sent the first advisors to Vietnam, not Eisenhower………dummy. Study history some more.
May 1961 – President Kennedy sends 400 American Green Beret 'Special Advisors' to South Vietnam to train South Vietnamese soldiers in methods of 'counter-insurgency' in the fight against Viet Cong guerrillas.
The role of the Green Berets soon expands to include the establishment of Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG) made up of fierce mountain men known as the Montagnards. These groups establish a series of fortified camps strung out along the mountains to thwart infiltration by North Vietnamese.
President Kennedy then sends additional military advisors along with American helicopter units to transport and direct South Vietnamese troops in battle, thus involving Americans in combat operations. Kennedy justifies the expanding U.S. military role as a means “…to prevent a Communist takeover of Vietnam………..” The number of military advisors sent by Kennedy will eventually surpass 16,000.
Kennedy wanted to limit our involvement, dummy?
http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/vietna…
Seems like it is the Democrats that had the documented issue with the Communists…….let's see a reference for your support, dummy….or will you just blow smoke out your ass and think people will actually believe you?
Rick – I applaud your analysis – it's spot on. You are right that the Democrats use Social Security as a political club. It's one of their strongest political weapons and they are not about to give up this advantage even if what the opposition is recommending makes sense.(not that I agree with turning SS into a defined contribution plan instead of a defined benefit as Bush suggested)
“they are not about to give up this [Social Security] advantage even if what the opposition is recommending makes sense”
They did, when Bush was in office. They had the chance to rescue the program themselves, and win subsequent elections and more importantly, gain some respect and associated political clout for years. They obviously should have done it. Did they? No. Incredibly, they insisted on doing nothing.
Aside from mental or other forms of dysfunction among the Dems, the only explanation is that they were counting on the support of a sufficient number of voters so defective in one or more ways that these voters may not only have accepted, but actually approved of the decision. That's buying cheap votes from truly cheap voters.
OK, so many of these voters were too stupid to realize this, or actually supported it. Some of us noticed it, though. (That's another reason why some of us are not surprised, and don't approved, that the Dems also didn't set Medicare right before trying to “reform” the rest of health care — and we never did believe the vow by Obama and other Dems who may have joined him, that entitlement reform would be done by them — or that it is important to them.) We're also not surprised by current Dem self-made blunders and their need to recover currently.
* * *
“Can you govern without believing in the efficacy of government?”
Actually, someone like Ron Paul or anyone who 100% demonizes government needs to be asked at least that, if he or she is running for — government office. Better yet — does he or she believe in the need for government [at all]?
“Yes, my liberal friends, there is an unfunded mandate for social security that works out to about $17.5 trillion by 2050. By that time, the entire federal budget could be comprised of payments for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.”
Rick — as soon as Social Security begins running deficits, it is failing, by definition.
With all these programs, perhaps you noticed what the Obama administration did this year, the year the President vowed to reform Medicare and reform entitlements (meaning Social Security and Medicare, essentially, as that was the context in which he made the vow, and which was obvious, anyway — we all know or should know what the biggest entitlements and budget siphons are).
Once deficits start, paying benefits in full requires new taxes, money taken from elsewhere, or more borrowing. This, after Obama and the Dems have spent and borrowed already to contemporary precedent-setting levels. (with no comparable results for all of it)
His administration's one known deed this year (the year of “entitlement reform”) was to remove from the annual Trustees' Report what has been in previous reports, about the future and the fiscal problems we (some of us) have long known and been told we will be facing.
“To put these magnitudes into historical perspective, in 2007 the combined annual cost of HI, SMI, and OASDI amounted to 38 percent of total Federal revenues, or about 7 percent of GDP. That cost (as a percentage of GDP) is projected to double by 2060, and then to increase further to nearly 17 percent of GDP in 2082. It is noteworthy that over the past four decades, the average amount of total Federal revenue as a percentage of GDP has been 18 percent, and has not exceeded 21 percent in a given year. Assuming the continued need to fund a wide range of other government functions, the projected growth in Social Security and Medicare costs would require that the total Federal revenue share of GDP increase to wholly unprecedented levels.”
http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/TRSUM/tr08su…
“To put these magnitudes into historical perspective, in 2006 the combined annual cost of HI, SMI, and OASDI amounted to 40 percent of total Federal revenues, or about 7 percent of GDP. That cost (as a percentage of GDP) is projected to double by 2042, and then to increase further to nearly 18 percent of GDP in 2081. It is noteworthy that over the past four decades, the average amount of total Federal revenues as a percentage of GDP has also been 18 percent, and has never exceeded 21 percent in a given year. Assuming the continued need to fund a wide range of other government functions, the projected growth in Social Security and Medicare costs would require that the total Federal revenue share of GDP increase to wholly unprecedented levels.”
http://www.socialsecurity.gov/history/pdf/tr07s…
etc.
Such is Democratic reform these days — remove the bad news. (Not denial, but rather, deception)
Oh, and Change [tm] in transparency and honesty in government and with entitlement reform…removing the bad news is a way of giving people more Hope [tm] about entitlements, I guess.
Of course, perhaps they and the low tail of the electorate IQ bell curve would prefer it to be that way.
“trying to reconstitute a nation that doesn’t exist anymore”
At least they still try to give some respect, sometimes, to the Constitution, unlike the Dem record.
If it's outmoded, incidentally, why not revise or even replace the Constitution with something more suitable to the way things are today? (The current Constitution is not outmoded, incidentally. That gripe is as old as Ratification and never got anywhere far beyond those whining in that manner.) Of course, what comes to many of our minds is the same thing that does when anyone engages in the little exercise I've suggsted before — imagine people in Washington (and elsewhere, including in the business world) starting a manned moon effort from the start, right now? Would you have confidence or trust in those in Washington? Do you believe they and those whom they invited to join them, would do any better with constitutional revision or replacement? Even just a few choice amendments?
No sightings this decade so far.
Truman sent troops to Vietnam after the Japanese capitulated Dummy. For the purpose of establishing order after Japanese occupation. The was NO Communist insurgency then. Just a general insurgency against the remaining Japanese troops set up as policemen by the stupid French.
The decision to oppose communist insurgency was certainly conservative and thereby MOSTLY republican, regardless of presidents.
Its Conservative hands that are attained with the blood of American youth and millions of Asians.
Take the partisan out of your history re-writing. Somebody might believe you and vote for a stupid greedy republican out of confusion.
Yes and it would have been fully funded without a problem had Reagan not robbed SS for “Star Wars”, that of course, does not exist. That was OUR money, not tax money. What right diod that Pig Ronnie Raygun have in stealing OUR money anyway?
Conservatives just cannot stand the idea that people might not suffer.
Social Security “trust fund” money has been taken and misspent on all kinds of things.
Why don't the Dems want to stop this practice? Why don't they want to reform and rescue Social Security (and Medicare)? They say reform is needed, after all. (Of course, do they raise the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare to something normal and long-overdue, in the seventies, for example, as well as revise benefit formulas? No.) There are no easy solutions. Removing the payroll tax cap, as has been explained countless times, won't solve the problem, only postpone it for a few years, for example. Tax increases and constraints on costs, including on benefit growth, and even benefit reductions (as well as modernizing the retirement age, and probably subsequent revisions periodically) are overdue and in some form are inevitable. The Dems “own” this and logic screams for them to seize the initiative and not only rescue these programs, but score huge points doing so (at least among the more intelligent voters, who are skeptical
or critical of the Dems, rather than those voting robotically for them already), by rescuing them before the serious harm begins and while they can control how the reforms will be done (particularly with respect to benefits versus taxes). But do they do this? Nooooo…
All interested individuals should study why J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI described Birch Society founder Robert Welch and the John Birch Society in FBI memos as “extremist”, “irrational”, “irresponsible”, “fanatics” and “lunatic fringe”.
And then learn why giants within the conservative intellectual and political activist communities (such as Barry Goldwater, Russell Kirk, James Burnham, Frank Meyer, Ronald Reagan) rejected the JBS as inept, ignorant, and harmful.
If the JBS merely was offering unorthodox alternative public policy proposals, there would be no problem.
But my experience has been that 99% of readers are not familiar with the underlying premises of JBS ideology. For more than 50 years, the JBS has defamed and attacked the patriotism, character, integrity, and loyalty of virtually our entire national leadership — and it refers to our national political leaders as “a conspiracy of gangsters”.
The following report is based primarily upon first-time-released FBI files and documents on the JBS and its assertions.
Since the Birch Society has always effusively praised Hoover and the FBI as our nation's most knowledgeable, authoritative and reliable source of factual information on the communist movement as well as on what constitutes legitimate and effective anti-communist activities –Birchers now have the opportunity to compare their assertions and conclusions to the statements and evaluations made by the person (Hoover) and the institution (FBI) they have enthusiastically recommended for 5 decades.
FBI FILES ON BIRCH SOCIETY:
http://ernie1241.googlepages.com/jbs-1
FBI FILES on W. CLEON SKOUSEN (former FBI Special Agent who endorsed the JBS)
http://ernie1241.googlepages.com/skousen
FBI FILES on DAN SMOOT (former FBI Special Agent who endorsed the JBS)
http://ernie1241.googlepages.com/smoot
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Rick,
Thank you for writing this. It's superb, and greatly needed.
I wrote about Jonathan Chait's article, too — but naturally I wrote it from my own political perspective, and as valuable as that may be, I think that similar conclusions coming from such a distinctly non-liberal perspective are even more valuable.
I'm really glad that you have joined TMV as a contributing writer (I'm not sure if I said that yet) — and in case you're a bit skeptical of my motives, I will be happy to repeat that the next time you write a post that I do not agree with so strongly.
Not sure what generation you came from but I think you better do a history check on who got us into the Vietnam war my man.