Can't Get Past the Crazy

I was thinking today about a problem in the political discourse that I lose sight of sometimes: namely that the source of much of my frustration is that I can't get past the Crazy.

What I mean by that is that I want to have thoughtful and civil arguments with people on the Right, in which I acknowledge the value of their points of view and they acknowledge the same for me, even as we continue to disagree because, in the end, we have different priorities.

But I can't get to that because the Right has gone crazy.  To wit:

• The argument over the federal budget should be something like this: liberals want to increase taxes more than cut spending to balance the budget, because we value spending on the social welfare state, while conservatives want to cut the welfare state in favor of lower taxes.  But when I try to get to that, I find the Right arguing that any tax hike at all is the End of Civilization, even though tax rates are the lowest they've been in many years.  They can't even acknowledge that there are two sides to the deficit equation.
• There's just no question that the Republican party has moved way to the Right over the last few election cycles.  Mitt Romney was the "conservative" in 2008, and now he's the squishy moderate- while his stated positions have moved to the Right!  The honest argument a Republican can make is to acknowledge that and defend it- "yes, we moved right, and thank God!  We want to experiment by forming a modern economy with a much smaller welfare state and with much lower tax rates on the wealthy- we think it will lead to so much growth that we won't need the welfare state very much anyway because everyone will be able to get a job".  But instead I hear how the problem is that Obama and the Democrats are socialists, dedicated to redistributing wealth and creating equal outcomes rather than equal opportunity.  A Democrat "move to the Left" is a matter of faith, notwithstanding the lack of evidence.
• The honest conservative argument on global climate change is that we can't afford to make the changes that would be required to make a difference in production of greenhouse gases, and that economic growth is just too important to imperil through untested technologies.  Instead we get the canard that Global Warming is a hoax being perpetrated by greedy scientists so they can get more funding.
• The Trayvon Martin case brought up race relations again.  The honest conservative argument is that we're putting too much emphasis on race, that progress is being made against racism, and that conservatives share liberals' disdain for racism and denounce it when found among their supporters.  But what I hear is that the only racism issue left in the US is that of Black Nationalists who hate White people.  I asked a particularly rabid Right wing correspondent of mine if he thought George Zimmerman was a racist, and he couldn't bring himself to say it.  But admitting that he's a racist doesn't undercut any conservative arguments at all- it gives conservatives a chance to join with liberals and denounce racism.  But they won't.
• The honest argument against the Affordable Care Act is that health care just isn't a right, or that it's too expensive to provide, or that funding it for poor people will pull too much money out of the system and imperil the "greatest health care in the world" that exists for the rest of us.  Instead we get ridiculous arguments about the individual mandate being unconstitutional, or canards about Death Panels.

I could go on, but you get the idea.  I'd love to have a debate about what a civilized society should provide through the government and what it shouldn't provide.  Instead, I'm swatting away CrazyFlies.

Follow-up on Radicalism

I've made this challenge before:

I've challenged some Republican friends to come up with one issue on which Democrats are now further to the left than they were in 2000 other than gay rights/gay marriage. I've never heard an answer.

Last night I was with some conservative friends and I made that challenge in the course of our conversation.  For the first time I heard a kind of answer: the conservatives I was with agreed with each other that it's not exactly that the Democratic party has moved Left so much as that they have failed to acknowledge areas in which liberal dogma has been clearly proven wrong.  Their favorite example was unions- they argued that unions in the public sphere were destroying state and local government budgets, and Democrats were continuing to support them.

On one hand, this answer sort of concedes my argument that only one party is growing more radical, but at this point I don't see any other response to the point- it's just unassailable.

On the other hand, though, it's a legitimate point that begs a response so here it is:

First of all, if I conceded the point that Liberals continue to support unions in the face of all evidence, I could still point out that the Republican party is doing that in practically every area of public policy- Global Warming is accepted by pretty much every reputable science organization but is denied by conservatives.  Republicans continue to throw out tax plans claiming that lower taxes increase revenues, despite tons of evidence to the contrary.  I could go on and on.

But of course I don't concede the point that unions have outlived their usefulness.  It's not true that government workers are getting better benefits than they used to get.  It's just that workers outside of government are getting a lot less, because unions are dying out.  This is related to the "99%" issue- workers in the private sector have less power than they did 30 years ago as more industries have de-unionized, and the result has been that recent wealth gains have virtually all gone to the top 1% of our society.  So I'd frame the problem not as "too much for government workers", but rather as "not enough for private sector workers".

Now the response to that point was that "we can't be competitive" with unions in today's world, with 3rd world workers lining up to work for pennies a day.  But of course there's no competitiveness issue when it comes to government workers- we're not competing against Cambodia when it comes to paying for fire departments.

We can't afford to pay government workers because we have historically low tax rates.  There's an obvious solution to that problem.

Now it still may be true that governments have negotiated too many sweetheart deals with unions.  The solution to that problem isn't to deny workers the right to organize- it's to negotiate better deals, put up with strikes sometimes, etc- it's messy, but workers should have the right to organize in a free society.

Parties Get the Candidates They Deserve

I get really tired of the whining from establishment Republicans that they are totally set up to win the 2012 presidential election, but might lose because their candidates are terrible.  And they kind of have a point, in that every candidate has huge glaring weaknesses that seem to render it impossible for him/her to be nominated, except that someone has to win the nomination.

But here's the thing: the reason that there are no good candidates goes back to the wild and radical right turn made by the party over the past decade.  People don't run for president if they haven't been around politics (except for Herman Cain I guess, but I think we can agree he has a different set of problems), but ten years ago virtually nobody was in favor of the policies that are now mainstream.  Imagine the current positions from a Republican politician in 2000:

• Health insurance mandate= authoritarianism
• Taxes are too low on poor people
• Climate change is a hoax, and nothing should be done about pollution
• Muslims are dangerous, and should not be allowed the same religious freedoms as the rest of us
• Deficits are always bad, and the US should balance its budget (a particular howler given the runaway GOP deficit from 2001-2007).
• Illegal immigrants are a scourge, and must be rounded up and deported even if they've been here since infancy
• Medicare should be privatized and moved to a voucher system
• Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme and needs to be cut back severely

With so many areas in which the party has been dragged to the Right, no long-serving politician can possibly have started out his career with such positions.  I've said before that Romney and Perry have been unfarily burned by past positions that were actually quite sane and intelligent, because they don't fit the current mood of GOP primary voters.

"But what about Chris Christie?  He would have been great!".  Chris Christie who hires Mulsims in his administration?  Who is compassionate toward illegal aliens?  Who believes in climate change?  He would have come up with warts just like everyone else.  Jeb Bush too. 

The Republican party has gone completely off the rails.  And they still might win the presidency!  But to get the nomination its candidates are going to have to turn themselves into pretzels to come down on the right side of all these issues.  That's going to look ugly no matter how you slice it.  So don't blame Mitt for his serial flip-flopping- blame his party.

"But both parties have been radicalized! That's the problem!"  I've heard a version of this from a few Republican and centrist friends of mine.  I generally answer them with this challenge:

Think about both parties and their mainstream platforms in, say, 2000. I can name you a half dozen major issues on which the Republican party has moved way Right (torture, religious diversity for Muslims, cap & trade/ environment, health care, progressive taxation, etc). Now think about areas in which the Democrats have moved Left- I can come up with one- Gay Rights/marriage/civil unions. That's it. If you can think of any more I'd love to hear it. (I hope you're not thinking Health Care, in which Democrats passed a bill much less liberal than that proposed by the Clintons, with ideas drawn originally from Right Wing think tanks in response to ClintonCare. The only thing that makes it seem more liberal is that it succeeded in passing).

That's a direct quote from an email to one such friend.  I sent it 11 days ago and haven't seen an answer yet.  In fact, nobody has ever given me even a lame attempt at an answer.

Good links on Republican Radicalization

Some of my web-surfing this morning is relevant to my last post about the radicalization of the Republican party.  Rather than rehash yesterday's post, here are some links that bolster the point:

Here's one from David Frum about how the Republican party has changed since 2000, written by a conservative former speechwriter for George W. Bush.

Here are a couple of posts from Jon Chait making the point that Republicans aren't really interested in deficit reduction, only tax cuts, and defending President Obama's leadership around budget issues (basically making the point that he has tried being very involved, tried staying out entirely, and tried negotiating behind the scenes all at different times, and found that none of those approaches work.  In order to lead, the other party has to be willing to follow).

Radicalization of the Parties

I am so sick of the Common Wisdom that both parties in the US have become radicalized.  It's basically an article of faith among the "Third Way" crowd.  But it's a classic example of false equivalence.

Sarah Pailin, Michelle Bachman, and  Herman Cain are extremely radical- much more so than anyone I can think of in the Democratic party mainstream.  The equivalent to those politicians on the Left would be Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore- but those guys have no pull at all in the Democratic party. The list of crazy stuff said by Bachman, for example, could fill a book, and she won the Iowa Straw Poll!

Let me put it this way: think about both parties and their mainstream platforms in, say, 2000. I can name a half dozen major issues on which the Republican party has moved way Right (torture, religious diversity for Muslims, cap & trade/ environment, health care, progressive taxation, etc). Now think about areas in which the Democrats have moved Left- I can come up with one- Gay Rights/marriage/civil unions. That's it.  (Some people jump in with Health Care, in which Democrats passed a bill much less liberal than that proposed by the Clintons, with ideas drawn originally from Right Wing think tanks in response to ClintonCare. The only thing that makes it seem more liberal is that it succeeded in passing).

Obama has tried mightily to work from the Center, but every time he turns that direction the Republicans have responded by running 10 steps toward the Right.

Hey, maybe the radicals are right: maybe we need to ditch the entire modern welfare state and return to 1929 America. I'm not buying it, but that's what a huge chunk of the GOP is selling.

By the way, I recommend browsing through the Third Way website.  It's staggering- the position papers criticize the stale thinking of Left and Right, contrasting the Michael Moore position with the mainstream Republican position on every issue. In the economics paper, the authors quote Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman from the Left- two voices totally marginalized by actual policy-makers in Washington.  Then they go on to propose.... basically the exact position of the Obama administration.  Unbelievable- they want so badly to believe in their narrative that they miss what's right in front of them.