The Atlantic ran a good piece on Friday about GOP antics. Some choice bits:
The details are complicated, but please don’t lose sight of these three essential points:
- As a matter of substance, constant-shutdown, permanent-emergency governance is so destructive that no other serious country engages in or could tolerate it. The United States can afford it only because we are — still — so rich, with so much margin for waste and error. Details on this and other items below.*
- As a matter of politics, this is different from anything we learned about in classrooms or expected until the past few years. We’re used to thinking that the most important disagreements are between the major parties, not within one party; and that disagreements over policies, goals, tactics can be addressed by negotiation or compromise.This time, the fight that matters is within the Republican party, and that fight is over whether compromise itself is legitimate.** Outsiders to this struggle — the president and his administration, Democratic legislators as a group, voters or “opinion leaders” outside the generally safe districts that elected the new House majority — have essentially no leverage over the outcome. I can’t recall any situation like this in my own experience, and the only even-approximate historic parallel (with obvious differences) is the inability of Northern/free-state opinion to affect the debate within the slave-state South from the 1840s onward. Nor is there a conceivable “compromise” the Democrats could offer that would placate the other side.
- As a matter of journalism, any story that presents the disagreements as a “standoff,” a “showdown,” a “failure of leadership,” a sign of “partisan gridlock,” or any of the other usual terms for political disagreement,represents a failure of journalism*** and an inability to see or describe what is going on. For instance: the “dig in their heels” headline you see below, which is from a proprietary newsletter I read this morning, and about which I am leaving off the identifying details.
Think Progress offered their take with The Complete Guide to the GOP’s Three-Year Campaign to Shut Down the Government, which I think is a little off for not recognizing that the No-Compromise extortionist campaign had been pre-planned and sold to the Tea Party rank and file in its complete form by the end of February, 2011 at the Tea Party Patriots American Policy Summit. Most notably, the strategy has worked remarkably well – the Tea Party has gotten what it wants – deep cuts in spending, tax cuts, and dysfunctional gridlock – an ongoing unofficial shutdown. An official shutdown is icing. In future their demands will get bigger as will the chunks of government they flick off along the way during their “failures.” What we’re seeing at play here is the grand master plan of attrition. Still, Volsky’s timeline does put the latest defunding debacle into some order. Probably worth a look.
Good post. Really highlights the failure of the media in general and the evils of safe districts. I can’t think why traditional Republicans don’t take their party back – hatred of a black man in the White House, I suppose. More than ever we have to do our part in Wisconsin to rid the country of the extremists and their supporting votes and that means ousting Ryan, Ribble, Duffy and Petri.
Thank you, Emma. And too true on all your points. I fear that you are correct – one primary reason Republicans don’t take their party back is bigotry and hate. Both override rational self-interest. The bigoted and hateful are easy to exploit.
Here’s the AP vote from this morning’s JS: “House votes to avoid shutdown, delay Obamacare”
I read that as wingnut talking points that say, “we won’t go along with Obama’s Grand Bargain, to ‘chain-the-CPI’ to cut Social Security and veterans’ benefits, but we still want to defund the ACA/Obamacare.”
JC,
Your interpretation is certainly one way to read the AP headline. I’d probably tend toward… “A grand bargain that includes the ridiculous and regressive wouldn’t be necessary in the first place with responsible conservatives on the other side of the negotiation table…” that is if a grand bargain were at all germane to the headline, but it isn’t.
Or I might read that headline as curiously uncritical of toxic extremism. I probably wouldn’t speculate on “Obama’s grand bargain” since the grand bargain to which you allude isn’t an option he assented to in this situation. What comes to mind as well with that headline is that AP gives no suggestion that government design and the democratic process itself has been gutted by the GOP’s political extortionists.
I suppose I wouldn’t regard that AP headline as a reflection of Obama or the last so-called “grand bargain” because clearly it isn’t. Below that headline there’s little more than the hollow emptiness of the headline itself – no critical substance, no discussion of the unhinged nature of the vote or the unhinged motivation behind the vote; but one thing the ensuing report mentions is that if the House version even reached the White House Obama would veto it. So it’s curious and a little inexplicable that this headline would generate thoughts of a grand bargain that won’t materialize or was ever a viable option. The latter reaction implicitly assents to GOP extortion and the desired trajectory for solidifying Anti-Obama/Anti-Government extremism within the public mind.
Reverting to jabs at Obama merely (and unnecessarily) distracts from the germane:
The AP headline hides the lie that the House didn’t vote to avoid a shutdown. They voted to ensure one.
Your interpretation of the headline furthers the AP lie, and your interpretation implies that wingnuts are directly responding to something which clearly they are not responding to. Your interpretation, therefore, injects a new, separate lie independent of the AP lie. For these reasons I must disregard your interpretation of wingnut motivation and the implicit burden it places upon Obama. Your interpretation suggests not only an acceptance of fallacious false equivalency, but an explicit promotion of it. I reject your interpretation as it doesn’t address the proximal or historical with any relevance.
Thank you for your thoughts, John. On this matter, let us agree to disagree.
JC,
The following from Lemieux is a good reminder of bad bargains (including Obama’s capitulation to religionists) that are pertinent to the current shutdown endeavor. Even then, however, the most germane is still GOP misogyny and extortion.
House GOP: Never Waste a Crisis by Neglecting to Punish Women!