“The GOP Is The Party Of Fear”: Scaring The Voters Works; There’s No Reason For The Republicans To Stop
The Republicans might consider themselves as the party of freedom, but their true identity, as Tuesday night’s debate made clear, is the party of fear. All the candidates on stage, with the partial exception of Senator Rand Paul, painted a frightening picture of America as a country that, as frontrunner Donald Trump warned, is on the verge of disintegrating.
“We need strength,” Trump said. “We’re not respected, you know, as a nation anymore. We don’t have that level of respect that we need. And if we don’t get it back fast, we’re just going to go weaker, weaker and just disintegrate.”
Trump is often portrayed as an anomaly among the GOP candidates, but consider the words of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, widely regarded as one of the moderates in the party.
“America has been betrayed,” Christie said in his opening statement, where his words were clearly carefully planned.
We’ve been betrayed by the leadership that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have provided to this country over the last number of years. Think about just what’s happened today. The second largest school district in America in Los Angeles closed based on a threat. Think about the effect that, that’s going to have on those children when they go back to school tomorrow wondering filled with anxiety to whether they’re really going to be safe.
Think about the mothers who will take those children tomorrow morning to the bus stop wondering whether their children will arrive back on that bus safe and sound. Think about the fathers of Los Angeles, who tomorrow will head off to work and wonder about the safety of their wives and their children.
One might wonder how Obama and Clinton are responsible for the Los Angeles School District overreacting to a bomb hoax. One might also wonder that about a presidential candidate who uses the Los Angeles incident not to criticize the tendency to overreact to perceived threats but to stoke fear.
But Christie was hardly alone. All the other candidates spoke of an America under siege, no longer respected in the world, with a weakened military, threatened by both homegrown terrorists as well as immigrants and refugees who might be terrorists. To be sure, Senator Rand Paul did enter a few libertarian caveats about the dangers of ranking security above liberty, but even he used xenophobic fear of immigrants to attack rival Senator Marco Rubio. Ultimately, all the candidates played to a politics of fear—and history suggests it will help them in 2016.
How did fear come to loom so large as a part of Republican rhetoric? The crucial turning point surely was 9/11, which gave birth to a culture of fear in America—about which a small but vital literature has emerged, such as Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream (2007), Corey Robin’s Fear: The History of a Political Idea (2006), Peter N. Stearns’s American Fears (2006). Using historical evidence, Stearns argued “that there either more fearful Americans than there once were, or that their voices are louder or more sought after and publicly authorized—or both.”
The best articulation of this culture of fear—and the concomitant willingness to do almost anything to secure an impregnable level of safety or security—can be seen in the 1 percent doctrine as articulated by Vice President Dick Cheney: “If there’s a 1 percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.” In effect, Cheney was calling for the United States to become one giant safe space, even if it meant massively overreacting to threats abroad.
Sanctioned by Washington, a language giving priority to safety has increasingly shaped other parts of society, including academia. Last September, Nicholas Dirks, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, argued that freedom of speech has to be tempered by an acknowledgement of the demands of safety and civility: “[W]e can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility.”
The culture of fear that grew up after 9/11 inevitably stifled free speech. “As a writer and editor,” Michael Kinsley wrote in The Washington Post in 2002, “I have been censoring myself and others quite a bit since Sept. 11. By ‘censoring’ I mean deciding not to write or publish things for reasons other than my own judgment of their merits. What reasons? Sometimes it has been a sincere feeling that an ordinarily appropriate remark is inappropriate at this extraordinary moment. Sometimes it is a genuine respect for readers who might feel that way even if I don’t. But sometimes it is simple cowardice.”
With both academia and journalism cowed, the years after 9/11 were a golden age for Republicans, when they were able to push a large part of their agenda, not just in foreign policy but often domestically as well. So it’s no surprise that Republicans keep returning to the well: Stirring up anxiety in the electorate has been so profitable for them. In his closing statement in the debate, Christie cagily evoked the memories of 9/ll:
On September 10th, 2001, I was named chief federal prosecutor in New Jersey and on September 11th, 2001, my wife and my brother who are in the audience tonight went through the World Trade Center and to their offices just blocks away from the Trade Center.
I lost touch with them for six hours that day and prayed that they were alive
Reviving 9/11 level fears is now a campaign strategy. Consider the midterm elections of 2014, when alarmist accounts of Ebola patients, “anchor babies,” and ISIS assassins all flooding the United States became a staple of Republican discourse. This fear-mongering paid handsome dividends at the ballot, with the Republicans winning the Senate and strengthening their hold on the House and in state legislatures. Scaring the voters works. There’s no reason for the Republicans to stop.
By: Jeet Heer, Senior Editor at the New Republic, December 15, 2015
“Most Simplistic And Mindless Solutions Imaginable”: Breaking; GOP Candidates Admit American Military Force Has Its Limits
Amid the competition in last night’s debate to see which candidate could make Americans more terrified that we’re all going to be killed by terrorists any day now, an actual substantive policy difference emerged on national security. While none of the candidates took positions they hadn’t taken before, it was the clearest explication of what actually is a real division within the Republican Party on foreign policy.
Though we sometimes think of the GOP as divided between Rand Paul on one side and everybody else on the other — one lone candidate skeptical of foreign interventionism up against a bunch of unreconstructed hawks — the truth is more complicated. And as we saw last night, the candidates currently in first place (Donald Trump) and second place (Ted Cruz) in the race represent a foreign policy vision that acknowledges that American power has its limits. That’s a stark contrast with their opponents, who essentially believe in George W. Bush’s vision, which says that American military power can solve nearly any problem and plant the seeds of democracy anywhere.
There are reasons not to give too much credit to Cruz and Trump, which I’ll get to in a moment. But their beliefs on the fundamental question of the limits of American power, particularly in the Middle East, were clearly laid out last night. Here’s part of what Cruz had to say:
So let’s go back to the beginning of the Obama administration, when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama led NATO in toppling the government in Libya. They did it because they wanted to promote democracy. A number of Republicans supported them. The result of that — and we were told then that there were these moderate rebels that would take over. Well, the result is, Libya is now a terrorist war zone run by jihadists.
Move over to Egypt. Once again, the Obama administration, encouraged by Republicans, toppled Mubarak who had been a reliable ally of the United States, of Israel, and in its place, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood came in, a terrorist organization.
And we need to learn from history. These same leaders — Obama, Clinton, and far too many Republicans — want to topple Assad. Assad is a bad man. Gadhafi was a bad man. Mubarak had a terrible human rights record. But they were assisting us — at least Gadhafi and Mubarak — in fighting radical Islamic terrorists.
And if we topple Assad, the result will be ISIS will take over Syria, and it will worsen U.S. national security interests. And the approach, instead of being a Woodrow Wilson democracy promoter, we ought to hunt down our enemies and kill ISIS rather than creating opportunities for ISIS to take control of new countries.
We didn’t actually topple Mubarak and we didn’t exactly topple Gadhafi, but in any case, Cruz is articulating a realist foreign policy vision here: We should focus on direct threats to American national security and not try to impose democracy, because overthrowing dictators creates volatile situations in which the outcome can be even worse than what came before. This is a direct contradiction to George W. Bush’s expansive vision in which the right invasion or two would spread democracy across the Middle East in a glorious flowering of freedom. (And yes, we should acknowledge that this vision was always selective — nobody proposed overthrowing the government of Saudi Arabia, one of the most oppressive dictatorships on earth).
After Cruz’s statement, Marco Rubio and John Kasich chimed in to argue that we actually should overthrow Assad, then Donald Trump came back with a statement that could have come from Bernie Sanders:
In my opinion, we’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly, if they were there and if we could’ve spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems; our airports and all of the other problems we’ve had, we would’ve been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now.
We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East, we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away, and for what? It’s not like we had victory.
It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized. A total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart.
The typical telling of the Iraq story Republicans offer is that everything was going great until Barack Obama came in and screwed it all up. But here, Trump isn’t even bothering with that — he’s saying that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was a bad idea from the start and had all kinds of negative unintended consequences.
It’s important to understand that Trump and Cruz aren’t doves. In fact, they have wedded this skepticism toward nation-building with the most belligerent attitude toward the Islamic State. Trump says he wants to “bomb the s— out of them,” while Cruz proposes to “carpet-bomb” them. So on the one hand they have a broader approach that seems grounded in history, while on the other they’re offering the most simplistic (you might even say mindless) solution imaginable to the immediate problem of the Islamic State.
For many of the other candidates, it’s precisely the reverse. Against all evidence, they still talk as though American power is essentially limitless and there are no unintended consequences we need to concern ourselves with when we do something like inject ourselves into a civil war in the Middle East. Yet on the Islamic State, they try to sound like they have a nuanced plan that’s built on an understanding of the complexities of the situation. Marco Rubio’s Islamic State plan might be wrong in all its particulars, but at least it has particulars, meant to demonstrate that he knows what he’s talking about. (You may have noticed that Rubio spends a lot of time trying to demonstrate that he knows what he’s talking about.) The same could be said of Jeb Bush.
As last night’s fear-fest made clear, the candidates know that their electorate is on edge and looking for a strong leader who will make them feel like the threats they perceive around them are being confronted. Trump and Cruz are offering instant gratification in the form of a glorious bombing campaign against the Islamic State, combined with a more careful approach over the longer term that would seek to avoid quagmires in places where, as Cruz likes to say about Syria, “We don’t have a dog in that fight.” The question is whether that’s appealing to a significant portion of the Republican electorate. We don’t yet know the answer, but eventually we’ll find out.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, December 16, 2015
“Carly Fiorina Trips Over Fact, Fiction Distinction”: Caught Once Again Saying Something That Was Plainly Untrue
At this week’s Republican presidential debate, Carly Fiorina hoped to get her struggling campaign back on track by pointing to her military bona fides:
“One of the things I would immediately do, in addition to defeating [U.S. enemies] here at home, is bring back the warrior class – Petraeus, McChrystal, Mattis, Keane, Flynn. Every single one of these generals I know. Every one was retired early because they told President Obama things that he didn’t want to hear.”
For Fiorina, it was a two-fer – she could boast about personal connections with top U.S. military brass while simultaneously condemning President Obama for dismissing generals who disagreed with him.
The problem, of course, was that Fiorina wasn’t telling the truth. David Petraeus, for example, didn’t retire because of a conflict with the president; he retired from the military to become the CIA director, but was forced to quit after a sex scandal in which he shared classified information with his mistress.
As Rachel noted on the show last night, the even more striking example is retired Gen. Jack Keane, who retired in 2003 – when Obama was still a state senator. The idea that Keane, who has never even met this president, was forced out of the military because of a disagreement with Obama doesn’t make any sense. Keane said as much during a Fox News interview yesterday.
But that’s not the funny part. What makes Fiorina such a bizarre presidential candidate is how she handled the follow-up questions the day after the debate.
Talking with reporters Wednesday after a town hall here, Fiorina was asked if she misspoke about Keane given the timing of his retirement.
“No, I didn’t misspeak,” she said. “But he has been someone of great experience who has been highly critical of the way this administration has not taken threats seriously and unfortunately he hasn’t been listened to. I would listen to him.”
The CNN headline on its piece read, “Despite facts, Carly Fiorina stands by claim about retired generals.”
It would have been easy for Fiorina, less than a day removed from the debate, to say she accidentally referenced Keane, but that’s just not how she likes to campaign. The same thing came up in September, when Fiorina was caught lying about Planned Parenthood, but instead of walking back her bogus claims, the Republican insisted that fiction is fact.
To be sure, Fiorina isn’t the only presidential hopeful to have been caught saying things that aren’t true. But she is the only national 2016 candidate to respond to incidents like these in such a ridiculous way.
As we discussed in September, Americans can learn a lot about presidential candidates by reviewing their records and proposals, but how they respond to challenges tells us something important, too. In this case, a candidate for national office was caught once again saying something that was plainly untrue, which in turn created a test: how would Carly Fiorina defend a lie? What would her defense tell us about her readiness for national office?
The answers should be alarming for her campaign supporters.
Indeed, in recent months, as Fiorina has seen her poll numbers steadily collapse, there’s been quite a bit of chatter about how the Republican businesswoman managed to fall so far, so quickly. There’s more than one explanation for her failures, but incidents like these are a reminder about Fiorina herself creating doubts about her preparedness for the White House.
Disclosure: My wife works for Planned Parenthood, but she played no role in this piece.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 17, 2015
“The Republican Presidential Primary Is About Only One Issue”: Who Can Best Reflect Voters’ Anxiety Back To Them
Not long ago, immigration was supposed to be the key issue of the Republican presidential primary, where even though the differences between the candidates are small, they all have to show voters that they’re better on the issue than their opponents. And “better” isn’t about having a superior policy solution, it’s about reflecting the voters’ feelings back to them in the most compelling way.
But then there was a terrorist attack in California, and everything changed. Immigration is no longer so important on the campaign trail; instead, the discussion is all about who’s tougher on terrorism. But while it looks like Republicans are talking about something completely different, the truth is that it’s the same discussion and the same emotions, just with a different group of foreigners as the main target.
The Republican primary is really about one thing — a complex, multifaceted thing, but one thing all the same. It finds its expression in any number of issues, but it always comes down to a feeling that Republican voters have. It ranges between unease and anger, but it’s always about the sense that things just aren’t right. Sure, they hate Barack Obama, but he’s more symptom than cause.
Think about that prototypical Republican voter, a middle-aged white guy with old-fashioned values. He sees immigrants moving into his area, speaking a language he doesn’t understand. He sees foreign terrorists on the news. He sees his country growing less religious, he sees gay people getting married and transgender people celebrated for their courage, he sees popular culture created by a bunch of damn hippies infecting the minds of his children. The world gets more confusing all the time, and he doesn’t like the direction things are going.
A Wall Street Journal poll in late October found 71 percent of Republican primary voters agreeing that “A lot of what is happening today makes me feel uneasy and out of place in my own country” (45 percent agreed strongly). And when Donald Trump says he wants “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” it sounds pretty darn sensible to our voter, whether he’s supporting Trump or not. Because somebody’s got to figure out what the hell is going on, and not just with the Muslims.
The political news of the week is the rise of Ted Cruz, who now leads in Iowa and has moved into second place nationally. There’s no telling yet how long it will last, especially since candidates popular with evangelical voters who do well in Iowa haven’t gotten their party’s nomination lately. But Cruz’s rise is also a story about what isn’t happening, namely the success so many people have predicted for Marco Rubio. And one reason may be that Rubio’s youthful optimism isn’t connecting with that jumble of negative emotions, the fear and the anger and the unease, that Republicans are feeling right now.
A big part of conservatives’ dissatisfaction comes from their perception that the national Republican Party has been letting the country slip away. Their representatives have won political victories, but they didn’t do anything with control of Congress. They haven’t fought Obama hard enough, and they’ve either been defeated or compromised on everything that’s important. Our long downward slide has continued unabated. So the fact that Cruz is universally detested in Washington is a strong point in his favor. Ask him what he’s accomplished and he’ll tell you about how often he has “stood up” against both the White House and his own party’s leadership. That may not sound like an accomplishment to many people, but to lots of primary voters, it is.
Rubio can say he’s fought against the Washington establishment, too, but he’s going to have a hard time convincing too many primary voters, particularly when they’re contrasting him with Cruz. And imagine that we go a couple of months without another terrorist attack. The issue will fade in importance, as all issues can, and it’s entirely possible, maybe even likely, that immigration would once again become the main vehicle through which voters’ feelings of unease are expressed. Should that happen, Cruz will attack Rubio mercilessly for trying to achieve comprehensive immigration reform early in his Senate term; it was Rubio’s temporary support of that effort that alienated him from many Tea Partiers.
Perhaps I’m wrong about this, and Rubio’s message that he represents a new generation of optimistic leadership will resonate with primary voters (although Cruz is only five months older than Rubio, he doesn’t talk about his youth in the same way as the baby-faced Floridian). But at the moment, while Rubio can rail at President Obama with the best of them, he isn’t channeling that sense of unease in the same way that Cruz and Donald Trump are.
The party out of power always feels like things aren’t right—after all, it’s infuriating to have to watch a president you despise on television every day, setting policy and making decisions you disagree with. But most of the time, that’s a problem that can be solved with the right electoral outcome. What worries many Republican voters right now, on the other hand, is something much bigger. They want someone who understands what they’re feeling—who gets the fear, the dismay, the unease, and even the anger. Even if none of the candidates are actually going to be able to do much about it.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, December 15, 2015
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