“A Special Kind Of Poison”: Over The Top Republican Rhetoric
Not all overheated political rhetoric is alike. Delusional right-wing crazy talk — the kind of ranting we’ve heard recently from washed-up rock star Ted Nugent and Tea Party-backed Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) — is a special kind of poison that cannot be safely ignored.
Let me be clear: I’m saying that the extreme language we hear from the far right is qualitatively different from the extreme language we hear from the far left — and far more damaging to the ties that bind us as a nation. Tut-tutting that both sides should tone it down is meaningless. For all intents and purposes, one side is the problem.
Believe me, I would prefer not to dignify the ravings of Nugent or West by commenting on them. Nugent seems to be motivated by paranoia; West, perhaps by cynical calculation. It would be satisfying to withhold the attention they seek, but this is not an option. The only effective way to deal with bullies is to confront them.
Nugent, who delivered his foaming-at-the-mouth peroration at a National Rifle Association convention, earned a visit from the Secret Service with his promise that “if Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”
That might or might not constitute an actual threat to the president of the United States. More chilling, to me, was the way his audience of gun enthusiasts applauded in agreement as Nugent compared the Obama administration to a bunch of “coyotes in your living room” who deserve to be shot. Nugent ended by exhorting his listeners: “We are Braveheart. We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November. Am I — any questions?”
No, I think he made himself quite clear.
Violent metaphors aside, the nub of Nugent’s argument — and I use the word advisedly — was this: “If you can’t go home and get everybody in your lives to clean house in this vile, evil, America-hating administration, I don’t even know what you’re made of.”
Vile? Evil? America-hating? Nugent doesn’t just characterize those with different political views as misguided or wrong. He seeks to paint them as alien and anti-American — as enemies of this nation, rather than citizens with whom he disagrees. In a subsequent interview, Nugent called Nancy Pelosi a “sub-human scoundrel” and referred to liberals as cockroaches to “stomp” in November.
This is what distinguishes the flame-throwers of the far right from those of the far left. Nugent and his ilk seek to deny their political opponents the very right to believe in a different philosophy. Agree with me, he says, or be stomped.
It would be one thing if this sort of vicious intolerance came only from aging rockers whose brains may have been scrambled by all those high-decibel performances. But it comes, too, from an elected member of the House of Representatives.
At a town hall meeting last week in Palm City, Fla., West was asked how many Marxists there are in Congress. He replied, “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party who are members of the Communist Party.” That is, of course, a bald-faced lie. There are no communists in Congress. What makes the lie even worse is West’s subsequent declaration that he stands by his words because he was referring to the 80-member Congressional Progressive Caucus, which West considers a branch of the Comintern.
“There is a very thin line between communism, progressivism, Marxism, socialism,” West claimed this week. “It’s about nationalizing production. It’s about creating and expanding the welfare state. It’s about this idea of social and economic justice. You hear that being played out now with fairness, fair share, economic equality.”
West can’t really believe this nonsense. What he’s trying to do is delegitimize the entire stream of progressive thought that has run wide and deep through American history since the nation’s founding. Disagree with his views, West insists, and you’re not just a political opponent, you’re a godless Marxist.
There is no symmetry here. The far left may hurl insults at the right but doesn’t scream “fascism” whenever a Republican proposes privatizing Medicare.
So this is what I want to know: Mitt Romney, do you agree with your prominent endorser Ted Nugent that the Obama administration is evil and hates America? House Speaker John Boehner, do you agree with your star freshman West that “78 to 81” of your colleagues are card-carrying communists?
Speak up, gentlemen; I didn’t hear you.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 19, 2012
“Striking And Ominous”: Bourbon Democrats On The Rise Again
The parallels between today’s conservative-dominated Republican Party and southern “Bourbon” Democrats in the post-Civil War era are striking and ominous.
The Bourbons — as conservative Democrats in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were known — were prosperous property owners in the South who set out to end Reconstruction and bring back the good old days of domination by upper-class whites. The Post’s Charles Lane alluded to them in his April 17 column, “A ‘white man’s party’?”
Historian Harvey H. Jackson III captured the objectives of the Bourbons in a 2004 article:
“Among their many goals was to keep Bourbon money in Bourbon pockets. They limited the state’s taxing power, abolished boards and offices (including the board of education), allowed the state debt to be settled in ways not fully understood today, and prohibited state support for projects such as river improvement and railroad construction.” Any of that sound familiar?
“The Bourbon [Democratic-written] constitution of 1875 was a victory for prosperous . . . Alabamians who did not want to pay taxes to improve the lives of those less fortunate than themselves and who did not want to finance commercial development that did not benefit them directly.” What contemporary political party comes to mind?
The Encyclopedia of Alabama, developed by the Alabama Humanities Foundation and Auburn University, puts it that “low taxes (particularly on property), weak government, and white supremacy — the core concerns of the Bourbons — became of the law of the land.”
The term Bourbon was most likely associated with the reactionary Bourbon Dynasty of France that attempted to undo the effects of the French Revolution. “In Alabama and the South,” the encyclopedia says, “Bourbon Democrats worked to undo what was done by the Civil War and Reconstruction.”
Conservative Republicans undoubtedly will take umbrage at any suggestion they belong in the same camp as post-Civil War conservative Democrats who proudly favored white supremacy and life before Appomattox.
So, let’s see. Are today’s conservatives big champions of states’ rights, a smaller and weaker federal government, less taxes, and more individual liberty? Yes, they will agree. But those goals, they would insist, are not racial in nature; they reflect a philosophy and set of values.
Yet even House Republican leader Eric Cantor acknowledges the existence of a “darker side” in this country. Asked this week by Politico’s Mike Allen if he has felt anti-Semitism from his GOP colleagues, Cantor, the lone Jewish Republican in Congress, first said no.
Then Cantor said, “I think that all of us know that in this country, we’ve not always gotten it right in terms of racial matters, religious matters, whatever. . . . To sit here and say in America that we’ve got it all right now, I think that pretty much all of us can say we’ve still got work to do.”
Indeed.
What’s more, the net effect of goals espoused by today’s conservatives is to achieve some of the outcomes sought by Bourbon Democrats. President Obama described their philosophy in a speech last month:
“If you’re out of work, can’t find a job, tough luck; you’re on your own. If you don’t have health care, that’s your problem; you’re on your own. If you’re born into poverty, lift yourself up out of your own — with your own bootstraps, even if you don’t have boots; you’re on your own,” he told a crowd in Burlington, Vt. “They believe . . . that’s how America has advanced. That’s the cramped, narrow conception they have of liberty.”
Conservatives today, of course, reject that characterization.
But conservative Democrats of the late 19th and early 20th century and today’s Republican conservatives would probably agree that:
America is better off when the federal government leaves people to fend for themselves;
Markets that are free from government regulation and taxes will produce prosperity;
There are rungs on the ladder of opportunity, but many at the bottom are too lazy to climb;
The wealthy, to whom much has been given, have no stake in anybody else’s success;
A business’s obligation is to those who own it;
We will not as a people go up or down together; in the end, each is on his or her own.
Yes, there are differences between the United States at the turn of the 20th century and today. But there are similarities too.
Protecting the interests of the propertied and the politically powerful may be a legacy handed down from yesterday’s conservative Bourbon Democrats to today’s conservative Republicans.
By: Colbert I. King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 20. 2012
“Inherited Privilege”: Romney Moves From Defending Inequality To Defending Inequality Of Opportunity
The political debate — the broader debate between the two parties, not just the campaign between President Obama and Mitt Romney — has largely hinged on inequality. Republicans have defended high (and growing) levels of inequality as the just rewards accruing to hard work and genius, while Democrats have argued for a role for government in limiting inequality. For weeks, Romney has fused his party’s defense of inequality with a defense of his own personal wealth — any suggestion that Romney’s regressive policies are tinged by self-interest, he has charged, is an attack on success itself.
Yesterday, Romney took that argument in a different direction. He moved from defending inequality to defending inequality of opportunity. The occasion was Obama noting that he had not been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. This is a standard rhetorical gambit, evoking log cabins and hard cider, and one Obama (as Alec MacGillis points out) has been using since long before Romney emerged as his opponent. Romney took it as a personal affront, and issued this sharp rejoinder:
“I’m certainly not going to apologize for my dad and his success in life,” Romney said Thursday morning on “Fox and Friends.” “He was born poor. He worked his way to become very successful despite the fact that he didn’t have a college degree, and one of the things he wanted to do was provide for me and for my brother and sisters. I’m not going to apologize for my dad’s success.”
Since Romney couched his defense of his wealthy upbringing in the same terms he has used to defend his own business success, nobody seems to have noticed the difference. But if you take conservative rhetoric seriously, it’s all the difference in the world. The conservative line, articulated by such figures as Arthur Brooks and Paul Ryan, makes a sharp distinction between equality of outcome, which is thoroughly evil, and equality of opportunity, which is the highest ideal. (Almost everybody opposes equality of outcome — what they oppose is virtually any steps by government to reduce inequality of outcome.) “Equal opportunity versus equal outcomes, very different political philosophy,” says Ryan.
In practice, the attempt to draw a distinction between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity collapses immediately. The number one thing parents try to do with their money is to buy better opportunities for their children. A new Brookings paper this week describes how having a more expensive home translates to better schools. The mere fact of being surrounded by richer, better-prepared students is itself an advantage. This is something we all know, of course. When you have kids, your goal is either to live in an expensive neighborhood with good public schools, or to be able to spend directly on expensive private schooling. It’s one of the things Romney himself knows — hence his comment that “one of the things [George Romney] wanted to do was provide for me and for my brother and sisters.”
Of course he did! And that is the point. The advantages George Romney transmitted to Mitt Romney include not just intelligence, height, good looks, and a stable upbringing, but a fancy private education at Cranbrook and a lot of money.
The conservative rhetoric about inequality has been attempting to sustain the pretense that Romney is merely defending his business success and the larger principle of merit. But of course, he’s also defending his own upbringing and the larger principle of inherited privilege. The fact that he did so without anybody noticing shows the degree to which, far from being “very different” things, these are one and the same.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, April 20, 2012
“Tax Shifting And Political Power”: Why Romney Loves The States And Hates The Feds
One of the main goals of Mitt Romney’s domestic program, to the extent that it can be discerned, is to transfer programs from the federal government to the states. Just which programs Romney wants to ship to the states, he does not say. But the goal is on his mind, and he has touted it both in private remarks to donors and in his recent speech to a tea-party group last Friday. Perhaps not coincidentally, economist and Romney adviser Greg Mankiw wrote a New York Times column this last weekend touting the virtues of pushing more policy toward the states.
Sometimes, locating policy at the state level can result in some kind of progressive policy innovation. Romney’s Massachusetts health-care plan offers one example. But this was a relatively rare event, brought about by the combination of its being a highly Democratic state that happened upon a large federal windfall unavailable to other states. In most cases, moving a policy to the states will tend to make it more conservative — less generous to the poor and vulnerable, and less burdensome upon the rich and powerful.
How do state programs differ from federal programs? For one thing, they’re paid for differently. Federal taxes charge the rich a higher rate than the poor. State taxes tend to charge a higher rate on the poor than the rich. So even if nothing at all changes about the program, simply breaking one federal program into 50 programs of the same cumulative size amounts to a lump sum transfer payment to the rich from the non-rich.
But making something a state program almost certainly means it will not stay the same size. State governments, unlike the federal government, must balance their budgets every year. When the economy contracts, this forces state (and local) governments into austerity mode. That’s why you’ve seen lots of laid-off teachers and police officers but not many laid-off Marines or IRS agents.
Finally, and most important, states are competing with each other. Every government has a general incentive to provide the best services for the lowest cost. But when you’re a state, you have an additional incentive. You don’t merely want to provide the best general environment, you also want to provide an environment that specifically appeals to business owners and rich people, and repels the poor and sick. After all, rich people may pay a lower average tax rate but they still pay more tax dollars than the non-rich. And poor and sick people suck up tax dollars.
So suppose a state decides it wants to provide really generous services for poor people — say, good medical care (that is, better than your standard Medicaid package) along with child care to help single parents work and scholarships so that any talented but poor kid can go to college. And the voters decide to pay for it by taxing the rich at higher rates. At some point, it will dawn on the voters that, however attractive this arrangement sounds, they may run the risk of driving rich voters into neighborhood states, and, worse still, serve as a magnet for poor and sick people who want to enjoy the comfort and opportunity denied to them elsewhere. All this would make this plan more costly, and possibly altogether unworkable. Indeed, exactly this consideration comes into play all the time when states debate their tax and spending policies.
Interestingly enough, Mankiw makes this argument in his Times column. He does not mention the possibility that offering more generous provisions to the poor and sick may attract more of them to a state. But he does note that, “Because capital is more mobile than labor, competition among governments significantly constrains how capital is taxed.”
In other words, locating more programs at the state level essentially gives the rich and powerful political power disproportionate to their numbers. The voters may agree on a given level of redistribution, but the ease of moving between state lines imposes a constraint that doesn’t exist at the federal level. (Well, it exists in theory — you can move to a different country, but it’s harder, and given that the United States has a less redistributive tax and transfer system than any other advanced country, the option doesn’t really come into play.)
As Mankiw points out, “redistribution is harder when people and capital are free to move to other jurisdictions that offer better deals.” If your goal is to reduce the amount of money that the government takes from the rich and gives to the non-rich, then sending programs to the states makes a lot of sense. And pretty much all the evidence we have suggests this is in fact the Republican Party’s main goal.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, April 20, 2012
“What A Revolting Development This Is”: Romney’s Immigration Adviser Says Mitt Won’t Support GOP DREAM Act
During the GOP presidential primary, Mitt Romney staked out the most extreme position on immigration of any Republican candidate. Romney even campaigned with his immigration policy adviser Kris Kobach, the author of Alabama and Arizona’s harsh immigration laws, on Martin Luther King Day.
Now that Romney is the presumptive nominee, he’s trying to soften his immigration rhetoric to win over Hispanic voters. The Romney campaign even tried to publicly downgrade Kobach from “adviser” to mere “supporter” yesterday — an effort that failed after Kobach refused to play along.
Nor is this the only example of Kobach refusing to let Romney etch-a-sketch away his harsh positions on immigration. After Romney said over the weekend that Republicans need to embrace a Republican DREAM Act to win over Hispanic voters, Kobach told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent that the former Massachusetts governor will not support any version of the DREAM Act that offers a path to legal status — like the GOP version Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) plans to introduce. And he added that no Republican should support such a proposal:
[Kobach] stated flatly that he didn’t think Republicans — or Romney — should, or would, support any version of the DREAM Act that provides undocumented immigrants with any kind of path to legal status.
If Romney sticks to this — and Kobach said he would — there’s very little room for him to moderate his approach to immigration. In addition to advising Romney on immigration, Kobach is a national GOP voice on the issue, suggesting the right would not permit any move of this kind.
“I’d absolutely reject any proposal that would give a path to legal status for illegal aliens en masse,” Kobach said. “That is what amnesty is. I do not expect [Romney] to propose or embrace amnesty.”
Details of Rubio’s proposed DREAM Act have not been announced, but the first-term senator has outlined a plan that would not offer a direct path to citizenship but would enable them to remain in the country legally. Despite his promise to veto the DREAM Act earlier in his campaign, Romney told a crowd at a private fundraiser that he wants a Republican DREAM Act to make the GOP the party of “opportunity.”
But if Rubio’s plan includes a path to legal status, or if Romney supports a plan that does, then Kobach said it would be an “unacceptable” proposal. “A path to legal status for someone who is here illegally is amnesty by definition,” he said. “It gives the alien what he has stolen.”
By: Amanda Peterson Beadle, Think Progress, April 18, 2012
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