Friday Reads: Post Cards from the fractious Right Wing
Posted: October 18, 2013 Filed under: morning reads 59 Comments
Good Morning!
This is probably going to strike you as a strange Friday Reads post but a few conversations with folks and this op-ed from economist Simon Johnson got me thinking about the great ongoing right wing conspiracy against Federalism, the New Deal, and the American way of life outside of those that were and still are wild about the good old days of the Confederacy. I really had a front seat to the Great Republican Purge of Reason, Secularism, and Modernity as a kid during the 1970s and a young adult in the 1980s and 1990s. I’ve never seen such an enduring crusade in modern times. It has come together to create a perfect storm and a perfect mess. The coalition of the crazy is also coming apart at the seams.
With a last-minute agreement on lifting the debt ceiling, the immediate threat of legal and financial disaster from a default on United States government obligations has been averted. But the last week has provided additional insight into how and why the current governmental arrangement known as the United States of America will end.
The mainstream narrative is that the problem is “dysfunctional government” or “paralysis in Washington.” That’s true, up to a point, but the real problem is the steady decline in legitimacy of the federal government – and the way this is related to what has happened on the right of the political spectrum.
For an earlier view of American government, I recommend the World War II trilogy by Rick Atkinson – the third volume of which came out this year (“The Guns at Last Light”). There was plenty of mismanagement, including by the military at all levels, during that conflict. But there were also remarkable achievements. In the 1940s, many people believed, with good reason, in the ability of the federal government to both organize activities at home and to have a positive impact around the world.
This was, perhaps, the most lasting effect of the Great Depression. In the 1930s, the private economy stumbled and private financial arrangements failed in many ways – but, on the whole, government was perceived as stepping in to help.
This positive view of an expanded federal government never sat well with people on the right, but the organized pushback was limited through the 1950s. It was only with the turmoil of the Vietnam War and other social pressures in the 1960s that the conservatives got their chance – starting with political direct mailing (American Target Advertising was founded in 1965), the rise of talk radio (particularly from the 1980s), and early anti-tax campaigns (including Proposition 13, which cut property taxes sharply in California in 1978).
Johnson argues that the right began to take advantage of the social upheaval occurring in the 1960s and 1970s to spin a tail that the Federal Government is something to fear and basically is some beast that needs to be tamed. As the federal government has acted to expand the rights of women, minorities, and new arrivals to the country, folks empowered by their local governments to suppress anything the local powers that be–white men, the plutocrats, local governments, businesses, and religious institutions–and their ability to abuse the powerless began to coalesce into the Republican party. The Republican Party has attracted business interests from its very beginning having sprung from the industrial north prior to the Civil War. What began to change was the realization that it needed to attract other groups in order to expand its interests. The Southern Strategy was used to attract the racist elements of the old confederacy. The 1980s saw the party attract Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and the religious right wing. These folks were incensed at advances made by the women’s movement and the budding GLBT rights movement . Libertarians—another brand of state’s rights and free market true believers–have been brought in by the money of the Kochs and other folks starting think tanks appealing to disenfranchised feeling white men who want their sex lives and pot as they want them, their privileges in tact, and their ability to avoid a draft to a foreign war the way it is.
There is a widening split in the party between these factions.
In a sign of the internal backlash against the right wing of the House Republican Conference, Louisiana Republican Charles Boustany questioned the political allegiances and motivations of his tea party-aligned colleagues and said they had put the GOP majority at risk in the current shutdown fight.
“There are members with a different agenda,” Boustany said Wednesday in an interview in his office. “And I’m not sure they’re Republicans and I’m not sure they’re conservative.”
His comments came a day after rank-and-file House Republicans rejected a package to reopen the government authored by their own leader, Speaker John Boehner. The result is that a bipartisan Senate-authored deal to end the two-week government shutdown appears poised to pass with almost nothing of substance gained by House conservatives for the shutdown they precipitated.
“The speaker has said consistently unless we can put 218 votes up, and preferably more than that, our ability to negotiate is pretty much undermined and that’s the problem we’ve repeatedly found ourselves in,” said Boustany, who has served since 2005 and is a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee. “Look at payroll tax. Look at fiscal cliff. You can go on and on. There are a handful of members – the numbers sort of vary, it’s in the 20-30 range – that are enough to derail a Republican conservative agenda in the House.”
Democracy Corp’s recent poll identified some of the major factions within the party. Each of them have extremely strong views and none of them are particularly palatable to the majority of Americans. The base voters have to hang together on each other’s extremist positions or they hang alone. Increasingly it looks like they may hang along. This is recent analysis from Bill Moyers’ group is by Joshua Holland.
Democracy Corps – a Democratic-leaning polling firm – released a study this week based on a series of focus groups they conducted with loyal Republican voters. They divided them up into three sub-groups which together represent the base of the party. Evangelicals represent the largest group, followed by Republicans who identify with the tea party movement. “Moderates,” the third group, make up about a quarter of the party’s base, according to the pollsters.
Fear of a changing society is one thing that unites all three factions. The battle over Obamacare, write the study’s authors, “goes to the heart of Republican base thinking about the essential political battle.”
They think they face a victorious Democratic Party that is intent on expanding government to increase dependency and therefore electoral support. It starts with food stamps and unemployment benefits; expands further if you legalize the illegals; but insuring the uninsured dramatically grows those dependent on government. They believe this is an electoral strategy — not just a political ideology or economic philosophy. If Obamacare happens, the Republican Party may be lost, in their view.
And while few explicitly talk about Obama in racial terms, the base supporters are very conscious of being white in a country with growing minorities. Their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities. Race remains very much alive in the politics of the Republican Party.
They worry that minorities, immigrants, and welfare recipients now believe it is their “right” to claim [public] benefits. Tea Party participants, in particular, were very focused on those who claim “rights” in the form of government services, without taking responsibility for themselves.
They are also unified in their belief that Obama is a usurper who has hoodwinked the public into re-electing him by hiding his true beliefs, which are essentially Marxist. They also think that Democrats have won the major political battles of our time because Republican legislators in Washington didn’t put up a fight.
But there are also deep divisions within the base, according to the analysis. Evangelicals still focus overwhelmingly on social issues. They think gay rights are the biggest threat to our society, but they also worry about the loss of what they see as an idyllic small-town culture. They feel besieged as the cultural ground shifts beneath them, and see themselves as a beleaguered, “politically incorrect” minority.
Tea partiers display a libertarian streak, and are far less concerned with social issues. They are staunchly pro-business. But there’s an easy alliance between these two groups – which make up well over half of the GOP base – because Evangelicals think the tea partiers are fighting back, and vice versa.
Both groups displayed a high level of paranoia, according to the researchers who conducted the study. They noted that this was the first time, in many years of conducting focus groups, that participants worried that their participation might trigger surveillance by the NSA or an audit by the IRS. In addition to thinking that Obama is a liar, and a covert Communist, these two groups were also more likely to express the belief that he is secretly a Muslim.
The moderates were, as one might expect, quite different. Like the tea partiers, they don’t worry as much about social issues. Their concerns are traditionally conservative – they worry about excessive regulation and taxation. They have a hard time taking Fox News seriously, and hold a deep disdain for the tea party faction. They are also keenly aware of their waning influence within the coalition.
Moderates are not so sure about their place in the current Republican Party. They worry about the ability of Republicans in Congress to make government work. They believe the party is stuck, not forward-looking, and representative of old ideas. They worry about the Republican Party’s right turn on social and environmental issues — which makes it difficult, especially for young moderates — to view the Republican Party as a modern party.
Unlike the tea partiers and Evangelicals, the moderate faction desperately wants lawmakers in Washington to find a common middle ground. They are less likely to worry about unauthorized immigration than the rest of the base, and some went so far as to speak positively about immigrants’ contributions to our society and economy.
I had a front seat to the first of the purges of moderates that occurred in the reddest of the red states. The media really didn’t notice it because they 
generally don’t spend much time in the great fly over where the first purge came from the religious right and really played out royally during the Clinton Years. They’ve been a little bit more cognizant of the rising power of the Libertarians since many of the young white media males are in their number. These groups are getting increasingly more difficult to herd as John Boehner has found out. They are no longer content to sit in the county and city level party structures working for the usual Republican suspects put forth by the Chamber of Commerce. They’ve infiltrated enough of the state offices to be able to move into the District and Congress. It’s driving the establishment Republicans crazy. But, it’s also what they more or less asked for given their strategies. Did they really think these groups were going to be content with meaningless platform stands and not much else?
The Tea Party which is increasingly made up of not only right wing populists but the religious right is sure to cause more problems for Boehner and the Beltway regulars. There is a future fight ahead to see if the current status quo will hold very long.
The deal extends funding for the government through Jan. 15. Republicans are now very, very invested in not triggering another government shutdown. Much more invested than they were last month, when party leaders got forced into shutting down the government against their better collective judgment.
Democrats won’t shut down the government. They’re not going to make demands unrelated to the issue at hand, like Republicans just did, and refuse to fund the government unless they get their ransom. But they will fight harder than ever to ease sequestration, and their leverage will come both from the deadline and the House GOP’s inability to govern itself. This is where the dynamic between Boehner and his hardliners will become relevant again. The only way for him to beat back Democratic demands without shutting down the government will be to pass appropriations in some form that neither exceed sequestration nor include the kinds of extraneous riders that will invite easy veto threats from Obama.
This will be an immense challenge. Hardliners aren’t particularly interested in funding the government without demanding ransoms, and even if they were, it might not be possible at the funding levels the party supports. Earlier this year they had to yank the one domestic appropriations bill they’d hoped to pass on the floor, because it was too austere for Democrats and moderate Republicans, and not radical enough for the hardliners.
They’re not going to get a lot of help from Democrats if they try to appropriate at 2014 sequestration levels. And if they can’t appropriate on their own, without once again dragging Obamacare into the equation, they’ll have a problem.
At heart, in all of this discussion of the deficit and spending, will be the call for bringing down both Social Security and Medicare. This continues to be a hard sell to the American people but seems like an inevitable discussion as one more bipartisan group sits down for talks.
The last-minute agreement didn’t eliminate the core conflict in Congress over fiscal policy, and the temporary funding extension for the government expires on Jan. 15. The debt ceiling increase expires Feb. 7.
Republicans say that in the next round of budget talks they will still refuse to raise taxes, while Democrats say they won’t cut entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare without more tax revenue.
House Republicans vowed to keep chipping away at the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the president’s signature achievement of his first term.
“We haven’t really resolved any of the big issues,” said Dan Meyer, who was chief of staff to Newt Gingrich when the former House speaker was confronting Clinton over the budget. “He didn’t get more revenue. He didn’t get the sequester caps lifted. All those decisions were punted.”
Everything’s been punted. We’re going to have to see if what we’ve gotten ourselves a new catfood commission. We do know that the Republicans will be coming for whatever they can grab for their extremist factions. Need Birth Control? No way! Want to access your right to an abortion? Try a quick plane trip to a blue state? Need an increase in your Social Security? Nah, too generous granny! I can see it all coming now.
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It appears that Diane Reidy the House stenographer is not alone in her delusions. Her husband spoke to the NY Post and he’s as nutty as she is.
Don’t crazy people seldom know they are crazy? 😉
I’m not a huge fan of Barack Obama but this is what he is up against: crazies!
How does on reason with people who believe the deity are talking to them through the t.v.?
Impossible!
Not a huge fan either but I’ve come to like and respect Obama more than I ever expected. To some extent he’s defined by his crazy enemies and they are also my enemies in just about every instance. His task is impossible!
I thought it was bad when the Right went after the Clintons, pulling stuff out of their butts as they went along.
But this last 5 years has been horrendous as must of their hatred is purely racial and they make no bones about it any longer.
I still don’t trust Obama to not “cave” to the demands but we shall see. I want to give him points but he makes it difficult.
I don’t think the Republicans can even be considered a serious political party anymore. They’ve been taken over by cults and the Kochs. The number of people actually interested the American form of government has dwindled. I don’t think any President could do well in this environment and I think Hillary is going to have a hell of a time of it if she runs and definitely if she does win. How can you govern when a huge number of decision makers want to bring on an end times and think alternative views are from a literal devil?
The US is currently ungovernable due to that widespread crazy.
How on earth do people like these manage to function at all? Reality is bound to make them go off at some point in time one way or another. They’re just lucky she can’t carry automatic weapons into the capitol buildings.
Great post, in that it’s good to know something about your enemy, but the sturm and drang of the GOP is getting old now. Their ongoing identity crises would be completely boring, if they weren’t dangerous. I’m just ready for them to explode, implode or whatever, just disappear please!!
I think one of the key phrases here is the high level of paranoia that runs in these people and its fed by daily doses of am radio, fox news, and the likes of Red State.
Random Tea Party Insult Generator: From actual insults posted on John Boehner’s Facebook wall.
http://clotureclub.com/tea-party-insult-generator/
All those insults from the god-fearing christian teapartiers? I wonder what happened to that “love your enemies”, “whatsoever you do” jesus that they swear allegiance too?
.
Ex-Speaker of the House Tom Foley has died at 84.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/10/18/tom-foley-house-speaker-obituary/2823003/
Now he was a House Speaker who had some backbone! RIP.
tnr: The Truth About the Obamacare Rollout
The problem is that that the states that really need it–like mine–have governors that didn’t set up the exchanges. The program was set up for state-by-state exchanges. The company that did the federal site underestimated the size of the programming job it sounds like
underestimated like crazy. not to mention the systems integration efforts for a boat load of old disparate systems!
An example which shows the irrelevance of the exchange website.
OregonLive: Oregon cuts tally of people lacking health insurance by 10 percent in two weeks
I need to get out of the South.
Roll by here and pick me up on your way out.
Don’t leave me behind!
Take me, too! I’m in what is considered the “Upland South”.
You guys can all come out here!
Hey, wait a minute I am gonna pack up my shit too. I can dig any place beside here.
Doctors Rush To Obamacare’s Accountable Care Approach
http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2013/04/27/doctors-rush-to-obamacares-accountable-care-approach/
So much for the meme that doctors would be getting out of doctoring.
Thanks for that link Dak. I was telling someone in the medical field last night that cleaning up the waste/fraud/abuse in the healthcare delivery & payment system was going to require a paradigm shift. That article outlines it well.
That’s really good governance. Makes me want to move.
I have some second-cousins in Oregon. Maybe I could live in their basement.
May not be a bad idea 🙂
Around here we have a lot of republicans. It is ironic to me that people who rail against government, etc are the same people who think if you sweep trash off your law into the street the city will come by and clean it up for you. It happens all the time. They also park ANYWHERE, sometimes right in the middle of the street, and expect the local police and city government to keep people from running into their car.
Remember all those Tea Party signs telling the Federal Government to keep their hands off their medicare and social security? These folks are the original low information voters. They are so involved with themselves they don’t manage to learn about anything.
OMG…..I might be scared STRAIGHT, or not!!!!
Tea party leader proposes ‘class action lawsuit’ against ‘homosexuality’
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/18/tea-party-leader-proposes-class-action-lawsuit-against-homosexuality/
Wow, talk about overreach!!!!! 😉
ROFLOL!
This was a fascinating post. I would add to the chronology of the rightward shift in American politics by including McCarthyism. The Red Scare in the early fifties destroyed a legitimate political movement in this country. Let’s not forget that the Communist Party existed as a legitimate political party in the 1930’s despite tremendous efforts on the parts of capitalist nations to undermine the Russian Revolution in the 19teens. Certainly, I’m not advocating communism, but there can be no doubt that the party’s existence, including its platform of ideas and advocacy of workers’ rights, helped shift the political spectrum toward the left. Once they demonized the far left to the point that you were afraid to even mention them, the fascists’ work became a lot easier.
Yep. The battlefield of ideas became a lot narrower,
Very true.
What???? Ted SCruz omitted an asset from his initial Senate financial disclosure? How do you turn a $6K investment into a 6 figure return in a decade? You Scruz it, that’s how.
He Mitt’ed it.
He’s got his eye on the primaries in 2016 and knows he’s got to prove his creds on the crazy train.
I can’t wait to see the GOP debates if this flock of TP/GOP’ers are in the mix. Can you imagine, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Marcus Rubio, Scott Walker, Bachmann or Palin all on stage together trying to out nut-job each other?
The last GOP primary season was like watching stand up comedy on steroids, The next one is going to be like watching stand-up comedy on Meth. Except for the part where I yelled at the TV, I really enjoyed the absurdity of it all, especially Mr.999, Mr Rick “I don’t know what the fuck to say” Perry, and Mr. Ron “I never met a question that I could answer in 1000 words or less” Paul.
If we can hold us all together in one spot for the next couple of years, we’ll have a helluva lot of Live Blogging fun.
Don’t forget Rick “I want to control women’s bodies” Santorum.
Oh, How could I forget Mr.Sanitarium? 🙂
If I had invested $6k during the same time period, I’d probably have recouped about $16.50 by now, If I found a gold bar it would turn into a rice crispy treat before I got it home.
NJ Supreme Court rules against Gov. Chris Christie.
Gay Marriages to begin in NJ Monday.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/18/21026864-nj-supreme-court-rules-state-must-begin-allowing-gay-marriages-on-monday?lite
Yay!!
That ruling should chap some TeaParty ass!! 🙂
Super Great Post today….
Here’s more proof of what you’re talking about:
Stockman sounds like he has been enjoying a few too many margaritas at Tortilla Coast.
Hey, bartender! “Impeshment” is on the table!
Did he say “dolson”? Was he trying to say “Ted Olson”? Oh, he’s smush mouth drunk!!!!!
Before he ran for Congress, the first time, he was literally living in a park in Fort Worth. He was a homeless addict for quite some time.
Ted Olson defended same-sex marriage in the Supreme Court. Stockman’s OK withe that?
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/18/freedomworks-ceo-says-its-a-real-possibility-republican-party-may-split-in-two/
Here’s another article of interest:
Hope they hurry up and go broke already,
Snowflake Snookie doubling down:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/onpolitics/2013/10/17/sarah-palin-senate-tea-party-primary/3000509/
Republican incumbents in these states aren’t ‘conservative’ enough? wtf?
I sense a shitload of fundraising emails going out to members of the Palinese Liberation Army real soon.
BB, put your Thursday Night Salsa up…………..will make your mouth water.
Oh good. Going to check it out.
You were right, Fannie. The egg burritos made my mouth water! I’ll try the salsa. The part I hate is getting the skin off the peppers, but I never tried it in a pan like that.