Wednesday, October 16, 2013

GOP Newspeak

I’ve noticed in recent months an increasing number of conservative voices animating the political “dialogue” on CNN. This is actually not a new trend, but a response to their losing market share over the past several years to Fox. But the disingenuous nature of so much of this “journalism” is worth considering as our democracy stands on the precipice of becoming little more than a bygone dream. For just one example among many, let’s look at the latest opinion piece from Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, Are Democrats More Extreme than Conservatives?

The piece is based on the tired premise that the new center has always existed and that it is the appropriate starting point for any political discussion. Clinton is sold as a reasonable democrat while LBJ and FDR are the leftist lunatics of a bygone era, when people thought government could, like, do stuff – like temper the magnitude and length of economic downturns, protect consumers and workers and help those most in need. Those bygone days are sold as government overreach and the work of near-communists who almost destroyed the economy, even as one helped save us from the worst economic downturn in the history of capitalism and the other did more than any president to lift up the poor and provide more opportunities for blacks in America. But this strategy is also brilliant and effective – by moving the center ever more to the right, it makes even moderate liberals seem extreme. So Obama, a disappointment to many progressives since his strong first two years in office, seem like a radical leftist hell bent on bringing back the Great Society: “Let us count the reasons: Barack Obama has taken the Democratic Party left of Clinton. He left blue-dog, centrist Democrats to be punished for his sins and they were wiped out in the GOP's 2010 Congressional landslide. All the while, the Internet has empowered and organized the party's remaining and most extreme elements. The Democratic Party can't go left. It is left, in entirety. They already occupy America's left fringe.”

Left fringe? If this is the left fringe, then there really is no hope for the future of the country. What is so leftist about this government? Is left of Clinton even necessarily liberal? Lest us forget the triangulation strategy that said let’s act like Republicans on economic issues while maintaining our liberal values – which led to media consolidation, the privatization of prisons, banking reform that hurt everyone except bankers and Wall Street and a false fiscal paradise that came crashing down seven years after he left office. But more to the point, what is so radical about Democrats today? Have they increased spending dramatically? Have they helped unemployed workers beyond extending their meager benefits so they don’t become homeless? Have they helped minorities to gain financially or academically? Have they helped the millions of families who lost their homes? Have they done enough to help stem the tide of global warming or anything to push for election finance reform? Have they done enough to regulate Wall Street in the wake of almost destroying the global economy?

The work of Obama only looks radical to radicals, who believe that Reagan was a great President, Bush’s only sin was not cutting spending and the Tea Party radicals are heroes (even if they need to beat them up a little to sound reasonable themselves). Really the argument just boils down to tired rhetoric with no substance like “Bill Clinton's New Democrats are dead. This is not Hillary Clinton's Democratic Party. Today's Democratic Party belongs to Elizabeth Warren. It is the party that just nominated a Sandinista trainee who returned from Nicaragua with "a vision of unfettered leftist government" for mayor of New York City, according to the New York Times.” Or “They dream audaciously, as Ruy Teixeira wrote in the Atlantic, of a new ‘Emerging Democratic Majority.’ As Peter Beinart noted in a Daily Beast piece, ‘The Rise of the New New Left,’ ‘Bill de Blasio's win in New York's Democratic primary isn't a local story. It's part of a vast shift that could upend three decades of American political thinking.’ The Democratic Party is now animated by the "mobilized left," Beinart writes, emboldened by Internet activism. Their cause was galvanized by President Obama's seemingly impossible re-election.”

Where’s the beef here? Oh my God, Democrats actually think they can win and actually challenge the 30 year rightward turn in America that has helped the rich and super rich but few others? How dare they! And was it really impossible to believe Obama could beat a guy who called a large minority of Americans lazy bastards who wanted to live off the government? But more acute analysis must be in the offing, to back his point, right? No, just more senseless piffle like this gem of reasoned analysis, “As Fred Thompson has noted, Barack Obama has been "George McGovern without the experience." Obama's answer to every economic challenge has been top-down. Our governing class knows best, he believes, especially since Washington's elite now includes him.
If the world has changed in eight decades, our President hasn't noticed. His view of government is cast from the bronze of Franklin Roosevelt and the '30s. He puts our big, dumb, inflexible public sector at the top of American life, to mandate redistribution and prosperity.”

Wow, he actually thinks our “big, dumb, inflexible public sector” can solve problems? No, he’s right – let’s continue to count on those corporations who really do have our best interests at heart; though when we’ll see the benefits is left to our imagination alone. But there’s more, of course: “His government doesn't govern education: The U.S. educational system barely edges out nations such as Slovakia, in international rankings. His government doesn't govern retirement: Our public-sector retirement system is akin to an unsustainable Ponzi scheme. His government doesn't govern health care: The Affordable Care Act is making health care more unaffordable for many seniors. His old government doesn't govern our economy: A record high 89 million Americans don't participate in the workforce and 300,000 more dropped out this August. Barack Obama is building the largest public sector since World War II and, yet, our government governs nothing. Still, an intellectually exhausted Democratic Party proposes nothing new. If at first you don't succeed, keep trying until you are $20 trillion in debt and failure litters your streets.”

In one sentence Obama runs a “do nothing” government and in the next he is growing the public sector without results. But what can we say of Reagan or the Bushes? They grew the debt (Reagan from a manageable level to heretofore unseen levels while moving the U.S. from the biggest creditor to debtor in the world), helped accumulate more and more wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people, reduced regulation leading to more financial crises and scandals, turned back the advances of affirmative action, attacked feminism relentlessly, sped up the destruction of our environment and made the world a less safe, less friendly and less free place for the many.

Essentially, Obama is supposed to fix the mess of thirty years of Republican rule by simply doing more of the same. This appears to be the argument. And if he doesn’t, he is a radical leftist that is undermining not only GOP orthodoxy, but some new American political philosophy that is heretical to challenge. And apparently it is he who is heralding tired old ideas, “While our world transforms itself through revolutions in energy, technology and communication, the ideologists of the left stagnate. Barack Obama's Democratic Party is intellectually exhausted. Their old Democratic Party has nothing up its sleeves but more of the same.”

So what is his alternative? Apparently a Republican party with exciting new ideas about shrinking government, dismantling the welfare state and successful entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, cutting taxes to the wealthy, more deregulation and destroying the last bastions of democracy and the environment with great aplomb, “A Republican Party advocating a path to fresh, natural, economic growth? Or a Democratic Party offering young voters the outdated economics of conformity, artificially imposed by Washington's elites?”


This is newspeak in its purest form from beginning to end. Remember the three central tenets of that Orwellian world: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength. Bush had us fight a war to “protect the peace” and then told us that “freedom isn’t free.” But what the GOP counts on more than anything is that ignorance is strength. It is certainly their only strength staving off irrelevance in the future political scene. Let’s hope the public isn’t buying anymore. 

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