Jumping Ship

Once a month I attend a local meeting of Democrats who gather to talk, to drink, and to eat, finding fellowship (as the Baptists would say) with like-minded folks in a parish dominated by Republicans and the far-right. During the course of our conversations, several of us have confessed to having voted for a Republican president at least once; others have confessed that they were once fiscal Republicans. Now they sound like--and are--Democrats, concerned about public education, the rights of women, the economy, unemployment, the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us, corporate domination of politics, the environment, climate change. It's not that these folks have changed that much--it's that the Republican party has changed significantly. Once, I think, we could have counted on both parties at least to do the best they could to steer the ship of state; they might differ in exactly to what degree to turn the wheel, but there was a balance of power that held the ship on a fairly reasonable course (not that there weren't mistakes).

That's no longer the case, and  Republicans who are publicly and loudly jumping ship indicate just how far right the Republican party has turned.

The latest conservative to publish a screed against the far-right turn of the party is Michael Fumento, who writes in Salon that

Apart from gaining fame and fortune for a select few, all the new right is accomplishing is turning Bismarck’s words upside down, making politics the art of the impossible. It demonizes the opposition even as it brutally enforces “team loyalty.” So nothing gets done, and bad trends just get worse. ["My break with the extreme right," posted 24 May 2012.]

Fumento joins the ranks of David Frum , who writes that he is "haunted" by his experience in the Bush administration. Frum is no liberal, no Democrat; he penned the phrase "axis of evil" that the Bush administration used so well in its march toward war with Iraq.  But here is what he writes about Fox News and Talk Radio:

Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling...[snip]...We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information. ["When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?," in New York Magazine, 20 November 2011.]

Another conservative who has jumped the ship of extremism is Michael Lofgren, who retired after 28 years as a Republican Congressional staffer last year and publicly let loose his inner frustrations over the far-right turn of his political party:

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy. [in "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative who Left the Cult," Truthout,  3 September 2011]

Lofgren does not pull any punches; he has plenty to say about Democrats, too, and notes that he is not a supporter of Obama, but that when Barack Obama won the presidency, he wanted Obama to succeed because he wanted his country to succeed. But his harshest criticism is leveled at his own party:

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant...[snip]...Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

The number of such apostate Republicans is growing. Before Lofgren, Frum, and Fumento, there was Bruce Bartlett, President Reagan's domestic policy advisor and a critic of his own contribution to Reaganomics [The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward]. Bartlett, an old-time fiscal conservative, makes no friends with today's Republican extremists with his criticisms of Republican fiscal irresponsibility. On Hardball with Chris Matthews, Bartlett reminds us that "[t]the Obama plan, the Affordable Health Care Act, was essentially the same thing that Republicans had been pushing themselves only a few years earlier"  and that higher taxes in the 80s and 90s actually led to a booming economy rather than to recession that Republicans had predicted. "I think the dirty secret," Bartlett says, "is actually that Obama is a moderate conservative, and if I were a liberal Democrat I would be pretty upset" [segment posted on Raw Replay, titled "Bruce Bartlett: Chunk of GOP either stupid, crazy, ignorant, or craven cowards," 28 July 2011].

While those of us meeting once a month at a local restaurant to discuss Democratic policies and the ship of state may feel vindicated by these criticisms aimed at the Republican party, how can we derive real comfort from our united concerns? They just reinforce our own fears that the ship may soon crash on the shoals of extremism.

Sane Conservative Voices I: Bruce Bartlett

As many mainstream Republicans have been echoing the anger and paranoia of the far-right, some sane conservative voices have been trying to break through the static. In an essay posted on the Capital Gains and Games blog, written in response to the death of Irving Kristol (the father; the son, as the writer points out, is another matter altogether), Bruce Bartlett writes:

The intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism today is even greater than it was when Irving Kristol founded The Public Interest in 1965. What passes for a conservative movement these days wears its anti-intellectualism as a badge of honor. But as Kristol correctly understood, right-wing populism has no future and fundamental changes in the direction of government policy must be based on serious research and analysis that is grounded on hard data; that is to say, reality.

Bartlett is no liberal. He was domestic policy advisor to President Reagan and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department from 1988-1993 (under President Bush). He has served on the staffs of Ron Paul and Jack Kemp. I disagree with some of Barlett's economic theories and with his (very unscientific) understanding of climate change, but I certainly agree with his assessment of the Republican party today. Sane people on either side of the political spectrum are alarmed by the lack of civility in public discourse, the paranoia manifested in the outrageous myths circulated about current domestic and international policies, and what amounts to demonization of the President.

In a recent column in Forbes, Bartlett addresses the Republican mantra that cutting spending will ameliorate the fiscal problem. It won't work, he writes, because Congress will resist cutting spending, no matter which party is in control of Congress, because the nature of the federal budget has changed, and because the population has changed (aging population will resist cuts in entitlement programs such as Medicare). And Republicans, he points out, never seriously address cutting entitlement programs:

On the contrary, they defend entitlements when Democrats suggest cutting them. The Republican National Committee has run television ads opposing cuts in Medicare because Obama proposed using such cuts to fund health reform. Many demonstrators at right-wing tea parties were seen carrying signs demanding that the government keep its hands off Medicare.

He also addresses the oft-repeated lie that Reagan cut spending:

When I raised these facts [about Medicare and the increasingly aging population] with a prominent Republican recently he counted that Reagan had cut spending. But he didn't. Spending rose from 21.7% of the gross domestic product in 1980 to 23.5% in 1983 before declining to 21.2% in 1988. And that improvement came about largely because favorable demographics caused entitlement spending to temporarily decline from 11.9% of GDP in 1983 to 10.1% in 1988. (Last year it was 12.5% of GDP.)

In a column on fiscal responsibility, Bartlett addresses the myth that tax cuts always illustrate fiscal responsibility:

Beginning in 1982, [Reagan] supported higher taxes almost every year of his presidency.....Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, promised during the 1988 campaign that he would never raise taxes--read my lips: no new taxes, he said at the Republican convention. But faced with large deficits and the need for Democratic congressional support for deficit reduction, he abandoned that pledge in 1990 and supported a large tax increase in return for tough spending controls.

Bartlett goes on to discuss how Clinton's tax increase, roundly criticized by Republicans, triggered "a huge economic expansion" and a surplus that George W. Bush inherited and then squandered:

Taxes were cut willy-nilly throughout the Bush years, and spending shot up for wars, new entitlement programs and any Republican-sponsored pork barrel project. Bush left office with a deficit of 3.2% of GDP--a reversal of 5.6% of GDP compared to the surplus he inherited."

In his article "The GOP's Misplaced Rage," Bartlett addresses the anger of those town-hall meetings we saw over the summer:

I think conservative anger is misplaced. To a large extent, Obama is only cleaning up messes created by Bush. This is not to say Obama hasn’t made mistakes himself, but even they can be blamed on Bush insofar as Bush’s incompetence led to the election of a Democrat. If he had done half as good a job as most Republicans have talked themselves into believing he did, McCain would have won easily.

Conservative protesters should remember that the recession, which led to so many of the policies they oppose, is almost entirely the result of Bush’s policies. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession began in December 2007—long before Obama was even nominated. And the previous recession ended in November 2001, so the current recession cannot be blamed on cyclical forces that Bush inherited.

And Bartlett puts forth the idea that this Republican anger is not born out of any real disenchantment with liberal policies but out of the petulance of having lost an election:

In my opinion, conservative activists, who seem to believe that the louder they shout the more correct their beliefs must be, are less angry about Obama’s policies than they are about having lost the White House in 2008. They are primarily Republican Party hacks trying to overturn the election results, not representatives of a true grassroots revolt against liberal policies. If that were the case they would have been out demonstrating against the Medicare drug benefit, the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, and all the pork-barrel spending that Bush refused to veto.

There is plenty with which I can disagree with Bruce Bartlett, I'm sure, but his sane conservative voice reminds us that liberals and conservatives can find common ground in order to make our republic truly strong. Loudly supporting fringe behavior such as Joe Wilson's shouting out to the President of the United States "you lie" is not the way to do that. The Republican Party needs to back away from the abyss.