Paul Krugman on the GOP:
… whoever finally gets the Republican nomination will be a deeply flawed candidate. And these flaws won’t be an accident, the result of bad luck regarding who chose to make a run this time around; the fact that the party is committed to demonstrably false beliefs means that only fakers or the befuddled can get through the selection process.
Of course, given the terrible economic picture and the tendency of voters to blame whoever holds the White House for bad times, even a deeply flawed G.O.P. nominee might very well win the presidency. But then what?
… If the dog actually catches the car — the actual job of running the U.S. government — it will have no idea what to do, because the realities of government in the 21st century bear no resemblance to the mythology all ambitious Republican politicians must pretend to believe. And what will happen then?
What frightens me is that I don’t think it matters whether Romney and Gingrich and all the other pretenders are ignorant or just cynical, because I think they’ll still feel they have to pursue teabagger/Fox/Rand policies, and they won’t think it matters whether those policies fail.
I think Republicans see themselves the way Wall Streeters see themselves — as people to whom nothing really bad could possibly happen, no matter how dire America’s problems are. If they get in, push more tax cuts that increase debt, and make spending cuts that worsen unemployment and leave more infrastructure to crumble, they’ll just find some scapegoat, sexting or illegal immigrants or Dodd-Frank, to blame everything bad in America on. If that doesn’t work, they’ll start a war, and make it just controversial enough that Democrats will hesitate to support it, then treason-bait those Democrats for their hesitancy.
I think this is true for America in any state of decay short of civil war. And perhaps even that qualification doesn’t apply.
This approach will work for years. It worked for George W. Bush for six years, didn’t it? (I think that’s what Cheney meant when he said his crew had proved that deficits don’t matter — if you can gull the voters with distractions like Saddam, you can get away with anything.)
And even if, after years and years, Republicans are eventually blamed for what they’re doing, they’ll bounce back in an election cycle or two — Watergate and Vietnam combined spoiled the GOP brand for only a few years after Nixon resigned (hell, Ford almost won, and Proposition 13 passed in California in 1978), while the debacle of the Bush presidency discredited the GOP for an eyeblink. (Democrats, by contrast, are still paying for being the Hippie Party forty years ago.)
What will the Republicans do if they actually win? Be as reckless as they are now. They assume that, at worst, we’ll suffer but they won’t, and they can get us to punish anyone but them if we do suffer.
There are a lot of organizations who thought they were too big to fail this year and then were swept into the dustpin of history.
Mostly, these were fascist and/or dictatorial organizations, but the GOP bears a passing resemblance.
Not too many of them were American, though.
That’s true. But, remember, no one suspects the Spanish Inquisition.
So…Gingrich is one of the soft cushions? Or the comfy chair?
Well, considering the fact that this guy exists they may be right – every time I think that Kentucky has the least-bright people in the country South Carolina comes riding to the rescue…
The people of Oklahoma are deeply insulted.
He’s not stupid. He saw how Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain made it.
And there’s some merit to the argument that reappropriating that symbol for something other than racist slavery might take the power out of it as a symbol.
Also it’s a great way to get attention and ensure that you are not harassed by the good ole boys.
Lots of incentives.
It would have been better had the Democrats actually been the Hippie Party forty years ago. The Vietnam War would have been shut down quickly, Richard Nixon would have never started down the road to a police state, Reagan would have remained a failed governor,….spin out your own alternative history.
The Republicans recovered in the 1970s because they were able to fracture the Democratic coalition, peeling off urban ethnic Catholic voters with the twin issues of busing and abortion. And then entering a coalition with politicized segregationist Baptists and evangelicals in the South, united behind Ronald Reagan.
They were able to bounce back in 1994 through Newt Gingrich’s bomb-throwing in the House and the consolidation of the Great Republican Wurlitzer project begun with the Powell memo in 1971.
They were able to complete bouncing back and consolidating their gains by a 20-year campaign of packing the courts to gain a majority on the Supreme Court, which threw the election of 2000 to George W. Bush (Richard Bruce Cheney).
They bounced back since 2008 because the corruption within the Congressional Democratic caucus matches their own.
The think they are too big to fail because (1) they are willing to slash and burn, (2) they have the money resources, and (3) they own the media spin.
The strategy to defeat them must (1) match their intensity but not their destructiveness, (2) work on people power to deliver the needed votes at all levels of government–don’t neglect down-ticket, and (3) make all the money spent on media go to waste and/or starve the media of campaign funds from Democrats. And it wouldn’t hurt to have a bunch of new Democratic faces for folks to vote for. And leave no seat unchallenged.
religious right. Conservatives were having problems until they allied with the Dominionists of the religious right in the 80’s. In her excellent book “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism” Michelle Goldberg points out that the Dominionists are specifically working to remove the social acceptance for modernism and the Enlightenment. This is what the effort to teach Creationism alongside real science is all about.
But the same effort to make science appear to be just another politically enforced opinion that can be overturned by the political majority also works to allow the non-rational non-economic anti-social ideas of libertarianism to be practiced alongside real economics. If you remove science and the criteria or rationality from government nothing matters except political power as delivered by ballots cast by those allowed to vote. This is why the Koch brothers created and support the CATO Foundation. It conducts the same kind of propaganda to undercut rational economics that the Ahmanson’s Discovery Institute does to undercut Darwinism and the science Darwin’s concepts support.
The predatory wealthy elites do not want rational oversight of their economic behavior because it is based on power politics and on buying politicians rather than on market activity in which competition would actually work out fair prices for goods and services.
Those elites have allied themselves with the radical Dominionist religious right because their methods are so similar. Both groups oppose rational government. The predatory wealthy elites want government based on wealth and power (a plutocracy) and the religious right wants one based on faith in a religious doctrine (a theocracy.) And right now, since they have either controlled or cowed the media, they both think that after the 2010 elections they are winning.
There’s much truth in what you say, so far as the impact on America of their policies goes.
But you ignore that they are not allowed to fail to enhance the power and wealth of the plutocrats.
Their aims in governing are not ours.
We aim at the common good of the nation.
They aim at the unscrupulous exploitation of the nation and even the planet for the gain of the plutocracy.
Even Krugman seems to neglect that point, quite often.
Their policies are not actually stupid, as we would have to judge them if they were aimed at the same goals.
They are just aimed at different goals.