Promoted by Steven D. I think yastreblyansky has a valid point, but unfortunately, when Dem voters are suppressed by gerrymandering and ID voter laws, or don’t turn out in midterm elections, this may be an effective strategy for the GOP.
Something funny from the short-paragraph factory at Heritage Foundation’s Daily Dogwhistle, sorry, make that Daily Signal, their would-be counterpart to Think Progress:
War on women. Minimum wage. Climate change.
You hear liberals talking about these same topics all the time. Why?
Kevin Williamson of National Review believes it’s because the left is struggling to deliver new ideas and policies.
“I can’t remember the last time I heard a new idea from the left; they’re intellectually bankrupt,” Williamson told an audience at The Heritage Foundation for an event, “Where is Liberalism Going?”
It doesn’t occur to Kevin Williamson that the war on women is still going on, the federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised, and the need to deal with climate change is more urgent every day. Or that people, i.e. voters, really want these things fixed, and we keep talking about them because they haven’t gone away yet. To him it’s more like that stuff is just so last year: Ew, you’re still wearing those?
That’s because that’s how conservatives think about policy initiatives. Conservatives have two kinds of idea-sets, one they can’t talk about and one they can: the first is simply to provide whatever their corporate overlords want, a tax break here and a deregulation there, and the second is for whatever they hope to sell to the wider public, supplied in annual spring and fall collections, like the “Room to Grow” show recently rolled out by Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin.
Never mind the fact that there’s actually nothing new in such proposals, as everybody has noted from Krugman to Forbes Magazine, just a tweak in the hemlines and some unexpected color combinations. What’s really interesting is the nakedness with which they think that way, and can’t understand that liberals don’t.
Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.
Promoting
Room to Grow…Has another name when loosely xlated into German, doesn’t it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
Here’s an idea that conservatives can’t handle. Public infrastructure is the revolution in economic life. If you’re for it, you are progressive; if you’re against it you are impractical ideological conservative.
What the US has been doing the past two decades is allowing the deterioration of public infrastructure at home in the name of “we don’t have the money”. And destroying infrastructure in other countries in the name of “there’s a threat; we have to do it; money is not object.”
How many Americans when presented with that framing would think that what we have been doing is crazy?
There is an information bubble with fairly rigid boundaries that is comfortable for conservatives and from which they rarely depart. They are tied to principles that flat-out have been tested over the last four decades, and those principles do not work. And when they do not work, they strive to purify those principles even more stringently, and the purified version is even more catastrophic.
When on principle you restrict government to provision of military services, police services, and enforcement of contracts, you get unending war, a police state, and theft by contract. Welcome to the brave new world conservatives have made and conspired to intensify even in the midst of a Democratic presidency of a President who ran on a progressive vision of change. Conservatives, unlike progressives, bake their principles into institutions to provide leverage and durability. They stack personnel in judiciary and bureaucratic positions who will as true believers ensure the perpetuation of conservative agendas.
Pointing and laughing at what they say doesn’t change that one whit.
After a decade of political blogging, how conservatives think is not huge news. Moreover, their rhetoric is aimed at manipulative persuasion not honest dialog.
We would be better off changing institutions.
This could be a front page post by itself’
That’s a pretty old idea too, and one of the best.
The pointing and laughing is kind of the way I think, sorry. Sometimes it’s too much fun and I forget to get to the point.
That’s the point. We allow ourselves to be manipulated by the “your ideas aren’t new” rhetoric and come up with those Clintonesque two-hour lists of tiny, sensible proposals. “I do so have new ideas!” We ought to glory in the old ideas. We ought to be tracing them to Lincoln and Washington instead of just the Roosevelts. We ought to be explaining that the New Deal isn’t finished yet.
Yep, infrastructure is as old an idea as the words “internal improvements”.
But don’t tell that to Thom Thollway Tillis.
Asheville Citizen-Times: Thom Tillis to constituents: It’s my way or no highway
Lexus lanes for the rich; potholes for the poor. A special exit funded for a Trump-owned corporation. A Spanish company contracted with guaranteed profits from the state. And Thom likely pocketing a bunch of cash from these guys.
And Democrats too afraid of the word “socialism” to come out advocating for infrastructure. In a state in which the state government still owns a railroad that runs from Raleigh to Charlotte and provides an extra two Amtrak trains a day.
There’s more than conservative blowhards to point and laugh at these days. If the consequences weren’t so desperately tragic for ordinary people, the political situation in the US right now would be one hell of a circus–with Obama the scripted ringmaster, the Democratic Congressional caucus the orchestra, the Republican-owned media the Wurlitzer, and the Republican Congressional caucus the clown car. The K Street lobbyists are the elephant act. And that’s pretty much it. No lion tamer. No acrobats. No aerialists or trapeze artists. No tumblers or jugglers.
I can’t remember the last time I heard a new idea from the left
This statement comes from a political movement whose agenda is to return America to the gilded age of over a century ago and roll back all the progress made since then.
‘cuz Net Neutrality was all the rage during the telegraph era. Solar Cell capacity, batteries worthy of usage for cars, vaccinations, etc. Williamson is either intellectually dishonest, dangerously ignorant, or both. I know what my vote is 😉