All the crazy we hear from the political right has impressed many Americans into wondering what has happened to Republicans and conservatives. As Michael Cohen opines for the Guardian, many of us suspect that the craziness seems scripted to appeal to an ideologically unsophisticated bunch of FOX news viewers. Republicans seem to patterning their appeals based on fears and faith rather than policy and duty.
Add to that, The Center For Media Affairs (CFMA) at George Mason University conducted a statistical examination of the truthfulness of political statements from leading Democrats and Republicans, and found that Republicans tend to lie 3 times as much as Democrats. It’s reasonable to wonder if they even know they are lying if it’s that bad.
Actually, what we are seeing are the increasingly desperate moves of a group that is losing political power as demographics change and half the population modernizes, and the other half doesn’t. In a real sense the red states of the American South now do much of the thinking for the GOP, and what passes for true in the South often doesn’t sell well elsewhere.
Credibility has become a serious issue — not simply a detail-oriented credibility issue of a few bent facts, but one where gigantic ideological divides are the commerce of the moment and the participants appear clueless about tweaking details. The consistent nature of this skew ideological vision suggests that something is inherently corrupt with the Grand Ole Party and US political conservatism, as a worldview.
Long time party notables like Bruce Bartlett and supply-side guru David Stockman have been suggesting as much for years, and many more, like Colin Powell, seem to cringe but are restrained in their ire. Long-term Republican adviser to Republican presidents, Bartlett has gone to using the word “wankers” on his Facebook posts to describe the party loons, “wanker” being the urban slang term for a masturbator. The schism is over the reality disconnect between facts, party values and statements, and whether that even matters to them, when it comes to voter appeals and governance. Worldview being what the party increasingly uses to win supporters, the Republicans have called the entire worldview into question in much of the nation.
Three aspects loom as evidence of the crazy, and how the discourse of conservative politics is getting so far afield that you couldn’t even run a small country on it. ?Unfortunately these disconnects involve the heart and soul of political conservatism. ?All have a common thread of misrepresentation:
- Any group who says they favor less-government, but then supports the Drug War, Iraq style military invasions, drug testing for welfare recipients, anti abortion laws, blue laws, profit-driven corporate/penal legislation, the Patriot Act’s increased police powers, and states’ rights designed to allow state and local officials to deny individual rights, has a serious cognitive dissonance problem. They want less government for some people and far more government for the rest of us, and we’re not supposed to notice that is not an honest rendering of “less-government”.
- “Wisdom of the markletplace” is supposed to warn of the perils of regulation, but in practice has become a political code phrase for an intentional lack of accountability and oversight for the private sector, and a nod to the idea you can say or do anything to get what you want. It speaks to how the end justifies the means, or the means justify the end, as long as “you” are in power. By degree, conservatives take this wisdom-of-the-marketplace thing to the extreme, and use it as a sound bite substitution for hammering out the details. They want you to trust them about the details, which they will take care of, later; you like the wisdom of the marketplace, right? OK then, thanks for your vote.
- Conservatism is a personal growth credo, misused in political conservatism to pretend that if individuals should act conservative, it’s a no-brainer to have government act the same way. It shows up as team loyalty from people who can’t make the leap from self-aggrandisement to cooperation in government. It taints understanding of complex issues, and cause people to oversimplyfy things they do not understand. This is the central misrepresentation of political conservatism, and is designed primarily to get votes from working people who relate to decisions on a visceral, ideological level. Certain people relate to this style of decision, and political conservatism actively courts and misinforms those who linger not on specific points, but who too quickly judge by ideological generalization. See FOX news.
A prescient?article penned by Ron Suskind in 2004 for the New York Times lays out the developing vice of the neoconservative wing of Republicans in the Bush administration, and things have gone progressively downhill for them since then. Still, the Bush presidency is the last real glimpse of anything that could be considered functional behavior from conservatives. The subject of the article is Bush’s faith-based ruling style where one agrees with the sound bites that put people in office, but the rest is not up for examination and must be adhered to by the masses. Suskind’s article revealed a quote from an aide that would be eventually attributed to Karl Rove, and it details the thrust of conservative accountability in our republic. If this is Rove, or Rove is the source of the idea, notice how the word empire is used not to refer to the nation as a whole, but to the conservatives at the top who pull the string:
”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Let’s remember that the behavior we saw during the Bush presidency was the last time Republicans actually looked like they could make sense enough to pull off anything they intended to. Any more, landing a wrench in the gears appears to be all they can do.
What has happened since then is history. Sarah Palin for Vice President, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain as brain trusts, and the ultimate loss of control of the Tea Party, are death knells for the controlled conservative presidency. Now, the collective wisdom of the “less-government” crowd is failing to construct a ruling coalition, and hopes for that in the future look dismal. They have given home to so many conflicting special interest factions that any of them speaking out loud looks nuts.
What does a national political minority, who is well-known, do when their appeals to strident governing their way are no longer working? They misrepresent both their policies and their opponents, as if their very political life depended on those misrepresentations. They MUST do that or perish, simply because they are a national minority — if they were the majority, people would already be on their side and they wouldn’t have to bend things so much.
While politics is a lesser-of-evils activity, there comes a time when a worldview is so fraught with error and hubris that it should be discarded. Political Conservatism should be put back as a social and personal credo for individual self regulation, and if they have so little faith in government, they should quit trying to run it. Too much of conservative politics has begun to look like wagging the dog so a few men can get the $175,000 a year, and the lobbying job they always wanted.
