What Drove The Republican Party Base Insane? (Spoiler: It Was More Than Just Fox And Hate Talk Radio)

This morning's first post-- based primarily on the work of Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson conflating today's off-the-rails Republican extremists with the post Civil War secessionist Democratic extremists of 1879-- is one of the most chilling ever at this blog. If you missed it, I heartily recommend you go back and read it right now. It will certainly put into context the GOP's hallucinatory dogma of paranoia and disorientation, something that goes beyond the silly Trump (and Carson) phenomena just to the heart of the neo-fascist train the Republican Party is about to unleash in the person of Ted Cruz, likely the real reason Reince Priebus was moaning last week that the party he presides over is "cooked" as a national party.

In a revelatory post at Salon Sunday Chauncey DeVega-- drawing brilliantly on the work of German-born political philosopher Leo Strauss (1877-1973), who was the dude, by the way, who laid the ground for Godwin's Law in 1951 with his Reductio ad Hitlerum-- does a deep dive about what's become of the GOP's "conservative" grounding and ability to handle actual analytic thinking. Today "the power and appeal of the Republican Party," he writes, "lies in how its consultants and media accomplices have created a highly entertaining and confusing type of absurdist political theater. While wealth and income inequality are central to America’s political polarization and dysfunction, the alternate reality cultivated by political leaders and right-wing media has a heavy impact on a political culture where broken politics is not just an aberration or outlier, but rather the norm." This is about to get very scary.

Movement conservatism is compelling for so many people because of its visceral emotional appeal, and how the mindsets of conservative authoritarians are oriented toward accepting a Manichaean, binary, fear-centered, and dominance-oriented perspective of the world.

Moreover, movement conservatism is obsessed with protecting “real America.” This functions both as salvation and as something at risk by “liberals,” “progressives,” people of color, immigrants, gays, or whatever other group is viewed as a threat to the status quo of the “good old days.” Alas, this “real America” never truly existed.

Nevertheless, this illusory world must be protected at all costs because it is central to the “politics of disorientation,” a vaudevillian and spectacular political belief system that today’s conservatism uses to make sense of the world.

The politics of disorientation has several elements:

Apocalypticism: Historian Richard Hofstadter, most famously in his seminal work The Paranoid Style in American Politics, noted how conservatives, even in the 1950s and 1960s, were creating a cult-like political system that prized orthodoxy over critical thought, alternative evidence, or empirical reality. This is the shadow under which the politics of disorientation operates for movement conservatives. On this point, historian Robert Toplin explains at the History News Network how:

Individuals who seek a broader understanding of the present political standoff in Washington may find Hofstadter’s judgments thought-provoking.

Richard Hofstadter recognized that evangelical leaders were playing a significant role in right-wing movements of his time, but he noticed that a “fundamentalist” style of mind was not confined to matters of religious doctrine. It affected opinions about secular affairs, especially political battles. Hofstadter associated that mentality with a “Manichean and apocalyptic” mode of thought. He noticed that right-wing spokesmen applied the methods and messages of evangelical revivalists to U.S. politics. Agitated partisans on the right talked about epic clashes between good and evil, and they recommended extraordinary measures to resist liberalism. The American way of life was at stake, they argued. Compromise was unsatisfactory; the situation required militancy. Nothing but complete victory would do.

Spectacle: The culture of illusion and distraction, wherein entertainment is a stand-in for full and authentic human experiences, enables the Reality TV-esque popularity of demagogues like Donald Trump, and the litany of ridiculous policy positions-- again divorced from empirical fact or reality-- offered by the leading Republican candidates. Here, Fox News, a “news” operation that has made right-wing talking points interchangeable with “facts,” represents the culture of illusion in full operation. That Fox News is America’s highest rated “news station” and actually has the most ignorant and uninformed viewership of any major news media outlet, signals to how entertainment is confused with substance in the culture of illusion and distraction. The masses are asses in such a system, not because such behavior is “natural,” but because such behavior is normalized and encouraged.

The right-wing media is one of the most effective propaganda operations in modern history.

Lies and Deception: The Right-wing media, the elites in the Republican Party, and its various interest groups, are engaged in a systematic campaign of deception toward the American people. This is philosopher Leo Strauss’s theories on truth and leadership in action.

As explained by political writer Jim Lobe:

…Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical-- divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that “those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right-- the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.”

This dichotomy requires “perpetual deception” between the rulers and the ruled, according to Drury. Robert Locke, another Strauss analyst says,”The people are told what they need to know and no more.” While the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, Strauss thought, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy, according to Drury, author of Leo Strauss and the American Right (St. Martin’s 1999).

Movement conservatives, and Republican voters, en masse, are utterly confused about the nature of reality, and respond with rage and anger when confronted by facts-- a version of the Dunning-Krueger effect, in which where people are ignorant but do not have the expertise or awareness even to know just how ignorant they are-- because they have been systematically misled.

A hallucinatory ideology. This is a dangerous system of belief wherein people are unmoored from reality and embrace distorted views of the world and the people around them, often driven by stereotypes or other types of hatred, which then works to legitimate destructive behavior.

Authoritarian political attitudes are on the increase in the United States. This trend is especially prominent among conservatives. Authoritarianism, with its intolerance, appeals to violence, and eliminationist rhetoric about “liberals,” “progressives,” and any type of “Other,” are fixtures and habits of the right-wing media and conservative political elites.

Hallucinatory ideology helps to create the intractability and hostility to political compromise and good governance that form the brand name of conservatism and the Republican Party in the Age of Obama.

Thus we find ourselves. And the question-- one that has lingered over American politics since the election of a Black and Democratic president drove movement conservatives to mouth-frothing derangement in 2008 and 2012-- still remains: Will normal politics on display in last week’s Democratic debate be able to defeat the madness and insanity of the Republican Party in November of 2016?

Or will a Republican win the White House, not because they are serious people with serious thoughts about how best to serve the Common Good, but rather because they are demagogues, more captivating than their Democratic rivals? The latter is a distinct possibility, as the politics of disorientation are a difficult foe for the rational and the reasonable to battle and overcome.

Late today, news broke from Denver that the former Republican president, George W. Bush detests the junior senator from his state, Ted Cruz, a neo-fascist who is also a Republican. Cruz worked for Bush when he was president but that didn't stop him from telling a roomful of rich Jeb donors yesterday that "I just don't like the guy."

Bush took a harsh view of Cruz’s apparent alliance with Trump, who stood with the senator at a Capitol Hill rally last month in opposition to the Iran deal. While Trump, the current GOP poll leaders, has attacked most of his competitors in the 2016 field, he has avoided criticizing Cruz.

One donor, paraphrasing the former president’s comment in response to a broad question about how he viewed the primary race and the other Republican candidates, said: "He said he found it ‘opportunistic’ that Cruz was sucking up to Trump and just expecting all of his support to come to him in the end," that donor added.

George W. Bush is well acquainted with his home-state senator, who served as a domestic policy adviser on his 2000 campaign before rising to national prominence by distancing himself from-- and often going out of his way to antagonize-- the GOP establishment. In his book published earlier this year, Cruz ripped Bush’s record, criticizing elements of his foreign policy and faulting the administration for enabling "bigger government and excessive spending and new entitlements."

While Jeb Bush’s campaign is spending far more time of late pushing out information that contrasts favorably with Rubio, his oldest brother seemed to see Cruz as the biggest threat in the end. According to several donors, the former president said not to doubt Cruz’s strength.

"He said he thought Cruz was going to be a pretty formidable candidate against Jeb, especially in Texas and across the South," a donor said.

...Bush also cast Cruz’s candidacy as an exercise in personal gain, not service. "He sort of looks at this like Cruz is doing it all for his own personal gain, and that’s juxtaposed against a family that’s been all about public service and doing it for the right reasons," a donor said. "He's frustrated to have watched Cruz basically hijack the Republican Party of Texas and the Republican Party in Washington."

It well may come down to a battle between GOP over-confidence and wretched, self-defeating Democratic Party leadership, but, unless Bernie Sanders figures out a way to overcome the Clinton/Wall Street money machine, it will certainly come down to another nauseating lesser-of-two-evils election that will change nothing for the country.

"Why Trump, Corbyn and Sanders Are Doing Well" (Ian Welsh)

"People are sick of the status quo and they will take a chance with anyone who is willing to actually bloody well try something different than the usual. And because most people don’t parse just on policy positions (nor should they, since politicians lie), what they are looking for are candidates who don’t act like the normal candidates and who therefore might actually do something different."

-- Ian Welsh, in a post yesterday, "Why Trump,
Corbyn and Sanders Are Doing Well"

by Ken

I have been trying like heck not to write about, um, you-know-who -- the guy John Oliver referred to the other day as "an old piece of luggage covered in Cheez Whiz." This also means that I've been doing my best not to pay any attention to him, including what he's saying.

By and large, I usually try to avoid listening to what political candidates are saying, since usually it's just what a cache of creep handlers have decided will play best with some possibly mythical coven of swing voters. (An obvious exception has been none other than Bernie Sanders. When he launched his presidential bid, I mentioned to Howie how surprising it was to hear the kinds of things he was saying -- the kinds of things one normally longs in vain to hear a major political candidate say. And I notice that just today the Borowitz Report has a major scoop on a scandal in the making: "Sanders Shamelessly Pandering to Voters Who Want to Hear Truth.")

Meanwhile, the stuff that the infotainment noozers have been pulling out of this guy's public utterances has given unblemished credence to the idea that it's even crackpottier-than-usual right-wing pandering. Sure, there's the obviously outrageous stuff, which is pretty, you know, outrageous. But it seems that's not all he's been saying, and somehow it never occurred to me that the 'tainment noozers might be hearing only what it serves their purposes to hear. Even though that's all they ever hear, since it'a all they ever listen for.

How's this for a bill of particulars?

• He doesn’t want to cut Social Security. Jeb Bush does. Obama has talked this up.

• He wants full universal healthcare. Yeah, he badmouths Obamacare, but he’s badmouthing it from a position of, “Give them the real thing.”

• His idea of returning manufacturing to the US and doing bilateral trade deals is not insane, or crazy, except to neo-liberal apologists and people too stupid to realize they’ve imbibed the economic philosophy of neo-liberalism, whose results have been the stagnation and then absolute decline of ordinary American wages. This is how capitalism worked for about half of capitalism’s history. Disagree if you like, but it’s not crazy.

• His idea of simplifying the tax code enough so that ordinary people don’t need professionals to fill out their tax forms is a good one. Jimmy Carter, by the way, wanted to do the same thing.

"He," in case you haven't figured it out yet, is The Donald. (Yes, that The Donald.) And this list was offered yesterday by Ian Welsh in a post called "Why Trump, Corbyn and Sanders Are Doing Well." Howie, you may recall, wrote a post yesterday called "Is Jeremy Corbyn The UK's Bernie Sanders?," focusing on the apparent front runner to be the next leader of Britain's Labour Party, who's inviting the party to return to the principles of the Labour Party after the nightmare interlude of Tony Blair's right-of-center "New Labour." (On the sidelines Tony B is having twittery convulsions of hissy fits.)

Ian offered the above list with just these preliminaries:

Let’s state the obvious about Trump.

No, not that he’s a joke, or a sign of fascism, or any of that.

Rather that a lot of what he says makes sense. His policies aren’t as crazy as people make out, and people who support him aren’t as stupid as the media pretends.

"I’m not a fan of Trump," Ian was quick to say, though you can be sure there are lots of readers who read right over this. "There are plenty of reasons why he’s problematic." He pointed out that Trump is "actually an economic populist on many issues." Again, he stressed that "people shouldn’t overlook that this comes married to some nasty nativism." But, he said, "I'm tired of people who are lumping all parts of the Trump campaign together."

Trump is doing well because he is telling some truths other politicians won’t, and because his actual policies sound good to right-wing populists. Populists have been divided into right and left for a long time, but it’s feelings that matter to right-wing populists. Trump comes across as a straight shooter and that’s why they’ll vote for him. (It is also why many of them will cross the lines to vote for Sanders if he’s the Democratic nominee and Trump isn’t the Republican one.)

Anyone who feels like a ”run-of-the-mill” politician loses big points in the current environment, because people feel like normal politicians are why we’re here, in this shithole economy, with no end in sight and plenty of reason to believe it could get a lot worse.

(Ian pointed out that The Donald also "told the truth about buying politicians.")

And then Ian made the connection to Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, with the thought I put at the top of this post:

Sanders, Trump, and Corbyn in England (whom I’ll write about in a bit) are all doing well because of this dynamic. People are sick of the status quo and they will take a chance with anyone who is willing to actually bloody well try something different than the usual. And because most people don’t parse just on policy positions (nor should they, since politicians lie), what they are looking for are candidates who don’t act like the normal candidates and who therefore might actually do something different.

There's another possible reason why the infotainment noozers have been missing what The Donald has been saying -- another reason besides occupational sloth and Village don't-give-a-damn-ness, why all they write about is the "dilemma" posed to orthodox far-right-wing Republican pols by his crudeness and nativism. These days far-right-wing Republican orthodoxy tends also to be Beltway orthodoxy, and the things Ian talked about yesterday undoubtedly offend this orthodoxy a great deal more than the nativist crudity.

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If the rabid right-wing beast Dan Backer really wants a "thank you," it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility

The rabid right-wing beast behind "Stop Hillary PAC" and assorted other right-wing degradations wants his copycat nemesis to acknowledge his "legal brilliance."

by Ken

It appears that the doody-sucking beast Dan Backer wants a thank you, specifically from Hillary Clinton. As reported by the Washington Post's "In the Loop" team ("Dan Backer has an anti-Hillary PAC -- and says Clinton owes him a heartfelt 'thank you'"), the Rabid Beast Backer, architect of the Stop Hillary PAC is tickled to note that his sworn enemy has had formed on her behalf a PAC called Ready for Hillary which follows the "hybrid PAC" model he himself concocted for use by criminally insane right-wing causemakers.

The Loopsters explain this "hybrid PAC" deal as --

the newish tool that allows a political committee to raise and spend unlimited cash to boost or take down a candidate while also giving a limited amount to the candidates themselves. In other words, it’s both a super PAC and a traditional one.

Now we just need to know a bit more about the Rabid Beast Backer. In addition to being "the treasurer behind the group opposed to a Hillary Rodham Clinton candidacy," he --

is also an activist attorney who happens to be the intellectual architect of hybrid PACs. As the lead counsel on the relevant federal case, he was responsible for getting them legalized. (He was also a top lawyer on this year’s McCutcheon v. FEC Supreme Court case, which he also won.)

And the Rabid Beast Backer's credits don't end there.

Backer is the listed treasurer for about 40 PACs, most of them hybrids. Some are legitimate operations, raising real money. Others have accounts of a few thousand dollars. Stop Hillary PAC has raised nearly half a million dollars since last summer. Backer also helps run a Stop Pelosi PAC and a Stop R.E.I.D. PAC, for non-fans of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Those entities, Backer says, are designed to build an army of opposition to the Democrats’ deep political operations.

“Stop Hillary will oppose those candidates and fight against those who will be part of the Hillary network,” Backer said. “And the biggest thing the PAC will do is remind people that Hillary the brand is bulls---.”

Meanwhile the Rabid Beast Backeris waiting for appropriate recognition from his nemesis, telling the Loop:

I did not get a thank you. They're taking advantage of our legal brilliance.

NOW THIS IS ALL PRETTY SLIMY

This hybrid PAC he unleashed on the fund-raising world is desiged to dig to new depths in the toxic swamp of campaign filth, and he's certainly entitled to recognize the irony when his sworn enemy sinks to his own level. And it is pretty loathsome, but that's where we are in Campaigworld USA 2014 and Counting. Are the doody wranglers of Big Campaign Finance supposed to willingly turn their backs on any scheme within the elastic confines of the law?

"Backer clearly aims to be provocative," the Loopsters note.

He’s accused the pro-Hillary team of criminal activity over its use of a mailing list from Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. He said Wednesday that her “primary achievement in life is getting her a-- kicked by Barack Obama.” When he launched Stop Hillary, he released a confrontational Web video, highlighting, of course, Benghazi.

There's an additional note of scumbag black comedy. The Loopsters report that at least so far the Rabid Beast Backer's ScamPACs haven't been dishing tons of moolah.

So far, Stop Hillary has given $25 each to five federal candidates, an amount too small to show up on its campaign finance reports. Stop Pelosi gave just $250 to Alex Mooney, a GOP congressional candidate in West Virginia, in from the $32,084 it has raised. The R.E.I.D PAC, which Backer says stands for “Stop Reckless Economic Instability caused by Democrats,” raised $3,728 and had not donated to specific campaigns as of the last FEC filing — but Backer said it gave to five candidates in Nevada in April. Most of the money raised by his political committees has been spent on fundraising expenses — spending the money raised to raise more money. [Emphasis added]

But what the hey? There's gotta be some shekels in it for the doody shovelers themselves, no?

On the question of a thank you for the Rabid Beast Backer, to, the Loopsters got a no comment from from Ready for Hillary spokesman Seth Bringman. But I would say that if the rabid beast is really hungry for a thank you from his enemies, it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility.

All he has to do is announce that he has been taking stock of his life's work of turning the earth into the living hell dreamt of by his master, Satan, and as a result he has come to the painful realization that he has reached the point where the only possible course of action, as with any rabid beast, is for him to be put down. And therefore he has risen to the occasion to do the deed himself, whereupon he douses himself with gasoline and lights his carcass into kingdom come.

Sooner would be better.

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Texas, the new right-wing paradise, is in fact a "basket case," says Joshua Holland

If you're going to make crazy-ass demands like that, then maybe there's no place in the "Texas Miracle" for you.

"French cuffs and cowboy boots are, like sauerkraut ice cream, an eclectic combination, but Perry, who wears both, is a potentially potent candidate for the Republican presidential nomination because his political creed is uneclectic, matching that of the Republican nominating electorate. . . ."

-- George F. Will, in a WaPo column,
"Rick Perry: A Texan's 'exceptionalism'"

"Conservative mythology now holds up Texas as a shining example of right-wing governance in action. Republicans would have us believe that gutting the state's social safety net, denying workers the right to bargain collectively and relentlessly cutting taxes unleashed a torrent of 'job creation' and, ultimately, prosperity. . . .

"He slashed taxes to the bone, handing out credits to his political cronies like they were candy. He decried the evils of Big Government while hypocritically using federal stimulus funds to help close Texas' budget gap in the short term, and now he's using the state's longer term fiscal disaster -– one of his own creation -– as a premise for destroying an already threadbare social safety net serving the neediest Texans. . . . Texas is indeed a shining example of conservative governance, as well as an almost perfect model for winning the race to the bottom."

-- Alternet's Joshua Holland, in "Texas Is a Shining
Example of Right-Wing Governance in Action
and That's Why It's a Complete Basket-Case"

by Ken

Often, we know, columnists don't write the heads for their columns, but this one sounds like the work of one of the country's most egregious scumbag poseurs. It's pretentious gibberish designed to paper over the true bona fides of a moron who dreamed of lifting himself into the lofty echelon of a sociopathic thug. As we know, sometimes dreams do come true.

The kindest thing an impartial observer could say about Rick Perry is that he's an embarrassment, as opposed to a disgrace, to the human race. Like so many other right-wing devils, he has systematically flouted law and decency to turn his bailiwick into a paradise for the plutocratic elites.

Which reminded me of the Joshua Holland piece last week on Texas I've quoted from above, which I've been meaning to say something about. The notion that Rick Goddamn Perry could be anyone's idea of a serious presidential candidate would boggle the mind if there weren't all those other Republican candidates apparently being taken seriously.

Under governor Rick "Goodhair" Perry's term in office, Texas has indeed been a model of conservative governance, but the truth is that it has resulted in anything but prosperity for the people of the Lone Star State. In fact, Texas is not only a complete basket-case, it would be faring far worse today without the help of policies enacted by Democrats at the federal level – policies Perry lambasted as "irresponsible spending that threatens our future."

Of course the Radical Right masks its greed and selfishness in lies and delusions, and Lies and Delusions Central is the Wall Street Journal, which has been trumpeting a number it came up with" "37% of all net new American jobs since the recovery began were created in Texas."

The Journal then spun that fact like this:

Capital -- both human and investment -- is highly mobile, and it migrates all the time to the places where the opportunities are larger and the burdens are lower. Texas has no state income tax. Its regulatory conditions are contained and flexible. It is fiscally responsible and government is small. Its right-to-work law doesn't impose unions on businesses or employees.

In the Journal's hyper-partisan view, the lesson to be learned is that "the core impulse of Obamanomics is to make America less like Texas and more like California, with more government, more unions, more central planning, higher taxes." That spin was echoed during last week's GOP debate by none other than Newt Gingrich, who asked, "Why [would] you want to be at California's unemployment level when you can be [at] Texas's employment level?"

James Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas, scoffed at the whole narrative, telling AlterNet, "the notion that our state government is a model is almost enough to beckon the spirit of Molly Ivins back from the shades." Galbraith said "Texas has been a low-tax, low-service state since the time of the Republic," and noted that it's "therefore impossible that this fact suddenly accounts for its better job performance over the past few years." (Texas' record of job creation under Perry is the same as it was under former governor Ann Richards, a Democrat.)

"Texas is an energy state benefiting from high oil prices and the incipient boom in natural gas," explained Galbraith. "That's an accident of nature." He added that the state "went through the S&L crisis, had major criminal prosecutions and more restrictive housing finance regulations this time around; hence it was not an epicenter of the subprime housing disaster. That's called a learning experience." Tighter regulation of the lending industry is also anathema to today's GOP. [Links onsite.]

Left out of the new right-wing narrative, says Joshua, is Texas's 20 percent population surge in the last decade, almost two-thirds of it Hispanic.

A surge in people created greater demand for goods and services, which leads to more jobs. But the jobs being created in Texas aren't keeping up with the state's expanding workforce -– the Wall Street Journal somehow failed to mention that during the exact same period in which it was adding all those new jobs, Texas' unemployment rate actually increased from 7.7 to 8 percent (it also failed to note that 23 states -- including such deep blue ones as Vermont, New York and Massachusetts -- enjoy lower unemployment rates than Texas).

But Joshua is most worked up over the notion that Texas has been "fiscally responsible."

Perry certainly adhered to the conservative playbook, offering massive tax breaks without the deep cuts in services that might inspire a voter backlash. As a result – an entirely predictable one – the Austin American-Statesman reported that "state lawmakers have spent much of the year grappling with a budget shortfall that left them $27 billion short of the money needed to continue current state services."

CNN adds that while Perry was railing against the Democratic stimulus package passed over the fierce resistance of conservatives, the state "was facing a $6.6 billion shortfall for its 2010-2011 fiscal years," and "it plugged nearly all of that deficit with $6.4 billion in Recovery Act money." The stimulus package created or saved 205,000 jobs in Texas, second only to California. But as James Galbraith told AlterNet, while "the state budget has not yet been cut drastically" due to the stimulus boost, "the key phrase is 'not yet.'" Now that the stimulus has run its course, "if projections for the current budget cycle are correct, things will get much worse in the next year."

Indeed, those cuts are now on their way. The Texas legislature imposed draconian cuts to Medicaid, cut tuition aid to 43,000 low-income students and is weighing $10 billion in cuts to the state's education system. According to Texas state senator Rodney Ellis, D-Fort Bend, the 2012-2013 budget will underfund "health and human services in Texas by $23 billion, 29.8 percent below what is needed to maintain current services."

But Perry's tax breaks are indeed part of the state's jobs picture; as Time magazine's Massimo Calabresi noted, Perry established several massive business tax breaks "designed to lure companies from other states."

Joshua notes that "the funds have been controversial," with millions of dollars going to --

whose officers or investors are major Perry campaign donors and Perry has allowed them to keep their subsidies in many cases even when they fail to deliver promised jobs. More important for the purposes of judging Perry’s job-creating record, even those that do produce jobs don’t necessarily create long-lasting ones, or increase the state’s overall prosperity.

Joshua cites a report "written for Perry last spring" by Michael Porter of Harvard Business School which argues "that such tax breaks 'ultimately don't support long-term prosperity,' because companies that can move easily 'are looking for the best deal and when the deal runs out they move' again, taking their jobs with them."

And what the "Texas Miracle" has been creating, says Joshua, is "crappy jobs." He quotes the American Independent's Patrick Brendel: "Texas has by far the largest number of employees working at or below the federal minimum wage." The state is "tied with Mississippi for the greatest percentage of minimum wage workers." California, he notes, is at the other end of the spectrum, at under 2 percent.

At a fundraiser this week, Rick Perry, who despite toying with the idea of secession in the past may now be eying a White House bid, told a group of Republican fat-cats that in his state, "you don't have to use your imagination, saying, 'What'll happen if we apply this or that conservative principle?' You just need to look around, because they've been in play across our state for years, generating real results."

In this, Perry is absolutely, 100 percent correct. He slashed taxes to the bone, handing out credits to his political cronies like they were candy. He decried the evils of Big Government while hypocritically using federal stimulus funds to help close Texas' budget gap in the short term, and now he's using the state's longer term fiscal disaster -– one of his own creation -– as a premise for destroying an already threadbare social safety net serving the neediest Texans. As a result of these policies, plus immigration and other external factors, his state's added a lot of low-paying poverty jobs without decent benefits. He's added very little in the way of "prosperity."

In the final analysis, Texas is indeed a shining example of conservative governance, as well as an almost perfect model for winning the race to the bottom.

Is it any wonder that George Will hearts Rick Perry?

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Thanks to the soft-on-dummies Obama campaign, right-wingers can repackage their disastrous failed policies as "common-sense wisdom"

by Ken

Confession time: I'm the one who added the clip of Rush Limbaugh talking to Sarah Palin to yesterday's Day 2 installment of Noah's Scorn Awards (The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same Edition), and I'm still feeling slimy. As the caption noted, it's 10 minutes of listening to these tireless worshippers of ignorance and hate yammer about "commonsense solutions" to our economic woes. Actually, I suspect that Princess Sarah initially misspoke her mantra, which turns out to be "commonsense conservative solutions." You know, the tried-and-true things that history has shown work! Um, er, tax cuts. Yes, that's it, tax cuts!

[Expletives deleted. Many, many expletives.]

Shouldn't these blithering fools at least wait until the economy has been put together again before they set about crashing it again? Is it really possible that they don't understand that it was the doctrinaire conservative insanity of their saints from Ronnie through Chimpy that got us into this mess? Oh, they had help along the way from "centrist" bubble-blowers like Clinton Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin (whose cronies and disciples are now the Obama Economic Brain Trust), but it wasn't brain surgery identifying the chief culprits.

"Is it possible that they don't understand?" What am I thinking? Is there anything that they do understand? I mean, apart from how to manipulate sadly gullible people to further their own agendas.

A HISTORIC POLITICAL OPPORTUNITY SQUANDERED

How is it possible that the whole litany of wacko economic bullshit that proved itself wrong to the point of catastrophe has survived to obfuscate and, potentially, enslave another day? It's easy, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama blew it. They were so persuaded by their wretched advisers -- truly the scum of the earth -- that they needed to be blander than bland, and run as "centrists" (meaning right-wingers only defanged versions of the psychotics who have taken over the Republican Party and the whole discredited Conservative Movement).

In the process they lost the opportunity to run hard against, not just George W. Bush, but the politics of death-and-destruction his regime inflicted on a helpless country for eight years. Every word out of those people's mouths was a calculated lie; every policy they promulgated, to the cheers of their de-brained right-wing worshippers, was garbage. Even before they collapsed the economy, there was an election's worth of teaching opportunity, a chance once and for all to show the American people how they had been lied to and deluded.

But none of the major candidates bit. That would have been both hard -- requiring a serious political conversation -- and really risky. So instead we got just vague alllusions to a possibly less-than-ideal recent past. Candidate Obama kept promising us "change," but he never bothered to articulate what we needed change from and why we needed it -- supposedly because that would have been "negative," and centrist American didn't want to hear negative campaigning. Of course that didn't stop the McCranky people from poisoning the political atmosphere with unremitting lies and slime.

By the time the election season was in full swing, the failures of the Bush regime, in domestic and foreign policy equally, had become so glaring and so deadly that all those onetime Bush worshippers, the people who for seven years screeched "Bush-bashing" anytime anyone tried to point out the simplest realities about those monstrous frauds, seemed to have forgotten that there ever was such a person. Even while Chimpy was still squatting in the White House, with all the powers of the presidency, the people who through two presidential terms had regarded him as the messiah even forgot, or denied, his name.

It wouldn't have been a matter of kicking him when he was down; it would have been a matter of making people see that running the country for the benefit of the people who bought and paid for his regime was politially and economically disastrous, that the new American imperial policy had not only been a disaster but had even broken our armed forces for use when they might genuinely be needed. The models developed by all of those lamebrains in neoliberal, neoconservative, and just plain right-wing think tanks were all wacko bullshit. Those crackpots thought they could create a "free market" utopia in Iraq; all they could do was destroy everything they touched, and put our own country through protracted agony. And none of this was helped by the generous helping of extreme-right-wing (especially Christian Right) social policy Chimpy unleashed on the rest of us to buy the loyalties of those increasingly out-of-control powermongers.

But the mainstream Democratic presidential candidates stuck to the handlers' lame scripts, and never laid a hand on the underlying failures of Reagan-Bush-Cheneyism. Of course President Obama in office has given us reason to wonder whether his reticence didn't have something to do with having less disagreement with Bush-Cheneyism than we assumed. An awful lot of the current administration seems to flow smoothly out of the Bush regime. So maybe in that sense there was no missed opportunity for the Obama campaign and future administration. But for the country, we lost the chance to discredit those disastrous ideas for at least a generation.

Instead, they're all back. We're once again hearing from Virginia Sen. Mark Warner about his famous "radical centrism" -- though this raises the question, if the Obama people don't even pay attention to someone as commitedly centrist as Senator Mark, whom do they take seriously?

And inevitably we have Druggie Rush and Princess Sarah fobbing off their "commonsense conservative" solutions. Don't kid yourself: Americans are prepared to swallow it all again.

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How the "Hitler twisters" have helped me understand the Holocaust deniers

Just 'cause he's been gone for more than 60 years
doesn't mean Hitler can't still provide assistance to
his spiritual heirs in the Right-Wing Noise Machine.

by Ken

I used to wonder about Holocaust deniers. What I wondered was, why? While it's possible that some or even all of them actually believe the nonsense they spew, it can't be from some deep soul-defining sense of belief, because it is after all utter bullshit. Is it really possible to have a soul that is defined by bullshit? I mean, it's not as if there are any reasonable grounds for Holocaust denial. All too clearly what you've got is people who have decided first to believe in this crap and then searched out the kinds of ambiguities and cracks that exist in any kind of historical enquiry to justify the crap.

I know I'm not expressing this very well, but my question, you see, was why? Why do they choose, not only to believe but to stake large parts of their reputation and lives on the nonsense they choose to believe? Don't people normally act in their self-interest? Well, where's the self-interest in promulgating nonsense while in the process (a) making a mockery of the historical record and (b) inflicting such pain on so many millions of people with direct ties to that horror (and the many, many millions more who simply respect the pursuit of truth)?

The other day it suddenly occurred to me that there's nothing at all mysterious about it, now that we've landed ourselves in a time when we have an entire political wing, teetering out there on the precipice, shouting, "We'll believe whatever we damn well want to believe, and we'll bash the brains out of any commie homos who try to shove facts in our face!"

Now it all seems so simple. There probably isn't one uniform set of motives for Holocaust denial. There are anti-Semites so rabid that it just drives them nuts to see Jews get "credit" for all that suffering and dying, and so, what do you know, there was no Final Solution! Somebody, undoubtedly some dirty Jew, made it all up! Then there are Nazi sympathizers and other fans of authoritarianism who just don't like to see the reputation of one of their heroes sullied. And so they demand to see a single document signed by the Führer authorizing any aspect of the Final Solution. (Of course the Führer didn't generally transmit such instructions on paper over his signature. But hey, wait a minute -- you mean there was a Final Solution?)

I'm sure there are many other paths to Holocaust denial. The subject has become a lot less interesting to me, because I understand that all those paths can tell us is what kinds of psychological problems the people who follow those paths have.

So what, now, about the 2009 version of Holocaust denial? The new deniers don't seem to deny either that the mayhem caused by Adolf Hitler in his short time in power happened, or that it happened as a result of Hitler's will. No, they've simply invented a new Hitler -- apparently snipped hastily out of a sheet of construction paper -- and pasted their Hitleroid over the real Hitler's picture.

And as a result of this ingenious remaking of the historical record, you know what? Hitler has turned into a leftist!!! It's like a magic trick, only a really, really slow-acting one, because it didn't take effect until more than 60 years after the guy died. It's kind of as if a magician promised his audience to make his lovely assistant disappear, then told the folks to come back in 60, 70, 80 years -- send the grandkids if necessary -- to see the illusion completed.

Of course it's not quite like that, because when the man was alive, it never would have occurred to anyone to try to make believe that Hitler, who was not only unapologetic but proud to be the driving force behind a movement of the extreme Right, was a leftist.

That Hitler -- and his ideological soulmates Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain -- were die-hard rightists isn't a matter of opinion. There's nothing to debate. It's simply who and what they were. And in the economic mess that was Europe in the 1920s and '30s, with the specter of militant Bolshevism looming from the East, the Far Right could be a winning position to stake out.

I can't tell you how stunned I was when I first became aware that modern-day Movement Conservatives have chosen to invent such a battle and fight it. They have nothing going for them in the way of fact or historical argument. Because again, the history is straightforward and incontrovertible. It has never been challenged because there's nothing to challenge. Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were never the least bit secretive about their political or economic philosophies. Does anyone really imagine that Franco fought the Spanish Civil War against Soviet-backed Republican forces because of his commitment to centrism?

Franco is an interesting case here, by the way, since his far-right-wing dictatorship in Spain endured until his death in November 1975. That extends the history of fascism an extra three decades. Is anyone suggesting that Franco was a leftist?

I'm forgetting, though, just how long ago 1975 was, at least in Movement Conservative-speak. They probably couldn't tell us how long ago it was either, because they're so proud of having no functional education. For all I know, they regard subtraction as a liberal plot -- to strip real American men and women of their real American manhood.

What I'm suggesting is that in a world where ignorance is not only bliss but a great blank slate on which to sketch whatever fantasy world you wish, not only is the Third Reich ancient history, but so is the Franco regime. To people who can't remember what happened yesterday -- even if it's by choice, as I would argue -- events of many, many years ago have no meaning, except as conveniently repackaged by their own propagandists.

As some of you may be aware, I had a visitation recently in our comments section from a commenter who helpfully debunked my proposition that Hitler was what he claimed to be, a man of the extreme Right. No, he corrected me, Hitler was a leftist, just not as far left as Stalin.

Just like the Holocaust deniers, he didn't give obvious evidence of being insane or unschooled, but the simple fact was that on a scale of zero to a million, he had no fucking clue what he was talking about. He was pulling it all out of his stinking butt. He might just as well have been arguing that gravity makes stuff go up rather than down, just not as far up as upsidasium. (By the way, I want to apologize for the crappy typing of my response to that visitor. I don't type well when I'm spluttering.)

All they have to go on is the fact that the Nazis were National Socialists, apparently not understanding that the whole point of the name was to offer a nice-sounding name that could be an alternative to (shudder) the other "socialism." As if Movement Conservatives didn't know about calling your political program the exact opposite of what it actually is -- what did their god George W. Bush do for eight years? You pollute, for example, in the name of "clean air."

Well, I guess it wasn't coming only out of his butt. It was coming from the same sets of talking points that Michele Malkin and Rush and Billo and Sean and Glenn use. And it's not hard to see how "Hitler twisting" has been of use to the Right-Wing Noise Machine. On the one hand, they have a Hitler Problem. They keep coming up against suggestions that they are the intellectual, political, and spiritual heirs of Hitler, as of course they are. As I've pointed out, the Right-Wing Noise Machine has to have come straight out of the dog-eared pages of their copies of Goebbels for Dummies.

At the same time, the one thing people really do remember about Hitler is that he was really, really bad. So why not do a Karl Rove presto change-o and turn your problem into the solution? Suddenly Hitler is a leftist! Just like Obama, who of course isn't much more of a leftist than Hitler was. But there we go with those pesky facts again!

Believe it or not, I have a suggestion for restoring rationality to discussion of such subjects, and I'm going to share it in my next post.

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Once again, clueless Democrats count for survival on even more clueless Republicans

Remember this guy? He used to be one of the country's leading experts on "conservative principles." Now he's mostly just a guy hanging around for his turn to take that big Appalachian Trail hike in the sky.

by Ken

The rumor flying around today was that Treasury Secretary "Tiny Tim" Geithner is about to be dislodged from his job. And people say the Obama administration doesn't listen to its critics!

Just two things before you head out to the street for dancing:

(1) The rumored replacement is Jamie "Ebenezer" Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, making him the man responsible for the savage war currently being waged by the retail-banking portion of his company against, well, its customers, at least the credit-card-holding ones, in anticipation of the new credit-card regs that go into effect, er, in this lifetime, give or take. If you thought the administration was in the pocket of the Wall Streeters and banksters before . . .

(2) In any case, the rumor appears to be coming, not from the White House, but from Wall Street sources, presumably on the ground that Tiny Tim has lost too much credibility to continue serving effectively as their front man. And presumably "Ebenezer" Dimon, who is known to have a cordial relationship with President Obama, has indicated to those sources his willingness to suspend his current project, which is to make sure that JPMorgan Chase is officially Too Big to Fail when he or one of his successors drives it broke.

So no, there's no indication yet of any willingness on the part of the administration to modify the course to disaster being set for the administration by chief economic mastermind Larry Summers, with the president's right-hand man, Master Rahm Emanuel, cheering from the sideline.

Meanwhile the NYT's Adam Nagourney reported this afternoon on the paper's political blog The Caucus (G.O.P. Considers 'Purity' Resolution for Candidates) that a resolution was circulated this morning signed by 10 Republican National Committee members --

listing 10 positions Republican candidates should support to demonstrate that they "espouse conservative principles and public policies" that are in opposition to "Obama's socialist agenda." According to the resolution, any Republican candidate who broke with the party on three or more of these issues– in votes cast, public statements made or answering a questionnaire -- would be penalized by being denied party funds or the party endorsement.

The proposed resolution was signed by 10 Republican national committee members and was distributed on Monday morning. They are asking for the resolution to be debated when Republicans gather for their winter meeting [in Honolulu].

The moving spirit behind the resolution is none other than the ghost of Ronald Reagan, who is said in it to have championed allowing a certain amount of diversity within the party's conservative views, believing "that someone who agreed with him 8 out of 10 times was his friend, not his opponent."

Whence the mathematical formula that fellow Republicans should be allowed to disagree with two of the ten principles presumably deemed by these deep political thinkers to be the core of conservatism -- in contrast to "Obama's socialist agenda." However, anyone who disagrees with a third principle should be denied money from the party and even its endorsement.

So what are the Magic 10 "conservative principles and public policies"?

(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama's "stimulus" bill;

(2) We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run health care;

(3) We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;

(4) We support workers' right to secret ballot by opposing card check;

(5) We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;

(6) We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;

(7) We support containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat;

(8) We support retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;

(9) We support protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and

(10) We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership.

I'm sure I don't need to detail for DWT readers how much unadulterated bullshit there is here above and beyond the ideological wackitude. For example, I've seen several people point out, with regard to (3), that the very definition of "cap and trade" is that it is "market-based," and that this "principle" therefore really doesn't mean anything. But this seems to be asking for more subtlety than can reasonably expected from people who seem to be, basically, mentally defective.

Obviously if you make a reference to "Obama's socialist agenda," you have just demonstrated that you don't have the tiniest clue in the universe as to what you're talking about. As it happens, our mentally defective wackadoodles don't have a much better clue as to what constitutes "conservatism." For example, (2), (3), (4), and (9) aren't statements of principles; they're hallucinations. And there's nothing in any way "conservative," though quite a lot that's delusional, in (5), (6), or (7) -- these are just positions that happen to have gained currency among the wackadoodles, and haven't even been accepted as Republican positions, as in the case of the immigration "plank."

And we should remember who these people with their fine conservative values are. These are, by and large, people who don't even believe the blather that pours out of their own steaming orifices. Think back a year, and remember how many of the white knights the wingnut battalions were expecting to lead them into battle in 2012 are now disgraced butts of jokes, having been shown up for the lying garbage they always were.

No Republican in the country, for example, was as categorical and uncompromising in his attempt to mandate "conservative values," or as peremptorily dismissive of even the tiniest dissent from them (hell, he would never have allowed shirkers to get away with agreeing with him on only eight out of ten conservative principles), as South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

I'll bet many of you even forgot that the slimy, lying turd is still governor of his state. But heck, no quitter he, our Mark, nosirree! No Sarah Palin, or Tim Pawlenty!

Of course there is already a movement afoot in the state legislature, though not much of one, aimied at impeachment, with a hearing on just such a motion -- based on the governor's lies in connection with his affair with his Argentine honey -- scheduled for Tuesday. Meanwhile today the state's ethics commission made public a list of "37 counts of using his office for personal financial gain," as Shaila Dewan reported today in the NYT:

The charges on the list include spending state money on business-class plane tickets, instead of flying coach; using state aircraft to attend political and personal events, like the birthday party of a campaign contributor; and using his campaign fund for noncampaign expenses, like a ticket to President Obama’s inauguration.

The list provides the first details of the accusations that the ethics commission will pursue after a wide-ranging review of Mr. Sanford’s travel and financial records, citing incidents from September 2005 to April 2009.

The specifics of the charges look like pretty small potatoes to me, but what's not small potatoes is that the guy, at the very core of who and what he is, is a liar and a fraud. Those bible-thumping values he's spent his career trying to shove down everyone else's throat are just lies he spewed to impress people and gain power over them. He's a man who has no discernible principles or morality, who in fact has no strength of character to stand up to the slightest tingle in his weewee.

Of course the RNC geniuses who cobbled this list of "principles" think Americans have forgotten last year, maybe 'cause they sure have, or have tried their darnedest to. And maybe Americans will forget, being rattled enough by the shitpile that eight years of the Bush regime dumped them into, which is now officially blamed -- by particularly stupid and/or dishonest people -- on "Obama's socialist agenda."

It's not as if the Obama administration or Congress has done much for those people who feel under siege. But it may be just their luck to have as their opposition so many people who are even dumber and more dishonest than they are.

God bless us every one.

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Welcome to the world of the "rootsgap" -- the gap between political leaders and their base

Conservative icon Ronald Reagan -- now there's a political
leader who was in tune with his base. (Um, wasn't he?)

"There is a serious leadership gap in this country. And by leadership gap, I mean something very specific, so specific that I'm going to give it a name. I call it a 'rootsgap'. A rootsgap occurs when a leadership is dramatically out of step with its base or the public at large."

-- Matt Stoller, announcing his (temporary?) leave-taking from OpenLeft

by Ken

I could have sworn I wrote about it here, but I can't find any trace of such a post. It was, I'm guessing, a year or two ago that I attended a panel discussion on the uses of new media in political life, and Matt Stoller, as a member of the panel, had to sit there and listen as the moderator read something that he had written. I wish I could remember what it was, which is how I came to search for that phantom earlier piece. I'm going to guess that it had something to do with the political establishment pays lip service to the new media, and in an awkward and tentative way tries to exploit them, but has no real regard for them and considers the practitioners barely worthy of contempt. That's a point I've seen Matt make a number of times.

Whatever this excerpt was that the moderator read, it was, in a word, brilliant -- taking a fresh angle on a familiar subject and coming up with an insight I'd never encountered expressed so clearly. I remember being green with envy; how often does that happen in a writer's life? Being surprised to have something you've written read back at you in a public setting, and it's something any writer in the room with any sense -- and the auditorium contained a lot of writers -- would have given anything to have written. As I recall, Matt handled the situation with perfect aplomb, seeming not to recognize himself as the author, but expressing strong agreement with the sentiments expressed.

As a writer, Matt has this ability I envy to say things I wish I'd said, only better than I could have said them. He also has the ability to look at a familiar set of circumstances and suggest a way of arranging them that makes sense of them, or at least makes them matter, in a way that never occurred to them, something I envy even more -- and something we're going to come back to in a moment.

Most likely you're familiar with Matt as one of the founders and principal voices -- along with Mike Lux and Chris Bowers -- of the OpenLeft blog. He's the bloggers' blogger, the most immersed in the broadest range of the nitty-gritty of U.S. political life, and also the most attentive to the development of the progressive blogosphere. He's really, really smart, yet at the same time, for all the strength of his convictions, he also has the ability, not at all automatic with really smart people, to backtrack on a stand he's taken and acknowledge that he missed the point on this one. I could express wonder that all this wisdom has been accumulated at such a relatively tender age, but that might appear petty.

It may sound as if I'm writing an obituary. Quite the contrary. Matt has made an utterly logical and yet fascinating career jump, as he announced to OpenLeft readers Tuesday:

I won't be blogging at OpenLeft for some time. I've taken a job inside the House of Representatives (more on that when I've cleared what I can say) to see how the place works and to help create the space for more progressive policies.

The piece was titled "Solving the Rootsgap," and it's a thoughtful, even challenging piece, which I encourage everyone to read. I can't say I'm crazy about the word "rootsgap," but then, to my ear "roots" doesn't compound well -- I kind of hate "netroots" too. But I guess you learn to live with the words if they stand for useful concepts.

Here's how Matt defines "rootsgap":

Ultimately what I've learned, from many of you as much as from the task of writing for the public for the last five years, is that there is a serious leadership gap in this country. And by leadership gap, I mean something very specific, so specific that I'm going to give it a name. I call it a 'rootsgap'. A rootsgap occurs when a leadership is dramatically out of step with its base or the public at large.

And he goes on to give what we might call his Example A:

In the 1970s, the conservative base felt consistently sold out by its politicians, like Gerald Ford, who pushed centrist unpopular pieces of legislation, like the Panama Canal Treaty, through the levers of government. Birth control, abortion, public sector unions, civil rights, consumer rights, the Equal Rights Amendment - all of these provoked a fierce reaction from the conservative base who felt betrayed by the Republican politicians who did not oppose liberalization fast enough.

However, beginning with the 1978 midterm election, the New Right found its voice, which was then steadily consolidated:

After literally forty years of organizing, we are now in a situation where the town of DC is entirely populated by the ghosts of the New Right, in both parties. Tax cuts are deified, the national security state is beyond reproach, and the economy of conservative political influence can prevent nationalized elections from having impacts on policy, as the election of 2006 showed. The conservatives fully closed their rootsgap -- their political leadership and their activist base are in many ways indistinguishable. This is both useful for conservative ideologues, and a problem for the political system at large. Politicians shouldn't be conservative movement activists, they should be politicians representing all the people.

Now we move to Example B of a rootsgap:

The Democrats have the opposite problem. Our politicians, who believe that the press is basically an honest mediator, and that expertise is honestly held within elite universities, do not consider the base particularly important. And on the more difficult issues, the public is rarely considered a possible source of political support.

He makes some observations about the history of the Democratic rootsgap, then observes:

The rootsgap has been the single most salient feature of modern American politics, at least since I've been paying attention. It cuts across economic issues, media policy, foreign policy, national security, civil liberties, you name it. Conservative (and often bipartisan) political elites ignore, usually the left but often the public itself, with almost no political consequences.

He cites Joe Lieberman as someone who "built an entire career, and even elevated himself to be the Vice Presidential candidate, on this feature." (For the specifics of the Lieberman example, I refer you to the full text.)

While being careful to establish that the Republican rootsgap of 40 years ago and the Democratic one of today are not equivalent, he fleshes out the familiar accusation that liberals are hopelessly out of touch with their base, and always have been in this country, bringing it to the present day.

The right presents us with a model, though an imperfect model, of organizing, of closing this rootsgap. That is why Reagan is such a hero (or anti-hero) to people like Obama, because Reagan was the messenger for a wave of grassroots organizing that changed the country profoundly in a conservative direction.

But Reagan, he insists, didn't simply ride the wave of the base he identified with; he led them.

Movements must have leaders, and these leaders must both listen to, lead, and be led by the activists and the public that supports them. There must be bonds of trust, even with inevitable disagreement. The right built up those bonds over forty years.

And leadership, as part of "a vibrant progressive world," is going to be needed all the more necessary in the challenging times we face now. There is a strong suggestion that leadership is not what we're getting from our new president-elect.

Liberals have been correct about the war in Iraq, the financial meltdown, the Bankruptcy Bill, the deficit, the Patriot Act, and, well, pretty much everything. What they haven't been is powerful enough to prevent the mistakes the country has made. And this is a leadership problem that we can and will fix.

As a movement, we need to be promoting and helping our leaders make the right decisions, pick the right policies, and surround themselves with individuals who will frame policy choices in real human terms, without the weak bromides that mask the cruel impact of bad policy decisions. That's the problem I want to start solving. And so I'll be moving away from public blogging, though I'm pretty sure I will return eventually, perhaps soon. Politics is always volatile.

Now there are some things that give me pause here, and not just in my much-compressed rendering. I think Matt is unquestionably right about the Republicans having had a very different kind of connection with the conservative base from the one Democrats have with the progressive one. But the nature of that connection seems to me more complex. Most of the Republican leadership had even less use for the conservative base than Democratic leaders have for the progressive one. They learned the language, and they learned how to manipulate the concerns. Maybe it doesn't matter, because in the end, the result is exactly what Matt describes. I just wonder if at some point that needs to figure into the equation, just as the stereotype of the elitist liberal out of touch with the common man sidesteps the reality of a frequently greater concern for, and even identification with, those surly rootsfolk, who nevertheless perceive something quite different.

As it happens, I have just resumed my reading of Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, after a months-long hiatus at about the 150-page mark. I always knew I would come back to it; I just needed to wait for a time when I could give it the attention and concentration it demands. And I've been plunged into the year 1966, as Nixon calculates his totally improbable and unexpected resurgence, basically by coopting the new conservative movement that had organized around the Goldwater presidential candidacy of 1964. Goldwater had of course been trounced by Lyndon Johnson, in one of the great landslides in U.S. political history. Only two years later, Nixon understood the soundness of the basic strategy, but for him it was only strategy.

Nixon understood how dramatically the country had changed in those two years since the LBJ landslide. And Perlstein lays out in detail the obtuseness of old-style liberals like then-California Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown (the father of the state's former governor and current attorney general, Edmund "Jerry" Brown), not seeing the gulf that had opened up between them and their constituencies. And yet it still seems to me that, easy as those liberals were to parody, they still had a better understanding of those constituents' needs than, say, Ronald Reagan, who in 1966 -- four years after Pat Brown had won his second term as California governor, thereby ending the political career of Richard Nixon (or so it was thought) -- demolished Brown's bid for a third term, winning 58 percent of the vote.

As I say, these quibbles may not matter to the thrust of Matt's argument, but if we're talking about the relationship of political leadership to bases, I think they're at least worth throwing in. Conservatives may have worshiped Reagan, but I'm not sure they really had much in common. I think Ronald and Nancy Reagan had a contempt bordering on active loathing for the "common" man, and outside elections spent approximately zero time in the company of anyone remotely common by their standards, according to which common would have meant "nonrich."

I don't think Reagan really had a philosophy. He didn't hate unions because he had a philosophy; he hated unions because he had outgrown them by casting his lot with the rich. And of course while he may have paid lip service to pulling yourself up by your bootstraps in this land of opportunity, no life could be a worse illustration of this than his. Granted, he was able to do every job he was handed, but the fact is that he was handed every job he got, and that his life really changed when he was adopted by his soon-to-be peers in plutopia. And of course considering the direction "movement" conservatism has taken since Reagan's time, the idea of him as spiritual father is grotesque -- he wasn't the least bit religious, and hardly made more than a perfunctory attempt to conceal it.

Then too, when I go back to Matt's definition of "rootsgap" and find, "A rootsgap occurs when a leadership is dramatically out of step with its base or the public at large," it occurs to me belatedly to wonder whether these aren't two way too different things, "its base" and "the public at large," to be shoehorned into the same kind of leadership gap. Can "rootsgap" really cover both? Are they really the same thing?

Again, I don't know whether, or how much, any of this matters. I consider it, in fact, a tribute to the substance of the argument Matt has laid out that these considerations even arise. I would love to hear some reactions from our readers to his piece.

I'm sure both Matt and we are going to be surprised by the discoveries he'll have to report, when he checks back in with us, based on his experience inside the belly of the beast.


MEANWHILE, FILLING THE GAP AT OPENLEFT . . .

I'm sure we'll all miss Matt's regular presence on OpenLeft, but talk about picking up the slack! Already on the job as an official regular OpenLeft blogger is none other than our good friend David Sirota. When it comes to real-deal progressive-activist credentials, and also the ability to write lucidly and engagingly about those issues, David is pretty much in a class by himself.

Good luck all around!

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