Must We Act As If They Mean What They Say?

The last time I tried the “conservatives are all talk” line Bush invaded Iraq.

Um, hold on a sec. What is it that the current Republican Party is actually doing that makes you think these folks don’t mean what they say? Because what I see is quite a lot of living up to very evil obsessions, mixed in with the customary dishonesty and general hatred of all others.

Could explain why you think Michelle Bachmann does believe the crazy things she’s saying, but Rick Perry doesn’t? ‘Cause I’m having a hard time seeing a difference.

@David

Rick Perry has compromised as governor so much that he has vetoed more bills than any other governor in Texas history. It’s not just that he’s been there longer, either; he holds the post-Reconstruction record for vetoes in a legislative session, with 82.

John@7: Alternatively, Republicans are doing fine making it harder and harder for potential voters to find out what’s going on, to tell anyone else about it, or to express their disapproval in any way that matters to Republicans wanting more political power for their own ends.

This is Gramsci’s territory, as I see it. The hegemony gets better at defending itself with practice, a lot of the time.

say “Wow, did you hear? Rick Perry is a flat-earther who wants to take America back to the nineteenth century! What a maroon!”

I think that’s been tried. (I’m in the UK, and the only way I even know that Perry is a creationist is from sites saying, effectively, lookita creationist maroon!) I think this is an approach with diminishing returns – it doesn’t recruit to the Left except from people who particularly hate religious irrationality, and beyond a certain point it doesn’t even mobilise the Left (because if our enemies are that crazy, what’s the point trying to fight them?)

I like John’s “utopian anti-utopianism” image (possibly because I read Leslie Fiedler at a formative age). The idea that life is hard and we can’t make it any better has a definite appeal on the level of fantasy – you can imbue those statements with a real libidinal energy, particularly if you complete the sentence …so you’d just better damn well look after yourself and your loved ones! Political radicalism always involves an appeal to the sense that the world could be radically different; the novelty here is the appeal to a sense that the world could be much, much harder (but we would triumph over it!).

So the argument is the American people at large enjoy listening to the extremist drivel coming from a number of Republican candidates, just as they would listening to post-apocalyptic fiction? That, among other things, implies that a lot of people listen to religious messages for mere amusement instead of belief; not sure I agree with the generalisation.

I think this article is confused. Politicians say things to get support that they can not and sometimes know they can not at the time deliver on. But, that does not mean that these promises do not inform their overall ideology and goals. Incrementalism and compromise are pretty much the life blood of democratic politics. Ronald Reagan did not completely end welfare either, but he was not insincere when he supported this goal. It was just not possible at the time given other priorities. I also do not think that conservatives necessarily get a free pass. Certain conservative ideas such as military isolationism have no more political traction in the US than nationalizing industry.

one of those tone deaf moments

“Kevin points out that if Hilary Clinton wrote a book about how much she wanted to repeal the Second Amendment and ban hate speech everyone would freak out that she was a radical. So what gives? [snip]

By contrast, Hilary Clinton would only write that book about wanting to repeal the Second Amendment, etc., if – against all likelihood – she really wanted to repeal the Second Amendment. Because, since she isn’t a conservative, she’s not going to get a Get Out of Crazy Jail Free card. So there is no profit to her in writing such a book. Turning the point around: given that liberals don’t systematically employ a rhetoric of believing things they don’t, but conservatives do, it makes a great deal of sense to give conservatives an endless supply of Get Out of Crazy Jail Free cards. And round we go.”

I think there is a different dynamic going on here. If Hillary Clinton were to write such a book, she would be standing alone in taking those positions, with a large gap between her and anyone else considered legitimate among the Democratic Party elite (let alone the Republican Party elite). When you stand alone, you are a loon. When are are a loon in a group, you are just taking one side of a legitimate debate. Jay Rosen spelled this out clearly a while ago.

“The deeper question, I think, is why it appeals so much to so many Americans that conservatives constantly say things that they don’t really mean. Let’s go back to that oft-quoted line from Free and Cantril (The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion ). Americans are “philosophical conservatives but operational liberals”. But, honestly, Americans aren’t really philosophers in a seminar room ‘this strictly implies that’ sort of sense. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that what Free and Cantril found is that when Americans say Big Things about American politics, whose consequences they aren’t really prepared to affirm, in practice, they say conservative things. Whereas when you find out what they really want, in practice, they are liberals. When Americans dream about something ideal, politically, that they kind of know they aren’t going to get, they dream a conservative dream. Since conservatism is, officially, an anti-utopian philosophy, this creates the odd situation of collective dreams of anti-utopian utopianism. But people are funny that way. (It’s sort of the opposite of the famous ‘and a pony’ strategy for wishes. Namely, since wishes are free, you might as well ask for absolutely everything. But, then again, sometimes it’s more appealing to think of being a rugged cowboy, with nothing but your pony, riding off into the Western sunset. Something like that.)”

I know this is the standard reading of public opinion, but I think it’s wrong. An updated argument can be found in Class War? what Americans really think about economic inequality by Page and Jacobs. They make the same argument – Americans are philosophically conservative but operationally liberal. What does the first part mean? Mostly things like Americans are concerned about government waste or says things critical of government in the abstract. On the other hand, the liberalism part shows Americans supporting a package of goals and policies supporting economic security and opportunity for all. If anything, I’d say this means Americans are philosophically liberal (even social democratic) but they have pragmatic concerns about cost. As for the abstract government thing – if your goals are as I described, you ought to be critical of government, which doesn’t exactly achieve those goals or even try consistently.

So what’s going on here? First, Republicans enjoy an organizational advantage – we shouldn’t point to electoral or policy success and presume it is a product of public support. (Hacker and Pierson make that argument in Winner Take All Politics and Off Center). And second, Republicans convey the sense that they stand for something, when Democrats don’t. (See Halpin and Teixeira, The Politics of Definition). This advantage helps them tremendously, even when Americans don’t agree on the specifics. Beside, Democrats rarely make arguments of the kind I describe above anyway, rarely advance claims about values, instead focusing instead on things like costs, so they are leaving a great deal of potential support lying on the table.

I second Bruce Baugh here.

And as for their recent political successes, note that they trashed the place, doubled down on the crazy, and won. In a sense there’s confounding going on – craziness and corruption trash the place, but the GOP profits.

RE: Rick Perry not actually believing what he says.

Perry might have done his share of compromising, but Bachmann has never wielded enough real power to have to compromise, not that she ever would. But Perry has also issued a state proclamation to pray to end the drought and sponsored a Christian revival while sitting as Governor, which seems to show he’s willing to back up his crazy with action. That might not be problematic in Texas, but I’m not sure how that will go over throughout the rest of the country.

It’s not that there’s no reason to believe Perry is insincere (there are plenty of such reasons), it’s that there’s no functional difference between his insincerity and Bachmann’s sincerity.

Quote from Nixon’s favorite movie Patton:

General Codman: You know, general. Sometimes the men can’t tell when you’re acting.

Patton: It’s not important for them to know. It’s only important for me to know.

(What happens when Patton even loses track of when he’s acting? You have to make the case by the record of actions taken, not just rhetoric.)

I’m reminded of that poor Republican politician who was on television being directly asked by an interviewer whether he really, genuinely thought Obama might not be a citizen. He got all frustrated that the interviewer was insisting on treating his assertion’s about Obama’s citizenship as statements of fact that he might actually believe, instead of as professions of faith that everyone recognizes he doesn’t REALLY believe. I wish I remembered who that was.

…I also can’t help draw an analogy between the ongoing skirmish between the New Atheists and critics like Karen Armstrong, who seem to get so upset at the New Atheists for continuing to believe that religious people actually believe the things religious people constantly go around saying they actually believe. I’m not sure what useful inference follows from that comparison, but it does seem that there’s a lot of similarity.

I second William’s comment @34. Lots of people have mocked the idea that anyone has a right to be angry with the White House for doing things that contradict what they campaigned on, because that was just the campaign. It’s hard to understand what democracy means when this is conventional wisdom, but it’s hard to deny that it is CW.

There was a discussion a while back involving Krugman and others about the nonsense the Admin was talking regarding the economy. Krugman ultimately concluded that they must believe the nonsense, which explained their policy choices. I think he had it backwards. They made their policy choices within the political constraints as they saw them (for reasons that, whatever they were, were politically unspeakable) and then had to justify them somehow, which is why we got talk about confidence and the rest. That tells us a lot about what they thought would justify their policies, and very little about why they favored them.

Clearly, over the past 30 years as a whole, the Republicans have prospered by doing what they do (easier to recognise than to define!), and have repeatedly doubled down on that strategy.

But are they doing so well now? Given the state of the economy, the Repubs ought to be odds-on to win the Presidency in 2012, but AFAICT Obama is seen as a slight favorite. And the general Repub approval rating is below that of the Dems, though of course both are bad.

I think the Repub strategy has long-term costs, as people understand the need for a complex decoding of everything they say, realise that factual claims made with a straight face may be entirely bogus and so on.

In this case I simply do not believe that any Republican is joking or trying to mislead anyone. They genuinely don’t believe it, they genuinely don’t care, and if people in 100 years time fry as a result: tough, that’s their problem.

That isn’t really contradictory. There is still a gap between the accurate statement of their position (‘who cares if some other people’s grandchildren die; poor people die, that’s how things work’) and the things that are amusing, empowering and effective to say (‘those pointy-haired geeks with their eleven-dimensional mathematical models, who made them the boss of you?’).

I don’t think that, 9 times out of 10, they genuinely believe all the scientists are wrong.

Imagine what would happen if the mainstream scientific consensus changed such that the seas boiling and the atmosphere becoming sulphuric acid was seen as a realistic possibility; something even the rich wouldn’t survive.

I’d predict they would be all over action right now, even if the evidence for it was massively weaker.

Actually, I think the Obama thing goes the other way. Lots of people (just about everyone her, for example) are really upset that Obama didn’t do what he said he would, and even his defenders mostly say that he would have done much more if it weren’t for Congress, the prevailing wind and so on.

On the right, the prevailing line is that Obama has done much more than he said he would, campaigning on vague uplift then bringing America to the brink of socialist hell within days of taking office.

AFAICT, only the most hackish professional centrists take the line “that was the Campaign, this is Government”

AFAICT, only the most hackish professional centrists take the line “that was the Campaign, this is Government”

Should I then infer that Obama is the only constant star of intent in a firmament of lies, whatever we believe about his intent? Sorry, but my brain overheats when I attempt it. From my perspective, what is said afterward about the reasons for the discontinuity between Obama’s words and deeds is just partisan housekeeping. After that flapdoodle subsides, what we’re left with is a man who says one thing and does another, while protesting all the while that he’s doing nothing of the kind. For one of the more egregious examples, see his Nobel prize acceptance speech.

I wonder. . . does anyone believe the nonsense spouted by the typical conservative? It’s not too difficult to find examples of conservatives saying something like “I disagree with most of what Candidate X says. . . but they annoy the liberals!” As if that, in itself, is a reason to vote for someone.

Is it possible that nobody actually holds any conservative principles at all, that pundits and politicians are pandering to a constituency that doesn’t exist?

That would suck. . .

41:Imagine what would happen if the mainstream scientific consensus changed such that the seas boiling and the atmosphere becoming sulphuric acid was seen as a realistic possibility; something even the rich wouldn’t survive.

I’d predict they would be all over action right now, even if the evidence for it was massively weaker.

I think the uber-oligarchs do understand. I believe, based on little evidence but on intuition, that they are building an space-ark, an undersea retreat, or something like that.

My reasoning? A) They are not stupid or crazy, and B) the social structures and conditions required to survive, as a society in anything like our present population, global warming and peak resources will be unacceptable to the elites, and C) Those who think they were born to rule and breed rulers do not become servants without pulling the world down around them.

I even think the top elites are accelerating catastrophe, in order to be in the most advantageous position before we egalitarians get organized. It will take too long to inform the masses. I think it will come down in generation, if not a decade.

A lot of people mistakenly believe that the GOP want to maintain the status quo. It’s been clear since at least 2003 that they no longer are satisfied with that tactic and will in fact do quite a lot of damage to the country, the government’s ability to function and even the environment, so long as the the end result is that they gain power. They’re perfectly wiling to hobble this country economically and turn tens of thousands of citizens into surfs if it means they get to sit in the driver’s seat. Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, as it were. Therefore they will say any old crazy thing they have to to get power.

The real problem is the fact that at least a quarter of the American electorate only engages in politics as a spectator of the sport of crazy rhetoric. It’s become a reality show, “Politicians Say The Craziest Things.” Unfortunately, the winner gets to rule the country and influence world events for the next four years.

I don’t think the politicians get to rule the country anymore. That’s part of what has changed.

There’s an old joke about politics being show business for homely people. But, look at the new Republican House leadership and the most prominent Republican candidates for President. These are not homely people, and that may be instructive. These are not people, who are interested in the actual exercise of power. However fierce and radical the rhetoric, these are not people, who are deeply committed to controlling things. If anything, the Republicans seem to be most deeply committed to letting other people, the uber-wealthy and powerful corporate business executives, run things. These are people, whose ambition is centered on the attention they receive as spokesmodel-politicians.

It looks like a Reality Show, because . . . it is a reality show.

The deeper question, I think, is why it appeals so much to so many Americans that conservatives constantly say things that they don’t really mean.

Eh, we discount things Democrats say during primary season as well. Nobody really thought Obama and Clinton were doing anything but pandering when they threatened to force a renegotiation of NAFTA. and of course, more recently, nobody thought Obama was quite as angry at the financial community as he pretended to be.

I think you’re digging too deep on this one. The explanation is the more conventional one that politicians, especially during nomination fights, attempt to appease the various factions within their respective parties. Everyone knows what they’re doing. The leadership of the factions appreciate it (the politician is signalling that he knows their importance), the rest of the country gags, and opponents gleefully use the pandering to create negative narratives.

As for Keller, he’s worried about a problem that doesn’t exist. Politicians do get flak for crazy statements and out-of-the-mainstream beliefs. They do get flak for the beliefs of their mentors and those they mention as inspirational.

It’s probably paranoid to wonder whether Keller’s insistence that we focus more on a candidate’s religion has much more to do with weakening Romney than anything else.

Politicians do get flak for crazy statements and out-of-the-mainstream beliefs. They do get flak for the beliefs of their mentors and those they mention as inspirational.

This is flat out untrue when it comes to Republican politicians.

And speaking for those of us in states that elected tea party governors, it turns out they meant exactly what they said.

” Clearly, over the past 30 years as a whole, the Republicans have prospered by doing what they do (easier to recognise than to define!), and have repeatedly doubled down on that strategy.”

John Quiggin: ” But are they doing so well now? Given the state of the economy, the Repubs ought to be odds-on to win the Presidency in 2012, but AFAICT Obama is seen as a slight favorite. And the general Repub approval rating is below that of the Dems, though of course both are bad.”

Um, John – do you *remember* 2008? The GOP capped eight f*cking miserable Bush years with trashing the economy, the worst that the USA has been in for several decades.
Two years later, they’ve retake a blocking position in the House, prevented most reforms, and have turned the debate (rhetorically and policy-wise) around onto their terms.

Obama should be a shoe-in for re-election, with the GOP still being in the toilet.

” I think the Repub strategy has long-term costs, as people understand the need for a complex decoding of everything they say, realise that factual claims made with a straight face may be entirely bogus and so on.”

That’s not apparent *anywhere* in the USA.

But it makes you think small, policy-wise. Because any bold thing you propose, even if it isn’t utopian, will be denounced as utopian. And electorally it’s a source of endless frustration. But the real source of this frustration is not conservative politicians but, per the title of Free and Cantril’s book: the political beliefs of Americans. Or rather, their political beliefs plus their political non-beliefs.

Isn’t this something of a self-fulfilling diagnosis? There’s a mistake in treating “the political beliefs of Americans” as if it’s some fixed constant value.

For one thing, the composition of “Americans” is changing. It’s at least possible that the general cultural concepts of what’s possible and what isn’t are changing as well.

For another, Eisenhower. What people thought of as “conservative” in the not-too-ancient past is crazy-eyed liberalism now. That shift didn’t just happen by itself, and I don’t see what makes an opposite shift inherently impossible. Unless you think there’s a ratchet effect towards the right?

56:I am predicting a whole lot of social unrest. How and where could they be safe and secure from the dying billions and their populist leaders?

The space ark, underwater retreat, etc. idea is simply silly. The world 4 C hotter will remain a vastly more hospitable place for the global elite than would any constructed habitat imaginable.

Yes, there is 25 deg C between summer temperatures in Anchorage and Riyadh, to make the planet genuinely uninhabitable from even the poles being as hot as the central Saudi desert would need 40+ degrees. Which you are not going to get over any period from anything like the standard understanding of climatology – the resource-using population would drop too low to keep pumping out that much CO2.

Hypothetically could get some currently-unknown feedback effect that would cause a runaway into Venus-like surface conditions, but that’s not much more likely than the ‘magically, the CO2 does nothing’ scenario.

Thing is, anyone actually thinking that way is not talking about climate science, but Noah. Yahweh never sent a flood that wiped out 20% of a town, and impoverished much of the rest. Virtuous places, that treat sinners appropriately, get good weather. Wicked ones get a warning or two, then annihilation.

bob mcmanus:

“I am predicting a whole lot of social unrest. How and where could they be safe and secure from the dying billions and their populist leaders?”

Behind their state of the art (robot) armies? Certainly, if I were very rich, I’d rather be sitting in Vancouver, BC (not predicted to be horribly impacted by a 4 C temperature change, and not super vulnerable to the near-term 2 m sea-level rise), protected by all the military my money could buy, than hiding out in a space arc.

Your theory is that rich people are looking at the current situation and thinking, “No, we shouldn’t take steps that would cut our profits somewhat now in order to prevent a world-wide anti-rich pogrom 50-90 years from now, instead we should devote trillions to secretly building space arcs or under-sea colonies (either of which are more vulnerable to attack than anywhere on the surface of the earth), so our children can live in conditions of dire misery (worrying about where your air is going to come from and eating your own reprocessed shit for food strike me as pretty lousy way to live) in space or under-sea.”

That strikes me as unlikely.

I suspect that most rich people are thinking, “My children will be dead and my grandchildren will have lived rich lives before any of this gets so bad that it affects people like me,” and very few of them are expecting a global anti-rich people pogrom any time in the foreseeable future.

Yes, if the 4 C temperature rise leads to a global anti-rich person pogrom (I’m unconvinced it would), then the rich people of 50-90 years from now may well think poorly of their predecessors. But I don’t think they will be cursing them for not building space arcs and under-sea colonies, rather for deciding that a small decrease in immediate profits was not worth preventing a 4 C temperature rise. The rest of us (rather, our descendents or analogs) will be cursing them for the same thing, global anti-rich pogrom or not.

To put it simply, John, the assertion that Republicans don’t really mean what they say has been the operative principle of the Obama administration from day one to day yesterday.

The flaw is thinking that just because someone doesn’t mean what they say, what they _do_ actually mean instead is necessarily something rational and morally acceptable. What they do mean is probably not actual cartoon super-villianry, just something that tends to enrich people like them at the expense of the general welfare.

But a plan rarely spoken out loud is hardly going to have all the kinks worked out…

Ignore last unfinished para (self-editing is a bitch).

The right wing is trouncing our asses because they’ve perfected exploiting the ambiguity of emoting.

You ~can’t~ treat an emotive statement as though it’s descriptive. You can try, but anyone with half an ear for passion will intuitively ~sense~ how hollow your response is. They may know, in a descriptive sense, that you haven’t said anything factually incorrect. But the narrative that intuition would pick up from any such exchange is “that right-wing person is trying to sincerely express some beliefs they strongly feel, and that arsehole left-wing person is trying to trip them up on their wording.” We can’t effectively fight emotive language by identifying emotive statements as descriptively bullshit.

(This might also be why leftist folks who despair at Obama and center-leftist folks who despair at people despairing at Obama spend quite a lot of time exasperatedly emoting at one another and calling one another out for various forms of descriptive incoherence in one another’s emotive statements.)

But not if they actually DID it.

I’m stuck feeling that after Iraq and torture-rendition, what’s left that could possibly be more heinous? All that seems left to me is doing different kinds of heinous things to different and possibly larger subpopulations of people. I’m not sure there are very many “a huge enough group of potentially gameswinging voters will punish this if it gets accomplished” lines left to cross. There are many nightmares yet to be made from the same horrors dredged up against new victims, and it’s possible that the wrong nightmare against the wrong populace will be their undoing, but the worst horrors have been unboxed already.

I just don’t have any confidence anymore in the ‘if they enact something horrible enough the voters will trounce them for it’ hypothesis. They could round up everybody with Mexican ancestry to be deported southward, make abortion categorically illegal, require that contraception be quasi-prescription and thus only be made available to anyone who has a driver’s license, they could impose draconian tax law that puts financial penalties on anyone with more than two children, they could repeal all forms of social welfare… … …and while most of us here would be up in full-throated arms about it, I don’t trust there’d be enough people rising up against any of it to turn back the tide.

Here’s the reflections of a long-time GOP Congressional staffer who just retired about whether the GOP believes what they say:

I have a friend I’ve know since high school, who is Republican and conservative. I used to think he couldn’t possibly believe what he said, when he would say things like the way to solve the drug problem was to poison the drug supply. After 30 years of knowing him, I’ve come to realize he really does believe it. He knows that it’s politically impossible to achieve (poisoning the drug supply, that is), but he really does think it would be a reasonable solution to the problem.

The only way liberals will have an impact is the Clintons and Obamas of this world get punished for NOT saying left wing things. There’s nothing effective can be done to change the fact that you have to say crazy things to get the support of the Republican base. But you can do something to change who gets to be the Democratic candidate. It’s because Obama runs after the the right-wing that they are so powerful. Even at the cost of enduring 4 years of Republican government it’s worth teaching Democrats the lesson which Republicans learned years ago. A leadership which betrays its base is worse than useless.

John@74: “Admittedly there’s no way to know for sure, but I suspect the latter is more likely to be the case.”

And there you go again John, asserting purely on the basis of your own belief, without a shred of concrete evidence, that “they can’t really be monsters because we all know that people aren’t monsters.” While all the actual evidence (see e.g. Sherri@79/80, and any number of other reality based comments above) points to the fact that, yes, they really do mean it, they really are monsters.

Is there any way we can persuade you to wake up and smell the fertiliser? Or will there come a day when the subversive elements are rounded up, with you in the back of the cattle car explaining condescendingly to the other passengers “of course they’re not really going to hang us all from the Brooklyn Bridge, they were just saying that to pander to the base, how could you be so silly?”

Much, much simpler point: As the last several presidencies have demonstrated, the presidency has the de-facto power to take america to war. Giving any of the applicants for the job of being in charge of the biggest war machine on the planet – including the nuclear arsenal – a free pass on saying crazy things is itself a completely insane thing to do.
It does not matter if you think it 90% likely that they are just mouthing of. The job they are applying for should not ever pass into the hands of someone who comes across as anything but the very essence of sanity. Even if they *are* just mouthing off, if they continue to do so while in office, that is going to have very real, and very negative diplomatic consequences. Given some of the things that have been said on the campaign trail, if certain of these people take office, you are looking at a world where half the British and French nuclear detterrent might very well end up being pointed at washington. Is that a outcome you want?

I’m wondering if I can almost literally turn this debate upside down by linking to this article on Salon. It deals with something called Vadum which has made a living from exploiting the American public’s seemingly limitless tolerance for watching fat morons making fools of themselves on TV. Anyway Vadum has ‘written’ an ‘article’ for a ‘magazine’ called American Thinker (no jokes please!) in which he ‘argues’ that the poor should not be allowed to vote.

As Salon puts it: ‘When you write that you actually just oppose letting poor people vote, you’re giving the game away. You’re never supposed to openly state the goals of the conservative movement, because no one but a small cadre of sociopaths actually supports them.’.

Now I know this is a ‘comic’ article and the writer is kinda sorta joking. But let’s face it, he’s also kinda not and I know this because the GOP is in fact trying to stop poor people from voting.

So my point is, given that this is in actual fact a goal of GOP politicians but one which they could never actually state: perhaps the evil, stupid, fascist, psychotic things Republicans say are indeed a bluff, but not because they ‘actually’ believe less evil stupid things. Perhaps their real beliefs are even more evil and psychotic, and its all a highly elaborate charade to convince us that they are only 85% evil whereas in fact they are 1 gazillion% evil.

Just an idea.

You are simply overcomplicating this. When they say crazy shit, you call them on it. With quotes and citations. Some faction of the audience will not want to hear that good-old-boy-bobbit is in fact talking complete lunacy, but that faction of the voting public is the core of the republican base – nothing you can possibly say will sway them, so they are of zero relevance to the question of how to craft an effective political message.
All that pulling your punches does is confer legitimacy upon the politicians who preach insanity way outside the relatively small circle of hardcore belivers. Because if they are taken seriously, and addressed with respect by their opponents, they must be serious and respectable politicans, right?

TLDR: When your opponents say foolish things in front of microphones, quoting them on it is both legitimate and wise tactics.

However, some of the current crop of candidates have gone so far that even network personalities have pushed back. Governor Perry went too far with his implicit threat of assault upon the Fed chief for debasing the currency, although it was the suggestion of violence rather than his economic ignorance that disturbed the talking heads.

Feature, not bug. The Very Serious People clutched their pearls while the Republican base lapped it up with a spoon.

And that’s kind of the crux of this whole discussion. “Going too far” isn’t a gaffe, it’s a strategy.

“Because, to repeat: everyone kind of knows that conservatives don’t really mean they want theocracy, even when they say something wild that might be construed as implying that they do, on the stump. ”

What makes people think conservatives do not want a theocracy? I see several issues where religious belief guides to the discussion to the point of paralysis. Abortion and gay marriage are just two of these hot button topics. Our culture does not recognize miscarried cells with life affirming things like names or birth certificates or funerals – cultural traditions that we use with the living human – yet conservatives, fueled by God, want such cells to be considered as “life” when discussing abortion.

Likewise, conservatives policy views of gay marriage are very much driven by the Bible – in a culture with such a high divorce rate, there is no real rational reason to prohibit same-sex couples from enjoying the privilege of pledging eternal devotion to each other in front of friends and family, but for the prohibitions on gay relationships found in the Bible.

Newt Gingrich, who criticizes gay marriage, is a man whose eagerness to shed the first wife so he could marry the second compelled him to serve divorce papers to the first wife when she was in the hospital being treated for cancer. Such are the very disturbed values that drive conservatives in their policy choices. And yes, American public policy is being dictated by such madness.

“in which he ‘argues’ that the poor should not be allowed to vote.‘

Strictly speaking, no. Seriously, read the essay, set down the secret decoder ring for a moment, and parse the actual words he actually set to paper. He does not argue that the poor should not be allowed to vote. He argues that nobody should be going out and encouraging them to vote.

Now, perhaps it seems a reasonable extrapolation from “don’t encourage them, don’t help them”, to “don’t let them”, but it’s not an extrapolation HE made. It’s one that’s been attributed to him, in the teeth of his actual words. And you should generally attack people on the basis of what they have actually advocated, rather than putting words in their mouth. Even if you don’t view this as a moral imperative, attacks on things people haven’t said are rather less effective when addressed to folks who aren’t already in agreement with you.”

Vadun’s position is that, if the poor, on their own initiative, drag themselves off to a government office, and jump through the generally applicable hoops that everybody else has to jump through to register, they should be registered. Subsequently, if they drag themselves to the polling place on election day, and again, comply with generally applicable rules to establish that they really are the person whose vote they want to cast, they should get to vote. But that nobody should be trying to make it especially easy for them.

Now, I can see why Democrats would want voting to be as easy as humanly possible. You rely on votes from a lot of constituencies which are, to put this politely, under-motivated. People who don’t actually care enough about voting to register to vote, unless you bring the forms right to them, hand them a pen, and pester them to sign. People who find actually going to the polling place, and maybe even standing in a line, too much trouble.

So you need registration drives, you need easy access to absentee ballots, you need to spread voting over several days… Because even the slightest inconvenience impacts your vote totals.

But this does not make a minor inconvenience “disenfranchisement”. It does not erase the difference between “not helping”, and “not letting”. And Vadun simply, unambiguously, did NOT say that the poor should not be allowed to vote.

He said that nobody should help and encourage them to.

@95

Mr. Bellmore talks to different Conservatives than I do. The ones that I’ve known all my life certainly don’t believe that the poor should be allowed to vote. The bit about simply making it difficult for them to vote is merely a concession to the political reality that you’re supposed to favor democracy in public.

Universal suffrage is a recent innovation. Even in the U.S., it didn’t become law until 1919; and in the U.K. it also came in after World War I, Lloyd George having promised it in the dark days of 1917 in order to mollify the masses at a time when they were needed as cannon fodder and war workers. That was then, not even a hundred years ago. Why would anybody think that limiting the franchise on a de facto or even de jure basis is impossible now, especially granted that countries no longer field mass armies? It remains an article of political piety to praise democracy, but who actually believes that the wishes of the majority should have a decisive voice in running things? Not the plutocrats, surely, though they’ve proved far more adept than the others in using populist methods when it suits ’em, but not the technocratic left either. The low level of political participation in American elections is at least partly a result of the unwillingness of either party to mobilize real majorities. All of which is why I think it’s pretty odd to think Vadun was kidding.

For another, Eisenhower. What people thought of as “conservative” in the not-too-ancient past is crazy-eyed liberalism now.

Not on sex, not on religion, and not on policing. Eisenhower presided over a country with explicitly Christian prayers in schools; contraception wasn’t available even to married couples in some states, and no information about it could be sent through the mail; homosexual activity was entirely and enforcedly illegal; and forget about militarizing the police–he just used the army to suppress dissent.

There’s always politics by bumper sticker. That’s the ticket.

“Mr. Bellmore talks to different Conservatives than I do. The ones that I’ve known all my life certainly don’t believe that the poor should be allowed to vote.”

I rather suspect, were you to bother to get down to details, that they do not, in fact, think “the poor” shouldn’t be allowed to vote. They might very well think “those on the dole” shouldn’t be, but it’s possible to be both poor and self-sufficient.

it’s possible to be both poor and self-sufficient

It’s very difficult, particularly if you’re undereducated, overworked, in danger of losing your job if you take time off to go to the polls, and so on. This describes quite a few people in this country. I honestly don’t see how what you’ve been saying on this topic avoids being anything but “Only those who can bootstrap themselves into a basic position allowing them the time and resources to vote should be encouraged to vote.”

I think the movie, the Help, is quite useful as a model for how the rich want to think about the poor. And use them. And, treat them.

The fantasies of the rich, and self-satisfied middle-class, about the poor tend to be rather more lurid or fantastical. I watched a movie on television about a very white family, where Dad died three years before, and Mom, the waitress, is unable to support the family, even with the teenage son working after school, and they are about to lose the house to foreclosure. There’s one mention of food stamps, when a fellow waitress advises overcoming pride and getting them. Later, we see the cupboard is bare and the kids are ill-fed by overworked mom. The central crisis, though, is that the teenage son may not be able to play basketball, because his English teacher is about to flunk him.

An angel and a handsome handyman drifter, who moves next door, intervene, and, after the angel lets the teacher miraculously live for a couple of imaginary days as the waitress-mom, the teacher decides to donate her vacation money to give the waitress and her family a year of mortgage-payment-free living.

This is the conservative utopia.

Emotionally, their attitude must be that gov’t can’t fix things. The ways to counteract and to destroy this gibberish ought to be crystal clear by now.

It would certainly be awesome, as the kids these days say, if Obama could hold forth with a bunch of charts showing each and every way that a majority of persons in this country has benefited from government programs. Bank account (yes, FDIC)? Mortgage (yes). Student loan, Social Security, Medicare, just, you know, driving around on roads and bridges, not dying from easily prevented disease, poor air or water or food? Yes. Ability to fly — on a plane! — without crashing? Yes, pretty much.

Perhaps our Senators and Representatives could push this message in their town hall meetings and whatnot.

@104
surely you’re not going to pretend that “eliminationist rhetoric”, as broadly defined has you have defined it, is the exclusive province of conservatives?

Is blurting out “Liberalsdoittoo!!!” anything but pure reflex at this point?

Is pointing out Republicans doing something you don’t like, and complaining if anybody notes that Democrats do it, too, anything more than pure reflex? Surely the point of mentioning that Republicans do something bad is to suggest that Republicans are somehow worse that Democrats, right? Which makes “Liberalsdoittoo” entirely relevant.

It’s like saying, “Republicans shit!”, as though it were some kind of indictment. EVERYBODY is using martial metaphors, clip art bullseyes, and the like.

Hyperbole, of course, (Must be some pacifist out there who shrinks from using “bullet” points.) but see this.

The left routinely uses “eliminationist” rhetoric, if you’re so crazy as to call the bullet in a bullet point list that sort of thing. Indeed, it wasn’t 24 hours after calling for a new civility, that the President was urging Democrats to “Bring a gun to a knife fight”.

The idea that violent political rhetoric is somehow a thing of the right is flatly absurd, it’s hard to understand how anyone who didn’t live in a cave could take it seriously.

I haven’t the time to read through all the comments, so someone may have already noted this, but it seems that today’s liberals actually adhere more to the true conservative principles of being realistic and pragmatic, while today’s conservatives are the ones with their heads buried in the sand, only concerned with their ideological view. Of course I’m not saying that the ideological views of liberals are same as true (or Burkean) conservatives, but I feel that they act similarly in their political method.

Uncle Kvetch 09.04.11 at 12:43 pm

” John, you’ve stated twice in this thread that you don’t think Ric Warren and those of his ilk really wanted the Ugandan government to put homosexuals to death. You’ve been asked what you base that belief on, and you just keep dancing around. So again…if it’s not a case of “we all know that people aren’t monsters,” exactly why do you think what you think?”

I second this – John, cough it up, please.

“John, you’ve stated twice in this thread that you don’t think Ric Warren and those of his ilk really wanted the Ugandan government to put homosexuals to death.”

We need some quotes. What *exactly* did Warren say that makes you think he really wants the Ugandan government to put homosexuals to death. I haven’t seen anything that even hints at that.

You’re using a standard that you wouldn’t accept if it were “socialists may or may not have really *wanted* the gulag, but their rhetoric is easily employed by those who do, and therefore socialists are responsible”. Or even more fun: “leftists created an atmosphere of hatred against captialist and middle class workers/intellectuals that is responsible for the Chinese Cultural Revolution even if they *say* that wasn’t their intention”.

When employed against your side, it is self-evidently ridiculous, right?

Your hypothesis is that they say the extreme stuff because they perfectly well know what it implies – and they affirm that. What makes you so sure you are right?

Um…I’m not, John. In fact I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a “hypothesis.” And to the extent that it is one, it’s much closer to “They don’t particularly give a shit what their rhetoric implies, because they don’t particularly give a shit about whether gay people are subject to violence, because if they did they wouldn’t say the things they do. Because we live in a world in which gay people are subject to violence on a regular basis — and not just in Uganda, but right here in their own backyard.”

If the Ugandan death penalty case is just too extreme, how about the 17-year-old kid getting dragged by his parents to Marcus Bachmann’s ministry so he can be exorcised of the demons of same-sex attraction? I would say the lines of causality and intention are a wee bit easier to trace there, wouldn’t you? Can you still say “they don’t really mean it”?

Look, you made a claim — “I doubt they meant for it to come to this” — and you were asked to support it. That’s all. Neither you nor I nor anyone else in this discussion can look into Ric Warren’s soul and see what dwells there. So there’s no really no call for petulant tu quoque’s here (Brett and Sebastian H already have that angle covered).

Now then: I’ve avoided bringing this up so far, but I keep coming back to the exchange I had with Belle on your blog some five years ago. If my buttons are being pushed here, it’s because your willingness to give someone like Ric Warren the benefit of the doubt is stirring the same kind of queasiness in me. This is not angels on the head of a pin territory. So maybe I should just step aside and cede the floor to people for whom Ric Warren’s statements are completely inapplicable, and therefore inconsequential.

Rick Warren has repeatedly affirmed that he doesn’t support the bill, but he also has a history of telling Ugandans that homosexuality is not a human right, and that it’s comparable to pedophilia. Pastor Warren may sincerely be horrified by the thought of the government rounding up and executing homosexuals, but…

I don’t see how this is either unclear or inconsistent. I’m certainly opposed to pedophilia, and I’d also certainly be horrified if the government, or vigilante groups, began killing anyone convicted of statutory rape. I don’t see that as a position that involves any cognitive dissonance whatsoever.

“By contrast, Hilary Clinton would only write that book about wanting to repeal the Second Amendment, etc., if – against all likelihood – she really wanted to repeal the Second Amendment. ”

Late to the thread, but this is a bad example IMHO. It is worse – Hilary, and most democrats, and the ACLU, don’t want to repeal the 2nd amendement, rather they want to pretend it just doesn’t exist, or if it exists, it means something completely different than what it says. Personally I find it more crazy to listen to liberals talk about “reasonable” gun laws, when I find most of them really mean nothing short of the UK ban in 99% of circumstances. That is crazy talk, far crazier than the throw-away lines of Perry, or even better Ron Paul.

I can’t think of a single thing that the Brady Center, the Democratic Party or Hilary would do different, legislatively, if the 2nd amendment were repealed than if it weren’t. That is crazy in my mind.

I’m just trying to form the most reasonable view I can of how his mind works. And I am saying that I doubt he’s thinking “YES! genocide now!” Even though he’s saying things which, were one to believe what he is saying, might reasonably make you conclude that gay people should all be killed or locked up. […] It’s more a case of not caring about the implications of what he is saying. But that’s actually what I’m saying, more or less.

Much clearer now — thanks, John.

We are, indeed, in agreement, and I think the problem may have been a misinterpretation on my part. When I read “I doubt they meant for it to come to this,” I took it to mean that you accepted Warren’s post hoc protestations at face value — i.e., he sincerely regretted the fact that his words were leading to this outcome. Which really would constitute giving him the benefit of the doubt. But you didn’t actually say, or even imply, that.

Accusing Warren of not caring about the implications of his words, in this particular context, is essentially an accusation of what the lawyers call depraved indifference. So I was wrong to read you as letting him off the hook in some fashion.

“Then I look at what is happening in Wisconsin and (perhaps more to the point) Michigan and at that point I find it quite reasonable to ask if the only reason they aren’t putting the most radical of their beliefs into practice – killing homosexuals being a good example – is because they haven’t finished their 30-year project of dismantling all constraints which prevent them from doing so. “

It’s funny; I look at the events in Wisconsin, and think, “The only reason they didn’t burn the capitol building to the ground, is that they still thought they’d be in control of it again someday.”

Well, no, not really, but that’s probably what I’d have thought if my thought processes were similar to yours.

John Holbo: “It’s more a case of not caring about the implications of what he is saying. ”

Considering that he’s the head of a very large megachurch, is nationally famous, etc., you’re assuming a lot of cluelessness on his part about his words, networking and implications.

BTW – something that I’ve meant to mention to you. Have you ever thought of updating your post on Frum and ‘Dead Right’? Because the GOP is now in the territory that Frum said was too extreme, and seems to be exploiting that territory quite happily.

John, the strategy of “calling them on their crazy bs” hasn’t really been tried consistently. The strategy of “oh, they don’t believe most of the crazy shit they say, so let’s focus on the substance” or some such, has been tried repeatedly, and the effect is the movement of the Overton window over to the sidewalk, as someone pointed out in a different thread. So, from an operational standpoint, you seem to be arguing in favor of a tried and awesomely losing strategy/tactic, yet dressing it up as “reasonable”, “probably more effective” and other such. Why would you say that is?

As for your #2, this is a pretty pathetic copout for a pretty damning rebuttal of your central thesis. The paragraph that starts “really it’s more complicated than that” goes in circles around the point that they don’t mean to enact what they say, yet Bush enacted many of the things he and Darth Vader said.

In fact, over and again, there is proof that the “conservatives” (aka batshit crazy teabaggers) really want to go at least half-way to their crazy rhetorical positions. Isn’t that crazy enough for you to call them on?

Moreover, your post doesn’t seem to be able to deal with your own argument in favor of calling them on their crazy stuff: not calling them on it allows them to hide their political positions, so no debate can take place. It’s all emoting, all signaling, all the time. All tribal identification. Plus some crazy positions at least (even by your admission) *will* be genuine, and when it comes time for implementation, they can claim “but I even campaigned on this issue and people voted for it”.

By the way, the claim that Perry doesn’t want to roll back the safety net to 1900 and won’t is completely baseless. There are few programs in the US that are key. Privatizing Social Security and limiting Medicaid will have gone halfway to 1900 for a *large* number of people. Do you care if the rollback only affects a few million but not the whole population? Does it matter if the rollback to 1900 only affects say the bottom 15% of the population? What if the rollback was to 1940? (ie, roll back Great Society gains). Is that acceptable craziness for you?

Sorry for third in a row:

Even if Warren thinks locking up or killing homosexuals is a bad thing, that doesn’t say anything about whether he deems it
– necessary (victims on the road to a better society)
– better than alternatives (e.g., societal decay, corrupting children, what have you)

In other words, did Mao think the famines in China caused by his policies were a good thing? Or a bad thing? Probably a bad thing, but necessary on the road to communist utopia.

The only thing I really draw from this discussion is that a lot of people just love the thought that people who disagree with them are evil. Why? Perhaps it elevates a mundane political fight into an apocalyptic battle of good vs evil, lending a bit of excitement to their lives. Perhaps it licenses them to shed their moral scruples about means employed. Perhaps they’re just so sure of their selves, and the rightness of their own views, it’s the only explanation they can grasp for why anybody would disagree with them.

Whatever the reason, I don’t think it’s a very good thing for civil society.

Yeah, I wouldn’t advocate torture. You might want to take that up with the President, not me; I’m not the one with the extraordinary rendition flights and people spending months at sea in a legal limbo.

“But “tax cuts for rich people” is not particularly popular among even the broad republican base, so they frame it as deficit reduction, or tax cuts for everyone (just some more than others).”

In many cases, they can’t simply say openly what they mean; they set things up both in rhetoric and reality. E.g., for decades they’ve been saying that Social Security is doomed, the obvious goal is to set that into people’s heads; they deliberately spend a lot of money on what they want, and then say that ‘we’ must make sacrifices, where ‘we’ are not the guys who get the goodies.

BTW – Medicare plan D was not something that Bush (or the GOP) ‘got’; they deliberately created a plan which would maximize pharmaceutical company profits.

@Barry – Agreed, but that is the point. They say they are against entitlments, but when it actually comes to putting together a plan, they don’t end up cutting Medicare, they end up bolstering it at the behest of the corps. that will benefit.

I actually don’t find it difficult to believe that Rick Warren doesn’t support the legislation in question. It’s not unlikely he doesn’t believe in legislating religion. That’s not to say that I think he would necessarily be surprised to find that his talks resulted in private efforts to exclude or disenfranchise, etc., homosexuals, or disapprove of them (short of presumably unforgivable things like murder). That’s not to say either that he should not have seen that it is irresponsible of him to give those talks to people who would be very, very likely to conclude he was giving them reasons to do things he would strongly disapprove of.

This is the issue–that his goal was to change their minds, he would not have had an opportunity to speak unless he promised to change their minds, and he should have considered what would change their minds in what direction–and not whether we should be suspicious or conspiracy minded.

short of presumably unforgivable things like murder

Who was the guy who said that once you indulge in murder, it’s only a matter of time till you stoop to really unforgivable behavior, like rudeness and procrastination?

Do “conservatives” at the federal level care about things like paving roads and the equivalent? That’s where you really get to rock bottom. Schools, okay, traditionally, they are handled by private organizations. Taking care of the poor, traditionally, is handled by private organizations and “communities.” But paving the roads has always been handled by the state. How does it get to be immoral to ask people to pay taxes and to approve plans for fixing potholes? That is what I don’t get. It’s just not reasonable, that can’t be what they mean, can it?

Most of the evangelicals I’ve known have been far, far from irresponsible. So it’s difficult to decide whether it’s better to call those who speak in public irresponsible or insincere or unreasonable.

piglet: “This post is just amazing. It’s bad enough that the right half of the American people lives in a fantasy world. We can’t afford the other half to also go nuts. And this post, John Holbo, is truly nuts. It is nothing but an appeal to liberals to not trust their eyes and ears, to live in cloud-cuckoo-land and ignore reality and pretend that bad things will never happen in the U S of A.”

I second this. And add:

“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

Martin Luther King, ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’

Substitute ‘centrist’ for ‘moderate’ above.

I really shouldn’t say ‘centrist’, because the people in question are not real centrists; they are accommodationists. The further the right goes in rhetoric and actions, the more they shift their position over to accommodate the right.

Every time the right doubles down on the crazy, the accommodationists tell us they don’t mean it. When they carry out a surprising amount of their crazy, the accommodationists tell us they don’t mean it.

In the end, the accommodationists are people who look out at reality, and deny it.

Seriously, read the essay, set down the secret decoder ring for a moment, and parse the actual words he actually set to paper. He does not argue that the poor should not be allowed to vote.

Seriously, Brett, here’s what he says:

Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.
Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.

I thought he was using “burglary” perjoratively, but now that you’ve explained it, I see he probably doesn’t even think burglary should be illegal – just like he doesn’t think voting for welfare recipients should be illegal. Now that I understand the author’s pro-burglary inclinations, I am able to read the article as you do.

Likewise:

Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American

Again, now that I understand the author’s acceptance of things Un-American, I know how to read this piece.

All I can ask, Brett, is that you be tolerant of those of us whose powers of discernment don’t match yours.