George Orwell's mirror for American leaders

I have been essays that George Orwell wrote in the thirties and during World War II. They hold up a distant mirror* to our current predicament.

Orwell, a "democratic socialist" with an evolving dislike and distrust of hard-line Communists, is not always insightful. His major error was assuming that Britain -- and ultimately, I gather, all countries -- had to make a binary choice between fascism and socialism. He roughs out some national stats, such as how many British citizens were likely to be malnourished circa 1937, but he doesn't seem to have much of a grasp of economics. He's vague about the changes he'd like to see, at least in the essays I've read (and in The Road to Wigan Pier, really an extended essay).

But Orwell did know people -- he was a passionate embedder, becoming a tramp to get to know tramps, staying in the miserably substandard homes of coal miners, talking in depth to hundreds of working and middle class people. And he has a certain moral clarity, a commitment to justice and alleviating suffering. He judges the privileged, but with empathy. He sees that his Marxist quasi allies are driven largely by hatred and he recoils from that.

Thus, while condemning  Britain's leadership through the post-WWI era for myopia, for clinging to their privilege, for cowardice and incompetence, Orwell pays grudging tribute to a certain baseline integrity. And that's where we get, to mangle a metaphor, a kind of mirror-by-contrast held up to the U.S. just now:

Master saboteurs

You've got to hand it to Mitch McConnell and the Republicans generally: Basically every aspect of their strategy and execution since Obama was first elected has been effective. Poison public perception of effective legislation like the stimulus and the ACA? Check.  Block all constructive legislation since winning the House, and blame Obama for inaction?  Check. Inhibit economic growth with savage austerity during a demand slump?  Check. Outmaneuver the president on budget issues by proving willing, or seeming willing, to shut down the government, default on the national debt, and pull the trigger on spending cuts beyond what anyone would have dreamed a few years ago? Check.  Depopulate the executive branch by slow-walking all appointments (until the filibuster rule change this year)? Check. Disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic voters with voter suppression measures? Check. Flood the airwaves with dark money supplied by their corporate and ideological masters? Check.

It's all worked. Some say the victories are Pyrrhic and will be short-lived. But if they can keep Obama's approval numbers in the low 40s or worse, and keep economic growth at a steady sputter, they may win control of the only branch and level of government they don't dominate.

Democracy in action, kinda

On one level, it's hard to imagine anyone taking issue with Carl Hulse's take on the passage this week of the "clean" debt ceiling hike:

After the shutdown, the filibusters and years of stalled bills, it was the actual passage of legislation this week that revealed the true depth of congressional dysfunction.

Hulse suggests that if only 28 House Republicans vote for a bill that a majority of them probably want to pass, something is deeply amiss:

Okay, so our problem is GOP extremism -- but what's driving that?

Jonathan Bernstein advances a kind of Bad Man theory of contemporary American politics -- the bad man being Newt Gingrich, the GOP's Faust. The problem with U.S. politics, he argues, isn't structural, and it's not political polarization per se:

No, the problem is the Republican Party, which has developed a weird and dysfunctional set of incentives along with the legacy of a handful of role models they would be better off without. There’s the race to be the True Conservative, which requires staking out ever-more-crazy positions in order to differentiate from RINOs and squishes – and the reaction by mainstream conservatives who are terrified at losing their conservative credentials and therefore cling as close as possible to the nuttiest radicals out there. There’s the lucrative conservative marketplace, which thrives on incivility and conflict – that’s one set of perverse incentives – and which also thrives when Democrats are in office, which is another set of perverse incentives. There’s the conservative closed information feedback loop, with Republican Party actors and politicians failing to see the U.S. that the rest of the nation sees.

The party that loses by winning

On July 4, 2011, when the Republicans were in the process of nailing Obama to the debt ceiling, David Brooks wrote:

If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases.

With about $4 trillion in deficit reduction over ten years the agreed target, Obama was ready to settle for just $800 billion in new revenue, a roughly 4-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue . But the GOP passed up Brooks' 'deal of the century.' A four-fifths win for the no-new-taxes-ever crowd wasn't good enough for them.

They did "win," though, by forcing Obama to swallow, under threat of national default, the Budget Control Act, which purported to match every dollar of debt ceiling increase with a dollar of deficit reduction, with no concession on the Republicans' part that any of that reduction would come through tax increases. Nor has it, now that Republicans have learned to love the sequester, or professed to. The BCA imposed over $900+ billion in cuts to discretionary spending over ten years, and then another $1.2 trillion through sequestration if a Congressional supercommittee could not agree on a plan to replace that second tranche with a deficit reduction package of equal value. Since Republicans would not agree to any sequester replacement including new revenue, it is still with us, and the DBA's deficit reduction mix remains (approximately, counting interest savings), spending cuts $2.5 trillion, revenue 0.

Tyler Cowen's modest proposal for an imaginary GOP

Tyler Cowen would have Republicans shake up the tax debate by proposing a tiny across-the-board income tax hike in addition to the moderate tax hike for the wealthy proposed by President Obama. Further tax hikes would then kick in automatically as (or if) spending rises. He regards this direction for tax reform as fairer and more sustainable than current proposals, as everyone would feel the effects of "paying" for whatever level of social services and other spending we collectively undertake. Here's the meat of it:

To see how this could work, consider this script: Let’s say the Republicans decide to largely give in to what the President Obama is proposing. There is, however, a catch: the president has to agree to raise marginal tax rates on all income classes, not just on the rich. The tax increase would be one-quarter of a percentage point, or some other arbitrary small amount, with larger increases possible for higher incomes, as has been discussed. The deal also stipulates that both the president and Congress must publicly acknowledge that current plans for government spending can’t be financed unless taxes on most or all income groups climb further yet, and by some hefty amount. 

In GOP heaven, St. Ronnie is lonely

Most GOP presidents in this century have helped advance American prosperity and security in enduring ways. Teddy Roosevelt busted the trusts. Eisenhower kept the peace while keeping the military-industrial complex under control and building our modern transportation infrastructure.  Nixon opened China to the US, helping to sap Soviet strength and provide an engine for global growth that's still chugging. Reagan helped feather down the Soviet Union peacefully, as did Bush Sr., while turning back Saddam's aggression and helping to lay the foundation for the balanced budgets of the 1990s.

Lots of twitterers, including James Fallows and Ezra Klein, have noted that while Bill Clinton mentioned George W. Bush three times in his speech last night, mostly positively, none of the GOP speakers in Tampa mentioned him by name. That's not surprising. Bush was a disastrous president on all fronts -- busting the budget, getting tens of thousands of US soldiers and Iraqi and Afghan civilians killed and maimed in two botched wars, permanently compromising U.S. civil liberties, massively eroding the nation's soft power. Not even Republicans can defend that record of faillure.

The next Republican president

About fifteen years ago, as I've recounted perhaps one time too many, I read a biography of Eisenhower and it dawned on me that a) for Democrats to win every election was not only impossible but undesirable, and that b) my political perspective had hitherto been rather limited, since I not only had never voted for a Republican for president but could not imagine doing so. I began mentally testing myself: could I vote for a Republican? Under what circumstances? (Asking myself the same question now, looking back on my life as a voter, I could make a strong case for George H.W. Bush -- who expertly helped feather down the Soviet Union, rolled back Saddam's Kuwait grab, and took a major step toward the balanced budget achieved in the Clinton years.)

My timing was spectacularly bad.  I don't recall if this little epiphany occurred before or after the 1994 election and the full Gingrichization of the GOP.  But in the intervening years, the GOP has hardened into the party of unlimited tax cuts and unlimited deficits, reckless unilateral warmongering, relentless immigrant-bashing and destruction of core civil liberties.

In recent weeks, as I've watched Obama go into post-election remission while the Republicans seize the whip hand on the Bush tax cuts and shamelessly hold New Start hostage, a kind of mirror-mantra has taken shape: the country can't afford another Republican president.  That is, not until the GOP has been chastened by further electoral setbacks and forced to acknowledge a few elemental truths: you can't fix the structural deficit without increasing tax revenue, democracy can't survive nonstop further concentration of wealth, the U.S. can't remain the world's sole wealthy country that fails to offer universal healthcare or afford to leave medical inflation untamed, our response to every threat abroad can't be a unilateral preemptive strike, and our civil liberties can't survive long-term when the government sanctions torture and shreds the fourth amendment (Obama has helped sustained the latter outrage, but as long as Republicans bay relentlessly for terrorist blood, Democrats will never roll back  the all of Bush's infringements).

If you read one post on health care reform...

let it be Paul Starr's brief history, showing the extent to which the Dems' bills have incorporated Republican ideas floated over the past half century:

...the Democratic proposals are built around the ideas that Republicans used to favor -- those proposals already are bipartisan compromises. Unfortunately, they are compromises with a Republican Party that no longer exists.

This fundamental truth is not only sad but dangerous. It's no particular compliment to the Democrats to note that this country currently has only one viable political party. The Republican Party is right now neither fringe nor mainstream. It's in some volatile liminal zone between the two, a nativist, militarist, authoritarian, Social Darwinian dreamland.

The free market that ate conservatism

Andrew Sullivan, addressing a reader's question why the Republican Party has embraced the lunatic right, posits:

The only real explanation that I can come up with is that the interests of "movement conservatism, the business" trumps patriotic conservatism as a political philosophy in the GOP.

The power of the conservative industrial complex - utterly cynical enterprises like Eagle Publishing and Fox News, for example - is real and has done a huge amount to destroy an uncynical and constructive conservatism.

There's an irony here. There's long been a tension in American conservatism between defense of "traditional values" on one hand, which include deference to established authority as well as Biblically-based sexual morality, and free market fundamentalism on the other. The latter, with its hostility to regulation, undermines traditional values by removing all restraints on the entertainment and advertising industries. Those industries have eviscerated public discourse, swallowed much of the news industry, and now hold the free market party itself hostage to a cadre of quasi-fascist screamers.

The limits of Republican 'rethink'

A useful Times article about Republicans beginning to rethink the Reagan mystique points toward without quite focusing on an elemental political truth: success ought to (but rarely does) suggest its own limits. If you succeed in cutting taxes, you can't indefinitely keep cutting taxes. If you succeed in building up the military, you can't indefinitely keep building up the military. If you succeed in reducing regulation, you can't indefinitely keep reducing regulation.

Here's the Times' chief example of a Republican "rethink":

“I don’t use him publicly as a reference point,” said Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, a Republican who lately has emerged as a potential national party leader. Mr. Daniels instead has urged fellow Republicans to “let go” of Mr. Reagan as a contemporary symbol....

Mr. Daniels, too, hails his former boss for “timeless” principles like suspicion of big government and appreciation of the importance of individual freedom and opportunity. As he tackles issues in Indiana — education policy lately is a hot topic — he says he asks himself whether Mr. Reagan would approve.

There's no indication that Daniels has asked himself whether Reagan's policies fit the country's needs today.

Minority retort

Republican Senator Mel Martinez of Florida, former RNC co-chair, warns the party:

The fact of the matter is that Hispanics are going to be a more and more vibrant part of the electorate, and the Republican Party had better figure out how to talk to them. We had a very dramatic shift between what President Bush was able to do with Hispanic voters, where he won 44 percent of them, and what happened to Senator McCain. Senator McCain did not deserve what he got. He was one of those that valiantly fought, fought for immigration reform, but there were voices within our party, frankly, which if they continue with that kind of rhetoric, anti-Hispanic rhetoric, that so much of it was heard, we're going to be relegated to minority status.

The Republican Party, relegated to minority status by minority voters. Now that was a slow train coming. Since one-party rule is good for no one, here's hoping the dead-enders' day ends relatively soon, and the Republicans begin the slow work of reaching out to new voters with new ideas. Time they "dou that..."

A Democrat "for" McCain

Financiers, who know how to hedge, often contribute to candidates in both parties. Why not the rest of us? This letter accompanied my contribution today to the McCain campaign:

Dear Senator McCain:

While I will almost certainly vote for the Democratic nominee in 2008, I am contributing to your campaign because I fear for the future of American democracy should a proponent of torture and the destruction of American civil liberties such as Rudy Depends-who-does-it Giuliani or Mitt Double Guantanamo Romney win a major party nomination.

This contribution is to honor your sustained and essential opposition to torture, suspension of habeas, assertions of unlimited executive power, and wholesale flouting of the Bill of Rights. Should you win the Republican nomination, I will rest assured that Americans are not prepared to sell their ancient liberties for a little bit of perceived security.

I should add that I believe that your support of President Bush’s misadventure in Iraq contributed to that disaster; that your campaigning for Bush in the 2004 election helped bring on four more years of assault on our core liberties; and that the ‘compromise’ you green-lighted in the 2006 Military Commissions Act ratified the Administration’s abuses. I am also disappointed by your repudiation of your own principled opposition to the Bush Administration’s irresponsible tax cuts, and by your cozying up to corrupt theocrats.

Nonetheless, on the all-important issue of torture and civil liberties, history will recognize that you stood as the conscience of a party run amok with fear-mongering and power-grabbing.

American democracy cannot function without (at least) two viable major parties. Should you win the nomination, the Republican Party will have taken a giant step toward a return to responsible governance.