As I sit here, waiting for the hurricane, studiously not doing any packing for my upcoming move, I get the chance to read a couple of the political and economic columnists I most respect and basically the news is this: if we’re going to get out of this hole we need to do more of the things we’ve been doing that has the nation in an uproar, we need to target them in ways that are even more unpopular among republicans, we need to debase the dollar and accept a little inflation for a couple of years.
In other words, no way.
The shocking thing, I suppose, is that this doesn’t seem to have happened before. I think part of that is that we’ve never had, as far as I can remember, this level of interest on such minor things. Fox News and CNN are carrying front page news on things like Secretary of Education appointments, House elections, things I can’t remember hearing about before. Republicans voted seven times to raise the debt ceiling under Bush, and I don’t recall it ever hitting a news cycle before now.
Which makes everything a battleground. Probably, fifteen years ago you could go to your constituents and give them just the kind of rhetoric they like, lower taxes, less government spending and involvement, and then go back to Washington and do the right thing—and without Glenn Beck yelling about it the next day nobody would even know.
But the real problem and the real question is why the right thing and the unpopular thing are so often the same thing these days? The debt ceiling debate is the obvious example. The day after the S & P downgraded the US credit rating, Michele Bachmann was on a debate saying that the downgrade proved she was right, that the US should never have raised the debt limit.
I would put it at 60-40 that Bachmann actually believed she was saying, but it would be hard for to be true for anyone willing to read words or know facts. I’m not being rude. The credit downgrade was entirely based, as the S & P made a point of saying, on fears that the US would not be willing to raise the credit ceiling in the future.
Saying that a credit agency downgrading the US’s credit over fear that the US will be unwilling to raise the debt limit in the future is proof that you shouldn’t raise the debt limit is like saying that the doctor being afraid you’ll keep eating cheeseburgers after your heart attack means that you should go directly to McDonald’s.
And that’s not a hard thing to figure out, it’s not a hard thing to prove, it’s not a hard thing to see that it’s true.
The issue is that you can approach the problem by saying exactly that as many times as you want, but if that worked it would work.
There’s a lot to be said about policy, lot of nuanced points to make, lot of factors to consider. But bottom line:
Republicans are fucking fantastic at getting a clear message at, strong enough that people believe the message and don’t feel like they’re getting overloaded with one guy saying one thing, one guy saying another, and who do you believe?
If the Huff Po falls in the liberal forest, believe me, the Republican trees don’t hear it and if they do hear it they think it’s propaganda. Michele Bachmann can say something that 5 seconds on google, or just looking up an actual news story, can show you is the exact opposite of what is true, and a large part of this country is right behind it.
There’s no use complaining about it, there really isn’t. There’s no use getting upset about it. What matters is results and Republicans get them and Liberals don’t.
A lot of this is because dissatisfaction is much easier to create than the kind of stalwart political faith that is able to brave numerous setbacks. Both sides can agree that things aren’t going well even if they can’t agree on anything else. It’s the easiest tool in the world for an opposition party too.
Another big part is the delivery of the message. The Republican propaganda machine knows that the point of their communiqués isn’t attempting to convince the populace, who doesn’t get a vote in the Senate, of the wisdom of various policies, but to gain control of the process. Mitch McConnell has made no bones about the fact that it is his prime legislative goal is to make Obama a one-term president. The Republicans spend their time, wisely, convincing people that the other guys are bad and wrong and skimp on the specifics.
The major issue, though, is that liberals and especially progressive liberals are just going to be on the unpopular side of debates. Even if someone was interested in doing something for the less fortunate, they wouldn’t necessarily want to pay taxes to do so.
And that’s true before Republicans invented a quack economic system that says the best way to help the less fortunate is to help the most fortunate, so they can be “job creators”. If you were only half-heartedly committed to paying taxes for things like food stamps and other social programs, how could you resist the idea that actually, not paying those taxes, and not making other people do it, has the same effect?
Even when it demonstrably doesn’t.
How could you resist somebody telling you that it’s okay not to want your kids to be educated by or be around gay people, or “alternative” types. It doesn’t mean you hate them, it just has sociological effects.
Even when it demonstrably doesn’t.
How could you resist the idea that you can keep your kids protected from sex by not letting them learn about it, or that an easy solution to the issue of evolution v. creationism is just to teach both? It’s not like they’re saying evolution is WRONG per se….
At base, it’s easy to be a Republican because it’s policies tell you that a world exists in which not paying taxes does as much good as paying taxes, that no one needs to make hard choices between religion and science, that it’s not prejudice to feel uncomfortable, and that not talking about difficult topics with your kids is better for them.
It’s not easy to be a liberal democrat. Once again, no use complaining about it, it’s just true and that’s why you have to work twice as hard to convince anybody, and so you get up, and if you want to convince anybody, you work twice as hard. It’s not anyone’s fault that if two people come to them and one says the best thing for the economy is to pay more taxes and the other one says the best thing is to pay less taxes, they’re going to go with the second guy, and that’s not going to change.
Right now, at this juncture in American history, Republicans both have the easier message AND are the warriors, the one fighting tooth and nail for their message.
Unless Democrats find ways to make their message clear, urgent, something people can identify with, and out there, there’s no real hope for the liberal agenda.