I read Michael Lofgren’s excellent piece on the many failings of the Republican Party over the long weekend. It’s not exactly anything new so much as it is all put very well. Lofgren is a long-time (and now ex) Republican congressional staffer, so his dirt is the real thing, obvious resentment notwithstanding.
He notes that both the parties in our American duopoly are rotten. “But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way,” he writes. “The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.”
He goes on to pick apart the many motivations driving the Republicans, foremost among them, at least for now, the desire to undermine government at every turn:
Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself. […]
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters’ confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that “they are all crooks,” and that “government is no good,” further leading them to think, “a plague on both your houses” and “the parties are like two kids in a school yard.” This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s – a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn (“Government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).
James Fallows observes:
Lofgren argues that today’s Republicans believe they are better off if government as a whole is shown to fail, not just this Democratic Administration. Republican hard-liners might seem to have “lost” the debt-ceiling showdown, in that they wound up even less popular than the Democrats are. But in the long view, Lofgren says, unpopularity for anyone in Congress, including their party’s leaders, helps the Republicans: “Undermining Americans’ belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy,” because it buildings a nihilistic suspicion of any public effort, from road-building to Medicare to schools. (Except defense.)
The whole thing is worth a read. I’ll have more to say in subsequent posts.
Late-night contribution: I’ve been mulling over this piece for a day or two now, as well as reactions to it (I found it through Fallows, as I suspect you did.) It mostly confirmed what I already felt was the case. But I’m quite alarmed by how many reactions are essentially throwing up their hands and saying ‘there is no way out of this.’
I think especially of Fallows, who is usually so optimistic. What is this sense of malaise or deflation in the professional media sphere that seems to be rendering so many career political reporters and pundits paralyzed? I feel it too, when I speak to uninformed family or friends about legislative gridlock. I can almost feel their attention, or maybe their credulity, slipping away as I talk.
When I read political reporting in mainstream news, I get the distinct sensation that the reporter also feels this, and is trying to write accordingly. What can be done to wake Americans up and crack the cynicism?
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