What Comes After Obamacare

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 85 Comments

The GOP has embarked yet another desperate push to persuade the public that the Affordable Care Act is too flawed to tolerate. The far right wins this ill-conceived campaign they may be very, very disappointed when they see their prize.

The core problem behind the GOP’s Obamacare gambit is we still have no alternative to offer. As a consequence, winning this campaign would probably be worse than losing. What comes after Obamacare? At this point the most likely answer is some form of single-payer insurance.

Through the cloud of hype and lies that has obscured the rollout of Healthcare.gov, one fact has emerged which should be giving Republicans pause. Expanded Medicaid enrollments under the ACA are rolling along smoothly. The Federal government, which according to Republican conventional wisdom cannot manage healthcare, is signing up new Medicaid recipients at a breakneck pace without a hitch.

Which part of the ACA is failing so far? The one involving private health insurers.

Without some alternative plan to offer, the GOP will be in no position to gain from Obama’s troubles. Rock-throwing is not policy. The bubble-dwellers have missed out on one crucial fact about public-opinion on Obamacare. A large component of the public opposition to the ACA is based on the fact that it fails to provide a publicly funded insurance program available to everyone.

Oh, and by the way, the process of enrolling new Medicaid recipients is rolling along swimmingly. Did I mention that?

Of all the complaints about the ACA, the one with the most traction in the real world is the fact that many middle earners who were previously paying for their own insurance will now pay more. They will pay more because the lousy policies they had been carrying have been legislated out of existence, they do not qualify for lower-income subsidies, and because they live in states that are resisting the provisions of the law that might otherwise have helped them buy better insurance.

For all the hype about the broken “you can keep your insurance” promise, that line won’t take us very far. Those affected are not a pool of people who loved their insurance options in the pre-Obamacare world. They were suffering some of the worst conditions created by our pre-ACA system.

They may be troubled by receiving cancellation notices, but those notices are not a new phenomenon and for most them their insurance already sucked. A small number of insurance cancellations are hardly going to convince people to return to a scheme under which your insurance could be cancelled because you got sick. If given an option to support single payer insurance or a useless package of Republican tax cuts, which direction is the public most likely to go?

Death Panel politics is short-term politics. The current Republican smokescreen of lies and distortions will have blown away before the mid-terms, much less 2016. What will be left is a country still living under a hopelessly complex, patched-together solution which only extends coverage for a subset of the uninsured. If Republicans expect to gain any credibility, we have to counter with more than whining. We need a plan.

There are a lot of options that could gain public support, but one thing is now crystal clear: whatever program eventually takes the place of the ACA, it will provide affordable insurance coverage for everyone, regardless of income. If Republicans want to present such an option, we will have a solid chance to participate in the debate that’s likely to come. If we don’t devise a plan, then the failure of Obamacare will most likely lead to some version of single payer insurance. It’s as simple as that.

If Republicans are not ready to present America with a proposal to deliver quality health insurance to everyone regardless of income, then it would be wise to shut the hell up about Obamacare. Until we have a plan, not just a slogan, the only people who will benefit from the failure of the ACA are in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. At this point, the failure of the Affordable Care Act would take America to a place we do not want to go. When the history is finally written, the Tea Party may find that all they gave America was single payer health care and a lingering hangover.

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Posted in Health Care, Tea Party

Frontline on Lee Harvey Oswald

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Chris Ladd — Leave a comment

Frontline does it again. Maybe the best documentary ever on the Kennedy Assassination.

Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald

Posted in Uncategorized

We Keep Outrunning “The Future”

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 5 Comments

Walter Kronkite recorded this vision of a fantastic, sci-fi future back in 1969. This “computerized communications console” is what a man might use to do work in the 21st Century, because in the future men do the work.

He can print a newspaper from some sort of a primitive copy machine. A closed circuit television lets him monitor the women of the house carrying out their chores. He can see a picture of the person he’s talking to on his speakerphone.

Ah, the pace of change.

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Posted in Economics

Preparing for a Post-Jobs Economy

Posted on November 19, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 39 Comments

The software company VMware has roughly the same market value as General Motors. VMware has 13,000 employees. GM employs almost a quarter of a million people. In addition to the current workforce, GM supports roughly half a million retired workers through its pensions and health insurance programs. VMware supports 0 retired employees.

Whether we mean to or not, we are deciding now on the shape of a post-jobs economy. What will American culture, politics, health care, and economics look like in an era when formal employment – a job – has ceased to be the most common way that Americans earn a living?

This is not just a question of how we treat the less fortunate, those who do not find jobs in shiny new tech startups. The post-jobs economy is not necessarily an unemployment economy. The shift away from formal employment does not mean stagnation or idleness.

More and more Americans are shedding formal employment in favor of more flexible work arrangements or starting their own businesses. Since 1990, small businesses and solo ventures have accounted for twice as many new jobs as large enterprises. Yes, many people are falling behind in the competition for knowledge-based jobs, but that is neither the only, nor necessarily the dominant theme of the knowledge economy.

The dynamics of the knowledge economy, much higher wages for professionals and rapidly declining inflation, are creating shorter, more flexible careers and more opportunity for entrepreneurship. For those who avoid falling into the dangerous chasms opened up by this economic realignment, the knowledge economy promises a freer, more prosperous world than we have ever known. The key to this future will be adapting our political arrangements to narrow those chasms and update the safety net beneath them.

Decisions we make now about health care, education, and the shape of the social safety net will not only affect the poor, they will determine how many Americans can afford the kind of risk-taking that accompanies entrepreneurship and innovation. For Republicans in particular, there is an opportunity hiding in this transition. If we can shed the notion that government=slavery, we could use a modified social safety net to unlock a massive economic expansion and a radical shift toward greater real personal independence than we have ever before experienced.

Imagine a country in which everyone can feed themselves, pay for a minimal place to live, and get access to health care. No matter how ill, damaged, or even indolent they may be, their children have an opportunity to earn an education and develop their talent if they so choose. Those who choose to work hard can live a lifestyle we can scarcely imagine. The wealth available to those who are particularly successful is spectacular.

Those who don’t work hard or succeed, for whatever reason, still survive reasonably well. Their children will not be precluded from opportunities to develop their talent by their parent’s failures.

Taxes on the successful fund an education infrastructure and a safety net that prevents the next generation from descending beyond help, but government is generally smaller and less intrusive than we have come to expect. A stronger safety net finances a wider room for failure, with less regulation and more individual accountability. Health care is paid for from taxation, but administered by private insurers and delivered by private providers.

The socialist model of deep state regulatory intrusion, public ownership of major capital, and mass unionization will be too restrictive to function. It is crumbling away globally under competitive pressure from more dynamic models. It will have to be replaced with a kind of universal profit-sharing plan.

Such an arrangement is not far from the way we live now, but it would require a government that sets standards rather than dictating outcomes. It would require higher taxes and a stronger safety net, but fewer government employees, more privatization, less support for unions and other interventions that distort market outcomes and dampen innovation. This model would free the innovation engines of global capitalism to crank out massive new wealth without risking the distortions, political and economic, which would come from an unmediated transition to lower net employment.

Without an updated safety net, the wealth concentration created by suddenly declining low-skilled employment would quickly breed economic stagnation. That stagnation would in time dim the prospects of everyone who had not successfully begun earning a living from capital, rather than wages.

That stagnation would narrow opportunities for investment, gradually converting capital owners into rentiers squeezing ever-diminishing returns from depreciating assets. In short, without efforts to support the most important resource in a knowledge economy – human innovation – the system would gradually eat itself, replacing an old overclass with a slightly nerdier new one before closing down. Without smarter efforts to expand opportunities, everyone will see narrowed horizons over time.

The Republican Party’s obsessive fear that someone might get government benefits they do not deserve is blinding us to a prime opportunity. More Americans are entrepreneurs than ever before. African-Americans are twice as likely as whites to start a new business. Republicans are inadvertently making this opportunity harder to seize by standing in the way of efforts to update the safety net.

Our changing economic landscape is creating an environment ripe for traditional Republican commercial values. If Republicans wake to this opportunity and find a way to shed the baggage of the Cold War, there is a potential for a long run of political success and economic dynamism. The makers/takers paradigm that defines the grumpy old Republican isn’t just arrogant, it is utterly false. If we recognize how the knowledge economy has wrecked that paradigm, new opportunities emerge for the party and the country.

It is important to remember that this economic transformation is a global phenomenon. The nation that experiences the greatest success in harnessing economic dynamism without creating a desperate underclass will dominate the next century. We have every reason to be the winners in this race. A bright future awaits if we have the courage and intelligence to seize it.

 

The rise of the Entrepreneurial Economy, http://people.few.eur.nl/thurik/Research/Teaching/The%20Rise%20of%20the%20Entrepreneurial%20Economy%20and%20the%20Future%20of%20Dynamic%20Capitalism%20-%20Thurik%20et%20al.%20%282013%29.pdf

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Posted in Economics, Ownership Society, Republican Party

My Favorite Republican

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 1 Comment

The lost hero of modern conservatism was a charismatic maverick who represented the best hope for the post-Cold War Republican Party.  He gave us an opportunity to build the Party’s center-right posture into a post-racial juggernaut that could have dominated our politics for a generation.

Intelligent, charismatic, and seemingly incapable of cynicism even when it would have served him, he didn’t know how to play to fear.  He didn’t know how to ride a mob.  And he lost, but I refuse to say that he failed because if the Party is ever going to recover any sort of broad credibility, we will do it by recasting ourselves in his mold.

My favorite Republican is Jack Kemp.

Kemp was an urban Republican from the Northeast, a combination of adjectives that in our time sounds like a punch-line.   A former football star and a Congressman from New York, he was the last great Hamiltonian of the modern era.

A brutal optimist, he carried an infectious faith in the power of freedom to foster prosperity.  As the author of Reagan’s 1981 tax cut (the Kemp-Roth Act) he was one of Reagan’s most reliable allies in Congress.  But Kemp was not a prisoner of anyone’s dogma.  He applied serious thought to a class of difficult problems that we don’t normally associate with Republicans.

Kemp actually wanted the position of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.  Think about that for a second.  Normally a throw-away position in a Republican Administration, he served in that role under Bush Senior and made it a platform.  He relentlessly pressed to shift ownership and decision-making from Washington bureaucrats to the recipients of aid.

He fostered the trend away from failed housing projects toward ownership and voucher-based programs.  He brought new emphasis to education issues and helped craft tax increment financing programs to attract new development to run-down areas.  He brought passion, intelligence, and humanity to conservatives’ policies on race and poverty.

At a time when hyper-partisanship was just beginning to rear its head, Kemp was always comfortable in a difficult crowd.  He fostered strong relationships all over the spectrum; his friendship with Henry Cisneros being a prime example.

Becoming Bob Dole’s running mate in 1996 should have placed Kemp next in line for the nomination, but by the late nineties the Pandora’s Box of extremists cracked open by Reagan had begun to wreak its toll on the political landscape.  Kemp was despised by the new radicals particularly for his candid posture on race.  Besides, by then no Republican politician willing to defiantly embrace a hell-bound Democrat was going to be tolerated in a leadership role.

When in 2002 he began to say some sober, sensible, and entirely heretical things about Iraq and the War on Terror (“What is the evidence that should cause us to fear Iraq more than Pakistan or Iran?”), he was summarily ushered to the margins of the conservative movement.  He would continue to speak on the subject, but there was no one left to hear him.

Congressman Jack Kemp died of cancer in 2009. The tensely muted eulogies from the new far-right politainers for one of the chief architects of the Reagan Era told the sad tale of our time.

Looking back, this excerpt from a particularly snide 1989 New York Times piece on Kemp is how I prefer to remember the man I so admire:

“You know what’s interesting?” asks Jack Kemp, a nonstop talker who finds a great many things interesting, and who had to be dragged out of two interviews by an aide long accustomed to humoring her boss’ verbosity. ”The idealism is now on the conservative side of the spectrum, and the pessimism is on the left. And for a long time it was the left that was idealistic, and it was the right that was pessimistic. And it drives our friends on the left crazy that you can be both conservative and idealistic and progressive simultaneously.”

Those were good times.  That was the atmosphere and attitude that made me a Republican.  It’s a return to that almost naive optimism and faith in American ideals that will restore the GOP first to relevance, and then to greatness once again.

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Posted in Ownership Society, Republican Party

Where the Crazy May Be Coming From

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 1 Comment

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke

Our politics is getting weird.  We’ve always struggled against opportunism and corruption and lying.  But the fresh rise of what can only fairly be described as “crazy” is hitting us like an invasive species dropped into your local pond.  It’s crowding out the parasites we’ve learned to tolerate and eating everything in sight.

While there have always been some odd characters attracted to power, it seems we’re dealing with a whole new category of crazy, something we’ve never encountered at the highest levels of our politics before.  This year we had a GOP Presidential candidate rise to the top of some polls by claiming that Obama was born in Kenya.  We have a new favorite (briefly?) who not so long ago accused the President of trying to set up mandatory, Communist-style re-education camps for youth.  Goofball theories backed by pure fantasy abound.  Rather than being hounded out of town, these folks become cult heroes.

Something has changed.  Facts are elitist.  Credibility is evolving into a liability and crazy has become a tactic.  Where is this coming from?

There is a depressing irony at work inside this problem.  Never in history have ordinary people had such ready access to reliable information.  In that sense it’s never been easier to determine what’s real.  Yet we seem more gullible than ever.

This torrent of information, both true and untrue, combined with an overwhelming pace of social change may be undermining our ability to function.  If so, what does that mean for representative government?

More than forty years ago Alvin Toeffler published Future Shock.  In it he predicted that society had entered a phase of constant, wrenching, and ever-accelerating change.  He expected this would lead to a form of social meltdown and a terrible strain on the individual mind.  There’s a comment from Toeffler’s book that seems particularly prescient:

“And what then happens when an economy in search of a new purpose seriously begins to enter into the production of experiences for their own sake, experiences that blur the distinction between the vicarious and the non-vicarious, the simulated and the real?  One of the definitions of sanity itself is the ability to tell real from unreal.  Shall we need a new definition?”

Maybe we are in the process of redefining sanity.  We have an abundance of reliable information to help us separate what is from what ain’t.  But we are also being overwhelmed by shiny distractions.  And it’s not just our omnipresent entertainment that is weakening our hold on what’s real.  This wealth of accurate information is available inside an atmosphere in which reality is becoming perilously complex.  Even the most common tools and devices that are woven into the fabric of our daily lives are now wonders beyond simple credibility.  Here’s an example:

I have a device sitting on my desk that is barely larger than a credit card.  It knows where I am on the globe at all times and can recommend a nearby restaurant I might like.  It allows me to hold a conversation or exchange messages instantly with another person who may be thousands of miles away.  It entertains me all day and night with music, games, movies and news.

That statement is utterly, incredibly magical and at the same time absolutely real.  And there is not a single human being on the planet, not one, who understands all of the materials and technology required to create my smart phone sufficiently to build one by themselves.  Somewhere in the 20th Century our lives came to be dominated by technologies that were products of cultures, not people.  We lost all individual control over them.

This world of credulous wonder and surplus information undermines politics, at least in the short run, by depriving us of what we most desire in evaluating public affairs – a singular narrative.  In the old days when there were three television stations the dignified white men on the evening news handed us that calming gift.  They had a staff of smart people who filtered through the galaxy of world events and digested them down into a storyline which we gobbled up at 5:30 pm Central.

With unfettered access to raw information we are faced with a horrifying new understanding – there is no single narrative and there never was.  What happened today is that seven billion people experienced seven billion different things from seven billion unique perspectives between every blink of an eye.

Most of them seem to be blogging about it.

As change accelerates to a blur our reality is refracting into a mosaic with no discernable pattern.  We are left on our own to figure out what it means, to translate it into the coherent story that our increasingly outgunned monkey-brains so desperately crave by using technology we can never hope to understand.

More and more we respond by shutting out the assault of cognitive dissonance and retreating from any unwelcome input.  We surround ourselves with news outlets, friends and even neighbors who carefully reinforce what we want to believe.  We are building our own reality to support our chosen narrative.  It doesn’t seem to be working out well on a personal level and it’s rotting our politics.

Will we adapt successfully?  Probably, though it’s hard to say how long it will take or how this process may permanently transform government.  And we probably won’t collectively sober up before a lot of people get hurt.  For the near term we can be certain that a significant chunk of our political energy will be diverted into fantasy and entertainment as we try to cushion ourselves from the onslaught of uncomfortable change and unwanted information.

Perhaps the best we can do individually is enjoy the fireworks and dodge the sparks.  Oh, and tweet about the experience.

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Posted in Political Theory, Tea Party

Can the GOP Survive Without an Enemy?

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — Leave a comment

Senator Ted Cruz raised eyebrows earlier this year by implying that Sec. of Defense nominee and former GOP Senator Chuck Hagel might be on the North Korean payroll. Last year Congressman Allen West found 81 members on the Communist Party in Congress. In 2010, the State of Oklahoma banned Sharia Law, finally halting the effort to impose an Islamic Caliphate on a place few Muslims knew existed.

The far-right hunt for enemies is growing more desperate by the day. The End of History has been hard on the GOP. Like Norman Bates harboring his mother’s corpse, Republicans can’t face the terrifying prospect of living in a world without a nemesis. Whether it’s Agenda 21, George Soros, the Muslim Brotherhood, or something else we found on YouTube, we can’t be satisfied until we’ve filled that aching void, that craving for comic-book terror.

The fight against the Soviets was only just ramping-up as the core rationale of a new Republican governing coalition when the Russians ruined everything by packing up their barbed wire and going home. We’ve been off-kilter ever since, groping toward some new purpose, still undefined.

Sen. Cruz’s recent comments have earned comparisons to Joe McCarthy, but frankly, McCarthy deserves more credit than that. Back in the ‘50’s the Communist threat was real. Soviet spies actually existed. It is true that McCarthy destroyed good people with false allegations in order to further his own career, but he was merely dishonest, not delusional.

The Soviets were the best friend the Republican Party ever had. By the late 70’s, Reagan shaped them into the magnetic center of the party, using them to temper the contradictory and sometimes odd impulses of certain elements of the coalition. In opposition to this enemy Republicans not only unified the party, they found an avenue to expand the coalition beyond traditional barriers.

The Communists served another strategic goal for conservatives as a proxy for less popular agendas. Over the years, unpopular fringes of the conservative movement learned to subsume their more unpalatable goals under the banner of “anti-Communism.” It’s in this function that conservatives ache most sharply for the lost Communism threat.

Strom Thurmond (then a Democrat) was an early master of this technique, claiming that the push for black Civil Rights came straight from Stalin himself. Religious extremists down through the years tarred nearly all of their opponents as closet Communists. Opponents even managed to paint Martin Luther King pink.

The end of Communism as an organized force in the world was a catastrophic surprise for which Republicans were completely unprepared.We’ve tried to manufacture new enemies – Muslims, immigrants, George Soros, the French. None of them can combine rugged hateability with a real-life, plausible threat. It takes too much imagination to transform them into a credible ideological alternative to Western market democracy. Communism, how we pine for thee.

Without the focus inspired by a good enemy, the discipline that defined the Republican Party in its brief Golden Age has broken down into a confusing calico. Business interests and traditionalists still anchor the core, but as you move out from the center this crazy quilt very quickly grows tattered and ill-smelling. Plus, it only covers a small section of the farthest right-hand corner of the bed.

The reliable, pragmatic party of markets and business has devolved into a final redoubt for those terrified of the future. Without a new rationale to hold the party together it has proven impossible to keep the tinhat brigades at bay. The Republican Party is on strike against the 21st Century, preferring the enemies of the past to challenges of our time. For a lot of Americans, modern America is a place in which they have no desire to live.

The desperate campaign to manufacture a new enemy took an ominous turn this spring. Sen. Rand Paul used his filibuster of the Brennan nomination to field-test a new enemy of freedom – the United States of America. We’ve become hungry enough for a villain to start casting our own government in that vacant role. Doing so requires a level of paranoid delusion that most of the population is unable to sustain, but it’s enough to spawn some serious problems if we don’t sober up soon.

Without an enemy there is only us, left here with no one else to blame for our problems and no choice but to engage them. The Republican Party could reorganize behind a new agenda of ownership, personal liberty, and capitalism, but only if we are willing to confront some ideologically uncomfortable challenges.

There is no sign yet of the Republican Party mustering the courage to face the responsibilities of a world without enemies. So, for the time being we’ll remain stuck here, gripping our shotguns, vigilantly watching the skies.

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Posted in Political Theory, Tea Party, Uncategorized

Ann Coulter is the Andy Kaufman of Politics

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — Leave a comment

Andy Kaufman is remembered as a comedian, but that’s only a default label.  We haven’t coined a term for what he did for a living.  His most popular role was the one he hated most, playing the lovable Latka Gravas on the 70’s sitcom, Taxi.  The rest of his career was dominated by a bizarre brand of somewhat humorous stunts.

Kaufman played games with the notion of real and unreal in a performance. He would stage injuries or on-stage fights or other incidents that took him out of character only to have him become another character in the process that we assumed (incorrectly) to be himself.  He sometimes played the smarmy lounge-singer Tony Clifton who opened for Kaufman’s show.  Kaufman as Clifton railed about how much he hated Andy Kaufman and hurled insults at the audience before “Kaufman” took the stage.

You could never tell whether to take the act seriously.  Like Kaufman, I don’t think Coulter is faking exactly, though she certainly isn’t playing us straight.  She’s just doing what comes naturally while the world around her struggles to catch up.  In both Kaufman’s and Coulter’s acts, the joke turns on the audience’s willingness to take it seriously.

Coulter is an Ivy League East Coast elitist who blames America’s problems on Ivy League East Coast elitists.  She once said that the world would be a better place if women didn’t vote.  She’s an attractive woman with an engaging smile who debates with the decorum you’d expect from a prison shower brawl.  Coulter plays a fierce conservative and in that role she has perhaps has done more lasting damage to the Republican Party than any single individual since Richard Nixon.

Coulter is a commentator, but she has transformed that role into something previously unknown.  At a time when other commentators couched their statements and felt embarrassment or shame if they were caught in an error, Coulter broke the rules.  She would take a shred of a fact and shape it into something a hair short of slander.  The rules that once stifled the world of punditry prevented anyone from calling her out on her tactics.  They were playing checkers while she was playing football.

Coulter’s day job now is to wake up in the morning and answer the question, “What could I say today to shock someone?”  But the act is more complicated than just being offensive.  She knows how to craft just the right outrage; the thing that will take her audience to the crumbling ledge of acceptable political discourse and let them sees what’s down there.  It is art, pure and simple.

And she entertains liberals just as much as conservatives, perhaps more.  How?  People love horror.  If she tried to make a living being loved by conservatives she would be lost in the punditocracy.  The magic comes from being loved by conservatives and sweetly loathed by the left.  It is a refined yet gruesome artistic effort.

She’s dancing on our gullibility, our willingness to take seriously anyone who’s been granted access to our televisions.  Along the way she’s playing key roles in both the destruction of journalism and the collective suicide of the modern conservative movement.  She’s probably not doing either by design.  Just like Kaufman, she’s doing what her inspiration tells her.  She’d probably be doing the same thing even if it didn’t make her rich.

Is she politically relevant?  Not anymore.  Pressing that shock button over time delivers a diminishing marginal return.  And as the atmosphere around her catches up to the innovations she introduced her act is becoming much more complicated to maintain.  The forces she helped set in motion are racing beyond her.

Her rise was based on twisting facts and stubbornly refusing to apologize, but that’s become the mainstream in commentating.  Plus, the new generation of ranters and conspiracists have evolved beyond the need for any facts at all.  Her appearance last year at Homocon, the gay conservative political convention, highlighted the growing threat of a kind of ironic implosion, where the act and the person collide in an unchoreographed disaster (see Kaufman’s wrestling injury).

By contrast, Limbaugh can do this forever.  He hasn’t personalized his act to the degree that Coulter’s done.  He doesn’t engage with the same consistently ad hominem style.  He makes a living playing the obnoxious uncle at Sunday dinner and in that role he’s almost likeable.  Glenn Beck is demonstrating what happens when a lesser professional tries to pull off Coulter’s routine.  Ad hominem is a volatile tactic because it puts you in play right along with your target.

With the rise of the Tea Party we may be seeing the whole far-right wave of the past generation beginning to crash onto the rocks.  That has some alarming implications for the professional ranters.  Coulter is good, very good, but still it’s not clear how long she can keep up this act.

And she’s running out of material.  The title of Coulter’s new book is “Demonic,” suggesting the degree to which she has mined-out the polemical potential of the English language.  If the dance continues she’ll soon have to borrow titles from Russian or the dreaded Spanish (¡Liberal Cabrones no Tienes Cajones!).  Or she could just give her books titles like ‘S&*theads’ or ‘A$$*les’.  If this far-right orgy is ending then maybe she’s timed the peak of her career well.  All good things have to end, just ask all those aging bankers who were at Woodstock.

Andy Kaufman rounded out his career by faking his own death from cancer while at the same time dying of cancer.  That’s a tough act to beat on so many levels.  I don’t know how Coulter intends to top that, but I like her odds.  More likely she’s waiting for her Joe Welch Moment, the incident in which someone finally and irrevocably calls her out on her cheap schtick.  Going down like her idol, Joe McCarthy, would give her career a dark moral arc that she probably craves.

But there aren’t any Welches anymore.  More likely she’ll just end with some stunt, perhaps a move to Communist China following a elaborate marriage to a box turtle.  I don’t know, I’m not an artist.

Till then I’ll keep watching her appearances and admiring her work.  It may be cheap and low, but it beats watching Nancy Grace.

Enjoy footage of Andy Kaufman on the Merv Griffin Show explaining his feud with “Tony Clifton” and tell me this doesn’t sound exactly like an Ann Coulter appearance:

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Posted in Republican Party

How Fundamentalists and Libertarians Buried the Hatchet

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — Leave a comment

Rand Paul is an unlikely fundamentalist hero.  He was a rebel in his days at deeply religious Baylor University, apparently forming some sort of half-sarcastic, anti-religious student group.  He’s a libertarian who quotes Ayn Rand and hasn’t denied his past drug use.  On culture war issues he prefers to dodge rather than charge.  In many respects Paul looks like the sort of Republican that the religious right has tried to purge from the party.

Yet Paul’s 2010 primary campaign against a well-established Republican drew endorsements from Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint, and even the humorless prudes over at Concerned Women for America.  The lock was in late in the primary campaign when James Dobson at Focus on the Family very publicly switched his endorsement to Paul.

So how have the high priests of Christian fundamentalism found such enthusiastic common cause with a prophet of Aqua Buddha?  Why are evangelicals overwhelmingly the largest block of Tea Party supporters?

This poorly understood alliance of Neo-Confederate Libertarians and the religious right can be partly traced to a strategic shift by Paul Weyrich during the Clinton years.  It helps explain why competence has diminished as a priority and some Republicans are comfortable promoting policies that seem dangerous to the point of recklessness.

Weyrich, the architect of modern American fundamentalism, generated some surprise when he declared in 1999 that the movement had failed.  Many fundamentalists at the time were feeling euphoric.  The electoral wave of ’94 had given evangelicals effective control of the GOP infrastructure across large swaths of the country.  Though they had failed to defeat Bill Clinton, their power in Congress and state legislatures was steadily growing.

However Weyrich saw a different trend.  When he worked with Jerry Falwell in the ‘70’s to turn evangelicals into activists he believed they would form an overwhelming political block.  That’s why he urged Falwell to call his group The Moral Majority.  But during the Clinton years he decided that he was wrong.

His 1999 “Letter on the Moral Minority in America” explained the problem, “our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important.”  In other words fundamentalists could get people elected, but they couldn’t persuade those people to enact the movement’s most outrageous policies.

The cultural base on which Weyrich had hoped to build his fundamentalist juggernaut was not as broad as he had hoped.  Weyrich blamed the public’s weak interest in his batty goals on the spread “Cultural Marxism.”  Instead of focusing their efforts on government, he urged religious activists to direct their attention toward a transformation of the culture.

This did not mean that evangelicals would take their Bibles and go home.  Under Weyrich’s influence religious revolutionaries would still participate in politics, but they would cease to care much about governing.

Weyrich’s shift was not uncontroversial, but it gradually gained political force.  In 2001, his Free Congress Foundation released a manifesto called Integration of Theory and Practice meant to guide activists in the pursuit of this dark new direction.

The document recommends “intimidating people and institutions that are used as tools of left-wing activism” so that “leftist causes will no longer be the path of least resistance.”  It endorses “obnoxious” tactics designed to “serve as a force of social intimidation.”  It outlines a grim strategy, “We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them.”

No longer hoping to achieve power as a majority, religious conservatives were freed from the demands of effective government.   No longer would evangelicals need to think about compromise, effectiveness, or even competence as priorities.  Consequences mattered less than purity.

The document also described a new posture toward libertarians:

“There is nothing in this movement that an operational libertarian would find objectionable…this movement does not promote a direct confrontation with the state, but a sort of “weaning off,” or a “walking away” from the state.”

But then there is this critical qualification:

“[We] must be willing to lose allies among the libertarians we brought on board the post-war conservative coalition …[W]e choose not to make a fetish of political freedom. We recognize that there are other freedoms besides political freedom–such as the freedom not to be subjected to a barrage of cultural decadence at every turn.”

Those two paragraphs written a decade ago define the scope of alignment in our time between fundamentalists and libertarians.  Weyrich didn’t create these strains in the fundamentalist movement, but he took them off the leash.  His shift neutralized a gnawing disagreement among fundamentalists over pre-millennial and post-millennial theology.  This approach meant the disagreement no longer mattered for practical purposes.

Weyrich’s strategic shift not only changed the fundamentalist movement, it eventually shifted the balance of power among libertarians.  This carefully calibrated opening from well-established Republican evangelicals meant that libertarians could actually win elections, so long as they were willing to embrace a deeply religious, Neo-Confederate re-branding of the philosophy.  Goodbye Ayn Rand, hello Ludwig von Mises.

The alignment between evangelicals and libertarians is most visible under the banner of the Tea Party.  The religious wing brings the motivating force of a fresh apocalyptic fetish while the opening to the libertarians offers some cover.  Rand Paul has thrived in this new environment, downplaying his libertarian credentials while backing key fundamentalist priorities.  A few adjustments allow him to become a far more potent figure than his father without compromising his values…much.

For the country this new political phenomenon means the far right has no incentive to compromise on issues critical to America’s fiscal health.  The ratio of spending cuts to tax increases doesn’t matter to the Tea Party.  They will not accept any deal that fails to weaken the Federal government.

How much damage are they willing to accept in pursuit of this strategy?  Glenn Beck’s investments in food storage and the helpful survival guides he offers on his websites offer a hint.  Unless Republicans find a way to counter this alliance inside the party we may all need to buy more of what Beck is selling.

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Posted in Libertarian, Neo-Confederate, Political Theory, Religious Right, Republican Party, Tea Party

The End of America…Again

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — Leave a comment

In British tradition there is a one-line statement that announces the passing of a monarch:

“The King is dead. Long live the King.”

A political institution with a 1500 year history spanning war, conquest, and in several instances its own apparent extinction, can afford to take a little bad news in stride.  The end of one reign is merely the dawn of the next.

We, on the other hand, are seldom so stiff-lipped over the passing of an era.  Each generation of Americans seems to kvetch over their own morbid fantasy of our demise.  During the ‘50’s our far-right fringe believed that the Communist juggernaut was “50-70% complete” with its conquest of America and Eisenhower was a conscious agent of the Soviet conspiracy.

When I was a kid, we feared that the Japanese were going to dominate the world.  Look how that turned out.  Now some of us are convinced that a totalitarian third-world country that registers a GDP per capita less than the Dominican Republic is about to steal our thunder or that immigration, which has consistently enriched us is about to finish us off.

At the height of our power (so far), we are running out of credible challengers to feed our favorite guilty obsession.

Pat Buchanan, America’s grumpy uncle, is the latest in a string of commentators to announce the nation’s impending doom.  The source of our demise this time around?  Take your pick.  Buchanan’s rambling screed, Suicide of a Superpower, blames America’s decline on just about every cultural or technological innovation since the 16th Century.

He decries, in no particular order:

Vatican II, discrimination against white men, Muslims, birth control, the Pope’s failure to protect a Holocaust-denying bishop (seriously, it’s on pp.107-9), Martin Luther, Socialism, Commercialism, Global Capitalism, Secularism, Mexicans, blacks, desegregation, blacks who rape white women (p.243), diversity, free trade, black sororities, Chinese, the Voting Rights Act (pp.332-9), universities, “bigotry against white Christians,” immigrants, Republican efforts to win non-white votes (p.346), and, most of all, the “decline of the European Majority.”

Buchanan has created an almost comprehensive encyclopedia of your Grandfather’s terrors.  Apparently he got tired before he could explain the dangers of spicy food and iPods.  Expect an addendum.

America has always been radically secular and shockingly culturally diverse compared to standards of the contemporary world around it.  At a time when European governments enforced one official state church as the only means to preserve civil order America tolerated an impossible diversity of belief.  Congregationalists, Anabaptists, Baptists, Jews, Shakers, Quakers, Catholics, Episcopal, Presbyterians, Methodists, and frontier types with their own home-brewed factions came together in a frightening collection of faiths that could only coexist under a carefully secular government.

Buchanan insists that the only reason these folks were able to live together and build the greatest nation on Earth was that they all descended from the same Judeo-Christian heritage. Nevermind, for a moment, that his history simply writes out of existence the contributions of a large percentage of Americans.  The common European heritage he speaks of in such magical terms wasn’t nearly common enough to keep them from slaughtering each other without scruple in the old country.  America has kept order for centuries by tolerating a shocking degree of cultural disorder.

The paranoid nativists forever warn that we are too culturally chaotic to survive.  They are right.  America dies over and over again in a thousand different ways, like the cells in your skin.   The real test of a culture is not whether it dies, but whether it regenerates itself.  What frightens these folks is our nerve-racking dynamism; our accelerating pace of reinvention.

We are in fact living through the end of white America.  That “end” will be just as catastrophic as the end of Puritan American, the end of Colonial America, the end of White, Male Landowner America, the end of New England Whaling America, the end of Slaveholding America, the end of Rural America, the end of Pre-Industrial America, the end of Jim Crow America, the end of Industrial America and all of the other endings America has experienced in her short history.

In other words, we can be confident that this ending will be yet another in a jarring series of gateways to an ever freer, richer, and more powerful future.  Such optimism may be out of step with the spirit of the moment, but it is still the most reasonable and sober expectation of what’s in store for us.

We are too independent to tolerate the claustrophobic, manufactured unity of a top-down cultural mandate.  Conservatives may score a few short term points selling Buchanan’s white Tribalism, but in America the “culture warriors” of each new generation always lose.  In the long run his vision is a blueprint for little more or less than Republican political failure.  The nation, if necessary, will simply go on without us.

Our chaotic diversity, for all its many benefits, makes for a white-knuckled ride through history.  Buckle up, because the next American Century will probably be even wilder than the last.  Somebody please remember to give Uncle Grumps his medicine.  He’s gonna need it.

America is dead.  Long live America.

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Posted in Immigration, Political Theory, Race, Tea Party
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