Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

The 9/12 marchers are crazy.  Seriously.  Your average Republican voter is certainly not crazy, but the institution believes that playing to the crazies is a good idea.

How to respond?  Reading liberal/progressive/whatever-term-those-people-prefer commentary,the rhetoric toward the right is a bit more confident, a bit less willing to tip-toe around crazies and say “If we just explain to them that the GOP is not on their side economically, we can still win their votes.”  And on multiple levels I think that’s largely a good idea:

1)  Starting with the stances I’ve staked out on this blog, there comes a time when you have to stop saying “Well, I appreciate your spirited argument, but I must respectfully dissent on a few points, while thanking you for this lovely discussion!” and must start saying “I’m through debating this, that shit is just plain wrong!”  We can debate exactly where to draw that line, and certainly we don’t want to take that hard line too often, but once the topic on the table is, say, torture, or the theory that Obama is a Muslim Nazi from Kenya sent here to build a socialist state, maybe it’s time to stop playing nice.

If liberals are through playing nice even with the worst of the worst, so much the better.

2)  For their own sake, Democrats can’t act like the guy who says “Please can I have it back?” in the whiniest voice possible after his lunch money has been stolen.  They had that reputation for decades.  Yes, there have always been loud and proud liberals, but I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to figure out what the Democratic Party really stands for.  The Democrats, as a party, have been much less confident than Republicans.

I think it has something to do with lingering kulturkampf from 1968**, bad advice from Bob Shrum, and a desire to disprove bad stereotypes about liberals (which merely results in living up to another stereotype) but I’m not sure.

3)  Purely from a policy standpoint, for whatever reason the Congressional Democrats as an institution (I’m mostly pointing to leadership, not good rank and file Democrats) played way too nice with Republicans on war and civil liberties in 2001-2008.  Yes, I realize that in the situation some compromises were inevitable, and we can debate precisely which ones some other time, but somewhere along the line things clearly took a wrong turn.

If “no more Mr. Nice Guy for the crazies” translates into better policy, great!

However, having said all that, I have a fear:

Pride cometh before a fall.  While playing to a “center” defined by Republican spin doctors never helped Democrats much, writing off the crazies can quickly morph into a kulturkampf of its own, leading to the writing-off of large regional or ideological groups that are larger than just the crazies.  That is dangerous.

Then again, there’s another scenario:

If the Democrats don’t merely write the wingnuts out of their own political calculations, but actually somehow make the point that the wingnuts are, you know, nuts, the Republicans may find that the only way to fashion a winning coalition that draws in some moderates is to also write the wingnuts out of their calculations as well.  In that case, we get a Republican party that is….something other than what it is right now.  And that would be good for the long-term health of the country.

The reasons why I discount this long-term scenario are:

1)  The scenario in which the Republicans can’t even get a few moderates is also a scenario in which the Democrats get all of the moderates, and I just don’t see any party growing that big.  It would be an awkward coalition for the Democrats to manage.

2) The wingnuts still need somewhere to go, and the Republicans might as well toss them a few bones to keep their numbers in the coalition.  As long as they are in the tent, there is the constant danger that they will claw their way back from marginal status to a dominant role in the party.

3)  Even if marginalizing the wingnuts plays to the long-term interests of the Republican party as an institution, playing to the wing-nuts plays to the short-term interests of lots of people, including elected officials from plenty of districts, talk show hosts who cash in by pandering to them, and firebrand pundits who sell books to them and cash in on the lecture circuit.***  And, to get even more Machiavellian, to whatever extent the parties’ shadier operatives play reverse psychology and meddle in the opposing team’s ranks, the Democrats certainly have no incentive to drive the wingnuts far enough from polite society for the Republicans to lose that unseemly anchor around their necks.

So, I suspect that the wingnuts will be with us for a long time to come.  As Greenwald says, they’ve already been with us for a while, why expect anything different all of a sudden?

*Post title explained here.

**My greatest fear is that 30 years from now young voters will be scratching their heads and wondering why all these old politicians are still talking about 9/11 and trying to prove that they aren’t stuck in a 9/10 mindset.

***I’ve sometimes thought about doing an experiment where I announce that I’ve had a conversion experience, write a creationist book where I use my authority as a Ph.D. in physics to argue that evolution violates the laws of thermodynamics, and see how it works.  Then I reveal that it was all a game.  However, I suspect that in the ecosystem of creationists there are other fierce predators who would resent a n00b trying to compete for cash on the lecture circuit, and I’d probably lose the game and my credibility.