p m carpenter's commentary

The inevitability of a (third) Tea Party

Undeniable was my sense last night that Lawrence O'Donnell's once mildly mocking confidence in Tim Pawlenty's inevitability has been reduced to a mildly confident mock. Or maybe I'm just projecting, since I seemed to be the only political observer who ever concurred with O'Donnell's initial analysis of Pawlenty's inevitability -- nonetheless having watched the latter's inexpressibly lackluster performance at the last GOP presidential debate, I too now sense that Pawlenty himself never believed in any personal political future but that of Vice President Pawlenty.

Whatever. For what remains politically immutable is that it makes little difference ... the Republican nominee, that is. The GOP can continue hamstringing the economic recovery and gyrate with wild abandon in freshly fraudulent and characteristically insincere critiques of President Obama's foreign policy, but its odds of capturing the White House shall persist as roughly equivalent to those of Sarah Palin winning a MacArthur Genius Award.

Because for the GOP, the 2012 presidential election will be a kind of ultimate conservative Rorschach Test, essentially a 2016 Republican primary and effectively a civil war of irreconcilable factions -- establishment vs. tea party -- wherein a singular supremacy shall at last be resolved. When I wrote, just now, that the choice of the 2012 Republican nominee will make little difference, I meant that, surely enough, in terms of Obama's inevitability. But I also meant that the nominee will make little difference as to the inevitability of the party's civil war.

Let's say Mitt Romney, or some Romneyesque candidate, manages to duck all the incoming fire and seize the objective. November's result: Tea partiers stay home and promptly blame the Republican Party's loss on its failure to nominate a true conservative. Or, let's say Michele Bachmann, or a Bachmannesque candidate, manages to seize the objective. November's result: The establishment-inclined stay home and promptly blame the Republican Party's loss on its failure to nominate a true conservative moderate.

Either way, no reasonable observer would envision a subsequent, four-year perpetuation of the GOP's internally profound contradiction. It is quite literally a party divided. As Politico reminds us this morning, "In last week’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, a half-dozen activist-friendly conservatives – Palin, Cain, Perry, Gingrich, Santorum and Bachmann – captured a combined 47 percent of the national primary vote." Gallup's polling has revealed a roughly similar 50-50 state of establishment-vs.-tea-party warfare.

Other odds, I'd wager, favor a Romney or Romney-like nominee in 2012, and that, in turn, would serve up titanic odds of a formal Tea Party by 2016, led by the GOP's disgruntled and by-then defrocked Bachmanns and Cains and Perrys, etc.

Because factionally, the GOP is inherently and prodigiously dissimilar to the bigger-tent Democratic Party, with its internally squabbling triumvirate of conservatives, moderates and progressives. Among the Dems' base, progressives are unquestionably the loudest, but they're also the smallest in numbers -- a mere 5 percent of the American electorate self-identifies as "very liberal" -- and their pathetic history of third-party divergence (from Debsian Socialist to Wallace-like Progressive parties) is but bracing, empirical proof that, however unhappy they may be, there's no place like home. As for the Dems' conservatives and moderates, well, their ideological distinction is scarcely noteworthy. Hence one big party they all can be.

These factional circumstances vastly differ from the GOP's. As the aforementioned polling indicates, there are, manifestly and indisputably, two Republican parties today of approximately equal numerical stature -- and intense irreconcilability. To be sure, for pragmatic electoral reasons the establishment would be content to tolerate in perpetuity the intolerably voluble tea partiers' impeccable crackpotism, but there is, simply, no way that tea partiers will tolerate for long a compromising, and compromised, GOP establishment. God gave us political crackpots so that we could amuse ourselves with third-party spectatorship; and to third-party status is precisely where the crackpotism of Tea is headed. So suit up, Michele, and Sarah, and Herman, et al.

Well that, anyway, is the way I read it. But do keep in mind, as I do, that along with Mr. O'Donnell, I also thought Tim Pawlenty would be the GOP's nominee.

Perry the Ditherer

Now here's the definition of "dithering" ...

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is still thinking, still pondering, still weighing the pros and cons; yes, he's now and tomorrow "reconsidering his earlier decision to stay out of the 2012 White House campaign."

Unbelievable. There he sits, this secessionist theocrat, perhaps the most psychotic of all the GOP's presidential wannabes -- a condition which virtually guarantees him the party's nomination, say so many of the party's lesser psychotics -- yet he just can't seem to decide.

It's sad, so sad to watch a roaring Southern demagogue of antebellum conceit wallow in the harrowing indecisiveness of liberal deliberation. 

The welcome death of a neoconservative impulse

Ross Douthat:

Once, I believed it myself.

But that was many years and many wars ago, and now I think [quasi-isolationist] Rand Paul is right.

Ordinarily, along other intellectual lines, I would say with utter sincerity, Congratulations, Mr. Douthat. But the calamity of Bush-Cheney's violent neoconservatism was so bloody foreseeable to everyone who bothered to pay attention to the vintage lessons of history, geography, theology, sectarian barbarity, international politics, cultural anthropology, executive overreach, militarism, fiscal insanity and myopic hypernationalism would only render such a congratulatory remark rather sarcastic.

So I'll just say, Glad you've grown up, Mr. Douthat, and leave it at that.

Devolutionary inbreeding

I reject Politico's premise, threaded throughout today's headline story of "GOP magic trick: Making Bush vanish," that the previous administration governed by principles of "compassionate conservatism." A more deceptive slogan would be hard to find in the squalid archives of political flimflam, however I traveled this wretched territory just a few days ago, so I'll refrain from such a near repetition of the "Bush-continuum" thesis.

Let's just say that even some of the Bushies acknowledge it, and regret it. Said former Bush adviser Peter Wehner of the post-Bush GOP, "I worry that there’s a temptation to denigrate government, that skepticism toward government becomes a sort of corrosive cynicism about government." The corrosive continuum didn't begin with Bush II, of course; it hatched under the Reagan administration -- government was the problem, claimed the Gipper, meaning the scapegoat: and to millions awash in white backlash, what an appealing scapegoat it was; it was cultivated by Bush I ("No ... new ... taxes": oops); and it survived relatively unscathed throughout the Clinton years ("The era of big government is over").

Now its suppuration has quite naturally devolved into the gangrenous manifestations of a Sarah Palin, a Michele Bachmann, a Rick Perry; it has even mortally diseased the once-staid moderates of the Tim Pawlentys. GOP pols of human diversity and variation are an evolutionary memory: they're now just pez-dispensed automatons of stepford wives and pod pals.

Yet the ever-increasing, intensely concentric pressures of devolutionary inbreeding and ideological purification can be -- indeed, always are -- a real political bummer. And the GOP's really bad trip will in time come -- if not first from its Ryanesque grotesquery and McConnellite indifference -- from the simple inexorability of demographics. Again, Politico:

[M]any Bushies believe the party’s continued refusal to make a deal on immigration reform and the nativist tone of some conservative activists will consign the GOP to irrelevance as the country’s changing demographics take hold over the long-term. "If you look at it purely from a political standpoint, Republicans in Texas and throughout the nation are going to get their clocks cleaned eventually if they don’t reach an agreement on immigration," said former White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett.

True, yet neither does it stop at just the immigration issue. The GOP is actively hostile to women's rights and virtually all minorities' concerns; the party is enclosing, isolating and trapping itself in a white shell of swan-song hubris. Its old-school strategists have to know where this self-entrapment leads.  

Hence, although I reject Politico's initial premise, I find its speculative conclusion spot on:

Should Republicans run on unadulterated conservatism and lose next year even amid a weak economy ... [s]omeone could emerge from the ashes and push a David Cameron-style effort to modernize the GOP.

That would be ... Jon Huntsman, even though he's foolishly befouling his own future nest by endorsing such witless doggerel as the Ryan plan. I would dissent from this guessed-at strategy, but maybe Huntsman believes he must be a good-soldier part of the GOP experience of hitting absolute rock bottom, before his fallen comrades will listen.

Another 'facts holiday'

As the NY Times reports this morning, the latest politico-corporate swindle (see GOP facilitation) -- yes, it is impossible to keep up -- is the "repatriation holiday" for overseas U.S. corporate cash, which would slash taxation here of "vast profits" held there.

The suits never tire of overselling:

Corporations and their lobbyists say the tax break could resuscitate the gasping recovery by inducing multinational corporations to inject $1 trillion or more into the economy, and they promoted the proposal as "the next stimulus" at a conference last Wednesday in Washington.

They were treated to such a holiday in 2005, and according to MIT economics professor Kristin Forbes, who was a member of Bush’s council of economic advisers:

"For every dollar that was brought back, there were zero cents used for additional capital expenditures, research and development, or hiring and employees wages."

The facts simply and plainly defy the politico-corporate promise of "the next stimulus." Therefore, look for this proposal to go far in Congress.

A winding response to Andrew Sullivan's "'Conservatism Is True,' Ctd"

Michele Bachmann's fitful incoherence delivered to the Right Online rally yesterday nevertheless briefly but perfectly captured one essential distinction between contemporary conservatism and elemental liberalism. She bellowed:

So do you feel as rich as you did two years ago?

In an economy like today's -- courtesy of a conservative mismanagement unwitnessed since the oblivious Jazz Age -- with so many suffering from material deprivation or at minimum a real and justifiable fear of material deprivation, Bachmann's use of that second, four-letter word was obscenely revealing: Are you rich enough?

Or perhaps I have my emphasis wrong. Perhaps Bachmann's deeper obscenity came more abbreviated: Are you rich enough?

Also yesterday, C-Span's BookTV aired a recent talk given by Mario DiNunzio at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, in which the historian culled, from the president's Second Inaugural Address, what he and many others would deem a proud reflection of liberalism's primal character:

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

To me, the philosophical beauty of that line lies in its rhetorical omission: one notes with awe and admiration progressive Roosevelt's conservative temperament in observing that those who are suffering possess too little, while the comfortable have, simply and unmodified, much. No radical redistributionist talk, no leveling sentimentalism, no social upheavals promised or incited; just a sense of American community with that selfless touch of American moderation: Progress is measured by its lack of extremes.

I believe I can venture without great elaboration that within progressive moderation there inheres a prodigious pragmatism -- the absolute epicenter of Rooseveltian liberalism, which, as so many American historians have observed (most notably Richard Hofstadter, in his magnificent Age of Reform), marked the fundamental shift, in effect the philosophical role reversals, of American progressivism and conservatism. Suddenly, it was much of the formerly utopian left that metamorphosed into New Deal progressives willing to experiment with down-to-earth, practical solutions to seemingly unamenable socioeconomic problems, while once hard-nosed, dollars-and-cents conservatives flew into reactionary, idealistic clouds of unreachable fantasy, and thus social indifference.

And not much has changed since, except that President Roosevelt's pragmatism is perhaps more pragmatic than ever under President Obama, and conservatives are profoundly untethered, more than ever, from reality.

Therefore, the below response to Andrew Sullivan's Friday response, of:

[A]lthough I acknowledge that for an entire generation or two, "conservatism" has come to mean ideological, fundamentalist, cultural panic and hallucinogenic economics, I don't want to concede the tradition of Burke, Babbitt, Hayek and Oakeshott to the left.

Mr. Sullivan, if non-ideological pragmatism defines in any durable way the philosophical tradition of authentic conservatism, then authentic conservatives' "choice" of left-right definition is approaching the Hobsonian.

Michele Bachmann, dimly lit

Historically there have in America been presidential candidates who campaigned on behalf of the most singular of issues: one thinks of the Prohibitionist or Greenback or Silver or Anti-Masonic parties, organizational creatures of intense narrowness whose chief protagonists were of similarly narrow intensity on the campaign trail.

They're still kicking around out there, these pathetic hopefuls, plotting national and possibly world domination and, in their own minds, with invariable and inexorable success -- for they, or so they hallucinate, have stumbled on the one invincible key to electoral victory.

We should be thankful that candidates of our two enduring political parties resist the third-party temptation to go cheap and easy; to land on some one, electrifying issue that might mobilize broad discontent, stir the phlegmatic masses and portend a national revolution of most unAmerican rebelliousness. And that's why I, for one, enthusiastically endorse the cerebral universality of GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, who announced last night, at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, in New Orleans, and I quote ...

President Bachmann will allow you to buy any light bulb you want.

Springtime for the right

It's a bit past the fecund season of spring, nevertheless the right's enchanting ideological edicts of candidate-straitjacket design are still blooming afresh across this once-great nation of Republican wreckage.

There's Grover Norquist's all-encompassing no-new-taxes pledge, of course; admittedly battered after this week's Senate vote to repeal ethanol subsidies, but you can bet your voter ID card that Grover will be back, shoving his wretched extortion demand under GOP noses with renewed, Corleone-like vigor. 

As well, Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul have all obediently signed the Susan B. Anthony List diktat that as president they would only "nominate judges and appoint executive branch officials who are opposed to abortion," that they would "push legislation to end all taxpayer funding of abortion," and, naturally, that they would ruthlessly assault half of our population by defunding the boogeywoman of Planned Parenthood.

(Note of interest: Mitt Romney refuses to sign the diktat, which indicates not, of course, that Mitt Romney has finally adopted a principle, but merely that Mitt Romney believes he's the nomination in his pocket and therefore he doesn't really need to play nicely with all the other children.)

And now comes Sen Jim DeMint from the doctrinaire (and primary) cesspool of South Carolina, vowing to oppose any GOP presidential nominee who intelligently rebuffs the new "Cut, Cap, and Balance" pledge, which, as you know, would in reality cut, cap, and balance the federal budget with the same threefold and exacting degree to which Voltaire defined the Holy Roman Empire: neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

It is, in my opinion, a good thing for Republican presidential candidates to sign such pledges, various edicts and assorted diktats, for each conceptually points to the absolute essence of the contemporary GOP: Leaders should be forbidden to think, to ever act pragmatically on the exigencies of the day, to even once apply independent thought to a national problem or predicament; they should instead be bound by the untender chains of an inescapable ideology, for in that lies an unthinking, prefigured comfort. Individual initiative and human intelligence and the small-r republican capacity to grow -- i.e., what the framers of the U.S. Constitution embraced and encouraged -- are suspect, unpredictable, and quite possibly perilous. 

I give you, the modern GOP -- stuck in its own muck.

(When) Do we care?

The NY Times' Roger Cohen writes, with his customary excellence, that Republican critiques of President Obama's foreign policy as one stemming sentimentally from "the capitals of Europe," or as a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" view, or as one steeped in a "lack of faith in American exceptionalism" are ... "baloney!"

I like Cohen's direct approach, concur with his assessment, and admire his brevity. On the other hand, do Americans, as Cohen asserts, really "care about foreign policy," when such policy turns physical?

Doubtless they do when it -- Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan -- inflicts pain at home, but only subsequent to their nationalistic expectations of thwarting, in a kind of blitzkrieging way, the godless Reds or the sinisterly swarthy -- Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. As with the economy, the American voter seems to believe that mere presidential determination should -- can -- equal clean and instant success. When he, the voter, finds that the enemy, too, gets a vote in the outcome, his martial exuberance tends to suffer.

This much is well known, but further seems to redefine -- or bifurcate -- the meaning of "care." Upon entering a brawl overseas, Americans are, by and large, extraordinarily care-less. Yet they begin to care deeply when their initial indifference to the human and fiscal cost of brawling strikes home. We simply haven't the spiritual fortitude of, say, the Achaeans at Troy, and perhaps that's a good thing. I just wish we "cared" at the start of these bloody things.  

Bombs away!

At 'Netroots Nation' yesterday,

four panelists -- [gay-activist Lt. Dan] Choi, immigration reform supporter Felipe Matos, America Blog writer John Aravosis and Fire Dog Lake Founder Jane Hamsher -- said they are planning to hold the White House's collective feet to the fire for its decisions on civil rights, whether it would hurt Obama's reelection chances or not.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to chuckle. I realize these are serious issues, and in no way do I diminish their importance. But being threatened by the adolescent malcontents of the utterly insignificant, whining teapot-tempests of Americablog and FireDogLake is like being under fire from the Italian infantry, circa 1943. One scarcely notices.

Andrew Sullivan's declaration of independence

Notwithstanding the left's perception of a monolithic right, there are conservatives of public intellectualism paddling mightily against modern conservatism's indulgent tide of ideological detritus. Earlier this week David Brooks made an admirable if flawed attempt -- he can't quite shake his vestigial ties of partisanship -- but, yesterday, Andrew Sullivan's was pitch perfect.

He opened with some basics:

[A]s I studied political philosophy more deeply, the core argument for conservatism was indeed that it was truer to humankind's crooked timber; that it was more closely tethered to earth rather than heaven; that it accepted the nature of fallen man and did not try to permanently correct it, but to mitigate our worst instincts and encourage the best, with as light a touch as possible. Religion was for bishops, not presidents. Utopias were for liberals; progress was not inevitable; history did not lead in one obvious direction; we are all limited by epistemological failure and cultural bias.

Mr. Sullivan, please allow this observation: The philosophical distance between your old-school conservatism and my pragmatic progressivism is, at its widest point, tissue thin. Although a tenacious socialist in primal ideals, I haven't experienced a utopian thought since my sophomore year in college, and I no more believe in the concept of human perfectibility than would the president of Cynics Anonymous. Indeed, I suffer from borderline misanthropy, albeit like so many misty misanthropists, in the abstract I love unconditionally the human race. My epistemological failures are many, my cultural bias endures, and the inevitability of progress, in my view, remains an open and precarious question.

So we begin, essentially, from interchangeable foundations: yours a kind of progressive conservatism, mine a conservative progressivism -- that, indeed, of old-school liberalism, which is to say, a contemporary pragmatic progressivism of the FDR school of politics. While you may wish to punctuate the conservatism of your progressivism, and I the progressivism of my conservatism, the conscientious student of history accepts that within the FDR exercise of pragmatic progressivism, there is no appreciable, philosophical emphasis on either noun or modifier. Since we live in the real world, each is intrinsically circumscribed by the other.

All of which -- but especially in its blanket rejection of simplistic ideologies -- accords rather nicely with your penetrating exegesis of contemporary conservatism:

[On whatever the issue] today's GOP could not be less conservative. I'd insist it's less conservative than Obama. It does not present reality-based reform for emergent problems. It simply reiterates dogma and ruthlessly polices dissent or debate... [I]t's Levin-land: either total freedom or complete slavery and a rhetorical war based entirely on that binary ideological spectrum. In other words, ideological performance art: brain-dead, unaware of history, uninterested in policy detail, bored by empiricism, motivated primarily by sophistry, Manicheanism, and factional hatred.

In my view the key and incontrovertible words in that delightfully brutal summary are "reality-based" and "empiricism." Those concepts are all the pragmatic progressive asks for when it comes to setting policy. It is more axiom than opinion, I'd venture, that humankind has always striven for progress, which renders that fundamental behavior empirical. Yet as the French and later the Russians proved with exceptional ethnic talent, progress, when overambitious, can be idiosyncratically and profoundly regressive. Without an attentive eye to the deathless inconvenience of worldy realities -- to which ideology, almost by definition, is blind -- excessively rapid progress ensures only squalid backlash and violent backsliding.

If I differ at all with your assessment, Mr. Sullivan, such difference lies in, I suppose one could say, your seeming immediacy:

[T]oday's unconservative "conservatism" is a movement held together by cultural resentment and xenophobic panic. Until it wrests free of this trap, it deserves its Palinesque fate: an ideology wrapped in anachronism, and laced with venom.

I'm reluctant to get into the historical "origins" game, since once begun, one soon discovers there is no chronological end; that is, there is no indisputable, pin-pointable beginning point for virtually any contemporary phenomenon. That said, I would nevertheless suggest that though chronically unwell, authentic "conservatism" is alive, as your essay yesterday, and on frequent occasions before, showed. Yet rather than labeling today's immensely corrupted version of conservatism as "unconservative," might I suggest you adopt historian Richard Hofstadter's 1960s' critical characterization of "pseudoconservatism" (regarding the ideological, radical right of that era). You are correct in seeing what flourishes now as un-conservative, but because its unscrupulous "conservative" practitioners insist on advertising their advocacy of it with a prodigiously pseudointellectual flamboyance, then let us, in turn, properly label their version for what it is: pseudoconservative.

The magic of certitude

Bruce Bartlett, formerly of the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations, restates reality in the face of Tim Pawlenty's fantasty-driven economic plan:

Pawlenty would cut the top individual income tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, cut the corporate rate from 35 percent to 15 percent, and eliminate completely all taxation of capital gains, interest and dividends.... Implausibly, Pawlenty asserted that despite reducing revenues by some $8 trillion over the next 10 years ... his plan would balance the budget. I could find no data or analysis of how Pawlenty’s plan would actually achieve this goal....

What is holding back business investment is not taxes, but poor economic prospects. For some time, members of the National Federation of Independent Business have listed "poor sales" as their number one problem. Businesses are not going to invest, no matter how low the tax rate is, if there is no demand for their output.

Now if only there were a GOP demand for reason and empirical evidence.

I divulge this yearning notwithstanding the fascinating NY Times article yesterday, "Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth," in which it is noted that

some [cognitive science] researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose [than 'the search for truth']: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick ... is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena. According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another. Certitude works, however sharply it may depart from the truth.

Hence the modern GOP's key political insight: Never let them see you sweat; which is another way of saying, just blather with towering confidence about whatever is easier for the gaping masses to comprehend. While Democrats convulse over yet another Keynesian analysis of federal spending's multiplier effect, Republicans scream "Cut the budget!" and from this will come "jobs!"

A simple thought experiment. Imagine yourself at a diner, in which you overhear three seated people. One asks the other two, "I wonder how we can reduce unemployment in this country?" The second begins to mumble about some guy "by the name of J.M. Keynes who confronted this very issue back in the early 20th century and what he econometrically determined through keen ..."; while the third person blurts with stentorian certainty, "The goddamn government needs to stop spending so goddamn much money so we can all get back to goddamn work!"

Whom do you think the innocent inquirer is more likely to believe?

"Certitude works, however sharply it may depart from the truth."

"A human tragedy"

On MSNBC, former DNC spokeswoman Karen Finney just referred to the Weiner Affair as "a human tragedy."

The Holocaust was a human tragedy. Stalin's purges and show trials were human tragedies. The American Civil War was a human tragedy, as were the Hundred Years War and a thousand others.

Now, thus framed, what was the Weiner Affair?

The GOP's war

From The Hill, rumblings of an uncivil war:

A series of policy battles that have broken out among House Republicans poses a significant challenge to Speaker John Boehner’s effort to unify his troops on a bill raising the nation’s debt ceiling.

A "series" is understatement. The battles resemble a deluge, ranging from a payroll tax holiday, agency regulations, agricultural subsidies, "homeland" (God, how I detest that term) security spending, the Afghanistan war, the Medicare debacle, the House budget, and, of all things, patent reform.

These collective clowns couldn't ideologically agree on the color of the sky; the prospect of Establishment vs. Revolutionaries has always loomed, and now the division is taking material form. 

Every day I feel more confident in predicting that within five years, or three, or one or two, the Tea Partiers will formally split from the Republican party and form a third. As it stands, Republicans are more internally splintered than Democrats -- and that, gentle reader, is, as you know, a lethal fragmentation.

The GOP development represents a thunderous contradiction, to be sure, since this is the party that voted nearly uniformly for Ryan's Medicare-killing budget plan; yet the cracks were always there, just waiting for political realities -- especially those in swing districts -- to expose them.

And?

No-news HEADLINES: Extra! Extra!

NYT: "Weiner Tells Friends He Will Step Down"

WaPo: "Weiner to step down from House, sources say"

Politico: "Anthony Weiner to resign"

The Hill: "Rep. Weiner decides to resign"

Thus surges another day of titillating nothingness, swamping the notoriously real.

Nostalgia gone wild

Time, and the ever-creeping, always-predictable degradations of the present, have a way of afflicting even the best minds with what I would call nostalgic pixilation, a pitiable state of delusional cognition, which I see has struck E.J. Dionne bad -- indeed, in the worst way. 

Perhaps I should thank the current crop of Republican presidential candidates for providing me with an experience I never, ever expected: During this week’s debate in New Hampshire, I had a moment of nostalgia for George W. Bush.

Children of the Light: Let us pray for Brother Dionne.

I quite agree with him that a panel of befuddled Bachmanns and grinchy Gingriches was enough to turn one's historical head -- to look backward, wistfully, and with near delight, at the mere constitutional horrors of a Dick Nixon, or the simple, reactionary travesties of a Ronald Reagan. But George W. Bush? That George W. Bush, of "compassionate conservatism"? No. Never. One might as well long for the decisiveness of James Buchanan, or the humility of Andrew Jackson, or the stand-up comedy of George Washington.

Dionne falls freshly for one of Karl Rove's oldest tricks: that of recognizing one's greatest political weakness -- in 1999 and 2000, Rove saw it in his party and candidate's debilitating compassion-deficit -- and then, out of whole rhetorical cloth, simply declaring the opposite to be one's greatest strength. Thus George W., who cared deeply about further comforting his own socioeconomic class, became the working class' "compassionate conservative."  

As proof of Bush's sincerity, Dionne, for evidential reasons unknown, quotes from a Bush speech, from 1999: "We have always found our better selves in sympathy and generosity, both in our lives and in our laws." To this, Dionne remarks, "Amen." My response would be somewhat less favorable: "Bullshit." Classic Barnum-Bushian bullshit, that is, QED.

The same shell game applied to candidate Bush's murmurings about a "humble" foreign policy. In reality he itched to be a war president -- they and only they go down in the history books as the "great" ones, Condi had schooled him -- and soon enough, he scratched. Defenseless Afghanistan wasn't near enough of a challenge; he needed a crippled, third-rate power he could nevertheless believably market as a formidable and necessary target. The boogeyman of Saddam's was a chickenhawk's dream.

Dionne admirably concludes with a sobered implication:

Bush nostalgia takes you only so far. The 43rd president, who might have given life to a constructive sort of moderate conservatism, instead unleashed the Tea Party furies that now engulf the Republican Party and threaten to turn Michele Bachmann, of all people, into a political giant.

I profoundly disagree with his tentative Bachmann hypothesis -- she's a sideshow of the GOP's currently running freakshow, destined perhaps to lead a dependably insignificant third party of Tea, but nothing more -- yet Dionne suggests a probable historical truism: It wasn't so much a black, quasi-progressive Democratic president who laid the groundwork for Tea Party lunacy as it was the infinite stupidities of the pseudoconservative George W. Bush administration.  

The year of Democratic samizdat?

Welcome to House Republicans' version of American exceptionalism, which means whatever they take exception to, is unAmerican. I guess if mere, second-generation Orwellian Luntzism fails to sufficiently deceive the electorate, then one should try one's hand at outright censorship.

From The Hill, quoting Democratic Rep. John Yarmouth:

The Republican-controlled Franking Commission, which controls content of mailings from congressional offices, is now dictating that any reference to the end of Medicare be cut out from correspondence. Whenever the word "end" is used, they say we have to use the word "change."

Rep. Gerry Connolly called it "blatant and transparent censorship."

I'm not allowed to refer to changing Medicare to a voucher system [said Connolly], even though Mr. Ryan himself referred to it as a voucher system. I must now call it a premium support system. This censorship would make former Soviet censors blush.

Five Democratic Members have written to Speaker Boehner, complaining that they have "surmise[d] that there is a deliberate, strategic attempt to censor any Member communication that echoes the widespread public criticism of the Republican Plan for Medicare."

What next for the Dems? A 2012 campaign of samizdat? Secret, forested communities of liberals who memorize the collected works of John Kenneth Galbraith? 'Radio Free Democrats' broadcasting from the Antilles?

How many times must Theodor Adorno's Authoritarian Personality be validated, vindicated and confirmed? The right detests free and open debate, and it loves the iron fist.

Those horrified neo-neoconservatives

Rarely in the history of newspaper publishing has such a preeminent organ of the fourth estate so cruelly missed the point. From the NY Times:

The hawkish consensus on national security that has dominated Republican foreign policy for the last decade is giving way to a more nuanced view, with some presidential candidates expressing a desire to withdraw from Afghanistan as quickly as possible and suggesting that the United States has overreached in Libya....

The array of Republican viewpoints, which have drawn new lines among neo-conservatives, Tea Party supporters, traditional hawks and other elements of the party, were on display during the first major presidential debate on Monday night, as the candidates started to mull the limits of American power at a time when some of the threats to the nation are less clear and its willingness to commit resources of all kinds is being looked at anew.

There is no GOP mulling "of the limits of American power," and there sure as hell is no "nuanced view" among its vastly opportunistic, major presidential candidates. Like everything else in Republicans' dimestore Weltanschauung, there may be shifts, but those shifts are wholly politically motivated and altogether researched and developed for mass-marketing purposes only.

When Republicans knew they could thump their nationalistic chests and recklessly commit American power overseas and humiliate the political opposition with cries of its "weakness," they did. Now that President Obama is prosecuting same, without the hubris and recklessness, they claim to be horrified by military commitments and appalled by any political spin ever put on national security.

Their foreign-policy perspective is as simple, as straightforward, as utterly mindless as: Whatever Obama is doing, we're against it. That, in seven words, is the entire GOP playbook on how to confront the immeasurably complex mutations of international relations.

Only at the very end of the Times piece did Jeff Zeleny's reporting even approach the political reality of Republican foreign policy:

John Ullyot, a former Marine intelligence officer who served as a Republican spokesman on the Senate Armed Services Committee during the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, said Tuesday that the party’s unified approach to foreign policy is steadily shifting.

"Republicans clearly sense fatigue among voters with our decade-long effort in Afghanistan, particularly after the killing of Bin Laden and the lack of a reliable partner," Mr. Ullyot said. "There is no stampede yet, but more Republicans are willing to raise tougher questions when it comes to committing our forces and sustaining long-term and costly engagements."

In short, they never really meant it. "It" was popular then, so they pushed it. It's looking unpopular now -- with you-know-who at the helm -- so they're agin' it.

Integrity, always integrity.

Romney's gossamer flings

I'm not particularly troubled by Mitt Romney's rather peculiar, public personality of hyper-wholesome inelegance -- what Dana Milbank labels this morning as "equal parts 'Leave It to Beaver' corniness and social awkwardness" -- mostly because I've enormous sympathy for anyone who must try to behave as a complete stranger's best or long-lost friend, just to get his or her vote, which is the quadrennial curse of all early-primary candidates.

Besides, other chief executives have been endowed with their share of personal weirdness: Tom Jefferson would flop around the White house in slippers and bedrobes and greet diplomatic envoys in such; FDR would mix afternoon cocktails for invited guests and declare his to be "Yummy!"; and Richard Nixon was so frightened by humanity that his forehead lived in a physiological state of permanent beads of sweat. And two of those president are properly ranked "great."

So as for Mitt? Let him ply his personal awkwardness. Who cares? What does trouble, though, is Mitt's apparent cranial vacuum; and what troubles even more is that no one in the press bothers to tenaciously inquire about it.

To explain: Romney persists in pronouncing Obama's economic policies to be disastrous, calamitous, yada yada; then he invariably adds that what this country needs is a good, private-sector job-creation plan. Peachy. But what's the plan?

Is it that in January, 2013, private employers will recognize that the new U.S. president possesses business experience (chiefly that of laying off thousands of workers) and so will automatically leap to hire by the millions, notwithstanding the economy's absence of aggregate demand? The latter of which was exacerbated, by the way, by Congressional Republicans having slashed government spending?

What, will Romney announce that his economic plan is a secret one -- like Nixon's peace plan? -- and we'll just have to wait to be awed?

Have I missed something from Mitt? Has he itemized any economic plan -- any real plan? -- other than his abstract catechism of private-sector mumbo-jumbo and free-market hocus-pocus and, naturally, more tax-cutting humbug?

To the political press: Would you mind, terribly much, asking him?

Mitch McConnell: "[We] crazy Republicans"

The National Journal's lede contains what first strikes the reader as oozing sarcasm ...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has some advice for President Obama as high-stakes debt and deficit talks intensify this week: Give Republicans all they want in spending cuts and don't raise taxes

... until one reads the lubricious quote:

"I can say pretty confidently, as the speaker has, that we are not going to raise taxes in this agreement," McConnell told National Journal during a lengthy interview in his Capitol office. "And what the president ought to say to his own political left is, 'Those crazy Republicans won’t let me raise taxes, but we need to do this for the country.' "

There inheres in those lines a complex tangle of arrogance, ignorance, fanaticism and infantilism, clarified chiefly through the profoundly Freudian humor of creeping self-awareness: "[We] crazy Republicans." Evidently -- to us, if not entirely to Sen. McConnell -- projecting an image of emotional instability and intellectual deficiency, as one enters negotiations upon which the nation's precarious future hangs, is now the political image of GOP choice.

Gone is any preposterous show of solemnity, that burdensome quality of character that once weighed down the serious likes of a Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt. It made a rough go of governing by whimsy and leading from the hip; better to just confess one's inner absurdity and let the policy cowchips fall where they may.

What the hell, it is only, as stated, the nation's future.

A first-rate abyss

That the question should be asked -- is "Michele Bachmann a first-tier candidate" for the presidency of the United States? -- is unquestionably the preeminent sign of abysmal direction on the desolate road of the GOP's intellectual wasteland.

The woman knows less about her own country's history than a chronically fidgety, inattentive fifth grader, and her witless McCarthyite proclivities make Joe look like a card-carrying ACLUer. The political "philosophy" in which she's steeped could be expatiated on one side of a tea bag, and "complexity" is a concept she has yet to encounter in this endlessly complex world.

That I exaggerate not, or at least not much, is perhaps the saddest comment of them all.

A pundit's vastly imperfect protest

David Brooks dreams of a new Hamiltonian Party with a "reinvigoration agenda" of entitlement reform, "early childhood education, technical education, community colleges, an infrastructure bank, asset distribution to help people start businesses, a new wave industrial policy," a simplification of the tax code and a "streamlining" of business regulations and "lower corporate rates, a sane visa policy for skilled immigrants, a sane patent and permitting system, more money for research."

Why a new party? Because, contends Brooks, "the two parties contesting this election are unusually pathetic."

Republican politicians don’t design policies to meet specific needs, or even to help their own working-class voters. They use policies as signaling devices — as ways to reassure the base that they are 100 percent orthodox and rigidly loyal.... The Republican growth agenda — tax cuts and nothing else — is stupefyingly boring, fiscally irresponsible and politically impossible.

As for the Democrats, they offer practically nothing.... They still have these grand spending ideas, but there is no longer any money to pay for them and there won’t be for decades.... [T]hey too are trapped in a bygone era. Mentally, they are living in the era of affluence, but, actually, they are living in the era of austerity.

Brooks' marked implication is that the two parties shoulder equal culpability for grinding this country to a fiscal pulp and then inflaming us with unrealistic expectations erected on impossible foundations. "[T]he two parties have grown more rigid," writes Brooks, so "Voters are in the market for new movements and new combinations."

I resist the cliche of "false equivalency." Nevertheless I'll use it this morning, because Brooks has discovered its Platonic Ideal.

For decades, Republicans have practiced the political skulduggery of Machiavellian fiscal murder most foul, and they finally have the Dems where they want them, which is in a chasmic hole from which the country may never crawl out. For decades they borrowed and spent and borrowed some more and spent some more and then they borrowed yet more and spent yet more with pornographic abandon, knowing all along they weren't trying to merely starve the beast of government, but essentially kill it -- to confine it in debtors prison and straitjacket our future.

This the traditionally conservative GOP accomplished by bamboozling a moderately conservative electorate into thinking that its fiscal policies were -- what else? -- traditional conservative policies, when in reality they were pseudoconservative humbug strategically designed to eviscerate the federal government, to gut New Deal and Great Society entitlements, to slash huge holes in our social safety nets, to maroon us forever on an inhospitable isle of grim austerity.

Did Democrats fail to sound the alarms? Did they cravenly duck under the GOP's demagogic fire? Did they cede philosophical territory, inch by inevitably destructive inch? Rhetorical questions all, but to now equate Democratic transgressions of cowardice with Republicans' sins of aggression, as David Brooks seems to do, is both harsh and unjustifiably harsh. And blind.

Democrats aided and to some extent abetted, but there is only one indictable villain here -- and it is ethically incumbent on authentic conservatives of public intellectualism to unseal that indictment and reveal the culprit's identity to the rank-and-file, conservative electorate. 

Democratic ideas for a better future can go nowhere because of ... Republican crimes; as well, and somewhat ironically, Brooks' own ideas for a "reinvigoration agenda" under a fanciful Hamiltonian Party can go nowhere because of ... Republican crimes. At the hands of a narrow minority of grotesquely reactionary ideologues we have, collectively, been hogtied, cheated, lied to, fettered, hobbled, and now stampeded into a quite possibly inescapable pit of national decline.

There is a path out, but it must begin with honest conservatives being honest about who, principally, got us here, and why, and how.

Soft-padded Pawlenty

It seems to me that there isn't much mystery behind Tim Palwenty's remarkable poltroonery last night. He has quietly conceded the race, and is already looking forward to Mitt Romney's call about the Number Two slot. Meanwhile he'll be a good, obedient little puppy dog on the campaign trail.

Damn, that was fast.

But maybe I'm wrong and Pawlenty will soon stop licking them and grow some new and bigger ones instead.

"Our rivers are full of fish"

What a numbing experience -- a panel of virtually indistinguishable ideologues and their relentless pounding on government as a universally negative force. Numbing, exhausting, and infinitely depressing. All would effectively preside over the closing of the federal government. They had little of interest and nothing of value to say.

Pawlenty was tonight's big loser: he was flat, dazed, unenergized, stiff, unimaginative and shockingly unassertive. He even failed to punch Romney on 'Obamneycare.'

Romney, Bachmann and Santorum all misrepresented the unqualified success of Obama's auto rescue; Gingrich opened by declaring that what we're suffering through economically is "Obama's depression." Oh, and I believe I heard Gingrich return to opposing Ryan's Medicare plan, since, sans sufficient public support, it moves too fast and too comprehensively. Points for Gingrich's political independence here (which was the only exception to my earlier pronouncement of nothing of value presented) -- and triple points awarded for what must be, by now, a quadruple flip-flop. Otherwise Gingrich was his old, vintage attack machine, proclaiming that the current president, who naturally desires reelection, is "anti-jobs, anti-business, and anti-American."  

Cain proved himself an idiot. Enough said on that. Paul rambled predictably about the wickedly destructive Fed and the need for economic "corrections," meaning endless and repetitive pain for 95 percent of the population. Pawlenty thanks and supports our troops, and he'd kill the bad guys. Bachmann -- poll-tested alert -- was horrified that Obama would "defer to France" on Libya. Santorum perceived Obama's "failure of leadership"; the president has also "embraced our enemies."

I lost count of the number of times Gingrich said "fundamentally."

Not one of the candidates mentioned the federal deficit's contributions from George W. Bush's two unfunded tax cuts, two unfunded wars and a gigantic entitlement program, also unfunded. The deficit is Obama's fault, because Obama is pro-big-government, as are all Democrats, case closed.

These candidates, and their friendly auditors, are living in an altogether unidentifiable universe.

Bachmann likes human life. Gingrich dislikes "political elites." Romney likes the idea of energy independence. Pawlenty dislikes Pepsi.

All of which reminded me of the infamous 1948 (Louisville, Kentucky) Courier Journal editorial that observed of GOP presidential candidate Tom Dewey: his campaign could be "boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. The future lies ahead." 

The irony of whine

The luscious irony of it all: just now, libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson on MSNBC decrying the "unfairness" of CNN, a private media corporation, debarring him from tonight's GOP debate.

I'm sorry, but aren't such decisions merely a part of the glorious free-market system? Do they not, speaking from a business-school point of view, "rationalize" themselves in time? Aren't there, inevitably, winners and losers in such a system?

And Gary, you happen to be one of the losers. Painful, is it not? But what are you looking for, Gary? Some manner of impartial mediator, judge, interventionist?

Oh Gary, what are we going to do with the likes of today's libertarians, already whining about how unfair some private decisions are -- those, that is, that directly, adversely affect them, and only them. Damn, Gary, surely you know to what monstrosity such thinking leads.

The GOP's unprecedented hostility

The American tradition holds. Only our love of baseball emotionally rivals our hatred of Congress.

A striking 68 percent of likely voters polled said the ethical standards of politicians have deteriorated in recent decades.... Meanwhile, 58 percent of voters think most members of Congress are "unethical".... Overall, 69 percent of likely voters said they somewhat or strongly disapproved of the job Congress is doing.

The optimistic view is that there's a built-in factor of a roughly 50-percent detestation of Congress, since the populace is customarily rather evenly split along partisan lines. When Democrats are in control, about half of the nation believes the institution is hopelessly corrupt, unethical, unprincipled and in general unbearable; when Republicans control, same belief, different believers. When control of Congress is divided, as it is now, then public disaffection is bound to inch up, due to a political synergy of antagonistic feelings greater than its parts.

Still, I wouldn't go so far as to venture the cocky opinion that little or nothing has changed. We have in America always harbored one major party that is less respectful of, let's say, government's benevolence (potential or real) than the other. In the 19th century, the labels were flipped, with Democrats broadly distrustful of the federal government and Whigs/Republicans favorable toward it. Contemporary conservatives, though are quite literally something else. They are intensely pathological in their seething denunciations of, and their fundamentally irrational hostility toward, government -- in a way not witnessed since the antebellum period's sectional breakdown. Even then, however, one could advance the plausible argument that America was composed of two distinct, irreconcilable cultures bound to politically divide. Thus Southern Democratic hostility toward Washington made some political sense, however demagogically stretched it was.

Today, one can try mightily to reconcile the GOP's flamboyant hostility with reality, and it just isn't possible -- no way, no how, in any manner; other, that is, than that it plays magnificently with the primary base. For virtually every national ill that begs a logical cure -- e.g., tax increases to reduce the federal deficit -- today's Republicans stand illogically and monolithically opposed to what is in fact (contrary to the sectional dispute) a rather simple fix. 

One reasonable conclusion: today's Republicans are even less patriotic, or nationalistic, or whatever sociopolitical term you care to use, than 1850s Democrats.

Somewhere there's political gold in this argument, I think, if today's Democrats could only determine how to effectively mine it.

Go Mitt go

I sense a remarkable prematurity in Politico's assessment that Mitt Romney

increasingly looks like the 2012 election’s marathon man, a steady and durable candidate who enters Monday’s New Hampshire presidential debate with a better shot than ever at becoming his party’s nominee.

But I hope my antennae are mistaken.

Should Politico be correct, though, and should Romney begin snowballing into an irresistible force -- again, far too early for such a prediction, since Tim Pawlenty possesses formidable assets manufactured specifically for the GOP's immutably demented bloc -- his electoral losses could amass to a near unprecedented magnitude. 

One of two developments would almost (this far out, qualifiers abound) guarantee such a beating.

First, where would the unhinged Palinites and Bachmannesque cranks of Tea Partying lunacy go on Election Day? Nowhere: they'd stay home, there's simply no way that a former healthcare-mandating Massachusetts governor will ever coax their ideological vote. And since these absolutists constitute such a substantial portion of the modern Republican Party, all those lovely, delicately balanced swing states would obediently drop into Obama's category.

The other potential is even more inviting: an internal conservative war, manifested, in short order, by a third party of Tea. I have my doubts that Sarah Palin's dermatological thinness and deep, enduring personal greed will ever permit her the demanding and costly challenge of a presidential contest. But Michele Bachmann shows no such reluctance; indeed, she seems to be itching for a third-party chance to give the GOP establishment what for.

If so, then Tea Partiers would of course flock to the polls. And with each of their vampiric votes, the lifeblood of Romney's hopes for the White House would drip, drip, drain away.

Weiner should go

It's a curious phenomenon of modern American culture that, for sure, there are entire brigades of the mentally disturbed or characterologically flawed among us, but perhaps more worrisome, whole armies of handwringing diagnosticians. For every one American who's a little bit goofy or just plain nuts, there are five other Americans consulting Oprah or Psychology Today or The Learning Channel in a desperate, (to me) incomprehensible attempt to discern just what in hell is wrong with Bob, or Mary, or ... Anthony. 

I see Ross Douthat has joined the ranks of diagnostically obsessed:

[T]he sad case of Representative Anthony Weiner’s virtual adultery ... isn’t lust or smut or infidelity, though online life encourages all three. It’s a desperate, adolescent narcissism ... [and] a pathetic quest for quasipublic validation.

Could be. Probably is. Don't know. And I don't really care.

More curious still is that, as I understand it, contemporary clinical psychiatry doesn't really know and doesn't really care, either -- beyond the necessity, that is, of conjuring an insured diagnosis for the paramount purpose of professional compensation. After that, the pro can write a script for an anti-depressant and another to battle anxiety and then, therapy-less, send the poor schmuck back to work to retain his insurance, which will pay for more five-minute sessions to write more scripts for more pills.

What I do know with epistemological certainty is this, and it comes straight from my latest copy of 'The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Practical Politics': For his party and country, Anthony Weiner is an enormously unnecessary distraction. No one asked Weiner to make a narcissistic fool of himself: his case isn't one of being framed or unfairly assaulted by the opposition, in which case his party would be ethically and politically obligated to close ranks and defend. No, Weiner wanted to be all about Weiner. He got what he wanted, so alone he should go.

Finally, how extraordinarily curious that, in comparison to those House Republicans of rather easily diagnosable sociopathy, which is of real and profound harm to the nation, equal if not superior interest has been shown by inhabitants of modern American culture in one flawed but essentially harmless individual.

Gingrich's macro-campaign: I like it

It is of course a preposterous thought indeed that we mere mortals could ever fully comprehend the inner wonders that propel the inexpressible goodness and awesomely big ideas of presidential he-can-he-really-can-candidate Newt Gingrich. But I must say, last week he stumbled on one wonderous idea that I think we can all fathom (not in its gingrichy metaphysical wholeness, naturally, but in significant part) and possibly learn to love.  

It's about his "campaign," which is to say, he hasn't one. And I like that.

I'm serious now, don't laugh. I admire Newt's conceptual, Zenlike approach to non-campaign campaigning, if we assume the traditional definition of campaigning, which is that of slogging through the climatological extremes of Iowa and New Hampshire for two years and sipping bad tea and weak coffee with Christian fundamentalist bluehairs and assorted philistines of Yankee Babbittry. 

Screw it. Who needs it? I mean, do we really need that? Does sharpening one's retail political skills better enable a future president to answer Hillary's 3 a.m. phone call? To read a budget? To recognize that Eric Cantor is an insufferable assclown?

Of course not. Presidential candidates, in our primary system of gauntleted desensitization, may learn how to better tolerate ordinary America's living-room mobocracy, but all that press-the-flesh insincerity and all those moments of rehearsed soundbite glory make them a better chief executive not. I'd rather they invest their time reading Gibbon or something.

Now, that's Newt's big idea. True, it likely came about only out of necessity: that is, his wife wouldn't let him go play with the other president-wannabe boys and girls of Republican mediocrity and smallness. But let us not quibble about that; the invention is the thing. And here, I do believe that Newt is on to something authentically Big. 

By all means we can proceed with the state-by-state or regional primary system of party-nominee selection. I do mean by all means; preferably, however, with a manifest emphasis on one: the one in which plausible candidates travel the entire land, without geographical focus, debating, jousting, probing one another in freewheeling candidate forums, unfurling policy papers at equally freewheeling press conferences, addressing all the voters in all the states simultaneously, and all it of nationally televised -- in other words, macro-campaigning.

We've more than 300 million interested parties. The age of micro-, retail campaigns -- launched on the less than universal profundity of ethanol subsidies -- should be mercifully euthanized.

Something along these electoral lines, I gather, is the idea that Newt has in mind. And it, finally, at long last, is a genuinely Big one. To be sure, it is also not, in reality, all that new. Nonetheless, Big it is. And I couldn't agree with him more. 

Public Knowledge: On the Dismantling of Intellectual Virtue

In the Washington Post's regularly helpful feature, "We read so you don't have to," Justin Moyer takes note of playwright and ultraconservative-convert David Mamet's billowing caprice as revealed in his latest "screed": The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. From Moyer's synopsis we receive no clue as to the main title's origin, although I suspect that Mamet, as a newborn "insider" of the right, now regards himself as having been initiated into a temple of esoteric insight which only the once-blind can so blissfully experience.

I myself take note of Mamet's conversion only because it signals an unmistakable mental, Moonie-like programming -- a pernicious process endemic to all cocksure ideologies, be they political or religious (with my apologies for the perhaps artificial distinction). As Moyer observes with a recitational chortle, Mamet's opinions are now "unrelenting in [their] criticism of socialism, President Obama, taxes, Fidel Castro, affirmative action, the United Nations, the liberal arts, Jews who defend Palestine, MoveOn.org and Jane Fonda." But those aren't opinions. They're a catechism, thoroughly cleansed and approved by committee.

The one that caught my historical eye was this:

Mamet contends that FDR’s tinkering with the American economy actually worsened the Great Depression. "In an attempt to Do Good for All, he dismantled the free market, and, so, the economy and saddled our country not only with 'social programs,' but with the deeper, unconscious legacy of belief in Social Programs, irrespective of their effectiveness," he writes.

All of that, now articles of faith on the revisionist right, is impeccable humbug. And the humbug is at least threefold.

First, the far left of Roosevelt's era ferociously assaulted his economic policies as having saved the free market system, which they did (until Roosevelt's interventions, the danger of a complete capitalist collapse was both real and possibly imminent); and Roosevelt, as a liberal politician of conservative temperament, never possessed any other intention. Second, far from the president "saddling" the nation's populace with social programs, he met an increasingly boisterous, bottom-up demand for such. All, and I mean all, traditional and private measures of public relief, from benefit societies to fraternal organizations to churches' emergency funds, had, by 1933, been consumed and exhausted. Only government remained. Last, to assert that Roosevelt cherished the New Deal's social programs "irrespective of their effectiveness" simply flies in the well-known face of his experimental pragmatism. He and his brain trust were willing to try pretty much anything, but above all it had to work; if it didn't, then they tried something else.

One or two other things. There is, in my opinion, considerable merit in the historical interpretation of the New Deal as rather mild reform. Doubtless, the far left contemporaneously saw it that way, and much of the right's hysteria in portraying it as radical and FDR as a socialist was merely a shameless political gambit. In addition, the prodigiously positive effects of Keynesianism were never competently introduced or economically realized until the coming of war. It was that spending -- not the New Deal's -- that first substantially mitigated and then ended the Great Depression.

Would the David Mamets of the right know or appreciate any of this? Unquestionably they've no humanitarian appreciation of FDR's 1930s, course-altering successes, however limited or politically restrained. But I suspect they know of them; indeed they know of them all too well -- otherwise they wouldn't rail against them with such intensely overreaching and almost inexplicable resentment.