The ultimate Tea Party, with Mitt dragged behind

The Post's Bernstein takes issue with Krugman on Romney:

I’d be very surprised if Republicans really do press austerity if they win unified control of government....

[A] lot of the anti-Keynesian talk we’ve heard over the past three years is almost certainly partisan, and not ideological, in nature. George W. Bush didn’t react to either recession during his time in office by championing spending cuts, after all.

Before going any farther, I first wish to point out that for all his tsk-tsking of President Obama's European bias, it is in fact Mitt Romney who has consistently advocated a European-style approach to U.S. economic recovery. To hear Romney tell it, when it comes to social-economic policy Obama is some sort of riddling Otto von Bismarck wrapped in a mysterious Clement Atlee inside an enigmatic François Mitterrand; yet it is Romney, in bewildering accord with his party's economus ignoramuses, who has repeatedly touted the disastrously foreign Merkel-Cameron-Sarkozy policy of strangulating austerity. Best stop there. If we get off on a Romney-hypocrisy jag, we'll be here all day.

The larger point requiring observation is that Jonathan Bernstein believes that Romney as president would re-re-re-convert to a some brand of Keynesian pragmatism, rather than, as his party now promises, ideologically slashing his (our) way to an economic apocalypse. And my point is, maybe Romney would indeed hew to sensible, empirical Keynesianism. On the other hand, maybe he wouldn't. Who knows? Which is one of the more troubling and most disturbing problematics with what is laughably called "contemporary conservatism": in reality an unmindfully erratic bunch of ever-shifting unpredictability with no core except, it can be argued, a nihilistic and anarchistic one.

I use these terms not lightly, but rather precisely. Contrary to common perception, anarchy isn't a political system, so to speak, in which everyone runs around like Emperor penguins stealing their neighbors' nest-pebbles, but rather a system in which there is, simply, no central authority (i.e., federal government); and nihilism isn't so much 19th-century Dostoyevskian agony or Nietzschean despair as it is the oversimplistic idea that things are so bad, it would be preferable to wipe the social-economic slate clean and start from scratch. 

In other words, anarchy and nihilism are the very "philosophical" species of the tea-partying radicals and revolutionaries who've been shoving the Republican Party farther and farther rightward for years now -- and revolutionaryism has a nasty habit of out-radicalizing itself, since the revolutionaries themselves feel the perpetual need to demonstrate their ever-purer purity.

Thus, before we realize the politico-philosophical catastrophe descending, we could -- "if they win unified control of government" -- be stuck with a Congress-cum-National Asylum full of Michele Bachmanns and Herman Cains, with a Gulliver on top, strapped by his loopy Lilliputians to idiotic policies such as "austerity."

The thing is, you see, with these guys, one never knows anymore.

Comments

[57andFemale]

Bernstein is so quaint. This would have been true of the past-reliable cynical Republican party, but not this time. This is the crew that laughed at the economic experts when the experts tried to explain to the Republicans in Congress how the debt ceiling worked. They laughed. This. Time. They. Mean. It. Bernstein pines for a time when Republicans actually cared about the financial health of the U.S. Mitt Romney has already said what he truly believes: let everything fall apart so the speculators can move in, buy all of the American houses (and ports, and services, and Medicare......) and bleed the country dry.

Romney is the most terrifying of them all, because he has no moral compass at all. Norquist is absolutely right: he will do what he is told without a nanosecond of conscience.

[57andFemale]

Besides, the meme that we should vote for a guy because he doesn't mean a word he says does not inspire confidence.

[majii]

While reading this post, I thought of the same thing 57andFemeale thought about-Norquist's assertion that the GOP doesn't need a thinker in the WH but someone who will mindlessly sign bills passed by a republican-dominated Congress. From what I've seen of Romney, he seems to be willing to do whatever he has to do to wield the reins of power, so I feel that if he were POTUS, he'd do whatever Norquist, Boehner, Cantor, McConnell, the Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street, etc, tells him to do and d@mn the nation and its citizens. His lack of core principles is dangerous because it sends me a signal that he just might be a man who will do things and feel not one ounce of regret if the results lead to multiple disasters of major proportion-a war in Iran that ushers in WWIII, the financial death of the U.S., a war on U.S. soil, the establishment of a theocracy, etc. These things, and others, keep me in an almost constant state of extreme concern about the future of our nation should any of the GOP candidates win in November. They're all equally dangerous.

[Robert Lipscomb]

I have doubted Obama's ability to be a transformational president because he did not a simple, understandable and strident principle to articulate and sell. He seemed to be destined to a quaint, moderate philosophy if figuring out the right thing to do and then do it.

Given the current political backdrop of this country, that might be the most radical idea of all.

[Peter G]

Well said Mr Lipscomb. With regard to austerity in Europe that is something that chooses the government rather than something a government chooses to do. It would be nice to think everyone can spend their way to prosperity in the Keynesian way but when your sovereign bond yields top 7 percent that isn't necessarily an option. It is for the United States but debatable for both France and Great Britain.