The 'ignorance' that George Will should really worry about

Paul Krugman:

[T]he modern American right doesn’t care about deficits, and never did. All that talk about debt was just an excuse for attacking Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and food stamps.

It's worse than that, as Krugman knows, but he had to economize toward column's end.

The worst-kept, indeed impossible-to-keep "conservative" secret is that the American right, since Reagan, has cared very much about deficits. It has cared about, caused and coddled them. The American right loves deficits, which were so easy and fun to procreate: just demagogue a litany of unfunded tax cuts, and demagogue an unfunded defense sprawl, and demagogue some unfunded wars, and hell, for good measure, even demagogue a lavish and unfunded expansion of the preexisting welfare state; and then, finally--and here's the right's really fun part--blame the entire, red-inked fiscal mess on big-spending, big-government liberals, to which a grotesquely sizable portion of the electorate will nod in sorry agreement, because of its propagandistic familiarity.

All of this is well known, of course; or at least the extent of its public comprehension is proportionate to the "informed" slice of our democracy--a slice that every small-r republican citizen works to expand.

But there's a problem with that civic formula.

The indefatigably ignorant of the right, like the overworked poor of the left, will always be with us; and yet the ignorant, very unlike the poor, possess an outsized enthusiasm for voting, which, naturally, keeps in public office a disproportionate percentage of knowing, and utterly disingenuous, ignoramuses-- who will never, never concede their disingenuity.

And there, then, is the real problem. One cannot negotiate with elected officials whose existential justification is grounded entirely in scheming misrepresentation and nihilistic disingenuity. We all, every small-r republican one of us, are desperately hanging on until 2013, when suddenly--or so we hope--a resurrecting age of reason and passable compromise and political detente will dawn. I have every confidence that President Obama will still be President Obama. But no matter what the ideological makeup of Congress, its rules and traditions will favor the re-ascendance of the schemingly nihilistic, who will by nature persist in blowing everything up.

Hence it may be less precise to say that "the modern American right doesn’t care about deficits" than to say, simply, that the modern American right doesn't care about America.

Comments

[AnneJ]

All I can do is sigh and ask "What will it take?" What will it take for the American electorate to finally wake up to this fact? And if there is an answer, I'm afraid to know what it is.

[Cernan Sixtyeight]

There's a law in Canada, making it unlawful for a news program to make up the news or lie. For this reason, Fox News is generally not allowed to broadcast in Canada. (If a viewer is really determined to view Fox, there are some alternatives, such as satellite but, the point is, since Fox is not news and lies about it, they are limited in Canada.)

We need to pass such a law in the U.S. This wouldn't be censorship. It would just compel Fox to, either start telling the truth or, if they wish to continue making up the "faux" news, they must put a disclaimer on the screen pointing out that what they're broadcasting isn't news. Doing this will go a long way to reducing ignorance in this country.

[Peter G]

I have long been of the same opinion that the ideological abhorrence on the right to any sort of social program spending manifests itself similar to a soon to be ex-spouse. Clean out the bank accounts, max the credit cards and party hearty with anyone who likes like a friend as a kind of spending territorial denial. You can't spend what I've already spent as it were. At the same time said spouse shows up in the court of popular opinion to declaim against spending by their better half on all those "welfare bums" and the need for fiscal restraint.

[Robert Lipscomb]

Sooner or later (and it appears to be sooner), the right will have to tell America that they cannot have Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - unless America does the unthinkable and taxes the shit out of the upper classes.

I wonder which they will choose?