PMC Commentary

Add yet another triumph

Well, shoot. Now we're going to have to listen to more GOP neocon praise of President Obama:

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi ... was killed Thursday as fighters battling the vestiges of his loyalist forces wrested control of his hometown of Surt.

And as The Hill reports, Qaddafi's extermination came "with the backing of a NATO air campaign supported by President Obama," adding that the dictator's "death would be the most dramatic moment yet in the Arab Spring."

Splendid. But, as noted, we must now tolerate yet more saccharine fawning over Obama's international leadership from the muscular right. Damn.

The real utopians among us

The Post's Richard Cohen takes a preliminary step to an argument I've been making for months:

The GOP is in thrall to dogma and ignorance, hermetically sealed against uncertainty, hostile to inquiry and inadvertently mimicking the leftist parties of old when communists, Mensheviks, socialists and other "icks" would beat the brains out of one another over some fine point of Marxist dogma.

Those "leftist parties of old"? They were the utopians of our political globe. They possessed not only answers to humanity's ills, but the answers -- every one of them -- to humanity's ills. They came packaged with a tidy ideology (not so much the Mensheviks, maybe, who were to the Bolsheviks' what Steny Hoyer is to Dennis Kucinich) from which thoughtful apostasy was deemed intellectual treason. They believed in the uniform perfectibility of Man.

At home there were times -- emphatically, during the 1930s and 1960s -- when their ideologies were not only tidy, but comprehensible: in the '30s, the overthrow of a failing and brutalizing capitalism; in the '60s, an end to imperialist war. While perhaps noble, both ideological goals were, in a capitalist empire, somewhat short on realistic probabilities.

Today, there is no real "leftist party" -- not, anyway, a neo-Marxist movement or organization of recognizable presence and influence. The first aforementioned of yore went the way of postwar prosperity, the other the way of youthful, Boomer exuberance. Their ideological progeny, if you will, are the peopled scatterings of a ramified incoherence: they are the "99 percent," which, of course, would by definition lump democratic socialists with right wingers, liberal Democrats with conservative Republicans, and moderates of all center-left stripes with moderates of every center-right stripe. The sloganeering, Occupy Wall Street rallying cry of "We the People" has been done to death; ideologically, there is no such thing, and in it, one can locate no coherent utopian theme.

Yet there are utopians among us -- just not on the left. They're the tea partiers. To most of us their sociopolitical paradise sounds more like Dante's hell, but hey, even nihilistic anarchists have a constitutional right to the elaborate fictions and fantasies of their choosing. The point to be stressed here, though, is simply that their fictions are an aggressive species of utopianism: a kind of governmentless, Social Darwinian nation in which we all delightedly scramble for what only the strongest among us deserve. The outcome, in time, will be the perfection of our imperfect society -- indeed, even the process of achieving perfection will closely imitate it.

So let us hear no more talk of the utopian left. It's as withered and depleted as any notional proletarian dictatorship; rather pitiably, all that remains is an unremitting demand for a "public option."

No, if you want to go utopian, go right -- far, far to the right.

Breathtaking

For all of last night's debate's pettiness and snark, I found this remark, from Mitt Romney, to be the lowest:

It doesn’t make sense to borrow money from the Chinese and take care of people around the world. Get the Chinese to help them.

The right's quintessential selfishness -- especially shameful in that it comes not from some wingnut who's nothing to lose, but from the GOP's likely nominee. This party's ethical descent is utterly breathtaking to watch.

Cain's blunder

E.J. Dionne's post-debate "hunch" is spot on:

Cain will take a hit in the polls and some of his support may go back to Perry, where it appears to have come from.

If any phenomenon has demonstrated the erratic superficiality of the far-right/tea party vote, it's Cain, who followed Perry, who followed Bachmann, who followed Trump in transient popularity. For tea partiers are as children, fascinated by toylike splash and shine, and always ready to leap to the next political bauble. 

Yet Cain's momentary appeal possessed deep historical roots. The pizza guy shrewdly underscored the simplicity of his 9-9-9 plan, and ever since Barry Goldwater's '64 dictum that "The big trouble with the so-called liberal today is that he doesn't understand simplicity," the far right's journey to love and embrace even the most preposterous versions of simplicity has been a long and devoted one.

In Cain, they found a voice as shallow as their comprehension.

Cain's blunder? That final "9" -- the one that more than doubles most states' sales tax. Had Cain nixed the triad and gone with a duet, he might have survived his fellow rightists' assaults. It goes without saying that the rest of his plan is idiotically unworkable as well, but that never stopped the right-wing horrors of Reaganomics or W.'s balanced-budgets-through-higher-spending-and-revenue-gutting.

The GOP debate: negatives all around

I was able to see only about the last half hour of the GOP debate last night, which happened to feature a charmless squabble between Rick Perry and Mitt Romney on religious faith and politics. Romney was on the right side of secular constitutionalism, of course, but the fact that the founders had already, vividly settled this issue more than 200 years ago only attests to contemporary Republicanism's extreme reactionaryism.

I've got to say, it downright depresses to listen to two potential presidents debating a non-debatable matter -- especially one as inflammatory as religious tests.

Otherwise, from the coverage I've read it appears that Herman Cain took his first return steps to political obscurity as he "defend[ed] his 9-9-9 tax plan against nearly unanimous criticism from his fellow candidates," reports the Times. I think it was David Gergen who commented immediately after the debate that if all your opponents are against your tax plan, you've got "a problem."

But look, Cain never expected to get this far, so his political problem is decidedly non-problematic (just as the Romney-Perry debate was non-debatable). If Cain has a problem at all, it's with Roger Ailes: Is the former too crazy for even Fox News?

I also see -- again, according to the Times -- that Perry "displayed a much more combative style." Translation: Like a desperate quarterback who starts throwing interceptions, Perry will soon screw things up even worse than he already has.

Last night's biggest story was, however, the story that wasn't. The most qualified GOP contender, Jon Huntsman, was absent from the stage. The Times reports that he "opted out in solidarity with New Hampshire Republicans who are angry that Nevada moved its caucuses up in the voting schedule." Yet the political reality was instead rather "Animal House"-esque: Huntsman was simply too well to attend. 

Yeah, that's about right

This lede from the NY Times is pretty much all one needs to accurately envision four depraved years of a Perry presidency:

In the first two weeks of Rick Perry’s presidential campaign, his aides turned to Brian D. Pardo, a Texas businessman under investigation by federal securities regulators, to use his Cessna Citation X business jet to fly to campaign events.

Occupy Wall Street -- yesterday

Anne Applebaum:

Protesters in London shout, "We need to have a process!" Well, they already have a process: It’s called the British political system....

In New York, marchers chanted, "This is what democracy looks like," but actually, this isn’t what democracy looks like.... Democracy requires institutions, elections, political parties, rules, laws, a judiciary and many unglamorous, time-consuming activities, none of which are nearly as much fun as camping out in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Which was largely the point iterated by Barney Frank last night on MSNBC: Hey, it's grand to see people motivated and engaged, but where were they when we needed them in 2010? Christ, the barbarians weren't just at the gates, they were flooding the bloody zone -- yet ... crickets.

I'll reindulgence my tediousness. Street protests and bannered marches are little more than political amusements. That certainly wasn't the case during the 1960s' height of the Civil Rights Movement, yet that was a time when three networks comprised television news, which viewers either watched -- or not. Today, viewers can (and do) catch the sixth episode of M*A*S*H for the seventh time, while that two-minute newsy segment on national and international events flies by, elsewhere.

Furthermore, these protests are going nowhere -- fast -- because the protests themselves lack an objective. In the U.S. they could be showcasing the momentous need to pass President Obama's jobs bill, but on that, they pass; they could be encouraging those with jobs to organize or join a union, but on that, they pass; or they could be demanding that the big banks be broken up, but again, on that, they pass -- at least in terms of any neatly defined, coherent program.

And if one doesn't know keenly what one is protesting -- worse, if one looks around and doesn't quite know what the others are protesting, either -- then one's protest is as likely to succeed as a smart idea in the GOP House.

Collective wisdom?

What David Brooks sees as virtuous, I see as appalling ignorance:

Many economists say the cutback in consumption will hurt the economy in the short run. But, according to the Heartland Monitor poll, 61 percent of Americans said the decline in consumption would "help the economy as it would create more savings that could be invested to create or expand business."

Some economists say the government should be spending more now to stimulate a recovery. Thirty-eight percent of Americans seem to agree with that. But 56 percent have said "government spending when the government is already running a deficit is the wrong approach during an economic downturn because it is only a temporary solution that increases long-term debt."

According to Brooks, somewhere in that compilation of pro-supply-sided, anti-Keynesian buffoonery is the collective wisdom of the wise masses -- a tautology loved by the selfsame herd since Andrew Jackson, but feared by thinkers since Tocqueville. The fragile premise, put further, goes like this: If the majority gives stupidity a thumbs-up, then stupidity -- see, for example, above -- is somehow converted to righteousness. Brooks calls this latest conversion -- again, see above-- an American "values restoration."  

Richard Hofstadter, he of the paranoid style diagnosis, called it American anti-intellectualism. And with that, it's hard to disagree. The history of popular ignorance as wise policy goes back to Aristophanes, and God knows the American Republic has been no exception. Nothing in politics sells like the Everyman's common sense, even when it's empirically nonsensical: save, and jobs will come, even with less demand; and government belt-tightening in a recession is smart.

One can always hope that Brooks' "Heartland Monitor poll" is a flawed outlier and thus the majority isn't as dumb as Brooks hopes. Unfortunately, such a reality would make little difference. For starters, the majority barely turns out to vote as such in presidential years, while a frightening and increasingly radical minority rules primaries and midterms. Second, all of the commentariat play Brooks' game (I know I do) -- that of cherry-picking polls and polling results, to prove the popular virtue of their point.

Still, the question remains: Is democratic ineptitude nonetheless virtuous, by virtue of its democracy? In time, we do seem to get things right -- think gender equality, gay rights and civil rights in general -- but oh, how we do take that time. Our present and most poignant hurdle: elementary economics.

Romney's trap

The inevitable divorce of the tea party loonies from GOP establishment forces is getting nastier, which is to say, more delightful, every day.

Tea Party Nation's Judson Phillips, for instance, calls a Romney nomination a "nightmare scenario" in which Judson would "push the button for him; I’m going to hope he’s better than I think." How much better? "He is better than Obama, but not necessarily by a whole lot."

Well, now there's an endorsement that should turn out Judson's troops on Election Day.

Even nastier -- albeit refreshingly blunter -- is Dustin Stockman, of the tea-partying Western Representation PAC: "As much as we can’t stand Barack Obama, if the Republicans choose to nominate Mitt Romney, it’s up to them to get him past the finish line."

There's no mention in The Hill piece of a third-party formation, but partisan disaffection that runs as strong as nose-holding and brutal ultimatums virtually cinches a formal, tea-partying contender, which, in turn, should decimate the Romney vote in swing states such as Virginia, North Carolina and Nevada.

Should Romney attempt to placate the loonies (which, in any event, he probably cannot), then he'd lose the independent vote.

He's trapped. Although he has two ways to turn, both are decisive losers.

A muddled, meaningless revolt

Occupy Wall Street Inc.'s first factional dispute is a real humdinger.

The question has arisen among the protesters as to whether they should maybe ask somebody to maybe do something about maybe this or that or something else: "We absolutely need demands," said one protester. "Like Frederick Douglass said, 'Power concedes nothing without a demand.' "

But, there's always a killjoy: "Demands," said another protester of, it seems, the Maddening Ambiguity School of Thought, "are disempowering since they require someone else to respond." 

Yes, I suppose placing demands on the powers that be would indeed be "disempowering" (although it's kinda '60s-empowering to use that word) to the powerful. A public petition to redress some wrong is, by its very nature, a grassroots species of controlling behavior.

This protester, however, appears to have meant that the issuing of demands is internally disempowering: "It’s not like we couldn’t come up with any," he added, "but I don’t think people would vote for them." Well, then, he's lost me, for they're protesting against ... what? He has also amused and comforted the wickedly powerful, since, evidently, the revolution will be televised, but not in any way organized.

In other locales, notes the Times, there are "many groups in the movement slowly formulating demands, though in each city, opposition has arisen from skeptical demonstrators." In Boston, for example, one of the aforementioned skeptics wrote, on Facebook, this mysteriously philosophical bagatelle: "The process is the message." My favorite, though, was a Baltimorean who told the Times that the movement's purpose is a "public sphere not moderated by commodities or mainstream political discourse" -- in short, Look at me, hear my roar of postmodernist, poststructuralist gibberish. His procedural message? Pomposity.

This is all a bit sad. The OWS movement possesses a vague yet intensely legitimate discontent with the ethically corrupt status quo, but it also requires the one thing it least desires and most rejects: a kind of benevolent despot, to lead it and provide form and meaning. Otherwise, they're only a bunch of folks on the streets.

The 'smallness' of OWS

Perspective isn't one of the media's more reliable attributes; thus our impression that the Occupy Wall Street movement is both massive and influential.

We hear it, we read it every day: a storm of outrage, a swell of protesters, a torrential collectivity hammering the mighty but unjust few. This, we're informed, is change in manifest action -- the power of agitation.

But then there's this, from the New Republic's Walter Shapiro, who recently spent a few days "in-country":

What struck me was the sincere and good-natured smallness of it all....

[A] Tuesday afternoon Millionaires March up Park Avenue ... attracted about 500 mostly middle-aged, union-affiliated demonstrators. And in late Wednesday afternoon’s drizzle, 400 temporary residents of Zuccotti Park tried to march the roughly eight blocks to Wall Street....

This is not the 1967 Pentagon March or anything like it. Nothing I saw in New York this week justifies the current level of the-whole-world-is-watching media coverage.

Even if it were comparable to the '67 Pentagon March, we should remind ourselves of how many more years the Vietnam war dragged on.

I've always been puzzled by street protests, American-style. The ones that turn violent merely alienate the true masses, while the chronically peaceful ones merely earn officeholders' indifference.

The transatlantic ideologues

Conservative Britain is no longer the envy of American pseudoconservatives, who are, after all, accomplishing here through a stealthy indifference to the nation's welfare what Prime Minister Cameron & Friends have accomplished there through an overt rigidity: "a vicious cycle of low growth, high unemployment and fiscal austerity," observes the NY Times.

"Low growth," as in a staggering slog of 0.1 percent; "high unemployment," as in 8.1 percent (the "highest ... in more than 15 years") and rising; and "fiscal austerity," as in a "harmful quack cure" and "a deliberate ideological choice."

And then, naturally, there's this: Cameron's "deficit-reduction policies have failed to revive the business confidence that was supposed to spur private-sector hiring."

"Supposed" by whom? Conscientious economists, economic historians and public-policy empiricists? Supposed, maybe, by David Cameron? No way. Cameron knew precisely what he was doing -- gutting government, at the economy's and the little guy's expense -- just as the wonkishly worried were precisely predicting the economic ruination that is coming to pass. 

Indeed not even they, the wonks, were required; hell, a chimpanzee with an "Intro to Econ" textbook could have forecast this grind. Like George W. Bush's marketing of the Iraq war through variously fabricated motives, Cameron sold deficit reduction as an irresistable carrot to "business confidence." In the U.S., the government-gutters call it -- that is, huckster it as -- "certainty." 

In Britain, the majority rules, hence tearful sympathy for the gullible rubes who democratically hefted their predatory rulers is hard to come by; but in the U.S., the minority dominates, hence our pain is (mostly) undemocratically derived.

Either way, the transatlantic ideologues are again getting their way, with profoundly predictable results. 

More Krauthammer funnies

Charles Krauthammer's hyperbolic hammering of President Obama's "villainy-of-the-rich theme" is classic polemic -- that is, it is stridency caressed by not even a sinew of reasonable context, either political or historical. And it caused me to think of these words, written by another U.S. president, regarding

the wrong and evils of the money-piling tendency of our country, which is changing laws, government and morals and giving all powers to the rich and bringing in pauperism and its attendant crimes and wretchedness like a flood. Lincoln was for a government of the people. The new tendency is "a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich."

FDR, right? Maybe Wilson or the rabble-rousing TR? No, those thoughts were committed to paper (his deeply thoughtful diary) by Rutherford B. Hayes -- yes, that Rutherford B. Hayes, Grand Old Party-member extraordinaire, of the Krauthammer-adoring Gilded Age -- in the mid-1880s.

Hayes, as political historian and former Nixonian Kevin Phillips has noted, was also so aghast at America's amplifying wealth disparity that he "favored blocking 'a permanent aristocracy of wealth' by legislation that would limit inheritance to five hundred thousand dollars, the rest to go to the state."

Again, that was a former Republican president surveying the socioeconomic wreckage of what contemporaneous GOPism had wrought. Yet Obama proposes an almost trivial uptick in the upper-income bracket and in Krauthammer's eyes he becomes a confiscatory, Marxist leveler, "turning general discontent into rage against a malign few" -- the poor things.

Strident, and rather pathetic.

9-9-9 = 0-0-0

Let's everybody get this straight: Herman Cain is not the GOP frontrunner. It makes no difference how many polls show him four or even 40 points ahead of the Massachusetts Dudley Do-Right of unctuous Mister Rogerses; Herman Cain, regrettably, is going nowhere. Not this year.

Never mind the utter imbecility of his 9-9-9 plan. That sort of thing has been no drag on GOP candidacies for at least 30 years. John Maynard Keynes spent a lifetime developing and refining modern macroeconomic theory, only to have Arthur Laffer cavalierly decimate all of it -- and us -- on a paper napkin. Hence in Republican economics, as in Republican politics, the frivolous and the flaky are king.

Need proof of 9-9-9's lunacy? For heaven's sake don't fritter away your valuable time on intellectually lethal dissections from qualified economists. Just know that on Lawrence O'Donnell's show last night, Joe the Plumber essentially endorsed it.   

Yet Herman has much bigger problems -- such as money and filing deadlines -- which some old-school Republican strategists still traffic in. "What else does [Cain] have to do? He has to raise $100 million," GOP media consultant Rick Wilson told Politico. And "You have to file in these states and you have to go through all the procedural things."

But, but, there's the book tour!

None of this is to say that Mitt Romney's economic prescriptions are much better; and, naturally, the same goes for the rest of the presidential pack, not to mention all the GOP House and Senate victims of short-term memory loss -- the whole bloody constellation of right-wing economic fantasies. Or, as Paul Krugman puts it this morning: "It’s a terrible thing when an individual loses his or her grip on reality. But it’s much worse when the same thing happens to a whole political party."

Which called to rememberance my graduate thesis, in which I argued that while American demagoguery was once an individual pol thing -- among, of course, both the left and right -- the contemporary GOP, beginning with the rise of the New Right, has institutionalized the practice party-wide. So now we suffer not only from a demagogic GOP, but a downright lunatic demagogic GOP.

But back to Herman, who should just allow himself a little more time, say, four years; and next time, Herm, raise some cash and file those papers. Because you never know: the GOP may resist treatment, it may refuse the Thorazine, it may proceed a.m.a. -- and stay as crazy as ever.

It's official

It surprises not that Herman Cain believes the facts-shuffling Paul Ryan or reality-denying Jim DeMint would make a dandy running mate, but reports that "Cain also said that he’d seek the help of ... Newt Gingrich as a campaign manager, Chief of Staff or strategist" is beyond any rational comprehension.

It's official, folks: The Republican Party simply cannot get any crazier.