Benghazification Realities

Krugman has two prophetically superb posts--"Benghazification Begins" and "Unacceptable Realities"--which borrow from the GOP's past madness to explain its agonizing next-ness:

[The Obamacare] crisis is over--for Obama and the Democrats. It’s just beginning for the Republicans, who won’t be able to let go of the notion that it’s a criminal scandal, and that mobs with pitchforks will march on the White House if only they can find the right words. They’ll try everything. They’ll hold endless hearings; they’ll get the usual suspects to publish many op-eds. Maybe they’ll get 60 Minutes to do a report that has to be retracted ...

For two months, thanks to the botched rollout, their delusions seemed confirmed by reality. Now that things are getting better, however, you can already see the rage building. It’s not supposed to be this way--therefore it can’t be this way. If, as now seems highly likely, Obamacare has more or less achieved its enrollment goals by 2015, and costs remain reasonable, that won’t be accepted--there will be furious claims that it’s all a lie.

Some observers see the GOP's descent into anti-empirical nutsville as chiefly a Tea Party phenomenon, hence roughly about three years old. Others date the party's explosive neuroticism from the birth of Bush II's regime--what with its bizarrely distorting neocon tics and prideful reinventions of reality itself--while yet others see the yonder Gingrich Revolution or even Reagan's preceding variety as the truer portents of Republicans' reality-denying (to use a bit of clinical shorthand) goofiness.

Arguments for each starting point have their self-evident merits, but we should also keep in mind that the GOP first went mad during the New Deal--and never quite recovered. Though FDR's program was fundamentally a conservative one designed to rescue capitalism from its unrestrained excesses, more than a few Republican pols and most of their monied friends saw nothing in New Dealism but a savage Bolshevism. It was then, as America's finest-ever political historian, Richard Hofstadter, argued convincingly in The Age of Reform, that American conservatives went off the pragmatic rails and plunged into babbling ideology.

That--the New Deal--was the turning point in what we might call our attitudinal politics. Before the early 1930s, observed Hofstadter, American progressives were the utopians, dreaming their unattainable dreams, while American conservatives simply got down to practical business, so to speak. After, Rooseveltian progressives were the empirically obsessed and realistically centered ones, as American conservatism increasingly resorted to little more than "high moral indignation" and ideological platitudes.

It was the beginning of Republicanism's reality denials--that government could be a positive force, that laissez-faire capitalism was deeply flawed, that many Americans hurt through no fault of their own, and that government could improve the economy, alleviate joblessness, safeguard workers' rights, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, employ the idle young, assist seniors, and offer hope.   

Republicans merely offered "furious claims that it [was] all a lie."

 

Comments

[Peter G]

Worse will befall those poor Republicans before they know it. Within the tea party and the conservative movement in general lies a cancer and that cancer will manifest itself as tax reform. Needed, as some guy name Carpenter pointed out to me, because the only way to redistribute in some sort of equitable way, the fruits of capitalism is to see that government has the income to do it. Looking after the needs of its citizens must surely cause the fall of civilization as we know it. Right?

[shsavage]

There is some argument to be made that the GOP began to go off the rails even before the New Deal. It was TR who led the progressive element out of the GOP in 1912 when he established the Bull Moose party and split the Republican vote, making Wilson the President. The GOP has never forgiven progressives for that. Though TR's third party died a quick death, the progressives migrated to the Democratic party, which helps explain why FDR was a Democrat.

[RT]

That's a good history lesson, PM, but I'd say the Republicans (that is to say, the movement conservatives) really went nuts when Clinton was elected. When Reagan was elected they thought they had won the argument. They were promised a permanent majority which would finally repeal the hated New Deal, Great Society, and everything else. This clearly did not happen. Theirs is the rage of people who found the light at the end of the tunnel was an oncoming demographic train.

[Charlieford]

I'll go the whole enchilada and say we've always been off the rails.

Go back further and you find Republicans fearing the South will soon force slavery on Massachusetts; Democrats expecting Lincoln to impose race amalgamation.

Or Adams thinking Jefferson a French tool; Jefferson convinced Adams is an agent of monarchy.

We're sort of nuts.

[RT]

@Charlieford: True. A successful system of government is not one that works *because* of this or that, but *in spite of* everything. By that yardstick the US system is still successful.

[Peter G]

Anybody following the jobs reports? They are starting to look consistently and suspiciously good. Much consternation at Redstate regarding these lies. for so they must be.