Grizzly Bear – "Two Weeks"

But Paul Ryan Seems Like Such a Nice Fellow

The big political news today is, of course, Mitt Romney naming Paul Ryan as his running mate. It's hard to keep up with all the coverage on Vice Presidential candidate Ryan, but Balloon Juice has been blogging up a storm today, providing some excellent links. Ezra Klein and Nate Silver provide good background on what it means, Charles Pierce weighs in, and Paul Krugman briefly left his vacation to post.

Paul Ryan was the key figure in the Stealthy Extremist section of my recent looong post, "The Four Types of Conservatives." Ryan's radicalism has been dissected very well many times, and in that post, I linked the archives of several writers and outlets that have done so. Their budget analysis is damning, and it speaks volumes about Ryan's (lack of) integrity.

I wanted to link Jonathan Chait's piece "The Legendary Paul Ryan" again, because it's one of the best introductions to Ryan, especially for people who aren't political junkies. I wanted to feature a different section, though:

How has Ryan managed to occupy these two roles in our national life—Fiscy award-winning spokesman for those Americans demanding a bipartisan agreement to reduce the deficit, and slayer of bipartisan deficit agreements—simultaneously? Here is where, in the place of any credible programmatic commitment, he substitutes his remarkable talent for radiating good intentions. New York Times business columnist James Stewart, for instance, recently opined that Ryan’s plan would usher in an overhaul of the tax code that would raise taxes on the rich, by eliminating special treatment for capital-gains income.

It is certainly true, as Stewart argues, that one could reduce tax rates to the levels advocated by Ryan without shifting the burden onto the poor and middle class if you eliminated the lower rate enjoyed by capital-gains income. But Ryan has been crystal clear throughout his career in his opposition to raising capital-gains taxes. An earlier, more explicit version of his tax plan eliminated any tax at all on capital gains. The current version, while refraining from specifics, insists, “Raising taxes on capital is another idea that purports to affect the wealthy but actually hurts all participants in the economy.” I asked Stewart why he believed so strongly that Ryan actually supported such a reform, despite the explicit opposition of his budget. “Maybe he’s being boxed in” by right-wing colleagues, Stewart suggested.

After Obama assailed Ryan’s budget, Stewart wrote a second column insisting that Ryan’s plans were just the sort of goals liberals shared. He quoted Ryan as writing, in his manifesto, “The social safety net is failing society’s most vulnerable citizens.” Stewart is flabbergasted that Democrats could be so partisan as to attack a figure who believes something so uncontroversial. “Does anyone,” Stewart wrote in his follow-up, “Democrat or Republican, seriously disagree?”

The disagreement, I suggested to Stewart, is that Ryan believes the social safety net is failing society’s most vulnerable citizens by spending too much money on them. As Ryan has said, “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency”—which is to say, plying the poor with such inducements as food stamps and health insurance for their children has sapped their desire to achieve, a problem Ryan proposes to solve by targeting them for the lion’s share of deficit reduction. Stewart waves away the distinction. “I was pointing out that, at least rhetorically, you can find some common ground,” he says. Stewart, explaining his evaluation of Ryan to me, repeatedly cited the missing details in his plan as a hopeful sign of Ryan’s accommodating aims. “He seems very straightforward,” he tells me. “He doesn’t seem cunning. He seems very genuine.”

Seeming genuine is something Ryan does extraordinarily well. And here is where something deeper is at play, more than Ryan’s charm and winning personality, something that gets at the intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary Washington. The Ryan brand is rooted in his ostentatious wonkery. Because, unlike the Bushes and the Palins, he grounds his position in facts and figures, he seems like an encouraging candidate to strike a bargain. But the thing to keep in mind about Ryan is that he was trained in the world of Washington Republican think tanks. These were created out of a belief that mainstream economists were hopelessly biased to the left, and crafted an alternative intellectual ecosystem in which conservative beliefs—the planet is not getting warmer, the economy is not growing more unequal—can flourish, undisturbed by skepticism. Ryan is intimately versed in the blend of fact, pseudo-fact, and pure imagination inhabiting this realm.

This dynamic is absolutely maddening – the constant impulse of mainstream media figures to ignore the evidence and anoint even extremists as sensible and responsible. In the terminology of the "four types" post, Paul Ryan is a stealthy extremist, but Stewart is insisting that Ryan is a sober adult. Okay, most of us have been taken in by a politician from time to time. (Although most of us haven't been paid to cover politics, either.) What's most frustrating is that Chait even points out to Stewart that his perception of Ryan is inaccurate – and Stewart replies, “I was pointing out that, at least rhetorically, you can find some common ground,” and that Ryan "seems very genuine.”

This is what sends my blood pressure soaring. Who gives a shit about common ground in rhetoric?!? Politicians lie all the time. They all love America and babies and whatever plays well in the region they're campaigning in that day. It's really not a big challenge to find "common ground" in rhetoric. The question is how much basis Ryan's proposals have in reality. As Greg Sargent likes to say, politics is supposed to be a clash of visions (and his example involves Paul Ryan). If there's no common ground to be found in the actual policies being discussed, and the values underneath them, well then, another speech won't help much – especially if it's bullshit from a charlatan.

One of the benefits of doing at least basic policy analysis – and one of the reasons it's so necessary – is that it helps one evaluate where a political figure is lying, and how badly, and to what consequence. Policy analysis is both a practical matter and a character assessment. Come election-time, voters can pick the candidate that lies less frequently and about less important things, and has higher credibility on delivering the good things and preventing the bad things, and so on. Making such decisions is essential to the whole democracy thing.

In Chait's account, Stewart doesn't care about the reality of Ryan's proposals. He's only valuing appearance. He is only judging by cosmetics. Maybe he's a fine reporter otherwise, and a nice guy in person, but it's appalling... if all too common among mainstream political reporters (the subject of another recent post). Perhaps, like many Americans, Stewart is so desperate to find common ground and get along and see responsible governance that he’ll seize upon any huckster than comes along who says a few nice things. But this is journalistic malpractice, not to mention bad citizenship. Policies should succeed or fail on their merits, and political figures should pay a cost for lying.

For the addled Sensible Centrists that dominate political reporting, "compromise" always seems to entail that liberals should capitulate to the center-left contingent of the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party should always capitulate to the (mostly) far-right Republican Party. (But somehow, the Republican Party is supposed to heed their rabid base, and never move to the left in the name of compromise. Hmm.) Actually, the true solution is exposing bad ideas and calling bullshit. And in that vein, may the accurate examinations of the Romney-Ryan plans continue!

Update: Greg Sargent, Scott Lemieux and Think Progress weigh in. (More updates to come, perhaps.)

Warren Zevon – "Werewolves of London"

This is one of my favorite Zevon songs. It's appropriate due to the London Olympics, and also because this recent NPR story (which received plenty of letters). Here's a live version.

Both Sides Do It: Partisanship Redux

I find I keep on returning to themes explored in a piece from last year, "Partisanship, Policy and Bullshit." Among other things, it contended that Beltway pundits tend to obtusely conflate different types of "partisanship," and explored why there's such a preponderance of bullshit in our national political discourse. Here's a partial recap and riff on that piece, focusing mostly on an extremely popular variety of bullshit: sagely pronouncing that "both sides do it."

Members of the chattering class tend to be well-educated, and it's not that they're stupid per se, but they mistake pedigree and status for merit. They're also lazy and really don't like to do policy analysis. The Beltway Conventional Wisdom is socially determined, not a matter of careful thought and analysis. As a class, pundits are shallow, careless people, and most of their opinions are issued after putting a finger in the wind and judging what will play well with the other club members. (Centrist fetishism, such as saying 'both sides are equally to blame,' goes over very well in what Jay Rosen calls the church of the savvy; it supplies the illusion of independence and insight while obviating any need for critical thinking and qualitative judgment.) Many Beltway pundits do not really think per se as much as they regurgitate unreflective class attitudes; their pronouncements are based on cosmetics, not substance. The Emperor's New Clothes isn't just a parable; it's the eternal ethos of the ruling class. (For the rest of this post, we'll refer to this crowd derisively as Very Serious People, or VSPs, because that's how we DFHs roll.)

Let's start with two statements:

1. My party is morally pure and the other party is evil.

2. This party is better than the other party (on this issue, and/or overall).

Very Serious People tend to conflate these. Every time someone (say an expert or activist) states anything that hints of #2, VSPs will take offense, acting as if that the person was actually claiming #1. Only a hack or zealot would insist on #1. Similarly, only a dogmatic breed of centrist would insist that wisdom hangs precisely midpoint between the two major parties (especially since they do change positions, making this type of "centrism" a shifting, moving target versus wisdom for the ages). Substantive political discussion between adults depends on accuracy and nuance, including assessing the consequences of policies, and when necessary, assigning appropriate degrees of blame.

Let's move on to two related statements:

2a. I support this policy because my party supports it. [Type one partisans, "hyper-partisans," hacks and zealots.]

2b. I prefer this party on this issue (or overall) because their policy positions are better. [Type two partisans, wonks and conscientious citizens.]

Very Serious People tend to conflate these as well. The process by which people come to their positions is very important. Not all opinions are created equal. Not all opinions are equally grounded in reality. Not all opinions are offered in good faith. However, if you're a lazy pundit and don't want to do any policy analysis, or discuss the reasons why someone holds their positions, you'll judge everything on cosmetics, and can opine sagely that both sides are equally valid, equally to blame, etc. Thus, a Very Serious Person or Sensible Centrist might pretend that a climate scientist, an oil company flack, and a religious fanatic all have equally sound views on global warming, that "opinions differ on the shape of the earth," and so on.

Tom Friedman is a classic example. Like many other Very Serious People, he proves he's one of society's indispensable "producers" by essentially rewriting the same column over and over again. He's fond of clutching his pearls over the equally rabid partisans from both sides!, and points to our salvation – Sensible Centrism. The problem is, on multiple occasions, the 'sensible centrist' positions that Friedman has championed are actually held by Barack Obama and other Democrats. The Republican Party has moved far to the right over the past thirty-some years, and for the most part, the range of discourse in D.C. occurs between far right Republicans and left-of-center Democrats (with others mostly excluded). Furthermore, the Republican Party has become obstructionist to an unprecedented degree. Friedman, however, can't be bothered to pay attention to any of this, or simply believes that accurate analysis would not play well with his target audience. It would necessitate calling out one side, and that would be terribly partisan, uncivil and unsavvy, especially in the eyes of the Aspen and Davos set. (You won't see Mann and Ornstein on many talk shows, because the thesis of their book, It's Worse Than It Looks, while well-supported, assigns blame and is thus extremely impolite.) Friedman, like many pundits, is obsessed with selling the image of being a sage, and desperately wants to be seen as a Very Serious Person; he is unwilling to embrace the fact-based analysis, honesty and courage necessary for delivering actual sage insight. The "Both Sides Do It" mentality sometimes manifests in the ol' "Even though I haven't studied this issue, I'm certain that I'm wiser than you" gambit. By legend, a large portion of Socrates' wisdom was that he knew how little he knew; in contrast, Very Serious People feel entitled to opine on matters they are largely ignorant about, and especially entitled to scold those silly "partisans" who surely must be looking at things all wrong.

Here are our next two statements:

3. Winner-Takes-All: We'll take all we can, and screw everybody else. [YOYO; You're On Your Own.]

4. Win-Win: Everybody benefits, there's still inequality, but things are slightly more equal and fair. [WITT; We're In This Together.]

Very Serious People tend to equate these, too. (You may be sensing a trend.) The useful YOYO versus WITT distinction comes from Jared Bernstein. It highlights that liberals and conservatives have very different views on the social contract. They also hold very different views on compromise, with liberals and independents valuing it and many conservatives opposing it. (See also Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's book, Winner-Take-All Politics.) As we’ve explored before, generally speaking, liberals are concerned with issues of fairness, while conservatives are focused on issues of power. They're simply not speaking the same language, nor are they fighting for the same things. This significantly affects both policy consequences and policy negotiations… although you'd never know it from watching the mainstream Sunday chatter. A black and white, "both sides are equal" worldview presents the illusion of open-mindedness while ignoring reality. Centrist fetishism is as dogmatic as hyper-partisanship (2a above)… and considerably more sanctimonious. It ignores substance, nuance, and important differences, and is thus irredeemably obtuse: Both sides do it. Policy doesn't matter.

Two charts featured in previous posts help illustrate these dynamics. Last year, Nate Silver provided some sharp analysis of the debt ceiling hostage situation (examined here at length in "Extremism in Defense of Nihilism Is a Vice"). Silver observed that the 'Republican's no-tax stance was far outside of the mainstream,' and significantly to the right of even Republican voters. When it came to a debt deal, congressional Republicans even rejected a deal that favored their position by 83 to 17 (the percentage of spending cuts to tax increases). Silver broke down the reasons and supplied a useful chart:

However, all but 7 Republicans in the House of Representatives, or 97 percent of them, have signed the pledge of Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform stating that any net tax increases are unacceptable. One might have believed this to be simply a negotiating position. But the proposal that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell floated yesterday, which would give up on striking a deal and instead rely on some procedural gymnastics to burden Mr. Obama with having to raise the debt ceiling, suggests otherwise. Republicans in the House really may be of the view that a deal with a 3:1 or 4:1 or 5:1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases is worse than none at all.

If we do take the Republicans’ no-new-taxes position literally, it isn’t surprising that the negotiations have broken down. Consider that, according to the Gallup poll, Republican voters want the deal to consist of 26 percent tax increases, and Democratic voters 46 percent — a gap of 20 percentage points. If Republicans in the House insist upon zero tax increases, there is a larger ideological gap between House Republicans and Republican voters than there is between Republican voters and Democratic ones.

If you remember the coverage from the time, you'll recall that the Very Serious People scolded both sides for their intransigence, ignoring everything Sliver pointed out. They also ignored (among other things) that the very same Republicans who screamed of fiscal Armageddon with a Democrat in the White House eagerly ran up the debt under Bush. (Plus, they fought like hell to keep the Bush tax cuts in place, when letting them expire was/is the single easiest measure to help balance the budget.)

The second chart appeared in "Partisanship, Policy and Bullshit," which I'll just quote:

Policy matters. The consequences of policies matter. This graphic, featured in an excellent series on wealth inequity by Tim Noah, shows a striking difference between America's two major political parties (and the Democratic Party is less liberal and more corporatist these days). The Democratic pattern is one of shared prosperity for everybody, while the Republican pattern is one of funneling more wealth to those who are already the richest. These basic patterns can be seen in the parties on most issues – the Democrats (certainly the liberals) fight for more equality, while the Republicans (and conservative, Blue Dog Democrats) fight for more inequality, seeking to maintain or accumulate more power. This means, if the two parties sit down to negotiate, they are not fighting for the same things, and they are not even fighting solely for their own interests. If the Democrats win and get everything they want, the Republicans, the wealthy and the powerful still do quite well; if the Republicans win and get everything they want, they, the wealthy and the powerful do extremely well, but everyone else gets comparatively screwed. That's the general pattern between the parties, although if we look at every single issue, there's plenty one can quibble about, especially since there are certainly corrupt, plutocratic Democrats. However, the key point is that policy matters, and most media coverage ignores this. They ignore that, in a situation like this, if the two parties negotiate, and meet in the middle, the result will be lopsided toward the Republicans, because what each side is fighting for is not equivalent.

Unless every Beltway pundit has suffered a severe head trauma, describing these dynamics is really not that difficult. It's not a matter of minute nuance, merely a matter of honest evaluation and a few shades of grey. Simply describing policy consequences and who benefits would generally do the trick. Similarly, it's really not hard for columnists (who can issue opinions) to criticize the failings of the Democratic Party (as liberal bloggers do all the time) yet still point out the many areas where the Republican Party is considerable worse. (As a few people have noted, the American Republican Party is really the only major political party in the developed world that denies global warming and opposes universal health care.) But Beltway journalists will do their damnedest to avoid uttering certain obvious conclusions.

None of this is to ignore the significant corporatist and imperialist factions in the Democratic Party, or the faults of the Obama administration specifically. But Beltway pundits, VSPs and "Villagers" rarely criticize the Democrats from the left. It's striking that so many pundits have such an off-base view of Centrism, Moderation, and Seriousness (not to mention Liberalism versus Socialism). Republicans can falsely claim that tax cuts to the rich raise revenues and rarely get challenged, and Paul Ryan's fraudulent budget plan will be praised by VSPs who haven't bothered to read the damn thing, but the quite good People's Budget from the Congressional Progressive Caucus is almost completely ignored. (And good luck getting coverage, Green Party.) Digby recently wrote about the supposedly "centrist" group Third Way, and their latest attempt to shred the New Deal and the social safety net, just as she's written frequently about efforts by Pete Peterson and other Very Serious People to do the same (covered in passing here in a post on wealth inequity). Certain opinions are deemed wise or foolish by default in the Beltway, regardless of their merit. This brings us to two stalwarts of the VSP mentality:

5. Shut up, Krugman, the emperor's clothes are gorgeous!

6. The rich are not working because they have too little money, the poor because they have too much.

(#6 paraphrases John Kenneth Galbraith, who also observed that "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.")

If you read Paul Krugman regularly, you know that austerity is all the rage among Very Serious People, despite all the data arguing against it (and the history of such tiny, forgettable events as the Great Depression). Preaching austerity just feels right to them, and expresses a set of moral values that entail... that the very people who caused the global economic mess should continue to stay in power and prosper, while the already-squeezed middle class and the poor should "sacrifice." Similarly, it's terribly rude to question that nice Mr. Cheney about his evidence of WMD in Iraq and a 9/11-Iraq link, or hold the Bush administration responsible for torture, or challenge the surveillance state that still continues, or discuss how other countries successfully deliver universal health care, and so on. Basically, in an amazing coincidence, the ruling class and its courtiers always think they're just swell folks (who should be deferred to, and not held accountable), but that the lower orders are lazy moochers (who need a good scolding and the boot). The more aware among this set are exploiting the shock doctrine (evil in the stupid-evil-crazy vortex), but many in the chattering class don't think that deeply, and are merely expressing unreflective class attitudes. They are simply arguing for what they view as the natural order of things. Part of the problem is that they're terribly cloistered, and cut off from the consequences of their own blithe idiocy (most are in the richest 1%). Not all of them are unredeemable. Still, it shouldn't be ignored that many of them are truly awful people.

To briefly recap the issue of the preponderance of bullshit: the 24-hour news cycle depends on a steady stream of content, or the appearance thereof. Hiring smart people to fill that time would be one solution, but there are only so many Rachel Maddows to go around (and she's got a pesky habit of wanting to research things, which takes time). The simpler, cheaper solution is to hire vapid chatterboxes who can gab away endlessly. (Pick up a dozen Steve Doocys and you're good to go!) Most TV political commentary is no more than gossip, and very insipid, fact-free gossip at that. Basically, the TV news model depends on the constant generation of bullshit. It is the coin of the realm. Cokie Roberts isn't going to call out Newt Gingrich, because he's a member of the club, and lord, it's not as if she wants to be held to any standards, either. Great reporters do exist, and discriminating new consumers do exist, but they do not drive the dominant corporate media model, particularly as exists in television. A corporate media is unlikely to challenge the status of corporations (except on comedy programs). In one sense, the corporate media is selling a cheap, pulpy substance with that genuine newsy flavor to the masses. (As Homer Simpson would say, "Infotainment.") In another sense, news viewers aren't really the consumers at all – they're the commodity being sold by the media to their real customers – their corporate advertisers.

Considering that any honest evaluation of the faults of our national political discourse would condemn most pundits to the pits of hell (well, the journalistic equivalent), it's not surprising that pundits are a wee bit reluctant to acknowledge these failings. (As long as we're talking in metaphors and fantasies, sending a few pundits to Purgatory or Limbo would be lovely. They assure us that suffering is redemptive.)

Most Beltway pundits value the appearance of bipartisanship for its own sake, not bipartisanship as a means of getting things done. They don't care about substantive differences between competing factions, and they really don't care about good policy and responsible governance. A change of the party in power rarely adversely affects them. While civility is a worthy trait, it's of secondary value to honesty and accuracy. But why discuss policy when you can discuss the slighted feelings of the powerful ("fee fees"), and the all-important issue of tone? Rather than criticizing Obama for his actual policies and other valid reasons, why not attack him for being mean? From the earlier post:

Obama has often been criticized for not fulfilling a campaign promise of changing the tone in Washington. Okay, he deserves some blame for that, in that it was a somewhat stupid promise, fine as an aspiration but requiring adjustments to the realities of the political landscape. However, most of the criticism Obama has received ignores that the Republicans play any role in all this. George W. Bush barely won election in 2004, yet this was hailed as a mandate. Meanwhile, the Republican approach was rejected by the American public in 2006 and 2008. In response, the Republican Party did not change their approach, and if anything, became more conservative and extreme. Their policies are neither good nor popular. Most of the corporate media has ignored all of this. Rush Limbaugh announced that he hoped Obama failed, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." As mentioned above, there's ample evidence of bad faith by Republicans on policy (follow the links). Yet somehow, this rarely gets noted by the so-called objective media. While Obama certainly deserves plenty of valid criticism, attacking him for "not changing the tone in Washington," while simultaneously ignoring Republican behavior, is absolutely imbecilic. As it stands, the blind, substance-free "bipartisanship" fervently urged by the DC Village can only be achieved through total capitulation by Obama and the Democratic Party.

The primary "bias" of our media is shallowness. (Although this naturally benefits the reality-challenged, those of bad faith, and the status quo.) When Jimmy Carter called the Bush administration the "worst in history" in 2007 (he later apologized), there was little discussion over whether it was true or not; the discussion wasn't Holy crap, he's right, and that's a serious problem to have a horrible president, and what are we going to do about it?, it was about how terribly mean Carter was, and that it was a breach of decorum. Most mainstream "debates" about torture don't focus on actual facts, including the findings of reports by the Senate and Red Cross, or a study by McClatchy; the Very Serious People have decided that calling someone a "war criminal" is much worse than actually being one. Similarly, why bother to ask what the hell America is still doing in Afghanistan, or press Obama about the high civilian death toll from drone strikes, when you can prove your manhood by attacking Chris Hayes for being un-American instead? Why discuss blowback and serious issues of foreign policy when you can harp about how a flag pin is the ultimate measure of one's patriotism? Occasionally, the truth is harsh. Good government depends on pointing out when the emperor has no clothes, and that's one of the key reasons we have the First Amendment. At times, it really is breathtaking that our national political discourse is so fucking insipid.

Basically, saying "both sides do it" is a form of trolling. In almost every case, when a Very Serious Person says "both sides do it," "both sides are to blame" or any of its variants, it is to shut down discussion, not to bring it to a deeper, more nuanced level. (There are exceptions, but they are few. We'll delve into this further in future posts.) Obsessing about "tone" and other cosmetics serves the same function. 'Sensible Centrism' is very popular because it gives the appearance of wisdom, objectivity, independence, impartiality and so on without having to commit to much of anything. It can adapted to almost every occasion, and is ideal for pundits who don't want to do their homework or deal with backlash from angry hyper-partisans (predominantly right-wingers). The tactic is a bullshitter's dream. Effective government and citizenship depend on making judgments and choices, the more informed, the better. Some level of qualitative analysis is essential for political figures when discussing policy, and for citizens in terms of voting and activism. Typically, our national political discourse shuts down honest discussion and reality-based analysis rather than encouraging it.

Blogiversary VII: Seven Posts in May

Blogging is not writing. It's just graffiti with punctuation.
– Contagion

A few days ago, this blog turned seven. It's been another year with little time to write and plenty of backlogged major-posts-in-the-works that would, uh, knock your socks off if you were only the type to wear socks, you hippie. Still, thanks to everyone who's stopped by for my occasional (mostly long-form) blogging. (At least I got in three film references above!)

As usual, I'll give a retrospective. Guilt has its uses, such as prodding me to finish "The Four Types of Conservatives" (another entry to the Chart Project). "Extremism in Defense of Nihilism Is a Vice" dissected the conservative extremism and bad faith driving last year's debt ceiling hostage situation.

"They Could Not Look Me in the Eye Again" looked at issues of dehumanization to commemorate Armistice Day 11/11/11.

"Surely the Constitution Must Match My Theocratic Beliefs" examined the ignorance and religious narcissism of Rick Santorum, while "My God Can Beat Up Your God (Defining "Tolerance")" dissected the whole "You're intolerant of my intolerance" shtick. (Both posts were for the annual Blog Against Theocracy.)

My annual post-Oscar film roundup is in four posts as usual, starting here (scroll through "older posts" at the bottom to read the rest).

For Banned Books Week, we looked at efforts to restrict Brave New World and Sherman Alexie. For National Poetry Month, we featured pieces by the recently deceased Adrienne Rich. For International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we looked at a Nazi board game.

Finally, in addition to spreading the luv during a few stints at Mike's Blog Roundup over at Crooks and Liars, there was the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2011.

I also spent a fair amount of time redesigning the blog. If you're a regular reader and have VS on your blogroll, and I haven't reciprocated, feel free to write me or leave a comment. Cheers, and happy blogging!

The Four Types of Conservatives

Most conservative political figures break down into one of four broad groups. They are Reckless Addicts, Proud Zealots, Stealthy Extremists and Sober Adults. Needless to say, they do not exist in equal numbers. The first three categories can overlap, but in individual conservatives, one flavor tends to dominate.

I'll be primarily discussing congressional conservatives (mostly Republicans, plus some Democratic Blue Dogs) and the professional political class, not average Americans (who tend to be more sensible). The full range of American conservatism is better described in a 2009 post, "Diagrams of Conservatism," which remains depressingly relevant. (There was also a companion piece looking at American politics as a whole.)

The chart above relates to the Stupid-Evil-Crazy diagram (detailed version):

Obviously all these categories are somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but if they help with identifying and addressing the multiple dysfunctions of contemporary American conservatism, great. Let's take a closer look at the new chart (this time drawn to proportion), and how it breaks down:


Sober Adults

Sober Adults make up the smallest portion by far, having been hunted near to extinction by movement conservatives. They believe in the social contract and some form of responsible governance, and can still be found if one looks hard enough, but they do not exist in significant numbers in positions of power. As John Rogers put it back in 2004:

I miss Republicans. No, seriously. Remember Republicans? Sober men in suits, pipes, who'd nod thoughtfully over their latest tract on market-driven fiscal conservatism while grinding out the numbers on rocket science. Remember those serious-looking 1950's-1960's science guys in the movies -- Republican to a one.

They were the grown-ups. They were the realists. Sure they were a bummer, maaaaan, but on the way to La Revolution you need somebody to remember where you parked the car. I was never one (nor a Democrat, really, more an agnostic libertarian big on the social contract, but we don't have a party...), but I genuinely liked them.

How did they become the party of fairy dust and make believe? How did they become the anti-science guys? The anti-fact guys? The anti-logic guys?

Tim Dickinson made a similar point in a November 2011 Rolling Stone feature, "How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich":

It’s difficult to imagine today, but taxing the rich wasn’t always a major flash point of American political life. From the end of World War II to the eve of the Reagan administration, the parties fought over social spending — Democrats pushing for more, Republicans demanding less. But once the budget was fixed, both parties saw taxes as an otherwise uninteresting mechanism to raise the money required to pay the bills. Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford each fought for higher taxes, while the biggest tax cut was secured by John F. Kennedy, whose across-the-board tax reductions were actually opposed by the majority of Republicans in the House. The distribution of the tax burden wasn’t really up for debate: Even after the Kennedy cuts, the top tax rate stood at 70 percent — double its current level. Steeply progressive taxation paid for the postwar investments in infrastructure, science and education that enabled the average American family to get ahead.

As Steve Benen detailed in one of several excellent 2011 posts on the so-called super-committee, "That [Republican] party is long gone." (The liberal blogosphere has been documenting this for years.)

It's important to note that the few remaining sober adults in the Republican Party can nonetheless be painfully wrong on any number of issues. (Sincerity and responsibility are valuable, but they don't automatically translate to wisdom.) However, the faults of this group are typically much less extreme than those of mainstream modern conservatives, and it's generally possible to work with the sober adults.

Over the past 30 (arguably 50) years, the Republican Party has gradually, publicly moved extremely far to the right, to the point that they do not believe in responsible governance anymore, and they say (or actually believe) things that are demonstrably false on almost every major issue of the day. The corporate media will do its damnedest to deny this is the case. It is considered bad form to call out the Republicans without saying the Democrats are just as bad, no matter how ludicrously false this is. The media also like to anoint certain conservatives as noble, principled or thoughtful, and will continue to maintain this fiction even when the evidence of idiocy or bad faith is overwhelming (consider John McCain, or Paul Ryan).

This highlights another key problem with conservative "sober adults" – they are so scarce, the corporate media will invent them. (This is a staple of Thomas Friedman columns, as it was for the late David Broder, although it's often sold as 'sensible centrism.') As a general rule, any conservative that a Beltway Establishment type praises as a sober adult or Very Serious Person is not.

Similarly, in our current political wasteland, well-intentioned liberals can get caught up in a Diogenes dynamic, so desperate to find sober adults among the opposition that that they'll seize on any conservative rebellious enough to state obvious truths as a "reasonable conservative." Some so anointed are indeed decent people and a few are genuinely insightful, but marketing one's self as a "reasonable conservative" to middle-information, "can't we all get along" NPR/PBS/NYT types is quite the cottage industry (David Brooks, David Frum, Andrew Sullivan, the late Tony Blankley, etc.). This group of voters, typified by left-of-center, socially tolerant college grads, are so committed to being fair-minded and so desperate for a sane political landscape that they will grade conservative political figures on a curve. Their desire is understandable, but having an open mind entails giving someone a fair hearing, not turning off one's bullshit detector. It's important to judge all contenders for "sober adult" status on their actual merits, and not gaze at them through the beer goggles of centrist fetishism (yeah, mull that disturbing mangled metaphor for a sec) nor let hope turn to delusion. To quote a driftglass passage I've featured before about good (and sometimes very smart) people falling prey to wishful thinking:

Jon [Stewart]'s problem is that, for all of his formidable comedic and observational skills, he is still in an almost catatonic denial about the country in which he lives. He obviously, deeply wants us to be something more than we are. Something better than we are. A place where people with different but sincere and well-reasoned beliefs can fight hard, come together afterward to figure out a good-enough compromise, and then move on to the next thing.

You know who else wants that? Every fucking Liberal I know.

But this simply is not that country: not some feisty middle-brow Camelot with a couple of equally wacky, equally flawed and equally honorable political philosophies contending in an arena with rules and referees. Instead, this is a country where one political party is ruled by loathesome men with grotesque motives on behalf of a tiny clique of plutocrats and bulwarked by an electoral army which is kept constantly tweaked to the point of near-riot by a carefully-cultivated media cocktail of rage, ignorance, bigotry and God.

What Jon cannot face is that he will never have the country he wants -- that we all want -- by clevering and cajoling and joking and reasoning it into existence.

We've tried that for the last 30 years..

We'll return to this theme, but for now, let's not grant "sober adult" status too eagerly, and move on to the other categories.

Reckless Addicts

Reckless Addicts make up the largest portion of conservative political figures by far. (Substitute another term if you like; I considered "drunken teenagers," but that sounded too innocuous.) Picture a teenage addict, with no sense of responsibility or concern for others' well-being. He's just after his fix. Perhaps he has well-to-do parents who are overly indulgent or just befuddled – either way, they're not intervening strongly enough. They just can't believe that their once sweet kid, who surely means well, would act this way. But he will lie, cheat, steal, and spend without concern for consequences. He's just having a good time, and cleaning up the resulting mess is someone else's problem. (The adults will take care of it.) Bankrupt his parents, burn down their house, screw over other people – none of it matters to him. Alternatively, think of an adult addict, abusive to his wife and children, recklessly blowing through all their savings and going deeply in debt, all to feed his habit. He doesn't care about the future; the welfare of others, even those he is supposedly responsible for, simply does not matter. Whatever conscience he has is deeply buried, and he will never stop his behavior voluntarily, without intervention.

The key difference between this type of conservative and an actual addict is that the conservative chooses this behavior, and does so eagerly. Addicts do make some initial choices, but some forms of addiction entail changes to brain chemistry and other physical symptoms. Overcoming addiction is not solely a character or psychological issue. Recovery lingo is largely true; enabling their behavior does not help addicts, but tough love can; most addicts need to hit rock bottom before they're willing to change. Then, with support, if they choose the path to recovery, they can achieve it (but it's not easy). Our conservative "reckless addicts" deserve far less sympathy, being mostly a mix of stupid and evil ("reckless" on the Stupid-Evil-Crazy diagram). They are hardly victims (although they victimize others) and "recovery" would be easy for them to achieve at any point. Basically… they're assholes. None of this means they're utterly irredeemable, but anyone expecting them to change their behavior voluntarily is painfully naïve. Being reckless addicts, they will only change with forceful intervention, when the consequences of their behavior become so harsh they absolutely must stop.

How does this look in practice? Well, the debt ceiling hostage-taking last year was a perfect (and dismaying) example of reckless behavior (examined at length in "Extremism in Defense of Nihilism Is a Vice" and a couple of other posts). Congressional conservatives took an unprecedented, extreme stance, far to the right of their own party members, and even rejected a deal that favored them by 87 to 13 (the percentage of spending cuts to tax increases). The same recklessness can be seen in muted form in the many conservatives who once supported infrastructure spending as a wise investment in America who then suddenly opposed it when a Democrat became president. It's prominent in Dick Cheney's conscious rejection of fiscal responsibility because "Reagan proved deficits don't matter" and in the deliberate fiscal recklessness of the conservative Starve the Beast strategy.

Conservatives also have a decades-long history of bad faith on health care. Early this month, Chris Wallace asked Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell about Republican plans to address the 30 (plus) million Americans without health insurance. McConnell lied and said he'd get to it, tried to run out the clock, and finally when pressed basically admitted that the Republicans had no plan and didn't really care. (This goes in line with the Republican habit of releasing budgets without numbers or staying vague about key details of their "plans," such as where $700 billion a year is coming from.) Similarly, Republicans have a habit of running for and against Medicare, depending on the situation. Earlier this month, Jonathan Bernstein noted that Republicans voted to repeal Medicare cuts they voted for and are campaigning against. (The New York Times covered these flip-flopping, bad faith efforts poorly, leading John Cole to exclaim, "It’s Not a Pivot, They are Shamelessly Lying and You Are Helping Them.")

These contortions may be most evident in the virtuoso incoherence of then Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele (back in 2009 in an Washington Post op-ed and subsequent NPR interview). Steele inveighs against the evils of a "government-run health-care system" while simultaneously praising government-run Medicare, simultaneously argues for and against cuts to Medicare, simultaneously decries waste but opposes efforts to curb waste, and simultaneously attacks intrusive government regulations and points to them as a necessary solution (to the abuses of private insurance companies). If you listen to him (and the NPR interview is unintentionally hilarious), his pitch is that Americans should vote for the Republicans over those awful Democrats… but he can't give a coherent reason why to save his life.

While nothing should be taken away from Michael Steele's stunning individual incompetence as a bullshitter (his performance is a personal favorite of mine), he's hardly an outlier. Conservatives have been allowed to get away with this crap for decades, and America has suffered for it. Given the dominant two-party system, America really does need both major parties to be somewhat responsible. They are not, and while the Democrats have plenty of faults (a subject for other posts), the two parties are not equally to blame for the current mess. (As I've said before, if both parties merely competitively pandered to the middle class, we'd be in much better shape as a nation.)

Consider: the American Republican Party is really the only major party in any industrialized democracy that denies the existence of global warming and opposes universal health care. Republicans are far to the right of their major international counterparts. Broadly speaking, American conservative policies do not work (except for a select, privileged few), conservatives do not care about responsible governance, and the system simply would not survive if they actually got their way. The entire political approach of the reckless addict depends on other people stepping in and being the adults. The classic pattern is for a conservative to rail against government spending (and often vote against it) in D.C., then go back to their home state or district… and take credit for the government spending that was often provided over their objections. In one of Rachel Maddow's all-time best segments (from 2010), she chronicled damning evidence of this:



That last section transcribed:

Republicans, right now, do not care about policy -- by which I mean, they will not vote for things that even they admit are good policies. On policy terms they have been caught bragging on the stimulus as good policy. I have no doubt that some of them think that health reform is good policy. We know they think that things like a deficit commission or cap-and-trade or PAYGO are good policy, because they're on the record supporting them.

But they're not going to vote for them because ... screw policy. Screw what even they believe is good for the country. Screw what even they believe is good for their own districts. They are not voting 'yes,' for even things they agree with. For anything substantive. They are not going to vote 'yes' for anything substantive that this president supports. It's not going to happen.

You're not going to earn Republican votes for a second stimulus, for example, by pointing out that it's good policy that creates jobs. We know they already know that. They concede that in their home districts. And they're still not voting for it.

And they are unembarrassed about this fact. They are not embarrassed. Charging them with hypocrisy, appealing to their better, more practical, more 'what's best for the country' patriotic angels is like trying to teach your dog to drive. It wastes a lot of time, it won't work, and ultimately the dog comes out of the exercise less embarrassed for failing then you do for trying.

(Especially when it's a junkie dog. They're the worst.)

It would be great if both parties would cooperatively work to solve problems, and shared in the attendant glory, but that doesn't happen. Bill Kristol, Frank Luntz, Rush Limbaugh, Mitch McConnell, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist and pretty much the entire conservative base (occasionally rebranded as the supposedly independent tea party) have explicitly rejected responsible bipartisanship in favor of destroying their perceived political rivals. Instead of working with their counterparts, discussing issues, and making compromises, conservatives have demanded near or complete capitulation... and for policies that do not work for the nation as a whole.

These people are not responsible adults, they are reckless addicts, and they are being enabled by a (mostly) gutless political opposition, a craven press insisting that "both sides are equally to blame," and well-intentioned but low-and-middle information voters who follow the media's lead. Mostly, American citizens just want everything to work well and for politicians to be responsible, but they don't follow policy or votes, and the press is little help, covering most political disputes as he said-she said gossip. Voters are largely clueless about how extreme and irresponsible the Republican Party has become, and pearl-clutching about "civility" and "bipartisanship" displaces any serious, adult discussion of what works policy-wise and who is to blame (and to what degree) politician-wise. That's a huge problem, since it turns out that making informed decisions as lawmakers and voters is kinda essential to democracy.

It really is unconscionable that large numbers of Republican politicians demonize and vote against measures they know work, and that help (or would help) the constituents they supposedly represent. Their constant, unrelenting bullshit makes our national political discourse dumber and less accurate, which is a serious problem. There's added irony in that conservatives are prone to use Ayn Rand's language about "producers" versus "moochers," which in their minds means that good, conservative, tax-paying real Amurcans are unfairly forced to pay to support those lazy, snobby, dastardly minorities and other librul types who vote for the Democratic Party. The truth is that most red states get more federal funding than they pay in taxes, while for most blue states, it's precisely the opposite. Conservatives demonize the very people and philosophy that is helping them. And they feel entitled to that aid – which they would deny to others – leaving them completely full of crap. As we've observed before, when most conservatives say "freedom," they really mean privilege. Reckless addicts, and the constituents who support them, are the real "moochers," parasites and free riders of the system. The further crisis is that the number of reckless addicts in power has grown substantially over the years. In the political ecosystem, reckless addicts depend on a larger number of responsible, sober adults to keep things running and to protect the reckless addicts from the negative effects of their own bad behavior. When reckless addicts grow too plentiful, there's a risk that they will derail the entire system. The added trouble is that they're not the only group throwing things off-balance. Reckless addicts (and stealthy extremists) have been telling lies for decades – and as a result, many of their listeners actually believe them.

Proud Zealots

Reckless addicts are bullshitters by nature, not caring about what they say as long as it gets them what they want, but the Proud Zealots are sincerely crazy. Reckless addicts may rail against the evils of government while enjoying its largess, but the proud zealots really, truly believe all that propaganda. They probably need the least discussion, since they should be familiar as the targets of mockery on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and many liberal-leaning blogs. They can be found in greatest percentage in the conservative base, but an alarming number hold actual power. I'll use Danny Goldberg's elegant summing up again:

Almost half of the public is either misinformed or subject to unanswered right wing narratives. If I believed that there was a chance of Sharia law being imposed in the United States I too would be gravely concerned. If I believed that most Europeans and Canadians had inferior health care to that of average Americans, I too would be against health care reform. If I believed that man-made global warning did not exist or that there were nothing we could do about it and that environmental efforts were responsible for unemployment I’d be against cap and trade. If I believed that prisoner abuse would make my family significantly less likely to be killed by terrorists, my thinking about torture would be different. And if I believed that the problems with the economy had been caused by too much government instead of too little, that my personal freedom was threatened by the government instead of large corporations, I’d probably be in a tea party supporter and a Republican.

Large numbers of rank-and-file conservatives believe things that are factually false – and they believe those because their leaders lie to them.

Unfortunately, when opinions do shift among the conservative faithful, it's usually for the worse. Jamelle Bouie summarized a recent Pew poll that found that "among conservatives, 30 [percent] say that [Obama] is a Muslim; among the most conservative voters that jumps to 34 percent. When Pew first surveyed this question, in 2008, only 16 percent of conservatives believed that Obama was a Muslim." A Tobin Project poll found that 62.9% of Republicans believe that the U.S. found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when it invaded in 2003; 63.6% of Republicans also believe that Barack Obama was born in another country (8% used to believe he was born in the United States, but now think otherwise), while a further 14.7% don't know. Meanwhile, a different, far-ranging Pew poll found that:

For the first time in a Pew Research Center political values survey, only about half of Republicans (47%) agree that “there needs to be stricter laws and regulations to protect the environment.” This represents a decline of 17 points since 2009 and a fall of nearly 40 points, from 86%, since 1992.

These numbers are depressing but not surprising, considering the hyperpartisan opposition to Obama declared by conservative leaders from the very beginning (covered above) and the constant lying by Fox News and conservative figures. Regardless of the exact mix of reasons, it's bad news for responsible government.

Connoisseurs of wingnuttia will have their personal favorites: Orly Taitz' Birther meltdowns, Louis Gohmert's dire warnings about terror babies, or any of the many unlovable scamps featured in Roy Edroso's weekly Village Voice pieces (which you really need to be reading if you aren't already). Still, Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) may be the quintessential proud zealot. She is indeed an extremist, and will lie about many of her more radical views, so a case can be made that she's instead a stealthy extremist who often fails badly on the stealth part. Still, she says things that are factually false and seems unaware of it; she also seems unaware at times of how fringe her views are. It's hard to ignore that she's nuts, and it remains her defining trait. In a piece on Bachmann, Matt Taibbi warned to take her seriously, but also wrote:

In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies...

Bachmann's entire political career has followed this exact same pattern of God-speaks-directly-to-me fundamentalism mixed with pathological, relentless, conscienceless lying. She's not a liar in the traditional way of politicians, who tend to lie dully, usefully and (they hope) believably, often with the aim of courting competing demographics at the same time. That's not what Bachmann's thing is. Bachmann lies because she can't help it, because it's a built-in component of both her genetics and her ideology. She is at once the most entertaining and the most dangerous kind of liar, a turbocharged cross between a born bullshit artist and a religious fanatic, for whom lying to the infidel is a kind of holy duty.

Proud zealots can accomplish a great deal for the conservative movement, but they're most effective firing up the conservative faithful. Problems arise if they're too honest with the general public. Bill Moyers and others called out the shameful McCarthyism of Representative Allen West, but West's remarks didn't make as much news nationally as did Michele Bachmann's accusations that anti-American Muslims had infiltrated the U.S. government, and that they included a key Hillary Clinton staffer, Huma Abedin. The Daily Show justifiably mocked this, and some leading Republicans were forced to distance themselves from Bachmann's insanity, with a few being honest enough to condemn her... while others chose to defend her.

As became painfully evident during the Bush administration, some conservatives will defend absolutely anything their movement does. As also became evident during the Bush years, the press struggles with this, and tries to deny how extreme the Republican Party has become. News junkies can provide a plethora of examples both past and recent, sadly enough. One of the most grotesque examples for me remains the sliming of then 12-year old accident victim Graeme Frost in 2007 by Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives. (I sometimes refer to it as part of The War on Compassion Itself, as well as the War on The Social Contract.) With depressing predictably, many in the press contorted themselves to avoid calling out the rabid rightwingers. Supposedly objective media critic Howard Kurtz stayed silent for a long time, before finally issuing a piece that downplayed the conservatives' viciousness and featured some appalling "both sides do it" false equivalencies.

When most conservatives say "freedom," they really mean privilege, and proud zealots believe they are fighting for what they perceive to be the natural order, which of course entails themselves at the top. That 'natural order' might be an existing, unfair status quo, the unfair hierarchy of a past era, or a mythical hierarchy that never existed (as with theocrats' false belief that the U.S. was founded as a "Christian nation"). Proud zealots will lie (it's permitted or even encouraged with infidels), but they still can be more honest in their way than the reckless addicts and stealthy extremists. (They're certainly more easy to spot.)

It seems that the proud zealots have significantly increased in numbers over the past decade or so, and there may be some truth to this. But Rick Perlstein provides important context in "Why Conservatives Are Still Crazy After All These Years":

But are right-wingers scarier now than in the past? They certainly seem stranger and fiercer. I'd argue, however, that they’ve been this crazy for a long time. Over the last sixty years or so, I see far more continuities than discontinuities in what the rightward twenty or thirty percent of Americans believe about the world. The crazy things they believed and wanted were obscured by their lack of power, but they were always there – if you knew where to look. What's changed is that loony conservatives are now the Republican mainstream, the dominant force in the GOP...

The reason [Reagan] didn't effectively fight tax increases was because, with a Democratic Congress, he didn't have the power to do so. Every time he actually had to sign one he made his preferences perfectly clear, blaming wicked liberals for forcing his hand and adding that this was why liberalism had to be defeated — so that he wouldn't have to sign one again.

This was "reality based." But so, politically at least, is the obstructionism of today's supposedly non-reality-based conservatives: They block all tax increases because they can. And it's worked, hasn't it? That's because as conservative power has steadily increased since the 1960s, more and more of what conservatives actually believe — and have always actually believed —has come to shape American society and its institutions.

In some cases, the proud zealots of today are the stealthy extremists and fringe crackpots of yesteryear; they've just achieved more mainstream acceptability. (An additional factor could be authoritarian followers reacting to more extreme leaders.)

Mocking the extremism and incoherence of proud zealots can be very effective politically (not to mention fun), but it's important to take them seriously enough to prevent them from acquiring actual power. They long to inflict their batshit on America. Proud zealots make the American corporate media very uncomfortable, because the usual media blather that "both sides do it" is exposed as false, and more painfully than usual. The media is frantic to pretend that the Republican Party has not become extreme or crazy, so it will desperately anoint conservative hucksters as sober adults and pretend that the proud zealots of conservatism aren't both crazy and commonplace (rather than outliers).

Stealthy Extremists

The Stealthy Extremist tends to be severely ideological and often very radical, but hides his or her true beliefs and intent from the public. (Audiences of the faithful can be spoken to more sincerely.) Stealthy extremists come in different flavors – theocrats, anti-abortion activists, hardcore bigots – but plutocrats seem to be the most popular strain these days. Stealthy extremists are typically the most dangerous type of conservative, because they're smart enough to realize that their extremism will not be viewed kindly by the public, and so they will lie shamelessly. Proud zealots seeking to outlaw abortion will make fire and brimstone speeches about baby-killing, but stealthy extremists will instead look at backdoor ways to legislatively restrict it. The inattentive might mistake them for sober adults, and the shallower members of the chattering class are often quick to laud stealthy extremists as Very Serious People (because praising a conservative gives them centrist cred).

In office, Dick Cheney was a stealthy extremist. Barton Gellman, author of the superb book Angler (which you should read if you haven't) observed that Cheney was "a rare combination: a zealot in principle and a subtle, skillful tactician in practice." Cheney was happy to work the back channels to achieve his goals, and his office aggressively worked to keep their dealings secret. He didn't want any glory, at least not immediately; he wanted results. Stealthy extremists do not want any honest, full, contextual discussion of their plans, and generally feel contempt for public opinion.

Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) is the best current example of a stealthy extremist praised by pundits as a Very Serious Person. Paul Ryan has a mild manner, but his policies are plutocratic and extreme (not surprising, given that he's a big fan of Ayn Rand). Needless to say, most of the pundits praising Ryan haven't bothered to read his budget proposals in any depth, and certainly not with a critical or expert eye. (Some surely haven't read them at all.) It's not that Ryan's policies are different but honorable; as Paul Krugman has pointed out repeatedly, Ryan's plans are fraudulent. But Paul Ryan's tone is pitched perfectly for centrist pundits, with his talk about sacrifice and responsibility (for the middle class and the poor, naturally, not the rich). And Ryan isn't just popular with pundits; his policies have been broadly adopted by Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate.

It would be hard to go through all the pieces dissecting and debunking Paul Ryan's plans on the federal budget, taxes, and Medicare, but each variant of his plan would give huge tax cuts to the rich and cut programs for lower-income Americans (despite America's already severe and increasing wealth inequity). For the diligent, there's plenty to read on Paul Ryan's plans from Paul Krugman, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Jamison Foser, Matthew Yglesias, Steve Benen, TPM and the CBO, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Jonathan Chait, Matt Taibbi, the Tax Policy Center, Citizens for Tax Justice, and I'm sure many more.

(If that weren't enough, government funding (Social Security survivor's benefits) helped Paul Ryan go to college, yet he wants to restrict Pell Grants that would help others do the same, and told a financially struggling student to work three jobs. He's made misleading claims about student grants and loans, favoring more expensive private loans and for-profit education. There's also the issue of his donors.)

"The Legendary Paul Ryan" by Jonathan Chait is one of the sharper portraits out there, and a good overview. After going over some details of Ryan's budget, Chait points out:

This is not a moderate plan. As Robert Greenstein, a liberal budget analyst, summed up the proposal, “It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history.” And yet, Ryan has managed to sell it as something admirable, and something else entirely: a deficit-reduction plan. This is very clever. The centrist political Establishment, heavily represented among business leaders and the political media, considers it almost self-evident that the budget deficit (and not, say, mass unemployment or climate change) represents the singular policy threat of our time, and that bipartisan cooperation offers the sole avenue to address it. By casting his program as a solution to the debt crisis, by frequently conceding that Republicans as well as Democrats had failed in the past, and by inveighing against “demagoguery,” Ryan has presented himself as the acceptable Republican suitor the moderates had been longing for.

Whether Ryan’s plan even is a “deficit-reduction plan” is highly debatable. Ryan promises to eliminate trillions of dollars’ worth of tax deductions, but won’t identify which ones. He proposes to sharply reduce government spending that isn’t defense, Medicare (for the next decade, anyway), or Social Security, but much of that reduction is unspecified, and when Obama named some possible casualties, Ryan complained that those hypotheticals weren’t necessarily in his plan. Ryan is specific about two policies: massive cuts to income-tax rates, and very large cuts to government programs that aid the poor and medically vulnerable. You could call all this a “deficit-reduction plan,” but it would be more accurate to call it “a plan to cut tax rates and spending on the poor and sick.” Aside from a handful of exasperated commentators, like Paul Krugman, nobody does.

The persistent belief in the existence of an authentic, deficit hawk Ryan not only sweeps aside the ugly particulars of his agenda, it also ignores, well, pretty much everything he has done in his entire career, and pretty much everything he has said until about two years ago..

As Matt Taibbi points out, Ryan is merely the latest in a long line of hucksters:

Every few years or so, the Republicans trot out one of these little whippersnappers, who offer proposals to hack away at the federal budget. Each successive whippersnapper inevitably tries, rhetorically, to out-mean the previous one, and their proposals are inevitably couched as the boldest and most ambitious deficit-reduction plans ever seen. Each time, we are told that these plans mark the end of the budgetary reign of terror long ago imposed by the entitlement system begun by FDR and furthered by LBJ.

Never mind that each time the Republicans actually come into power, federal deficit spending explodes and these whippersnappers somehow never get around to touching Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. The key is that for the many years before that moment of truth, before these buffoons actually get a chance to put their money where their lipless little mouths are, they will stomp their feet and scream about how entitlements are bringing us to the edge of apocalypse.

The reason for this is always the same: the Republicans, quite smartly, recognize that there is great political hay to be made in the appearance of deficit reduction, and that white middle class voters will respond with overwhelming enthusiasm to any call for reductions in the “welfare state,” a term which said voters will instantly associate with black welfare moms and Mexicans sneaking over the border to visit American emergency rooms.

The problem, of course, is that to actually make significant cuts in what is left of the “welfare state,” one has to cut Medicare and Medicaid, programs overwhelmingly patronized by white people, and particularly white seniors. So when the time comes to actually pull the trigger on the proposed reductions, the whippersnappers are quietly removed from the stage and life goes on as usual, i.e. with massive deficit spending on defense, upper-class tax cuts, bailouts, corporate subsidies, and big handouts to Pharma and the insurance industries.

This is a political game that gets played out in the media over and over again, and everyone in Washington knows how it works. Which is why it’s nauseating (but not surprising) to see so many commentators falling over themselves with praise for Ryan’s “bold” budget proposal, which is supposedly a ballsy piece of politics because it proposes backdoor cuts in Medicare and Medicaid by redounding their appropriations to the states and to block grants. Ryan is being praised for thusly taking on seniors, a traditionally untouchable political demographic...

Stealthy extremists provide important cover for the reckless addicts. But it's all a very cynical con game, and with potentially dire consequences. For most of the chattering class, cosmetics trump substance by a wide margin. Forgive me for quoting it at length, but this Paul Krugman post from 2011 nails the problem:

I’ve been reading various “news analyses” of the Ryan plan, and I’m feeling depressed. In the past, I’ve complained about false equivalence — of “views differ on shape of the planet” type reporting. But what I’m seeing here is worse: supposedly objective, even-handed reporting that actually prejudges the issue according to current conventional wisdom.

The stories I have in mind say things like this: “There are those who criticize the Ryan plan, saying that it’s too radical/goes too far.”

As a card-carrying member of Those Who, I protest. This is just wrong.

People like me don’t say that the Ryan plan is too radical; we say that it’s a fraud. The spending cuts are largely fake, either because they’re just magic asterisks or because they wouldn’t survive politically; the revenue estimates are fake, because they combine huge tax cuts with vague assurances that extra revenue will be found by closing loopholes. There’s no there there — except for big tax cuts for the rich and pain for the poor.

All I can think here is that reporters are so deep into the Beltway conventional wisdom that this is a Bold, Serious Plan that they just tune out the people saying that no, it’s not.

And what makes this especially bad is the fact John Cole points out, that the people praising the plan don’t seem to have actually read it:

The plan is bold! It is serious! It took courage! It re-frames the debate! The ball is in Obama’s court! Very wonky! It is a game-changer! Did I mention it is serious? The math demands it! We need to have shared sacrifice! This puts us on the right course! It’s serious and bold!

Read any one of their pieces the last couple of days, and it was like conventional wisdom/villager mad libs. Actually reading the bill, realizing it isn’t serious, it isn’t bold, that it won’t set us on the right path because it gives away as much in taxes as it cuts from the needy, realizing the only people sacrificing are the poor while the well-off are lavished with trillions in tax cuts- well, doing that and actually thinking, like Bruce Bartlett, James Fallows, Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, and others managed to do, that would be just way too much work.

I like that phrase, conventional wisdom mad libs.

Anyway, no, I don’t think the plan goes too far. I think it’s disingenuous and fraudulent. And the reason I think that is that I have actually done the math.

Stealthy extremists such as Ryan benefit from a pundit class that eschews policy analysis, and ironically, extremists also benefit from their very extremism. Ryan's plans should succeed or fail on their merits (rather, their severe lack thereof), but their radical nature means that rather than rejecting them, the public just doesn't believe they could be real. Democrats running a super PAC ran into this when trying to raise funds (emphasis added):

Burton and his colleagues spent the early months of 2012 trying out the pitch that Romney was the most far-right presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater. It fell flat. The public did not view Romney as an extremist. For example, when Priorities informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan — and thus championed “ending Medicare as we know it” — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.

The same dynamic also protects rich extremists such as the Koch brothers. An accurate accounting of who they fund and what positions they support sounds like something out of a conspiracy thriller. It's unfortunate but not terribly surprising that some business owners hate unions (as do the Kochs), yet the public would be more shocked by the many Koch-funded attacks on the Commons, including public libraries, public media, public schools, and public roads.

Other stealthy extremists bear mentioning, including the many American theocrats and anti-abortion activists. Foreign policy has its share, particularly the war porn crowd. And while almost all Republican officials practice fiscal irresponsibility or fiscal recklessness, for the extremists, it's all part of a deliberate, long-term starve the beast strategy (see also the Two Santa Claus Theory). Karl Rove and Grover Norquist have sought to permanently crush the Democratic Party through the K Street Project and other measures.

Still, Paul Ryan is probably the single best current example. His policies are extreme, he lies about their consequences, he is praised by pundits who either don't analyze his policies or agree with their radical (and cruel) aims, and his positions are so excessive that even when they are accurately described to members of the public, they don't believe anyone could be so extreme. Nor is the press liable to set them straight. These dynamics are extremely troubling. The reckless addicts and proud zealots may do more damage in the short term due to sheer numbers, but the stealthy extremists are typically the most dangerous and do the greatest long-term harm.

Categorizing Conservatives

Sober adults are usually the easiest to spot, because they don't spout obviously crazy shit. The other three types can be tougher to distinguish, because they tend to make similar statements to one another. (You'll notice some names were mentioned in more than one category above.) However, their underlying beliefs differ, and over time, they tend to reveal themselves. Feel free to come up with your own, more extensive breakdown, but this may help:

(Click for a larger view.)

Liberals, moderates, independents – anyone who is not a conservative – should definitely support and encourage conservative sober adults against their more extreme, reckless and zealous brethren when possible. Irresponsible conservatives should be offered opportunities to become sober adults. However, some proportion is in order; they already have those opportunities, every time they vote, or give a floor speech, or do an interview, or meet with constituents, or huddle with lobbyists. They can choose to be (at least marginally) honorable or not. Plus – addicts need to want to change. It can't be done for them. In the long run, it doesn't do America any favors to grant irresponsible conservatives sober adult status they don't deserve, or accommodate their extremism, or bow to their zealotry, or enable their addiction. Conservatives should be given the benefit of the doubt to begin with, but their nature should become clear as they establish a track record of votes, positions and statements. (For instance, if Newt Gingrich hasn't set your bullshit detector off yet, it needs recalibrating.) Some small commitment to responsibility is all that's really necessary to join the good government club; running things well is hard enough without letting the raging assholes rule the roost. Effective representative government depends on accountability. Assessing the consequences of policies is essential so that things can run better. Sometimes, that means assigning blame. Capitulating to extremism out of some painfully misguided sense that "civility" trumps honesty and responsibility isn't honorable – it's immoral.

Offer the scoundrels a way out, offer them chances to quit their addictions, their zealotry, their extremism. But if they choose not to go that route – and sadly, that's been the trend pretty relentless for years – cut them off. Make it cost them. Banish them to the political wilderness for a few elections (or generations – they're a stubborn lot). Addicts need tough love. Zealots need to be kept away from power. Extremists need to be challenged. It's not "civil" or "serious" to ignore a track record of disastrous policies, inaccurate statements and bad faith – it's immoral and irresponsible. People of good faith who want America to run better need to make more of an effort to learn what the hell is going on and who is to blame – and they need to challenge that crap. Sometimes, that means they need to pick a side.

The "four types of conservatives" mostly apply to the Republican Party, but also to Democratic Blue Dogs, and arguably to "centrist" Democrats on a number of issues, including imperialism, corporatism, and plutocracy. The faults of the Democratic Party compared to the Republicans is a longer discussion we've had before and will again, but for this post, I'd just suggest that different reform efforts often reinforce each other rather than being mutually exclusive or counterproductive. For instance, efforts to opposes imperialism are important, as are efforts to develop independent media. But it's hard to sell the notion of a general social contract and decent treatment in international relations, sell the idea of not hating and fearing foreigners, when roughly half the country not only hates and fears foreigners, they hate and fear their fellow Americans. It's hard to discuss more subtle issues (blowback, and the failures of bipartisan imperialist attitudes) when our national political discourse refuses to call out even glaring misconduct by one party. Challenging stupidity, craziness and evil in one arena generally has a positive spillover effect. And as Thomas E. Man and Norman J. Ornstein point out in It’s Even Worse Than It Looks:

The second [of two sources of dysfunction in current American politics] is the fact that, however awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing challenges.

I wish it were otherwise, but we do not live in a country where decent folks in Al Franken's "mushball middle" can frolic happily in the fields of moderation, secure in the knowledge that everyone in political power values responsible governance, shared prosperity and the basic idea of a social contract. Movement conservatives have been waging an all-out war on all of that for decades, and the true zealots never, ever stop voluntarily.

Personally, I would rather not spend so much time on politics, and sympathize greatly with my friends in "I just want to be left alone" camp. The problem is, as the saying goes, even if you don't care about politics, they care about you. (The aggressive Bush campaign in 2002 for an unnecessary war with Iraq was the wakeup call for many, but the insanity predated that, and it's hard to keep track of all the callousness, irresponsibility and batshit craziness of the past decade or so.)

My plea to anyone who covers politics (particularly the corporate media) would be this. Please try to judge political figures and policies on their merits. Please recognize that policy matters. Please call out corruption and bullshit whenever it occurs and no matter who spouts it. (Liberal and independent bloggers try to call out the Democrats frequently, not just the Republicans and conservatives.) But also, when one side's rap sheet grows much, much longer and more egregious, please don't panic and succumb to efforts to work the ref. Don't traffic in false equivalencies and insist that both sides are equally to blame when it just ain't so. Please don't grade conservatives on a curve, and please actually read and analyze the damn policies of stealthy extremists before you praise them as "Very Serious." Please supply useful information versus gossip, and help voters make more informed choices. Add nuance, complexity and detail rather than offering bland centrist generalities and comforting establishment clichés. Making informed, qualitative judgments is essential for good governance and thoughtful voting, and political commentary should encourage that process instead of shutting it down. Obviously, there are many reasons the corporate media won't listen – but then, addicts, extremists and zealots never stop voluntarily.

(Edited slightly for typos, clarity and to add a link.)