Let us again speak of the limits of civility in political discourse

By R.K. Barry

Yesterday Paul Krugman wrote about the hurt feelings the Republican leadership claimed upon listening to President Obama's speech on the economy last week. They seemed not to like, as Krugman points out, Obama's assertion that the Paul Ryan plan is cruel nonsense and should be exposed as such.

It was richly ironic to be reading about Republican hurt feelings on a day when right-wingers across the country were gathering to listen to the likes of Donald Trump, Michele Bachman and Sarah Palin, who have drawn serious attention to themselves by calling our president all manner of nasty names like "socialist, "the guy who wants to off grandma," and the "worst president ever," etc., etc.

In that context, having Republicans claim insult was a little odd.

Don't get me wrong. Civility has its place but not, perhaps, so much in the current context in which, as Krugman writes, "the two parties have both utterly different goals and utterly different views about how the world works."

Krugman continues:

It’s not nice to say this (but the truth is rarely nice): whatever they may say, Republicans are not concerned, above all, about the deficit. In fact, it’s not clear that they care about the deficit at all; they’re trying to use deficit concerns to push through their goal of dismantling the Great Society and if possible the New Deal; they have stated explicitly that they want to reduce taxes on high incomes to pre-New-Deal levels. And it’s an article of faith on their part that low taxes have magical effects on the economy.

Obama and Democrats generally tend to believe that major social programs are worth protecting, having extended them with health care reform. They tend to accept the fact, and the research to support it, that tax cuts for the wealthy are not the cure-all for what ails us.

So, the battle lines seem to be drawn. If civility means that we sit around politely chatting while Republicans tell lies about their true intentions, I want no part of it. While I hope we would all reject violence, I see no downside to taking to the streets to scream at the top of our lungs if necessary that we will not calmly debate the contours of a new economic regime that sees the rich get richer and the rest of us fight over the scraps.

Civility is all too often code language for passivity - and passivity always works in the interest of those who already have the power.

When it has been necessary to stand up for justice, fairness and equality, Americans have frequently found the strength to do so, whether for civil rights, women's right, gay rights or to oppose the war in Vietnam. In each instance, those who were being challenged could be heard bemoaning the lack of civility shown by protestors. You could always count on that.

The reshaping of our society proposed by Republican lawmakers and activists certainly requires the kind of push-back we saw in these earlier movements. If it doesn't happen in a way that is civil enough for them, I don't really care.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost)

A failure of leadership: Jonathan Chait and Paul Krugman on Obama, the budget, and the government shutdown that never was

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I haven't written much on the budget/shutdown, mainly because I just haven't had much to say. I never thought a shutdown was likely. Boehner was certainly facing enormous pressure from the right, but most Republicans understood that a shutdown would hurt them politically (if not the country generally), and it was inevitable that a Democratic Party that fears confrontation and that is, for better or worse, all about compromise, would give in. And that's just what happened.

So who won? -- a question Jon Stewart amusingly looked into last night. Well, the Republicans, perhaps, as they came away with fairly significant concessions from the Democrats (even if this was just about domestic discretionary spending), but many on the right aren't happy, whether over the continued funding for Planned Parenthood or over the fact that spending wasn't cut even more -- and while Boehner emerges intact, it's not clear how long he'll be able to hold off the Tea Party. But I'm not really sure the Democrats lost. A shutdown would have been bad for everyone, and so avoiding a shutdown without giving up too much is a sort of "win" for them, as long as they can take the fight to the budget battle still to come and thence into 2012.

And Obama? For a president who is all about compromise, yet another compromise is also a win, and he'll now be able to position himself to secure even greater support from independents when the time comes. He stepped in when he needed to, acted like the mature adult in a world of petulant children, and, however this may irritate progressives (myself included), accepted a deal that will benefit him politically at the expense of fighting the Republicans' disastrous agenda.

That's just the way I see it. I'm not saying I like it.

And the big political problem, it seems to me, is that, once again, Democrats just caved without much of a fight at all, even a symbolic one, except over Planned Parenthood (which, to be fair, is worth fighting for, but it's not the be-all and end-all of federal budget issues), allowing Republicans to secure the upper hand, and a fairly significant "win," despite the fact (forgotten by the media, it seems) that they're still the minority party (controlling the House but not the Senate or the White House) -- even after last November's "shellacking." At TNR yesterday, Jon Chait offered a number of reasons for why this happened. Yes, Democrats are generally more conciliatory (to their credit, perhaps, if not so much in the crucible of legislative politics), and, yes, the issue generally favours Republicans (who can spin their economic and fiscal agenda as "small government" (and who likes taxes? who likes government (until you realize what it does for you)?). But this, to me, is the most convincing explanation:

Republicans were able to credibly threaten a shutdown of the government. That willingness to impose harm on the entire country if they didn’t get a sufficiently friendly outcome proved to be powerful bargaining leverage, moving the goalposts progressively closer to them.

In other words, Republicans are just tougher negotiators, willing to push the country to the brink, or at least to bluff that way, to get their way. It's a game of chicken, and Republicans know that Democrats swerve first. Of course, Democrats should have known better. They should have called that bluff and challenged Republicans to shut down the government. Sure, the government may then have been shut down, but wouldn't Democrats then have "won" politically? At the very least, they would have had a strong case to take to the American people.

But, no. Not this time. Not ever, it seems.

And it doesn't help that Obama himself wasn't really up for a fight. As Paul Krugman writes:

What have they done with President Obama? What happened to the inspirational figure his supporters thought they elected? Who is this bland, timid guy who doesn't seem to stand for anything in particular?

I realize that with hostile Republicans controlling the House, there's not much Mr. Obama can get done in the way of concrete policy. Arguably, all he has left is the bully pulpit. But he isn't even using that -- or, rather, he's using it to reinforce his enemies' narrative.

His remarks after last week's budget deal were a case in point.

Maybe that terrible deal, in which Republicans ended up getting more than their opening bid, was the best he could achieve -- although it looks from here as if the president's idea of how to bargain is to start by negotiating with himself, making pre-emptive concessions, then pursue a second round of negotiation with the G.O.P., leading to further concessions.

And bear in mind that this was just the first of several chances for Republicans to hold the budget hostage and threaten a government shutdown; by caving in so completely on the first round, Mr. Obama set a baseline for even bigger concessions over the next few months. 

I still think Obama succeeded politically, continuing to set himself up nicely for re-election next year. But Krugman is right that he weakened himself and his party over the long run, essentially giving Republicans still more confidence that they can they way, or at least a great deal of their way, just by controlling the House.

It will take more time to sort out who "won" and who "lost" this shutdown battle, but with an absence of principled, determined leadership in the White House, the losers ultimately are the American people, who need something other than the Republican agenda and who have a president who is apparently unwilling to fight for anything at all.

Hate, violence, extremism: Krugman on the Arizona shooting

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Just to drive the point home, allow me to quote Paul Krugman, who yesterday made the case that many of us have been making the past few days:

When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?

Put me in the latter category. I've had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008 campaign. I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton's election in 1992 -- an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again. The Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion: in April 2009 an internal report warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence...

It's true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn't mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.

Exactly. I made very much the same argument here (my initial thoughts on the shooting) and here (my further reflections on the socio-political context underpinning the shooting). It's not so much (or not just) the violent, hate-filled rhetoric of the right but the extremist, incendiary conservative ideology behind that rhetoric -- that is, the ideology that finds an outlet in that rhetoric, via the partisan demagoguery of conservatives like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, the ideology that has found a home in the Republican Party.

Again, as we keep repeating, it's not that the killer, Jared Lee Loughner, is a straightforward conservative, a card-carrying member of the Tea or Republican Party. He does seem to be "deranged," to use a loaded and hardly clinical term -- that is, he does seem to be mentally disturbed. He is apparently an "independent," and, no, it does not appear that his agenda is specifically Republican. His views appear to be generally right-wing but on the fringe, though his paranoid conspiracy theories seem as if they could have been taken straight from Beck.

But it is wrong, I think, and as Krugman suggests, to treat him as a detached loner who acted in a vacuum of his own derangement. To do that is to ignore context, to ignore the bigger picture, the "national climate." And we do that at our own risk.

The potential was out there, and it was building -- and it continues to build. Anyone who was paying attention should not have been surprised at all.