A Brief History…

I have been mulling the question of whether this incredible article was worth responding to. When I saw the title on Real Clear Politics, I assumed it was a parody. I’m still not 100% sure it isn’t.

In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama’s tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation. These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

The writer has not considered the possibility that Obama’s economic and national security policies are detached from reality. He does not give any thought to the possibility that millions of people have been running businesses and living their lives without the benefit of government and would like to continue to be left alone.

He also ignores the fact that, as a result of tax reforms the past two decades, about 35% of the tax payers pay no income tax. Thus, there is a constituency for new spending that knows the responsibility for paying those bills will be someone elses. In fact, by 2009, that percent who pay no tax had continued to rise and is now nearly 40%.

Maybe those people who pay no income tax are the “stupid and ignorant” group he is referring to. No, he seems to think that the middle class, which pays the vast majority of income tax, is the target of his ire.

The usual way to describe such inconsistent demands from voters is to say that the public is an angry, populist, tea-partying mood. But a lot more people are watching American Idol than are watching Glenn Beck, and our collective illogic is mostly negligent rather than militant. The more compelling explanation is that the American public lives in Candyland, where government can tackle the big problems and get out of the way at the same time. In this respect, the whole country is becoming more and more like California, where ignorance is bliss and the state’s bonds have dropped to an A- rating (the same level as Libya’s), thanks to a referendum system that allows the people to be even more irresponsible than their elected representatives. Middle-class Americans really don’t want to hear about sacrifices or trade-offs—except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them. We like the idea of hard choices in theory. When was the last time we made one in reality?

I tend to agree with him about California but there is one characteristic about California that he doesn’t mention. Which political party dominates California government ? In 2005, Arnold Schwartzenegger, who had been elected two years before during the recall of his predecessor, Gray Davis, attempted to pass four reform initiatives to try to get control of the runaway entitlements of California. The teachers’ unions and the SEIU mobilized against him and all four initiatives went down to defeat. Arnold quickly caved in the political left and we are now on the verge of bankruptcy.

Schwarzenegger’s proposals to curb spending and weaken unions inflamed passions on both sides, partly because of the election’s roughly $50 million cost in a state that repeatedly faces budget shortfalls.

Though some of the measures were complex, Schwarzenegger cast the election in simple terms: Support him and the state moves forward — vote no and protect a broken system of government in Sacramento.

Actually, he gave up and the state has continued its decline as middle class tax payers flee to other states.

So who has good ideas to stop the financial whirlpool the US is caught in?

I don’t mean to suggest that honesty is what separates the two parties. Increasingly, the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians in either party who are prepared to speak directly about our choices, on the one hand, and the majority who indulge the public’s delusions, on the other. I would put President Obama and his economic team in the first group, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republicans are more indulgent of the public’s unrealism in general, but Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial. Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.

Climate change ? He still thinks that AGW is a high priority ? Wow ! Plus he thinks Obama’s $3.8 trillion budget is drawn up by “serious politicians” ? Maybe he thinks that Gorbachev was on the verge of solving the Soviet Union’s problems in 1989. He thinks the Obama who raised discretional spending by $84 billion this past year is serious about deficits with his fake spending freeze? What about the federal employee situation ? The only place in the US which is not having a recession is The District of Columbia and environs. Federal employee numbers are climbing rapidly, where the numbers are expected to increase by 153,000 in fiscal 2010. Private industry, mostly small business, has lost about 4.5 million jobs.

The political left, having lost the confidence of the electorate in record time, is unhappy with that electorate. Imagine if Obama had really tried to be bipartisan and had incorporated Republican concepts in his first big “stimulus” bill. Imagine for a moment that, instead of the famously corrupt payments sometimes in non-existent Congressional districts, to interest groups and local government, the bill had included a six month holiday from FICA taxes. That would have resulted in a similar deficit but it would have had instantaneous effect and it would have been distributed to the working tax payers. Imagine if the health care bill had included exchanges in which individuals could have purchased insurance that was tailored to their needs, high deductible for young healthy workers for example, and the mandates of the special interests had been left out. Had that been done, Republicans would have much less to complain about and Weisberg might even like us voters more. We wouldn’t be so ignorant.

Alas, the chance was wasted and now the left is angry at us “ignorant” middle class voters. James Fallows has a pretty good essay on American decline until he gets to the last two pages. Then we get back to the tired old complaints about the electoral college and the Senate and the inability of Democrat phonies like Kerry to get elected.

America the society is in fine shape! America the polity most certainly is not. Over the past half century, both parties have helped cause this predicament—Democrats by unintentionally giving governmental efforts a bad name in the 1960s and ’70s, Republicans by deliberately doing so from the Reagan era onward. At the moment, Republicans are objectively the more nihilistic, equating public anger with the sentiment that “their” America has been taken away and defining both political and substantive success as stopping the administration’s plans. As a partisan tactic, this could make sense; for the country, it’s one more sign of dysfunction, and of the near-impossibility of addressing problems that require truly public efforts to solve.

Of course, when Bush tried to deal with the coming collapse of Social Security by allowing private accounts, the Democrats demagogued it mercilessly but the Republicans are the “nihilists.”

We could hope for an enlightened military coup, or some other deus ex machina by the right kind of tyrants. (In his 700-page new “meliorist” novel, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, Ralph Nader proposes a kind of plutocrats’ coup, in which Warren Buffett, Bill Gates Sr., Ted Turner, et al. collaborate to create a more egalitarian America.) The periodic longing for a “man on horseback” is a reflection of disappointment with what normal politics can bring. George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower were the right men on horseback.

Here we go with the left’s fondness for military coups and authoritarian government. They can’t win elections so it is the voter’s fault and they want to try to do without those ignorant voters.

I guess it wasn’t a parody.