The Republican Party Has become so Destructively Extreme, and the President so Strategically Inept, that One Wonders If Anyone in America Is Going to Wake Up Enough to Grip Reality —  the Irony of the Tea Party’s Partial Correctness

© 2011 Peter Free

 

29 July 2011

 

 

Loud voices in a democracy frequently overwhelm the quieter sanity that resides there

 

Two of today’s immediate “raising the debt ceiling” problems are:

 

(i) the lack of progressive counter-balance to the Tea Party

 

and

 

(ii) the fact is that the Tea Party is arguably accurate in regard to the unresponsiveness of our behemoth federal government.

 

 

The Tea Party is not completely wrong — it is the absence of intelligently determined opposition that is the problem

 

Thanks to the Tea Party, one corner of national debate is now unmistakably stated.  Presumably, an uprising on the “progressive” side would serve to force a more fact-based discussion about our national direction.  But that more moderate political uprising has not occurred.

 

In short, the Tea Party itself is not the problem.  The lack of a voluble, intelligent, and determined opposition to the Tea Party’s arguably bad ideas is.

 

The one-sidedness conundrum is strategically compounded by the fact that the Tea Party is fundamentally correct in saying that our Federal Government is overly complex, often spendthrift, and completely unresponsive to calls for change.

 

When the Tea Party’s diagnosis is at least descriptively correct, it can be difficult to persuade listeners that its proposed solutions are wrong.

 

Progressives and moderates have failed to successfully hold ground against too-extreme Republican ideas.  They have been unwilling to agree that:

 

(a) an unaffordable, too-Byzantine government is indeed part of the nation’s existential problem

 

or

 

(b) that big government needs to finance itself in the long-term by taxing people in addition to the wealthy.

 

As former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson has implied, we have been suckling free milk too long to recognize that the (i) governmental “dairy” costs money and (ii) the revenue to pay for our suckling has to come from somewhere.

 

 

The Tea Party has had to be intransigent

 

The Tea Party’s inflexibility in regard to raising the debt ceiling and keeping government expenses under control are directly due to our demonstrated inability to reform Washington’s expensively domineering excesses.

 

When Government is structurally immovable in practice, the only recourse seems to be the implementation of extreme measures.  When Grover Norquist defends his “no new taxes” pledge, he does so on the grounds that government never retreats in its unaffordable expansions of influence.

 

His proposition is hard to argue with, at least on the basis of historical evidence.

 

Though one might find instances of reduced expenditures within one federal department or agency, the overall thrust of government expansiveness and control has been generally upward.

 

From my perspective, government expansion has been due to significantly more than just as a response to evolving social and environmental complexity.  There has been an arrogant, self-interested, and self-sustaining inertia involved in federal influence that freedom-loving people need to beware.

 

Consequently, the Norquist position is not an empty-headed one.  There is tactical, even strategic, merit to his saying the equivalent of, “Since we can’t control the unyielding domination of government and unnecessary programs, we can force the government to conduct itself within a specified budget ceiling.”

 

 

“But, even if Norquist is partially right, what about maintaining social safety-nets?”

 

The social safety net question is where our national argument needs to occur.  “Progressives” have been complacent about making it.

 

The safety nets that we have today were essentially impromptu responses to challenging times.  They were never rationally calculated with an eye toward maintaining sustainable expenses over time and in response to changing demographics.

 

The Tea Party and Grover Norquist today supply what we can call the “No Safety Net” or “Reduced Safety Net” portion of the debate.

 

It is time for moderates to come up with a reasoned, affordable, and implementable response the Tea Party’s arguably anti-social arguments.

 

But we haven’t.  And that has “liberal” economist Paul Krugman upset.

 

 

When seemingly everyone in leadership has gone nuts or cowardly, truth is welcome from any quarter — Paul Krugman speaks out

 

Paul Krugman said:

 

Many pundits view taking a position in the middle of the political spectrum as a virtue in itself. I don’t. Wisdom doesn’t necessarily reside in the middle of the road, and I want leaders who do the right thing, not the centrist thing.

 

But for those who insist that the center is always the place to be, I have an important piece of information: We already have a centrist president.

 

But making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior.

 

The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

 

© 2011 Paul Krugman, The Centrist CopOut, New York Times (28 July 2011) (paragraph split)

 

 

Liberal Robert Reich holds the President accountable for dropping his share of the national direction ball

 

Robert Reich asks:

 

How can it be that with over 9 percent unemployment, essentially no job growth, widening inequality, falling real wages, and an economy that's almost dead in the water -- we're locked in a battle over how to cut the budget deficit?

 

Part of the answer is a Republican Party that's the most irresponsible and rigidly ideological I've ever witnessed.

 

Part of the answer is the continuing gravitational pull of the Great Recession.

 

But another part of the answer lies with the president -- and his inability or unwillingness to use the bully pulpit to tell Americans the truth, and mobilize them for what must be done.

 

[T]he man who has occupied the Oval Office since January, 2009 is . . . a man seemingly without a compass, a tactician who veers rightward one day and leftward the next, an inside-the Beltway dealmaker who doesn't explain his comprises in light of larger goals.

 

A more disturbing explanation is that he simply lacks the courage to tell the truth.

 

Obama cannot mobilize America around the truth, in other words, because he is continuously adapting to the prevailing view.

 

This is not leadership.

 

© 2011 Robert Reich, The Empty Bully Pulpit, Huffington Post (29 July 2011) (paragraphs split)

 

 

Not a good time for a responsibility-avoiding President

 

On the bright side, adversaries frequently force us to achieve our potential.

 

The amorphously-constructed Tea Party is giving social moderates an opportunity to grapple with choosing and arguing for a more sensible national direction.