Steven Pearlstein writes that America would be better off with a Republican like Mitch Daniels, Governor of Indiana, as Senate Minority Leader rather than Mitch McConnell.

The bad Mitch, as most Americans know by now, is the charmless and shameless hypocrite who offers up a steady stream of stale ideology and snarky talking points but almost never a constructive idea. McConnell has decided that the only way for Republicans to win is for President Obama to lose, and he will use lies, threats and all manner of parliamentary subterfuge to obstruct the president’s programs.

The good Mitch, by contrast, is a principled but practical conservative who respects the intelligence of voters and would rather get something done than score political points. Daniels is a genuine fiscal conservative who took a $600 million state budget deficit and turned it into a $1 billion surplus but managed to do so without cutting spending for education and even increased funding for child welfare services. He pushed hard to lower property taxes but didn’t hesitate to propose temporary hikes in income and sales taxes to keep the state in the black. He privatized the state’s toll road and then used the $4 billion proceeds to launch a major public works investment program.

Many have pointed out that Republican governors tend to be less crazy than Republican congresspersons — there are exceptions — mostly because governors actually have to govern. So if Mitch Daniels went to Washington he might end up being as big a waste of time as Mitchell Mitch McConnell. Ezra Klein says, “Telling this story in terms of good people and bad people doesn’t give enough weight to the structural incentives that make people of all sorts do good and bad things.”

Matt Yglesias takes this a bit further —

We’re suffering from an incoherent institutional set-up in the senate. You can have a system in which a defeated minority still gets a share of governing authority and participates constructively in the victorious majority’s governing agenda, shaping policy around the margins in ways more to their liking. Or you can have a system in which a defeated minority rejects the majority’s governing agenda out of hand, seeks opening for attack, and hopes that failure on the part of the majority will bring them to power. But right now we have both simultaneously. It’s a system in which the minority benefits if the government fails, and the minority has the power to ensure failure. It’s insane, and it needs to be changed.

A rightie blogger, missing the larger point, snarks that when Republicans were the majority many Dems made noise about obstructing the Bush agenda. However, as I remember it, it mostly just noise — rarely were the Dems able to stop the Bushie steamroller. On the other hand, Republican obstruction of the Obama Administration has been pretty effective.

So the problem is not just that Congress can’t get anything done. Under some circumstances it can act effectively and decisively. However, in recent years when Congress acts effectively and decisively, it does so to do things that should not be done — e.g., wreck the nation’s finances with ridiculous tax cuts, start pointless wars, interfere with Terri Shiavo’s medical care. Pushing each of these bad decisions are mighty forces of ideological and vested interests.

But when it comes to taking care of the needs of the American people — forget it. It seems that nothing the American people really need the federal government to do can ever get done. Which means, basically, that Washington cannot govern. Because using the country’s power and resources to serve narrow partisan, ideological and vested interests is not governing. Responding to the needs of the people is governing.

Update: Another rightie mis-reads Matt Yglesias and thinks Matt is just complaining about the filibuster (see rightie’s earlier post in which he does the same thing). Of course, the issue is not the filibuster itself but the fact that a large chunk of Congress serves partisan and corporate interests only. We, the People, are screwed.

[Update: The rightie tells me I am in error. No; I say again, the filibuster itself is not the principal issue. See the Steney Hoyer interview linked in the next paragraph, where Hoyer says “This is a United States Senate that has had more cloture votes in one year than in the ’60s and ’70s combined.” The use of the filibuster as an instrument of obstruction is part of the institutional set-up to which Matt Yglesias refers, but the filibuster itself has been around forever, even in times past when the Senate really could do useful work.

And there is a lot more to the “institutional set-up” than just the filibuster. The procedures for getting bills out of committee, for example, were often used by the Republicans to bottleneck Bill Clinton’s initiatives and appointees in the 1990s. In the past few weeks we’ve seen Republicans using amendment procedures to block progress in the Senate. This is way more than just the filibuster.

The deeper issue is the obstructionism itself, what is causing it, and how it functions. This reaches into far more aspects of Senate procedure than just the filibuster, but more importantly it reaches into the way all of our political processes have broken down.]

See also Ezra Klein’s interview of Steney Hoyer. Hoyer is talking about the difficulty of working with today’s whackjob Republicans, although of course there are also Democrats who don’t represent their constituents any more.

Newt Gingrich was of course the chief proponent of that policy, and he and Bob Michel, who was leader of the Republicans, disagreed. And Gingrich eventually succeeded in pushing Michel out. Michel’s view was you sit down, offer your input, and move forward. The theory was that the American people elected the legislative body to make policy and so you make policy. Gingrich’s proposition, and maybe accurately, was that as long as you, Bob Michel, and our party cooperate with Democrats and get 20 or 30 percent of what we want and they get to say they solved the problem and had a bipartisan bill, there’s no incentive for the American people to change leadership. You have to confront, delay, and undermine and impose failure in order to move the public. To some degree, he was proven right in 1994. …

…The motivation Congress has on each side of the aisle is to be in the majority so it can set policy. But it’s very difficult for the institution to move forward on a bipartisan basis when the minority party does not believe that that’s in their best interest to regain the majority.

And it really isn’t in the Republican’s best interest to regain the majority, because they have no interest in governing. Their interests lie in serving corporate and partisan needs, and at that they are actually just as effective, if not more so, remaining in the minority.

Update: As usual, BTD filters this discussion through the prism of his own ego and interprets it as an excuse for President Obama. But I don’t see it as being about Obama; this is much bigger. Bill Clinton battled the same forces during his administration — he couldn’t get health care passed, and many other of his initiatives (such as the airport security bill that might have prevented 9/11) were watered down to the point of total ineffection. Now the same forces are more concentrated, more entrenched, more rigid.

Yesterday I saw a blurb that defined the clash over climate change as a struggle between science and ignorance. But these days what major issue isn’t essentially a struggle between knowledge and ignorance? Whether you’re talking about climate change, health care reform, national security, abortion, etc., you can see a dividing line between people who build their opinions upon a framework of facts and people who, um, don’t.

Knowledge and ignorance don’t necessarily sort themselves into Left and Right. You can find all kinds of ignorance all across the political spectrum. But in the U.S., because so much of the Right has been overrun by extremists the ignorance scale tips heavily in the Right’s favor these days. And screaming, antagonistic ignorance so permeates media and government that the U.S. is becoming increasingly ungovernable.

In his blog, Paul Krugman talks about climate change deniers.

Nothing gets me as many crazed emails and comments as any reference to climate change. The anti-global-warming people are just filled with hate for anyone who suggests that maybe, just maybe, the vast majority of scientists are right.

Of course, the Right has created a myth that large numbers of scientists disagree that the climate is changing, and no amount of hard data will persuade them otherwise.

Krugman’s comments are partly in response to a question from Digby:

Can someone explain to me why these people hate this climate science so much? I mean, I get that they don’t like gays and think women should stay barefoot and pregnant. I understand that they hate taxes that pay for things that help people they don’t like. Evolution — yeah, that’s obvious.

But global warming? Why? Is it all about their trucks or what? I just don’t get where the passion comes from on this one.

Part of it is that whatever “libruhls” are fer, they’re agin’. But Krugman points to two other cultural factors.

First, environmentalism is the ultimate “Mommy party” issue. Real men punish evildoers; they don’t adjust their lifestyles to protect the planet. (Here’s some polling to that effect.)

The survey that Krugman links to says that much climate change denial is cultural, and identify three types:

• People who deny global warming because they don’t want their lifestyles. Even if they think it is real, they don’t want to do anything about it.
• People who are confused by propaganda and misinformation.
• People who deny global warming because the science conflicts with their economic, partisan or religious beliefs.

Not all climate change denial is confined to America, of course. Blaine Harden reports for the Washington Post that in Australia, as in the U.S., “partisan politics and vested interests have paralyzed some of this country’s response to climate change.” The deniers include farmers who refuse to concede the climate is changing even as their farms dry up and blow away. They don’t want to believe that their way of life is coming to an end, and they hang on waiting for a rainy year that will turn things around.

Regarding propaganda and misinformation — see Sean Hannity claiming that 2009 will be the “9th coldest year on record,” when in fact it is more likely the 5th warmest year on record, ending a decade that is the warmest on record. See also James Fallows’s analysis of news coverage of global warming.

I’ll come back to the third bullet point in a moment. Krugman continues,

Second, climate change runs up against the anti-intellectual streak in America. Remember, just a few years ago conservatives were triumphantly proclaiming that Bush was a great president because he didn’t think too much.

I think this second point is part of the third bullet point above. Critical thinking is an alien concept to a large part of our population. Rather, one’s opinions are formed by tribal loyalty and held on faith alone. So often one hears the ignorant say liberals “believe in” abortion or evolution, when belief has nothing to do with it. But they cannot imagine any other way to form opinions.

For many, faithfulness to the doctrine of climate change denial is an integral part of their ideological tribal loyalty, and tribal loyalty in turn is part of self-definition. A threat to the doctrines of the tribe is experienced as a threat to oneself. Admitting to the truth would bring on a massive existential crisis. So the more evidence for climate change, the more angrily, and frantically, they will denounce it.

As Digby points out in her post linked above, since swifthack other climate scientists have been targeted by hackers and thieves who seem to think they are on a holy mission. “This global warming email pseudo-scandal is turning wingnuts everywhere into revolutionary criminals,” she says. This will get worse before it gets better.

At the Guardian, Sue Blackmore writes about the often-noted correlation between high levels of religiosity and societal dysfunction — the “strong positive correlations between nations’ religious belief and levels of murder, teenage pregnancy, drug abuse and other indicators of dysfunction.”

The 1st world nations with the highest levels of belief in God, and the greatest religious observance are also the ones with all the signs of societal dysfunction. These correlations are truly stunning. They are not “barely significant” or marginal in any way. Many, such as those between popular religiosity and teenage abortions and STDs have correlation coefficients over 0.9 and the overall correlation with the SSS is 0.7 with the US included and 0.5 without. These are powerful relationships. But why?

These results don’t necessarily show causality. Does religiosity cause dysfunction, or do people cling to religiosity as a way to cope with dysfunction? We see here in the U.S. that the “Bible belt” states long have had the highest rates of divorce, teen pregnancy, etc. Where is cause and where is effect?

I am using the word “religiosity” rather than “religion” because I think much of what passes for religion in America is really superstition (I make a distinction between religion and superstition at the other blog). The overwhelmingly Christian hyper-religious of America on the whole are remarkably ignorant of basic Christian doctrine. Few can recite the Ten Commandments if put on the spot, and I suspect most wouldn’t recognize the Sermon on the Mount if they bumped into it outside of church. Instead, much of the country is infested with a social pathology in which religious totems — the cross, the Bible, tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments — get mixed together with extremist political beliefs and magical thinking to create a toxic and impenetrable ignorance.

And now we’ve got a big, honking positive feedback loop in which the ignorance causes more personal and societal dysfunction, which causes people to cling more tightly to the ignorance. They’re even becoming more aggressive and militant about their ignorance. I have little hope that this will be turned around in my lifetime.

In some parts of the country a culture of personal crisis has taken hold in which people imagine themselves besieged by powerful evil forces, when in fact they’re mostly causing their own problems. But because they are unwilling to be honest with themselves about what’s really causing their problems, the more stressed they are the more self-destructive they become.

I remember reading that when the Black Plague started to spread in Europe, people blamed witches and went around killing cats, thinking the cats were associated with witchcraft. The scarcity of cats allowed rodent populations to explode, thereby spreading the plague. A lot of conservative reaction to today’s problems hasn’t evolved much from witch scares. (Energy crisis? Global warming? Lie, deny, and drill baby drill.)

So climate change denial might be seen as symptomatic of a deep social and cultural pathology. But I have no idea what’s to be done about it.

I found this very moving:

I take it that the British aren’t quite used to the bullying, consensus-through-intimidation tactics of the American Right. We’ve seen the YouTube video in which a climate change denier makes an ass of himself on British television by behaving the way all righties behave while on American television.

Now George Monbiot tells us that the repetitive talking points of the Right are the products of brainwashing.

When I use the term denial industry, I’m referring to those who are paid to say that man-made global warming isn’t happening. The great majority of people who believe this have not been paid: they have been duped. Reading Climate Cover-Up, you keep stumbling across familiar phrases and concepts which you can see every day on the comment threads. The book shows that these memes were planted by PR companies and hired experts. …

…The people who inform me, apparently without irony, that “your article is an ad hominem attack, you four-eyed, big-nosed, commie sack of shit”, or “you scaremongers will destroy the entire world economy and take us back to the Stone Age”, are the unwitting recruits of campaigns they have never heard of.

Welcome to our world, George. BTW, George ends the column with:

These people haven’t fooled themselves, but they might have fooled you. Who, among those of you who claim that climate scientists are liars and environmentalists are stooges, has thought it through for yourself?

About half of the comments have been removed by the moderator, but many of those that remain amount to knee-jerk rightie talking points, thereby underscoring Monbiot.

At Time magazine, Bryan Walsh writes “The Stolen E-Mails: Has ‘Climategate’ Been Overblown?” which does a good job of explaining the facts behind swifthack. Here’s just a bit:

According to PSU’s Mann, that statistical “trick” that Jones refers to in one e-mail — which has been trumpeted by skeptics — simply referred to the replacing of proxy temperature data from tree rings in recent years with more accurate data from air temperatures. It’s an analytical technique that has been openly discussed in scientific journals for over a decade — hardly the stuff of conspiracy.

As for Mann and Jones’ apparent effort to punish the journal Climate Research, the paper that ignited his indignation is a 2003 study that turned out to be underwritten by the American Petroleum Institute. Eventually half the editorial board of the journal quit in protest. And even if CRU’s climate data turns out to have some holes, the group is only one of four major agencies, including NASA, that contribute temperature data to major climate models — and CRU’s data largely matches up with the others’.

In brief, some of the scientists went a bit overboard battling the climate-change deniers, which is understandable. But the great injustice of this battle between truth and fiction is that the deniers don’t have to play by any rules. They can lie, cheat, fudge, use character assassination and guilt-by-proxy arguments all they like. But scientists may not, because if they fall off their pedestals for even a moment, the deniers will eat them alive.