Resistant to Reality

Following up the last post, today’s Krugman column is Republicans Against Reality.

What’s happening now is that the G.O.P. is trying to convert Mr. Ryan’s big talk into actual legislation — and is finding, unsurprisingly, that it can’t be done. Yet Republicans aren’t willing to face up to that reality. Instead, they’re just running away.

When it comes to fiscal policy, then, Republicans have fallen victim to their own con game. And I would argue that something similar explains how the party lost its way, not just on fiscal policy, but on everything.

Think of it this way: For a long time the Republican establishment got its way by playing a con game with the party’s base. Voters would be mobilized as soldiers in an ideological crusade, fired up by warnings that liberals were going to turn the country over to gay married terrorists, not to mention taking your hard-earned dollars and giving them to Those People. Then, once the election was over, the establishment would get on with its real priorities — deregulation and lower taxes on the wealthy.

At this point, however, the establishment has lost control. Meanwhile, base voters actually believe the stories they were told — for example, that the government is spending vast sums on things that are a complete waste or at any rate don’t do anything for people like them. (Don’t let the government get its hands on Medicare!) And the party establishment can’t get the base to accept fiscal or political reality without, in effect, admitting to those base voters that they were lied to.

The result is what we see now in the House: a party that, as I said, seems unable to participate in even the most basic processes of governing.

(See also Krugman’s correction to what he wrote in the column about the food stamp program.)

I think also what’s happening is that elections are being won by people too stupid or deluded to see the lies as lies. They are true believers, in other words. They don’t understand they’re supposed to be just pretending.

See also Stan Collender.

Also, too, see House GOP plans anti-Washington push in August. House Republicans have left Washington and are telling the home folks how awful Washington is. However, as Stan Collender (link above) says, right now it’s not so bad. The House is in recess, after all.

6 thoughts on “Resistant to Reality

  1. I think also what’s happening is that elections are being won by people too stupid or deluded to see the lies as lies. They are true believers, in other words. They don’t understand they’re supposed to be just pretending.

    Yes! This, exactly, is what has been worrying me about the most recent Congresses. Some of them aren’t just pretending to hold completely nonsensical, mutually incompatible beliefs – they’re really bonkers!

  2. I beg to differ – they are both stupid AND deluded.

    That in the nature of Manichean extremists.

    Before the wealthy and powerful created the Tea Party, telling the rubes in the base one thing, but still doing occasionally constructive things, was possible.

    Now, the rubes want rubes like themselves in their state legislatures and in DC.

    And that is why, until this mania hopefully dies out with its old base, this country is in a shitload of peril – not from the religious extremists from without, but from the (supposedly) Christian ones, within.

  3. “Every day I serve in Congress, I work to fight Washington.”

    I get this image of the House Republicans all standing around punching themselves in the face. Which of course is barely even a caricature at this point. I still can’t get over the fact that they think people who don’t have health insurance are going to riot if anyone tries to offer them coverage at a price they can afford.

    I am totally serious when I say that I expect to see bumper stickers that say “Fuck you! Vote Tea Party!” before this is all over. Or some variation. With their grasp of history, they probably think Ford telling New York to drop dead was a glorious moment in their party’s history, so maybe they’ll take that up as their rallying cry.

  4. Shorter teatard congresstool:
    “I told you government doesn’t work. I went to Washington and made it not work.”

  5. And they came to WI and made it not work. I can say one thing for Scott Walker, he proved in real life that austerity and republican economic policy just aren’t based in reality. They just don’t work. WI is 50th in the country, dead last, in short term job creation, meaning over the next two years. That’s according to the liberal rag called Forbes Magazine. But Scooter is running around the country raising millions of dollars for his presidential bid. God help us all if he’s successful.

  6. Buckyblue,
    We have well over 30 years of evidence that Conservatism doesn’t work – not on a local, not on a state, and certainly not on a national level.

    Yet our MSM doesn’t point this out to people, because they’re afraid that they’ll be labeled as “Liberals!”

    That, and the fact that 5 or 6 rich conservative individuals and corporations, own 90’s of our news mediums.
    It doesn’t behoove them to point out that that which is helping them, is killing the country and its people.

Comments are closed.