Save America. Vote GOP.

In the real world HRC is President and the GOP is beginning a painful reform process that will lead to a far better conservative party and a healthy American democracy.

In our consensus hallucination a walking tire fire is President, the GOP is further from reform than ever, and smart Dems are reading Josh Marshall’s advice. Oh, and the wake-up button isn’t working.

While we’re waiting for wakefulness we might as well come up with a plan or two. Plan one is to address the root cause of non-college misery. That will be useful if we survive (hint: avoid war with China) to get a sane government again.

Plan two is about getting a sane government. Towards that end we need to save the GOP from its addiction to the unreal. Unreality is a dangerous drug, after decades of abuse the GOP is in desperate need of rehab …

From Tabloids to Facebook: the Reality Wars (revised from my original)

I’ve been thinking about Russia’s successful hacking of the 2016 US election. It shouldn’t be seen in isolation.

It should be understood as part of the ancient human struggle with delusion and illusion — the reality wars.

In the US the reality wars were once bipartisan; each party struggled to separate fact from fantasy. Over the past few decades the GOP stopped fighting, they embraced the unreal. From Reagan to Gingrich to the Tea Party to Trump. By the 21st century we began seeing books like “The Republican War on Science”.

Unreality spread like a virus. AM talk radio was infested. Then came Drudge and Fox. Later Breitbart and finally the Facebook fake news stream. From the Clinton “murders” to birtherism to child pizza porn slaves.

This wasn’t bipartisan. The anti-reality meme, a core historic component of fascism, became concentrated in the GOP. Russia jumped on board, but Russia is more of a plague carrier than an intelligent agent. They lost their reality-war in the 90s. All their news is unreal now. Putin, like Trump, takes the fakes.

Trump’s victory is a triumph of the unreal. Of Will, I suppose. Now it threatens us all.

The rebellion against reason, against the perception of the real, is old. It’s a core component of fascism, but it’s much older than fascism. The Enlightenment was a setback for the unreal, but it wasn’t a final defeat. Now, in our troubled 3rd millennium, anti-reason is strong. It has taken over Russia. It has taken over the GOP, and Trump’s GOP has taken over America.

Somehow we have to rescue the GOP from it’s addiction to the unreal. That would be hard if it had been defeated. Now it seems impossible.

But there is a way. We need to vote GOP.

Vote GOP … in the primaries that is. In my home of Minnesota the Dem contenders are all pretty reasonable. I can send some money and volunteer to support the party, but my primary/caucus vote isn’t needed. On the other hand, the Minnesota GOP has lots of reality denialists running for office. I can use my primary vote to favor relatively sane GOP contenders.

If even half of Dems vote GOP in primaries we can ally with sane conservatives to pull the GOP back from the brink. Yes, there are a few sane conservatives. They are a dying breed, but there is room to ally with them here.

Then, in the election, we vote Dem. If America is lucky the Dems win. If America is unwise the GOP wins — but it’s a saner GOP. A setback, but not a catastrophe.

Work for a sane GOP. As a good Dem, vote GOP. 

Post-election reflection

I don't often pull down my posts for a rewrite, but this one was up for a few hours before I took it down for a rework. Here's the revised edition with a strikeout.
------
My team won the big one. I read my Talking Point, Krugman, and Salmon, so I wasn’t surprised. On the other hand, since I’m a bit mathic,  I wouldn’t have been surprised if Romney had won either. So not surprised, but very grateful.

My team won even bigger in Minnesota. Voter-ID, anti-gay marriage amendment, GOP State House – all gone. I didn’t expect all of that. So there I’m surprised, and very grateful.

I'm grateful to the Obama and Biden families, to Bill Clinton who may have earned some forgiveness for delivering himself to his enemies so long ago, to the Millenials who seem to like voting (and that will change many things), to all the Obama donors big and small, to my friends Kathy and Lin who won their fight, to Paul Krugman who rails against ignorance, to Obama voters, and especially to the campaign team. I listed to Obama’s acceptance speech, and some parts were obligatory filter – but his gratitude to his volunteers and campaign team was very sincere.

I'm also grateful that, despite some dire predictions, most of the white GOP voters I know seem to be going on with their lives without riot. Even those who claimed they'd go Galt may be sobering up, though there may be rare exceptions. It's as though they didn't entirely believe Fox/Rove TV. Certainly Boehner and McConnell didn't -- they went to bed early on election night.

I’m grateful, but I ain’t exactly joyous. I’m not sure entirely why, but it's not hard to list potential contributors.

First there was the tidal wave of stupidity that infested even commercial-free NPR as both parties fought for the allegiance of the inattentive, uninformed, and unmotivated. It felt like pledge week on steroids.

Then there was the partial success of the House GOP's scorched earth policy over the past two years, and the success of the GOP governors' redistricting policies that keep the House Red even when the nation goes Blue.

The GOP's voter suppression tactics were depressing -- and Florida is still a democracy disaster area. (It's time for a federal intervention). Romney's jaw dropping whoppers were much worse than McCain's -- and they never seemed to cost him all that much. His "budget plan" was a bad joke. Overall, the etch-a-sketch worked depressingly well. He ought to have lost by a huge margin, he lost by a few percent.

Dare I mention the billionaires? Yeah, we learned (again) that wealth is no measure of intellect or even cunning, but I suspect they did more harm than we are willing to admit.

Maybe it’s also a primitive tribal responsibility thing. Sadly, I am not a blue-eyed husky mix. Like John Scalzi, I am “the GOP “demographic” down to the last jot and tittle”. So, while I think it would be crazy for President Obama to feel depressed about black men behaving badly, I feel badly that so many of my tribe [2] of very-advantaged relatively-wealthy and somewhat educated white men behaved like fear-infested pithed fleshbots with an etch-a-sketch memory ... made very bad choices.

*Cough*. Yeah, that's the problem sentence. It's a bit ... harsh.

I'd like to know what's going on in the heads of my white folk tribe. To consider that let's set aside the elderly; they are vulnerable and easily manipulated. Let's set aside the cynical wealthy; for them Romney is a logical choice. Let's even assume that a fraction of the GOP (all white) base is truly opposed to abortion on genuine religious or ethical grounds -- and not just using 'pro-life' as a tribal flag. Set them aside. Lastly, set aside the less educated or the white impoverished who are disconnected from the world.[4]

That still leaves a large group of people who should know better, and whose justifications for voting for today's GOP [3] don't make sense. Except that 80% of GOP voters are overtly racist [1].

So maybe I don't really want to know what's going on in the heads of white male GOP voters.

I think I know why I'm not joyous. Grateful though.

[1] I know at least white GOP voter who isn't, and who was still convinced Obama would destroy America. She may be in the same mysterious category as black Republicans.
[2] Really I have several tribes, but I can't escape the male and pigment-deficient one.
[3] Some have stated reasons, but they are either data-free or contradicted by simple data. This doesn't mean it's impossible to rationally vote for any Republican candidate, just not the ones we have now.
[4] GOP voting Libertarians don't get exempted because today's GOP is less "Liberty" friendly than today's Dems. A third party vote is absolutely defensible however.

Dark Crossings: Closing the Strauss gap with the GOP

Four years ago I was offended by the GOP's Strauss strategy - a strategy that assumes most Americans are gullible peasants ...

Gordon's Notes: IHT: The long reach of Leo Strauss (Pfaff 2003)

... Bush and Rove live the Straussian story. The key element is that 'stories' are what the masses need. It's why Bush has absolutely no credibility among anyone who thinks. It's not that Bush is stupid, it's that we know everything he says is a 'story' for the 'masses'....

Gordon's Notes: Rove , Bush and the Swift Boat Veterans. Goering Lives.

... Now we begin to understand where the swift boat fraud is coming from. Kerry's biography portrayed some of them to as incompetent leaders and war criminals. They responded with a frantic barrage of accusations, amplified and encouraged by Bush money and right wing adulation. The more the money, the more the power, the more their memories changed.

There are links to the successful attacks on Dukakis, Clinton, McCain and others. This strategy works, and it works well. The masses can be swayed. Goering perfected these techniques 70 years ago, Rove is merely refining the master's work.

Leo Strauss, idol of the neocons, preached the power of stories to guide the masses...

Of course we know how it turned out four years ago. The Strauss strategy worked beautifully.

It still works...

Will the GOP's negativity produce a backlash? - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

... there is this Rasmussen Reports poll from today, taken after Palin's speech:

A week ago, most Americans had never heard of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Now, following a Vice Presidential acceptance speech viewed live by more than 40 million people, Palin is viewed favorably by 58% of American voters. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 37% hold an unfavorable view of the self-described hockey mom.

A CBS poll taken during the GOP Convention shows Obama and McCain tied (after showing Obama with a 6-point lead last week), while the Gallup daily tracking poll continues to show Obama with a 7-point lead...

... But the idea that Americans instinctively recoil from negativity or that there will be some sort of backlash against Republicans generally and Palin specifically because of how "negative" their convention speeches were is pure fantasy. Cultural tribalism and personality attacks of those sort work, especially when they're not aggressively engaged..

Now, four years later after attacking the Strauss strategy of Cheney, Rove and Rumsfeld, I realize I've crossed over to the dark side ...

Gordon's Notes: Daily Show savages the GOP flip-floppers

... Some of my more logically minded friends are having trouble believing that the right wing can be so internally inconsistent. They need to read more Orwell.

The GOP has DoubleSpeak deep in their DNA. They do this stuff because it works; because a very large number of Americans are driven by emotion rather than reason...

Has America really changed, or was it always so? My reading of American history is that that authoritarian power of the Strauss strategy has waxed and waned here, just as it has in many democracies. In our time it's strong. I don't know why the Strauss strategy works so well now. Maybe it's driven by a power shift from less educated males to more educated females, maybe by changes to the economics of the media business, maybe it's due to the aging of the voter pool, maybe it's all of these and more.

Whatever the reason, Strauss rules today.

The problem for the enlightened rationalist is that there's a Strauss Gap between the GOP and the Dems.

In Straussian terms we can divide the GOP voters into the peasants and the masters. The masters know the GOP rhetoric is irrational propaganda, but they're fine with that. They imagine the GOP will serve their interests [1], and they believe that the rhetoric is needed for the masses.

Unfortunately, I can also divide the Dems into two groups -- but they're different groups. We too have voters who feel rather than reason -- though in our case their feelings are in fact aligned with their interests. Unfortunately, we have the Idealistic Rationalists instead of the Straussian Rationalists.

The Idealistic Rationalists are my former tribe. They believe that appeals to reason and noble values will work.

They're almost right. The elections are finely balanced. I fear, however, that American is still in a Straussian cycle -- and we could get worse.

We need to convert our Idealistic Rationalists to the Dark side, to convert them into reluctant Straussians. At the very least, they need to accept a painful truth -- Obama will not be speaking to you. He will say what he must say -- and you won't like it.

Harsh times. I wish they weren't so, but we know where wishful delusions lead.

Join me Luke, join the Dark Side of the Force ...

[1] Jonathon Schwarts explained beautifully why GOP rationalists are wrong to think the GOP serves their interests. They need a world that works as much as the rest of us, and whatever the short term gain the GOP gives them they'll lose big within they and their children's lifespans.

Update 1/19/2009: It's a good think I wasn't running Obama's campaign. Obama didn't need no stinkin' Strauss. I don't understand why Americans weren't fooled again, but, apparently, we weren't.

GOP 2.0: What rational climate change politics might look like

"With great power comes great responsibility." Gingrich's inner geek smiled at that one. Certainly they had the power. The Democrats had been crushed by the 2012 elections. President Romney now controlled the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court -- and the filibuster had been eliminated in early 2013.

Gingrich was philosophical about the Vice Presidency; Cheney had taught him what could be done. Romney was happy enough to hand off the big one to him.

Not health care of course. That had been a trivial problem; it took only a few months to tweak ObamaCare, throw in some vouchers and a few distractions, and launch RomneyCare. The GOP base was fine with rebranding, and the dispirited remnant of the Democrats saw little real change.

No, the big one was climate change. Romney and Gingrich had never truly doubted that human CO2 emissions were driving global climate change, but pivoting the base took a bit of work. They'd begun with ritual purges; Hansen was quickly exiled to the lecture circuit. Then came the American Commission on Truth in Science. There wasn't even much tormenting of old enemies; the size of the GOP victory had taken the fun out of that. In short order the "weak mindedness" of the Democrats was exposed and the "honest and rigorous" examination of the Romney administration was completed. It was time, Murdoch's empire declared, for strong minded Americans to face hard (but not inconvenient) facts.

The hardest challenge came from a contingent that felt global warming was a good thing, even God's plan. American drought was weakening that group, but they were a constant headache.

Now though it was time for policy, and Gingrich couldn't be happier. He'd been meeting with Bill Clinton of course; the two rogues loved the evening debates. Clinton's engagement wasn't just for fun, despite the GOP's dominance there was still room for politics. America's wealthy had been irrationally terrified of Obama, but they were also afraid of runaway warming -- and they had considerable power. Trillions of dollars were at stake in any real attack on global warming, and every corporation in America was at the door. The Military was pushing for aggressive management. Lastly, Gingrich knew that power can shift. He'd seen it before.

He wrote out the options, and labeled them by their natural political base ...

• Climate engineering: solar radiation reduction, massive sequestration projects (R)
• CO2 pricing (by hook or crook) (R/D - political debate is how revenues are used)
• Subsidies for public transit (D)
• Urban planning measures (D)
• Military strategy to manage anticipated collapse of African nations (R)
• Military strategy to manage anticipated climate engineering conflicts with China (climate wars) (R)
• Tariff's on Chinese imports to charge China for their CO2 emissions (R/D - but probably tied to American CO2 pricing)
• Massive investments in solar power and conservation technologies (D)
• Massive investments in fusion power (R)

The Climate Wars were particularly troublesome. There were simple things China could do, like pump massive amounts of sulfuric acid, that would alleviate the disaster their scientists had predicted. These measures, however, would be disastrous for the US. On the other hand, war with China was unthinkable.

Gingrich new he had to put a price on Carbon and he had to get China to avoid the most dangerous (for the US) forms of climate engineering. The rest was in play. This was what Great Men were made for ...

See also:

Gordon's Notes

• Why is the modern GOP crazy? 7/2011
• Denialists in favor of a warmer earth 6/2011: This is a common GOP position now - Climate change is not due to humans, it's a good thing, and God approves.
• Global warming: Doonesbury and China 9/11 - another GOP position variant, warming is relatively bad for China, relatively good for the US. This is probably true.
• Global Warming: We're scr***d. 8/2006 - it's too late anyway. Another GOP position, also partly true.
• The rational basis for climate change denialism 20/2010 - God made the earth for us, so the climate is His.
• Greece, America and GOP 2.0 12/2011
• Global climate change: it's time to think radical 9/2006 - climate engineering is coming.
• UnReason: The Republican War on Reason 2/2011
• We're crazy now. We were crazier forty years ago - 9/2010 by historic standards, we're not as crazy as we fear
• Birthers, Deathers and Truthers - the reason behind the madness 9/2009 - maybe the GOP is now in recovery?
• America 2011: exploring the boundaries of democracy and capitalism 1/2011: Democracy is not robust
• Keystone XL, carbon sequestration, and the tax in the closet 11/2011
• A taxonomy of American politics 2/2011 - where values differ, how democracy would work if the GOP recovers
• Climate Change and the Black Plague 5/2007 - disease changes will be disruptive
• Climate Change 2010: Plan B 11/2010 - a Carbon Tariff on China
• Why you should vote for the Tea Party’s coven in the century of the fruitbat 10/2010 - maybe only the GOP can tackle climate issues
• Separated at birth: alternative medicine and climate change denial 5/2011 - Old discussions resurface.
• Thai floods - microcosm of global climate change 11/2011 - the early and biggest impacts are outside of the US and Canada
• Science, the media and the Himalayan glacier. What's wrong? 11/2011 - scientists are cowed
• Tornados and global warming - how do we judge predictions? 5/2011 - Bayes and climate. Evidence is always probabilistic.

Others

• Shibboleths — Crooked Timber 2/2011
• The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney - 2011 book
• Existential threats - Charlie's Diary 6/2011 - fun Stross post on existential threats. Climate change is fairly low in this ranking.
• Some things are just really hard to believe: more on choosing your facts. « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science - 8/2010 - Why some things are hard to believe (roots of denialism)
• Weather as a weapon: The troubling history of geoengineering. - Slate Magazine 9/2010

Reflections on friends who vote GOP

I have not been a fan of the modern GOP. I see today's GOP as the party of torture, corruption, thoughtless bellicosity, cynical manipulation of American fears and hatreds, bad policy, anti-science, anti-reason, and so on. I also disagree with most GOP values, though my support for abortion rights is unenthusiastic.

And so, when a good person and a friend writes asking when I might join the "sane" party, I am taken aback. My Dems are often (mostly?) corrupt, pompous and venal - but I do think of them as the saner party. How can good people feel the GOP is the sane alternative? It is suspiciously convenient to say these people are delusional. Instead I'll try to examine their beliefs along four chasms - Facts, Values, Faith and Tribe. I think I can understand their beliefs best in those terms.

Facts

Not everyone obsessively follows hundreds of blogs and uses selected super-readers as fact filters. More reasonably, but unfortunately, not everyone reads factcheck.org. If you live in some parts of the country, and if you don't read online news or the New York Times, you will be told many things that are not true. More perniciously, you won't hear of anything that might change your perceptions.

If you believe the chain letters, or the WSJ OpEd page, or Murdoch's newspapers, you may well believe the Democrats are insane.

This seems like the easiest canyon to bridge. Facts, after all, can be tested. Predictions can be falsified. In reality, however, Vulcans are few. People may be attracted false facts because they support three other chasms.

Values and culture

What do the strong owe the weak? When do the ends justify the means? What are the limits to tolerance? What far can Americans move from a cultural mean?

These are fundamental differences. A good and generous person may feel they owe nothing to the weak save what they choose to give. That person is a natural supporter of the GOP. These are legitimate distinctions

Faith

We usually think of Faith in terms of Deities, but there can also be a Faith in Markets. Faith, by definition, is not amenable to discussion. If you believe the true duty of all men is to serve a particular deity, then your first political choice must be to support the Party closest to your deity. If you believe that Markets are infallible, then you must support a Party that shares your belief.

The chasm of Faith is a legitimate distinction between the GOP and the Democrats. Even religious Democrats tend to accept theological tolerance -- even when that tolerance is theologically inconsistent. The GOP has a much stronger claim to the Christian fundamentalist vote.

Tribe

Humans support their Tribe. It is especially hard for a member of a powerful Tribe to see its time is passing. The GOP is the Party of the White Tribe, and in particular of the White Male Tribe. The Democratic Party has a much blurrier Tribal identity, but if you're non-White or Gay or Lesbian it's a natural home.

The GOP and Dems are separated by chasms of Fact, Faith, Values and Tribe. The chasm of Fact seems easiest to cross, but often choices of Fact serve needs of Faith, Values and Tribe. Good persons, by reasons especially of Faith, Values and Tribe, may feel my party is less than sane.

Why is the modern GOP crazy?

The GOP wasn't always this crazy. Minnesota's Arne Carlson, for example, wasn't a bad governor. Schwarzenegger had his moments.

Ok, so the modern GOP has never been all that impressive. Still, it wasn't 97% insane until the mid-90s.

So what happened?

I don't think it's the rise of corporate America or the amazing concentration of American wealth. The former impacts both parties, and not all the ultra-wealthy are crazy. These trends make the GOP dully malign, but the craziness of Koch brothers ought to be mitigated by better informed greed.

That leaves voters. So why have a substantial fraction, maybe 20%, of Americans shifted to the delusional side of the sanity spectrum? It's not just 9/11 -- this started before that, though it's easy to underestimate how badly bin Laden hurt the US. It can't be just economic distress -- Gingrich and GWB rose to power in relatively good times.

What's changed for the GOP's core of north-euro Americans (aka non-Hispanic "white" or NEA)?

Well, the interacting rise of the BRIC and the ongoing IT revolution did hit the GOP-voting NEA very hard, perhaps particularly among "swing" voters. That's a factor.

Demographics is probably a bigger factor. I can't find any good references (help?) but given overall population data I am pretty sure this population is aging quickly. A good fraction of the core of the GOP is experiencing the joys of entropic brains (here I speak from personal white-north-euro-middle-age experience). More importantly, as Talking Points describes, this group is feeling the beginning of the end of its tribal power. My son's junior high graduating class wasn't merely minority NEA, it was small minority NEA.

This is going to get worse before it gets better. The GOP is going to explore new realms of crazy before it finds a new power base; either as a rebuilt GOP or a new party.

It's a whitewater world.

Update 7/8/11: Coincidentally, 538 provides some data on GOP craziness ....

Behind the Republican Resistance to Compromise - NYTimes.com

... Until fairly recently, about half of the people who voted Republican for Congress (not all of whom are registered Republicans) identified themselves as conservative, and the other half as moderate or, less commonly, liberal. But lately the ratio has been skewing: in last year’s elections, 67 percent of those who voted Republican said they were conservative, up from 58 percent two years earlier and 48 percent ten years ago.

This might seem counterintuitive. Didn’t the Republicans win a sweeping victory last year? They did, but it had mostly to do with changes in turnout. Whereas in 2008, conservatives made up 34 percent of those who cast ballots, that number shot up to 42 percent last year...

... the enthusiasm gap did not so much divide Republicans from Democrats; rather, it divided conservative Republicans from everyone else. According to the Pew data, while 64 percent of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents identify as conservative, the figure rises to 73 percent for those who actually voted in 2010...

Americans Elect - another try at GOP 2.0

Unsurprisingly, given the current state of the GOP presidential primary, people who'd prefer to vote GOP are advocating third party equivalents. This endorsement is from a Marketarian venture capitalist ...

A VC: Americans Elect (Fred Wilson)

Yesterday my partner Albert and I sat down with the people behind Americans Elect. For those that don't know, Americans Elect is an online third party movement. In their words, "Pick A President, Not A Party."...

Fred and  his kin assert the usual 'false equivalence' claim that both parties are equally dysfunctional. Sorry, that's not true. Team Obama is a good representative of a reason (data + logic, including evaluation of political realities) based implementation of social compact ("Branch I") values for a multicultural nation. The 2012 Dems are about as healthy as political parties get in an era where voters tolerate widespread corruption.

The problem, of course, is with the GOP. It has fallen into a political death-spiral where its survival depends on tribes that lack a common framework for interpreting reality. Some cleave to particular religious doctrines, others to secular tribal beliefs. The modern GOP is the party of unreason.

Obviously, this is bad. It's bad because the GOP has quite a good chance of taking full control of government. It's bad because a weak GOP will lead the Dems to destroy themsevles - and we'll have no government at all.

We all need need GOP 2.0, a reason based representation of Branch II values, a party that speaks for the powerful, the incorporated, the status quo, the authoritarian impulse and all those wary of change and disruption. Americans Elect is a part of the process of finding GOP 2.0. I wish them luck; we need this process to succeed.

A GOP blog I can read

It hurts me to read blogs or editorials written by 2012 Republicans. Oddly enough people like Santorum don't bother me as much as the Romneys and Douthats and Friedmans [1].

Santorum doesn't cause me intellectual pain because he's logically consistent. His God has told him that Man should have Dominion over the earth, so environmental objections are the work of Satan and most Christians are thus Satan's pawns. Since his God promised no more Floods, Global Warming can't happen. He's an internally consistent Capitalochristian fundamentalist. Yes, he's crazy, but that alone doesn't bother me. Besides, he makes Romney mad, so he serves a social purpose.

Nothing here I haven't said before of course -- except recently a I found a Republican blog I can read.

Well, at least the author ran on the GOP ticket when I voted for him in 1994 (first and last time I voted that ticket). Now, however, Arne Carlson's blogger profile doesn't mention the R or G words. He probably voted for Obama last time. (The state GOP hated him in 1994 and hates him even more now.)

So maybe he's not much of a Republican by post-Reagan standards. Go back to President Ford though, and he'd have been northern GOP [2]. If America is to have a health democracy with a  reality-based GOP 2.0, he might be mainstream GOP again.

For now Arne is my token GOP voice - whatever they may call him

[1] Friedman isn't technically a Republican - yet. Given the flavor of his reasoning though, he's more than half-way there.
[2] Excepting sociosexual issues. Progress is funny. In the 1970s even Romney's current reactionary statements on Gay and Civil Rights would be unspeakably progressive, and Romney would be almost a mainstream feminist.

See also:

• Greece, America and GOP 2.0 11/2011
• Roots of the irrational in American politics: pre-dementia and religion 7/2011
• GOP 2.0: What rational climate change politics might look like 12/2011
• UnReason: The Republican War on Reason 2/2011
• Why it hurts to read the right 9/2010

The mindset of the GOP establishment - Peggy Noonan

Peggy Noonan, of Reagan era fame, represents the core GOP establishment. Her disgust with Sarah Palin is given full vent in a WSJ OpEd, though, as DeLong points out, she's completely oblivious to Palin's resemblance to both Reagan and George W Bush.

A Farewell to Harms - WSJ.com - Peggy Noonan

Sarah Palin's resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her plain—to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits, and let go of her drama...

... She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

... The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon...

Bonbon Palin. Ok, so the GOP establishment has now declared war on Palin. I wonder if this is a prelude to declaring war on Limbaugh; I suspect it's a warning that he needs to join the Gingrich group as quickly as possible.

So far, so good. We need a respectable opposition party, and the Party of Palin would be a catastrophe. The more interesting bit of the essay, however, is the the conclusion. That's where Noonan outlines the bleak worldview of her cohort ...

... Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate....

It's interesting to note what the GOP establishment isn't worried about

• Anything Christian fundamentalists care about including abortion and gay marriage
• Global climate change
• Peace and prosperity in China and India
• Healthcare for all Americans

Instead they're worried about (I'm interpreting Noonan's dog whistles here)

• Secessionism?! That would imply she's worried about American right wing terrorism, and the intolerable burden of Black President.
• Bankruptcy?! Do the wingnuts in the GOP really believe that America will default on its debt obligations, or is this something they do to incite the lunatic fringe?
• WMD: This is the one area where the GOP establishment is not completely out to lunch, but of course they have no useful options to put on the table.

So the GOP establishment wants to run on

• Culture wars and Dangerous Black Men
• Defense

Hmm. Why does that sound so familiar?

Update 7/13/09: Frank Rich has a good counterpoint editorial…

… In the aftermath of her decision to drop out and cash in, Palin’s standing in the G.O.P. actually rose in the USA Today/Gallup poll. No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president…

Noonan represents a small slice of today’s wrecked GOP.

After Trump: reflections on mass disability in a sleepless night

I’m having trouble sleeping. There are a few boring reasons for that, but the election is not helping. So it’s time to write while sleep-impaired. I’ll try to keep this short, but I’m also going to break it into sections.

Context

My son has a substantial cognitive disability and little prospect of self-sustaining employment. His temperament is different from mine. I am novelty-seeking and instinctively skeptical of authority, he loves routine and structure. I am Vulcan, he is Klingon.

I am elite. He is not. Obama is my ideal President, he declared for Trump (though, interestingly, he chose to abstain in the end). I used to be uneasy around police, he loves K9 cops.

My son’s growth and development has shaped my life and thought for 20 years. He has informed my thinking about mass disability, something I’ve been writing about for 8 years. Because of him I have sympathy even for the Deplorables, angry and lost in a world that doesn’t want them any more.

The Big Picture

I don’t think any period in human history has seen as much cultural change as America 1950-2016. Civil Rights. Feminism. Gay Rights. Atheist Rights. Gender Rights. I have a flexible mind, and I feel a bit awed by all I have had to unlearn and learn. It’s not just America that’s changed of course. I believe that, in addition to ecological collapse and economics, the 9/11 world is a reaction to the education and empowerment of women.

And then there’s the demographic transformation of America. There’s a fertility transition that continues to drop family size; without immigration America’s population would be shrinking.  There’s the rapid aging of the post-war boomers. There’s the transition of the euro-american to minority status.

Now add China. No period of human history has seen anything comparable to the rise of China — if only because it is nation of a billion people. The economic transformation is severe; there is a limit to how quickly economies can adapt.

And, of course, no period of human history has seen an intelligent machine. We live in the AI era. Not the sentient AI era, or at least not so far as I know. But we now have distributed, almost ubiquitous, machine intelligence. Pre-AI technologies have already eliminated much of the work that supported the non-college middle class. The service work that remains pays far less and demands strong emotional control. A control that many men, and some women, don’t have.

The AI era is the era of mass disability. An era when the work that is valued and compensated requires cognitive and emotional skills that perhaps 40% of the US population does not have. No, more college will not help.

Extreme cultural transformation. Demographics. China. The AI era and mass disability. I haven’t even mentioned that pre-AI technologies wiped out traditional media and enabled the growth of Facebook-fueled mass deception alt-media.

We should not be surprised that the wheels have come off the train.

The GOP in 2016

We will lose the consumer protections and financial regulation slowly built over the past 8 years. We will lose Obamacare. The Gender Rights movement will stall.

I’ve seen some talk of the Senate minority slowing this, but we are also going to lose the filibuster.  We are unlikely to win the House or Senate in 2018 — so this will happen.

This will be sad and it will hurt a lot of people, not least Trump supporters.

It may not be as bad as some fear though. ObamaCare was failing. It was a tough political compromise that ran into GOP hellfire; the GOP blocked the post-launch fixes any big legislation needs. It was from the start intensely corporate and bureaucratic, with a misguided focus on analytics and top-down controls. GOP Representatives and Senators are not going to risk the wrath of their constituents, especially the non-college whites who are at risk of losing coverage. There will be a replacement. It will cover fewer people but perhaps it can be built up.

CO2 control seems to be hopeless now, but I’m not so sure about that. Sure, Trump is an idiot, but not everyone in the GOP truly believes that global warming is a good idea. There’s a chance the GOP will make changes that Obama could never get past the GOP.

This was all going to happen with any large GOP victory. Indeed, with his political core of white non-college voters Trump is going to be more cautious that Cruz or Ryan.

Trump: the mass disability conversation

I once wrote a blog post titled "Donald Trump is a sign of a healthy democracy. Really.”. It was really prescient:

… I enjoy seeing the GOP suffer for its (many) sins, and it would be very good for the world if the GOP loses the 2016 presidential election, but Trump won’t cause any lasting political damage. Unless he runs as a third party candidate he’ll have no real impact on the elections.

Hah-hah. Laughs on me.

This part holds up better:

Trump appears to be channeling the most important cohort in the modern world — people who are not going to complete the advanced academic track we call college. Canada has the world’s highest “college” graduation rate at 55.8%, but that number is heavily biased by programs that can resemble the senior year of American High School …

… about 40-50% population of Canadians have an IQ under 100. Most of this group will struggle to complete an academic program even given the strongest work ethic, personal discipline, and external support…

… this cohort, about 40% of the human race, has experienced at least 40 years of declining income and shrinking employment opportunities. We no longer employ millions of clerks to file papers, or harvest crops, or dig ditches, or fill gas tanks or even assemble cars. That work has gone, some to other countries but most to automation. Those jobs aren’t coming back.

The future for about half of all Americans, and all humans, looks grim. When Trump talks to his white audience about immigrants taking jobs and betrayal by the elite he is starting a conversation we need to have.

It doesn’t matter that Trump is a buffoon, or that restricting immigration won’t make any difference. It matters that the conversation is starting. After all, how far do you think anyone would get telling 40% of America that there is no place for them in current order because they’re not “smart” enough?

Yeah, not very far at all.

This is how democracy deals with hard conversations. It begins with yelling and ranting and blowhards. Eventually the conversation mutates. Painful thoughts become less painful. Facts are slowly accepted. Solutions begin to emerge…

I guess we’re having the conversation now. Too bad we didn’t have it four years ago. Obama, my ideal president, missed that one. He wasn’t alone, as recently as 2015 I complained “Both DeLong and Krugman missed the college vs. no-college white middle-age cohort, and I think that’s the important story” (K had a false start in 2012.)

Late in the campaign Obama picked up the theme with work on labor market monopsony and “predistribution”. Some of the Bernie Sanders themes that Clinton adopted, like free community college, were a first step. Overall though my team missed this one. It was a huge miss. They should have been reading Gordon’s Notes …

Trump: white nationalism and patriarchy

Half of college educated white women voters voted for Trump. I can’t quite get my head around that one. That cohort would have given Clinton the election.

Half.

What do we understand that? We need to resurrect anthropology and fuse it with journalism. How? I’ve no idea, but we need a way to explain ourselves to ourselves. A NYT piece made a good start with an interview of some of these women. Rage about the Black Lives Matter movement and critiques of police (prime job for the blue collar) were a factor; as well as susceptibility to Facebook-fueled right wing agitprop. I suspect these women are also relatively comfortable with traditional male-female roles. They want a “strong leader”; maybe they favor “enlightened patriarchy”. (The article had one significant error, it claimed white college-educated women voted for HRC. They did not. If they had we wouldn’t be talking about this.)

The whites are acting like a tribe. It’s different from acting like we own the country. This is shades of old racism mixed with aggrievement, loss, and bitterness. Unfortunately, unlike other tribes, the white tribe votes.

Reagan pioneered the use of white racism to win power. Trump has kicked it up several notches. He has summoned  our demons at just the right wrong time. Now we live with the consequences. Trump isn’t going to beat these demons back, he is much more racist than Reagan was (more than most of us imagined).

On the other hand the GOP is going to get nervous about this. The party is not going to be comfortable with overt white racism. There will be some GOP help with stuffing the Nazis and Klansmen back in the bottle. We will need that help.

The Resistance

In my home town of St Paul Minnesota a mob has been blocking a freeway. That’s dumb team. Stop doing that. We need more leadership. There’s a guy I know who’s going to be out of a job in seven weeks…

Ok, so Obama is probably going to want to take a break. We are going to need someone though. This isn’t just one crazy election. Remember the “Big Picture”. There are huge forces at work, especially the lack of demand for non-elite labor (what I call “mass disability”). If you think we’re in trouble now, imagine what’s going to happen to China in the next few years. (Russia is toast.)

We need to oppose Trump. He’s a twisted wreck. I suspect, however, that he’s going to find a lot of long knives in DC. The GOP leadership are not nice people, and they prefer Pence to Trump (not that Pence is good news).

We need to oppose Trump, but we also need to remember why we have Trump. We need to focus on the big picture - there are solutions. We live in whitewater times; we need to hold onto each other while we try to steer the raft. Because there’s a waterfall ahead …

See also: 

I’ve been writing about this for a bit over 8 years …

KRISTOF: Watching the Jobs Go By - his weakest column in years 2/2004. Very early thoughts in this direction.

Why your daughters should be roofers — not architects 3/2004. Precursor ideas.

On redistribution 6/2004. From an article in The Atlantic: “It is doubtful that in any society with universal suffrage the majority is going to sit on the sidelines and watch, generation after generation, while a handful of investors and corporate managers reap almost all the benefits of technological and economic progress."

The limits of disaster predictions: complex adaptive systems 2/2007. We have survived doom before.

Mass disability and Great Depression 2.0 3/2008. 

"I believe that about 20% of adult Americans aged 25 to 65 are effectively disabled in our current globalized post-industrial economy. I believe this number will rise as our population ages. I believe this is the fundamental problem, along with network effects, driving modern wealth concentration.

Over time the economy will change to develop niches for unused capacity (servant economy?), but the transition need not be comfortable. In the meantime technological shocks, such as ubiquitous robotics, may induce new disruptions to a non-equilibrium economic structure — risking extensive economic breakdown."

Causes of the Great Recession: China, GPSII and RCIIIT. Now for Act III 4/2010

Civilization is stronger than we think: Structural deficits and complex adaptive systems 5/2010. Hope.

Post-industrial employment: adjusting to a new world 5/2010. College is not the answer.

Unemployment and the new American economy - with some fixes. 1/2011 “In a virtualized economy workers with average analytic and social IQ less than 125 are increasingly disabled. Since this average falls with age the rate of disability is rising as the we boomers accumulate entropy …Start applying the lessons learned from providing employment to cognitively impaired adults to the entire US population.” Looking back this is when my thinking about mass disability began to crystallize.

Mass disability goes mainstream: disequilibria and RCIIT 11/2011. I thought we’d have the conversation then, but it didn’t go forward. Unfortunately.

Life in the post-AI world. What’s next? 9/2011

The Post-AI era is also the era of mass disability One of my favorites. 12/2012

Addressing structural underemployment (aka mass disability) 5/2013 Some ideas on solutions. Good ideas by the way.

Donald Trump is a sign of a healthy democracy. Really. 8/2015

Trump explained: Non-college white Americans now have higher middle-aged death rates than black Americans 11/2015 “Both DeLong and Krugman missed the college vs. no-college white middle-age cohort, and I think that’s the important story” 

Trumpism: a transition function to the world of mass disability 8/2016

How does the world look to Trump’s core supporters? 9/2016.

After Trump: information wants to be free, but knowledge is expensive 11/2016. This feels fixable, but it’s a fundamental problem.

Another marker of the GOP's long fall - no more Jews

The GOP has reached another milestone in its quest for irrelevance ...

GOP loses last Jewish senator with Coleman loss

WASHINGTON - The defeat of incumbent Norm Coleman in the drawn-out Minnesota Senate race leaves Republicans without a Jewish senator for the first time in half a century.

Coleman's departure comes two months after the GOP's other Jewish member, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, switched parties to become a Democrat...

In the House, Eric Cantor of Virginia ... is the only Jewish Republican in the 435-member body. That's down from eight Jewish GOP members who served in the House during the 1990s.

The National Jewish Democratic Council lists 30 Jewish Democrats now serving in the House. The Senate will have 13 Jewish members as of next week when Franken, Coleman's rival in Minnesota, is sworn in. That's 11 Democrats and two independents who normally vote with the Democrats.

Ira Forman, CEO of the National Jewish Democratic Council, said the sharp drop in the number of Jewish Republicans in Congress paralleled the party's shift to the right. "It's a reflection of where the Republican Party has gone," he said. "It's left the Jewish community pretty cold."...

So how many Catholics are left in the GOP? There must be a few or else the GOP would be an almost 100% WASP shop now.

I think Minnesota has the only Muslim Representative (definitely Democrat), and I'm pretty sure the Democrats have all the de facto (dare we speak it?) atheists.

For Jewish representatives the House and Senate ratios are now 30:1 and 13:0. Pretty severe ratios, especially the latter.

So is anyone in the GOP paying attention at all?

No, I didn't think so.

The GOP is again the party of torture – and it might work for them

Fifteen months ago I wrote that the GOP wasn’t the torture party any more …

Gordon's Notes (Feb 2008): The GOP isn't the torture party any more

… Mitt "thumbscrews" Romney is gone. Even Ron Paul is gone. Only McCain and Huckabee are left.

McCain's opposition to torture is well known. But what about Huckabee?

In December he declared waterboarding was indeed torture.

Huckabee Chafes at 'Front-Runner' Label - washingtonpost.com

... Huckabee joined Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in declaring his opposition to the interrogation procedure known as "waterboarding," and said he would support closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a contrast with the other leading Republicans...

I'm surprised to be saying this, but the GOP isn't the pro-torture party they were in May of 2007, or even in November of 2007.

Every single GOP candidate that backed torture has been eliminated from contention.

Sure, the rabid right winguts of talk radio still pant ecstatically about the secret joys of agony, but their candidates are gone. Republican voters, after all, have a voice in what the GOP is.

Shockingly, it seems they don't like torture any more -- if they ever really did…

I was wrong.

Today Romney is running for 2008. Limbaugh and Cheney are ascendant. The GOP is the Party of Limbaugh, and the Party of Torture.

It’s not a foolish move. Torture is far more popular in America than I had thought (emphases mine) …

… 55% of Americans believe in retrospect that the use of the interrogation techniques was justified, while only 36% say it was not. Notably, a majority of those following the news about this matter "very closely" oppose an investigation and think the methods were justified.

We Americans are still in a very dark place. I am even more mystified by Obama’s victory. In the context of this support the GOP’s embrace of the joys of torture may make political sense. This is true even as, in one of history’s great ironies, the Bush team seem to be edging away from the torture policy.

This will be a long struggle. I believe Obama will do everything feasible to get us away from the road to oblivion, but he’s still got a huge uphill fight. Consider the short list of political problems he has to face

• Americans don’t believe that radical change in the earth’s climate is a potential threat to civilization
• Americans are completely unready to accept the best possible health care option - “Crummy Care”.
• We can’t try prisoners who are alleged to have been directly involved in the 9/11 attacks because our torture practices make the cases legally illegitimate
• Afghanistan and Pakistan
• The collapse of the world economy, now running on unsustainable performance-enhancing fiscal stimuli
• The ever falling cost of havoc
• North Korea
• India and Pakistan
• The tenuous status of America’s legal framework
• China’s political and economic stability (perhaps the greatest near term threat)

It’s a long, long road.

See also

• Torture and the case for replacing a rotten CIA (and from 2007)
• Cheney’s claims of torture effectiveness are lies: This says more about Cheney and his ilk than about torture. My opposition is not based on the stupidity of torture as a form of interrogation, it’s based on the world we want to live in.
• Cheney drowned his victims until they told him Iraq was behind everything
  

Covering the retreat: GOP Senator Chuck Hagel

This is how GOP Senator Hagel tries to cover the retreat:

Chuck Hagel - Leaving Iraq, Honorably - washingtonpost.com

There will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq. These terms do not reflect the reality of what is going to happen there. The future of Iraq was always going to be determined by the Iraqis -- not the Americans. Iraq is not a prize to be won or lost. It is part of the ongoing global struggle against instability, brutality, intolerance, extremism and terrorism. There will be no military victory or military solution for Iraq. Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger made this point last weekend...

Riiiiggghhhht. I'm sure history will agree.

Hagel was a part of the GOP team that oversaw what now appears to be one of the greatest foreign policy debacles since Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor (clarification: that was Japan's debacle). The US won't come out of this debacle as badly as Japan did, but our reasoning and execution was comparably flawed. The honorable thing for Hagel to do would be to admit that he screwed up and call for Bush and Cheney to turn their foreign policy responsibilities over to Bill Clinton -- or even Baker/Bush I.

Hagel struggles to put an "honorable" face on one of history's great blunders and to shift responsibility for a disastrous outcome to the Iraqis. In other words, he blames the victims. In this case they are not blameless, but the majority of the blame falls on the GOP and their supporters. At the same time he writes:

We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam....

... We are destroying our force structure, which took 30 years to build. We've been funding this war dishonestly, mainly through supplemental appropriations, which minimizes responsible congressional oversight and allows the administration to duck tough questions in defending its policies. Congress has abdicated its oversight responsibility in the past four years.

For Congress, read "the GOP"; they have been the Congress. Hagel calls for bipartisan support for a "phased retreat", a phrase that presumably means "no helicopters on the embassy roof". His essay could be summarized as "The GOP screwed up because the Iraqis weren't good enough, the Dems need to share the blame."

Disgusting. We may well end up with an orderly or disorderly retreat and a colossal defeat with dishonor, but the Dems should not shield the GOP from their incompetence. History will not judge Hegel or the Rovian-GOP kindly.

The debt ceiling: Can Goldman Sachs win if the US defaults?

The GOP is expected to blackmail the Democratic party by holding the American economy hostage. This isn't news; Bruce Bartlett has been talking about the debt ceiling and debt default since last June, and has been expecting this crisis since January.

Even so, I haven't worried. It's not that I think the GOP is reasonable or even rational. The GOP is certainly crazy enough to blow up the village in order to save it. I haven't worried about this because I have assumed that the GOP will obey its masters on the big things  ...

Gordon's Notes: Is the GOP truly a pawn of corporations and the wealthy? We'll find out soon. (Jan 2011)

... Charlie Stross says emergent corporate entities control America. Krugman says wealth alone is sufficient explanation, emergent entities are an unnecessary complication.

John Gordon says control (the bouncing yellow ball) of America is a dynamic balance between the emergent corporate entity (ECE) powerful (wealthy) individuals, and the voting masses [1]:

Of course I'm right, but it would be nice to have evidence.

Fortunately, there's a natural experiment coming up. The GOP is threatening to destroy the American, and world, economy. This is in the interests of neither powerful individuals nor ECEs. So if it happens, then Stross, Krugman and I are all wrong. The Voters have power after all, and it's just too bad so many Americans are detached from reality...

Recently, however, I realized there was a flaw in my logic.

I assumed destroying America was not in the interest of American "Corporate Entities". That's not necessarily so. I expect there's a way to make vast amounts of money off a US debt default, particularly for a company that has "insider" information. If Goldman Sachs were to bet on default, then they could combine with GOP whackiness to finish us all off.

Now I'm worried.

Christopher Buckley's Obama endorsement and some good news for a change

Christopher Buckley writes the back page of the National Review.

He ain't a guy I'd normally read, but the wonders of the net sent me to his Obama endorsement: Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama - The Daily Beast.

It's good. Turns out he's a small government conservative and social libertarian. Who knew? I don't agree with those values (who shall care for the weak?), but I can work with 'em.

Buckley has been a McCain supporter for many years, but the Palin affair and McCain's courting of the fringe has broken him. He read Obama's books, and he switched.

So why doesn't he write this in the National Review?

That's an interesting story.

Turns out a fellow NR journalist wrote recently turned on Sarah Peron Palin. She started receiving Paul Krugman type email -- 12,000 hate messages from the loons of the right.

Buckley thinks he can dodge the hate mail. Maybe he can, those NR readers are pretty dim. They probably won't find his announcement.

So another moderate Republican has decided Palin/McCain is cracked, and Obama (remember how he praised Reagan? He's damned good.) is a remarkable man. That's good news, and a sign that the GOP has a reform constituency. We really need a strong, healthy, non-whacko GOP, so that's good.

There's more good news. McCain ran into some loons from my home state (Lakeville Minnesota, a growing exurban community with plummeting real estate values -- so lots of fear) at one of his rallies. He had a run in with one of the audience and ended up defending Obama and repudiating his own advertising campaign.

That would be mildly good news if it meant McCain had some vestiges of honor left [1], but there's better news than that.

The GOP's hate campaign, so far, isn't working as expected. Palin/McCain's disapproval rates are rising. The hate mobs are making the media nervous. Maybe the money people are starting to think what would happen if one of McCain's lunatics penetrated Obama's security perimeter. Whatever, the GOP is retracting.

So American's are not quite as susceptible to pure hate strategies as I'd thought. That's good.

So do I think Obama will win?

No.

All McCain has to do is play nice and beat on Palin a bit. Tone things down a tad, but run the same attacks in a stealthier manner. The media will fall over itself with relief that the "real McCain" is back. The GOP can then let the attacks simmer at a lower level.

So I still think McCain will win, Palin will become President, and America will shuffle off into the history books.

I confess, though, that Obama is doing better than I'd imagined. I feel good about the money we send him.

So here's the last bit of good news.

Obama is very good at this game. He knows what McCain and the GOP will do next. He'll be ready.

If anyone can get us out of this trap, it's Barack.

[1] The consensus is that McCain has been getting an earful from GOP moderates and donors. Personally, I wonder if his staff has been getting complaints from the Secret Service. They are, after all, protecting Obama from the loons.

Dems for a rationalist GOP - is there somewhere to donate?

Krugman is very worried about the 2010 triumph of the Tea Party ...

Op-Ed Columnist - Paranoia Strikes Deep - NYTimes.com

Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied...

...In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster...

Krugman is not always right. Unfortunately, he's the best prognosticator we've got, even if he's better at forecasting doom than at coming up with practical alternatives (perhaps because we don't have a lot of practical options).

We can't make Palin/Bachman go away, because their constituency is right be afraid. Even if Bachman had lost her Minnesota seat (she almost did, it was surprisingly close) someone else would have taken her raving loon position.

Instead of focusing on the crazies we should be trying to build a Reason-based GOP. Liberal democracies need a dynamic tension between the genetically gifted and the neurotypical, between those who inherit wealth and those who inherit struggle, between the market and the wise, between the thrusting and the compassionate. If the powerful do not get their extra votes, they will crash the system (to their own detriment, but the powerful are not often insightful).

A rationalist GOP won't have my values of tolerance and compassion. It will, however, have a calculated interest in the survival of American (if not human) civilization, in educating productive workers, in reducing unprofitable and uncontrollable wars, and in clean air, water, and even beautiful spaces.

I wouldn't vote for or admire a rationalist GOP, but I would understand and respect its necessity. Without this kind of opposition, without the struggle for power, my Dem party will become a sewer of corruption (No, it's not a sewer yet. If you think it is you've led a protected life).

Today Newt Gingrich is the closest thing to a rationalist GOP -- which is pathetic. As feeble in Reason as he is, he's also powerless and all but forgotten.

We need to rebuild a post-Reagan rationalist GOP -- or we'll be governed by the likes of Palin and Bachman and human civilization will be a smoldering wreck.

Where do we start donating?
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Palin, Noonan, and the fears of euro America

Peggy Noonan recently outlined the GOP establishment’s personal fears (emphases mine) …

... Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate....

I channeled Noonan’s dog whistles to respond …

• … Secessionism?! That would imply she's worried about American right wing terrorism, and the intolerable burden of Black President.
• Bankruptcy?! Do the wingnuts in the GOP really believe that America will default on its debt obligations, or is this something they do to incite the lunatic fringe?…

Frank Rich’s July 12th OpEd is an indirect response to Noonan, pointing out that whatever she might want to believe, Palin is the heart of today’s GOP. Ironically the Palin-GOP is listening to the same tunes as Noonan, the song of the end of euro dominated America (emphases mine) …

She Broke the G.O.P. and Now She Owns It -Frank Rich - NYTimes

… The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.

Its voice can be found in the postings at a Web site maintained by the fans of Mark Levin, the Obama hater who is, at this writing, the No.2 best-selling hardcover nonfiction writer in America. (Glenn Beck is No.1 in paperback nonfiction.) Politico surveyed them last week. “Bottomline, do you know of any way we can remove these idiots before this country goes down the crapper?” wrote one Levin fan. “I WILL HELP!!! Should I buy a gun?” Another called for a new American revolution, promising “there will be blood.”

These are the cries of a constituency that feels disenfranchised — by the powerful and the well-educated who gamed the housing bubble, by a news media it keeps being told is hateful, by the immigrants who have taken some of their jobs, by the African-American who has ended a white monopoly on the White House. Palin is their born avatar. She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her.

For a week now, critics in both parties have had a blast railing at Palin. It’s good sport. But just as the media muttering about those unseemly “controversies” rallied the fans of the King of Pop, so are Palin’s political obituaries likely to jump-start her lucrative afterlife.

One must give a sort of odd credit to right wing whackos – they buy a lot of books!

There’s a lot of fear out there in white America -- the fear of an era ending. It’s a fear that attracts the GOP, from Noonan to Palin.

How bad is the new GOP? Old GOP stalwarts yearn for defeat

Shrillblog detects the end-times. Old-time GOP stalwarts seek defeat, and likely lust for Clinton:

Shrillblog: Breaking News: Shrillness Singularity Discovered!

…George H.W. Bush speechwriter Christopher Buckley, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush advisor Bruce Bartlett, former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, Cato Institute Chairman William A Niskanen, conservative constitutional lawyer and activist Bruce Fein, Ronald Reagan speechwriter and former National Review editor Jeffrey Hart, and ConservativeHQ.com Chairman Richard Viguerie all write in to say...

… They hope the Republicans lose in 2006 ...Well, let’s be diplomatic and say they’d prefer divided government—soon …

I’m sure they weren’t quite so direct as the above paraphrasing implies, but anyone from the old-time respectable GOP must feel the same way.

The Bush/Cheney/Rove/Rumsfeld GOP practices an authoritarian populism familiar to students of history and of South American politics. It’s not the GOP I grew up with. I didn’t like Reagan or Bush I, but that was before I experienced Rove’s GOP. Now even Reagan, demented though he was, shines like a beacon in the harbor. (Were it not for his unforgivable crime of handing a gun to his enemies Clinton’s retrospective radiance would blind unprotected eyes).

It’s difficult, and painful, to remember what competent governance was like. An entire generation of young voters has no experience with government that’s worthy of the name.

Greece, America and GOP 2.0

Krugman tells us Germany and the EU must bail out Greece lest the entire EU crash and burn. Germany is unenthusiastic. Michael Lewis makes Germany's lack of enthusiasm understandable ...

Amazon.com: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World Michael Lewis

… government owed … $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek ….

… In just the past twelve years the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled … The average government job pays three times the average private-sector job ...

… The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against annual wage bill of 400 million ...

… The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is … fifty for women …

… In 2009, tax collection disintegrated, because it was an election year ...

… as estimated two thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year ...

…. Greece has no working national land registry ...

… all three hundred members of the Greek parliament declare the real value of their houses to be the computer-generated objective value … "every single member … is lying to evade taxes"...

Lewis describes Greece as a "perfectly corrupt society". Greece seems to have hit the limits of corruption; where the only honest people are either perversely oppositional or autistically incapable of deceit.  It's easy to see why Germany wants to put Greece through a world class social reengineering program.

Wow. Good thing we Americans aren't so corrupt. Good thing we don't have vast corporations paying no taxes. Mercifully our corporations aren't hiding trillions of dollars abroad. Our politicians don't use charitable donation scams or generate profits through insider trading that's illegal for all but Congress critters.

No way do we have the kind of widespread fraud and abuse of the weak that can lead to economic collapse.

Seriously though, if Greece is a nine on a ten point scale of democratic collapse and societal bankruptcy, how do we score? Are we a six? Do I hear a seven?

More importantly, how do we get back to a reasonable "four"? Greece is getting schooled by Germany (whose bankers were as stupid as any on earth), but nobody is going to school the US. All of Greece is barely New Orleans; we're too big to be taught.

We are going to have to reform ourselves. Occupy Wall Street can help, but to reform government we need to solve the problem of the Republican Party.

Both our political parties are corrupt, but the Dems are at least connected to science and logic. The GOP is no longer a part of the reality-based community; whatever Romney and the like may really think they have to pretend to be delusional.

We can't salvage our democracy with only one working political party. We need a reformed GOP. Some party has to do the bidding of the powerful -- lest the powerful tear the nation down. We don't need the GOP to become a shining beacon of integrity, but we do need them to be connected to logic and arithmetic and falsifiable predictions.

This isn't inconceivable. I can't imagine voting for a modern Republican, but only fifteen years ago I voted for a Republican Governor named Arne Carlson. Arne is still around, and he represents a faint voice of sanity in the modern GOP (emphases mine, note that "Pawlenty" is considered a "moderate" by modern GOP standards, but to Carlson he's a far right extremist) ...

MinnPost - Gov. Arne Carlson Blog: Bedford Falls or Pottersville?

... the Republican Party went from moderate to what I call “the new Right”. But it was more than a shift in political philosophy. Leaders like Sutton and Pawlenty and numerous others saw the party as representing not only a different and more narrow philosophy but also as having the power to rigidly enforce that philosophy on its elected members. Orthodoxy prevailed over representativeness and the result has been that cooperative governance with Democrats, Independents and Republican moderates is not possible. It is either the way of the “new Right” or not at all.

Politics is no longer a contest of competing ideas with respect for dissent but increasingly the imposition of an authoritarianism that all too often is cloaked in patriotism and religion. In this environment, the party and its beliefs are paramount and elected officials serve the party...

... my memory of Republicanism in Minnesota goes back to a party that was always building a better community … So many of our leaders came out of the progressivism of Harold Stassen while still committed to the conservative virtues of prudent financial management. Policies ranging from consumer and environmental protection to human rights to metropolitan governance bore the fingerprints of an endless array of community oriented GOP Governors from Elmer Andersen to Harold LeVander through Al Quie and on.

In addition, Republicans produced an endless array of truly talented legislators from all over Minnesota who came to our capital city to govern and always with an eye to the future. Simply put, Republicans, like their counterparts, the Democrats, felt that good politics stemmed from the competition of good ideas that produced quality governance.

And in this mix, leaders from every walk of life and every profession from medicine to agriculture participated. There seemed to be a sense of obligation to give something of oneself in order to build a better community for our children….

...The Republican Party both in Minnesota and nationally has a choice to make. Does it want to build a true Bedford Falls with a commitment to the well being of the whole or does it want to lead us to “Pottersville” where the quality of life rests with the privileged few?

We're in a bad place, but we can work our way out. Occupy Wall Street can help with some things, but they can't help with the critical mission. The critical mission is to reform the GOP; and only Republican voters can do that ...

So how do we help them?

I said Romney could never win the GOP primary ...

Five years Romney was running for President. Back then I wrote:

Gordon's Notes: Romney: not possible

In order to win the GOP primaries Mitt Romney has to convince Christian conservatives that he's reversed many of his longstanding opinions. He also, incidentally, has to publicly renounce his religion and be born again as a Baptist ....

I wrote my post around Kenneth Woodward's 2007 NYT OpEd.  Woodward walked through the theological gulf between Christian fundamentalisms and Mormonism -- and he didn't even touch on the more exotic portions of traditional Mormon belief. I didn't believe a former Mormon bishop could win the GOP primary. Perhaps he could win the presidential election -- but not the GOP primary.

It took five years, but it seems I was not exactly right.

I'd like to know how he did it, and how evangelicals crossed that divide. In the meantime, I think some credit goes to GOP voters. Maybe quite a bit of credit -- depending on what they were thinking.

So how exceptional is Romney's religion? Is Mormonism technically Christian? I tried two sources, both were a bit evasive ...

Encyclopedia of Religion and Social Science

... In its Christian primitivism and antinomianism, it was akin to many other "restorationist" movements, such as the Campbellites, which emerged at about the same time in the "burned over district" ...

... in the 1840s, Joseph Smith and his successor prophets began to promulgate a series of new revelations and doctrines that moved Mormonism in a sharply heterodox direction relative to the Protestant heritage from which it had emerged. Since then, mainstream Protestantism, especially the more evangelical and fundamentalist varieties, has generally been unwilling to consider Mormons as part of the Christian family, despite the continuing Mormon claims to being the one, true, authentic church of Jesus Christ, restored to usher in a new dispensation of the fullness of the Gospel.... 

and

Mormon (religion) -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Mormon beliefs are in some ways similar to those of orthodox Christian churches but also diverge markedly...

.. Mormons regard Christian churches as apostate for lacking revelation and an authoritative priesthood, although they are thought to be positive institutions in other respects. Smith, they believe, came to restore the institutions of the early Christian church. Although calling people to repent, Smith’s creed reflected contemporary American optimism in its emphasis on humanity’s inherent goodness and limitless potential for progress.

Perhaps it's a bit of a sensitive question. I'd go with technically Christian-related but not Protestant; probably closer to Christianity than Unitarianism or Judaism. Obviously there's a bit of irony if the Obama-is-a-muslim slice of the GOP ends up electing an arguably non-Christian President. (Maybe that's why Romney encourages Trump; it keeps the Birther whackos busy. Left alone they might go in another direction.)

If Romney does win he'll be expanding the religious range of the American presidency ...

Religious affiliations of Presidents of the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Unitarian

• John Adams
• John Quincy Adams
• Millard Fillmore
• William Howard Taft

No denominational affiliation

• Thomas Jefferson
• Abraham Lincoln
• Andrew Johnson
• Ulysses Grant
• Rutherford Hayes
• Barack Obama (previously United Church of Christ)

However, since the list includes four Unitarians (we go there - they evidently take agnostics) the historical record already stretches a good bit beyond "mainstream" Christianity. So President Romney would be unusual, but, theologically speaking, not entirely unprecedented.