The 47% and the radicalization of the GOP

Here's the blog post that got me to thinking about this issue.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/09/republicans-and-47-case-study

Kevin Drum traces the history of the earned income tax credit and the GOP. As you'll see, there was a time when each party cared about the poor, and they battled on the best way to help them. Ronald Reagan, as I'm sure most of the politigeeks here now, was a key driver in the expansion of the EITC.

Then there's Obamacare. Again, most of us here are probably aware that Obamacare is not only a pretty close copy of Romneycare, but that Obamacare's grandfather is the 1990s conservative plan on health care. Again, there was a time in the not-distant past when Republicans recognized that the large and growing segment of the uninsured in the US were a policy problem to be fixed. There was a time within the last half dozen years when the mandate was Republican dogma, and for very good reason!

A political system in which 2 parties more or less identify the same problems that need to be addressed, but have differing philosophies on how to address those problems, is a system that can work. (Although the now-de facto supermajority requirement in the Senate is a significant impediment.) It HAS worked.

But a system in which one political party has gone so far off the deep end that the problem with poor people is NOT how to improve their lot in life, the problem with poor people is a) how to get them to have some skin in the game and b) how to ignore them otherwise; a political system in which to one party, our appalling combination of high health care costs and terrible health care outcomes is not a problem to fix, but a system in which we need to ensure that the winners in that system stay winners; a political system in which one party believes the proper response to an economic crisis brought on by the collapse of the financial industry is NOT to better regulate that industry, but instead the proper response is to figure out how to scapegoat a law passed 30 years earlier under Jimmy Carter, that is a political system that is incapable of solving our countries problems.

Financial regulation and health care are big, big problems, and not easy for a political system to solve. And they're not any easier than redefining our security policy in an age of non-state actors. I mean, one party has a bizarre belief that our foreign policy should be subsumed to whatever is in Israel's interest. (The Democrats are scarcely better in large part because there's no benefit to being better on the issue. And also in large part because they kinda suck, too.) And fin-reg and health care are cakewalks compared to trying to close what appears to be permanent and huge budget deficits.

Thoughts?

Matt, he asked for thoughts.

I'm guessing Matt's referencing My Cousin Vinny.

Oh, then it is funny?

I don't get it, Matt. Are you saying that the GOP didn't used to think the number of uninsured is a problem? Or are you saying they still think it's a problem to be solved?

GOP also used to think they could find a private enterprise-based measure to address CO2 emissions. Then they decided cap & trade was socialism.

I've watched the whole video a couple of times but one part didn't jump out at me until last night: RMoney actually says that the 47% also believe they have a right to food. FOOD. Once of the basic things a human being needs to survive is something that Mitt doesn't think is a right.

More tedious than a Billy Bragg/ Florence + The Machine show.

Food, healthcare and housing to be specific.

Shit, who needs that? If you starve, get sick and die, you have no use for a home!

But not as tedious as one of your posts.

Hmmm. Maybe.

In fairness, they may think food is a right, they just don't think the government should be responsible for providing it. (As to the question of who would if not the government, I think that's faith-based, AKA "******** you, I'm not paying for it.")

As to the wider question, if the Republicans have become the party of the 1% and their End-Timer coat carriers, and the Democrats have adopted what used to be the conservative positions of yesteryear, then who's fighting for progressive change? I'd argue that a political culture that rejects progressive change will have a very short shelf-life.

Did Billy Bragg leave the seat up on your toilet or something? This is, like, the third time you've ragged on him in the past couple days.

Jonathan Haidt must be having a field day watching the fallout over Romney's "47%" diatribe because he addresses exactly that mindset in his book "Righteous Mind". Basically, he says what I've been saying for 20 years, namely that when it comes to people's belief systems, psychology trumps objective reality any day. And that goes for the left as well as the right although we have been spending the last 20 years watching the American right go from reasonably psychological to just plain batshit crazy.

As for the exact "47%" comments, Haidt would probably argue that wingnuts have an excessively narrow definition of "fairness" that focuses almost exclusively on proportionality and not enough on equality so they basically believe (or pretend to believe) that people really get what hey deserve and if you're poor or your rich, you somehow morally deserve your outcome. Ergo, if you're not rich you're lazy or stupid or somehow otherwise morally unworthy.

Of course, rich wingnuts like Romney can double down on this belief system via the human fallacy that if I'm successful then it is solely because of my hard work and undoubted genius while other people are again lazy, stupid etc. Of course, if someone like that sees someone they don't like being successful, then that person obviously got there by luck or cheating.

Haidt (and I) argue that the views stated by Willard are not based on rational thought, they are a "gut" view likely caused by many factors, none of which are conscious to the believer. This is why the myth that all poor people are lazy and stupid and don't deserve to enjoy the benefits of civilization will never be eradicated no matter how much data you give the believers showing exactly who the "47%" really are.

People not locked into the over-reliance on proportionality to explain wealth or poverty, of course, see things differently and I think what makes Mittens' remarks so fabulously ill-timed is that a lot of Americans just went through a period where they tasted economic ill-fortune through no immediate fault of their own so they know damn well that if wealth or lack thereof cannot automatically be explained as a moral failing. And now those Americans see how rich Reeps really think about those below them in the wealth scale and it's not a pretty picture.

A wonderful point, on which I would like to expand.

I lived in Berkeley in 1979. Anybody who did would acquire humility about being a Democrat from the left. As a general rule, those were some commie-loving, delusional, self-righteous, tedious ********ing assholes.

So when I say that today's right should be institutionalized -- and it should -- realize I know what batshit looks like from the other side. It's not your politics. It's that you are fact-disrespecting, partisan, self-centered assholes who hate American just as much as the 1979 Berkeley lefties hate America.

Are we clear now? And can you leave this country?

Thanks -
Actual true American who loves this country and its people, all 100% of them.Well except for you. But once you leave, all 100%.

Fixed

That Libertarian Party logo is frighteningly similar to that of Buffalo Wild Wings. It also brings to mind the Columbus Crew.

It's possible that I just need coffee, though.