Dear America,
I was skimming through the channels last night--cable costs a fortune but offers very little in the way of entertainment no matter how many channels you get--when I happened upon a symposium by one of those conservative think tanks being given by the editor of the National Revue and his wife along with two other conservative thinkers. I listened for a few minutes and I realized something. They were doing nothing more than offering conservative pedantry to the audience, which was in turn lapping it up. It was not a display of dazzling empiricism to support the notion that liberals were dragging academe, or as they called it, the academy, down the primrose path, but rather a series of postulations that were nothing more than opinions, but that sounded like irrefutable facts by virtue of the certitude with which they were enunciated. It was clever; the presentation was one sided but it looked like a debate because the four contributors were all giving different opinions not about the subject itself, but about a single assertion as to the subject...that liberals were abusing their control of "the academy." Thus, whether liberals are abusing their control of the academy, or even whether or not liberals had control of the academy was not up for debate. It was considered axiomatic, and without opposition on the panel, no one bothered to address the topic, and thus, given that the discussion was about something assumed to be a fact, it became such to anyone who was listening and who was so inclined anyway.
I realized that a variation of that tactic was how the Republican conservative party had managed to shift the nation's politics so far to the right that the Democrats went from controlling both houses of Congress after six years of Republican abuse of their control univocal control, to losing the control of both houses won in 2006 within eight years. They didn't exactly lie. They just didn't bother to confront the truth. For example, during the Bush administration, over 60% of the American people favored a single payer system of health care. But when the Democrats in a congress led by Nancy Pelosi were given the opportunity to pass laws creating such a system, they were thwarted by a collaboration between Republicans and Democrat conservatives, who presumed to call themselves "Blue Dogs." Thus, an idea propounded by the Republicans when the Clinton administration appeared to be leaning toward a single payer system--that is a system in which government would require everyone in the country to buy what a business, the insurance industry, was selling--was the only thing that Congress could pass, and then only barely so during a narrow window between when Senator Al Franken's election to The Senate was validated and when Ted Kennedy died. So, we got what the Republicans had wanted when both the Democrats and the electorate wanted something else, but the Republicans still managed to turn the nation against both notions because neither one of them was theirs. And the way they did it was by this same tactic of creating axioms that people who subscribed to their general dogma could believe, like the notion that everyone was going to lose his extant insurance, or the right to chose his own doctor if his policy didn't get cancelled. They did it by trotting out a few cases in which policies preferred by some conservatives were cancelled under the Affordable Care Act because they didn't comport with The Act's minimum requirements, but they left out two things. First, they made it seem like these tales were commonplace when in fact they were so rare that only a few of them ever came to light. But more importantly, that these people who lost their insurance were offered insurance that complied with the law and were better off on account of it. And they trumpeted the purported vindication of their condemnation of what they began to call "Obamacare" in derision so loudly that no one noticed when eleven million people signed up for insurance under the federally mandated scheme to get affordable health care for the forty eight million who couldn't afford it when the law was passed. Nor did they even have to confront the fact that the law had resulted in affordable healthcare for more than five million people who had never had insurance before. All of their rhetoric was based on just enough truth--there were a few cases in which people could no longer get the insurance they had before the law was passed and as a result found themselves in different physician networks--to give the illusion of axiomatic truth that was beyond refutation, and the Democrats let them do it with impunity.
It was the same with the recent "CROMNIBUS" appropriations agreement. The provision of the Dodd Frank Act that was intended to obviate future bailouts of banks by requiring banks to separate their commercial banking enterprises from their proprietary investment activities, like the purchase and sale of derivatives that was the cause of the recent great recession, was repealed by agreement with the Democrats, who denied that they were in favor of it but voted for it anyway, thus denying themselves any claim that it was the Republicans who screwed us all, not them. And they did it with arguments like, that law really only affects four or five big banks, and the banking establishment in general will not be changed by the repeal. Of course, it was only five or six banks that put us in the economic mess we've been in for the past six years, but Democrats never seem to mention that. The Republicans did the same thing with campaign financing under cover of a conservative doctrine upheld by our conservative Supreme Court that endows corporations with the rights of human beings, which Mitt Romney invoked when he said, "corporations are people too, my friend," at a highly publicized campaign rally.
In short, the Republican resurgence was not a matter of superior positions on pivotal issues. It was simply a matter of superior polemical skills...and a failure of Democrats to call them on it.
Your friend,
Mike
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