If you only read one meaty article today, it should be historian Rick Perlstein’s Mother Jones piece on how the Republican Party has come to inhabit a virtually fact-free zone in which ideology and spin dictate the terms of debate and there’s no one to referee.
Perlstein takes the reader quickly through the twentieth century development of counter-factual politicking, from William Randolph Hearst’s invention of the dastardly destruction of the U.S.S. Maine, to LBJ’s vast exaggeration of the Tonkin Gulf incident, to Ronald Reagan’s dangerous assertions that truth-telling about America’s sins and shortcomings was unpatriotic.
But the most recent lurch into “mendocracy,” says Perlstein, has involved an enormous expansion of the ranks of authorized liars, abetted by “neutral” media who no longer seem to think there is any such thing as objective truth:

There evolved a new media definition of civility that privileged “balance” over truth-telling–even when one side was lying. It’s a real and profound change–one stunningly obvious when you review a 1973 PBS news panel hosted by Bill Moyers and featuring National Review editor George Will, both excoriating the administration’s “Watergate morality.” Such a panel today on, say, global warming would not be complete without a complement of conservatives, one of them probably George Will, lambasting the “liberal” contention that scientific facts are facts–and anyone daring to call them out for lying would be instantly censured. It’s happened to me more than once–on public radio, no less….
And here, in the end, is the difference between the untruths told by William Randolph Hearst and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the ones inundating us now: Today, it’s not just the most powerful men who can lie and get away with it. It’s just about anyone–a congressional back-bencher, an ideology-driven hack, a guy with a video camera–who can inject deception into the news cycle and the political discourse on a grand scale.

Perlstein has put his finger on one of the most important phenomena of contemporary politics, one that has no obvious solution and thus represents something we don’t really want to talk about. We can’t bring back Walter Cronkite to referee for us, but we also can’t just accept a situation where progressives are expected to go into “neutral” venues and yuck it up with Andrew Breitbart.

Something I’ve noticed in the commentary on Haley Barbour’s decision against running for president is that it’s often asserted there is no longer a “southerner” or “true southerner” in the race. Aaron Blake did this in the Washington Post yesterday.
Now this has got to hurt if you are former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer or former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, since I suspect it’s their seriousness as candidates rather than the authenticity of their southern background that’s in question.
But what about Newt Gingrich, who represented Georgia in the U.S. House for about twenty years?
Sure, Newt was born in Pennsylvania and was an Army Brat who moved around. And he’s never had a southern accent. Nor was his suburban Atlanta House district–at least after he moved to avoid being gerrymandered in 1991–the kind of place where it was easier to find good barbecue than a good bagel. I used to tell people who complained about southern domination of American politics and cited Gingrich as an example: “Newt’s district isn’t in the South. It’s a collection of subdivisions and malls where you can phone the South toll-free.”
But still, the guy moved to the South (Columbus, Georgia to be exact) during high school, and never left (even now he lives in Virginia). He did represent Georgia for a long time. His presidential campaign, assuming it happens, will be based in Atlanta, and he’s got a lot of high-profile cracker support (including the current governor, Nathan Deal, and a famous former governor named Zell Miller). I don’t know exactly how much that will help him in, say, South Carolina, but it’s not as though the man will have to be taught how to speak at a Southern Baptist Church (he was once a Baptist deacon before a divorce or two; he’s now a Catholic, which doesn’t hurt in the South like it used to) or what to order at Lizard Thicket. While no one will ever confuse Newt with a magnolia mouth like Barbour, let’s give the guy a break and let him call himself a southerner if he wants.

Implying that he lacked sufficient “fire in the belly,” Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour surprised a lot of people today by announcing he would not, after all, run for president in 2012.
I’m with Jonathan Chait on this one: I never saw how Barbour would become a viable presidential candidate, despite all the money he could raise and all the wild adoration he inspired among Republican insiders. Hard-core conservatives never much trusted him, and as a former lobbyist for foreign governments and tobacco companies, he just had too hard a sale to make to actual voters in both the primaries and a general election. Some Republican pros also shuddered at the prospect of sending a Mississippian with a chronic soft spot for the Good Old Days of segregation up against the first African-American president.
The most interesting legacy of the Barbour proto-candidacy was his apparent decision to defy the party orthodoxy demanding unconditional support for higher defense spending and military adventurism. For now, that niche is again solely occupied by Ron Paul.
Barbour’s decision will instantly increase speculation that Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels could jump into the race. They are big buddies, and former Bush administration colleagues. Like Barbour, Daniels is extremely popular among Beltway insiders, who will now, I predict, begin publicly begging him to run (he’s said to be close to a decision).

As James Vega explained in the previous post, GOP budget wizard Paul Ryan is a very big fan of that perennial favorite of adolescents everywhere, the late Ayn Rand (if you are unfamiliar with Rand’s life and work, check out my review of two recent biographies that appeared in Democracy last year).
While Ryan’s muse is still posthumously selling a lot of books, the long-awaited movie version of her self-described magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, is not doing so well. To be more precise, the flick is billed as “part one” of a projected trilogy, but it’s not clear at this point that parts two and three will ever be made.
As Dave Weigel notes, receipts for Atlas Shrugged, Part I have taken a nose-dive in the second week after its release, which is never a good sign:

In its second week of release, after expanding from 300 to 465 theaters, Atlas Shrugged: Part I may have started to tank. The movie hauled $879,000 over the weekend; more importantly, it only made an average of $1,890 per screen. The first week, it made $5,600 per screen. Producers have been talking about expanding the film to 1000 screens by the end of the month, but even in a remarkably lame year for Hollywood films (Water for Elephants, anyone? Anyone?) there’s no new audience discovering the film.

And that’s with Rand acolytes and elements of the Tea Party movement hyping it.
I haven’t seen the flick (the closest theater showing it is about an hour-and-a-half drive away), and am not in a hurry to see it, having gone through an Objectivist phase in high school like many Americans. The reviews are mostly very negative, and it’s reasonably clear the movie was rushed through production to take advantage of the latest politically-driven Rand fad.
The film’s notable lack of success is highly ironic, though, for two reasons. Rand spent a critical chunk of her own life in the movie business, which was, in fact, her ticket out of the Soviet Union as a young woman. But even more importantly, she always preached that money provided the only morally valid measure of human effort; it’s why she (and many of her followers) wore a gold dollar sign pin the way Christians wear crosses. By that standard, the movie she inspired appears to have been something of a waste of everybody’s time.

Robert Scheer has a thought-provoking column this week on the perspectives of multinational corporate executives about their prospects in the U.S. and elsewhere. And he goes beyond the usual hand-wringing about the inability of individual nation-states to control what multinationals do.
For one thing, he points out that multinationals depend on the U.S. government for a lot more than direct tax and spending subsidies: most notably, for a massive defense infrastructure that makes doing business around the world possible.
But Scheer also makes this observation based on what corporate CEOs say about what motivates them to invest in particular countries:

General Electric, which was bailed out by taxpayers and which stored so much of its profit abroad that it paid no taxes for the past two years, was forced to tighten up, but while cutting its foreign workforce by 1,000 it cut a far more severe 28,000 in the United States. Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of GE, recently appointed by President Barack Obama as his chief outside economic adviser, admits that this does not involve poorly paid work that Americans don’t want, but instead prime jobs: “We’ve globalized around markets, not cheap labor. The era of globalization around cheap labor is over. Today we go to China, we go to India, because that’s where the customers are.”

Interesting, eh? We are constantly being told by conservative pols and opinion-leaders that consumer demand in the U.S. is irrelevant to the current economic crisis; that it’s all about the terrible burdens faced by “job creators” (enjoying record profits, by the way) in the way of wage, tax and regulatory costs. Thus individual states, and the national government as well, are being encouraged avidly to pursue “race to the bottom” competitive strategies ravaging the public sector in the name of the almighty desideratum of lower business costs.
If this strategy made sense, of course, then “low-road” states like Alabama and Mississippi would be the economic dynamos of the whole world. But it’s good to hear a validation that something else is actually going on from a corporate titan.
This topic was discussed at length today on the syndicated public radio show “Left, Right and Center,” in which I sat in for Arianna Huffington along with regulars Scheer, Matt Miller and Tony Blankley. There’s a feature at the very end where everyone gets to say something very brief (in my case, 10 seconds were left) about any old topic. I got in a quick reference to today being Earth Day. It was the first and only time that was mentioned, which is, I suppose, a sign of the times.

It’s been pretty widely acknowledged that the environmental cause in this country has experienced some bad times lately. But’s it is still a shock to recognize that on this particular Earth Day, the main environment-related initiatives in the news have been Republican efforts to kill off or neuter the Environmental Protection Agency–a Republican creation, as it happens–and to liberalize offshore oil drilling.
To borrow the first line from Bradford Plumer’s rumination in The New Republic on the collapse of climate change legislation: “What the hell went wrong?”
Some would point to internal conflicts and shortcomings in the environmental movement; others to the traumatizing effect of the global economic crisis. The one thing that is crystal clear is that environmental causes, once perhaps the most bipartisan and transideological of all causes, no longer enjoy significant Republican or conservative support; au contraire, as a matter of fact. And this development has occurred very, very recently.
It’s pretty well known that cap-and-trade–or “cap-and-tax” as conservative pols now like to call it–began as a Republican initiative to use market forces, as opposed to command-and-control regulation, to promote environmental improvements, notably in the successful attack on acid rain begun when George H.W. Bush signed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. John McCain was for years the point man in Congress for cap-and-trade. Republican governors like Tim Pawlenty took on bipartisanship state initiatives to deal with climate change. And beyond the purely political circles, the idea that environmental activism was entirely compatible with conservative values seemed to be spreading through much of the last decade. “Creation care” was among the hottest topics among U.S. evangelicals. The Vatican sponsored a conference on climate change in 2007. Even George W. Bush came around to the proposition that man-made factors were almost certainly causing potentially catastrophic climate change.
Then the rock rolled back down the hill. And while you can debate the contributing factors ad nauseum, the most persuasive argument is that bipartisanship on the environment–as on health care and other issues–was a casualty of the conservative/GOP determination, which is now deeply rooted in rank-and-file opinion, to oppose anything supported by Democrats (with powerful interests who profit from the destruction of the environment, of course, promoting this trend with big money and disinformation).
It’s hard to predict whether or when this sudden withdrawal of one of America’s two major political parties from even a rhetorical investment in environmentalism will change; the indicators certainly are not positive, as witnessed by John McCain’s headlong flight from his own record in 2008, and by Tim Pawlenty’s recantation of his climate change initiatives as a terrible mistake.
For the time being, anyone interested in environmental progress had better hope for a Democratic victory in 2012.
UPDATE: I only mentioned in passing the “creation care” movement among conservative evangelical Protestants that was so evident just a few years ago. But the massive backlash in the Christian Right against this movement recently, and the close coordination of the religious backlash to corporate anti-environmentalism, is very well documented by a new report from People for the American Way. It’s kind of terrifying, not just to environmentalists, but to Christians who don’t buy the idea that God has commanded us, through the agency of oil and coal extraction companies, to despoil the earth. It’s certainly grist for reflection on this Good Friday.

Old-timers probably remember when there was a robust ongoing debate on the Left and Center-Left about the word “progressive” as an ideological identifier. Was it a good replacement for “liberal,” which had been made toxic by billions of dollars worth of conservative demonization? Was it the property of serious Leftists, who had used to define themselves in opposition to conventional liberals (not to mention moderates and conservatives) in the Democratic Party for decades? Or did it connote the historical traditional that went back to the Brandeis-Croley debates of the early twentieth century, when self-described “progressives” could be found in and beyond both major parties?
This all remained inside baseball until Glenn Beck began developing his convoluted conspiracy theories for a rapidly expanding audience a couple of years ago, and made “progressivism” a lurid term for a quasi-satanic and quasi-totalitarian cabal going back to Woodrow Wilson, that was complicit in both communism and fascism and entirely inimical to American constitutional traditions.
Beck’s audience is now rapidly shrinking, but he’s still able to start a fight, and did so this week (as noted by Salon‘s Alex Pareene) on his radio show by applying the “P-Word” to none other than his old Fox buddy Mike Huckabee.

Nearly all of what Beck says about Huckabee is pretty ludicrous (aside from such stupid slurs as calling the Rev. Jim Wallis a “Marxist”). But the interesting thing is that Huck fired back in an unusually uninhibited way on his own blog:

This week Glenn Beck has taken to his radio show to attack me as a Progressive, which he has said is the same as a “cancer” and a “Nazi.” What did I do that apparently caused him to link me to a fatal disease and a form of government that murdered millions of innocent Jews? I had the audacity–not of hope–but the audacity to give respect to the efforts of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to address childhood obesity. I’m no fan of her husband’s policies for sure, but I have appreciated her efforts that Beck misrepresented–either out of ignorance or out of a deliberate attempt to distort them to create yet another “boogey man” hiding in the closet that he and only he can see.

Wow. Them’s fightin’ words. It’s unclear whether they mean that Beck is now marginal enough that even Christian Right pols can take a swing at him, or that Huck’s really not going to run for president in 2012. But you can bet it wouldn’t have happened a year ago.

Having first declared that the 2012 Iowa Caucuses had become a “global wingnut magnet” with the arrival on the campaign trail of Judge Roy Moore, I’ve now got a more measured assessment, which I’ve written up for The Atlantic.
You can read it all, but the basic theory is that the Christian Right is holding something of a Caucus-Within-the-Caucuses to determine which of their champions will carry the cross into the main battle with “moderate” infidels like Mitt Romney. It’s sort of what happened in 2008 when Mike Huckabee became the Iowa alternative to Romney among Christian conservatives only after he out-organized Sen. Sam Brownback at the state party straw poll in the summer of 2007.
So Republicans who are hoping that the freak show of far-right candidates crowding Iowa will give more oxygen to “moderates” may be missing the point. Within the context of the Christian Right, Roy Moore is not a madman, but just, well, a rather passionate man of distinctive Dominionist views. He’ll get his audition, along with Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum and maybe T-Paw (if he keeps evolving in the radical direction he seems to have chosen) for the Christian Right nod, but The Faithful will probably go into the Caucuses themselves more or less united.
There’s one other thing that strikes me as fascinating about Moore’s invasion of Iowa. His political act in Alabama has pretty much worn itself out after two very poor showings in GOP gubernatorial primaries. It could very well be that the Judge feels more at “home” in Iowa, one of the few places in the country where conservatives are obsessed with the issue of same-sex marriage. He wouldn’t be the first Alabama demagogue to find a surprisingly receptive audience Up North, would he?

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
During the 2008 election cycle, Mitt Romney was often accused of treating politics more like a consumer-focused business than an exercise in leadership. “My view is, we ought to double Guantanamo,” he said, radiating the sense that if primary voters wanted something, anything, he’d be willing to sell it. His strategists obsessed about creating and selling “Brand Romney.” To many, these efforts made him look like a crass twit, a market researcher’s caricature of the perfect Republican candidate, even as he came in second-place for the GOP nomination. This election, however, Romney may have to compete with Donald Trump.
Trump, the real estate mogul and reality TV star, has been putting out the types of feelers that usually signal a real candidacy rather than a publicity stunt. He is riding high in the polls on essentially the same customer-service-style political strategy that fellow entrepreneur Mitt Romney pursued, but a la Trump, stronger, bigger, crasser–and in a far more radical political environment, where the demand for an ultra-hard line on terrorism has been eclipsed by the niche demand for Birtherism, along with extreme policy positions that voters weren’t even obsessing about yet like virulent anti-Chinese protectionism and a policy to openly steal the Arab world’s oil. The Republican establishment has perceived this as a threat–believing that Trump will drag the entire Republican field into a world where they cannot be taken seriously by general election voters–and launched an all-out effort to tar him. But the truth is that their effort may be a lost cause, for reasons that are intrinsic to the success of Trump’s consumer-focused approach: This year, GOP voters’ hunger for radicalism is so great that it can be filled by essentially anybody. Kill off Trump’s candidacy and the demand will remain, leaving an opening for yet another demagogic charlatan to take his place.
Trump first raised eyebrows in the Republican establishment by taking steps that a serious candidate would take before running for president–planning trips to Iowa, chatting up potential staff, sitting down for an interview with Christian Right journalist David Brody. Then, last Friday, Public Policy Polling released a survey that showed Trump not only running ahead of the entire 2012 field, but registering numbers higher than such prior leaders as Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. That caused the Republican Powers That Be to stop dismissing him and launch the kind of sustained attack that is said to have succeeded in fatally damaging Sarah Palin’s credibility as a potential presidential candidate. During the last few days Karl Rove, George Will, and the Club for Growth have all trashed Trump very aggressively.
But a closer look at the PPP findings should reveal the weakness of this elite strategy. What they show is not a desire to support the faux tycoon per se, but a raging right-wing, anti-establishment fever that has only gotten stronger in recent months. Ending or mortally wounding a Trump candidacy would only address its symptoms, rather than curing a condition in which voters will follow whichever candidate is willing to outdo his or her opponents at wingnuttery. According to PPP, fully 23 percent of self-identified Republicans say they could not vote for any candidates who “who firmly stated they believed Barack Obama was born in the United States.” Another 39 percent weren’t sure they could vote for such Birther-defying candidates. The pollster didn’t test some of the other provocative positions associated with Trump, such as his stance on China or desire to despoil the Arab world of its oil, but I have a strong feeling those sentiments would perform pretty well, too. There may be no coherent body of views you could call “Trumpism,” but even without Trump, there would be a hunger for spicier red meat than is being offered by the current crop of Republican candidates.
This screw-the-establishment sentiment must be understood in the context of what looks to be growing dissatisfaction with compromises made by Republicans in the Tea Party Congress and statehouses. The House Republican leadership has been congratulating itself for “winning” the recent appropriations fight without shutting down the government, and without triggering an outright revolt among the House freshmen. But that’s not going over well in activist land. This previous Tax Day weekend saw a slew of protests against the latest establishment sell-out: In a nice act of revenge against her Beltway detractors, Sarah Palin regaled a Wisconsin audience with a fiery attack on Congressional Republican gutlessness, taunting them that they need to learn to “fight like a girl.” And conservative pressure to go to the mats over a debt limit increase is rising rapidly each day, particularly if the alternative is some sort of budget deal with Democrats that leaves tax increases on the table while removing the kind of radical attack on domestic spending advanced by Paul Ryan’s budget.
This dynamic creates an enormous temptation for non-congressional Republicans to join the revolt, as evidenced by the rapid devolution of Tim Pawlenty into an extremist on budget issues and a favorite at Tea Party rallies. (He’s now opposed to raising the debt ceiling, even though that would damage the U.S. economy on a scale similar to a nuclear attack.) And if there is something that GOP voters want which Pawlenty is unwilling to give them because he decides it’s too crazy, then there will always be Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann, who are receiving rapturous receptions on the campaign trail, to flay him for his equivocation.
If Trump is pushed out of the limelight or off the campaign trail by the conservative establishment, or by his own erratic record on a host of issues, the atavistic longings of the rank-and-file conservative base will simply affix themselves elsewhere as other candidates try to tap the rich vein of anger he’s helped galvanize. And if he survives the pounding he’s about to get from respectable opinion, then George Will is right: He will make a “shambles” of every Republican presidential debate. But that’s not only because he’s an eccentric demagogue who is willing to say just about anything for attention. It’s also because he’s exactly what conservative voters crave.

To my great surprise, at the National Review site, former Sen. Fred Thompson responded to my TNR piece (cross-posted here) last week making him the symbol of disappointing, half-hearted dark-horse candidates for president.
Like TNR’s Jonathan Chait, I found Thompson’s response interesting, humorous, and even endearing. He did, unfortunately, interpret an entirely metaphorical reference to “abundant stops for rest and ice cream” much too literally. But if I have repeated inaccurate reporting of his actual comings and goings at the 2007 Iowa State Fair, I apologize. As an attendee of that particular fair (though not the same day as Fred), I am quite sure that he was perceived as violating Fair Mores, even if he actually didn’t, and I wish he had gone to more trouble to set the record straight back then.
He didn’t much deal with the broader issues my article raised, but that’s okay. My main point was to upbraid Republican opinion-leaders for their endless faith in late-entering dark-horse candidates. And Fred Thompson provides a warning vastly more credible and vivid than mine:

So Mr. or Ms. Dark Horse, you have not played by the rules, you late-comer, and your belly fire is suspect. And people will go to great lengths to prove their suspicions correct. Therefore, you must be willing to run over your grandmother, mortgage your soul, and behave like an over-caffeinated Elmer Gantry in order to make up for your insolence. Only then will they be comfortable with the idea of your being president.

Thank you, Senator.