It’s been apparent for years now that increasingly large elements of the conservative movement in this country have been building a parallel universe with its own facts, its own rules, and its own drama of good versus evil. It’s largely impervious to empirical data, and relies heavily on assertion and reassertion of key claims that flow from ever-more-lurid (and thus inherently unverifiable) conspiracy theories.
One key claim that’s grown to truly monstrous proportions is that the U.S. Constitution is being perpetually threatened by “voter fraud”–vast numbers of unqualified voters drawn from minority groups, herded to the polls to support Democratic candidates who in turn promise the loot the virtuous law-abiding white majority to pay off miscreants with “welfare.” This claim has been around for decades, but used to be little more than a cynical effort to find some rebuttal to better documented Democratic claims that the Republican Party routinely sought to intimidate or disenfranchise minority voters (a practice that came to especially bright light during the 2000 election crisis).
The growing importance of voter fraud allegations to the GOP in recent years was made evident by the U.S. Attorneys scandal of the Bush administration, in which failure to produce such allegations was the rationale for several politically motivated firings.
But it’s during the last year-and-a-half that the same old undocumented claims of voter fraud have become linked to a broad right-wing narrative of vote-buying and election-stealing on a massive scale that supposedly explains both the financial crisis and the election of Barack Obama, and that centers on the activities of a previously obscure and marginal grassroots organizing group named ACORN.
Regular readers of this site know the narrative by now: engorged with federal grants, ACORN engineered the housing and financial crises by intimidating lenders into offering mortgages to poor and minority families with no means or intentions of making their payments, and then when the chickens came home to roost, gambled everything on an illegal effort to secure bailouts and a general “socialist” takeover of the country by stealing the White House for its long-time associate and radical community organizer, Barack Obama.
The extraordinary strength of this crazy theory, which has the particular advantage of absolving the Bush administration and Wall Street of responsibility for the financial crisis and the current recession, was astonishingly demonstrated by a recent poll showing that an actual majority of self-identified Republican voters believe that ACORN stole the 2008 elections.
Any narrative this powerful has to be fed continuously, which is why the recent congressional vote stripping ACORN of nearly all access to federal grants was a pyrrhic victory for conservatives. How could they keep fear of ACORN alive?
That necessity led to yesterday’s strange event in the U.S. House, a partisan “forum” on ACORN that was sort of a parody of a congressional hearing, based on the circular reasoning that the refusal of the House itself to launch an wide-ranging investigation of ACORN was proof of the conspiracy’s power.
You can read Dave Weigel’s detailed account of the “forum” by following the link above, but the main claim yesterday (specifically by Rep. Darrell Issa of CA) was that the White House serves as a “war room” for ACORN, as “proved” by Obama’s tangential relationship with ACORN years ago in Chicago, and more recently, by the hiring of Democratic election law wizard Bob Bauer as White House Counsel. Bauer’s smoking gun, it seems, is that he once wrote a memo dismissing broad-based GOP election fraud claims, and warning (accurately) that they would be retailed by the McCain-Palin campaign. Anyone denying the conspiracy, you see, is obviously a party to it.
Personally, I hope yesterday’s “forum” is the first of many such events. The centrality of the ACORN Derangement Syndrome to the contemporary Right’s world-view–along with the opportunity for more responsible conservatives to repudiate it–needs to be right out there in the open, and not secluded in viral emails or segregated at Fox News. It helps explain not only the virulence of conservative passion against the Obama administration, but the rat’s nest of self-exculpation, paranoia, and yes, racism that too often underlies it.

It’s reasonably well understood that this year’s federal economic stimulus legislation helped (though not as much as it might have) cushion state and local governments from a fiscal disaster attributable to falling revenues, automatically increasing entitlement expenditures, and balanced budget requirements. The rationale for this federal aid–to keep states and localities from counteracting the stimulative effect of federal spending via tax increases and spending cuts–is less well understood. So, too, is the fact that the continuing fiscal crisis around the country continues to undermine the impact of federal stimulus.
That’s the departure point for an important new article by Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect. Aggregating the numbers, Meyerson reaches a startling but entirely justified conclusion:

[H]ow much does the government’s stimulus come to when we subtract the amount the states and localities are taking out of the economy from the amount the feds are putting in? The two-year Obama stimulus amounted to $787 billion, of which $70 billion was really just the usual taxpayers’ annual exemption from the alternative minimum tax, and $146 billion was actually appropriated for the years 2011 to 2019. That leaves $571 billion that the federal government is pumping into the economy during 2009 and 2010. Subtract the amount that state and local governments are withdrawing from the economy (they have a combined shortfall of around $365 billion, but let’s say they do enough fiscal finagling so that the total of their cutbacks and tax hikes is just $325 billion), and we’re left with $246 billion.
At $787 billion, the stimulus came to 2.6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product for 2009 and 2010 — not big enough, but a respectable figure. At $246 billion — the net of the federal stimulus minus the state and local anti-stimulus — it comes to just 0.8 percent of GDP, a level lower than those of many of the nations that the U.S. chastised for failing to stimulate their economies sufficiently.

In other words, most of the debates we’ve heard about the size and impact of the federal stimulus effort have ignored the actual net spending once you aggregate federal, state and local government actions. That’s a pretty big ommission, and that’s why the University of Chicago’s Harold Pollack and I argued earlier this year that we need to start thinking comprehensively about intergovernmental coordination:

[F]ederal budget debates should expand to include the national budget, the sum total of spending, taxes and policies that implement and finance national governance. At a minimum, the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office should routinely scrutinize the financial impact of proposed federal policies on every level of government.

Meyerson goes on to examine other damaging aspects of our federal system with respect to economic policy that are well worth reading. But what’s most interesting and alarming about his analysis is that it’s so unusual. Most policy discussions in Washington either ignore state and local governments, treat them as an unimportant sideshow, or assume that the many parts of the intergovernmental system move roughly in coordination, and in the same direction. Now more than ever, it’s time to understand that the left hand of our system may be working at active cross-purposes with the right.

Two of my favorite online writers, Chris Bowers of OpenLeft and Nate Silver of 538.com, had an interesting exchange that touches on a perennial issue of concern to Democrats: should self-conscious progressives (using the Progressive Caucus definition of that term) care if a bunch of “centrist” or conservative Democrats in the U.S. House lose in 2010?
Chris says, basically, no. His reasoning is that there is already a “non-progressive majority” in the House, and that non-progressive Democratic losses might well strengthen the hand of the Progressive Caucus in the Democratic Caucus at large. He also suggests that some of the seats lost by the kind of Democrats he doesn’t like might be picked up by the kind of Democrats he likes down the road.
Nate offers a rejoinder that looks closely at the 39 most vulnerable House Democrats and argues that Chris’ generalization of them as non-progressive is quite questionable. Choosing the three most difficult (and significant) House votes as a measure, he notes that 18 voted with the leadership and the administration on all three; 27 voted “right” on two out of three; and only two went the wrong way on all three. Since Speaker Pelosi undoubtedly gave some of these Members a “pass” on one or more of these key votes, they seem less than monolithically rebellious, and the idea that replacing them en masse with (typically) right-wing Republicans as a matter of indifference is a dubious proposition.
Neither Chris nor Nate directly addresses the obvious issue that it matters to Democrats if they actually control the House or not, and neither really gets into the question of whether at least some of the endangered Democrats accurately represent the views not only their districts, but of Democrats in their districts. Chris is clearly focused on the relative power of the Progressive Caucus vis a vis the Blue Dogs, but as Nate points out, 39 of the 53 Blue Dogs aren’t endangered at all.
I understand that OpenLeft was founded with the explicit goal of moving the congressional Democratic Caucus to the left, and is determined to get progressives to place a higher premium on ideology (and real-life policy results) than on blind partisanship. But Nate’s right to question the sort of one-step-back, two-step-forward logic that is indifferent to gains by a rabidly conservative GOP so long as it damages ideologically “unsound” Democrats. It’s not clear we as a party or a country can afford that sort of “long view.”

Last night I hung out with my father for a few hours, and as we chatted cable news was on the tube in the background (CNN, as it happens). I don’t watch as much cable news as I probably should to stay in touch with the zeitgeist, but the experience helps explain why the stuff makes me crazy.
On a day when the Senate was beginning a momentous debate on health care reform, and on the eve of the President’s big speech on Afghanistan, what were the gabbers gabbing about? Mainly the White House “party crashers” and Tiger Woods. In other words, two “stories” where nobody currently knows the facts, and everybody probably will know most if not all of the facts in a few days. Even the guests being beamed across the planet to discuss these weighty matters seemed to run out of anything to say within minutes.
There was, on Larry King, a brief discussion of Afghanistan, but only in the context of an “interview” with Jesse Ventura, who bellowed at the camera on this subject along with the Big Two of the party crashers and Tiger.
The only other story I noticed was the death watch for Mike Huckabee’s presidential ambitions in the wake of the killing spree apparently undertaken by the man whose sentence for burglary was commuted by Huck back in the day.
But it got worse. Driving away from my father’s house late last night, I twirled the AM radio guide in search of something innocuous, only to discover that virtually every station I could pick up was sporting right-wing talk. The main subject on Wingnut Radio was Huck, whom nobody defended, though the burial ceremony was made less interesting by the admission of each and every one of these firebreathers that they hated Huckabee as a “bleeding heart” long before this incident (typically because he doesn’t profess to hate immigrants, and because he criticized other Republicans last year for not admitting the economy was in trouble–you know, the same economy that’s now proof that Obama needs to be driven out of office). And to think: before yesterday the Arkansan’s main political problem were the lbs. he’s been putting on, and the distant thunder of a possible Palin run for the White House.
Next time I’m in the car, I’ll just listen to the hockey broadcast. It’s totally inscrutable to me, but far less offensive.

As I noted earlier, a new Washington Post poll of Republicans recorded the remarkable extent to which today’s rank-and-file GOPers can’t identify much in the way of any clear-cut Republican leaders. Having just read Sam Tanenhaus’ meditation on Sarah Palin in the New Yorker, I’m beginning to wonder whether the leaderless nature of the GOP represents a temporary vacuum or something a little more profound.
Here’s Tanenhaus’ kicker:

To judge from [Palin’s] book, the most exciting time in her life was the election of 2008, when she was embraced by the army of “everyday, hardworking Americans,” the “everyday folks,” and “thousands of regular Americans coming out with their signs” who mobbed her tumultuous rallies, thrilling to her odes to the “true America.” She gave them a “magnifying mirror.” They reflected her own image back to her. This adoration is kept alive today by the excited autograph-seekers in Grand Rapids and Fort Wayne, in the audience that gave Oprah Winfrey her best ratings in two years, and in the various advocacy groups that have sprung up to promote Palin for the Presidency: Conservatives 4 Palin, Team Sarah, Vets 4 Sarah, 2012 Draft Sarah Committee, Sarah Palin Radio, SarahPAC. The true meaning of Palinism is Sarah Palin—nothing more and nothing less. She is a party unto herself.

Now it’s hardly novel to observe that the excitement Palin has aroused among (particularly) cultural conservative activists reflects how closely she resembles them, or that her fans celebrate her lack of conventional credentials or policy knowledge as a badge of honor. But it may also reflect a genuine leadership crisis in the conservative movement and the GOP, wherein no one who is not a Palin-style “mirror” of grassroots qualities can be trusted.
It’s not enough to call this sentiment “populist.” Historically, most “populist” leaders have represented a preexisting ideological set of beliefs in one or both major political parties, and a relatively specific set of policy goals. Yes, populists like Tom Watson (with his dirt-farmer persona) and William Jennings Bryan (with an idiom derived largely from the Bible) derived some of their appeal from personal identification with the lives and values of people who felt disenfranchised. But they were also genuine leaders who pulled their followers along to positions on policy matters and political loyalties they might not have embraced on their own.
The history of “right-wing populism” in this country is murkier and more controversial. But by and large, the conservative populist impulse has been one that relatively conventional Republican politicians (notably Nixon and Reagan) or regional reactionaries (George Wallace) have exploited in the pursuit of conventionally conservative ends.
Palin strikes me as more like another famous conservative “populist,” Joseph R. McCarthy. And I don’t say that in order to invoke an invidious identification of the overall political dangers represented by St. Joan of the Tundra and the famously irresponsible red-hunter. What strikes me as similar is the extent to which both politicians were relatively ordinary people who were suddenly swept into vast celebrity by an almost accidental association with grievances poorly advocated by conventional political leaders.
McCarthy stumbled upon the power of many years of accumulated unhappiness–mostly among heartland conservatives, but elsewhere as well–with a bipartisan foreign policy led by northeastern elites that aligned the United States with what many considered historic national enemies–not just the Soviet Union, but “Europe” generally, and for many Irish-Americans, the United Kingdom. It’s sometimes forgotten that many of McCarthy’s red-hunting conservative allies fulminated against the “loss” of China and the “betrayal” of Korea because they deeply resented a Euro-centric foreign policy, as reflected in their general opposition to the establishment of NATO. At a deeper level, many of McCarthy’s supporters (particularly in the midwest) were the very people who were initially opposed to war with Nazi Germany, on the theory that Hitler represented a Western bulwark against Bolshevism; even those who didn’t feel we backed the wrong side in Europe often thought we should have negotiated an armistice with Germany that would have avoided the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe (an argument still advanced by Pat Buchanan). The eventual consolidation of conservatives in favor of an aggressively internationalist anti-communism was a later development, but it’s obscured the isolationist roots of the McCarthy uprising.
McCarthy eventually came to grief, of course, in part because of his sloppy and reckless tactics, but more immediately because he extended his attacks on Democratic foreign policy “betrayals” to attacks on the Eisenhower administration and even the Army. And thus the leadership class of the Republican Party came together to crush the fiery Wisconsinite, even as they sought to coopt his appeal by their own anticommunist fervor.
Like McCarthy, Palin is appealing to a variety of unredeemed cultural and political discontents, and like McCarthy, she’s gradually extended her liberal-baiting into attacks on conventional Republican pols, most notably the people surrounding the very presidential campaign that made her a celebrity. Unlike McCarthy, however, she’s not taking on a highly popular and newly elected Republican president, but a defeated GOP establishment that millions of conservative activists believe betrayed them through “big government” initiatives, excessive bipartisanship, and the failure to successfully execute a counter-revolution against legalized abortion, legitimized homosexuality, and other forms of cultural pluralism and diversity (or as they would say, “relativism.”). Moreover, said establishment has also been terribly weakened by its association with economic calamity, caused, so thinks the conservative “base,” by the reward-the-crooks-and-welfare-loafers “big government” betrayals of the autumn of 2008.
This doesn’t mean that Palin is destined to fill the leadership vacuum in the Republican Party. Like Joe McCarthy, she’s more suited to act as a vehicle for discontent than as the agent for its vindication. But make no mistake, the contemporary dynamics of the Republican Party and the conservative movement make it very unlikely that anyone from that quarter will curb her as Ike and his allies curbed and then broke McCarthy. If and when Palin succeeds again in creating a national public policy furor via a casual Facebook post, as she did with the famous “death panel” screed (arguably as irresponsible as anything Joe McCarthy said), it’s more likely that Republicans will coopt her than repudiate her. So while Sarah Palin probably won’t become the leader of the GOP, she may well play a major role in setting the terms on which anyone else can command the leaderless masses she represents.
UPDATE: Just discovered that the great historian of populism, Michael Kazin, penned a piece for the Washington Independent right after Palin’s selection as McCain’s running-mate, comparing her to Joe McCarthy. But I’ve made a quite different argument about her–and McCarthy’s–relationship with “elites” in the GOP.

Today’s Washington Post features a big new poll of self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Unsurprisingly, these voters don’t like Barack Obama, don’t like the general direction of the country, and don’t want their leaders to help enact health care reform legislation (not that they are in any danger of doing so).
The two findings most worth paying attention to are (1) yet another confirmation that Republicans are undergoing a rightward shift; and (2) the complete lack of a consensus about Republican leadership.
On the ideological front, there’s been a modest but revealing shift in the composition of the Republican rank-and-file since the last time the Post polled them, in 2007. Asked if they regard themselves as liberal, moderate, conservative, or very conservative, GOPers chose this last category, the most extreme available, more than ever. In June of 2007, self-identified liberals (11% of the total) and moderates (24%) together outnumbered those insisting on calling themselves “very conservative” (30%) by five percentage points. Now the “very conservative” are up to 32%, while “moderates” have declined to 22% and “liberals” have been nearly halved, to 6%. Overall, “conservative” GOPers currently overwhelm “moderate” GOPers by nearly a three-to-one margin. This is in sharp contrast to the ideological profile of the Democratic Party, in which the number of “moderates” equals and usually exceeds self-identified “liberals.” The overwhelming ideological impetus in the Republican Party is centrifugal, not centripetal.
The second finding of note is that today’s GOPers have no agreement whatsoever about where to look for leadership. Offered an open-ended question about “the one person [who] best reflects the core values of the Republican Party,” nobody receives over 18%, and 8% insist “there is no leader.” The last presidential nominee, John McCain, does respectfully well at 13%, though nobody really thinks of him as the future of the GOP, and his running-mate, Sarah Palin, runs first at 18%, out of a combination of celebrity and her special appeal to social issue extremists. After that, no one scores in double digits. The congressional leaders, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, each weigh in at a booming one percent.
All this adds up to a situation where the increasingly conservative rank-and-file “base” of the Republican Party is pulling its putative leaders to the right rather than following their direction. Given the traditionally hierarchical nature of the GOP, that may be a refreshing change for its members, but it’s not exactly designed to produce a message or candidates that appeal to the rest of the electorate.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
It’s hardly a secret or an accident that much of politics revolves around the elimination of doubt among voters on public policy issues. Base-mobilization strategies for elections typically involve convincing people with clear preferences but weak civic engagement (or doubts about their own “team”) that any given trip to the ballot box is of epochal importance. Swing-voter persuasion strategies also tend to focus on efforts to convince the undecided that one’s party or candidate will make the country a much happier place. And while doubt’s evil twin, fear, most definitely has a place in both base and swing strategies, it’s still aimed at convincing voters there is a clear and unambiguous, if largely negative, difference between the consequences of voting this way or that.
I mention the dubious political status of doubt in the context of a long and fascinating piece we just published at The Democratic Strategist by Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, director of The Progressive Project, entitled “Zero For Thirty-One: Lessons From the Loss in Maine.” A veteran of the struggle for LGBT rights and marriage equality, Beach-Ferrara concludes that ballot measures to stop gay marriage keep winning in no small part because equality advocates don’t talk much to conflicted voters, particularly those for whom religious dogma pulls them away from their own personal sense of fairness–i.e., non-bigots who are lumped in with bigots in most LGBT-rights strategies.
Based on her first-hand interviews with torn voters, Beach-Ferrara contends that marriage equality activists would do well to spend some time convincing such voters to reflect their true convictions by conscientiously passing up the opportunity to make a choice they aren’t prepared to make. In other words, rather than pushing people to come down on one side or the other, activists should have looked at doubt as a political asset.
Beach-Ferrara’s provocative article immediately reminded me of the only politician I’ve ever heard talk about doubt as a religious value: Barack Obama. In his famously controversial but ultimately effective commencement speech at Notre Dame in May, Obama addressed the faithful in terms that Beach-Ferrara (herself a divinity student) would find congenial:

[T]he ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen. It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us, and those of us who believe must trust that His wisdom is greater than our own.
This doubt should not push us away from our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, and cause us to be wary of self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open, and curious, and eager to continue the moral and spiritual debate that began for so many of you within the walls of Notre Dame..

Given the usual tendency of progressives to deal with conservatively inclined religious people by pandering to them, steering clear of the subject, or offering the faith-based counterdogmas of the Christian Left, Obama was indeed offering something new: pluralism based on conscientious doubt, or as it was once called, the fear of God.
But doubt can obviously become a political asset beyond the ranks of the religious. We normally think of doubt on political or policy questions as an inherently conservative force, leading to a preference for the devil you know. At a time like the present, however, when “wrong-track” sentiments are exceptionally strong and most major public and private institutions are held in low repute, doubt can lead in very different directions depending on how that emotion is deployed.
That’s one important reason why health care reform has been so difficult a topic for progressives. Democrats have been focusing much of their efforts reassuring people with health insurance that reform won’t degrade their coverage. But this message has come at the expense of accurately describing the terrible unfairness and inefficiency and unsustainable trajectory of the current system. Reassured voters have no real stake in reform. Doubters may, but only if they are convinced the status quo represents as much or more of a risk than a new system.
The bottom line is that doubt is going to be an important popular sentiment on complex topics like health care, climate change, globalization, or the long-term fiscal challenge. It can work for progressives, or against them, but the prevailing unhappiness about current conditions in the country ought to make doubt-based decisions—or in the case of gay marriage, decisions not to make decisions—friendlier to real change. So long as we treat certainty as the object of every political communication, and write off the doubtful as stupid, cognitively challenged, or unmotivated, we miss that opportunity.

Like most everyone else who is not in the food or other essential services industries, we’re taking a break from work today. And we’re very thankful for not having lost a job, a loved one, or our minds, during the last year.
A happy Thanksgiving Day to all, and we’ll be back tomorrow.