(W)hen the conversation moves away from abortion to contraceptives – as it has this week – the intensity gap flips: A much larger segment of voters are willing to penalize a legislator who votes to defund family planning. That became apparent in polling that Democratic firm Lake Research Partners did earlier this year, which found that 40 percent of voters would be less likely to support a member of Congress who votes to defund family-planning programs. Just 22 percent would be more likely to support such a lawmaker.

That particular poll isn’t a perfect analogy for the current debate about the contraception mandate. But it speaks to something I’ve heard a lot in recent interviews with abortion right supporters: When the reproductive health debate moves away from abortion, it becomes easier to message and connect with voters. Unlike abortion rights, an issue that tends to split voters, most polls on contraceptives and birth control tend to find Americans solidly in support. That Lake Research poll I mentioned earlier found that 84 percent of Americans view family planning, including contraceptives, as basic health care. (Emphasis mine)

Remember, even the voters of Mississippi rejected personhood. When you tell pro-life women that their pills or IUDs will be illegal under an “abortion” law, support drops dramatically. If the GOP thought they could paint President Obama into an “anti-Christian” corner, then it’s a corner that contains a supermajority of American women.

For that matter, most of the White House’s “controversial” birth control policy has been in place for a decade, putting the Bushies and the Republican Senators who sponsored the Federal contraception mandate in that same corner. Republicans grandstanding on this issue in Congress should probably check their own health care plan as well:

Since 1998, every insurer participating in the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program (FEHBP) — including members of Congress — has had access to comprehensive contraceptive coverage, including emergency contraception, such as the morning after pill. Republican lawmakers now want to prevent access to the coverage they enjoy to employees of religious organizations who may not be of that religion or who disagree with anti-contraception doctrine (89 percent of Catholics say contraception decision should be theirs, not the church’s).

Whenever a Republican says the Constitution doesn’t include a right to privacy, remember they’re not just talking about Roe v Wade. The Supreme Court established privacy rights in Griswold v Connecticut by overturning a state ban on birth control. Not one major pro-life organization in the United States supports birth control access, so this is not hyperbole.

But it is a perfect wedge issue for Democrats, who have struggled with the abortion issue for years. Being a “pro-life Democrat” is no longer a workable solution in the teapublican age. Republicans have enforced a party purity on the issue, which means the entire GOP is vulnerable to this exploit. The whole party is picking up the torch of a conservatism straight out of the 1920s:

“Contraception is under attack in a way it really wasn’t in the past few years,” says Judy Waxman, the vice president for health and reproductive rights at the National Women’s Law Center. ”In 2004, we could not find any group—the National Right to Life Committee, the Bush campaign, anyone—that would go on the record to say they’re opposed to birth control,” adds Elizabeth Shipp, the political director for NARAL Pro-Choice America. “We couldn’t find them in 2006 either, and in 2008 it was just fringe groups. In 2010, 2011, and this year, it’s just exploded.”

2008 was a nadir of culture war conservatism. Teapublicanism degenerated from fiscal tightfistedness into a great doubling-down on culture war issues by the right. As a result, this element of the pro-life movement has slipped from the background into the limelight. It was always there, driven mainly by the Catholic conservatives behind the pro-life movement and veiled by the “right-to-life” rhetoric of Protestant politics. Americans get to see it now, out loud and proud.

Boehner’s comments today, and Romney’s recent comments, suggest Republicans are adopting a broad strategy of casting the Dem attacks on inequality as an assault on the essence of capitalism itself, as an attack on the underpinnings of American life and greatness.

Yet the polling all suggests that broad majorities of Americans simply don’t agree with this frame, and that it’s completely out of step with this political and economic moment, among middle of the road voters and even sizable blocs of Republicans.

Mitch Daniels’ SOTU response Tuesday night also hit on these themes of un-Americanness. It’s still a line we’ve heard before, though: the Republican Party hasn’t changed its tune since Obama was sworn in, and the effect of their rhetoric may be wearing off. For while polls show a thin majority will vote for a generic Republican, Obama leads all of the actual Republican contenders — especially Newt Gingrich — in head-to-head matchups.

Gingrich has blown plenty of dog whistles, exciting the knuckledraggers who turned out for Sarah Palin rallies in 2008, but he’s got a big problem with independents. The “liberal middle” does not care for him, or for anyone else on the debate stage with him. Despite their unpopularity, all four candidates claim to be conservatives. How can so many Americans despise them, but still call themselves “conservative”?

As I keep saying, this phenomenon has to be understood as a cultural conflict. More Americans call themselves “conservative” than liberal, but what that word means to them is less about politics than social identity. On most specific issues, today’s “swing voter” is actually liberal, not conservative — though they reject the L-word, as they’ve been taught to think of “liberal” as “left.“

Moreover, today’s “conservative” politicians are often so radical that many “conservatives” do not recognize them. Take Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan, for instance. Despite its incredible unpopularity, he hasn’t given up on vouchers. Instead, he’s just renamed them “premium support”:

“We’re not backing off on the kinds of reforms that we’ve advocated, but we have to write it,” Paul said during a break at the GOP’s issues conference in Baltimore today. “We’ve done more to normalize the idea of premium support than anything at all. We’re confident that these are the right policies. There’s an emerging bipartisan consensus that’s occurring on doing premium support reform to Medicare is the best way to save Medicare.” (Emphasis mine)

Nothing about the Ryan plan has changed except the terminology. If reelected, Republicans will try yet again to push this nonsense through Congress, to the same effect. They will continue to spout the flagging rhetoric of fear and loathing. But it is just possible that Americans are no longer responsive to these tired old lines, and ready to hear the president instead:

This year, 82 percent of those who watched the (State of the Union) speech said they approve of the president’s plans for the economy, up from 53 percent who approved before the speech. Eighty percent said they approved of Mr. Obama’s plans for the deficit — in contrast to 45 percent before the speech. Eighty-three percent approved of Mr. Obama’s proposals regarding Afghanistan, which received only a 57 percent approval rating beforehand.

I kept saying in 2010 that Democrats had a tremendous opportunity if they could rally around a party platform and contrast themselves against the radicalism of tea-infused Republican politics. Of course, that didn’t happen, and despite good and improving prospects for a Democratic comeback I have yet to see the party unite on this front.

In a world where Democrats understand teamwork, Eric Cantor and John Boehner are the personified targets of a “Flip This House” campaign the way Pelosi was in 2010. In the real world, however, Paul Ryan can claim “bipartisan consensus” because one Democrat helped him formulate the latest iteration of his Medicare privatization plan.

Until Democrats can get on one page, they will not be able to take advantage of Republican weakness. This shouldn’t be hard, but in fact it’s the hardest thing for Democrats to do.

“(This bill)…attacks every aspect of an illegal alien’s life…is designed to make it difficult for them to live here so they will deport themselves.”

Mitt Romney last night? Nope, that’s Alabama House Majority Leader Mickey Hammon pushing HB56, the state’s “papers please” immigration law, to a vote in last year’s legislative session. Romney was blowing a rather well-worn dog whistle, as Adam Serwer explains at MoJo:

This is the right-wing’s answer to the question of how you deport eleven million unauthorized immigrants: You don’t. You force them to “deport themselves.” Although immigration reform advocates would prefer a solution that involves a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants already here, Romney and his top immigration advisers believe they can remove millions of people through heavy-handed enforcement that makes life for unauthorized immigrants intolerable. This approach is notable for its complete lack of discretion and flexibility. Unauthorized immigrant parents with citizen children who need to go to school? Americans who are married to an undocumented immigrant who needs medical treatment? “Self-deportation” hits them all with the same mailed fist.

Also at MoJo, Clara Jeffery calls it “the phrase of art” for immigration opponents, pointing back to this policy document from Mark Krikorian, who has been neck-deep in the formulation of state immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama. Krikorian has a long record of flirting with nativist organizations, and he won’t stop with the illegal immigrant of so much easy demagoguery. Oh no! Indeed, the title of his 2008 book is The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal.

Krikorian — and FAIR, his organization — mean to push out every foreigner, including that dangerous Mercedes executive caught under HB56. As I keep saying, such incidents are features of these laws, not bugs. Here he is at National Review:

It’s a mistake to think of legal and illegal immigration as distinct phenomena. They come from the same places through the same means, often in the same families and even the same people (shifting back and forth between being legal and illegal), and have the same impact on society. Obviously, any effort to reform immigration policy has to start with enforcing the rules, because without that, it doesn’t really matter what the rules are. But in addition, you have to consider whether the rules themselves should be changed. And apart from the, admittedly grave, question of legal status, all the other problems caused by illegal immigration are also caused by legal immigration. (Emphasis mine)

All the arguments about “what part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand?” are so much wind, because this isn’t even about the undocumented. It’s about making America less brown, and anyone who tells you something else is just rationalizing.

The United Nations defines ethnic cleansing as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.” That’s exactly what Krikorian wants to do for America, though by less violent means (for now). It’s why immigrants in Alabama are afraid to send their children to school, or call the police if they’re attacked, or take a temp job clearing tornado damage.

The FAIR strategy is a bit more gentle than, say, Rwandan Tutsis with machetes or Serbian “police” with AK-47s, but the effect — and the intentions — are the same. Pressure to emigrate is pressure to emigrate. You can wrap fascism up in a flag and a cross, but it’s still fascism. Sadly, at least three of the remaining four Republican candidates seem quite comfortable with this.

Am I being hyperbolic? Reductio ad Hitlerum? Let’s ask the Jews who left Germany before Krystallnacht, because we can’t ask the ones who stayed:

Until the early 40’s, the intent of the German anti-Jewish policies was to make life so difficult for Jews that they would leave on their own. Many found it difficult to abandon homes their families had lived in for generations, and to leave communities and extended family members. Many believed the anti-Jewish events would stop under international pressure.

Also see “nonpersons.” As I keep saying, people who draw Hitler mustaches on Obama are actually describing their own minds. The “same old conservative movement” is patriarchal, authoritarian, and utterly dissonant. It is the calamity it would prevent. The fourth man on last night’s stage is Ron Paul, who has the endorsement of Stormfront. I’m sure they will be fine however the foreigner gets sent home to preserve jobs for “real Americans.” Nudge, nudge!

Moreover, there is a terrible deliberateness to all this: Scott Beason, who wants to “empty the clip” on illegal immigration, tried to kill an amendment sponsored by the state’s most powerful churches by fearmongering Islamic terrorism. Mo Brooks, who will “do anything short of shooting” an undocumented person, has talked up the foreigners-are-Democrats conspiracy theory at town halls. Beason chose to pass the unaltered House version of the bill, deliberately incurring federal court challenges.

They mean it, and here’s the scary part: it’s working. Alabama is getting whiter. So is Arizona. Both documented and nondocumented are leaving, because in fact the line is blurred when a citizen brings his elderly mother to end her days with him, or a guest worker encounters prejudice from police on a routine stop, or the vast immigration bureaucracy loses your new wife’s paperwork. In fact, if you’re an American citizen of color and unable to get documents because of an identity snafu, you can wind up being a nonperson. Don’t laugh: it happens (.PDF). See here, or here.

The Southern Strategy stopped working in 2008 and then started working again in 2009; it may yet pay dividends in a whiter America. Republicans have paid absolutely no price for this garbage, and until the voter exacts a cost in power they will not stop. There is no moral center to the Republican Party or the conservative movement. The dissonance is total. That should be overabundantly clear by now, however the clown car horse race winds up.

I could not bear to watch the final Republican debate. One of my Twitter correspondents — a sweet-tempered Alabamian named Jill who identifies with neither party, and so considers herself part of the middle — asked me why not. I answered with some notes about the crisis of modern conservatism: trapped in a fact-free fantasy world, the dominant political philosophy of the last three decades can no longer answer any major problem we face. The GOP nomination process has devolved into idiots scoring zinger points.

Jill describes herself as conservative; in fact, my correspondent is a liberal, and does not know it. She has been conditioned to reject the word. So let us now restore its true meaning: liberals make liberal use of evidence and theory to arrange the broadest good. Liberalism does not idealize the biggest possible government, but rather the best. Government has no inherent moral goodness: only the use, misuse, or abuse of government has moral impact.

This is in contrast to conservatism, which is defined by suspicion of, and resistance to, change. Conservative politics have in fact become little more than advocacy for a great rolling-backwards: to the Gilded Age, the Civil War, segregation, and every Lost Cause of American politics. Indeed, the litmus test of conservative politics is willingness to undo Roe v Wade. Gay marriage is another battle the conservative movement appears to be losing. Michele Bachmann wants to bring back incandescent light bulbs. These days, conservatism doesn’t mean smaller government so much as government-mandated regression.

Liberalism is not the opposite of conservatism — that would be progressivism, which sees government as a channel of positive change. I am progressive because I am liberal. I am also conservative on some issues because I am liberal. Liberalism is the opposite of ideology. Conservatism and progressivism are ideologically-driven movements.

Occasionally I get asked why there is no third party for this liberal middle. There used to be one; it was called the Democratic Party. But the American middle has been eaten away, and so has the party, by three decades of  disorganization, discontent, and disinformation.

Democrats accepted conservative economic orthodoxy in the 1990s, first with the election of Bill Clinton and then the conservative takeover of Congress. Back in those heady pre-internet days, FOX News was talk radio, which constantly blasted the word “liberal” as an epithet and attached it to every imaginable issue. Classical liberal economics have been re-labeled as “conservatism,” and liberalism turned into a bogeyman.

Rush Limbaugh has made an entire career out of lumping “the left” and “liberal” together until they have become synonymous, but they are not. A liberal makes decisions on empirical evidence (“the science says climate change is happening”) or emotional attachment (“be kind to animals”). Liberals do not identify with a party so much as their perceived independence of party.

This is why liberals like Jill can be mushy on a ‘litmus test’ issue — say, abortion. Most pro-life slogans (abortion stops a beating heart) are appeals to emotion. Yet Jill is not an absolutist; she expresses reservations about the pro-life extreme too.

“Liberal” is the center. Anyone who tells you anything else is trying to make you stupid.

The success of modern conservatism is that it has almost destroyed this liberal center of our politics. The ideological purity of Republican ranks is increasingly mirrored in the Democratic Party, where the zone of acceptability is shrinking. Nobody wants a Blue Dog anymore: you’re either with us or against us.

But it isn’t simply that politics are “polarized” between two extremes in our winner-take-all system. American society has been atomized: unions have been destroyed by offshoring and so-called “right to work” laws. Yesterday’s communities of interest — Rotary clubs, the American Legion, you name it — are mere shells of their former selves. Churches used to be hotbeds of liberalism; today, they are hot zones of virulent conservatism.

In this environment, tea parties were supposed to be the arrival of “true” conservatism; you’ll remember the GOP rationalized its losses in 2008 as punishment for not being conservative enough. For the conservative movement, 2010 was supposed to be different: at last, the party is listening to us. But it is the same Republican Party and the same movement, only worse than before.

George Lakoff has demonstrated that Americans can be divided into thirds, with the middle third switching back and forth according to how politicians communicate with them. This is where the so-called “swing voter” emerged in American politics, but in fact white suburban voters had been “swinging” further and further from the liberal center of American politics for years — and they slammed shut like a door in 2010.

Drawn like metal filings to the magnetic forces of culture politics, the so-called Reagan Democrats declared themselves Reagan Republicans after all. Encouraged, teapublicans immediately turned their efforts to dismantling what is left of the liberal structures that support the American middle. Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposal, Scott Walker’s union-busting, and budget showdowns are all about tearing down liberal democracy to defeat liberal Democrats.

Today’s Republican Party promises that we can reach free-market Nirvana if only we complete our national self-destruction. Against that, America has a Democratic Party that cannot come together on anything.

Democratic operative Paul Begala has decried the absence of unified talking points in the party, but he admits to rejecting talking points when provided them because he prefers to think independently. As Will Rogers once joked, the Democratic Party isn’t an “organized” party — and never has been.

Unsurprisingly, Jill does not see a reason to vote for any Democrat. She might decide to vote for the Republican next year, or she may find Republicans abhorrent but not vote at all instead of supporting Democrats. The Republican candidates trading barbs on stage would be fine with that, but the rest of us — Jill included — stand to lose.

It is within the Republicans power to obstruct and, by doing so, make the president look weak and ineffectual. That’s the path they’ve chosen. However, the collateral damage has been enormous and the voters seem to have noticed.

People now are much more likely to tell pollsters that they want to see the president take a confrontational tone with Republicans rather than cooperate with them. That plays right into Obama’s hands as he shifts to campaign mode.

Attending a community leadership training seminar last week, I heard a Republican city council member from Huntsville tell the room he was a Republican, but not a tea party Republican — and with exactly that kind of emphasis. Indeed, tea parties have huge and growing unfavorable ratings these days, as the public understands what lies behind the label is nothing new.

But is the House GOP leadership prepared to backpedal? Evidently not, and in part that is because tea party Republicans are the most engaged on these issues. It’s not that they’re unaware of the polling — take Eric Cantor, for instance, who recently told his caucus to avoid taking things to the brink again:

The message from the majority leader is an effort to prevent the kinds of fights over government spending that could lead to government shutdowns this fall if Congress cannot agree on legislation to fund the government.

It suggests Republican leaders worry they could take a political hit if there is a government shutdown from voters already irritated over the contentious summer talks on raising the debt ceiling.

Instead, House Republicans want to use the crisis to pursue further ecocide and wage-destruction as “jobs bills:”

The Cantor memo provided additional details on the regulatory focus. The week of Sept. 12, House Republicans will try to overrule an NLRB ruling that restricts Boeing’s effort to transfer an assembly line from Washington state to South Carolina. Business leaders accuse the Obama administration of interfering to try to help their labor allies, because South Carolina is a right-to-work state with fewer unions. Labor leaders say the aerospace company is seeking a spot for cheaper labor.

The next month or so will focus on EPA regulations. House Republicans would pull back an effort to regulate coal ash in mining-heavy states that they say would hinder concrete production and cost more than 100,000 jobs. Through the fall and winter, Cantor said, the caucus will vote on at least 10 regulations that committee chairmen have identified as “costly bureaucratic handcuffs that Washington has imposed upon business.”

That is virtual boilerplate from the producerist manifesto. Coal ash regulations do not threaten anyone’s job, much less 100,000. On the other hand, Cantor’s party wants to kill transportation and infrastructure funding that supports hundreds of thousands of actual, real, not-imaginary jobs. If Cantor cared about the concrete industry, he would want to fully fund the maintenance and improvement of roads, bridges, and dams. But that’s not what he wants.

His goal, and that of his majority in the House, is to make sure the president cannot improve employment numbers before November of 2012. They don’t care how many of us are put out of work to accomplish that.

Whether or not Democrats, much less progressives, capitalize on this is another question altogether. I’m pretty sure the president plans on doing so as he “shifts to campaign mode,” because at this point he has every permission to go on the offensive.

And this manufactured crisis is all about power.

A hierarchical society is only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. When out of power, the Party sabotages government and economy in order to regain power by leveraging resentment and ignorance. Holding partial power, the Party sabotages government and economy in order to win full power. On taking full power, the Party is uninterested in governing and does not care about the economy. The Party is only interested in power, and not as a means but as an end in itself. Orwell understood: they are the fear they want us to feel.

]]> http://www.osborneink.com/2011/08/the-party-is-only-interested-in-power.html/feed 0 http://www.osborneink.com/2011/07/double-down-on-the-crazy.html http://www.osborneink.com/2011/07/double-down-on-the-crazy.html#comments Wed, 06 Jul 2011 20:00:52 +0000 Matt Osborne http://www.osborneink.com/?p=11361 Continue reading →]]> What to do when half the independents in your “movement” have figured out the scam?

Utah’s independent voters are cooling to the state’s tea party movement, with support dropping by more than half over the last several months, according to a newly released poll.

[...]

There were smaller dips in support among moderate Republicans. However the backing among those who consider themselves “strong Republicans” actually increased to 82 percent, the poll found.

Tea parties were always about rallying a tiny sliver of the American public to make noise out of all proportion. Authoritarianism polarizes the electorate; desperation makes culture warriors reach farther than ever before. With all the moderation thus chased out from under the Big Tent, a lurch to the extreme right is the only maneuver any Republican can make anymore. Even David Brooks seems to understand that the paranoia I heard at Congressman Mo Brooks’ town hall last week is the new normal for Republicans, who “may no longer be a normal party:”

Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

[...]

But to members of this movement, tax levels are everything. Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation.

[...]

The struggles of the next few weeks are about what sort of party the G.O.P. is — a normal conservative party or an odd protest movement that has separated itself from normal governance, the normal rules of evidence and the ancient habits of our nation. (Emphasis mine)

Tea parties are in fact a “psychological protest.” Tea parties do, in fact, have a “sacred fixation” on tax cuts. This separation from normality has been going on for a long time, but Brooks is just now noticing that the core of his party consists of culture warriors and apologists for oligarchy. These groups have slipped the surly bonds of Earth-based policy, indeed have been emigrating from terra firma for decades, without notice from the chattering classes who don’t live in Red State America.

The tea party wants government to fail. They have wanted Obama to fail, reform to fail, and now the republic. They are not patriots, no matter their freak flag.

Numbers are psychologically important; this is why the tea party astroturfers feel the need to lie and lie and lie about the size of their marches. The “bandwagoning” affect is a major component of GOTV, a subject I treated recently by visiting the Democratic headquarters in Huntsville. In the interests of fairness and balance, I visited the Lauderdale County GOP headquarters the other day and found someone who’d talk to me: