If Parody Isn’t Dead, It’s Certainly Endangered:

Yesterday I mocked New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s pandering to the anti-vaccination movement. Later that same day, Republican, Kentucky Senator, Presidential aspirant, dangerous charlatan, and follower of Aqua Buddha Rand Paul went a step further by saying that vaccinations should be a parent’s choice and that vaccinations could lead to mental disorders. If you thought that was the bottom of the barrel when it comes to bat-shit Republican political grandstanding in service of deregulating everything in this country that isn’t a woman’s reproductive system, then clearly you must be new here.

While Paul and Christie were busy arguing for policies to reduce the herd immunity of the American populace, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis was working on setting back health and sanitation in this country by about a century. During a question and answer session on Monday, Tillis reminded the audience that he favors allowing restaurants to opt out of requiring their employees to wash their hands after using the restrooms, because nothing screams FREEDOM quite like contracting dysentery. At the rate that these guys are going, sometime in mid-March some Republican official somewhere is going to start publicly advocating bloodletting as a key aspect of their proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act.

How Does The Onion Even Keep Up?

One of my favorite skits from the first season of Comedy Central’s Key and Peele involves President Obama meeting with Republican leaders and sending them into a complete tailspin complete with wild hysterics as he proposes policies they would be expected to agree with only to have them reflexively oppose him. It’s looking as if the President may actually be forced to do something similar, as even the most common sense suggestions from the White House continue to face reflexive opposition by the Republican Party.

The latest example involves an interview the President gave which aired Sunday night, in which he urged parents to vaccinate their children. This call comes on the heels of a measles outbreak, which has spread to 14 states, connected to unvaccinated children visiting Disneyland. With that as background, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to wake up Monday morning and read this headline—Chris Christie breaks with Obama on vaccines. While Christie's actual remarks don’t exactly call for parents not to vaccinate their children, he does stress “balance” between “whatever the perceived danger is by vaccine” against “what risk to public health is.”

While it is almost comical that a presumptive presidential contender is entertaining a debate on this topic in an effort to pander to some theoretical base, it does speak to a deeper problem in our culture. Many of the problems facing us such as climate change, rebuilding our infrastructure, and promoting public health rely on trust and faith in institutions. If something as basic as vaccinating our children against deadly infectious disease receives this type of pushback, what does that say about the prospects for other issues that will involve trade-offs and sacrifices? So yes, Chris Christie probably just sunk his election prospects (to the extent that they ever really existed), but this is also just one more data point in a trend that honestly has me worried/depressed/disgusted.

The Case For The Establishment

Salon’s Bill Curry article on Sunday makes the argument that progressives need their own version of the Tea Party. He claims that progressives can currently be divided into four camps: Democrats that are “ready for Hillary”, people that work with the Democratic Party and view Hillary as somewhere between a “flawed candidate” and “spawn of Satan”, those who back third party candidates because they view the Democratic Party as hopelessly compromised, and those who have given up on politics all together. He goes on to state that Democrats have become too resistant to change and that the groups need to have a debate about the way forward and hopefully return to a time when “progressives made the policies that Democrats made into laws.”

There’s something to be said for his analysis. The dividing lines of the movement seem to be about where he has placed them, and there is some historical truth to the observation that policy ideas have tended to come from outside of the formal party structure, and that progressives have relied on the Democratic Party to do the working of transforming policy initiatives into legislation. He even states that “it offers the most direct path to progressive governance” (of course, that line is immediately preceded by describing the party as a “corrupt and empty husk of an institution”). Where I’m going to have to disagree with him is the viability or even the desirability of a bizarre world faction of the Tea Party.

What I think he gets wrong is the nature of the Tea Party and where they get their power from. First, the Tea Party owes its birth to the same powerful interests that it claims to stand against; it was (and in some respects remains) an AstroTurf organization. It is true that the organization has developed into a monster that threatens the life of its creators, but pretending that the organization sprung up organically hampers any analysis of the viability of replicating it on the left. Secondly, the great strength of the Tea Party and the accompanying reactionaries that share their politics (if not their branding) is in their ability to remain uncompromising, even in the face of potential disaster. This is illustrated by the inflexible stance they took regarding the debt limit negations. Mitch McConnell famously described the negotiations as a hostage taking, and in the face of potential economic catastrophe (and yes, defaulting on the nation’s debt would have been a legitimately unmitigated disaster), they held firm and managed to force massive cuts in spending that we are dealing with to this day. After the fact, comments by the Republican lawmakers leave little doubt that they were ready and willing to pull the trigger on a gambit that would have resulted in difficult to imagine suffering for millions of people. However, it is because they are reactionaries, looking to undue the success of the New Deal and Great Society programs (some would go so far as to say they are looking to repeal the entire 20th century), that they are able to remain so uncompromising. If your goal is to destroy, you have no need to negotiate because the disaster that would result in a failure to compromise serves your interests as well.

There is simply no effective way for progressives to credibly or responsibly maintain a similar posture. The debate on the left over the Affordable Care Act public option demonstrates this difficulty. It would have been ruinous to blow up the entire bill, and the real benefits that it has brought to millions of uninsured Americans, over an insistence that the public option be included in the final bill. That is the hard truth. It is much harder to create than to destroy, and a governing system that requires consensus building and deal making will always structurally disadvantage groups trying to build civil society. The emergence and rising prominence of the reactionary right-wing simply makes this problem more acute. 

It is true that as the Republican Party has careened ever further towards outright psychosis, the Democratic Party has been drug towards the center as a defender of the status quo. To those that are angry with the Party’s response, I would ask, what is your alternative? Remaining uncompromising, and furthering the non-function (as opposed to simple dysfunction) of government is no way to convert the people that have abandoned politics. Tacking further to the left and risking the fracture of the body politic would be an even worse outcome. To those that disagree, I ask, what is your theory of change? Is the collapse of the current order likely to bring about any of the progress that you seek? Keep in mind, that it is the opposition that is stockpiling firearms and food. As frustrating as the realization may be, it is quite likely that we are simply stuck playing defense in the intermediate term, attempting to limit the damage that the vandals that have taken over the Republican Party can accomplish (I know playing defense isn’t sexy, but no one ever said living in a democratic republic is always fun). That isn’t to say that there aren’t policy goals worth pursuing; improvements to the ACA, instituting maternity and sick leave, rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure, establishing a higher minimum wage and promoting unionization are all worthwhile goals. None of those polices are worth giving up what we already have; a country relatively free of political violence, with functioning (albeit crumbling) infrastructure. The far right is perfectly willing to abandon that, and if what we have dissolves, it will be elements of those factions that stand to benefit. So to those that say that progressives need their own version of the Tea Party, I emphatically respond—No, we really don’t.

Tempting, but I’ll Pass:

I recently had a conversation with a liberal activist friend of mine and he suggested that Democrats should “team up with Tea Party types to punish John Boehner” (his words, not mine) for inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to Congress on the topic of Iran, while the Obama administration is engaged in talks with the Iranian government over their nuclear program. My friend is a really intelligent guy, so I tried not to dismiss the suggestion out of hand, but it soon became clear that we just have fundamental disagreements about the nature of the right-wing in current American politics. He’s from the camp that thinks that it’s always a good idea to come together with folks on common ground that you agree upon, and I’m of the opinion that the opposition is the opposition for a reason.

At first glance, it might appear that it would be possible to find common ground with Tea Partiers on at least a few issues. They loudly denounce crony capitalism, which should be a decent starting point for collaboration with liberals who are concerned with the growing domination of American politics by corporate interests. Their rhetoric is, however, just a smokescreen, designed to take advantage of and redirect growing populist sentiment towards policies beneficial to the same corporate interests that the Tea Party faithful regularly denounce. A study funded by the National Cancer Institute found that the Tea Party can trace its roots back to the pro-tobacco lobby that was active in the 1980’s. Given that history, alarm bells should be going off at even the thought that a true partnership could be arrived at.

I’ve spent a few days thinking about my friend’s suggestion, and the only conclusion I can come to is that his proposal likely stems from, at least in part, the growing polarization and resulting echo chamber effect between the parties and the ideological groups that make them up. If all you know about the hard-right is what you hear on the news, it would be easy to mistake these folks for people ideologically committed to putting a stop to the insider deals, which can be all too common. Also, given their flag waving personas, the idea of a foreign leader attempting to influence American foreign policy should be exactly the type of thing that would allow for an alliance designed to punish the Republican leadership. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), I’ve actually had the opportunity to spend some time with the Tea Party base (this is what happens when half of your family is made up of honest-to-goodness wingnuts), and let me tell you there is little to no common ground to be had there, and what agreement that does exist between the far left and right I don’t want a thing to do with.

Simply put, the Tea Party is a reactionary white nationalist party with a heavy dose of theocracy thrown in for good measure. Threats directed at American Muslims after the release of the film American Sniper is just the latest example of the worldview held by the base of this movement. While it theoretically might be possible to use their racism against their congressional leadership on this particular issue, liberals should reject any partnership that would result in teaming up with folks that will likely be spouting rhetoric straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For one thing, there’s a fairly extensive history of idealistic activist types being rolled by the hard-right whenever alliances like this have been formed (feel free to do your own research on this, but trust me it’s there). Additionally, partnerships like this risk attaching a stench to anyone even remotely involved. While you might be thinking that you’re simply defending the administration, or hitting back at an outrageous breach of etiquette by the Republicans, what you would really be doing is giving an air of respectability to some rather nasty Anti-Semitism. So, where does that leave us? I, of course, think that John Boehner’s latest gambit is a bad thing for the country, as it risks undermining the administration as they engage in important negotiations. I also would relish the idea of sowing dissension within the ranks of the GOP. However, in this case, doing so would come at too great a cost (on the other hand, if the Republicans insist on tearing themselves apart I do have stockpiles of popcorn). A better strategy for liberals would be to critique the GOP on the merits, that attempting to use a foreign leader, any foreign leader, to influence the conduct of American foreign policy is a dangerous game that should not be played. Beyond that, we can hope that the Obama administration is able to continue its track record of being able to deliver surprisingly substantive accomplishments in the face of outrageous Republican obstruction and sabotage.

Priorities

As a liberal/progressive/Democrat, it sometimes feels like one of our greatest strengths is, at times, a weakness. I’m speaking of the great diversity of experience and opinion within our camp. The right-wing has pretty successfully campaigned on their three G’s (God, guns, and gays) and done so in the service of an agenda which has been responsible for a massive explosion of inequality, and has been detrimental to the well-being of all but the most affluent. They have been able to hammer their talking points home with a discipline that would almost be admirable, if it didn’t come from a place so filled with ignorance and hate. On the other hand, liberals at times seem determined to live up to the stereotype of a person unwilling to take their own side in an argument. I realize that my opinion doesn’t count for much, but I would really like our side of the aisle to pick three issues to focus on and just continue to work toward policies that addressed them. 

If you were to ask me what those issues should be, I would probably decide that we should focus on working to reduce economic inequality, protecting women’s rights (particularly as it relates to healthcare), and working to improve criminal justice policy (specifically as it relates to people of color and the poor). I’m not saying that there aren’t other issues out there that aren’t worthwhile for liberals to concern themselves with, but I do think that these issues would have the best opportunity to bring together the disparate elements within our camp, and that making progress on these topics would improve the probability that success could be achieved on other issues. Additionally, these issues are broad enough that it would allow for a variety of approaches in addressing them, which would allow for our diversity of opinion, talent, and life experience to operate as a point of strength. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that we should be looking to excommunicate anyone from the movement for having different priorities, but asking for a little bit of focus shouldn’t be a position that requires courage to hold (and at times I really think it does at the moment). That’s my two cents on the issue, and of course your mileage may vary. I’d love to hear back from you, and to know what your opinion on this is.