David Brooks is mad as hell and he’s not gonna take it anymore.
Over the past months, Republicans enjoyed enormous advantages. Opinion polls showed that voters are eager to reduce the federal debt, and they want to do it mostly but not entirely through spending cuts.
There was a Democratic president eager to move to the center. He floated certain ideas that would be normally unheard of from a Democrat. According to widespread reports, White House officials talked about raising the Medicare eligibility age, cutting Social Security by changing the inflation index, freezing domestic discretionary spending and offering to pre-empt the end of the Bush tax cuts in exchange for a broad tax-reform process.
The Democratic offers were slippery, and President Obama didn’t put them in writing. But John Boehner, the House speaker, thought they were serious. The liberal activists thought they were alarmingly serious. I can tell you from my reporting that White House officials took them seriously.
The combined effect would have been to reduce the size of government by $3 trillion over a decade. That’s a number roughly three times larger than the cost of the Obama health care law. It also would have brutally fractured the Democratic Party.
But the Republican Party decided not to pursue this deal, or even seriously consider it. Instead what happened was this: Conservatives told themselves how steadfast they were being for a few weeks. Then morale crumbled.
This week, Republicans will probably pass a balanced budget Constitutional amendment that has zero chance of becoming law. Then they may end up clinging to a no más Senate compromise. This proposal would pocket cuts that have already been agreed on, and it would eliminate leverage for future cuts and make them less likely.
There is room to quibble here. The “broad tax-reform process,” for example, would have included tax increases. That’s a poison pill for many Republicans. But the broad strokes here are right: Obama had not only allowed them to get away with holding the nation’s credit line hostage but given them fabulous cash and prizes for doing so. And they’re almost certainly going to get much less by insisting on everything than they had already achieved at the negotiating table.
I’m less sold on his conclusions, however, as to why this happened:
The Beltway Bandits. American conservatism now has a rich network of Washington interest groups adept at arousing elderly donors and attracting rich lobbying contracts. For example, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform has been instrumental in every recent G.O.P. setback. He was a Newt Gingrich strategist in the 1990s, a major Jack Abramoff companion in the 2000s and he enforced the no-compromise orthodoxy that binds the party today.
Norquist is the Zelig of Republican catastrophe. His method is always the same. He enforces rigid ultimatums that make governance, or even thinking, impossible.
The Big Government Blowhards. The talk-radio jocks are not in the business of promoting conservative governance. They are in the business of building an audience by stroking the pleasure centers of their listeners.
They mostly give pseudo Crispin’s Day speeches to battalions of the like-minded from the safety of the conservative ghetto. To keep audience share, they need to portray politics as a cataclysmic, Manichaean struggle. A series of compromises that steadily advance conservative aims would muddy their story lines and be death to their ratings.
The Show Horses. Republicans now have a group of political celebrities who are marvelously uninterested in actually producing results. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann produce tweets, not laws. They have created a climate in which purity is prized over practicality.
The Permanent Campaigners. For many legislators, the purpose of being in Congress is not to pass laws. It’s to create clear contrasts you can take into the next election campaign. It’s not to take responsibility for the state of the country and make it better. It’s to pass responsibility onto the other party and force them to take as many difficult votes as possible.
Both parties have and had always had Beltway Bandits, Show Horses, and Permanent Campaigners. Maybe their numbers have increased but not enough so as to matter. And, at the end of the day, Bachmann has one vote out of 435 and Palin has no vote at all.
There’s certainly something to the criticism of talk radio and their Fox News broadcast brethren. The volume has gone up and the coverage has increased from three hours of Rush Limbaugh in the middle of the day to something like 24/7. But it’s not at all clear how much of the Michaean struggle bit is an act and how much of it is zeal.
Brooks concludes:
All of these groups share the same mentality. They do not see politics as the art of the possible. They do not believe in seizing opportunities to make steady, messy progress toward conservative goals. They believe that politics is a cataclysmic struggle. They believe that if they can remain pure in their faith then someday their party will win a total and permanent victory over its foes. They believe they are Gods of the New Dawn.
This, it seems to me, is the real issue. There have always been True Believers among the party organizers on both sides. But they’re threatening to take over the Republican Party for good.
While a growing phenomenon in recent years, it’s really come to a head since the 2008 election. After all, George W. Bush certainly managed to make bold policy shifts during his tenure in office, like them or not. But 2006 put Republicans in a minority in Congress and 2008 put them on the sidelines. Rather than taking the lesson that Bush personally or Republican policies generally were to blame for their disfavor, they took the opposite lesson: They weren’t being true enough to their core beliefs. That’s generally a sucker’s bet but they managed to cash in big in 2010–although some of us argue that the party would have done better without crazies in a handful of key races.
I’m still holding out hope that McDonnell, Boehner, and other grown-ups will get a reasonable deal done and avoid crisis for both the country and the party. But it’s no longer a certainty.
