Garance Franke-Ruta has ignited a small firestorm with her hatchet-job on the right-wing blogosphere and specifically Red State’s Mike Krempasky (Note that I am a contributor to Red State as well, although to my knowledge I’ve never met Krempasky.)
Of course, Krempasky fired back with an article that exposed the spurious logic behind Franke-Ruta’s argument. He also revisits the subject here and fellow Red Stater Josh “Tacitus” Trevino does an excellent job of getting into the mind of a left-wing activist.
The concept that — gasp! — political bloggers might be — double gasp! — involved in politics should hardly be a surprise to anyone. Most bloggers who write about politics have at the very least an active interest in politics, and a good number of them are politically active. I was active in the College Republicans for many years, and have met many prominent political figures. It’s really not that hard for someone who’s basically a nobody politically speaking to gather a rather impressive array of contacts just by being active in a political organization. That doesn’t mean that there’s some kind of organized conspiracy afoot.
As Josh Trevino quite astutely notes:
The left itself, though, is lately seized of the idea of an impending fascism in American life and discourse. Concurrent with this is the notion that the right-wing controls everything — excepting their lonely bastions of online liberty, of course — not due to any merit or legitimate affinity on the part of the American people, but rather by dint of a nefarious combination of lies, chicanery, and superior organization. What is the matter with Kansas, anyway? Well: Kansas has been duped. Markos Moulitsas used to claim that if only fundraising was equalized, the level playing field would mean that the inherently superior pull of the left’s ideology would mean Democratic victory from sea to shining sea. One hasn’t seen that line resurrected since the Heinz fortune and the online obsessives failed to pull off a win last November.
The inbred self-righteousness — and the concurrent equation of political belief with personal virtue — means that there is a general unwillingness to admit the obvious: the right hasn’t dominated politics and political discourse in America since 1994 because of any conspiracy; it hasn’t done so because of superior organization; and it hasn’t done so because it has pulled off the remarkable feat of deceiving 51% of c.300 million Americans for over a decade. The right’s in charge because, well, folks like the right. They like what it does. They like what it stands for. It’s as simple as that. Yeah, we’ve got our think tanks. Yeah, we’ve got our magazines. Yeah, we’ve got our activist campaigns. Yeah, we’ve got our bloggers who know lots and lots of people — more on that in a moment. All the above, of course, is also true of the devotees of the Socialist Fourth International. And, well, the Democrats. What’s the difference? It’s the ideas, stupid.
All this idiocy about conspiratorial connections between bloggers, Karl Rove, Jeff Gannon, the Zeta Reticulan Grays, Major League Baseball, the Bavarian Illuminati, etc., all a form of partisan masturbation for Democrats. See, it’s not that they’re getting beaten because their ideas are becoming increasingly incoherent, it’s because of the conspiracy. Once you start seeing boogeymen in every corner it provides you an excuse for everything. Why John Kerry didn’t lose because he couldn’t articulate a clear position on anything — he lost because of them. Trevino’s next thoughts are particular important:
Franke-Ruta’s essay does little more than feed the self-righteous paranoia of the American left at a time when it needs it the least. Make no mistake: American politics needs a healthy opposition movement and a healthy two-party system. Keeps us honest, for one: who else is going to shame the GOP leadership into rediscovering small government? Okay, so that would be the libertarians — you get the picture. Ideological movements built upon a conspiratorial view of their enemies rapidly adopt the imagined worst characteristics of their enemies, even as they progressively abandon any meaningful critique of those enemies.
The “progressive” movement has become a parody of the things they claim to stand up against. The level of orthodoxy among the lefty blogosphere and intelligentsia is appalling — witness the way Peter Beinart is being shunned for the heresy of arguing that Democrats need to get serious on national security. Witness how the Kossacks revel of destroying Jeff Gannon, then decide that they need to dig up dirt on Alan Greenspan because he had the audacity of suggesting that private retirement accounts in Social Security might be a good thing. If ever there was a need for the left to have a “have you no decency?” moment it’s now.
However, it’s far easier to just slip into fantasy and let the evils of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy explain all. Sadly, that’s exactly what many members of the left have done over the last few years. If you’re trying to be relevant and attract people to your point of view, doing it through blind and spiteful attacks against anyone who disagrees with you is hardly the way of going about it. It is for this reason that no right-wing conspiracy, real or imagined, could do as good as job of destroying the left as they’re doing to themselves now.
Well, it’s not as if the right doesn’t engage in this sort of thing as well… just go over to Frontpage Magazine’s site (www.frontpagemag.com, I believe), and you can get the link to “The Network”- basically their take on the “vast left-wing conspiracy”. Now, I generally avoid Frontpage, as I find Horowitz to generally be an asshat with no sense of humor (unlike National Review, which I read regularly, since I thoroughly enjoy their wit), but this sort of thing cuts both ways…
So, what you’re telling us is that Democrats are not being defeated because of the lies and chicanery of the Right, it’s because Americans aren’t interested in fair wages, affordable medical insurance, having Social Security retirement/disability benefits, caring for the poor and destitute, and the protection of their own civil liberties?
You expect us to believe that a group of people are knowingly selling off – no, giving away, as they get nothing in return – their liberties, security, and way of life to a handful of rich elites? That’s idiotic. Of course Republicans are cheating and lying; their policies are so manifestly bad for everyone but the powerful at the top that it’s ludicrous to suggest that the people at the bottom would go along for literally no reason whatsoever.
And this is exactly the point I’m making.
The left has bought into this idea that all Republicans are a bunch of evil, scheming plutocrats, etc. It’s a simpleminded and idiotic way of dismissing an argument without ever even thinking about it. It’s stupid, infantile, and entirely unpersuasive.
Take Social Security. There are some legitimate arguments against PRAs. However, what we’re hearing is THE EVIL REPUBLICANS WANT TO TAKE AWAY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MAKE GRANDMA EAT DOG FOOD! CHIMPY MCHITLERBURTON MUST GO!
Which of course doesn’t even remotely reflect the real argument – that personal retirement accounts will help strengthen Social Security by giving workers more control over where their contributions go. The argument that workers are just too stupid to manage their own money when well over half of the country is invested in the stock market doesn’t even remotely fly. The Democrats are making the argument that you shouldn’t have the rights to invest your Social Security money. That in no way is protecting anything but the Democrat’s Social Security gravy train.
But the left wing has to embrace these straw men, because they can’t argue the subject on their merits. That would require treating the opposite opinion with respect rather than the kind of blind schoolyard attacks that spew forth for the left wing.
Look at your own damn arguments. If you’re so convinced that Republicans are evil, fine, but you’re sure as hell not convincing anyone else with blind ad hominem attacks. The argument that 51% of the American electorate has been hoodwinked into “giving away” their way of life to “rich elites” is nothing more than a giant lefty circle jerk. So long as the left continues to insult the American populace and wave their self-superiority around they’ll continue to lose.
And given such an attitude, it’s a damn good thing too.
Leave it to the GOP sloganeers to attempt to discredit the caricature leftist stereotype with simplistic straw men of their own. Josh Trevino’s “astute observation” that the political right has universal control of government because “people like the right.” Every poll taken in the new millennium has shown a clear majority of Americans closer to the Democratic position on most major issues. Any set of issue statistics debunks Trevino’s hypothesis that slick self-marketing has NOTHING to do with the GOP’s political ascension. In reality, Republicans attain majorities because of the political map, which allocates political power based on geography rather than population. Thus, the collective Democratic Congressional Caucus can routinely garner more votes than Republicans do collectively, yet still be the minority party because 90% of the San Francisco vote for Nancy Pelosi doesn’t matter outside of San Francisco.
Even without accounting for the GOP’s geographic advantages, Republicans still have a bare majority in our 51-49 nation. Given that public support for Republicans despite their disagreement with them on most issues, it’s quite obvious that there’s more in play here than “people liking the right.” Perhaps outside the context of the Iraqi war, voters would have been more willing to hold Republicans accountable. It’s a mystery how so many people who hated Bush and strongly oppose the war still pulled the lever for Bush. Read pre-election accounts of voters in places like West Virginia and you’ll realize how large that group likely was.
Jay’s comments to Chet have effectively completed his transition into a cartoon clone of the very people he rails against five times a day or more. It’s patently obvious that a substantial percentage of proud Republican voters will have a lower standard of living for themselves and their children because of choices they make at the ballot box. For Jay to suggest that the millions of welfare state-dependent Republicans, basing their votes in accordance with the “will” of an invisible man in the sky, will not see their quality of life plummet if the GOP agenda for America is realized means one of two things. Either he hasn’t even considered how GOP-proposed policies will affect those making less money than he does, or he’s an active huckster in the very “vast right-wing conspiracy” to dupe the masses that he claims doesn’t exist.
Jay’s argument is fundamentally wrong. It isn’t the ideas. Polls show that Americans almost always prefer Democratic policies when the questions are phrased without reference to political parties. Republican ideas simply have no traction with the American people, as demonstrated by the wholesale public rejection of Bush’s privitization plans. And his Iraq policy. And his cuts to government programs. And on and on and on.
The American people, largely, are liberals.
The Democrats are making the argument that you shouldn’t have the rights to invest your Social Security money.
You shouldn’t. That is the point. The reason Social Security is able to provide defined benefits without defining contributions is because everybody’s money goes to the same place.
Republicans aren’t interested in strengthening Social Security; they’re interested in phasing it out. They don’t want to help the poor; they just want to be able to tell people that it’s their own fault they’re poor. That’s the extent of Republican charity. It’s like they have their own saying: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. But why the hell is it my problem?”
Wow Jay.
What did you do to deserve such a determined fan club? 😛
It’s the old argument of fanatics.
The poll the counts – the election gave President Bush the first outright majority of any Presidential candidate since 1988. A larger percentage of the American electorate voted to reelect President Bush than voted to reelect Bill Clinton in 1996. For the first time in over 75 years, Republican voter ID and Democratic voter ID are at parity. Bush gained among nearly every voting group in 2004. More African-American voters (who are as socially conservative as any group) voted for Bush. More Hispanic voters voted for Bush. Hell, more athiests voted for Bush than did in 2000.
34% of the American electorate are self-described conservatives. 21% are self-described liberals.
Supposedly a majority of Americans are liberals – which apparently does nothing to explain why no outright liberal has won the Presidency since LBJ. Even the most successful Democratic politician of the last 25 years was so successful because he was able to coopt and “triangulate” conservative positions.
The left is self-destructing because they’ve bought into their own bullshit. They really believe the idea that Republicans hate the poor, etc, because it’s all they have left. It’s a substitute for thinking, a form of political masturbation, and a way of dodging the real issues.
This country needs a vibrant opposition, if for nothing else than to keep the GOP on its toes — too bad the left has decided to run off to their own little echo chamber.
The left just doesn’t get it. It’s neither morally or mentally superior to perpetuate dependency on social handouts rather than promoting self suffienciency. We don’t need more programs, we need more that work. They keep telling people they are going to do something for them but never quite pull it off. People are tired of empty promises, they don’t think the handouts will ever be enough, they want the opportunity to make it on their own, not another program that’s destined to keep them beholding to the democrats. And most importantly, they no longer believe the levelling the playing field benefits anyone. They want to better themselves and the lives of their families and have finally realized that’s done by hard work, not social engineering and certainly not by social engineering coming from the ideology that has taken over the democrat party today. They want a chance to do as good as the best are doing, not as good as it comes to when you average it out. In words that the left will find terrifying, they are developing faith in themselves because they’ve been let down so many times by the left. They’ve seen to many others get ahead by hard work to keep believing it can’t be done and seen too many others keep coasting through life, waiting for the day when the left finally delivers on promises it can’t keep.
They really believe the idea that Republicans hate the poor, etc, because it’s all they have left.
Well, it’s either that, or you’re all idiots, to a man. How else do we explain the manifest failure of Republican policies to help anybody but the rich?
I thought I was giving you all the benefit of the doubt. I guess you’d rather I considered you all criminally stupid? Because that’s the only alternative.
It’s neither morally or mentally superior to perpetuate dependency on social handouts rather than promoting self suffienciency.
Republican policies don’t promote self-sufficiency. They’re simply fronts so that Republicans can wash their hands of any responsibility to the less fortunate.
In words that the left will find terrifying, they are developing faith in themselves because they’ve been let down so many times by the left.
I’m sure that’s a very nice story that helps you sleep at night, but meanwhile, in the real world, wages are dropping, rents are rising, unemployment is up, and people are being crushed by debt and poverty, all thanks to an ideology that basically says “helping people is bad.” Republican policies don’t match the claims. I maintain they do exactly what they’re designed to, however – they allow unconscienced people like you the luxury of blaming the victim, under the guise of “personal freedom” and “empowerment.”
Because the argument isn’t even remotely true. Republican policies have worked. Welfare reform was a Republican issue long before Clinton coopted it. If anything, it’s liberal ideas that failed. The War on Poverty and the Great Society programs were all massive failures that increased poverty rather than decreasing them.
Yup, just call anyone who dares challenge you “criminally stupid”. That’s a real way to be persuasive.
In the real world real wages have increased by 2.4%, and incomes have risen 7.4% since January 2004 according the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In some places but not all. Meanwhile, home ownership, especially among minorities is at an all-time high. Rent control in places like New York City have had the exact opposite effect, making affordable housing harder to find. Environmentalist groups and opponents of “urban sprawl” make it difficult for more low-income housing to be build, and lawsuits and regulation make rents higher for everyone because property owners have higher insurance premiums and are less able to evict dangerous tenants.
Unemployment is down to 5.4% – the same figure as it was during the start of Clinton’s second term. Total labor underutilzation is also down.
The level of poverty in the US is correlated directly to the performance of the economy. Policies that hurt the economy or economic downturns increase poverty. The best way of reducing poverty is to grow the economy and provide more opportunities for all.
Furthermore, poverty in the United States is hardly endemic. More than half of people below the poverty line now will be above it in four months. More than 80% will be above it in a year. Only 2% of the total population stays below the poverty line for four years or more.
And those are just the figures I have on hand. If left-wing ideologues would actually bother to do a modicum of research they’d realize that their arguments are pure crap. This idea that America is terrible, etc, is just a scare tactic designed to make people increasingly dependent on the state.
That straw man sure keeps the birds away, doesn’t it. Over here in the real world, red states give far more to charity per capita than blue states. The difference is that Republicans believe that charity is an indiidual responsibility, while Democrats define “doing good” is taking someone else’s money. Helping people by stealing from someone else may be fine for Robin Hood, but it’s a horrendously shitty moral outlook. There’s nothing compassionate, charitable, or benevolent about income distribution. It’s just another form of greed, and an especially odious one at that.
“red states give far more money to charity than blue states”
What those statistics really represent is that low-income red states have a higher percentage of religious fundamentalists who tithe a high percentage of their paltry income to their churches. Not all of us consider a donation by a trailer park-dwelling Mississippi Wal-Mart clerk to help the preacher’s wife pay for her boob job to qualify as “charity.”
“Democrats define ‘doing good’ as taking someone else’s money. Helping people by stealing from someone else may be fine for Robin Hood, but it’s a horrendously shitty moral outlook.”
Boy do I have a utopia for you and all of your tax-averse friends in rightie fantasy-land…..Somalia. There is currently no semblance of organized government there, and everything from education to national defense to water access is privatized and available only to the highest bidder. Only in the Somalia scenario of universal privatization can your thesis that “taxes=theft” be overcome. Of course, actual theft, along with other assorted violence and anarchic mayhem, is far more likely to occur when the brute savagery of the unrestrained social Darwinism that you and the fringe right advocate is practiced.
Wow, a set of straw men that would make the folks at Burning Man jealous…
Republican policies have worked.
Reaganomics was a failure; economies have always underperformed during Republican administrations.Abstinence-only sex education increases the spread of STD’s and increases teen-pregnancy; Republican pollution policies decrease corporate accountability for environmental damage. Their education policies drive funding and support out of the public schools. Their business policies concentrate control of markets into the hands of a few. Their attempts to curb voter fraud actually eliminate valid votes and reduce transparency in the accounting.
What’s next? The Bush-Cheney “Ice Cream and Lollipops” bill, where we line up and get beat by rubber hoses? Republican policies almost always have the opposite effect as their stated goal.
In the real world real wages have increased by 2.4%
While inflation grew by 2.7 %. That’s a net loss of wages.
Unemployment is down to 5.4%
Up from 5.2 last month, and, of course, almost 1.5% higher than the rates Bush inherited.
the same figure as it was during the start of Clinton’s second term.
Ah, but within a year of Clinton’s second inaugeration, that rate was on its way down. Within a year of Bush’s second term, it was skyrocketing. Now it’s year 5 of Bush, and it hasn’t changed. You couldn’t have picked a better example of the failure of Republican policies.
The best way of reducing poverty is to grow the economy and provide more opportunities for all.
And the best way to grow the economy is from the bottom, not from the top. Liberal polices put more money in the pockets of you and I, and unlike the corporate elites, we’re much more likely to spend it domestically than in moving production overseas. It’s simple logic – logic that everyone understood until Reagan turned good sense on its head.
Furthermore, poverty in the United States is hardly endemic.
In fact it’s the highest it’s ever been – 35.8 million Americans were poor in 2003. Up from 31 million in 2000. Increasing levels of poverty is hardly consistent with the idea that Republican policies reduce poverty.
As for the class mobility you refer to – it’s been declining in the past few decades, and is the lowest its ever been. You continually offer point statistics absent of the context that would show that they don’t indicate what you claim they do. More people are poor than ever before; they’re staying poor longer than ever before. Republican policies simply don’t work.
The difference is that Republicans believe that charity is an indiidual responsibility, while Democrats define “doing good†is taking someone else’s money.
A funny argument to make when it’s the Red states that are drawing the most Federal money. Apparently, the doctrine of “smaller government” that Republicans love so dearly pales when its the Republicans who suddenly have to tighten their belts.
Oh, and here’s a hint. Pointing out the ridiculous consequences of your arguments isn’t erecting a strawman. Quoting almost verbatim from Republican arguments isn’t erecting a strawman. Apparently you don’t realize that your sophmoric attempt to dismiss unimpeachable rebuttals to your flimsy arguments wears a little thin after the 6th or 7th repetition. But I’m sure you’ll read this and simply stick both fingers in your ears again and mutter “strawman! strawman!”