I forgot to put this piece up by Bruce Bartlett last year but it's obviously still relevant. Bartlett used to work for Ronald Reagan as his chief economic adviser and has since sworn off of supply side economics as well as admitted how he wrong he was on many things. I wonder if this will ever be the case for some of my regulars here...
He makes several good points in this column, among them are these:
Until that moment I had not realized how closed the right-wing mind had become. Even assuming that my friends’ view of the Times’ philosophy was correct, which it most certainly was not, why would they not want to know what their enemy was thinking? This was my first exposure to what has been called “epistemic closure” among conservatives—living in their own bubble where nonsensical ideas circulate with no contradiction.
Contradiction is treason!
Among the interesting reactions to my book is that I was banned from Fox News. My publicist was told that orders had come down from on high that it was to receive no publicity whatsoever, not even attacks. Whoever gave that order was smart; attacks from the right would have sold books. Being ignored was poison for sales.
I later learned that the order to ignore me extended throughout Rupert Murdoch’s empire.
That's because you were disobeying their will...oops, VILL!
The final line for me to cross in complete alienation from the right was my recognition that Obama is not a leftist. In fact, he’s barely a liberal—and only because the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today. Viewed in historical context, I see Obama as actually being on the center-right.
Huh. Now who has also said that before?
So here we are, post-election 2012. All the stupidity and closed-mindedness that right-wingers have displayed over the last 10 years has come back to haunt them. It is now widely understood that the nation may be center-left after all, not center-right as conservatives thought. Overwhelming losses by Republicans to all the nation’s nonwhite voters have created a Democratic coalition that will govern the nation for the foreseeable future.
But they don't care, Bruce. As long as the win the argument and/or make money off of rubes.
At least a few conservatives now recognize that Republicans suffer for epistemic closure. They were genuinely shocked at Romney’s loss because they ignored every poll not produced by a right-wing pollster such as Rasmussen or approved by right-wing pundits such as the perpetually wrong Dick Morris. Living in the Fox News cocoon, most Republicans had no clue that they were losing or that their ideas were both stupid and politically unpopular.
They still don't have a clue as is evidenced by my comments section. Of course, none of this could be their fault, right!?
I am disinclined to think that Republicans are yet ready for a serious questioning of their philosophy or strategy. They comfort themselves with the fact that they held the House (due to gerrymandering) and think that just improving their get-out-the-vote system and throwing a few bones to the Latino community will fix their problem. There appears to be no recognition that their defects are far, far deeper and will require serious introspection and rethinking of how Republicans can win going forward. The alternative is permanent loss of the White House and probably the Senate as well, which means they can only temporarily block Democratic initiatives and never advance their own.
Yet they still believe...
3 comments:
The final line for me to cross in complete alienation from the right was my recognition that Obama is not a leftist. In fact, he’s barely a liberal—and only because the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today. Viewed in historical context, I see Obama as actually being on the center-right.
This is exactly what you say, Mark. So what does this say about his point of view and biases? That he's becoming just as leftist as you. Claiming that the Republican party (which today generally holds positions to the left of John Kennedy) has moved to the right is just wildly out of touch with history.
Rather than write more, I'll just borrow from a well written comment:
Just as George W. Bush seemed to be all over the map, so is Bruce Bartlett. When he criticized Bush for not sticking to conservative principles he was on the money, but when he called Obama “center-right” he left the planet and moved to the land of insanity. Obama is a left-wing progressive WHO WAS RATED BY LEFT-WING GROUPS TO HAVE SCORED HIGHER THAN TED KENNEDY when he was in the Senate.
As President, Obama does the usual bobbing and weaving, but he still believes in redistribution (NOT a conservative principle) and in class envy as illustrated by his stubborn insistence on increasing the taxes on the wealthy. Wealth, by the way, has been defined down. Increasing taxes only on the wealthy will do little to bring in more revenues (taxes and revenues are NOT synonymous — especially since it is well known that increasing certain taxes can [and have] resulted in decreased revenues); President Obama has made it clear that he wants to increase taxes on the wealthy not for economic reasons but for ideological ones: it is out of his sense of “fairness.” If one were be truly fair and really wanted to try to improve the economy he would promote increasing the taxes for EVERYONE. No one above the lowest income rate would pay zero taxes; everyone with an income would pay something. Additionally, spending would have to be cut. Romney was more willing to cut spending while Obama has shown no interest in cutting spending other than the military and “waste and abuse.” As much as George W. Bush’s Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D plans were/are fiscal monstrosities, Obama’s changes are even worse. Whereas Bush allowed some competitiveness, Obama’s plan ultimately results in total federalization.
Moreover, Obama’s entire ideological background ranges from Progressive to Marxist. The backgrounds of his parents, instructors, his pastor for twenty years (who preaches Marxist Black Liberation Theology), and his own activism, all attest to the fact that attributing to him a label of “center-right” is beyond ludicrous. On social issues he is just as far to the left, with no compunctions about forcing religious entities to submit to doing things that go against their consciences and a record of defending infanticide (yes, as a state senator he defended it as part of his greater defense of abortion in all instances). Clearly Bartlett has no clue what he is talking about. If that wasn’t good enough for him he could have compared the party platforms of the various left-wing and far-left wing political parties (Democratic, Socialist, Communist, Green, etc) to parties considered to be on the right, such as Republican, Libertarian, and American and Constitution parties, and looked at the elements that they shared and disagreed on. An analysis based on elements found in party platforms would have shown Obama to clearly be in the left-wing camp. Not center-left, but hard left.
Here's another good comment (complete with statistics):
it is difficult to take seriously the substance of someone who makes such claims as, “the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today. Viewed in historical context, I see Obama as actually being on the center-right.”
Just a couple snapshots of the “historical context” ought to be enough to remind us of how far away from conservative principles the spectrum has skewed over the decades.
* Adjusted for inflation (using 2000 dollars), “In the early years of the United States, the federal government spent about $30 per person annually. By the 1910s, [federal] government expenditures per capita were about $129, or slightly more than four times the 1792 level. In 2004, the federal government spent $7,100 per capita, nearly 55 times more than was spent per capita in the 1910s…. Total government expenditures per person (federal + state + local) totaled $2,350 in 1948 and nearly $12,150 in 2004.” (Thomas A. Garrett and Russell M. Rhine, “On the Size and Growth of Government,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, January/February 2006, 88(1), pp. 13, 17.)
* “In 2010, 40.8% of all births were to unmarried mothers. Among Hispanics that figure was 53%, and among blacks 73%. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later a Democratic senator from New York, called for emergency federal intervention to aid in ‘the establishment of a stable Negro family structure,’ and justified it in part by an out-of wedlock birth rate among blacks of 23.6% — half of what it is today.” (“The Fraying Knot,” The Economist, January 12, 2013, on-line version of an article “from the print edition.”)
It is natural for those who get disenchanted with one perspective or another to fire back at former fellow travelers, saying that they’ve found the path out of darkness, and it is natural for those still in the darkness to resist this. However, when the self-appointed “Reality-Based Community” puts forward axe-grinding drivel pretending that Barack Obama would be a center-right figure by historical standards, it appears that they themselves have no stronger grip on reality than the opponents whom they are not even seriously attempting to persuade.
And about some of those other statements you quoted…
The New York Times does have a leftist bias.
Republicans do not hold the House due to gerrymandering.
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