Category Archives: conservatism

On the Couch

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Nate Silver’s data say that if the election were today, the electoral college vote would be something like 350 to 188 in favor of Obama. Still, Dems faint in terror at the least discouraging news; the wingnut faithful (although not the GOP party itself) are only now telling themselves that McCain might lose. Nah, he couldn’t.

Rush Limbaugh’s gut is telling him McCain can win (or is it gas?) and John H of Power Tools tells us,

From Drudge: Zogby’s polling yesterday had John McCain pulling into a one-point lead, 48-47, over Barack Obama. That result is an outlier, I suppose, but Obama has never been able to seal the deal with the voters and quite a few remain undecided, one in seven according to a recent AP poll. Throughout the campaign, McCain has made a series of runs where it looked as though he might catch up, only to fall back again. And the state by state polls continue, for some reason, to look worse for McCain than the national numbers.

Still, I have a feeling that once you get past his core constituencies, Obama’s support is very thin. The fact that he has had to try to cast himself as a tax-cutter is revealing. Does anyone really believe it? True, there’s a sucker born every minute, but still… If there really are voters who have contemplated voting for Obama on what are essentially conservative grounds, it would not be surprising if some of them shift their allegiance between now and Tuesday.

I’m not even going to comment on that.

Y’know what? If the poll numbers were exactly reversed, right now the GOP would be making open preparations for the inauguration — “measuring the drapes,” as it were — and the Dems would have written off the election and be debating how to re-organize for 2012.

If Obama wins narrowly, the Right will console itself in the belief that ACORN stole the election and the majority of the people are still behind the rightie agenda. IMO the deepest, darkest, most terrifying nightmare lurking under the bed for righties is that they aren’t the majority. That’s a reality too terrible for them to face, even if God rubbed their noses in it.

Wingnutism is built on the foundational belief that only righties are the real Americans, and all others are freakizoid elitist not-Americans with deranged ideas. If the wingnuts were to realize that most Americans do not, in fact, think as they do, I’m not sure how they would react. Truly, brains would explode. But I don’t think they would ever admit they aren’t the majority. I don’t think they are capable of it. Obama could win every state in the Union on Tuesday, and they still wouldn’t admit they had truly lost.

Center-Right?

In recent days I’ve heard, over and over again, that America is a “center-right” nation, and Obama had better not forget that, else he push liberalism too far. John Meacham of Newsweek writes,

Should Obama win, he will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal–a perennial reality that past Democratic presidents have ignored at their peril. A party founded by Andrew Jackson on the principle that ‘the majority is to govern’ has long found itself flummoxed by the failure of that majority to see the virtues of the Democrats and the vices of the Republicans.

Which “past Democratic presidents” are we talking about? Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy certainly were not politically imperiled. Harry Truman didn’t lose public support because of liberal policies, but because of Korea. Jimmy Carter was not, in fact, particularly liberal in his domestic policies (any righties reading this who now are choking and sputtering should do some research), and pushing liberalism too far was not what cost him re-election. Bill Clinton wasn’t notably liberal, either.

IMO only Lyndon Johnson fits Meacham’s mold. Lyndon Johnson pushed liberalism (in the form of his Great Society programs) further than the white majority was ready to go at the time. Of course, that little Vietnam War dustup cost him some support, too.

And isn’t it astonishing how well the right-wing narrative has been imprinted in our brains? Meacham warns that Obama had better not take the too-liberal path that has tripped up so many Democratic presidents, even though it didn’t?

Here’s my problem with the “center-right” claim: Wingnuts see themselves as being “center-right,” even though on any global politcal spectrum they’re hanging off the extreme right end by their fingernails, and Obama’s policy proposals as they are would be considered center-right just about everywhere but here. Those of us who really are liberals quickly acknowledge that Obama is less liberal than we are. So where is the center?

Chris Cillizza writes,

If Obama does win next Tuesday, there will be significant excitement and expectation within the Democratic base that a progressive agenda — universal health care, removing the troops from Iraq — will quickly be passed into law.

If that happens, expect Republicans to use such an agenda as fodder in 2010 for the need to have divided government in Washington.

I can see the Republican campaign now. We warned you people that if you elected Democrats you’d get affordable health care and we’d get out of a pointless war in Iraq. You didn’t listen. And how you’re sorry, huh?

If that happens, expect Republicans to use such an agenda as fodder in 2010 for the need to have divided government in Washington. … Governing and campaigning are not the same thing. And, in a country that — if the Post/ABC survey is to be believed — still tilts center-right, Obama must be careful not to drift too far to the left in the heady early days of his administration.

Yeah, he doesn’t dare actually accomplish anything he promised in order to win the election. Americans don’t really want any of that stuff, even though they elected him because of what he promised. Makes sense.

The Post poll Cillizza talks about said that just 22 percent of likely voters called themselves “liberals” while 38 percent called themselves “moderates” and 37 percent claimed to be “conservatives.” The problem with self-identifying polls like this is that hardly anyone know what “liberal” or “conservative” means any more. If you asked people to define liberal, you’d probably get some nonsense about liberals loving to raise taxes, put everyone on welfare and otherwise waste money. By that definition, I’m not a liberal, either. However, that’s not what liberalism is.

To get a real measure, it would be more accurate to give people some sort of typology test, something like the famous Myers-Briggs personality test, to test actual attitudes and opinions on issues. I bet the results would show the nation is a lot more liberal than it thinks it is.

Update: See Thers at Whskey Fire.

The GOP Race to the Bottom

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For some reason this reminds me of “The Prisoner,” except the Prisoner wanted the identity of Number One, not Number Two. Does that make all the rest of us Number Six, or whatever number Patrick Mcgoohan was?

But Number One isn’t anti-semitic either, according to Joe Klein:

I’ve never met Rashid Khalidi, but he is (a) Palestinian and therefore (b) a semite, so the charge of anti-semitism is fatuous. Khalidi is also a respected academic, the sort of person who is involved in foundation work that John McCain, for one, was willing to support financially.

See also “Profiles In Douchebaggery” by John Cole.

Why Righties Are Living on a Different Planet

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As if you didn’t already know that they’re living on a different planet — see Bill Whittle’s post at NRO — Barack Obama is quoted from a radio interview he gave in 2001 on the subject of funding schools equally after the Brown vs Board of Ed. decision. — keep that context in mind —

Obama speaks:

You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil-rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it, I’d be okay, but the Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.

And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution — at least as it’s been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: [It] says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.

And that hasn’t shifted, and one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil-rights movement was because the civil-rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.

A caller asks, “The gentleman made the point that the Warren Court wasn’t terribly radical. My question is (with economic changes)… my question is, is it too late for that kind of reparative work, economically, and is that the appropriate place for reparative economic work to change place?”

Obama replies:

You know, I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way. [snip] You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues, you know, in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time. You know, the court is just not very good at it, and politically, it’s just very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard.

So I think that, although you can craft theoretical justifications for it, legally, you know, I think any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts.”

Whittle and the entire Right Blogosphere believe they’ve found the smoking-gun proof that Obama is a socialist. I’m serious. That’s how insane they are. Righties are absolutely bouncing off the walls convinced they’ve found “the bombshell” that will sink Obama’s campaign. Just read Whittle’s “interpretation” of Obama’s remarks. They are pathological.

As Prometheus 6 says, “What they are doing is standing strong against equal rights for all Americans with this attack. And The National Review is right in the mix. And all of them disgust me.”

The McCain campaign is putting out the lie that Obama called it a “tragedy” that the courts didn’t order “redistributive change.” As Greg Sargent notes,

As you can see, Obama simply didn’t say that the court’s faiulre to take up redistribution was a tragedy. Rather, he was arguing that it was a “tragedy” that the Civil Rights movement expected the courts to do too much in this regard, which led the movement away from other ways of accomplishing redistributive goals, such as organizing and legislative politicking.

And taking such matters out of courts and instead working through the legislative process is something righties have said they favor, or so I thought.

The problems is, of course, that if the entire noise-making apparatus of the Right jumps on this lie and pounds on it together, they could peel some votes away from Obama. So even though it’s absolute nonsense, it could do some damage. Stay tuned.

See also Oliver Willis and Martin Lewis.

Common Guys R Us

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Bill Kristol — Harvard grad, scion an old elite family, who has spent his life in a cocoon of privilege — says it’s OK if politics is getting vulgar. It’s those salt-of-the-earth common people who have made it so. And, by gosh, in America, they’re in charge! If Peggy Noonan doesn’t like it, she is just being snotty.

Of course, the simple-minded peasants who prefer Barack Obama to John McCain don’t know what’s good for them. But they might change their minds and elect John McCain anyway. And wouldn’t that annoy the media elites! (Kristol, who inherited a magazine from his father and is capping a career of non-accomplishment as a columnist for the New York Times, does not see himself as a media elite. Why not? Media elites prefer Obama. And the McCain campaign has Joe the Plumber!)

I’m not making this up.

Update: It’s what I get for posting something quickly before dashing off to physical therapy (see last post). Bill Kristol founded Weekly Standard; his daddy Irving founded some other magazines.

Update: More stuff to read this morning —

Paul Krugman, “The Real Plumbers of Ohio”

Conor Clarke, “A Philosophical Dead End”

Michael Tomasky, “The Republicans have lifted the lid off their rightwing id”

Jonathan Alter, “We’re Heading Left Once Again”

Walter Shapiro, “Turning Indiana Blue”

Howard Wolfson, “The End of Nixonland”

Taken together, the articles above all say we’re on the edge of a massive political realignment.

Fairness, Justice, Equality, Stability

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As anticipated, Sec. / Gen. Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama this morning. Yes, we all remember how Powell allowed himself to be a tool, but many still admire him. Matt Yglesias:

His endorsement helps ratify the post-Palin trend toward McCain solidifying his base but losing his once-formidable support from moderates. Plus I bet it’ll inspire someone at the Corner to say something racist.

We can all look forward to that. And speaking of racism and other forms of discrimination, I give you the Rightie Genius of the Week, Robert McCain, who writes,

This idiotic liberal tendency to equate inequality with injustice is indefensible as logic.

If you need to stop and reflect on that for a bit, take your time.

In context, I believe Mr. McCain was using the word equality to mean identical, which I think only works in mathematics — not even then, if I’m doing the mathematics. However, here in Real World Land, equality — as in equal treatment under the law — is the cornerstone of justice. When elements are equal they are not necessarily identical, but they have the same intrinsic value even if they have different attributes.

Mr. McCain was commenting on this column by Jonathan Cohn, “What’s So Awful About ‘Spreading the Wealth’?” Cohn’s primary point is that progressive income taxes are fairer than flat taxes. As part of this argument, he writes,

Another rationale for progressive taxation is the fact that random chance has profound effects on everybody’s financial well-being. (A guy named John Rawls once wrote a thing or two about this.) Mandating economic equality–i.e., carrying out a truly socialist agenda–would obviously be wrong. But there are compelling moral and economic arguments for asking the fortunate to pay a little more in taxes, in order to blunt the influence of chance on people’s lives.

Mr. McCain is having none of that. Which takes us to equating inequality with injustice:

Why is random chance “unjust”? Whence the “moral” obligation to equalize outcomes? This idiotic liberal tendency to equate inequality with injustice is indefensible as logic.

But Cohn didn’t use the words justice or injustice anywhere in his column. Mr. McCain leaped to the conclusion that Cohn wants to “blunt the influence of chance on people’s lives” out of a sense of justice, but that’s not what he said, and that wouldn’t be my primary argument, either.

What is the purpose of government? Cohn writes, “Government performs certain essential functions, from education to national defense.” How do we know which functions are “essential” and which are not? And why would blunting “the influence of chance on people’s lives” be a function of government? This is what we need to think about.

I say government is a means — not the only one, but the major one — by which people maintain civilization. Through government, theft and murder are criminalized and discouraged. Through government contracts are enforced, which enables people to work together to build cities and engage in commerce.

Put another way, the principal purpose of government is to maintain some sort of orderly and stable system that allows people to live peacefully in proximity to other people. Ideally, public and private sectors work together to maintain conditions in which people can provide for themselves and pursue their own interests as freely as possible.

Reasonable people can disagree about which functions should be public and which should be private. But that argument often is not about “morality” or “equality” or “justice.” It’s about balancing stability and liberty.

A classic problem for democratic government is the balance of civil liberty versus crime control. Like it or not, totalitarian governments generally do a better job of controlling crime than democratic governments. If you want to really clamp down on crime, whip up a police state. But most of us don’t want to live in a police state. So we put limits on police powers and accept a higher risk of crime. In this equation, we take away from stability and add to liberty.

For years conservatives have called for deregulation for this or that part of the private sector, because regulations get in the way of profits. But the point of many of those regulations is to discourage risk-taking. Recent events ought to be teaching us that risk-taking has its down side. If it were just a matter of some investors taking risks with their own money that would be one thing, but we see that risk-taking can create widespread financial instability with widespread harmful consequences.

So, the primary point of putting limits on what financial managers can do with investors’ money is not just to protect the investors from losses, but to keep the economy itself from becoming unacceptably unstable. Unfortunately, this is a lesson that has to be re-learned every few decades.

Likewise, the primary reason government has an interest in blunting the influence of chance on people’s lives is to maintain political and social stability. Certainly, the government cannot be ready with a band-aid every time a citizen stumbles. But history teaches us that when a large portion of citizens, especially middle-class citizens, are facing catastrophic disruption and falling through the economic cracks, political and social instability are right around the corner.

I’m not talking about saving people from their own folly. I’m talking about saving them from other peoples’ folly, or the consequences of natural disaster, or something else that’s bigger than they are. Self-reliance is a wonderful virtue, but sometimes it isn’t enough. And maintaining the integrity of the middle class as a whole is good for everybody.

Let’s go back to Mr. McCain.

The purpose of taxation is to collect revenue for the government, not to reward or punish various classes of citizens.

I agree, but the rest of this paragraph suggests to Mr. McCain suffers some sort of brain damage.

The fiscal action of government is never equal, and inevitably divides the population into taxpayers and tax consumers (as another famous guy said), and tax consumers will always argue for the expansion of revenue. If left unchecked, government become nothing more than organized theft, plundering one part of the population in order to enrich another part.

I like the part about government being unchecked. Once again, we see that the ideal of government of the people, by the people, and for the people has been forgotten. Rather than being an instrument for We, the People, to govern ourselves, government has become an alien fungus that no one can control. But let’s go on …

First, I’d like to know which Americans are not “tax consumers.” Who living here does not benefit, directly or indirectly, from the justice system, the national security system, meat inspectors, highways, etc.? Show of hands? Anyone?

Who is being “plundered” and who is being “enriched”? Certainly there’s a lot of plundering going on, but seems to me it’s the corrupt, not the poor, who are the perps. If Mr. McCain actually believes that the poor are benefiting disproportionately from his tax dollars, he should try being poor for a while. Mr. McCain may not be on food stamps, but he receives benefit from his tax dollars whenever he uses air transportation, buys a steak, or has good shipped across country.

Remember the “lucky ducky“? This would be funny if it weren’t so, I don’t know, pathological.

I’ve argued in the past that one defining features of righties is that they don’t grasp interconnections. They have rigidly linear thought processes and don’t see the complexity of interrelationships that supports all of us. Well, here it is again.

Update: Matt Yglesias again:

Meanwhile, as John McCain says, it’s true that forty percent of the workforce pays no net income taxes. But everyone who works pays payroll tax. Payroll tax is a tax, ergo if you work you pay taxes, ergo if you work you could receive a tax cut. It’s true that the method by which you deliver tax cuts to people with no income tax liability is via a refundable tax credit, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re talking about reducing the tax burden on people who pay taxes. You’re offering them a tax cut, in other words. Or as McCain puts it, “socialism.” Meanwhile, George W. Bush is nationalizing banks and John McCain wants to buy up bad mortgages so that those who currently own them don’t need to pay any financial penalty for their unsound lending practices.

It stuns me that McCain doesn’t think taxes taken out of paychecks count as taxes.

The Right Hates America

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Sarah Palin thinks some parts of America are not the “real” America. A McCain staffer says northern Virginia is not “real” Virginia. I’m sure that’s going to go over well with northern Virginia voters. See also Marc Ambinder, “McCain’s Cosmological Breakthrough: Unreality Is Expanding.” Hysterical.

John McCain thinks tax cuts for the middle class amount to “welfare.” A congresswoman thinks Americans are sending un-Americans to Congress.

In St. Louis, 100,000 people show up for an Obama rally, and a rightie blogger writes,

100,000 IS A LOT OF DUPES.

* STILL: HE GOT A BIGGER CROWD IN BERLIN THAN IN ST. LOUIS. WHY!?
* WAS THERE A ROCK BAND IN ST. LOUIS, TOO?
* WHO BUSSED THESE HORDES OF MORONS INTO ST LOUIS? WHICH UNIONS?

JUST ASKING…

So all those decent, hard-working citizens of St. Louis who came out today, hoisting their kids on their shoulders to see the candidate, are “hordes of morons.” The Right spits on you, St. Louis.

However, I disagree with Ambinder. I don’t think unreality is expanding. I think the Right’s fantasy world is imploding. They aren’t used to having to deal with the real world. No wonder they’re confused.

Why Am I Not Surprised

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Today the seething aggregate of hate known as “Michelle Malkin” is raging about “Operation Joe the Plumber.”

My syndicated column today reports on Team Obama and the Obamedia’s mission to tear down Joe the Plumber. Yes, we are in the midst of a new contagion: Joe The Plumber Derangement Syndrome. JTPDS.

In truth, not Team Obama but the mainstream news media began to “background” Joe the Plumber as soon as John McCain made him his tax policy poster boy. And it turns out he’s not a plumber, his name isn’t Joe, he owes taxes on his property. Most of the stories I’ve seen about “Joe” have been mild in tone, however. Public interest stuff to satisfy the curious.

Frankly, he doesn’t interest me that much except as an example of a pig-headed conservative who continues to vote against his own economic interests. We’ve seen his type before. It’s called “dumb.” But let’s go on …

Does anyone else remember the crusade led by Little Lulu against the parents of Graeme Frost? Thanks in part to Lulu, the Frosts got death threats.

Another of Lulu’s targets, Denise Denton, committed suicide a few weeks after Michelle published Denton’s work address on her blog, along with the accusation that Denton aided sedition. To be fair (some of us try to be fair) Denton had a number of other crises in her life at the time, but being the target of a hate swarm could not have helped. Lulu, of course, refused to acknowledge even a peripheral responsibility for Denton’s death.

I could spend the morning digging up more examples of Malkin’s reckless cruelty toward ordinary people who have done something to displease Miss Perpetual Indignity. But you get the picture.

Ask What You Can Do for Your Country

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What can I do for my country? you ask. You can email this chart to everyone you know.

Accompanying text:

Since 1929, Republicans and Democrats have each controlled the presidency for nearly 40 years. So which party has been better for American pocketbooks and capitalism as a whole? Well, here’s an experiment: imagine that during these years you had to invest exclusively under either Democratic or Republican administrations. How would you have fared?

As of Friday, a $10,000 investment in the S.& P. stock market index* would have grown to $11,733 if invested under Republican presidents only, although that would be $51,211 if we exclude Herbert Hoover’s presidency during the Great Depression. Invested under Democratic presidents only, $10,000 would have grown to $300,671 at a compound rate of 8.9 percent over nearly 40 years.

You can also email this article titled “The Simple Arithmetic of Employment: Job Growth Is Always Higher When a Democrat Is In The White House.”

[Update: The email function for the above article seems to be busted. You can email this post instead; see “Email This” link at the end of the post.]

So why is it so many people believe Republicans are better for the economy? Because Republicans say they are. Over and over and over. With great conviction. I’m sure they believe it. But they are nuts.

For that reason, I think Harold Meyerson is jumping the gun a bit in his column “The God That Failed.”

Today, conservative intellectuals might want to consider writing a tome on the failure of their own beloved deity, unregulated capitalism. The fall of the financial system has been so fast and far-reaching that there’s been no time to fully consider its implications for the reigning economic theology of the past 30 years. But with the most right-wing administration in modern American history scurrying to nationalize the banks, the question cannot be elided indefinitely.

What exactly do economic conservatives believe now that their god is dead? What’s become of the glories of privatized Social Security? Of the merits of 401(k)s vs. defined-benefit pensions?

Meyerson assumes the ideologues pay attention to the real world. Although I think the True Believers will have a harder time pushing their unregulated capitalism privatization is best trickle down supply side swill in the near future, they will not lose faith in it. They’ll blame George Bush for this little glitch of a global financial crisis somehow, but say their theories are still correct, and Bush simply didn’t adhere to them faithfully enough.

Meanwhile, nearly 70 percent of Americans now want stricter regulation of the financial sector. From the Los Angeles Times:

“I always thought the least amount of government in people’s lives, the better,” said Bagley, 29, a poll respondent who was contacted in a follow-up interview. “But now you see what happens when you take it to the extreme.”

Exactly. The problem with wingnuts is that they can think only in extremes. Judging by their rhetoric, they think there are only two kinds of government — totalitarian communism or laissez-faire libertarianism. And they apply something like a one-drop rule to judge which is which — even one drop of un-laissez-faire libertarian policy renders a nation into a Stalinist gulag. For this reason, they cannot be worked with. Either vanquish them, or surrender.

So they cannot be educated. But, apparently nearly 70 percent of the American people can be educated, which is no bad thing. Now is the time for progressives like us to do everything we can to educate our fellow citizens about economic reality. It’s what we can do for our country.

See also:

“The death of the Washington consensus? Paul Krugman’s Nobel prize for economics signals the intellectual tide is turning against unrestricted free trade” by Kevin Gallagher.

“Misplaced Blame,” New York Times editorial

“Let’s Spend Money” by Dean Baker

A Conspiracy So Immense

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Hilzoy says the gang at The Corner “seems to have gone well and truly insane.” I don’t know where she gets the “seems.”

The wingnuts discovered that in his 1996 state senate campaign, Obama was endorsed by the New Party, a branch of the Democratic Socialists of America. Some 12-year-old New Party campaign literature identifies Obama as “a member,” and of course it doesn’t occur to the wingnuts that a fringe group would ever resort to padding and propaganda.

And if we’re going to play Joe McCarthy’s old “guilt by association” game, let’s talk about John McCain sitting on the board of the U.S. Council for World Freedom, a group linked to former Nazi collaborators and ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America.

Never mind that. The New Party and ACORN (boogaboogaboogabooga!) have infiltrated and hijacked the Democratic Party. See, the entire Democratic Party is nothing but a front for socialist world domination.

I wonder if we shouldn’t just open some Evil Empire amusement parks so that the wingnuts can act out their fantasies in a safer environment.

You know the Right has slipped its tether when even David Frum is telling them to chill out.

Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for a man who may well be the next president of the United States, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting.

A McCain supporter was arrested for threatening to empty his shotgun at the California Louisiana registrar’s office unless he got his voter registration card faster. Someone at a Palin-McCain rally shieks “kill him!” at the mention of Obama and Ayers. We’re going to be very lucky if no one else flips out and launches a killing spree.

End of an Empire

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Some are saying the United States is no longer the dominant world power it used to be. See, for example, “A shattering moment in America’s fall from power” by John Gray and “Financial Hubs See an Opening Up at the Top: Wall Street’s Long, Dominant Run Is Fading, Global Financiers Say” by Ariana Eunjung Cha in today’s New York Times.

A decline from Top Dog status is inevitable; what goes up must come down, nothing lasts forever, etc. I’d like to think that if Al Gore had become POTUS in 2001 the decline would have been long forestalled. But the fact is that the social pathology known as “American conservatism” would have used its media muscle to weaken Gore and push us toward the edge of the cliff, anyway.

The Tao brings all things to equilibrium. A nation puffed up with a myth of its own exceptionalism is asking to be deflated.

I’ve argued in the past that the U.S. has to choose between being a republic or an empire; we can’t be both. The American Right chose “empire.” But if we fail as an empire, as we seem to be doing, maybe we’ve got a shot at restoring a republic. We’ll see.

I thought of this today when I read Jonathan Freeland’s column at The Guardian — “This pansy-ass limey Brit won’t butt out — the US election is our business.” Three weeks ago, Freedland wrote a column saying the world would judge America harshly if we choose McCain over Obama. Naturally, this column inspired some spirited objections.

The counterblasts featured all the usual themes familiar to any columnist or blogger who wades into this terrain. America had saved Europe’s “ass” twice before — and we would doubtless come bleating for help again when we inevitably sought rescue from the Muslim hordes imposing sharia law on London, Paris and Berlin. We can’t defend ourselves, of course, because we are limp-wristed “Euroweenies”, effeminate socialists whose own decline robs us of the right to say anything about the United States, which remains the greatest nation on earth.

Britain specifically forfeited the right to meddle in US affairs more than two centuries ago, when it lost the War of Independence. Besides, Obama is a Marxist, so Europe is welcome to him. One Bill07407 managed to capture the flavour of this virtual avalanche — including the curiously homoerotic undercurrent that runs through much rightwing American invective — with this effort: “If you want Comrade Obama we will gladly ship him over after he loses in a landslide. Meanwhile you can kiss my ass. I bet you would enjoy it faggot.” Equally reflective, this from bioguy777: “I love it! A pansy-ass limey Brit begs the US to do his bidding while his own country slips further towards total Islamic rule. We’re electing McCain, and the rest of the world can piss up a rope if they don’t like it. 1776, BITCH!”

Brits may find this amusing. They don’t have to live with these creeps.

For too long, the myth of American exceptionalism has prevented us from dealing honestly and pragmatically with both foreign and domestic issues. Too many Americans seems to think our country is a fortress of might and plenty unto itself, and what goes on elsewhere has no effect on us. If what goes on elsewhere is not to our liking, we have the almighty U.S. military and and endless flow of wealth to set things right. And, of course, God is on our side.

We can endlessly analyze the social-psychological miswiring that causes this attitude. However, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to understand there’s a deeply buried existential fear at the core of the hair-on-fire need to feel “exceptional.”

Whatever the cause, can a majority of Americans come to understand that our superpower, top dog status is not what makes us a great nation? And that we might actually be a happier, saner and more stable nation if we forget about being a mighty empire and re-focus on being the best republic we can be?

***

Sort of along these lines, a few days ago columnist Kathleen Parker wrote that Sarah Palin is out of her league and should step down as veep candidate. Today she discusses the reaction —

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn’t, I should “off” myself. …

…Who says public discourse hasn’t deteriorated?

The fierce reaction to my column has been both bracing and enlightening. After 20 years of column writing, I’m familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.

This must be the first time she’s pissed off the Right.

My mail paints an ugly picture and a bleak future if we do not soon correct ourselves.

The picture is this: Anyone who dares express an opinion that runs counter to the party line will be silenced. That doesn’t sound American to me, but Stalin would approve.

Readers have every right to reject my opinion. But when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one’s own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk. (I hear you, Dixie Chicks.)

The thing is, there’s nothing new about this attitude. Anyone who has waded into the world of Free Republic has bumped into the “totalitarians for liberty” crowd. Or is it “libertarians for totalitarianism”? Whatever. We don’t call ’em wingnuts for nothing.

Whatever they are, wingnuts wrap themselves in the conceit that they are the mainstream and speak for the majority of Americans. If it ever dawns on them that they are, in fact, an unpopular minority faction, they are likely to become more dangerous.