View From The Asylum

America is now so politically unstable that its constant lurching about has finally caught the attention of people who like to disregard politics and attend only to making money. It was their view of the political crisis that tipped S&P into downgrading US bonds. Yes the deficit is a problem that started them worrying, but it was the obvious fact that our political collapse prevents any form of sensible discussion about deficit that finally made a downgrade necessary. In my view they should have gone further. Such is the grip of the extreme right wing on our political system, and so inane are the policies being presented from that group, that our debt should have been downgraded even further. Lest you think I am being partisan: there were enough voices on the right claiming that a default was either no big deal or was necessary in order to get “Washington’s attention”. Yes, they advocated economic catastrophe as a legitimate political weapon. That is neither responsible nor constructive.

That is extraordinary. It is evil. It is astoundingly unbalanced, ill informed, dangerous, and just plainly stupid.

But it is the standard we now get from the right. The notion of a centrist Republican is both quaint and distant. The current crop of presidential candidates has taken collective leave of their senses and wandered off even more rightward. I never imagined it was possible to get more extreme. I was wrong.

That this is now concerning the Republican old guard is one of life’s more amusing current spectacles. Even the Wall Street Journal – nowadays little more than a Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece – ripped them all in a major editorial. When Murdoch, hardly a balanced shrinking violet, thinks someone is too far to the right, civilized people need to start worrying. The WSJ, after dismissing the entire group as unsuitable for the presidency, called for new faces – Chris Christie or Paul Ryan seem to be their preferences – and quite openly started the campaign to downgrade Romney, Bachmann, and Perry in particular.

The problem that the Republicans have is that their core voters are way off the charts in extremist land. A recent study found that the gap between the two ideological wings of American voters is the widest in 120 years. This division stemming entirely from the drift to the distant right on the part of the Republicans. The Democrats occupy most of the same positions they have for decades.

Last weekend’s straw poll in Iowa was a totally meaningless event because of the extremist views of those attending. Iowa has the most extreme core of Republican voters in the country consisting as it does of a mix of religious fanatics and neo-libertarians. Understandably Bachmann won. She is a bona fide nutcase. But she also represents very well a group of voters who resent pretty much everything about modern America. She, like a lot of American politicians, is a religious zealot. She is socially conservative and thus out of step with the average American voter. She has also said she would oppose extending unemployment insurance for our jobless workers; she would repeal bank reform; she would repeal health care reform; she would advocate a constitutionally enforced balanced Federal budget; and she was one of those who spoke about default as proper and sensible way forward. Nowhere has she addressed the outcomes of all of this. She, like most Republicans are staunch advocates of free market magic and small government, no matter that the vast majority, not just of Americans, but of Republican supporters are passionately attached to their entitlement programs. This is no economic program, but it resonates well with the extremists who constitute the Tea Party, who thus rally around Bachmann as their leader.

Perry is new to the race. Typically anyone entering at this point has a hard job in overcoming the more established candidates, but, such is the disarray, he has in just three days leapt to the front to challenge the consensus front runner Romney. Perry is from Texas so his language and demeanor are larger than life and his record distorted by his home state oddity. He is seen as strong on the economy because Texas has added so many jobs even in the depths of the recession. Those jobs tend to be minimum wage, but that is not an obstacle to his claim that we need more, not less, deregulation; that we need to defang unions even more; and that we need to carve government down further to open more space for private enterprise to drive us all forward on the wings of an investment surge. That Texas has actually performed less well, in percentage terms, than high tax, big government, and left of center Massachusetts doesn’t seem to get much of a mention. That would ruin the right wing narrative, and upset Perry’s chances of election. So the truth will have to be ignored. Then there’s Perry’s absurd statements about the Fed. He argued clearly that he thinks any attempt to use monetary policy to boost the economy is treasonous. Printing money would, he said, debase the currency and may succeed in getting us moving. In which case Perry might not get elected. Apparently this is his definition of treason. His recent advocacy of Texas seceding from the United States – because it is now run by a socialist – is OK though. Ugh.

Set beside Bachmann and Perry, Romney is the epitome of rectitude and good sense. Which, naturally, makes him hard to understand. His supporters seem to think he is the centrist in the race, and, indeed, that he was governor of Massachusetts appears to support that notion. Which is exactly why he is pariah to the right, thus making his road to the nomination very difficult. His health care reform was the model for Obama’s. This is somewhat awkward for the Republicans who revile all things Obama. He made a few half hearted comments about the debt default before falling into line and saying he opposed it. Apart from that it is very hard to tell what his economic policies would be. All we get is a steady trickle of supply side sounding stuff and evasions about substance. Romney, thus far, has chosen now, the middle of a storm, to avoid saying anything about what he might do were he to win. This is normal Romney tactics – he has a record of being whatever is necessary to win elections. His views are thus all over the lot. He is the ultimate chameleon, and hardly the solid leader we need to make the hard decisions that lie ahead.

So I agree with the WSJ, this is a rum bunch, none of whom should ever reach the White House. They are simply irresponsible and hugely dangerous to our way of life. This despite the pretense of protecting said way of life. But the WSJ, and its owner, is being disingenuous. After all it too has piled on with virulent anti-Obama bile ever since he was elected, and it tolerated the enormously irresponsible fiscal policies of his predecessor out of blind ideological loyalty. Only when the tide of extremist insanity rose high enough to threaten the profits of big business, did the WSJ realize that it had invoked a populist movement that it no longer could control. I need not mention the role played by Murdoch’s primary vehicle of propaganda – his Fox News Network – in destabilizing, energizing, and indoctrinating our right of center voters. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, Murdoch cannot control his troops. They are marching ever more to the right and threatening his newspaper’s advertisers and subscribers.

All of this is encapsulated nicely in a conversation I had a few days ago with an acquaintance whom I talk with maybe once a month. He is a late middle aged salesman for a steel manufacturer. He is a solid Republican. And he would appear for all the world to be a good, honest citizen. Except he is embittered and deeply anti-social. Although I am sure he would deny being so. In his words: America is spent. It is finished. Why? Unions. Illegal immigrants who leech off hard working people like himself. High taxes. Socialist entitlement programs paid for by those high taxes. Obama. Obama. Obama. Unemployed layabouts who do not deserve to be supported. Unfair Chinese competition. Oh, and Islamic designs to undo Christianity here in America. Because of all this he supported going into default rather than raising taxes. In his view the country is already destroyed, so any further damage is incidental. He is absolutely opposed to the US taking any more debt because he will have to pay it off while the layabouts and leeches get a free ride. Plus he doesn’t believe that debt is something a properly run home should have, so nor should a properly run nation. Unless that debt pays for the military, in which case, as a patriot, he is willing to make an exception. So Reagan’s debt is OK. So too was Bush’s. There were wars to fight. But Obama, being a socialist, has run up unnecessary and wrongheaded debt.

Here’s the culmination of his argument: it would be better to fall into depression than use debt to fend it off. Only through the pain of depression will the layabouts, the illegal immigrants, and the other leeches be purged. If that pain is deep and long lasting, so be it.

There is no counter argument to this mix of bitterness, cynicism, small mindedness, self-pity, and social antipathy. That someone could reveal all this in the space of less than an hour, and be profoundly attached to it all, astonished me. The seething hatred and loathing of what modern America has become that undergirds this outpouring shocked me. I had no response. My standard Keynesian answers merely stirred up more hatred. Yet I feel he is a good person. He has been relentlessly misinformed and misled. His views are genuine. His attitude is hardened by the recession and the fact that his employer has downsized violently to survive. The constant drumbeat of hatred spewed out by the likes of Murdoch has been sufficiently divisive that someone like this person, who ought to be a pillar of society, so reviles it that he actually argues for its downfall.

Burn the village to save the village.

America has fallen into a spasm of extremist rage. It has gone mad.

The inmates have risen up. The asylum has run amok. What do we do now?