Asymmetric Extremism

It comes down to this: what are the incentives to lie? Are they positive or negative? For Republican politicians, from both the standpoint of individual ambition and political ideology, they are 100% positive.

One cannot be nominated by the Republican party for higher office these days by acting the way David Broder wants the "older, wiser heads" of the GOP to act. Those alleged "older, wiser heads" have no constituency whatsoever, even assuming they exist (a proposition called into serious question by Charles Grassley and their ilk.)

And if you are ideologically opposed to health care reform, the most effective way to keep it from happening is (just as you've said) to spread so many lies that its proponents need to spend all their time fending them off.

In this case, ambition and ideology align completely. The kind of effort required to counter it? It would take the massive effort that the Obama campaign applied in last year's campaign, concerning nonsense like "Obama is a muslim who will take his oath of office on the Koran." And that would arguably take the same massive groundswell of support, so there are people *everywhere* who are responding to those insane viral emails with "that's not true, you KNOW it's not true, it's not nice to lie."

But -- it seems to me, I could be wrong -- many of Obama's supporters wonder, with reason, what it is he wants us to be supporting. Will it ultimately be worth fighting for? Many of us suspect (or are certain) that the Baucuses of the world will ultimately sell us out. The Republicans don't have this problem. They can just be passionately against anything the Democrats settle on, whatever it might turn out to be.

I like this post, Ezra, but I don't think it's a very far trip from your points to the following:

1) Electoral success is built on some amount of legislative success (and that's surely a debate as well), 2) Injecting huge amounts of crazy into a debate works against the legislative process, 3) One party is willing to inject the crazy into the process while one party restrains itself.

This seems to me to have a likely result of assisting the party that injects crazy into the process in mounting electoral victories.

bcamarda2: I agree with your sentiments, but I have made my decision to be one of the voices pushing for this legislation. This means going to the town halls and making sure the crazies don't shut it down; rounding up a group and going to our Senator's and Representative's offices, speaking with the staff, and dropping off hard copies of our health care stories and concerns; emailing and calling my Rep's office (who supports reform and the public option) to let him know I support him, etc. I agree with you - I would like to see Team Obama show some passion and grit on this issue. But I am not going to let my perception of less than optimal commitment from others determine my actions. When this is over, I'll be able to look back and say, "I did pretty much all I could."

I place the fault of the crazies dominating the discussion the first half of August squarely on the White House communications team. When they did not get their legislation before the August recess, they should have had a back up plan. They should have been ready with an entire media campaign that featured the ordinary citizens who are being squeezed and/or killed by the current healthcare system. Now they're putting it all on Obama and a few townhalls. It all could have been avoided with a back up media strategy. I know they're all exhausted because they haven't had a day off since the election. But c'mon.

john mccain has a lot to do with this.

from the moment he legitimized sarah palin by putting her on the vice-presidential ticket, in the hope of his own political gain, he empowered these fringe groups.
the forces working against change and progress, are powerful, evil and always present.
that force has a life of its own.
like cutting the snakes on medusa, it is more than fulltime and neverending work.
it isnt just an allegory, it is real life.
we have to keep fighting the good fight.
there is no other choice.

I continue to struggle to find the right words for how I see the right/GOP behaving. The closest I can come to is a total lack of maturity. That this is what passes for thoughtful, reasoned debate in this country just blows my mind. On a daily basis, I fight the urge to just drop out - to stop paying attention to any of it because I'm so tired of this craziness.

Claire McCaskill talked about having to use her "mother voice" on the protesters at one of her town halls, and that was exactly like I felt. If they're going to act like children, treat them like children. I know it won't keep the MSM from covering them as if they had any actual ideas to contribute, but I sure wish there were more voices out there calling out the "hold my nose until I turn blue" bunch for the children that they are.

I really appreciate seeing columns like this one written - Steve Perlstein (sp?) at the NYTimes had something similar the other day, 'The Crazy Tree' or the like. I am struggling with the despair about the knee-jerk extremism on the right, from self-appointed leaders of the right; maybe its because changing this mode of public discourse was one of the pillars of Obama's presidential campaign that hooked me early on. We fail as a nation, we have no possibility of sustained greatness and leadership in the world, if this is who we are as a culture. Forget about spin, outright vicious, violence-hinting lying, has become standard practice - that absolutely astonished me, and I wonder whether any issue would ever be immune from it. Perlstein argues this has been a long-standing practice of the right; Klein, Perlstein and others point out a recent, destructive change however - that being the media's coverage of blatently false extremism as if it is a legitimate opposing side of a debate. The media's inability to provide fact-based news coverage instead of conflict-centric entertainment, is such a danger to our nation in my view. Funny to hear anchors on CNN dismiss Rush Limbaugh as an entertainer, when they slide ever nearer to his model of speaking to the public. The thing is, I need a rational, intelligent opposition to listen to -- it helps me formulate my opinions. There are a few (desperate) commentators on the right praying for emergence of rational leaders and dialogue from their camp (David Frum for one), and some of them argue rationality and intellectualism on the right was what allowed conservatives to rise into political prominance in the 1990s. I wonder if that's true; has the right ever been able to convince the public to adopt their ideas without the fear-mongering, hate-inducing, me-now-to-hell-with-the-rest-of-society-including-my-kids, rhetoric? Do we hear nothing else from the right now because the republican party has shrunk to a small (hopefully) faction that chooses anger and hatefullness as a life-style? A paraphrase of Howard Fineman (Newsweek) may tell it all -- when the creek runs low, the muck at the bottom is exposed. The real question is why democrats or the left or progressives are so weak in the face of this behavior from such a marginal minority. President Obama may now be inclined to bless health care reform legislation that does absolutely nothing to address the debt and deficit multiplying that were the main reasons he made this issue central to his administration's first term. To have that result merely due to unconscienable uncivil behavior from the right would be a blow to change we wanted to believe in.

If the legislative process had put something clear and positive on the table by now, it would be dominating the news. If Obama had gotten behind one specific plan and pushed it, it would be dominating the news. Coverage of opposition on the right comes about because of disarray on the left.

You know what really hurts the legislative process and gives the media time to air crap about death panels? The 60 vote Democratic caucus allowing itself to be held hostage by Max Baucus and his Gang of Six. Pass a frakking bill already and the media would be talking about the bill, the signing ceremony, whatever is next on the Congressional agenda instead of the peak wingnut lie du jour.

'bcamarda2' is right. Red meat for his supporters, that does not sit well with this President. Agreed, there should not be pandering. But even his own principled stands may not be holding - 'bending the curve'.

With each passing day, for Obama's base it is clear that he will not be able to deliver anything substantial for them, specifically in regards to Health Care. He is struggling with 'cost control mantra' also, the major interest for conservatively leaning Democrats. So in the end people are going to question 'what the hell does he bring to the table then?'. If not much for the insured folks (controlling insurances, there is bi-partisan consensus for that; that cannot be Obama's victory alone), let us walk away then.

These are dog days for Obama supporters as well as in the end for any, average, American.

The one silver lining is that, when a health care bill finally passes (and something will pass, even if it's not the bill we want), then come 2010 and 2012, there will be a lot of GOP candidates who will have said enough dumb, crazy, or offensive things that they'll basically have to give up on winning any of the Purple states again. Which, yes, leaves us with a tasty reduction sauce of crazy from the people in safe seats. But it also means more moderate Democrats who can be counted on to do the right thing most of the time instead of almost none of the time.

I have to wonder what the result would be if, instead of responding to the crazy, the Administration talked about the stuff they want the people to hear. And when they get questions in a press conference about euthanasia panels, to say straight from the shoulder, "To the extent that Congressman Bohener actually believes what he's saying, he's nuttier than a fruitcake."

I seem to remember Howard Dean stating that he was agnostic on whether Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks before they happened.

Ezra asks "I wonder if that's true; has the right ever been able to convince the public to adopt their ideas without the fear-mongering, hate-inducing, me-now-to-hell-with-the-rest-of-society-including-my-kids, rhetoric?"

I think the answer is yes - the dominant methodology of "rational" analysis of policy making over the last two generations has been conservative in it's deep skepticism about the possibility of government to attain the public good. This methodological stance has convinced people through argument, at least as much as most social scientific ideas do, and has seeped so deeply into the conventional wisdom that many on the left now take it for granted.

However, the arguments for this conservative stance are flawed, and fail to account for actual governmental successes.

For the details I refer you "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" by David Moss and Mary Oey, a chapter in the forthcoming volume "Government & Markets: Toward a New Theory of Regulation" to be published by Cambridge University Press this fall:

http://www.tobinproject.org/twobooks

In essence, the media and its reporting practices and standards are acting like zombie bots enabling a massive denial of service attack on the nation's available bandwidth for sensible discussion about health care and health insurance.

A good point. However Sarah Palin, who would seem to be exhibit A for the prosecution, (thankfully) no longer holds public office.

"If you think back to Medicare Part D, or No Child Left Behind, there just wasn't a similar dynamic."

These also had bipartisan support. The Dem health bills - which are much more far reaching and consequential - do not. From a Republican standpoint - and increasingly that of the American public - no bill is preferrable to any currently under consideration.

As tempting as it is for Dems to blame declining support for their health care plan on right-wingers' antics, they should get off their high horses and look at:

(1) polls which show that by 3-1 Americans say it is more important to get health care costs under control than to expand coverage;

(2) polls which show increasing alarm over the size of the deficit/debt;

(3) polls which show Americans feel the stimulus has ineffective and/or wasteful;

(4) the CBO's repeated conclusions that the various Dem plans it has analyzed will not control costs and will add substantially to the deficit.

So now you have the Dems changing tack and trying to whip up privately insured voters' insecurities. They are not addressing Americans' biggest stated concern with respect to health care.

Oh, and btw, the Dems are holding their own when it comes to "extremism" and Pelosi is on record previously as having said she thought such antics were praiseworthy when in support of a cause she deemed worthy.

"Pelosi is on record previously as having said she thought such antics were praiseworthy when in support of a cause she deemed worthy."

No, that was Barry Goldwater.

tbass, Medicare Part D was bipartisan because Democrats actually care about doing the business of the goverment. Republicans have made it quite clear that other than a couple moderates (pretty much just Snowe and Collins at this point) they're going to vote against pretty much every piece of legislation presented by Democrats. Even the people supposedly negotiating a bipartisan bill are saying they wouldn't even vote for a bill that they thought would be good for the country.

Face it, Republicans just don't take governing seriously.

THANK YOU for making this point, and I try to bring it up with anyone who tries to equivocate with that "both sides do it" trash. When Rush Limbaugh says something to millions of people, it's a bit different than a blogger's rant. Simply put, the left distances itself from their crazies; the right embraces them as model citizens.

P.S. ever notice how opinion polls are only supposed to matter when Democrats are in charge?

I agree to the extent that a fringe element, distracting to a productive legislative process, does indeed exist; however, I must include BOTH Howard Dean and Sarah Palin in that distracting group, with the express clarification that Palin has been at least mainstream enough to receive her own party's nomination for high office.

To elevate the voice of unelectable extremists like Howard Dean above that of other ordinary citizens just erroneous as it was to elevate the voice of Jerry Falwell above other ordinary citizens.