Out of Control
“When reality does not match your assumptions, check your assumptions.”, Long-forgotten University of Georgia philosophy professor, 1989.
My ex-wife told me a number of times that the thing which bothered me the most is when things weren’t “fair”. Now, I’m perfectly fine with lopsided battles – Michael Spinks got paid well for his 91 seconds against Mike Tyson, for example – but unsportsmanlike conduct? No. Changing the rules of the game in the middle of it? Fuck that, the rules are the rules. Even changing the very nature of the game in your pursuit of winning? No.
There was something troubling about how easy Dubya won the 2000 Republican nomination. He was anointed, anointed early, and that was that. Being full-on team Conservative, I, too, was outraged by the unfairness of Al Gore withdrawing his concession, and eagerly awaited the recounting of the votes to determine the real winner.
And what I saw, on my side, was just… disgusting. Limbaugh ramps up the hate to levels where I effectively turn him off for good, only listening when major events occurred like 9/11, Obama’s 2008 win, etc. The lawsuits to stop the recount and just declare Dubya the winner. The actual design of the “butterfly ballot” itself, obviously designed to confuse the voters for the purpose of drawing off Al Gore votes, giving them to Pat Buchanan. Not many voters, but maybe enough, and in 2000, enough people were, (imho), purposely confused by this design to throw the national election.
Not that it mattered because the Bush team committed the gravest sin of all: They stopped the vote count and had the Supreme Court of the United States declare him the victor. At the time I was OK with this… it was ugly, but the nation needed to “move on” (lol, sound familiar?) When the FL Supreme Court ordered a recount (there were up to 61k uncounted votes), the Bush team immediately petitioned Scalia, who strongarmed the USSC into stopping the count, with Stephens dissenting, noting that “counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm.”
But it does if you’re a Republican. Which, of course, is the point.
Well, that’s just great. My guy won, but under shitty circumstances, with the courts showing me they are willing to overturn democracy for the technocratic demands of the law. The principle is to count every vote, but technically, the law says votes have to be certified by THIS SPECIFIC date, so principles be damned – there’s a deadline! It’s right there! In paper, and everything!
Hopefully, this was an aberration and Bush and his team of crack, experienced advisors will be able to continue the 90s record of peace and prosperity, right?
I do not need to go into the problems of the Bush Presidency, they are well documented, having occurred in the Internet age. 9/11. Iraq, where thousands of American troops were introduced to PTSD’s and crippling injuries, all while destroying a functioning society by the means of killing over 100,000 civilians, in revenge for an attack Iraq did not plan, in search of weapons of mass destruction which never existed, this madness supported by the conservative, Republican establishment. The Great Recession. The growing reliance on whipping up social and cultural issues to drive civic engagement, like the insane debate re: Terry Schiavo.
And all this I watched, with growing disillusionment and a dawning sense of horror - Is this who we are? It seemed as if the worst elements of the party, the ones I thought we “rationals” could control, were infecting otherwise solid men and women. The whining of Rush became the party platform as people who listened to him for a decade + started getting into office, echoing his grievance politics.
And the intellectual underpinnings I relied on began to buckle. Bush’s economy sputtered at best, then crashed, causing me to wonder about the efficacy of those conservative solutions put into place– perhaps getting rid of Glass-Steagall wasn’t the greatest idea in the world?
Perhaps deregulated financial markets are not necessarily self-correcting?
Perhaps capitalism, despite the arguments of Ayn Rand, Hayek, and others… perhaps it really isn’t a moral system which demands honesty in all transactions, but… maybe it’s just another con?
Maybe Selfishness isn’t a virtue?
Perhaps the United States… rapidly turning into a post-industrial Hyperstate… perhaps it really can’t be run like a New England town hall, no matter how romantic the notion sounds?
And, holy shit, if you look around the country, it really is falling apart, with a lot of people suffering and a bunch of infrastructure looking old and worn out – maybe we could address this obvious problem?
(And, ZS, to the question of opinions which were “entirely uncontroversial or even liberal 20 years ago”… the people responsible for promulgating those positions have been found not to even have believed in them, and the positions themselves fall apart under scrutiny. Perhaps if we could be told of one of these beliefs which has befallen your description, I may be able to address it directly.)
The Crash
“We’re going to do everything… and I mean everything… to kill it.”, Republican House Majority Leader John Boehner discussing President Obama’s first-term agenda, 2010.
The conservatism I grew up with died on November 4th, 2008.
I didn’t realize it then despite having cast my first vote ever for a Democratic candidate, and I don’t think most Americans understood it either. And, of course, ‘old time conservatism’ – that of small government, low regulation, fiscal and personal responsibility, and a dedication to fairness – it didn’t die immediately, no, it stumbled around for a few years akin to an Opera diva who caterwauls for 20 minutes after having been stabbed in the chest.
For a week or two, I was actually intrigued by the Tea Party. I had deluded myself that it was a reaction to Bush’s handling of the economy (it hurts to admit I was this stupid, but it may be good to get it off my chest), but it did not take long to realize that the party had nothing to do with economic justice, the organization existing solely so the Republican establishment could wipe their ass with TP’d Obama hate.
To me, the Great Recession is when conservative economics lost any pretense to validity. Not only had this problem been caused by policies reflecting the conservative viewpoint, the solutions… or lack of… proposed by the GOP did nothing but inflict pain on the very people they were to elected to help.
And it was obvious that, despite conservative opposition, the Obama programs did work, at least, as much as they were allowed to work. GM didn’t go under. We didn’t enter a vast, long Depression ala 1929-1935 or 1873-1878 though there was every expectation we were about to do so. (I lost a job because of that PowerPoint presentation!) Obamacare did not have any of the problems forecast by conservatives – job losses, productivity losses, losses in US competitiveness, inflation – and, while problematic, did achieve goals it set out to achieve, and all for the general betterment of America, not the specific betterment of some Americans.
The conservatives? They did nothing. Absolutely nothing. Spent the entire period from 2009-onward without forwarding a single policy idea other than hating Obama, tax cuts, and voter suppression. Regardless of the issue, regardless of the need, regardless of the pain, their answer was always “no”.
And then the inevitable happened: Fueled by a growing disassociation from the main society via the creation of internet bubbles, in a country where structural racism is in our very framework, every person to whom racial animus is their #1 issue… every one of them started going to the Republicans.
Slowly, at first, brought in by the Tea Party, whose supporters understood the underlying racial message better than I did, these new conservatives were not interested in traditional economic conservatism but in the anger fueled by their TP congressman, with Limbaugh, always Limbaugh, but now buttressed by Boortz, Savage, Hannity, Carlson, more, all talking in the background fueling the white cultural grievance machine, aided and abetted by the internet and social media.
And this was when the GOP officially left me. While I voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, there were tons of R votes on my down-ballot. But the people I voted for didn’t care about any of that old time conservatism and, by now, I didn’t either. It was bullshit. We weren’t going to get rid of any departments. We weren’t going to get any term limits. We even went to war with the wrong people after 9/11! Hell, you could build arguments showing the Repubs sucked at economic policy compared to the Democrats and have done so since 1869.
In the end, it was a philosophy which overlooked cruelty for profits – you can ask my Dad: just read his quote above.
This is where things stood in 2014: The conservatives/Republicans had largely shed any pretense of Reagan-era conservatism, except to mouth them at rallies and speeches, and were quickly pivoting to a political party focused on cultural grievance and white identity politics.