Return of Bircherism

The Tennessee General Assembly passes a delusionally paranoid, anti-UN resolution against Agenda 21. The fact that it's anti-environmental? Bonus!

WHEREAS, according to the United Nations Agenda 21 policy, social justice is described as the right and opportunity of all people to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment which would be accomplished by socialist/communist redistribution of wealth

This sounds like the John Birch Society bullshit (h/t @Trace Sharp) I heard growing up in Tennessee 40 years ago, and sure enough it is. Don't any of them wonder how we're still free if fluoridation was a communist conspiracy to drug us all into sheep-like obedience?

Rick Perlstein (h/t Paul Krugman) notes that the crazy conservatives have been with us a long time - longer than we've called them wingnuts.

[A]longside the ordinary tacking of American political preference between Democrats and Republicans, conservatism continues to thrive. That's because power begets power: Democrats can be counted on to compromise with conservative nuttiness, and the media can be counted on to normalize it. And it's because there will always be millions of Americans who are terrified of social progress and of dispossession from whatever slight purchase on psychological security they've been able to maintain in a frightening world. And because there will always be powerful economic actors for whom exploiting such fear, uncertainty and doubt pays (and pays, and pays).

Conservatism is not getting crazier, and it's not going away, either. It's just getting more powerful. That's a fact that a reality-based liberal just has to accept – and, from it, draw strength for the fight.

What we had until Ronald Reagan and talk radio brought them out of the darkness was a social norm that scoffed at the fever swamp of ultra-conservative imagination. Well, nationally, not in the South. We no longer have that moderating national norm, which is really depressing, and the continuing reason wingnuts are so sensitive to any norm that limits their various and sundry bigotries.

Still, it's hopeful to look back with a gimlet eye and see that we liberals have overcome the wingnuts before. Now, to do it again.

Update: Lest I get too optimistic, more lunacy on Agenda 21.

Why truth is more important than civility

Republicans can only win if they lie. But they can only lie successfully if no one names them liars.

When one side breaks the social contract, and the other side makes a virtue of never calling them out on it, the liar always wins. When it becomes "uncivil" to call out liars, lying becomes free.

Al Franken knows this, and he knows the wrath of the wingnuts when resisted by truth, especially truth told by mocking the hero of the right-wing lie, large or small, Rush Limbaugh.

I have been telling friends for more than a decade that we Democrats must destroy the credibility of Republicans ourselves. The media is too cowed - and bought off - to do it. After twenty-five years, we should have learned that.

The only way for Democrats to win is for us to say bluntly and consistently when confronted with a lie: That's a lie and you're a liar if you repeat that.

And we need to follow up by connecting the dots:

You can't trust Republicans to tell you the true facts. You can't trust Republicans to interpret facts in good faith. You can't trust Republicans to have your interests at heart. The Republican Party exists for the purpose of fooling you into helping the wealthy take an ever-larger slice of the pie, while telling you how lucky you are to be getting the stale crumbs.

Over and over and over and over again until the message sinks into members of a culture besotted by bullshit.

Party crashers

Any political coalition large enough to elect a President has internecine conflicts. While the Democrats' differences have been starkly visible for all of the past fifty years (remember when the House wanted a veto-proof majority against Jimmy Carter?), Republicans have been better at closing ranks and presenting a unified front to the world.

Remarkably, despite their thorough beatings the last two election cycles, Congressional Republicans are still united in fealty to discredited economic ideology (low taxation of the wealthy solves all problems) and to anti-sex social conservatism. Sure, there have been prominent dissenters from the GOP party line in the Senate, but the hold of Delayism over the party is choking and almost complete even with John Boehner running it.

Outside Congress in the semi-real world, however, Republican electoral losses have turned the smug self-satisfaction of 2004 into wild unpredictable panic. Who's going to run the party? Surely not Rush Limbaugh, although the wealthy owners of the GOP believe he's still in their camp and know they can't afford to offend him.

Michael Steele is certainly not going to run the GOP. Since he lacks a national constituency, he never was. He was a seat-warmer from the beginning, a way of kicking the can down the road while the factions prepared for their confrontation.

Sarah Palin, who as a world class narcissist is a couple of standard deviations beyond even the commonly narcissistic run of politicians, thinks she should be in charge. That would be hysterical if it weren't so scary.

Palin looks like a threat to take her "gun-toting, churchgoing, working-class whites" and go to a new party, uh, vanity candidacy. I've often advocated a new conservative party to supplant the Republican Party, which I view as irredeemable, but Palin's loose coalition of Idiocrats is not the responsible center-right counterbalance I hope for. A successful Palin party would end the United States (not that I think its success would be likely).

The GOP elites that Rick Perlstein reports on in Newsweek are not the elites that matter. What matters is funding, and Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and David Brooks are recipients of funding, not nearly so much originators of it. They disagree about Palin, and that's fun to watch, but that's more about the media and general election politics than it is about internal power struggles.

What we're really seeing is the tension that was always there between the three major factions of the GOP. The policies that have really mattered to the party have benefited the wealthies. The bullies and the fundies have had to do with table scraps, and they've noticed again that they don't get the respect they believe they deserve. As always, Grover Norquist's anti-tax management faction has to find a way to pacify the Republican rank and file, who are full of people who don't benefit from Republican economic policies.

Conservative so-called intellectuals don't actually matter in this fight. They are tools to shoehorn propaganda into the media. Perlstein gives them outsize importance.