When was the last time you heard a specific indictment of the failures of modern Conservatism?
Not on a liberal blog. Nor in a progressive magazine. But bluntly before low-information America. A scathing point-by-point indictment of Conservatism absolutely unambiguously 'naming names'.
It's actually kind of amazing how mind-meltingly easy Conservatism has it considering the mess.
Legions of very intelligent people outside of the American Right have been predicting that perpetually malignant Republican behavior would eventually lead to an inevitable tipping point. The idea was that there would be a fundamentally self-inflicted political reckoning for the GOP. 'One day, the Republicans will go too far! Then the American people will make them all pay!' Sadly, this great comeuppance via rolling ball of their own garbage has never ever materialized. If anything? The false hope that low-information voters will magically act as high information voters, all thanks to the GOP finally finding that line that is their fatal one to cross, is a mirage.
The ACA is under fire, again, by bad faith-fueled wingnut zealots. RW Robes and Suits edition. Only more is at stake than just another impotent House GOP Repeal-No Replace waste of time. This time? Real and lasting structural damage could be done to the ACA if the Scalito gang takes a 5-4 bite at the bad faith apple. Maybe we dodge this bullet. But maybe not. As we leave the DHS funding manufactured crisis behind, one could be forgiven for needing a program to keep track of all of the Conservative political terrorism going on at any given time to dread. No organized crime outfit on Earth enjoys Conservatism's utterly consequences-free existence.
Besides the pushback about the "fatal four words" attack on the ACA itself, something else should catch and hold your attention. Some familiar organizations helped to make this possible.
Shortly after the A.C.A. passed, in 2010, a group of conservative lawyers met at a conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, and scoured the nine-hundred-page text of the law, looking for grist for possible lawsuits. Michael Greve, a board member of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian outfit funded by, among others, the Koch brothers, said, of the law, “This bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene. I do not care how this is done, whether it’s dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, whether we strangle it.” In time, lawyers hired by the C.E.I. discovered four words buried in Section 36B, which refers to the exchanges—now known as marketplaces—where people can buy health-insurance policies. The A.C.A. created federal tax subsidies for those earning less than a certain income to help pay for their premiums and other expenses, and, in describing who is eligible, Section 36B refers to exchanges “established by the State.” However, thirty-four states, most of them under Republican control, refused to create exchanges; for residents of such states, the law had established a federal exchange. But, according to the conjurings of the C.E.I. attorneys, the subsidies should be granted only to people who bought policies on the state exchanges, because of those four words in Section 36B. The lawyers recruited plaintiffs and filed a lawsuit; their goal is to revoke the subsidies provided to the roughly seven and a half million people who were left no choice by the states where they live but to buy on the federal exchange.
Hard Cases By Jeffrey Toobin The New Yorker March 9, 2015 Issue
Wow.
Those lovely folks who gave us the Iraq War, and whose ideology set the stage for a Second Great Depression? They may have found a way to strip millions of their affordable care. At last. Which, of course, brings around the dire predictions about how this time the Right, if they do this, or this happens, wow, they are so screwed. This time? This is the one that is too much! Too far! This time! This is the time they pay a price for their actions. This? People will get this. Low-information will be as high-information voter. Odds are? Nope. Low-info Joe has not a clue.
It's 2015.
Movement Conservatism? Conservatism itself? It all should be about as credible as Communism.
Instead, as a brand, an ideology, it is as crisp and as clean as a brand new white cotton sheet.
Which is remarkable, really.
If you can think of a dead-wrong assumption that can be made in the realms of governance (town, city, state, or federal), economics (local, regional, national, or global), education (public and private, K-12 to College), foreign policy (in times of war and peace), or in the mechanics of how a society evolves and responds? Be it about basic maintenance, or disaster relief, or any manner or form of security crisis, opportunity, or growth? Movement Conservatism has gotten it wrong. Not just wrong, epically wrong, dangerously wrong, tragically and lingeringly wrong. Wrong on grand levels of scope and scale that require their messes to be cleaned-up after for years and years to come. And yet, here we are. Again. And again. And again. And again.
Hearing the words "The American Enterprise Institute" should elicit a thermonuclear glare.
Nope. No matter how big the messes? No matter how deep or how low lasting the crises?
The brand, the ideology, and the organizational tools of Movement Conservatism are never singled-out for blame. Conservatism is a widely tried and hugely failed disaster. But to the average low-information Joe? If he hears "Conservative Think Tank" he thinks of a place where smart people think up new and novel ideas. It's never driven home, again and again and again, just how great a factor modern Conservatism is in our paralyzed public culture of mainstreamed hostage taking, nomination blackmailing, manufactured governance crises, and crippling planned obstructionism. At some point? It is an entirely faith-based idea that the Right will self-implode.
Yes, they have access to lots and lots of money. But they also don't have to use that ocean of money to defend Conservatism, or their track record, so they are both hugely funded and fully free to use all of it to keep on offense and do more harm. Conservatism, like 'The Dude', abides.
This matters. It all plays a direct roll in how we keep ending up sabotaged or screwed.
Conservatism has no ownership over anything that it has ever done to do Americans harm. Republican politicians, RW pundits, and culture war celebrities are all completely disposable syringes. Human delivery devices. They aren't important. That drug they deliver is, and its fine.
That's amazing, really.
Movement Conservative policy will kill, injure, and sicken more innocent Americans than every terrorist attack ever committed by any terrorist group that has ever tried to attack this nation in its entire history combined. By a massive margin. ISIS cannot take millions of Americans and unceremoniously dump them into crisis-level poverty over time with the wave of a pen. Al Qaida cannot deny millions of Americans who are in desperate need of healthcare access to that care with a hammered-down gavel or a bad faith-fueled appeal to another zealot in robes. Boko Haram cannot take desperately needed food away from millions and millions of hungry American children with a position paper and an unscheduled late night vote. Movement Conservatism can. If a foreign power did to Kansas what Brownback's cult of origin did to it, we'd likely be at war.
If people were going to get it on their own? The shift would have happened a long time ago.
Nothing that the Movement Conservative Right does is at all self-discrediting in current politics. No failure. No overreach. No blackmail forced shutdown. No political hostage crisis. No economic disaster. No own goal. No war without end. No cheat, ratfuck, scam, or lie. The GOP doesn't own any of those assumed to be blatantly obvious as to be self-discrediting failures non-Conservatives assume that they own, and neither does Conservatism as a tried and failed governing philosophy. The proof? Look around at our country. At the town, state, and national level. Autopsy the saga of the ACA, up to and including the "fatal four words" threat that has it before the Supreme Court today. Big Tobacco wants to know where it can sign up for this deal.
The ACA ordeal, every minute of it, has been one constant and painful lesson in both seeing the Right as it is, not as you might wish they would be, and tactically acting accordingly, from start to finish but in stopping giving the low-information voter any undue credit at all. Now this.
“This bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene. I do not care how this is done, whether it’s dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, whether we strangle it.”
Four words. Seven million people. For a malicious hope to catastrophically strip innocent legions of their new access to affordable care. Why? Well, its simple. It's 'a matter of political hygiene.'
What are the odds that anyone you might randomly stop tomorrow knows this is how they roll? Right now? It's "hyperbolic" and "beyond the pale" to quote it, but not for them to have said it. How's that working out? We get told to be less divisive, while they turn America into Kochistan. I don't think 'outlast it' is any more viable than waiting for erosion to dissolve away a rock wall.
The only thing the American Right truly understands is the politics of the political bloody nose. They do what they do, until you force them to finally stop. The only way to make them stop is by making whatever it is that they are doing exceed their (rather surprisingly, and very gallingly considering how respectfully they've been treated as a threat, limited) political pain threshold.
At this point I would strongly advocate for a low-information voters variation of this brutal rule.
The only thing that the low-information voter obviously understands is the political bloody nose. If you don't bloody the GOP's nose? The low-information voter concludes you are admitting they are right, else you wouldn't take it. If you don't blame their failed ideology? Specifically? This matters too. It's like the adult version of the law of the school yard. If you do nothing, say nothing? Leave it alone assuming the truth is obvious to see? Its taken as a default admission that you admit it's all true. No indictment of Conservatism? That is taken as a tacit admission that Conservatism is right. An admission of defeat, guilt, and conceding the argument. If this weren't so? The Democratic Party would be the most dominant force in American public life, and the GOP would be a marginalized joke the Kochs kept on life support.
The Great Bamboozled aren't going to blame the Right if their ideology doesn't ever get a fight.