Tea Party Revanchism

After meeting last night with Speaker of the House John Boehner, along with Senate majority leader Harry Reid and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, Obama's stated position is that "grand bargain" talks on the federal budget can begin once the government reopens with a clean funding resolution and the debt ceiling is raised.

Republicans promptly rejected this. They have no intention of giving up their leverage, which is what agreeing to Obama's conditions would entail. The GOP has no wish to enter into negotiations. Republicans have been sidestepping budget talks for the entire year. They have no intention of giving something up to get something in return. They think that Obama can be made to cave in.

Already sights are set on October 17, the deadline when the federal government reaches the debt ceiling. The Tea Party now sees that once you go over the brink, as it has with the government shutdown, it no longer provides any strategic advantage; in fact, it becomes a liability.

And that's where we are at now. Can the Tea Party caucus wagging the dog in the House remain intact for the next two weeks until the next brink, the debt ceiling deadline?

There was a sharp drop off from late morning on yesterday in interest in the government shutdown. I measure this by the number of stories that appear on the Google News page and the chatter among my office coworkers. So there is the possibility that the country could muddle along for the next two weeks with a government shutdown as the new normal. But bit by bit the GOP will suffer, and overall there is no question that they are losing the propaganda war. I am doubtful that House Republicans can hold out until October 17. Obama is putting Wall Street to work on lobbying the GOP leadership. This might not bear fruit this week -- I originally thought the Tea Party would be deflated by Friday -- but I bet by next week Boehner will be ready to release a "clean CR" for a vote.

The Tea Party, which is the populist base of the current Republican Party, is based on nostalgia for a time that we haven't seen in this country since the full employment and social and racial homogeneity of the 1960s. The Tea Party's revanchism is founded on a desire to return to the past -- before Vietnam was recognized as the quagmire it was, before the Black Panthers, before Haight-Ashbury spread to every large city in the nation -- when factory jobs were still plentiful and rents inexpensive and the suburbs were new and futuristic.

I've been reading an excellent history of The Chocolate Watchband, a 1960s Garage Punk Psychedelic band from the San Jose suburbs, written by lead singer David Aguilar. Aguilar captures the essence of the middle-60s -- the raw power -- that I believe to be at the heart of Tea Party revanchism:

It was the spring of 1966. It was a very different world than what it is today. 

Using the words of Tom Shachtman, "America was a monster. Our booming economy was one leg of the colossus and the other was our Military might. In the world, only the Soviets and we counted. We believed our environment and natural resources were virtually limitless. We were certain American ingenuity, technological virtuosity, and money could solve the world's problems. We believed Americans could fix anything and that nuclear missiles, the ultimate weapons of destruction, could actually keep us from having a global war. On the ladder of life, youth was expected to start at the bottom and creep upward as described by the system. In other words, the ladder of success was a long and arduous climb everybody had to make to succeed in this world. We lived in a dream of constant upward mobility. It was powered by never-ending consumption. We knew how much people above us were earning because it was reflected in the things they owned." 

The Watchband lived in nuclear families in identical little patio homes in the suburbs of San Jose. The nuclear family consisted of a man and woman, married for the first and only time to each other, living together with their natural 2.4 children with a cat and dog thrown in for good measure. Single-parent families were rare and the thought of one was difficult to comprehend to our society. Mark's dad had passed away when he was 2 and his mother had never remarried. He was the exception in the group. We all went to the same schools, studied the same things, and had the same teachers our brothers and sisters had. At school we dressed up in costumes for Halloween, planted trees on Arbor Day, sent tiny little punch-out paper hearts around for Valentine's Day and had both Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays off. We obeyed most of the rules, feared discipline from our parents if we screwed up, and any young woman getting pregnant paid the penalty of either being banished to a relatives' house until delivery and adoption took place or was she ushered immediately into the wedding chapel. If it was before the sixth month, she got to wear white. There were no ifs, ands or buts about this one. Single mothers and inter-racial marriages were unheard of. FM radio was called "Underground Radio" because they played songs longer than 3 minutes in length and didn't have a lot of commercials. TV went off the air at 1 AM and came back on at 6 AM. Milky Ways and Snickers cost a nickel and Cokes in green bottles were a dime with 2 cents returned on the empty bottle .... no lie!

The irony of Tea Party revanchism is that the prosperity of the 1960s created the conditions for undoing the rigid social boundaries and simplicity that the lily-white, predominantly rural, present-day Know Nothings hanker after.

Class Warfare

Boehner wins re-election as speaker of the House and in doing so he talks tough about deficit reduction.  This from today's Jonathan Weissman story:

The agenda laid out by both Mr. Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, jibed well with the demands of small-government conservatives who have complained that neither leader has been sufficiently confrontational with Mr. Obama.

Both said cutting spending would be front and center, putting them on a collision course with the president and Democratic leaders. And neither was taking seriously the president’s pledge not to bargain over raising the government’s statutory borrowing ceiling.

Krugman's column takes in the big picture about the current conflict consuming our national politics.  He calls it a class war.  Republicans want to undo the New Deal and Great Society to lock in low taxes for the wealthy.  The identity of the Democratic Party is predicated on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and now Obamacare.  Since the GOP doesn't have the power to pass any legislation all it can do is extort cuts by means of threat -- of default (by refusing to vote for an increase in the debt ceiling) or government shutdown (by refusing to approve a continuing resolution at the end of March).  The class war will be fought in budgetary battles.  As Krugman says:

[T]he G.O.P. retains the power to destroy, in particular by refusing to raise the debt limit — which could cause a financial crisis. And Republicans have made it clear that they plan to use their destructive power to extract major policy concessions.

Now, the president has said that he won’t negotiate on that basis, and rightly so. Threatening to hurt tens of millions of innocent victims unless you get your way — which is what the G.O.P. strategy boils down to — shouldn’t be treated as a legitimate political tactic.

But will Mr. Obama stick to his anti-blackmail position as the moment of truth approaches? He blinked during the 2011 debt limit confrontation. And the last few days of the fiscal cliff negotiations were also marked by a clear unwillingness on his part to let the deadline expire. Since the consequences of a missed deadline on the debt limit would potentially be much worse, this bodes ill for administration resolve in the clinch.

So, as I said, in a tactical sense the fiscal cliff ended in a modest victory for the White House. But that victory could all too easily turn into defeat in just a few weeks.

Rationality is the ability to recognize a pattern and act on it.  The clear pattern at work here is that Obama says one thing to appeal to his base -- those voters who put him in office -- and then ends up acting differently.  Now that the election is over what leverage do voters have to alter this pattern?

Fiscal Cliff Not a Debt Crisis But a Political Crisis

Based on a reading of today's paper I think it's clear that there will be no deal on the fiscal cliff.  Not only have the Republicans failed to identify the loopholes they will close in order to raise the $800 billion in revenue that Boehner has agreed to but they refuse to identify which spending cuts they want to make.  As put in an unsigned editorial in the New York Times:

None of these brave budget-cutters want to go on television and say, cut the F.B.I. Or cut the Border Patrol. Or cut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that’s exactly what they’re doing by insisting on slashing discretionary spending. Republicans are so afraid of this reality that they won’t even detail their demands for cuts to the White House in the fiscal-cliff talks, instead waiting for President Obama to go first so they won’t be stuck with the blame. 

Both Paul Krugman's column and the front page story by Jonathan Weisman and Jackie Calmes point to months of bitter "trench warfare" to come.  This from the Weisman and Calmes:

If no deal is reached, Republicans are increasingly talking about a more hostile outcome in which the House passes legislation that extends tax cuts for the middle class, sets relatively low tax rates on dividends, capital gains and inherited estates, and cancels the across-the-board defense cuts, but leaves in place across-the-board domestic cuts. Then House Republicans would engage in what Mr. Boehner, in a private meeting last week, called “trench warfare,” a running battle with the president on spending, first as the government approaches its statutory borrowing limit early next year, then in late March, when a stopgap government spending bill runs out. But such legislation might not be able to pass the Senate, leaving the country no closer to a resolution. 

Get ready for more brinkmanship and the resulting market somersaults, first when we run up againt the debt ceiling next month and then in March when the continuing resolution that keeps the government running expires.

In Krugman's column one finds a refreshing, unvarnished assessment.  The fiscal cliff is not a debt crisis it's a political crisis brought on by a political party that is at a dead end ideologically.

It’s a dangerous situation. The G.O.P. is lost and rudderless, bitter and angry, but it still controls the House and, therefore, retains the ability to do a lot of harm, as it lashes out in the death throes of the conservative dream.

And it's a party that still has enough juice to pass right-to-work legislation in a historically strong union state like Michigan; it's a party that is insulated by rigorous gerrymandering; and it is a party that, like the Marvel comics super villain Thanos, worships death.  Because what else can supporting the Pentagon at the expense of all other discretionary spending not to mention Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security mean?  It's best not to try to placate such a party, as Obama did in the summer 2011 debt ceiling negotiations.  Let's go off the cliff and meet the death worshippers head on.