To function properly in Washington, everyone needs a bogyman. One of the first things a newcomer learns in the nation’s capital is that the Chinese ideogram for “danger” also means “opportunity.” Whether this ubiquitous device exists anywhere outside the text for Motivational Speaking 101 is a moot point. What is not a moot point—what is far from moot indeed—is that it is useless in DC to advocate policies that are “good.” One can only achieve results by advocating policies that are “necessary”—necessary to ward off disaster.
For the left, of course, the great bogyman is catastrophic climate change, a towering yet misty creature whose efficacy waxes and wanes with the economic weather. When times are tight, he somehow seems less threatening.
For the neo-con right, the monster is Iranian nuclear capability, a similarly misty chap that has somehow maintained an uneasy existence in the parched Persian desert for decades, although, for some reason, only those wearing AIPAC lenses are able to see the beast clearly.
For the Tea Party right, the great monster is government spending. This creature is much less misty. It walks among us, and you can touch it every day. Which, for the Tea Party, is part of the problem.
The Senate is currently lurching, maybe, towards a semi-resolution of the question of whether the Republican Party is actually willing to let the government operate, and there’s a good deal of speculation as to the amount of damage the Tea Party crew has received. Have they been chastened?
I would say “no,” because I would say that the Tea Party is about crisis politics rather than governing. House Republicans voted for “real” cuts in government spending in the abstract by supporting Rep. Paul Ryan’s “get real” budget, which supposedly sets us on the road to zero deficits in, well, thirty or forty years. Ryan achieves this by leaving Social Security, Medicare, and defense sacrosanct while cutting domestic spending aggressively. The domestic spending bills that would have made those cuts were never introduced on the House floor, because the Republicans couldn’t pass them. They wouldn’t vote for the spending cuts that they claim so fervently to desire.
The icing on this cake o’ hypocrisy is that, to make everything fit, Ryan actually relied on the Medicare savings projected under Obamacare, the very program that, of course, the Republicans were denouncing as the End of American Civilization (Republicans no longer care about Western Civilization).
So the Tea Party doesn’t want to govern. They want to fight. And, as long as they’re in office, they’re going to keep on fighting.
Afterwards I
Ross Douthat, attempting to provide some perspective on the current Tea Party, critiques the situation as follows: “The methodless madness [of the Tea Party crew] distinguishes this shutdown from prior Congressional Republican defeats (the Gingrich shutdown, the Clinton impeachment), when you could at least see what the politicians involved were thinking.”
In fact, Ross, the current “methodless madness” is identical to past Republican assaults on Democratic presidents. Once more, there is a pretense of policy [the “point” of the Gingrich shutdown was to force President Clinton to accept major cuts in Medicare, the precise opposite of the current Republican position] but the real purpose is to inflict political damage as an end in itself. Winston Churchill, writing of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, when he first entered Parliament, remarked that he “was still young enough to enjoy political intrigue for its own sake.” That’s where the Tea Party Republicans are now. The more damage they cause, the happier they are.
Afterwords II
There are spending cuts the Republicans would like to make, of course. They would be happy to cut, or, rather, to eliminate, anything that benefits “the poor.” Well, back in the day, liberals had a saying: “A program that only helps the poor is a poor program”—that is, a “targeted” program that doesn’t target the middle class as well as the poor will not survive politically. Of course, one could “solve’ the problem by eliminating welfare for the poor but not for the rich, which is exactly what House Republicans voted to do when they passed a 10 percent cut in spending for Food Stamps while leaving farm subsidies untouched. Unfortunately for the right, you can’t balance the budget on the backs of the poor, because the poor don’t get enough of the government’s cash. You can balance the budget on the backs of the middle class, but who wants to do that?
