Matt's comment reminded me to make a couple quick points. He made some good observations about Congress control among others, so I encourage you to read his contribution, but he also reminded me of a general practice I want to encourage in discussing politics.
No matter what your political position on the left/right scale, we've been trained over the last ten years to meet critique of our party in particular with counterattacks: When a Democrat is accused of ethical violations, they answer instantly with comments about all the Republicans who have been scandalized. When a position comes under attack, the opposing position is mocked. When a mistake, error, or lie is exposed, often the response is: "Well both parties are crap. This is just more evidence of that."
None of this actually authentically examines the behavior of either party or position. Realize that when I spend time dissecting the Republican party, I make NO claims about the Democrats. I am not doing it to create an inequity between them and favoritism for their opponents. Particularly this week, the goal is to examine a rift that has formed in Conservative politics and one that I believe needs immediate attention.
So back to the subject at hand.
The media war is well underway before Obama is even a candidate for election. Conservative media took a new stance on politics. Instead of the classic liberal slant of media that bordered on subliminal, the new generation of conservative talk and television came out guns blazing. The feeling among conservatives was 'hell yea, about time'. These pundits, however, gained popularity and rating by getting more and more ruthless towards their liberal counterparts to the point where people like Ann Coulter could reach national acclaim among Conservatives by publishing a book calling liberals traitors.
The quiet causality of this new media philosophy was dialogue. Liberals, offended at being so demonized, responded in kind, reacting to venom with venom and discussion of ideas and the merits of elected official's actual stance on individual bills faded into a cesspool of name-calling and attacks on the people speaking. As the war continued any slip or stance from either party was met with a counter punch with neither side willing to examine if incoming attacks or information from their own people was accurate if the actions of the opposition could be used as a weapon.
A good example: Arizona's crime - violent and property - has been decreasing steadily since before Obama took office and for the last 5 years. This is not opinion, it is numeric fact. Yet John McCain and others continue to propagate the line Phoenix is the kidnapping capital of the US and that these kinds of crime are on the rise. This isn't politics. This is facts. And these claims are patently false. Why the misinformation? Because being wrong has become such a pariah in our culture and voters no longer check what their party sources say. Even though the raw facts of the situation contradict the claims and have been proven, Arizona's Republicans will not back down from their claim and continue to repeat it.
Why? We've identified that conservative values are very important to the American people. So why would the party representing conservatives wage a war on opposition that was so important that even raw facts to their own constituents became acceptable casualties?
From what I've been able to tell, it comes down to a split in the road where voting power and money diverged. Where the Republican party has to please two masters who did not play nicely together.
The issue reaches back - all the way to Ronald Reagan. Reagan started, and Bill Clinton completed, the questionable process of liberating business from geography: Globalization. Corporations were freed up to operate in any way that was most profitable to them taking advantage of 'free trade' to diversify their operations across global markets.
But the big problem with this policy was that it also freed big business from any incentive to reinvest in the United States. In fact it created something of a perverse incentive to do to America what corporations had been doing to our southern neighbors for decades: Namely draw out the profits from consumers in the region and move them to other world economies where more could be done with less. The pure economics started bleeding us of economic growth, kept unemployment high so employers retained leverage over work conditions, and consolidated wealth into massive organizations that operated well beyond the purview, borders, or interests or individual governments.
The Republican party, ever pro business, found more and more of it's support from these trans-national companies. Understand that to a trand-national with billions in assets, small percentages can mean millions in profits. So the lobby effort by these companies to adjust policy outstripped anything provided by average policy based voters.
So over time, the Republican party was faced with becoming more and more the mouthpiece of transnational interests. Their policies reflected tax adjustments and trade incentives that had little to do with any business that was actually invested in American society. But the need for votes in order to retain power remained. At first, the smoke screen was to convince local and small business owners that the profits would 'trickle down' from policies that clearly supported global business. But the money didn't come. Record profits didn't turn into record investments or record low unemployment. So the media war began. The target? Not the liberals or the left. The effort was to eliminate political dialogue, stop voters from doing independent research and just get conservatives believing pundits and party authorized sources so they'd keep Republicans in office.
Realize none of this was malicious per se. The Republican party has always been business focused. But what happened was that with globalization, business went to war with itself. Two groups of businesses arose - one invested in and passionately believed in the US, the other interested solely in what the US government could do for bottom line costs with no local reinvestment beyond what made money. The party was torn by the need to please their voter base which was predominantly the former and their money base which was predominantly the latter. The way to do this? Keep Conservatives in the dark about what Republicans mean by 'business' and turn them on the Republican's political opponents as the cause of all social and economic ills.
But conservatives as a whole only bought it for a while. The facade is slipping. Tomorrow I will go into why the 2008 election (independant of Obama) and the Tea Party are powerful indicators for a glacial crack within the Republicans that may, in time, spell the end of that party if it's not understood and acted on by responsible conservatives.
No matter what your political position on the left/right scale, we've been trained over the last ten years to meet critique of our party in particular with counterattacks: When a Democrat is accused of ethical violations, they answer instantly with comments about all the Republicans who have been scandalized. When a position comes under attack, the opposing position is mocked. When a mistake, error, or lie is exposed, often the response is: "Well both parties are crap. This is just more evidence of that."
None of this actually authentically examines the behavior of either party or position. Realize that when I spend time dissecting the Republican party, I make NO claims about the Democrats. I am not doing it to create an inequity between them and favoritism for their opponents. Particularly this week, the goal is to examine a rift that has formed in Conservative politics and one that I believe needs immediate attention.
So back to the subject at hand.
The media war is well underway before Obama is even a candidate for election. Conservative media took a new stance on politics. Instead of the classic liberal slant of media that bordered on subliminal, the new generation of conservative talk and television came out guns blazing. The feeling among conservatives was 'hell yea, about time'. These pundits, however, gained popularity and rating by getting more and more ruthless towards their liberal counterparts to the point where people like Ann Coulter could reach national acclaim among Conservatives by publishing a book calling liberals traitors.
The quiet causality of this new media philosophy was dialogue. Liberals, offended at being so demonized, responded in kind, reacting to venom with venom and discussion of ideas and the merits of elected official's actual stance on individual bills faded into a cesspool of name-calling and attacks on the people speaking. As the war continued any slip or stance from either party was met with a counter punch with neither side willing to examine if incoming attacks or information from their own people was accurate if the actions of the opposition could be used as a weapon.
A good example: Arizona's crime - violent and property - has been decreasing steadily since before Obama took office and for the last 5 years. This is not opinion, it is numeric fact. Yet John McCain and others continue to propagate the line Phoenix is the kidnapping capital of the US and that these kinds of crime are on the rise. This isn't politics. This is facts. And these claims are patently false. Why the misinformation? Because being wrong has become such a pariah in our culture and voters no longer check what their party sources say. Even though the raw facts of the situation contradict the claims and have been proven, Arizona's Republicans will not back down from their claim and continue to repeat it.
Why? We've identified that conservative values are very important to the American people. So why would the party representing conservatives wage a war on opposition that was so important that even raw facts to their own constituents became acceptable casualties?
From what I've been able to tell, it comes down to a split in the road where voting power and money diverged. Where the Republican party has to please two masters who did not play nicely together.
The issue reaches back - all the way to Ronald Reagan. Reagan started, and Bill Clinton completed, the questionable process of liberating business from geography: Globalization. Corporations were freed up to operate in any way that was most profitable to them taking advantage of 'free trade' to diversify their operations across global markets.
But the big problem with this policy was that it also freed big business from any incentive to reinvest in the United States. In fact it created something of a perverse incentive to do to America what corporations had been doing to our southern neighbors for decades: Namely draw out the profits from consumers in the region and move them to other world economies where more could be done with less. The pure economics started bleeding us of economic growth, kept unemployment high so employers retained leverage over work conditions, and consolidated wealth into massive organizations that operated well beyond the purview, borders, or interests or individual governments.
The Republican party, ever pro business, found more and more of it's support from these trans-national companies. Understand that to a trand-national with billions in assets, small percentages can mean millions in profits. So the lobby effort by these companies to adjust policy outstripped anything provided by average policy based voters.
So over time, the Republican party was faced with becoming more and more the mouthpiece of transnational interests. Their policies reflected tax adjustments and trade incentives that had little to do with any business that was actually invested in American society. But the need for votes in order to retain power remained. At first, the smoke screen was to convince local and small business owners that the profits would 'trickle down' from policies that clearly supported global business. But the money didn't come. Record profits didn't turn into record investments or record low unemployment. So the media war began. The target? Not the liberals or the left. The effort was to eliminate political dialogue, stop voters from doing independent research and just get conservatives believing pundits and party authorized sources so they'd keep Republicans in office.
Realize none of this was malicious per se. The Republican party has always been business focused. But what happened was that with globalization, business went to war with itself. Two groups of businesses arose - one invested in and passionately believed in the US, the other interested solely in what the US government could do for bottom line costs with no local reinvestment beyond what made money. The party was torn by the need to please their voter base which was predominantly the former and their money base which was predominantly the latter. The way to do this? Keep Conservatives in the dark about what Republicans mean by 'business' and turn them on the Republican's political opponents as the cause of all social and economic ills.
But conservatives as a whole only bought it for a while. The facade is slipping. Tomorrow I will go into why the 2008 election (independant of Obama) and the Tea Party are powerful indicators for a glacial crack within the Republicans that may, in time, spell the end of that party if it's not understood and acted on by responsible conservatives.
If you can clarify one point please, are you saying that business moved "offshore" simply because of the 'free trade' idea's "started by Regan and Completed by Clinton"?
ReplyDeleteI think free trade was a huge part of the problem. It's more complicated than one policy, but if I had to lay the blame for the bad version of globalization, I would start with the Reagan tax cuts and then pile on the Clinton trade agreements. If I had to lay a percentage blame, I would pile a lot of the blame on Clinton. Where the tax cuts set up monopolistic destruction of the middle class, Free Trade effectively made those monopolies unassailable by US law.
ReplyDelete