I don’t read a lot of opinion columns. It’s not out of any distaste for editorial writers, rather that I don’t often find too many of the “official” opinion columns that offer anything painfully new as opposed to the analysis you can find around the ol’ blogosphere.
Paul Krugman is an exception to this. Razor-sharp and with a command of history as well as contemporary politics that few writers other have, his column is one I feel it necessary to keep up with, and his current insight on the collapsing Republican Party should be required reading. We can distill it down to two ideas:
Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?
Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.
The first point is one I’ve been bleating about for years now. The conservative philosophy embodied by Grover Norquist’s declaration of wanting to shrink goverment down to the point where he can “drown it in the bathtub” has always struck me (and I would hope anyone with even basic reasoning skills) as terribly illogical. Why would Republicans be working so hard to take control of the government if they see government as the problem? To tear it down from the inside?
As for that racial aspect, that’s become just plain depressing. The refusal to just come out and say what is bubbling under the surface has turned into almost a game of sorts, whereby the right racially baits the left, only to immediately shout “race card” when called on it. Krugman brings up the “Barack the Magic Negro” incident, which really came to prominence when Limbaugh played it on his program. Of course, the reason he played it (and the reason he claimed it was written) was to accuse Democrats of racism, saying that it wasn’t until Obama came around that Democrats were willing to vote for a black man, or a “halfrican” as Rush puts it. According to Limbaugh, liberals are racist because it took a “non-black black” for the left to support him. That it was only him and his ilk analyzing his race and connection to that race seemed lost on him, as well as Ralph Nader who accused Obama of not focusing on “black” issues such as… poverty and AIDS.
The Republican Party defines itself as overtly despising government (not the current government or Democratic government, just government entirely) and subtle racism. The ascendancy of Bush, however, showed at least that first half to be smoke and mirrors, as year after year saw the office of the President growing larger and more powerful, complete with extra government agencies and exploding spending. The racism hung around.
