Tag Archives: Frank Rich

The permanent Republican victory

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Frank Rich cautions against premature liberal gloating of coming triumphs, demographic or otherwise:

What’s more, the right thinks long-term, and if you look at the long-term, the whole ugly “fiscal cliff” standoff was a win-win for conservatives, no matter what their passing defeats in this week’s deal. The more Washington looks dysfunctional, the more it sows dissatisfaction with the very idea of a Federal government. Yes, Democrats and the White House can argue that polls show that the Republicans would be getting most of the blameif Congress couldn’t reach agreement on the “fiscal cliff.” But that’s short-term liberal wishful thinking. Long-term, this intractable dispute has undermined Americans’ faith in government, period, and the voters’ plague-on-all-your-houses view of Washington is overall a resounding ideological win for a party that wants to dismantle government, the GOP. The conservative movement is no more dead after its 2012 defeat than it was after the Goldwater debacle of 1964.

Silver lining? Social issues, at least, seem to be a winning hand for the Dems:

John Roberts is as political a Chief Justice as I’ve seen — political in the sense of wanting to be well-regarded by mainstream public opinion and posterity. He’s no Scalia-Thomas-Bork right-wing bull in the china shop. Much as I welcomed his upholding of Obamacare, his logic was so tortured that I shared the view of conservative critics that he was holding a finger to the wind and cynically trying to be on the right side of history. His remarks about  the nation’s fiscal impasse are content-free and gratuitous — and irrelevant to his constitutional role — but they do reflect his own desire to maintain a noble public image. It was, one might say, a Howard Schulz PR move. If nothing else, this Chief Justice’s continued obsession with his own profile may bode well for the future of same-sex marriage: Hard to imagine that Roberts will thwart a civil rights breakthrough now enthusiastically supported by an overwhelming majority of the young and even not-so-young Americans who will write the history of the Roberts Court.

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Irrational exuberance?

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[hulu http://www.hulu.com/watch/423753]

Frank Rich thinks so. Echoing his comments from mid-October (which I covered here), Rich insists that the post-election Democratic triumphalism is misguided, and that nothing has substantially altered the long-term prospects for Tea Party-style conservatism:

More seriously, if you look at the GOP’s suicidal talk right now, and the Democratic and liberal triumphalism, it’s very much a replay of what I wrote about in last month’s piece. After LBJ beat Goldwater in a far bigger victory, an out-and-out landslide, in 1964, Republicans moaned about being consigned to minority party status and possibly oblivion; Democrats talked about having won the war of ideas and demographics as well as the politics. (Goldwater only carried his home state of Arizona and a swath of the Confederate South.) Two years later, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, and four years later Richard Nixon became president. The core small-government credo of conservatives has been remarkably consistent and resilient ever since and still commands a majority following according to last week’s exit polling. What’s more, the GOP bench — Rubio (who’s very slick by the way), Ryan, Christie, Jindal, etc — is far younger than that of the Hillary-Biden post-Obama Democrats. This new Republican generation will find a way to put a kinder, gentler, Hispanic, female face on the GOP soon enough.

This is a depressing forecast. But it’s a useful counterpoint to jubilant predictions of Republican moderation (which I’ve expressed as recently as yesterday). Jonathan Cohn is on roughly the same page regarding the mindset of the American right:

It’s basically another version of the 47 percent argument—i.e., that 47 percent of the country is dependent on the rest of the taxpaying public. It was kicking around in conservative circles even before Mitt Romney invoked it at that now-infamous Florida fundraiser. And judging by recent commentary, it’s going to keep kicking around for a while longer. Last week, National Review’s Kevin Williamson concluded that “offering Americans a check is a more fruitful political strategy than offering them the opportunity to take control of and responsibility for their own lives.” Just today, Washington Post conservative writer Jennifer Rubin wrote that the Democratic Party won by “feeding its base cotton candy.”

It’s true that Americans, on the whole, are more enthusiastic about receiving public services than they are about paying for them. They always have been. And it creates real policy dilemmas, particularly as an aging population makes services more expensive. Do we scale back these programs or raise taxes to pay for them? Do we trust the marketplace to find efficiencies, or turn to the government? Conservatives need to be more forthright than they have been about their proposed answers to these questions: We can’t cut Medicaid by a third, as Paul Ryanproposed to do, without seriously harming low-income people. But liberals also need to confront some unpleasant realities. Over the long run, we can’t sustain the current level of benefits without asking the middle class to pay at least a little more in taxes.

But sometimes the argument about free stuff has a more insidious meaning—and you don’t have to strain to hear it. During the Fox News broadcast on Election Night, Bill O’Reilly declared, “It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.” In case the reference to “traditional America” was too subtle, O’Reilly went on to talk about Obama’s strong support among blacks, Latinos, and women.

Tangentially, this “maker vs. taker” paradigm is no longer restricted to the United States: it’s taken on a global appeal. Fellow blogger Max Marder notes a very 47%-esque comment coming from a member of Israel’s new Yisrael Beiteinu-Likud party:

An article from Haaretz this afternoon quoted Likud-Beiteinu Knesset member Faina Kirshenbaum  Romneyesque’s diatribe against Israeli-Arab citizens:

“The Arabs are an economic burden on the state. They barely pay taxes and receive enormous budgets from the state,” Kirshenbaum told a German-Israeli sister cities conference held in Jerusalem by the Union of Local Authorities in Israel.

“The Arabs in the State of Israel pay NIS 400 million in taxes, but receive benefits worth at least NIS 11 billion,” she said.

“The Arabs in the State of Israel want equal rights, but they don’t contribute to the state. In order to receive equal rights, they must contribute to the state like every other citizen and serve three years, either in national service or in their communities.”

“Only 38 percent of Israeli citizens pay taxes, and a small portion of them are minorities. Tax-paying citizens of the state are carrying the rest of the population on their backs,” she added.

Kirshenbaum’s comments doubly mirror defeated presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who said both that a lack of Palestinian economic success vis-a-vis Israel was the result of cultural inferiority and that 47% of Americans were essentially moochers off of the state. What both Romney and Kirshenbaum miss, obviously, is that Israeli-Arabs are at best second-class citizens in the Jewish State. Israeli-Arabs, like African-Americans, are worse off than the majority because of historic discrimination, not laziness.

It’s a bitter irony that, following on the heels of one of the worst global recessions in modern history, the emerging narrative is that class warfare is being waged by the poor against the successful and wealthy. This seems odd, given the enormous bailouts staged in the United States and elsewhere simply to save this very same Team Successful from irreparable financial ruin. Clearly, no good deed goes unpunished.

I am becoming gradually convinced that one of the chief problems preventing genuine financial and tax reform in the U.S. is the massive blindspot that lower- and middle-class Americans have about…themselves. No one thinks of himself as a taker, but millions think that half the rest of the country is. How convenient, then, that all these nameless, faceless takers all turned out to have voted for Barack Obama. Maybe Frank Rich has a point.

(Video at the top is only marginally related to anything in this post, but I couldn’t let the opportunity to sneak it in slip away.)

Does this election even matter?

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Frank Rich isn’t at all convinced:

But isn’t the tea party yesterday’s news, receding into the mists of history along with its left-wing doppelgänger, Occupy Wall Street? So it might seem. It draws consistently low poll numbers, earning just a 25 percent approval rating in a Wall Street Journal–NBC News survey in September. The tea-party harbinger from 2008, Sarah Palin, and the bomb throwers who dominated the primary process of 2012, led by the congressional tea-party caucus leader Michele Bachmann, were vanquished and lost whatever national political clout they had, along with much of their visibility (even on Fox News). So toxic is the brand that not one of the 51 prime-time speakers at the GOP convention in Tampa dared speak its name, including such tea-party heartthrobs as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. Scott Brown, who became an early tea-party hero for unexpectedly taking Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in 2010, has barely alluded to the affiliation since.

All this evidence is misleading. As one conservative commentator, Doug Mataconis of Outside the Beltway, wrote during the GOP convention, it means nothing that Republican leaders don’t mention the tea party anymore. “In reality, of course the Republican party of 2012 is pretty much the tea party at this point,” he wrote. “One need only look at the party platform and listen to what the speakers are actually saying to recognize that fact.” He saw the tea party as “likely to see its influence increase after the November elections regardless of what happens to the Romney/Ryan ticket”—and rightly so. Though the label itself had to be scrapped—it has been permanently soiled by images of mad-dog protesters waving don’t tread on me flags—its ideology is the ideology of the right in 2012. Its adherents will not back down or fade away, even if Obama regroups and wins the lopsided Electoral College victory that seemed in his grasp before the first debate. If anything, the right will be emboldened to purge the GOP of the small and ideologically deviant Romney claque that blew what it saw as a “historic” opportunity to deny a “socialist” president a second term.