The Moral Case For Catfood
by digby
Ed Kilgore notes that the Tea Party/GOP Senate nominee Joe Miller from Alaska is just the latest to join a parade of Republican candidates who are taking a a very far right position on everything, but perhaps most surprisingly on Social Security and Medicare:
Miller is just the latest of a number of Republican Senate candidates this year who have called for phasing out Social Security and Medicare. DeMint himself has long described these programs, along with public education, as having seduced middle-class Americans into socialist ways of thinking.
As Republican pols from Barry Goldwater to George W. Bush can tell you, going after Social Security and Medicare is really bad politics. And they've yet to come up with a gimmick, whether it's "partial privatization" or grandfathering existing beneficiaries, to make major changes in these programs popular (I seriously doubt the very latest gimmick, "voucherizing" Medicare, will do any better once people understand the idea). Indeed, Republicans notably engaged in their own form of "Medagoguery" by attacking health care reform as a threat to Medicare benefits.
Yet the sudden Tea Party-driven return to fiscal hawkery among Republicans, particularly if it's not accompanied by any willingness to consider tax increases or significant defense spending cuts, will drive the GOP again and again to "entitlement reform." In Senate candidates like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle and now Joe Miller, we are seeing the return of a paleoconservative perspective in the GOP that embraces the destruction of the New Deal/Great Society era's most important accomplishments not just as a matter of fiscal necessity but as a moral imperative.
Kilgore suggests that Democrats take their views seriously and make sure that Americans are correctly informed of them because historically this has been a losing game for the right.I think this is largely correct, but I think we have to watch Democrats just as closely. They seem oddly willing to join this crusade under the illusion that they will be saving the programs by chipping away at them.
The logic of this escapes me, particularly in view of the fact that the right is pushing a moral case, which might end up getting conflating with liberal values of social justice and common good and cause an unintended fraying of the consensus on the programs. Kilgore notes:
In endorsing Miller on behalf of his Senate Conservatives Fund, Jim DeMint emphasized this dimension of Murkowski's defeat: Joe Miller's victory should be a wake-up call to politicians who go to Washington to bring home the bacon. Voters are saying 'We're not willing to bankrupt the country to benefit ourselves.'
This is language of self-sacrifice for the greater good, which I'm not sure has been used by the far right in the context of destroying the social safety net. (Fiscal scolds pitch generational warfare, but it's not quite the same thing. This has a broader reach.) And the Religious Right hasn't gone this way before, instead worrying themselves about the culture wars. I've heard from an expert on the Religious Right that this is, in fact, an appealing approach to the evangelical side of the movement and very successfully marries the libertarian and Religious Right wings of the tea party. (And the Village will love it --- they've been calling for poor people to sacrifice for years. They can write breathless columns about how everyone has to pull together while they travel to and from green rooms in the back of a limousine.)
Beck is probably a short lived leader of this movement, for the reasons described by Sarah Posner, but he did realize that it was important to present himself as a high priest uniquely able to decipher the deeper meaning of the sacred texts of both the Bible and the Constitution and turn them into one worldview. This moral case for destroying the safety net may be the key.
The funny thing is that I remember having an argument with a fairly prominent Democrat a decade ago in which he insisted to me that because Clinton had proved that Democrats were better economic stewards by vanquishing the deficit that we had fought our last battle over the New Deal programs. Seems like only yesterday.
Update: Posner reminded me of this scary article about the crossroads of Christian Reconstructionism and the tea party, which speaks to this more directly. These guys have been around for a long time but they are making a play for the mainstream. If all these tea party candidates make it (and don't kid yourself, they might) they will have a claim to serious institutional politics.
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