Sunday Treat: p m carpenter

p m carpenter's commentary

September 15, 2007

The "Cult" of Republicanism: Simplicity as Idol

OK, Barry, I'll take your advice and simply blame it all on you. For as you, Mr. Goldwater, advised during your ill-fated 1964 presidential campaign: "The big trouble with the so-called liberal today is that he doesn't understand simplicity."

Problems? No problems, you said, as long as "we have the courage to face them.... Those who don't have that courage want complicated answers" -- a spirit of wholesale anti-intellectualism that prompted NYT columnist Tom Wicker to note that you're like a "child..., with a child's directness and lack of complexity."

From that '64 campaign, you, Barry, inadvertently created the New Republican Guard -- the New Right -- which morphed over the years into the blind, anti-intellectual monsters in control today; those who, in their pursuit of electoral dominance, trashed the electorally inept Old Guard's cherished principles of small government, balanced budgets and fiscal sanity.

And trash them they did -- soundly, solidly, completely -- endowing us with a bloated, supply-sided, debt-ridden, ineffective government; ineffective, that is, except for those who don't need it. The anti-intellectuals would merrily rake in the plutocratic cash to grease their political machine and further indulge the plutocracy, leaving the middle class and poor to fend for themselves. Socialism, as they say, for the rich; capitalism for the rest of us.

As columnist Jonathan Chait observes in a recent New Republic article, "Feast of the Wingnuts": "American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane. The scope of their triumph is breathtaking. Over the course of the last three decades, they have moved from the right-wing fringe to the commanding heights of the national agenda. Notions that would have been laughed at a generation ago ... are now so pervasive, they barely attract any notice
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"The result has been a slow- motion disaster," writes Chait, availing massive deficits, unsustainable income inequality and big government by business lobbyists.

Meanwhile the anti-intellectual politicos on the right hysterically charge that, for instance, rising income inequality -- buttressed by slashes in marginal tax rates and resulting in jumbo deficits which the middle class and poor will inherit -- is merely a demagogic fright-mantra of liberalism in its habitual campaigns of class warfare.

But the demagoguery was, and is, all theirs, of course. And now, as the economic chickens come home to roost, some of their then-gleeful co-conspirators are bellowing blame and fingering the real culprits. But only from a safe and sagacious distance.

The latest self-sparing, safety-first co-conspirer to rat out his pals is Alan Greenspan. Monday is the official launch of his delicious memoirs, "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World," in which -- from that familiar distance -- he not only fingers the culprits, he screws them but good.

According to a NYT advance peek, "Greenspan paints a picture of Mr. Bush as a man driven more by ideology" -- that would be the ideology of simplicity advanced by Barry Goldwater -- "and the desire to fulfill campaign promises made in 2000, incurious about the effects of his economic policy...."

Incurious. The perfect word. For when one possesses an all-encompassing, roundly simplistic ideology that makes intellectual strain a needless exercise, curiosity becomes merely a time-consuming interference with presidential bike rides.

Jonathan Chait's article delves deeply and insightfully into the origins of what he calls today's Republican "cult" of ideological economic madness. Some may care to read it. But me? I'll just take Goldwater's anti-intellectual advice and simplistically blame it all on him -- much as he did himself, after it was too late, and he saw what madness he had wrought.