RUDE AWAKENINGS
FEBRUARY 10, 2014
Why the Tea Party Is Folding on the Debt Limit
They were never irrational, just delusional
BY @noamscheiber
Share
"You've got to know when to hold them and when to fold them", thus spake Michele Bachmann in an interview with The Washington Post
last week. Bachmann is, of course, the high priestess of not knowing
when to fold them. In 2012, she alleged an Islamist conspiracy at the
top levels of the U.S. government. Even after the allegations swept her
into a polar vortex of criticism--"[t]hese attacks have no logic, no
basis, and no merit and they need to stop," Megiddo-like significance in Tea Party eschatology, Bachmann told the Post that "[t]here is a pragmatism here … most of us don't think it's the time to fight."
Assuming Bachmann is right about the mood of her fellow conservatives, and the Post
story suggests she is, one feels moved to ask: What the hell happened?
It's not just the debt ceiling fight, after all. In the past several
weeks, the once-proudly nihilistic Republican House has managed to
approve a bipartisan farm bill, a piece of legislation Tea Partiers
torpedoed just six months earlier,as well as a budget deal that Paul
Ryan hammered out with his Democratic Senate counterpart. And the
mellowing appears to extend to Tea Partiers outside the House too. The
president of Heritage Action, the lead instigator of GOP brinkmanship
over the past few years, now talks charmingly of the need for an affirmative "reform agenda" so that the group can shed its obstructionist image.
In trying to explain this new circumspection, commentators have naturally seized on
the fiasco that was last fall's shutdown, which is useful as far as it
goes. But, at the time, it was hardly obvious that the shutdown would
have a chastening effect. The real question is why it had such an effect. Only that can tell us how Democrats should respond.
Before
we get to that, however, it's worth reviewing what the shutdown did not
accomplish. It emphatically did not cure Tea Partiers of their darkest
fantasies. They still yearn for a violent confrontation with the
president, or at least any chance to humble him. That explains why so
many right-wingers are demanding something, anything, in exchange
for raising the debt limit, even if they realize they have no leverage
to extract a meaningful concession. At its most farcical, the
Republicans' debt-ceiling strategery has devolved into a search for
demands that are likely to be satisfied anyway, like the so-called
Medicare fix, so
they can claim they forced Obama to give ground. (My own suggestion:
Refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless Obama promises to join Michelle and the kids for dinner every night that he's in town, an honest-to-goodness pro-family ritual, albeit one he's been practicing for over five years.)
In
fact, the shutdown didn't change much of anything about the Tea
Partiers themselves. It just gave us some insight into what governs
their behavior. To borrow the reigning metaphor of this discussion, it's
not that the shutdown broke the fever. It's just that we now can now
say whether the illness is viral or bacterial.
By which I mean:
Prior to the shutdown, it wasn't clear whether Bachmann et al were
irrational (that is, so zealously attached to their ideological goals
that they ignored conventional political incentives, like widespread
public disapproval), or delusional (meaning they were perfectly capable
of responding to political incentives in theory; they just assumed the
masses supported them).
The shutdown demonstrated that the Tea
Partiers are, for the most part, delusional rather than irrational: They
can be forced to reconsider a particular tactic if you persuade them
it's politically catastrophic. It just requires an epic level of public
anger to break through their epistemically-stunted
consciousness. The Tea Partiers had basically believed that the country
backed their monomaniacal fixation on repealing Obamacare, and their
jihadi plan for getting it done. The shutdown, or at least the endless shutdown-inspired hand-wringing on Fox News, managed to disabuse even them of this belief.
This may seem like an academic point, but the upshot is pretty important. Amid the recent thaw, you can sense to rhapsodize about tax reform or fiscal grand bargains again. It would shock no one if back-channel feelers were being sent.
But
the lesson of the shutdown is that engagement and accommodation is
worse than useless, it's counterproductive. When you're dealing with
delusional people, any gesture in their direction will only be
interpreted as confirmation that their delusions are true. When Obama
agreed to pare tens of billions from his 2011 spending request shortly
after the GOP won control of Congress, House Republicans didn't see it
as a sign of good faith, as the White House believed they would.
(David Plouffe: "The trust was increased.") They interpreted it as an
admission by the president that the public supported their radical
agenda. It's only through confrontation?doing away with negotiations and
inciting voters to communicate which side they support?that you have
any chance of breaking through. Going forward, that means there's no
probably difference-splitting approach to, say, getting an immigration
bill through the House. If you want immigration reform, let Republicans
reject the reasonable-sounding bill that passed the Senate, then force
them to pay a brutal price for their unpopular position in 2016.
For
much of the past three years, Democrats have indulged on one of two
fallacies about the House Republicans: That you can deal with them if
you just move far enough in their direction (the White House circa
2011); or that you can't deal with them at all because they're
fundamentally off their rockers (many progressives). But it turns out
you can deal with them, or at least impose your will on them. You just
have to understand the Tea Party psychology that the shutdown made
transparent.
Noam Scheiber is a senior editor of The New Republic. Follow @noamscheiber
This post was edited on 2/11 10:06 AM by eastcane
FEBRUARY 10, 2014
Why the Tea Party Is Folding on the Debt Limit
They were never irrational, just delusional
BY @noamscheiber
Share
"You've got to know when to hold them and when to fold them", thus spake Michele Bachmann in an interview with The Washington Post
last week. Bachmann is, of course, the high priestess of not knowing
when to fold them. In 2012, she alleged an Islamist conspiracy at the
top levels of the U.S. government. Even after the allegations swept her
into a polar vortex of criticism--"[t]hese attacks have no logic, no
basis, and no merit and they need to stop," Megiddo-like significance in Tea Party eschatology, Bachmann told the Post that "[t]here is a pragmatism here … most of us don't think it's the time to fight."
Assuming Bachmann is right about the mood of her fellow conservatives, and the Post
story suggests she is, one feels moved to ask: What the hell happened?
It's not just the debt ceiling fight, after all. In the past several
weeks, the once-proudly nihilistic Republican House has managed to
approve a bipartisan farm bill, a piece of legislation Tea Partiers
torpedoed just six months earlier,as well as a budget deal that Paul
Ryan hammered out with his Democratic Senate counterpart. And the
mellowing appears to extend to Tea Partiers outside the House too. The
president of Heritage Action, the lead instigator of GOP brinkmanship
over the past few years, now talks charmingly of the need for an affirmative "reform agenda" so that the group can shed its obstructionist image.
In trying to explain this new circumspection, commentators have naturally seized on
the fiasco that was last fall's shutdown, which is useful as far as it
goes. But, at the time, it was hardly obvious that the shutdown would
have a chastening effect. The real question is why it had such an effect. Only that can tell us how Democrats should respond.
Before
we get to that, however, it's worth reviewing what the shutdown did not
accomplish. It emphatically did not cure Tea Partiers of their darkest
fantasies. They still yearn for a violent confrontation with the
president, or at least any chance to humble him. That explains why so
many right-wingers are demanding something, anything, in exchange
for raising the debt limit, even if they realize they have no leverage
to extract a meaningful concession. At its most farcical, the
Republicans' debt-ceiling strategery has devolved into a search for
demands that are likely to be satisfied anyway, like the so-called
Medicare fix, so
they can claim they forced Obama to give ground. (My own suggestion:
Refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless Obama promises to join Michelle and the kids for dinner every night that he's in town, an honest-to-goodness pro-family ritual, albeit one he's been practicing for over five years.)
In
fact, the shutdown didn't change much of anything about the Tea
Partiers themselves. It just gave us some insight into what governs
their behavior. To borrow the reigning metaphor of this discussion, it's
not that the shutdown broke the fever. It's just that we now can now
say whether the illness is viral or bacterial.
By which I mean:
Prior to the shutdown, it wasn't clear whether Bachmann et al were
irrational (that is, so zealously attached to their ideological goals
that they ignored conventional political incentives, like widespread
public disapproval), or delusional (meaning they were perfectly capable
of responding to political incentives in theory; they just assumed the
masses supported them).
The shutdown demonstrated that the Tea
Partiers are, for the most part, delusional rather than irrational: They
can be forced to reconsider a particular tactic if you persuade them
it's politically catastrophic. It just requires an epic level of public
anger to break through their epistemically-stunted
consciousness. The Tea Partiers had basically believed that the country
backed their monomaniacal fixation on repealing Obamacare, and their
jihadi plan for getting it done. The shutdown, or at least the endless shutdown-inspired hand-wringing on Fox News, managed to disabuse even them of this belief.
This may seem like an academic point, but the upshot is pretty important. Amid the recent thaw, you can sense to rhapsodize about tax reform or fiscal grand bargains again. It would shock no one if back-channel feelers were being sent.
But
the lesson of the shutdown is that engagement and accommodation is
worse than useless, it's counterproductive. When you're dealing with
delusional people, any gesture in their direction will only be
interpreted as confirmation that their delusions are true. When Obama
agreed to pare tens of billions from his 2011 spending request shortly
after the GOP won control of Congress, House Republicans didn't see it
as a sign of good faith, as the White House believed they would.
(David Plouffe: "The trust was increased.") They interpreted it as an
admission by the president that the public supported their radical
agenda. It's only through confrontation?doing away with negotiations and
inciting voters to communicate which side they support?that you have
any chance of breaking through. Going forward, that means there's no
probably difference-splitting approach to, say, getting an immigration
bill through the House. If you want immigration reform, let Republicans
reject the reasonable-sounding bill that passed the Senate, then force
them to pay a brutal price for their unpopular position in 2016.
For
much of the past three years, Democrats have indulged on one of two
fallacies about the House Republicans: That you can deal with them if
you just move far enough in their direction (the White House circa
2011); or that you can't deal with them at all because they're
fundamentally off their rockers (many progressives). But it turns out
you can deal with them, or at least impose your will on them. You just
have to understand the Tea Party psychology that the shutdown made
transparent.
Noam Scheiber is a senior editor of The New Republic. Follow @noamscheiber
This post was edited on 2/11 10:06 AM by eastcane
