We had been assured earlier this week that Richard Mourdock was no Sharron Angle, but guess what? He's apparently for the
repeal of the 17th amendment. Or at least he was during the nomination battle. You can't really get more Tea Party than that; repeal of direct election of Senators is a perfect blend of autodidact Constitutional silliness with an eventual position that must play as some combination of goofy and irrelevant to those outside of the initiated (wait, the economy is horrible, the US is at war, and your big idea is...huh???).
Hey, I'm about as anti-Progressive as anyone, but I'd put direct Senate elections second only to women's suffrage as an actually very good Progressive structural reform.
Anyway, there's nothing about it on
Mourdock's web site, but that does raise the question: which issues should I look for when I take a tour around GOP Senate candidate web sites? Mourdock has a lot of buzzwords and sloganeering (he's against liberal activist judges and he thinks Obamacare is unconstitutional and presumably should be thrown out by non-activist judges...oh, never mind). He is for term limits, for abolishing the
Fed IRS,* and auditing (but not ending) the Fed. On Democratic web sites, I was interested in whether they took stands on issues that Democratic activists care about. I guess I am interested in whether marriage shows up, and torture (Mourdock has neither -- in fact, very little on foreign affairs/national security at all). What else?
*Corrected
". . . for abolishing the Fed, and auditing (but not ending) the Fed." ???
ReplyDeleteIRS. Thanks, corrected. Sorry for the sloppiness, everyone.
DeleteWhen you hear "activist judge" don't think "judge who does stuff" but "judge who doesn't want government to be restrained by plain-language of constitution."
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of nutty politicians: how about that Andre Carson saying that Tea Party congresspeople want to hang blacks from a tree, and then reiterating it several times? Kinda bringing the crazy, right? I mean especially after the "n-word" insanity about the Tea Party? Crazy like McKinney?
Obsession with ending the senate filibuster is the perfect lib/dem blend of suppression of minority rights and love of new legislation. The economy is horrible, the US is at war, and dems want to change this because they think that more legislation will fix things?!
ReplyDeleteYes, that is indeed the case. They have a whole list of legislation that they believe will help the economy, which doesn't seem to be recovering as well on its own as they would like.
DeleteFor example, infrastructure projects are an easy way to make more jobs. In this current environment, they'll have to be paid for with new taxes, which has often been agreed to by both parties in the past.....
There's a difference between less legislation and less laws, let alone less government. If you want to repeal a law, that takes an act of legislation. If you want to modify a law to be less harmful to the economy, that takes an act of legislation. Any sort of change requires new legislation.
DeleteHey, I'm about as anti-Progressive as anyone.....
ReplyDeleteNo, you're not. You're forgetting that you're not talking here only to political scientists and professional historians. Since I think even your regular readers might find that line confusing, allow me to gloss it a bit, and correct me if I'm wrong:
You don't mean "progressive" in the contemporary political sense, or in the conversational sense of favoring progress. You're referring specifically to the Progressive Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But, even within that, you're not referring to that movement's broader social goals or even to many of the specific reforms it promoted. For instance, I'm guessing that you're not against government regulations to restrict big corporate monopolies and price-fixing cartels. You probably don't want to abolish national parks and turn them all over to logging and mining interests. You're not in favor of poisoned food or medicines, and therefore favor a vigorous role for the FDA. And so forth.
What you're specifically referring to is the Progressive Movement's attempt to break the power of political parties. The old Progressives associated parties with spoils systems and corrupt machine politics, and believed that government was in general something that could and should be turned over to expert, nonpartisan administrators (like the professional "city managers" that many cities still have today). You, by contrast, believe that parties play an essential role in governing modern democracies. I agree with that. But let's be clear that the party system we have today is partly the result of the Progressive Movement's success at cleaning up some of the worst abuses of the past. Parties are much less boss-led and more internally democratic than they used to be, for instance. You don't actually oppose those reforms, right?
OK, that's fair; I'd say it's broadly all sorts of Progressive-era political regulation that I tend to be against. It's true that much of it was anti-party, but it was also anti-interests, and I'm mostly against that, too (that is, I'm against a lot of Progressive-in-spirit campaign finance reforms.
DeleteAnd, yes, I am against a lot of it. I'm not quite with Plunkitt on civil service, but I'm a lot closer to him than I am to Good Government types. I think we would be better off without statewide ballot questions.
Some of it, of course, was in response to things that had changed in the world...voter registration, for example, although it didn't need to go the direction it did.
I think we would be better off without statewide ballot questions.
DeleteTrue. In their defense, the Progressives couldn't foresee "astroturfing" or the huge role of TV attack ads. But on balance it's been a failed experiment.
Sharron Angle ranted about black football jerseys being the color of evil in 1992. Congressional Dems had a strategy session on Tuesday with the Center for Social Inclusion where Dems were taught to tie Tea Party messages about low government to racism. Reading through some of the publications offered by CSI (all of whom show no knowledge that correlation and causation are different concepts) I found gems. The best was a moron-class breakdown of Tea Party statements in 2010 wherein Angle's 1992 statement was attributed to campaign 2010 as an example of anti-AA racism.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.centerforsocialinclusion.org/wp-content/plugins/publications/uploads/Tea_Party_and_foreclosure_FINAL1.pdf
I wonder if crazy Carson's Tea Party "hanging tree" and "n-word" lies are coming from the leadrship of the party instead of some element the CBC?
For those who don't have as much time to kill as I do, the report that backyardfoundry links to is an analysis of data from the 2010 elections to determine how economic conditions and the racial composition of districts correlated with the success (or lack thereof) of Tea Party candidates. The conclusion:
DeleteThe Tea Party’s strategy of dividing voters along subtle, and not so subtle, references to race and ethnicity works in White economically distressed communities, but not necessarily White economically healthy communities or communities with sizable populations of color. This suggests that strategies, which address race and economic opportunity, will be critical to policymakers and advocates. It does not necessarily suggest that the policies of the administration itself are to blame for voter reactions. Therefore, CSI recommends communities and policymakers must confront this negative use of race as a wedge in political debate by creating messages that reach people personally, positively engage them on the impacts policies have on communities of color, and offer solutions that can benefit all people. Within this frame, CSI has identified a growing opportunity for cross-race alliance building that will reject the Right’s attempts at dividing a nation through empty policy discussions filled with racialized messaging. (emphasis added)
So, yeah, pretty much exactly what backyard just said. ;-)
Jeff,
DeleteUnder "Messaging Analysis" beginning page 5 I read (paraphrased) "whites voted against their interests because they don't like brown skin. They got Tea-wedged. And Sharron Angle ran on "black is the color of evil."
How far off is that?
backyard, it's a little more complicated than that. Here's what I believe the authors consider the key result of the study (not paraphrased):
DeleteIt appears that in districts where economic insecurity is not high, districts with majority White populations are not overly jumping at Tea Party messages. These results suggest that when Whites who live in racially isolated districts face economic insecurity, they are more responsive to racial messages that exploit economic fears and implicit racial biases.
I've seen more rigorous (and better written) work on this, so I don't want to go too far defending this particular report. But it's a very old observation that race can be used to get people to misdirect their anger and thus vote against their own interests. The authors of this report are arguing that this is NOT because poorer whites are automatically racist, nor will they automatically "jump at" racially coded political messages. Rather, they're saying, the data suggest that whether such messages work depends on specific local circumstances: how "racially isolated" a community is and the degree of its immediate financial distress (which this report measures in terms of local foreclosures).
The authors then go on to recommend counter-messages "that proactively confront the race wedge." I find their examples a bit confusing, because they call them "race-explicit" yet only some of them mention race. But in those cases, the point of mentioning race is to say to white voters, "Your problems are NOT the fault of minorities or illegal immigrants; we're all suffering together here." In other words, the report is saying that race-coded appeals from the right should be explcitly acknowledged, not ignored in hopes they'll fail on their own. But there's nothing at all here about hanging trees or the N-word that I can see.
Jeff,
DeleteNo, no... hanging tree and n-word talk is primarily from Andre Carson. The super-sane Democratic leadership finds Carson's race-war language so unremarkable that he was never even censured (surprise!) for his KKK references concerning Tea Party congressmen.
I wonder if Professor Bernstein has any strong opinions about the quality of the science displayed in this paper. You seem to find it to be pretty money. After all, it does blame rino and Dem losses on racism.
I doubt that any political scientist would hold up this CSI study as the state of the art. Depending on what you were trying to learn, you would ideally control for other variables among districts, like party identification, incumbency, and past election results.
DeleteBut I still think you're overreading it when you say it blames Dem losses on racism. It's about poltitical messaging, and the kind of message it urges is that people of all races are suffering together and that solutions ought to be found together. Even if the study's premises were all wrong, it's hard to see how having more Dem candidates adopt such a message would do anybody any harm.