You Can't Beat Something With Nothing

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Sep 29, 2007 at 10:35

In a diary Thursday, "Emanuel and Hoyer Blocking More Aggressive Dem Tactics on Ending War", Chris wrote:

The Politico points out the obvious:

  But it's a simple truth, whether you support the war or not: There is a lot more Democrats could do to change, or at least challenge, the politics of the war in Washington, even if they do not have the numbers to impose new policies on President Bush.

  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) could force a vote a day over Iraq. She could keep the House in session all night, over weekends and through planned vacations.

  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) could let filibusters run from now till Christmas rather than yield to pro-war Republicans.

  Such tactics might or might not be politically sensible, but in their absence, anti-war lawmakers can hardly say they have done everything possible to challenge the war and bring attention to their cause.

  Lawmakers over the past generation have threatened and sometimes carried out such extreme parliamentary maneuvers over less consequential matters than dying soldiers.

This is one of the reasons why the Demcoratic base is so frustrated. Republicans, for example, were willing to go nuclear in order to force their judicial nominees across. Democrats, by way of contrast, are not willing to go nuclear over ending the war. There is a widespread perception that Demcorats are giving up too easily, and not playing their entire hand.

Chris was understating things. The Democrats are not playing anything in their hand.  They're playing the Republican's hand!  Condemning MoveOn?  What next?  Declaring Bush "President for Life"?

But let's back up to that short-but-to-the-point list of things the Democrats could do.  Surely, this list comes as no surprise to anyone.  We're not talking solutions to differential equations here.  What they all have in common is something surprisingly simple.  One might even say, elementary:  They are about setting the agenda, even if you can't win right away.  And the mere fact that this seems to be utterly beyond the Democratic establishment tells all too much about the state of politics in America today.

It's not just about Iraq, of course.  It's about everything-everything from impeachment to Katrina to privatizing Social Security to the Minnesota bridge collapse.

Take Impeachment, for example....

What exactly was gained by taking impeachment off the table?

Clearing the decks to pass the Democratic agenda?

Democratic agenda? Are you kidding?

What was gained by taking impeachment off of the table was George Bush's legitimacy.  For four long years he had utterly flauted the rule of law.  He could do it because he had Congress bottled up.  Then the Democrats took over, and they said, "That's fine.  We're okay.  Bygones, bygones.  Whatever."

It was, in short, a validation, a stamp of approval for his near-dictatorial style of rule.  What good could possibly come of it?  Was there any piece of Democratic legislation that Bush was likely not to veto out of grattitude for not being investigated with eye toward impeachment?

No, of course not.  The man is a sociopath.  Gratitude is not in his vocabulary.

What would have made sense would be if, after being sworn in Nancy Pelosi said something like this:

"Look, we all know that Bush has been out of control.  He's done a lot of things that on their face look like impeachable offenses.  But our job is to fix, not to punish.  Punishing only makes sense if it will fix things.  So we're going to try to work constructively with Bush and with the Republicans in Congress.  We will do that for 90 days.  And if they block us for 90 days, if it's clear that they won't let us fix anything, then we will start looking into impeachment, because that will fix problems in the future, by making any future troublemaker like Bush think twice before he acts.

And remember, it's not necessay for us to remove Bush from office.  He's going to be gone in two years, anyway.  But we will stigmatize him simply by documenting what he has done and holding him publicly accountable.  And we will stigmatize anyonme who defends his record of trying to undermine the very heart of America's system of government, the system of checks and balances that protects us against tyranny.  We will force the Republican Party to start acting like a responsible political party again, or else the American people will force them out of existence.  It's just that simple."

Of course, Pelosi did nothing of the sort. And now all of us are paying the price.

But there's much more price to come.  We're talking collapse of the Roman Empire price.  Is it too late already?  Could be.  There's really no way to tell.  But we ought to keep that possibility in mind, so as not to just assume that everything is fine since it hasn't all gone quite to hell just yet.  Because that's the problem with the Versailles Democrats' mindset.  It assumes that things are basically okay, because, let's face it, for the Versailles Democrats things basically are okay.  I mean, hey, they have the good parking spaces again!  What more could anyone want?

Okay, okay.  Snark overload.  Time to turn on the wonk.

Wonk Prelude

My big picture point here is simple: you win by (a) picking your fights and (b) picking your terms.  You don't have win your fights by other people's terms, so long as you win them on your own--and those terms are reasonable.  Which is why guerilla armies almost never "win" battles-and far less often lose wars.  Democrats are still allowing others to dictate terms to them, and this is precisely why they're losing battle after battle after battle.

How should they redefine "winning"?  Well, every time you force Republicans to make an unpopular vote, you win.  Every time you force Republicans to split with one another, you win.  Every time you make Republicans look foolish, meanspirited, craven or corrupt, you win.  Every time you put Republicans on the defensive, you win.

Right now, our country is falling apart, quite literally.  It's over two years after Katrina, and the place is still a disaster area.  The Minnesota bridge collapse was just a tiny little reminder.  Things are falling apart.  And why shouldn't they?  We are no longer paying to fix things. We are paying extortionists not to finance smear campaigns attacking us.  And this is not really a very popular thing to do-for either the extortionists or the extorted.  So what would be a better idea?  How about a massive bridge-and other infrastructure-repair program... paid for by repealing all Bush tax cuts for people making more than $200,000 per year?

Couldn't win?  Bush would veto it?  Not enough Republican support?

Precisely!

I want to tell you a little story about what sort of spending different people support.  And of course I want to tell that story in numbers, from good old friend the General Social Survey

The Wonk

The General Social Survey has asked a core set of questions about spending priorities since 1972, expanding that core set substantially in 1984, and adding a few more items since.  It has also asked a variety of other spending questions in different forms over the years, sometimes just once, sometimes more often.  For the sake of this analysis, I'm going to group them by families, most of whose members were asked in the same time-frame. What we're looking at is figures that tell us how much liberals and conservative differ from one another.  These figures are easily calculated.

Say 80 percent of liberals want to spend more on education, 5 percent want to spend less and 15 percent think spending is about right.  Say for conservatives the numbers are 60, 25 and 15.  The overall difference between them is (ABS(80-60)+ABS(5-25)+ABS(15-15))/2=20, where ABS(X) is the absolute value of X, and the sum is divided by two, since every time two people differ, they are counted twice.

Here's the first family of questions, most of which run from 1972, but a few of which are much more recent:

Family 1	All Purposes	Welfare State Spending		General State Spending
		Core	Periphery
NATFARE	19.4	19.4
NATRACE	19.2	19.2
NATENVIR	19.1		19.1
NATARMS	19.0			19.0
NATCHLD	17.7	17.7
NATCITY	15.9	15.9
NATHEAL	15.8	15.8
NATSCI	12.8			12.8
NATEDUC	12.5	12.5
NATPARK	9.4		9.4
NATSOC	8.6	8.6
NATMASS	7.5		7.5
NATAID	6.5			6.5
NATSPAC	4.9			4.9
NATDRUG	2.8			2.8
NATROAD	2.3			2.3
NATCRIME	2.0			2.0
AVERAGE	11.5	15.6	12.0	7.2

What we see here is very interesting, I think.  I've already shown before that conservatives are strongly supportive of government social spending-but not as supportive as liberals are.  Here we see that the liberal-conservative gap in spending support is greatest for core welfare state items, such as spending on welfare, to improve the conditions of blacks, or even for education.  It decreases for the next category of peripheral welfare state items, spending that is not spent directly on people, but benefits the society as a whole, and does proportionately less for the affluent.  Finally, the gap is least for the category of spending that is entirely outside the welfare state concept, much of which tends to do more for those who have more.

This same pattern can be seen in the next family of questions, which were asked one time only in 1984, but had the same general form, although the specific wording differed:

Family 2	All Purposes	Welfare State Spending		General State Spending
		Core	Periphery
NATRACEZ	18.0	18.0
NATCITYZ	14.4	14.4
NATHEALZ	14.3	14.3
NATFAREZ	13.2	13.2
NATDRUGZ	12.9			12.9
NATPARKZ	9.8		9.8
NATMASSZ	8.0		8.0
NATENVIZ	7.9		7.9
NATEDUCZ	7.6	7.6
NATSPACZ	7.3			7.3
NATAIDZ	5.3			5.3
NATSOCZ	4.5	4.5
NATCRIMZ	4.4			4.4
NATROADZ	3.3			3.3
AVERAGE	9.4	12.0	8.6	6.7

There's a slight deviation for a third, similar family of questions, which were asked from 1984 onward:

Family 3	All Purposes	Welfare State Spending		General State Spending
		Core	Periphery
NATARMSY	22.0			22.0
NATFAREY	21.0	21.0
NATRACEY	19.6	19.6
NATENVIY	17.7		17.7
NATCITYY	15.0	15.0
NATHEALY	14.2	14.2
NATEDUCY	12.0	12.0
NATDRUGY	10.3			10.3
NATCRIMY	7.4			7.4
NATAIDY	6.3			6.3
NATSPACY	3.9			3.9
NATARMSZ	19.0			19.0
AVERAGE	14.0	16.4	17.7	11.5

Here, the environment is the only spending question that falls into the middle category, and we've already seen that it can be an outlier, looking more like a welfare state core question, as it did in the first family.  There are no questions about parks or mass transit, which tend to produce smaller differences.

We see an even more different pattern with a fourth family of questions that was presented in a different form, but the number of questions was smaller, and again, the questions that would have produced smaller differences in the later two categories were not present:

Family 4	All Purposes	Welfare State Spending		General State Spending
		Core	Periphery
SPENVIRO	21.4		21.4
SPHLTH	20.8	20.8
SPARMS	20.1			20.1
SPARTS	18.4		18.4
SPMENTL	18.1	18.1
SPSCHOOL	15.6	15.6
SPPOLICE	9.7			9.7
SPUNEMP	7.9	7.9
SPRETIRE	5.8	5.8
AVERAGE	15.3	13.6	19.9	14.9

Finally, a comletely different set of questions, which have to do with spending vs. cuts.  I count two of them in the general spending category because they target specific types of spending that fall into that category.  This shows a much greater difference between liberals and conservatives:

Family 5	All Purposes	Welfare State Spending		General State Spending	Spend v. Cut
		Core	Periphery
TAXSPEND	25.5				25.5
CUTDEBT	21.9				21.9
CUTSPDR	19.7				19.7
DEFSPDR	17.6			17.6	17.6
CUTSPDFG	16.3				16.3
DEFSPDFG	10.8			10.8	10.8
CUTGOVT	10.1				10.1
AVERAGE	17.4			14.2	17.4

If we aggregate all the questions from these five families together these are the averages we come up with:

SUMMARY	All Purposes	Welfare State Spending		General State Spending	Spend v. Cut
		Core	Periphery
Family 1	11.5	15.6	12.0	7.2
Family 2	9.4	12.0	8.6	6.7
Family 3	14.0	16.4	17.7	11.5
Family 4	15.3	13.6	19.9	14.9
Family 5	17.4			14.2	17.4
AVERAGE	12.7	14.3	12.8	9.5	17.4

Thus, we find even larger differences on spending vs. cuts than we do on welfare state spending-and by a considerable margin.

Two questions: What's the point of all this, anyway, and how does it relate to impeachment or anything else I was talking about before?

The answer is simple:  These differences are all relatively small.  They're nothing close to 100%.  But by playing on them skillfully, conservatives have managed to maintain considerable support, even while going against what most people want-and they've managed to redirect discontent away from themselves.  In fact, ever since Ronald Reagan, conservatives have consistently managed to roll up enormous deficits, more than all the other Presidents combined, and then they've used those deficits to force cuts in popular programs.  They've been so successful, in fact, that this is what lead them to believe that they could do away with Social Security-and they almost got away with it.

A key to how they've done this is by controlling the political narrative.  Cutting government spending is popular.  Spending just for spending's sake is obviously foolish, so when people are given the choice, "cut or spend?" with no specific purpose given for spending, there is a natural bias towards cutting.  And this is precisely where movement conservative strength lies.  When they talk about cutting government, they rarely talk about specifics, with the notable exception of "welfare" which has extremely negative connotations.  And thus it is much easier to garner support for cuts, which end up affecting spending for which there is relatively strong support-and not just from liberals.

Consider two questions in the first family with almost identical differences-NATENVIR-spending on the environment, and NATARMS-spending on the military.  The latter is one of the few in which conservatives favor more spending than liberals.  And yet, while slightly more conservatives think we are spending too little on the military (29.4%) than think we are spending too much (29.4%), far more think we are spending too little on the environment (52.8%).  How does this accord with the normal stereotype of a conservative voter?  Answer: it doesn't.  It reflects the disconnect between that actual individual conservative voter and the dominant political narratives that purport to define such voters, as well as liberal and moderate voters.

This, then, is the dirty little secret of American politics:  movement conservatism doesn't just subvert the will of the Americn people as a whole.  It subverts the will of conservative voters as a whole.  And, of course, when bad things happen as a result-bridges collapse, we lose an entire city, or a war, whatever, there's always a way to pin it all on the "liberals," the "looney fringe" like MoveOn.

Yeah, that's the ticket.