The Party of Denial
One respect in which I thought it might be healthy for the conservative movement to go into opposition for a while is that it might kick them out of the habit of knee-jerk denialism about problems. With Bush in office, there was a tendency to dismiss any concern about any aspect of the nation’s economic well-being as a politically motivated attack on the Bush administration. So for no real reason, the conservative movement became an ideological tendency devoted to the proposition that rising household debt was a good thing.
With the right on the way out, maybe that can change and conservatives can start seeing problems and trying to devise distinctly conservative solutions to them. So far, though, Andy McCarthy seems determined to stay in denial mode, deriding talk of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression as a bit of “Obamanomics” spin.
35 Responses to “The Party of Denial”
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November 26th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Nope, it’s their chance to see problems everywhere, including ones they caused and ones that may not even exist, and then to blame them all on the Obama administration. I think we ought to have their MO down by now.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
I think McCarthy is simply readjusting the expectations game in favor of his team, so that when things turn up it won’t seem quite the stunning leadership success. Standard vapid transparent partisanship, really…I keep harkening back to Hilzoy, who expressed relief that she didn’t need to engage these people’s pseudo-arguments anyway, since THEY DON’T MATTER
November 26th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
I remember fondly my dad taking me to the bank during the 70s and opening a cd for me that paid 16%. I was unemployed, but had no debt. Good times. So today is much, much worse than then.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Unemployment measures have changed since the 80s. The U6 number is getting pretty close to what it was then. Yes, we’re not that bad yet, but what has people nervous is that we’re pretty bad at the moment, and the downturn is just starting out. Pretty much everyone (who isn’t a CNBC idiot) is predicting four quarters of negative growth already baked in, with the potential for more.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
The secret to some of these more nonsensical Andy McCarthy posts is not necessarily that the man is a moron. It’s that Andy McCarthy is sometimes writing for an audience of one, which is to say Rush Limbaugh.
If you live out here in the sticks, you have two talk radio stations to listen to in the mid afternoon: NPR or Rush Limbaugh. NPR is horrible in the afternoon, so horrible that I listen to Limbaugh. And he has on occasion referred to his “good friend Andy McCarthy who blogs at National Review”.
I can see how if you were a wingnut writing for a potential audience of 15 million wingnut radio listeners, you might write stupid shit just to get references by Rush Limbaugh.
November 26th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Depends on the duration of the CD and when it was bought. Inflation hit a high of 14.8% in 1980, and these days a 1.2% real return (yeah, I just subtracted, I’m lazy) is doing damn good. Heck, outside of 1979-1981, that CD would have been giving you about 5% more than inflation. You’d need to be a Somali pirate to get that rate of return these days.
November 26th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
With the right on the way out, maybe that can change and conservatives can start seeing problems and trying to devise distinctly conservative solutions to them.
That would require that they adopt the non-conservative view that there are a significant variety of problems such that it is the proper role of government to solve them.
Conservatives seem to hold in general that the problems that exist are for the most part either (i) the moral or genetic failings of individuals and none of the business of government, (ii) genuine social problems that are best dealt with via moral exhortation from the pulpit or the radio studio, (iii) the problems caused by government, where the solution consists of getting the government to stop doing stuff.
The only exceptions to this pattern that I can think of are national defense, violent crime and property crime. Those are the areas in which conservatives actually want the government to do things, and do a lot of those things. We tend to forget now, but back in the day crime was one of the really big conservative issues. Conservatives argued that liberals in power were too tolerant, lax, permissive, forgiving and rehabilitationist, and that law and the social order were going to hell because of it. They probably had a point in some cases, but a combination of policy changes from both sides of the partisan spectrum, and social changes having little to do with government, have neutralized the crime issue.
We might see a return of these attacks from the right, if Obama goes ahead with significant prison reform, sentencing reform, etc.
November 26th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
True, and my bad. After much Google-fu (the BLS site isn’t the most user friendly) I did find the tables and I am wrong. The numbers are actually closer to the worst of 1994. Ballparking, I’d say that U6 was around 16% or so in 1980, and currently we’re at 11.1% for October, and there’s no reason to believe that November will be an improvement, and it looks like we might might have the worst annual U6 since it started being measured.
My previous statement that things are still fugly for being so early in the downturn still stands.
November 26th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
@ al and davenyc
ok, i give up. what’s u6 and why does it matter?
November 26th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Re: So today is much, much worse than then.
It may have been good times for you personally, but not for an awful lot of people. I was just 13 when Reagan was elected, so I didn’t suffer much from that economy (my father had a secure job with an automatic COLA), but I can still recall the sheer craziness of 1979-1980: we were running out of oil, inflation was going to go to Weimar Republic levels, everything would be scarce, survivalists were holing up in the mountains with guns and canned food, there would be mass starvation in the Third World as the Population Bomb detonated, a new ice age was coming, the Russians were going to conquer the world, we’d all be vaporized in a nuclear war. Plus disco, platform shoes and the leisure suit.
Things basically suck right now, but we’re no where near that level of mayhem and despair.
November 26th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Conservatives are obsessed with liberals. Partly because it’s in the nature of conservatives to resist the change that all those nasty liberals are foisting on them, society, and everything decent. But among conservative elites, there’s a particularly strong feeling–a sort of Orthogonian resentment for their trendy liberal peers. Take it from me, I’ve seen it personally: many conservative university professors really hate their colleagues. Among elite circles, all the interesting people are liberals, and that really bugs the conservatives.
Taken on its own merits, conservative thought is just fine. But the Conservative Movement has, for the last 60 years, suffered a serious taint of resentment that has affected its judgment deeply. Pick up any conservative newspaper, and half the the op-eds are silly “look what those crazy libs are doing now!” pieces–even when conservatives are politically ascendant, and should really be paying attention to the issues that are facing them.
So when the Bush administration started seriously fucking up (Nov 7, 2000), many smartish conservatives chose to see it as more liberal bellyaching rather than the reality: that the long hoped-for comeuppance of their smartypants liberal peers was being denied them, yet again.
Conservative elites (ie any conservative journalists, academics or commentators, the most visible and intellectually influential parts of the movement) feel like outcasts in their own class. The war of the ideologies is very, very personal for them, and Bush’s obviously hopeless presidency has become a sort of personal humiliation, and they were indeed in deep, deep denial about it.
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