A Failure to Communicate

How do you communicate with someone who lives inside a bubble?

It's long been clear that the Republican party has built a bubble for their base as part of a very successful tactic to secure party loyalty.  By filling the bubble with Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the right wing blogosphere, the party has been able to create an alternate reality where Democrats are always wrong, Republicans are always right, Democrats routinely devise nefarious plans to destroy America and Republicans ride in to save the day. The bubble has shielded the base from reality, so Republicans don't have to acknowledge decades of data showing that trickle-down economics increases debt without doing anything to grow the economy or create jobs.

But the stunned looks on the faces of the Fox News team when Ohio was called for Obama, the refusal of Karl Rove to accept what had happened, the fantastical rationalizations coming from the right in the aftermath (Romney wasn't conservative enough!) have lead to a disturbing conclusion.  It appears that, at some point, the Republican leadership crawled into the bubble after their base, sealed it behind them, and the air is becoming increasingly toxic in there. 

If you want to be a competent politician, you can't buy your own spin.  It's routine to downplay bad poll numbers, but in private you're still supposed to take them seriously.  If Nate Silver wasn't playing party politics when he correctly projected the Republican takeover of the House in 2010, then he probably isn't playing party politics now.

In fact, I think some of the critical failures of the Romney campaign stem from the candidate's inability to see beyond the Republican bubble.  At key points in the campaign, Romney picked themes that were staples of the bubble, but known falsehoods outside of it.  Themes like: Obama took a bad economy and "made the problem worse", "you didn't build that", Obama didn't say "Act of Terror" for 14 days and Jeep will be "moving all production to China".

Saying that Obama had made the economy worse was the opening gambit of the Romney campaign.  Inside the bubble, the complete failure of Obama's economic policy is gospel.  Outside the bubble, people know that Obama turned an economy that was losing 800,000 jobs a month to one that has been adding 100,000 - 200,000 jobs a month since 2010, which does not meet the definition of the word "worse".  With so many Americans still suffering, angry and desperate for a faster recovery, Romney's best case for himself was the economy, but he undercut that case by providing a false assessment of what was really happening.

The Republican Convention was Mitt's big chance to reintroduce himself to the American people after the Republican debates.  Unfortunately, Mitt chose "you didn't build that" as the convention's theme.  This was very popular inside the bubble, where people accepted the bizarre notion that the President of the United States would actually believe that entrepreneurs should be denied credit for the businesses they created and that America should abandon the free market.  Outside the bubble, it was clear that the President was talking about infrastructure.  While individuals can build businesses, they can't build the infrastructure necessary to support those businesses, so a healthy economy requires both individual achievement and responsible government.  Basing the convention on a known falsehood was one of the reasons the convention flopped.

In the second debate, Romney had a real chance to score points from the tragedy in Benghazi.  He squandered that chance by basing his attack on the bubble myth that Obama did not use the phrase "act of terror" until 14 days after the  attack.  The myth held that Obama was trying to pretend that he had defeated Al Qaeda entirely, was embarrassed to be proven wrong, and was trying to cover up by pretending terrorists were not involved.  In truth, Obama claims to have severely compromised Al Qaeda's central leadership, greatly reducing their ability to mount another 9/11 scale attack, but he has made it clear the Al Qaeda and its affiliates still exist and terrorism remains our top national security threat.  Also, Obama is on tape the day after the Benghazi attack clearly using the phrase "acts of terror".

Finally, the warped reality of the bubble led Romney to spend the last day of a very close race lying to the people of Ohio about the auto industry.  Outside the bubble, Bloomberg News had reported that Chrysler was planning to resume Jeep sales to China and would eventually produce those Jeeps locally.  Back in the bubble, a blogger with stunningly poor English comprehension skills took this to mean that Jeep would be shipping all US jobs to China, and Romney believed him.  Even after the real Bloomberg story was revealed, the CEO of Chrysler made it clear that Jeep would not be moving any US jobs and was in fact planning to add 1,100 new US jobs, and interviews starting popping up with Ohio voters who made it clear they know a lot more about Jeep than Mitt Romney does and they don't appreciate being lied to, Mitt still couldn't be convinced to climb out of the bubble and accept reality.  In spite of the evidence, he and his running mate Paul Ryan kept repeating the lie to the bitter end.  Thanks to the bubble, Mitt Romney spent the last day of the campaign poisoning the voter pool in America's most critical swing state.

So how do you communicate with someone who lives inside a bubble? 

How do you communicate with someone who has had that bubble hermetically sealed and covered the interior with reflective paint?  How do you convince them to scratch off a patch of that paint and see for themselves what the outside world looks like? 

To help residents of the bubble understand what objective reality actually looks like, I hope the following thought experiment might be helpful:

Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush was a Democrat.

Imagine that nothing else had changed.  That everything happened exactly the way it did in real life, except that instead of having a capital "R" after his name, Bush had a capital "D".

Imagine that a Democrat had turned a surplus into the largest debt in history.  Imagine he accomplished this, in part, by simply giving away the surplus, spending a large percentage on bureaucracy in the process, then initiated two wars and an expensive prescription drug program without providing any way to pay for them.  If a Democrat did that, would we be referring to Democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility?

Imagine that a Democrat presided over eight years of the weakest economic growth in modern history, followed by the most catastrophic economic collapse since the Great Depression.  Would we describe Democrats as the party that understands business and the economy?

Imagine that the most devastating terrorist attack in US history had occurred on a Democrat's watch.  Imagine that the Democrat responded by starting the two longest wars in US history, and was unable to conclude either war by the end of his presidency, or to find the terrorist most responsible for the attack.  Imagine that one of these wars turned out to be entirely unnecessary and counterproductive, in spite of costing twice as many American lives as the 9/11 attacks and more Iraqi lives than Saddam Hussein.  Would we call Democrats the party that's tough on terror and dependable on defense?

Imagine that a Democrat lost a great American city and over 1,000 American lives due to inaction in the face of a great storm.  Would we describe Democrats as the party that brought competent, business-like management to the White House?

Imagine that a Democrat had inherited an America at the peak of its power, the one undisputed economic and military superpower in the world, and left an America so damaged that many, both at home and abroad, were questioning whether our best days were behind us.  Would we describe Democrats as the party of bold leadership?  As the party we could trust to keep America strong?

If a Democrat had that record, how long would it be before we trusted Democrats again?

Yet Republicans never lost faith.  In 2008, they chose John McCain, who essentially promised to keep the Bush administration going.  In 2010 they voted in a House that promised to double down on Bush's policies, and promptly became the most incompetent and unpopular congress in history.  In 2012, they chose Mitt Romney, who not only pledged to return us to Bush era policies, but filled his campaign with ex-Bush staffers, the exact same people responsible for these disasters in the first place.

Now try the same thought experiment for Barack Obama:

Imagine that a Republican inherited the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.  An economy so bad that many analysts said that avoiding a new depression may be impossible.  And yet the Republican President did exactly that.  He halted the economic collapse, prevented a new depression, turned the recession into a recovery, transformed an economy that was hemorrhaging 800,000 jobs a month into one that for two years added 100 - 200,000 jobs a month so that, by the end of four years, he created more new jobs than his predecessor had in eight and along the way he had saved the US auto industry.  Would we be calling this a failed presidency?  Would we be saying that Republicans had made the economy worse?

If you say that we should take steps to speed up the recovery, most people would agree with you.  If you say that much of Washington is broken and in desperate need of repair, most people would agree with you.  If you want to have productive discussions about the size and role of government, most people would be happy to join you.  But if you say that Obama's policies have failed, that he took a bad economy and made it worse, that we could improve our situation by providing tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, that our country is on a more dangerous trajectory now than it was four years ago, you are simply wrong.  You are making statements that are utterly and demonstrably false. 

If you are more frightened by the direction our country is heading in 2012 than you were in 2008, there is something fundamentally wrong with your reality testing.

Unfortunately, fundamentally flawed reality testing has been a defining feature of the Republican party for some time now, and in 2012 it cost them dearly.  It's clear that the bubble is running out of air, and Republicans need to poke some holes in that thing if they want to survive.

When Neutrality Becomes Bias

There seems to be a paradox in modern politics.  Every election the technology for fact checking grows faster and easier, and yet it seems as if it also becomes easier for politicians to get away with lying.  My suspicion is that this is because we've lost the mainstream media as the arbiter of truth.

Back in the day, it was the responsibility of the media to hold politicians accountable for their actions.  This required investigative journalism, which was very expensive, but it was an investment that paid off.  Major scoops, like Woodward and Bernstein's work on Watergate, was what differentiated newspapers and drew readers from the competition. 

But two things changed that.

First, political operatives discovered that if they couldn't counter the message of a story, they could still attack the messenger.  Accusations of bias became an effective technique for derailing any story.

Second, the advent of the internet fragmented the media market.  Investigative journalism lost its status as the primary draw to news outlets, while remaining just as expensive.  

Now that it had become both dangerous and unprofitable, mainstream news sources abandoned investigative journalism in favor of parrot journalism.  In the new paradigm, the news would simply repeat what other people said.  Instead of investigating a quote, the media would simply "balance" it with a quote from someone else who disagreed.  Since the media never made a judgment for themselves, they were off the hook for accusations of bias, and they could save the money they would have spent on investigating.

Unfortunately, this new paradigm required the media to base its reporting on a fundamentally false premise: that being unbiased and remaining neutral are equivalent.

The premise holds true for matters of opinion.  When two politicians disagree on values or political philosophy, it is appropriate for the media to demonstrate lack of bias by remaining neutral.

However, in matters of fact, neutrality becomes a form of bias.  When two politicians disagree on a fact, there are only two possible explanations: either one is right and one is wrong, or both are wrong.  Whatever the explanation, to remain neutral the media must portray both politicians as being equivalent.  But if one of them is right and the other is wrong, the media can only accomplish this by pulling  down whoever is right and lifting up whoever is wrong.  In effect, the media is showing bias towards whoever is wrong.

The unintended consequences of playing it safe is the we have created a media that is not biased towards the left or the right, but is instead biased towards falsehood.  In the process, they have made lying a viable political tool.

The Bizarro Sixties

I've come to think of our current era as the Bizarro Sixties.

In the original sixties, the stereotype held that liberals were magical thinkers, while conservatives were common sense pragmatists.  A liberal might be expected to say: "Maybe if we form a circle and hold hands and project our positive energy out into the universe, we can fix the world's problems".  A conservative would be expected to respond: "Well, I'd say that and a dollar will buy you a cup of coffee".

In the 21st century, these roles seem to have flipped. 

Republicans now seem to value philosophy over real world experience. 

In the year 2000, Republicans introduced the idea of the semi-sentient free market.  If we just unshackled the market through deregulation, gave massive tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and stood back out of the way, the system would sort itself out to produce the strongest economy possible.

We then spent 12 painful years proving this idea to be catastrophically false.

With regulations dismantled and the Bush tax cuts  in place, we limped through 8 years of the weakest economy in modern history, followed by the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression.  Throughout that time, we amassed conclusive evidence that the Bush tax cuts had done nothing to stimulate the economy, create jobs, or aid in the recovery, they had simply ballooned our debt, while reckless deregulation was a major driver of the economic collapse.

The Republican plan to fix this disaster was unanimous: renew the Bush tax cuts and continue deregulation.

In the 21st century, the bizarro conservatives now say: "Pay no attention the lessons of history!  The purity of our vision must not be muddied by facts!  If we just believe hard enough while  repeating the mistakes of the past, maybe tomorrow an invisible hand will reach down from the sky and make it all work this time."

It has now fallen to liberals to step into the shoes of the common sense pragmatist and respond: "Well, that didn't work.  Let's try something else."

The Republican Faith

In the elections of 2010, Republicans rode a wave of voter dissatisfaction with the economy to sweeping victories by promising to focus our national attention on job creation.  However, once the new class of 2010 picked up the reins of power, they defied expectations.  Instead of focusing on jobs, they focused on woman's health issues.  While efforts to boost the economy ground to a halt, Republicans around the country began introducing unprecedented volumes of legislation aimed at restricting access to abortion and contraception. 

This turn of events was baffling to many of us.  How does promising jobs lead to restricting access to healthcare?  How  did so many Republicans decide to take the same seemingly random turn at the same time?  My hypothesis: this can be explained as an artifact of Republicans restructuring their party as a religion.

The Republican drive to restructure their organization from that of a standard political party to something that more closely resembles a religion started to take shape under Reagan, but solidified under Gingrich's Contract with America.  As with most things, this restructuring came with both good news and bad news.

The good news was that political opponents became blasphemers.  Debates on the merits of policy became battles between good and evil.  This created a base of true believers whose faith could never be shaken by policy failure or broken promises.  In a political party, you can switch if the other side is providing better results.  In a religion, you can't join the devil just because God isn't delivering. 

The bad news was that policy became dogma.  There was no longer any middle ground for policy that has merits but isn't the right solution for the moment.  Policy could only be good or evil.  This meant that Republicans could never add new ideas.  They were limited to the policies already approved, since they had just declared all other ideas to be blasphemous.  So when Republicans want to stir things up, or differentiate themselves in a primary, they either have to turn against an idea that they formerly supported, or take an old idea to a new extreme.  The Contract with America built a house and destroyed all of the extra building material, so the only way Republicans can alter their house is to burn down one of the existing rooms.

This put the Republican class of 2010 in a tight spot.  They had run on economic reform, but the only economic tools left to them were tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation, and there wasn't much left to do with those tools.  So their choice was to sit in the echoing silence of their inaction, or distract the American people with noise of some other kind.  Once again, strict dogma had given them very few choices.  They could champion gun rights, but there are few rights gun owners don't already have.  They could start in on gay marriage again, but that theme was growing tired.  So that left reproductive rights. 

Clearly there are many severe social conservatives in the Republican party who have been itching to go medieval on America for decades, but the question is: why did the entire party pick this moment to let loose?  I think the answer is that Republicans have so limited themselves in terms of policy that this was the only path left without a self-imposed roadblock.  It was a choice between attacking woman's rights, or doing absolutely nothing.  In the end, risking half the vote was preferable to letting the public see that, for Republicans, taking action on the economy is an impossibility.

 

P.S.

This also helps explain the seemingly self-destructive "Incredible Shrinking Tent" tactic of the modern Republican.  If everyone outside the party is evil, then you can never make new friends, you can only turn former friends into enemies (since old enemies get stale after a while and you need to do something to keep the base energized).  So the Republicans have had to keep turning against new segments of the American population:  liberals, gays, atheists, Muslims, Hispanics, immigrants, people who live on coasts, people who care about the environment, Americans with college degrees, poor people, African Americans, women and now people who like sex.  Inexplicably, polls show that this leaves 50% of the population, although you would think the only demographic left to attack would be ultra-wealthy celibate white men. 

Next thing you know, Republicans will be going after people who like to share cute cat photos online.

No Mystery

For many Americans, it seems that the cause of our recent economic meltdown remains a mystery.  Without this knowledge, many now embrace solutions that are, in fact, the exact same policies that caused the crisis in the first place.  Primarily, these involve the removal of essential regulations. 

We have allowed ourselves to believe the fiction that we once had a perfectly functioning free market that was corrupted by regulation and now must be freed again.  In truth, our nation has been plagued by a long series of boom-to-bust economic disasters, with a brief reprieve in the second half of the 20th century following the economic reforms of the Great Depression.  This suggests that economic chaos is the natural state of an unregulated free market and that certain key regulations are required for economic stability.

America's first boom-to-bust cycle resulted in the Panic of 1819.  This was followed by the Panic of 1837, the Panic of 1857, the Long Depression of 1873 - 1896, the Panic of 1907 and finally the Great Depression of 1929 - 1939.  At this point, the American people were tired of continuous economic chaos and empowered the government to take common sense steps to fix the problem.  It was clear that in the modern world, hard work and prudent investing were no guarantee against dying in poverty, so we began creating the social safety net.  It was also clear that a stable economy requires certain baseline regulations, principally the provisions of the Banking Act of 1933 that have become known as the Glass-Steagall Act.

Glass-Steagall drew a line separating commercial banks, where people keep their money, and investment banks, which gamble on high risk / high reward investments.  It recognized that if banks could gamble with the nation's life savings, they could hold the nation hostage.  If they gambled and lost, they could avoid responsibility by telling the nation: "If I go down, I'm taking you all with me".  The government would then either have to bail them out, or suffer a national catastrophe.  By separating commercial and investment banks, Glass-Steagall required the former to safeguard the life savings of the nation, while allowing the later to ride the free market as hard as they liked, as long as they were willing to pay the consequences.  Think of it as the anti-bailout bill.

Given modern rhetoric, you would expect these regulations to have resulted in the end of the free market, the rise of socialism, the nation's collapse into an era of oppression and decline.  Instead, what followed was the greatest period of wealth and stability in American history.  This was the period in which America became the world's preeminent economic superpower, in which the American Dream became our reality, in which capitalism triumphed over communism to become the world's dominant economic system.

We had finally built a foundation that would give our economy the stability to grow.  The economy would still go up and down, but without the devastating collapses that would set us back to square one.  This golden period lasted until the end of the 20th century, when we allowed ourselves to be lulled into false sense of security, to forget the lessons of the past, and to begin chipping away at the foundation our economy was built upon.  In 1999, the principal provisions of Glass-Steagall were repealed and by the beginning of the 21st century our economy's foundation had been entirely chipped away.

What happened next was exactly what you would expect: the floor dropped out from under us.

Our economy returned to its natural state of boom-to-bust chaos. 

The problem is not that certain people are greedy, or unscrupulous, or engaged in class warfare, or are being unfair.

The problem is that, after a few shining decades of reality-based economics, we started making decisions based on how we would like the world to be, rather than the way the world really is.  Today, the path to recovery is clear.  We need to stop repeating the mistakes of the past and start repeating its successes.