Fox New's 24-hour outrage cycle and how it hurts Republicans

By Richard Barry

James Fallows at The Atlantic cites a new study by Bruce Bartlett called "How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics."

He draws attention to two aspects of the study he finds particularly noteworthy.

The first is its source—for those who don’t know, Barlett is a veteran of the Reagan and Bush-41 administrations and was an influential early proponent of supply-side / tax-cut economics. He also worked for Ron Paul. Since then he’s harshly criticized the Bush-43 administration, but in no sense does he come at this as a Democratic party operative.

The second and more important reason is Bartlett’s accumulation of detail showing (a) that Fox’s core viewers are factually worse-informed than people who follow other sources, and even those who don’t follow news at all, and (b) that the mode of perpetual outrage that is Fox’s goal and effect has become a serious problem for the Republican party, in that it pushes its candidates to sound always-outraged themselves.

As it was written by a relatively high profile Republican, I suppose that means it can't be so easily dismissed as a piece of partisan tripe, although Fox News watchers have a name for those putatively on the inside who question their world view and the politics that flow from it: RINO.

That Fox News viewers are poorly informed, well knock me over with a feather.

On Fox's goal of perpetual outrage and how that pushes Republican candidates to "sound always outraged themselves," that's interesting. 

This approach works when preaching to the choir but not all that well when the goal is to expand one's reach, which is something the GOP would need to do to, say, win the presidency. 

Most voters don't live their lives in a state of high agitation and quickly grow weary of being around and listening to people who do. 

Criticizing the state of affairs as they are is always a part of electoral politics, but so is providing a plan to move things in a positive direction, usually the greatest part. 

If Ronald Reagan had just been about bemoaning the sad state of America due to liberal malfeasance and not also about a bright and shiny future, however unrealistic, he wouldn't have gotten very far.

Yes, positive works, and is in fact necessary. Fox News doesn't really do positive, and to the extent that conservative politicians tailor their message to be in sync with Fox's 24-hour outrage cycle, they are setting themselves up for failure.

Bruce Bartlett walks like a duck

By Frank Moraes

After Bruce Bartlett's amazing performance on Up with Chris Hayes yesterday, it is hard to complain much about him. Just the same, I found much to dislike in his article at The American Conservative, "Revenge of the Reality-Based Community."

The biggest problem is that Bartlett spends half the article justifying his conservative credentials. But then he discusses his awakening to new ideas and new insights. These place him firmly inside the big tent of the Democratic Party. And yet, he still considers himself a Republican and can't understand why the whole of the Republican establishment has turned its back on him. He even writes in a particularly vulnerable moment, "Honest to God, I am not a liberal or a Democrat. But these days, they are the only people who will listen to me."

This is kind of sweet, actually. But he follows up that statement with a bit of Old Testament level hubris, "When Republicans and conservatives once again start asking my opinion, I will know they are on the road to recovery." Let me get this straight: Republicans are deluded because they don't listen to him and all he is telling them is stuff that liberals are eager to hear? Well, I'm sure that he'll get a call from the Heritage Foundation any day now.

If it talks like a liberal and thinks like a liberal it is a fucking liberal! But Bartlett doesn't want to believe that because it would make a mockery of his past belief. And so he has become a kind of apologist for the past Republican Party, complimenting it for its successes and ignoring its many failures. I don't doubt that his many blind spots are genuine. In particular, he seems blind regarding the racism of his party for Bartlett's entire life. Here he is trying to steal the black vote for the Republicans in 2008:

I thought knowing the Democratic Party's pre-1964 history of racism, which is indisputable, would give Republicans a story to tell when they went before black groups to solicit votes. I thought it would also make Republicans more sympathetic to the problems of the black community, many of which are historical in their origins. Analyses by economists and sociologists show that historical racism still holds back African-Americans even though it has diminished radically since the 1960s.

Read more »

Do Republicans really want Americans back to work before the next election?

By Richard K. Barry

It seems that Republicans never get tired of saying the same things about how to strengthen the economy no matter how wrong their prescriptions are proven to be.

Tiresome as it is, the only thing we can do is correct them, again and again.

President Obama thinks we need a jobs bill. Most sane people, including most Americans, think we need a jobs bill that works to increase demand. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, apparently, thinks that creating demand is irrelevant and that we need only deregulate the economy to get things back on track.

Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly cites two papers that demonstrate how wrong Republicans are about this -- one by Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute and another by Bruce Bartlett, an economist and veteran of the Reagan and H.W. Bush Administrations (you know, that hotbed of socialism).

As Bartlett explains, Republicans like to argue that freeing the private sector of all those pesky consumer safeguards and worker protections will "reduce uncertainty" for business and get the economy humming again. The problem is that it's just not true:

Evidence supporting Mr. Cantor's contention that deregulation would increase unemployment is very weak. For some years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has had a program that tracks mass layoffs. In 2007, the program expanded, and businesses were asked their reasons for laying off workers. Among the reasons offered was "government regulations/intervention." There is only partial data for 2007, but we have data since then through the second quarter of this year. [...]

As one can see, the number of layoffs nationwide caused by government regulation is minuscule and shows no evidence of getting worse during the Obama Administration. Lack of demand for business products and services is vastly more important.

These results are supported by surveys. During June and July, Small Business Majority asked 1,257 small-business owners to name the two biggest problems they face. Only 13 percent listed government regulation as one of them. Almost half said their biggest problem was uncertainly about the future course of the economy - another way of saying a lack of customers and sales.

As Bartlett concluded:

In my opinion, regulatory uncertainty is a canard invented by Republicans that allows them to use current economic problems to pursue an agenda supported by the business community year in and year out. In other words, it is a simple case of political opportunism, not a serious effort to deal with high unemployment.

Here we have Republicans pushing an agenda that has nothing to do with helping Americans who are out of work find a job. No doubt they are using the poor economy to push deregulation because that is always what the business community wants. And they also tend to have ideological blinders on about the value of any kind of government regulation.

But it is a terrible thought to contemplate that Republicans know quite well that a jobs bill will bring down unemployment, if only marginally, and that is not what they want to see before the next election.

Terrible thought indeed.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Bruce Bartlett, David Frum, and the closing of the conservative mind

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Bruce Bartlett has had a long career in Republican politics. He worked for Ron Paul and Jack Kemp. He was a fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He was a senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House, working for Gary Bauer, later a Treasury official under Bush I. He worked at the Cato Institute.

Starting in 1993, he was with the right-wing National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas... until it fired him for being too critical of Bush II. As he puts it himself, he was fired "for writing a book critical of George W. Bush's policies, especially his support for Medicare Part D." And that, it seems, was it. The scarlet letter was applied. "In the years since," he laments, "I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, DC."

All because he broke ranks and spoke out, putting principle before partisanship. No matter his long record, an entire career, of committed conservatism.

In related news, David Frum, the former Bush II speechwriter who has been deeply critical of the GOP over health-care reform and other issues, and the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have parted ways. Was he fired? He claims not, and he very well may not have been, but Bartlett, responding to the news, and taking it for granted that Frum was fired, launched a sound criticism of the current state of American conservatism:

I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn't already.

*****

I wanted to say that this is a black day for what passes for a conservative movement, scholarship, and the once-respected AEI.

Even if Frum wasn't fired, even if the parting of ways was mutual, or perhaps a cost-cutting measure (Frum claims that he was invited to stay at the AEI on a "non-salary basis"), Bartlett, I think, is right. Conservatism these days is about either a) blind loyalty to the Republican Party, b) anti-government teabagging extremism, or c) theocracy -- or d) some contorted combination of the above.

What's more, both the Republican Party and the conservative movement, to the extent there is one anymore, are about purging and purifying, with dissenters, even conservative ones like Bartlett, even the occasionally bipartisan likes of Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, ignored, alienated, or excommunicated. Simply put, in Dear Leader Rush's party, in a movement dominated by the Hannitys and the Malkins, all that is acceptable is the narrow ideological fringe of the increasingly extreme right.

**********

The title of this post refers back to the title of Bartlett's post at Capital Gains and Games, which, of course, refers back to the title of Allan Bloom's famous book, The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom, as you may know, was a Straussian, a follower of Leo Strauss, and I, who studied at the University of Toronto with two of Bloom's leading students, am also one.

Yes, I remain one now, despite my liberalism and objections to neoconservatism (which, through Bill Kristol and others, is linked to Straussianism), and I still think there is a great deal to like about Strauss, an amazing political philosopher in his own right, and his immediate followers, including Bloom (who taught at Chicago and Toronto), whose translation and textual analysis of Plato's Republic are simply magnificent, as is so much else of what he did academically.

There is also a lot to like about The Closing of the American Mind, which tells some difficult truth about the intellectual decline of America as a modern liberal state. Anyone who pays attention to contemporary popular culture with a critical mind, even a generally open-minded liberal who welcomes new things and finds Bloom's occasionally reactionary conservatism distasteful, should agree that all is not well with the American mind. The decline of standards not just of excellence but even of goodness is all too apparent. Liberals like me argue that the benefits of progressive politics and an opening society far outweigh this decline in terms of importance -- I hardly think that returning to the narrow, oppressive elitism of the past, a bigoted world ruled by privileged white men, is desirable -- but we should nonetheless be seriously concerned about what has happened, and is happening, not just in America but in liberal democracies everywhere.

For more on Strauss, and on the possibility of reconciling Strauss and liberalism, see a pair of posts I wrote at my place way back in April-May 2005:

-- Education and liberation: What it means to be a Straussian, Part I; and

-- Diversity and conformity: What it means to be a Straussian, Part II.

I would add here that Allan Bloom himself was a lifelong Democrat -- unlike most Straussians, who tend to be Republican and generally on the political right. I hope that he, of sound and acute mind, would have objected to what is happening in the Republican Party and in American conservatism generally.

The American mind may very well still be closing, in a cultural way, despite the incredible advances of recent years (such as the growing recognition of gay rights, a greater appreciation for human rights, despite the barbarism of the George W. Bush administration, and the election of a black man to the presidency), but the conservative mind, now decaying, seems to have been shut down altogether, the Great Purge, of which both Bartlett and Frum have been victims, showing no signs of abating anytime soon.