Not a bubble, a hall of mirrors

224 thoughts on “Not a bubble, a hall of mirrors”

1. “echo chamber” always worked for me.

2. Hm, why did they not go all the way to Naked News?
   OK, I think that one is easy. NN women are in charge, FN women are bridge bunnies.

3. I find that the Obsidian Wings bloggers tend to be more civil towards those with whom they disagree than do many bloggers on the left. But I find them generally as immersed in the liberal echo-chamber as those other bloggers – and as Brett has noticed in the past, they tend to be just as unaware of the effect.
   There is a lot more symmetry than you realize. It is much easier to see other’s biases than to see your own. If there is a major asymmetry, it is that – as Haidt and some others have noted – liberals seem to have a lot more trouble understanding conservatives than the reverse.
   For example, I find that a lot of commenters on liberal blogs have internalized an understanding of conservatives that has no connection with reality. You’ve probably heard things like, “conservatives want to destroy the middle class” or “the only reason conservatives oppose Obama is his color.” It is only by remaining in the liberal echo chamber that it is possible to hold onto such ideas.
   On the contrary, for all the echo chamber effect on the right, most conservatives do seem to have at least a moderate understanding of the left – although there is the frequent and uncharitable suspicion that when bad things happen, it is by design rather than incompetence.

4. liberals seem to have a lot more trouble understanding conservatives than the reverse.
   I would have to disagree. If you reversed roles and had a standard issue liberal try to make the conservative case, I’d be willing to bet they would do a better job of it than a randomly chosen conservative picked to make the liberal case. Frankly, liberalism is not easily explained. Many self identified liberals I know are unaware of the intellectual underpinnings of their political allegiance (cf. Eric Alterman’s “Why I Am A Liberal”). To expect a run of the mill conservative to do so is really a stretch.
   As to your examples: As somebody who swims in the shallow pool of the liberal echo chamber I don’t feel it’s a big stretch to demonstrate that public policies favored by many, if not most, conservatives actually do have the effect of destroying the middle class (rabid anti-unionism for starters) and that a good deal of conservative opposition to Obama is undeniably fueled by racism.

5. I’m not speaking just from my opinion, here. This post reports Andrew Bigg’s analysis of the Jonhathan Haidt’s studies which reached this conclusion.
   Briefly, they asked conservatives and liberals to answer questions about their own moral beliefs – and then asked them to answer as though they were of the opposite ideology. And he found that conservatives could answer the way liberals would a lot more reliably than the reverse.
   And yes, I obviously think it is big stretch to demonstrate those things unless you take liberal assumptions as inherent truth.

6. Well, I know few liberals that would agree with those statements as long as there is ‘only’ in them (and an implied ‘all’ before conservatives).
   From my POV the first claim changes intentions with effects. Imo (US) conservative policies would in the long run lead to the elimination of the middle class but this is not the primary intent. As I have claimed repeatedly conservative policies have the same effect a Ostwald ripening and that means no stable middleground a middle class could aggregate on. Imo a middle class can never be a natural equilibrium but can only exist when the natural process towards a strict two class system (a few haves and everyone else havnenots) is hemmed or actively fought against. And this is fundamentally against conservative values as we understand them today (those values are either neutral/libertarian = let nature happen or affirmative/reactionary = actively push the natural equilibrium). The middle class is essentially a buffer that will get used up unless artificially replenished.
   As far as racism goes, classic racism is today in the US primarily a thing on the right, a reservoir that can and will be tapped. As a result open or hidden appeals to racism can only be a tool on that side at the moment. For the liberal side such an appeal would be a net negative. I think there are relatively few federal conservative racists but quite a lot of pretenders* (because they need the local vote). The even fewer true racists on the left on the other hand cannot risk showing their beliefs for the same tactical reasons. As a result racism is strongly overrepresented on the conservative side (true + pretend) and underrepresented on the left (true – pretend).
   I am primarily talking about colour-bound racism here** leaving out the other classic, antisemitism. There one can find a specific leftist version, while on the right it is tied not to conservatism in general but almost exclusively to the religious fraction.
   *my guess is that 9 out of 10 federal GOP birthers are pretenders not true believers
   **again, talking about today not the past

7. Hartmut, are you claiming that a significant number of conservatives are racists, or that what few racists exist are mainly on the right? And why separate claims of racism from antisemitism?

8. I wish I could find the link, but I can’t so I’ll so my best to summarize.
   A Democratic group (Democracy Corps?) commissioned an in depth study of the thinking of Republican voters. It amounted to a lot of listening. A LOT of listening. They set out to create a safe space where self-identified Republican voters could voice their thoughts uncriticized and unchallenged.
   They found three categories of Republican voters.
   The Evangelicals. These folks expressed fear that America was becoming unrecognizable to them. Much of that fear was in terms of the increase in the percentage of Americans who are not white. They did not use racist terms and were very concerned that they be perceived as racist. However, they did express the belief that somehow nonwhites were not as genuinely American as they were or the increase in nonwhites was somehow a threat to their sense of what America is. They tended to believe that Obama was Muslim, born in Kenya and so on. They also tended to think that their kind of Christianity was the religion of the Founding Fathers and that the nation was supposed to conform to their beliefs and that other beliefs lacked legitimacy. They felt particularly threatened by what they called “the gay agenda.”
   The moderates. These folks claimed to believe in small government or opposition to big government although that was not defined. They were concerned about balance budgets although they didn’t seem aware of the results of cutting taxes during wars. They were uncomfortable with the evangelicals and did not share either the anti-immigrant or anti-gay views of the evangelicals.
   The third group were the ones who claimed to be libertarian.
   All groups expressed a lot of fear and anger.
   What I notice about this is that there’s a huge element of what must be willful ignorance or the groups would be just as disaffected from the Republicans as they are from the Democrats. I also don’t believe ANY libertarian is sincere in their philosophy because they never want to apply it to themselves. And I’d have a lot more respect for those who favor small government and oppose big government if that sort of claim didn’t so often come from people who want big government for themselves.
   I am discussing Republican voters here, rather than conservatives because no one, least of all the self-proclaimed conservatives, has ever to my knowledge articulated a philosophy that they wanted applied to their own situation or state.
   So, no I don’t think Republicans are all racists or even mostly racist. I think the basic difference between people who vote for Republicans and people who vote for Democrats is that Republicans think the government should serve them and represent them and Democrats think the government should serve and represent everyone.
   It’s a difference between a fearful exclusive attitude and a hopeful inclusive one.

9. The other thing that strikes me is how incongruent the beliefs of those Republicans are from objective reality. The Founding Fathers were not the religious equivalents of modern evangelicals. Some of them were hardly Christians at all.
   Cutting taxes for the wealthy does not create jobs. That’s not how capitalism works. It’s pretty hypocritical for a person to be in favor of Medicare, the Bonneville Power Admin. interstate highways, and the VA while opposing Obamacare.
   Modern Democrats tend to be more practical, more oriented to doing what seems feasible to solve a problem. Modern Republicans seem to want to impose their fantasies on the rest of us and when their fantasies don’t work, they deny reality, or when their fantasies affect them personally in a negative way they exempt themselves from the application of the fantasy. In any case ideology or religion trumps learning and thinking.

10. In my opinion there are enough racists in the conservative voter pool that it is unsafe for most conservative candidates to not at least pander to them. In parts of the country it is simply suicidal not to use the proper code words that give the impression to that part of the base that the candidate is a reliable racist. If they don’t, they will not survive their primaries because that part of the base is overrepresented there. Looking at rather recent polls that in some Southern states a majority still is in favor of miscegenation laws should dispel the notion that racism is dead or dying. And those are unmistakably red states.
    Why I separate racism and antisemitism? Because they overlap but only partially. There is political, racial and religious antisemitism that can occur separately or in any mix. Colour-bound prejudice cannot be separated from the notion of race. On the left antisemitism is nearly 100% political, on the right any combination is possible, although political occurs rarely in pure form there (as far as I can tell only in a subgroup of libertarians that is also isolationist).
    Another reason to exlude antisemitism from our discussion here is the almost uniquely US phenomenon of rabid antisemites that are also rabidly pro-(RW)-Israel, a seeming contradiction that can only be explained with a certain perverted religious interpretation of scripture (in essence: G*d hates the Jews but needs them to kindle Armageddon, and we have to follow G*d there. The way G*d acts out his plan is through Israel’s RW, so we have to support it unconditionally. The Jews are G*d’s and our useful idiots). This can only be found on the conservative side but it is not something even a majority of conservatives subscribe to.

11. Here’s a good article about liberal stereotyping of conservatives, and vv:
    http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0050092
    Those researchers found that conservatives understood liberals better than v.v., but they note that their subjects were all from very “blue” regions. It may be that where conservatives are the majority, the misunderstanding runs the other way.

12. Here’s that “Inside the GOP” report:
    http://www.democracycorps.com/Republican-Party-Project/inside-the-gop-report-on-focus-groups-with-evangelical-tea-party-and-moderate-republicans/

13. “There is a lot more symmetry than you realize. It is much easier to see other’s biases than to see your own”
    Oh, if there were only some sort of way to distinguish the validity of a ‘bias’ or ‘opinion’ or ‘belief’. Hey! how about we check with this little thing called Objective Reality?
    If only there were a field of knowledge dedicated to discovering and explaining that darn Objective Reality thing. Why, the practitioners might even have some insight for separating ‘truth’ from ‘BS’.
    But that costs money and makes some people uncomfortable, so I guess it’s not surprising that they try to shut it down.

14. Those researchers found that conservatives understood liberals better than v.v., but they note that their subjects were all from very “blue” regions. It may be that where conservatives are the majority, the misunderstanding runs the other way.
    Which would be rather interesting to study. It would be consistent with Biggs’ explanation, and contrary to Haidt’s. The main reason to suspect that explanation was the finding that “… liberals were the least accurate about conservatives and about liberals.” That last – that liberals were less accurate about their own beliefs than were conservatives or moderates about liberal beliefs is surprising to me. I don’t think any of the suggested causes explains that one very well.

15. Oh, if there were only some sort of way to distinguish the validity of a ‘bias’ or ‘opinion’ or ‘belief’. Hey! how about we check with this little thing called Objective Reality?
    Outside of the hard sciences, it is rather difficult to find truly Objective Reality. If you cannot measure it in the lab and have others reproduce your experiments and duplicate your results, it is very easy for people’s biases to color their perception.
    For example, one of the conservative vs liberal studies asked about how much progress there had been in racial equality since the 1960s. I’m sure it will not surprise you that different groups have very different answers. So how do you decide what Objective Reality is? Each group will insist that it is correct and the others are living in a fantasy.

16. You’ve probably heard things like, “conservatives want to destroy the middle class”
    As Hartmut says, this may not be the intent, but it does seem to me to be a likely consequence of many conservative policies.
    Rather than telling me I’m in a liberal echo chamber, tell me why anyone imagines that eliminating estate taxes and reducing or eliminating taxes on capital income would not establish a hereditary largely tax-exempt aristocracy.
    Then tell me why cutting financial aid to college students, cutting higher education budgets, and generally making it harder to finance college doesn’t hurt people’s chances of having a decent middle-class sort of career.
    I could go on, and I’m sure others can add to this, but the point is that before you cantell me that my thinking is just ideological you have to tell me what’s wrong with it.

17. OK, well you seem to be changing the things that you think will destroy the middle class, but let me give it a shot.
    
    Until 2009, Germany had no capital gains tax at all, and real estate held for at least 10 years is still exempt from such tax. I have seen no evidence that Germany has a hereditary largely exempt aristocracy. Many nations also have no estate taxes, again without the aristocracy appearing.
    But even if one did, how would that destroy the middle class?
    Then tell me why cutting financial aid to college students, cutting higher education budgets, and generally making it harder to finance college doesn’t hurt people’s chances of having a decent middle-class sort of career.
    Let’s start by playing, “spot the hidden assumptions.” Implicit in your challenge is that going to college is likely to launch people into a middle-class career, and not going to college is likely to prevent it. I don’t believe that is warranted. For decades, we’ve had a viable middle class with relatively few of them going to college. Even today, there are skilled positions in manufacturing (such a machinists, welders, nc operators) going begging, which would provide middle class incomes – but we don’t have enough people with the skills.
    And especially nowadays, we have a significant portion of college graduates who cannot find work that actually requires college. There are a lot of causes for that, which are worth a discussion of their own – but the point is that assuming that you reach the middle class if and only if you go college is simply not warranted.
    On the other hand, a lot of people are going to college and learning little or nothing, but building up enormous debt – and student loans are a large part of that. Colleges have become big businesses, paying administrators CEO-like salaries, while using underpaid adjuncts to do the actual teaching. Many of them over-emphasize social aspects over academics, and few if any pay much attention to actually qualifying their students for good jobs.
    A generation or two ago, a college degree was almost a guarantee of a good income (although not the only path). But that was largely because degrees were relatively rare. Now they are commonplace, and tend to be viewed almost like a high school diploma was back then.
    I would say that ladening young people with debt that they cannot pay with the minimal skills all too many outside of the STEM disciplines have achieved is a much bigger obstacle to a middle-class life than cutting the subsidies could ever be.
    

18. And apparently the “Obamacare” that Germany has is worth shutting down the government in order to stop. Give us Germany’s safety net and I am guessing that there would be a lot of happy liberals here, and I am assuming that the cost for higher education in the European Union is generally a lot cheaper than here as well.
    And the concern over unemployment is duly noted. There was also a reference to objective reality being hard to find outside of the hard sciences. With regard to economics, how about we give Keynesianism a try, because it is pretty clear that what we have been doing is not working very well. And refer to Krugman for a discussion of what constitutes objective reality in economics (yeah, I know, argument from authority).

19. I’m not speaking just from my opinion, here. This post reports Andrew Bigg’s analysis of the Jonhathan Haidt’s studies which reached this conclusion.
    Biggs and AEI are simply propagandists. I am not familiar with Haidt’s work, but it seems interesting. So I read some other reviews of his work. His views are somewhat controversial. One, of many, questions I would put to him would be, “If conservatives are more in tune Haidt’s six moral foundations, why do they dismiss global climate change?”
    There are things that are indeed objectively “true”. These include (1.) US wage stagnation; (2.) Redistribution of income and wealth upwards; (3.) Our woeful GINI coefficient; (4.) Studies that show upward class mobility is less here than elsewhere.
    As a policy matter, I would argue these outcomes are the result of public policy decisions that are overwhelmingly supported by conservatives. So I don’t see what this has to do with one’s assumptions, liberal or otherwise.

20. Even today, there are skilled positions in manufacturing (such a machinists, welders, nc operators) going begging, which would provide middle class incomes – but we don’t have enough people with the skills.
    This is not true. If the wages offered were higher, people would acquire the skills. That is how markets work. If there was a skills “shortage” one would expect to see the wages offered for these positions increase dramatically in order to attract employees. We do not see this. Dean Baker has short this myth down tirelessly.

21. Haidt argues that there are particular reasons why liberals reject 3 of what Haidt suggests are the 5 foundations of human morality, which are ingroup loyalty, purity and respect for authority, which form a major part of conservative beliefs about moral authority (the other two are empathy and reciprocity)
    The reason is that they have so often been used to keep down groups in society, groups that now are coming to the fore. While liberals can be condemnatory with the latter three, they tend to valorize the first two and I think that liberals would acknowledge that.
    But it would seem to me that the first two are the foundational principles of most major religions, while the latter three are generally accepted to be things that occur when religion and moral belief becomes problematic in the context of a large scale society.
    Biggs wants to suggest that each of those foundational principles needs to be equally adhered to, but from my liberal hall of mirrors, the first two are the foundational principles and the latter three are ones that we have to acknowledge people have, but we should strive to overcome in many cases (but not all, mind you)
    I’d also point out that it is the case that a number of conservatives (hopefully not here) valorize, afaict, the latter 3 at the expense of the first two. On the other hand, a lot of liberals would be happy to work with conservatives if they were willing to accept the first two principles wholeheartedly. And people who are willing to sacrifice the first two for the latter three, be they on the right or the left, (and there are those on the left for whom calls of purity of thought and respect for authority loom large) are called zealots for a reason. There are certainly zealots on the left, but given that they are generally powerless, I’m not sure the comparison gives you as much as you think it does.

22. Ok, engineer here who has things made by skilled machinists on a regular basis. We do, in fact, compensate for the shortage of machinists, by exporting work to other countries, mostly in places like Malaysia. This kind of caps the premium a good machinist can get, but let me note that, even so capped, our machinists make more than this engineer.
    Even driven down by a plentiful supply, the pay machinists get would make this career path remarkably better than going to an expensive college so that you can inquire if somebody wants fries with that.
    I’d also note that it’s no accident our head machinist hails from England, not the US. It’s kind of hard to switch in midstream from forensic pathologist to machinist, it’s not like you can go down to the store and buy the “machinist skill-set expansion pack”, and get a job tomorrow. We’re talking here about a career which usually starts with the (Now almost gone!) high school shop class, and goes through an apprenticeship program that lasts quite as long as college, though with the advantage that you get paid during it.
    No kidding, last year we had some simple work, and had the bright idea of farming it out to the local shop classes, so the students could earn a bit of money. We couldn’t, there weren’t any.
    So, my advise to any of you with kids: Be sure to tell them that becoming a machinist IS a pretty good career path, which DOESN’T involve going into debt to pursue.
    As for the rest of the topic… No point in addressing it, you wouldn’t hear me for the echos.

23. liberals seem to have a lot more trouble understanding conservatives than the reverse.
    this is wishful thinking, plain and simple.
    for every “conservatives want to destroy the middle class” or “the only reason conservatives oppose Obama is his color,” there’s a “liberals want to America destroy America”, “… ban football”, “…ban guns”, “…control your life”, etc.. (all taken from the Google auto-complete). there’s “liberals want to destroy [family | Christmas | marriage | babies | the Constitution]”, there’s “liberals want [Sharia law | the terrorists to win | to capitulate]”, etc.. should i keep going?
    “liberals want to disarm America”, “liberals want America to be like [France | Germany | Sweden]”. “liberals hate [free enterprise | hard work | winners]”.
    more?
    how about the classic “the left wants to keep blacks on the government plantation” ?
    how much understand of anything does bullshit like that show?
    no, the “conservatives” i’ve come across (including those in the media) show no understanding of what liberals want. and that’s because they are railing against the imaginary liberals created by “conservative” media which portrays liberals in simple, absurdly evil terms in order to make them easy to hate. because if you’re in the business of selling the cure for liberalism, you need the marks audience to hate liberals. and they do a damned good job of it, too.

24. So, my advise to any of you with kids: Be sure to tell them that becoming a machinist IS a pretty good career path, which DOESN’T involve going into debt to pursue.
    Not terrible advice – though I’d be inclined to train as a plumber instead, just in case 3D printing takes off. I have yet to hear of a glut of plumbers.
    As for the rest of the topic… No point in addressing it, you wouldn’t hear me for the echos.
    That would be a shame.
    I’m sure you have, for instance, some interesting things to say about ‘respect for authority’, judging from a couple of your recent posts over at the Volokh blog.

25. “and that’s because they are railing against the imaginary liberals created by “conservative” media which portrays liberals in simple, absurdly evil terms in order to make them easy to hate.”
    Hearing that coming from a liberal, especially at a site like this, is just so hilariously ironic.

26. go ahead Brett, tell the world what you think liberals want. prove me wrong.

27. Mean annual wage for machinists: $40,860
    Mean annual salary for mechanical engineers: $84,770.
    US per capita income: $42,693
    Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

28. I would say that ladening young people with debt that they cannot pay with the minimal skills all too many outside of the STEM disciplines have achieved is a much bigger obstacle to a middle-class life than cutting the subsidies could ever be.
    But that debt would be much lower if the colleges were better-supported and tuition was less. They might also have a better chance to pay it if our system did not award the bulk of eeconomic gains to the very wealthiest in the country.
    As for German taxes, maybe I should let Hartmut take the question, but I think they are substantially higher than here, and finance a considerably more generous social safety net. Per Wikipedia, for example, capital income such as dividends and interest are taxed at about 30%.

29. Brett, over here it was once recommended to first learn a trade and only then to go to university, i.e. first the machining then the engineering. I know several people that first became lab assistants and then studied chemistry. I think those people tend to be better as a result than those that go academic from the start. But, and it’s a big but, this is not really feasible anymore because it leads to an age disadvantage that tends to be a real killer when first job applications get filtered through Human Resources before going to the actual experts. In my experience the old lab assistants and machine shop runner are the sergeants that keep things running but the young ones are considered lower life forms because they lack academic credentials. And the academics have to be young when entering the marketplace or their chances are low. Remember, it’s the merchant class running the companies not the craftsmen and the former got bitten by the youth bug (plus they despise those risen through the ranks with a fervor of old aristocrats). Respect for craft WAS once conservative, these days it seems to be the opposite (again).

30. Nominal taxes are a bad indicator when there is no info, whther they get actually paid. In Germany (by decree of the highest court) effective taxes may not exceed 50% (not top rate, total charge) but for the most part they get actually paid. One can expect to pay about a third of one’s income in taxes (federal + state + local, they are not normally separated). In the US the nominal rates tend not to get paid by the top income owners, over here they are (at least since the state put fear in the evaders by purchasing Swiss bank data on the black market). The system is far from perfect but lightyears afar from the corrupt-to-the-core one in the US. It helps not to have a parliament of millionaires and people that treat their time in office as merely a probation period for a lobbying position (former chancellor Schröder lost a ton of public respect when he switched to GASPROM the moment he got thrown out of office. He is rarely heard of these days). I hope it helps that the FDP seems to have destroyed its brand by going from socially liberal to corrupt libertarian for good and now is out in the wilderness.

31. “Hearing that coming from a liberal, especially at a site like this, is just so hilariously ironic.
    First, let us pause for a courtesy laugh:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LluIBu8HdV4
    Brett Bellmore comment, May 10, 2012 at Reality-Based Community, on a thread of responses regarding North Carolina’s Gay Marriage Ban, and in which Brett endorses the ongoing purge (Stalinist vocabulary brought to you by the Bubble Boy) of “RINOs” who mistakenly primp within the Republican Party’s House of Mirrors:
    —— “Such ‘Republicans’ will take, publicly, the positions they find necessary to get Republican votes, so as to be seen fighting the ‘good’ fight, but they really don’t want to prevail on a lot of the causes they need to be seen fighting for.
    The national GOP got in trouble over this after ’94, when they inadvertently found themselves in the majority, and their usual “go down fighting” strategy became too obviously taking a dive. Suddenly the base of the party understood that a fair number of their champions had been throwing the fights all along, and that they were never going to win on some things until they purged the RINOs.
    The purge still has a long way to go, given the power of incumbency, but it’s starting to bear fruit. Some are really distressed by the resulting ‘gridlock’, but the Republican base doesn’t want their representatives helping Democrats to get done the things they were sent to stop.” ——-
    The purge has been largely successful in North Carolina. One might hope it’s starting to look more along the lines of a Circular Firing Squad inside of a House of Mirrors (that’s gonna be a mess), but in the meantime, here is nearly fully-purged Libertarian/Right-Wing Christian Chimera North Carolinian Governmental House of Mirrors at work:
    http://www.balloon-juice.com/2013/10/14/mostly-what-we-did-was-pray-and-sing/
    For entertainment’s sake, let’s apply further hilarity at a site like this:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRtyqK4nbVU

32. liberals seem to have a lot more trouble understanding conservatives than the reverse.
    FWIW, after hanging out on political blogs for the last 10 years, I can say that it’s extremely rare to read a conservative characterization of liberal motivations, interests, and goals that seems even vaguely accurate.
    To me, of course. But, being on the left, it seems to me that it’s my prerogative to say if someone’s description of what I think is accurate or not.
    I suppose it’s possible that I’m secretly thinking things other than what I think I am thinking, in ways that can readily be perceived by the average conservative, and I am simply unaware of it.
    That does, however, seem to give me credit for feats of mental gymnastics that I’m really not sure I’m capable of. If nothing else, it seems like a lot of work, much more than I’d normally be inclined to bother with.
    I’ll also say that yes, in fact, I have over the years found many of the things that conservatives say and believe to be difficult to understand. Profoundly so, in many cases. In some cases, I actually preferred not to try to understand, to be quite honest.
    The folks in the Pinochet fan club, the folks who think blacks should be grateful for slavery because it let them hear about Jesus, the folks who cheered for the idea of letting uninsured people die. Whoever thought it was a good idea to schedule “Guns Save Lives Day” for the first anniversary of the Newtown shooting.
    I don’t get it, am not going to get it, am not interested in even trying to get it. There are some rabbit holes I’m just not going down.
    I’m sure similar things exist in the other direction. Whatever.
    Regarding the Biggs’ piece, I thought his “practical example” of the conservative in NYC amusing.
    Yes, if you live in a place where your point of view is markedly in the minority, you are relatively more likely to (a) not be that vocal about your point of view, and (b) have relatively greater understanding of the other point of view, because you’re immersed in it.
    Duh.
    If you find that oppressive, you can always move. People do. But generally, that’s not necessary, most folks can find a way to live with, befriend, and even grow to like and enjoy the company of people they don’t necessarily agree with.
    There will just be some topics that you will probably have to not bring up.

33. You know it is possible to know what a test group of self identified Republicans said about themselves. Just follow the link Dr. Science provided.
    Blaming college students for being burdened with debt didn’t come up as a taking point, to my recollection.
    BTW if low cost college education was the cause of low paying jobs for the college-educated, then shouldn’t we expect Denmark to be over run with unemployed or under-employed college students? I don’t actually know what Denmark is like, but I also don’t think that expensive college education resulting in debt is the cause of unemployment and underemployment of college educated people. I will leave it up to those who wish to make that case to do the research on a nation where a college education is easily obtained.
    Back to the subject: I think the Hall of Rightwing Mirrors is the tendency to substitute ideology or religion for reality. Granted people can argue the facts–what is a fact, which facts matter–but that’s rarely the conversation with conservatives. Conversations with conservatives end up being about their ideology or their made up facts. The conservative position on an issue is usually “It’s against my principles to do anything about that”. OR “There is no problem for me therefore we don’t have to do anything about that.” Of “It’s all the fault of those other people therefore we shouldn’t do anything about that”. Or a list of “facts” from Fake News.
    Witness the debate over Obamacare: it’s socialist! Big government interference with your personal medical decisions! Thousands of IRS agents hired to put people in jail for not buying insurance! And, if fake facts didn’t win the argument, then: It’s against my principles to have another big government program!
    Republican politicians discuss tactics, rather than the solving of the nation’s problems or addressing of the nation’s issues. Tactics, framing, talking points, these are of course discussed by all politicians, but with Republicans it’s the whole conversation. In the last forty years how much discussion has come from the Republican party about the separation of races in this country or income inequality> All the Republicans wanted to do with Jim Crow was exploit racist resentment about integration for their own advantage. And all they (the politicians and party “thinkers”) have done about income inequality is promote hate talk radio, andmake astroturf resentment groups like the Tea Party to milk people for votes so they could promote their Ayn Rand philosophy.
    Ideology and tactics. Not practical problem solving or grounded processing of feedback to see how well programs and policies are working.
    That’s the Hall of Mirrors and the lack of a reality-based approach to politics: the belief that the only problems worth addressing are theirs, the use of simple-minded self-serving ideological rhetoric to justify that selfishness, and the use of fake news to create their own facts.
    And believing their own made up facts.
    Skewed polls is the classic example.

34. “Meanwhile, GOP enthusiasm for the showdown, from both conservatives and grandees, is waning. Members are spending considerable time calling one another to lament, and they’re worried about fading public support. “We can’t get lower in the polls. We’re down to blood relatives and paid staffers now,” said Senator John McCain on CBS’s Face the Nation. “But we’ve got to turn this around, and the Democrats had better help.”
    The quote from McCain made me laugh. He is being honest about a fact: poll results. He also insisted that a Fake News talking head be honest about who caused the shut down: he insisted against her lie that it was the Republicans.
    Good for him.
    I don’t know what he means about the Democrats helping. Enabling isn’t helping. IF he Democrats make any concessions, then the Republicans will just pull this stunt again. And again. And again. Seems to me the best help that anyone can give to the Republican party right now is to vote them out of office until they face up to how ideological and extremist their party ahs become and clean house.

35. At a site like this (do you mean OBWI, or do you mean a site like OBWI; if the former, stop hedging and write “at OBWI”), I find it remarkably easy to differentiate among conservative views expressed across a range of issues — wj is not slart is not McKinneyTexas is not Sebastian is not Brett Bellmore.
    Just so, at a site like this, I would hope Laura, Doctor Science, Russell, cleek, byomtov, Hartmut and company know that they possess many views which differentiate them from me, and each other, both in substance and certainly expression.
    At the professional political level, given the differences in Party discipline, one of those observations is less true than the other.

36. Laura quoted McCain: “But we’ve got to turn this around, and the Democrats had better help.”
    Captain Phillips (Tom Hanks) in “Captain Phillips” tried to help the Somali Pirates who hijacked his ship and then kidnapped him turn things around (in his own interest, of course, but still), to no avail.
    Why? Because the pirate leadership wouldn’t take a polite, albeit small “yes” for an answer.
    So the Navy Seals provided a great big bloody “NO!”

37. Well, most conservatives on this site would be totally unwelcome at the Values Voter Summit and mostly unwelcome at CPAC, so their conservative credentials would be quite questionable in ‘professional’ con circles.

38. I just can’t stop harping on this!
    Here’s another example of how the Hall of Mirrors works:
    The Republicans in Congress decide to shut down the federal government. As a result, national parks, forest, memorials and monuments etc. are shut down. This causes an embarrassing incident for the Republicans when a group of vets can’t get into a memorial. So what do the Republican politicians do? They announce that the memorial is private and was being shut down out of spite by Obama (They lie). Mark Styne at NRO goes one farther and decides that all federally owned and managed lands are not federal after all. Posts proliferate on Facebook claiming that the WW2 memorial was privately owned.
    Lie, lie, lie.
    And when the lies don’t work, modify the lie. The memorial is federal but has never been shut down in previous shut downs, the memorial is federal but Obama is wasting money by spending money he didn’t need to shut it down…one confabulation after another.
    And today a bunch of screaming meanies high jacked a rally that was supposed to be nonpartisan and turned it into an Obama hate-fest complete with Confederate flag. The fact that the organizers didn’t want partisanship at the event will not be acknowledged at Fake News, of course.
    That’s how the Hall of Mirrors works.
    Of course there’s an element of human nature involved. Everybody seeks self-reinforcement. But only one party has a whole organized structure to promote whatever self-serving nonsense the leaders confabulate combined with a base willing to believe anything so long as it justifies their proclivity for being fearful and resentful.

39. Enough with the movies!
    Let’s revisit an early reality show from 50 years ago to see how one denizen of the confederate house of mirrors suggested how “liberals” should help him and fellow denizens save face:
    http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2013_10/template_for_dem_aid_to_republ047308.php
    One gun drawn was embarrassing.
    Please draw all of the guns and then we can maintain our pride. Odd people, these.
    We’re three days away from all guns being drawn by Federal troops.
    If that will help the Republican Party save the face they see reflected in the House of Mirrors, I’m happy to oblige.

40. [R]esearchers found that conservatives understood liberals better than v.v., but they note that their subjects were all from very “blue” regions. It may be that where conservatives are the majority, the misunderstanding runs the other way.
    I suspect there is something to that. During the past fifty years, the Democratic Party has nominated ten candidates for President. All can be fairly characterized as liberal. Four are native Southerners.
    Each of these four won a plurality of the popular vote at least once. (The only non-Southern Democrat to do so is President Obama, and his Republican opponents were both from outside the South.)
    Southerners. whether conservative or liberal, are steeped in a culture that respects religiosity and military service. This cultural background can be a distinct advantage in electoral politics, irrespective of ideology.

41. This:
    http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/10/14/when-conservatives-boo-the-cops/
    I applaud the cops’ equanimity in the face of this stuff. Especially from people who thought the Chicago Police Force’s murderous violence in 1968 against a previous group of hippie bubble-people was insufficient.
    No doubt the late Moe Lane is running a post at RedShift decrying the raising of one eyebrow by one of the cops as a liberal, thuggish assault on his person, but I noticed the cops didn’t stop the mob from scraping the paint off of the wrought-iron fence by slamming down metal barricades against it, which, unless the taxpayer wishes rust to set in, will have to be sanded repainted now, at my expense.

42. I read Haidt last year and wasn’t that impressed. Because of that, he didn’t leave much of an impression. I thought he stereotyped a bit himself, contrasting the secular left with the religious conservatives. As a leftie Christian, I felt left out. Admittedly churchgoers skew right these days, but I suspect this might be a relatively recent development in America, caused in part because so many of the loudest religious leaders skew right, such as the American Catholic bishops. Which is startling, since back in the 80’s they were coming out with statements that leaned left on the arms race and social issues and rightwingers were saying they should stay out of politics. Maybe Pope Francis will change that. Anyway, I personally know people who stopped going to Catholic Church services because they felt they were being bombarded with reactionary propaganda–sometimes they switched over to the Episcopal Church (which is how I met them) or they stopped going altogether.
    On whether conservatives understand liberals, I grew up in the immediate post Jim Crow South, where many whites were still pretty racist. But they knew what was “politically correct” (before that term was used) to say in public. So yes, they understood in some sense what the liberal pov was on race, the liberal pov that they saw on television and understood to be what they were supposed to think. I’m talking about both children and adults. In private the white kids would use the n word freely–around teachers they didn’t. In the letters to the editor opposition to busing (not that this was all racist, of course) was invariably couched in non racist terms, but among the children I knew the n word again played a prominent part in the discussion. So the racists understood the nonracist pov in some sense–did they really understand what was wrong with racism? I’d guess they could recite the non-racist position on this. My point is not that modern day conservatives are racist (though some are, as shown by the Democracy corps focus groups), just that people can “understand” a viewpoint because they hear it in the media without really understanding it.
    Conservatives can recite the liberal pov on social issues because the MSM is socially liberal. I seriously doubt that too many conservatives understand the liberal position on economics the way a liberal reader of Paul Krugman understands it. I was just told by a conservative friend of mine that America’s problems are caused by poor ghetto blacks and immigrants who are living on the dole–he used the terms “takers” and “makers”. White people are the makers. I provided him with the Democracycorp link that Laura mentioned and Dr Science provided and he agreed with the Christian conservatives, who said the same things.
    He provided me with a link to this David Horowitz article below from Front Page. The interesting thing in it is that some of the criticisms of centrist liberals (on Iraq and Libya) echo what people say on the far left, but overall, if this is the sort of “understanding” that rightwingers have of the left, it’s not what I’d call a very deep understanding. Maybe it would satisfy Haidt.
    link

43. i made it two paragraphs and one sentence into that Horowitz article. that was enough for me to conclude that Horowitz does not know a fnckign thing about actual liberals. and that he’s too busy fighting the imaginary commies under his bed to learn.

44. Welcome John Herbison to a site like this:
    “Southerners. whether conservative or liberal, are steeped in a culture that respects religiosity and military service. This cultural background can be a distinct advantage in electoral politics, irrespective of ideology.”
    More like irrespective of reality.
    Let me cover one ear to drown out the apparent yodeling from both echo chambers to ask how you account for the treatment meted out by both southern conservatives and liberals to George McGovern, war hero who flew 35 missions over Europe in World War II, and a religious man, as opposed to their support for Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, which I don’t believe included any military sacrifice on the latter’s part.
    Max Cleland? What say he? Did the Vietcong get his tongue too?
    John McCain’s military service certainly didn’t gain him or his adoptive black child any respect in the 2000 South Carolina Presidential primaries among the hemorrhoid-riddled Southern draft dodgers like Ralph Reed, Rush Limbaugh and George W. Bush (the latter talks funny but I guess he doesn’t count, having up north of the Mason-Dixon).

45. FF,
    But I find them generally as immersed in the liberal echo-chamber as those other bloggers – and as Brett has noticed in the past, they tend to be just as unaware of the effect.
    The last time this came up, the only example of echo-chamberism on the Left that could be offered was ‘not aware of how your stance on guns damages your political position’.
    And that struck me as laughably incorrect. For myself, Im entirely aware of the national polling on guns (ie people tend to like ’em but also think background checks at gun shows are a good idea), and Im not even anti-gun on a personal level.
    Today, we have on offer:
    “conservatives want to destroy the middle class”
    “the only reason conservatives oppose Obama is his color”
    Those don’t sound like most of the commenters here, IMO. And we’re seeing most of the liberal commenters disavow those statements or at least modify them significantly.
    Here’s the test- if you say all us libs are in the echo chamber and then say something that’s indicative of that, we should mostly be *agreeing with you*. If you say something like the above, mostly I think you’ll get people saying that these are comic exaggerations.
    Now, there are boards where those will get a lot of traction. This just isn’t one of them.
    [For myself, I could modify those into statements about my beliefs, but as stated they are flat wrong IMO].
    liberals seem to have a lot more trouble understanding conservatives than the reverse
    Based on your understanding of what looked to you like the liberal consensus on this board, Im gonna say maybe not so much. 🙂
    Briefly, they asked conservatives and liberals to answer questions about their own moral beliefs – and then asked them to answer as though they were of the opposite ideology. And he found that conservatives could answer the way liberals would a lot more reliably than the reverse.
    That doesn’t surprise me, but for a different reason that you suspect- liberals and liberal media do a fairly good job of displaying liberal policy preferences and positions. In my experience, conservative media display conservative positions that are radical compared to the general pool of Republicans. If one only hears conservativism via Limbaugh and The Corner, one gets a pretty biased viewpoint…
    To take the gun example again: if one weren’t looking at the poll data- just listening to conservative news sources and political rhetoric, one might think that the average conservative was strongly opposed to background checks for all firearms purchases. This isn’t the case, but the conservative media do not do a good job of portraying the moderate positions of conservatives in general.
    No one who listens to NPR or reads/watches the MSM thinks ‘liberals are after all the guns’ or ‘liberals want to make everybody get gay married’. So only wingnuts who refuse to even see MSM info can believe that stuff.
    But a liberal who eg listens to conservative talk radio gets a pretty ugly picture of conservative viewpoints, one not balanced by moderate positions because moderate conservatives either 1)mainly use MSM-type mainstream sources rather than partisan ones or 2)just aren’t good at making themselves heard in an atmosphere that demands ideological purity.
    Put another way: the idea I get of liberal views from the media I read matches pretty well with the range of liberals that I know personally. The idea I get of conservative views from the media I read diverges wildly from the conservatives I know personally. If I didn’t know a lot of conservatives personally, it wouldn’t be surprising that I thought Limbaugh was representative.
    That last – that liberals were less accurate about their own beliefs than were conservatives or moderates about liberal beliefs is surprising to me.
    That is surprising to me insofar as it doesn’t make sense- ie I would’ve thought that for any group ‘their own beliefs’ was measured by what they say they believe, and therefore the same thing.

46. He provided me with a link to this David Horowitz article below from Front Page.
    There’s no fanatic quite like a convert.

47. It is much easier to see other’s biases than to see your own. If there is a major asymmetry, it is that – as Haidt and some others have noted – liberals seem to have a lot more trouble understanding conservatives than the reverse.
    Looking more closely, I see that this isn’t a question of understanding the other side’s political beliefs, but the other side’s core moral beliefs. That is interesting, but using it as a proxy for ‘understands the other side’ doesnt strike me as a sound idea- particularly if the subject at hand is echo-chamber-ism and factual disputes.
    I also note that Biggs generously observes that the original author does not agree with Biggs’s assessment that this is indicative of a greater understanding of liberals by conservatives that vice-versa.

48. To echo sand mirror Russell ;), yeah, Horowitz, instead of taking the hard way from fanatic leftist revolutionary to sane person by migrating through moderate liberalism and then on to moderate conservatism, ducked out the back door of radical leftist revolutionary politics and re-enter the scene via the back of radical right revolutionary politics.
    I guess he noticed the speaking fees are more remunerative if he supports the FBI murder of Fred Hampton rather than raging against it for free from the Left.

49. The house of mirrors begins to crack in the hedge-fund” community:
    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/rich-hedge-funders-poor-feel-135414201.html
    It’s about time.
    Poor Ayn Rand.
    Of course, like any monolith (like a site like this), it really wasn’t a monolith. It’s just that the monolithic voices in the echo chambers were much louder than the minority voices who thought maybe the rhetoric had gone too far.
    Until this week.

50. “I guess he noticed the speaking fees are more remunerative if he supports the FBI murder of Fred Hampton rather than raging against it for free from the Left.”
    Now that’s an aspect of the right I freely admit I’ve never understood. Are people like Horowitz genuinely insane, or just in it for the money?
    Or is it a little of both? For some insight into this important issue, here’s the sentence that seems to have stopped Cleek from reading further–
    “The president, his chief operative Valerie Jarrett and his chief political strategist David Axelrod all came out of the same Communist left and the same radical new left as I did, and all have remained heart and soul a part of it.”

51. The differences (some similarities in kind, not in severity) in the parental political backgrounds and the activist and political trajectories of Horowitz, Jarrett, and Axelrod can be easily gleaned from each of their Wikipedia profiles.
    It’s a little like comparing the lives of, on the one hand, Ayn Rand careening out of the Stalinist terror to become the darling of the American Objectivist bodice-ripping set, and say, Reagan economist Bruce Bartlett or Jerry Brown.
    The angles of the trajectories and the relative disfigurement of the resulting ideologies are completely different pathologies, though I’m sure Horowitz views himself as the exposer of truth regarding Stalinist fellow-travelers and Axelrod and Jarrett as undercover agents furthering our Stalinist future by providing healthcare insurance to folks in the Ukraine.

52. I still miss the good old days when the NPR station in my town mostly played conservative bluegrass music and traditional jazz. When they gave a show to that Liberal Nutcase Garrison Keillor we had to switch the dial to KFBK and listen to Rush.

53. whatever floats your boat, jeff

54. Fuzzy, my descriptions of what conservatives want, and their motivations, were much more understanding and generous in spirit before the Bush 43 administration.
    During that dark time, conservative Republicans in power and in the electorate demonstrated to me over and over again that the worst things I had formerly said about them were far too generous, and the most complimentary things I had formerly said about them were simply untrue.

55. The 14th Amendment:
    http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2013/10/21/131021taco_talk_hertzberg
    Congressional leaders are issuing happy talk today and the markets believe them.
    Still in three days, the 14th Amendment could be invoked and next week we could be seeing impeachment proceedings in the House.
    The usual suspects a la 1868.
    Fun all around, these close shaves.
    Never again.

56. So, no I don’t think Republicans are all racists or even mostly racist. I think the basic difference between people who vote for Republicans and people who vote for Democrats is that Republicans think the government should serve them and represent them and Democrats think the government should serve and represent everyone.
    I think this is indicitive of why there is so much confusion and talking past each other in these discussions. We are all of us quite sloppy in the definitions we are using.
    For example, when you say “Republicans” do you mean:
    – people who are registered Republicans?
    – people who routinely vote for Republicans in general elections?
    – people who run for state or national office as Republicans?
    Not exactly identical sets, although there is natually some overlap. There are, for example, those of us who have been regiustered Republicans for years, and vote in Republican primaries. But have not see, in the past couple of decades, a Republican candidate in a general election at the state or national level that we could vote for. (For me, Bob Dole was the last one.)
    Then there is “conservative.” Does that mean:
    – people who self-identify as conservatives? (regardless of how they define that)
    – people who actually hold beliefs that in some way resemble conservatism? (You know, actually have respect for Burke, and know what the past was really like, etc. What today gets labeled “RINO” or “socialist” by the radical reactionaries who claim to be conservatives.)
    That said, I think we can generally agree that, while not all Republicans (or conservatives, however you define that) are racists, the vast majority of racists are Republicans these days. And claim to be conservatives, dedicated to saving the country, even as they wave Confederate flags and proclaim the virtues of the nullification doctrine that drove politicians in the Confederacy.

57. The Republican Party gives it away to the rest of the world:
    http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/10/china-calls-de-americanized-world
    Nixon and Kissinger went to China and now they live there.

58. Someone or other the other day said the House can make any rules it wants..
    No, it can’t.
    It can’t institute a de facto Parliamentary system into our governance with out asking my permission.
    http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/10/can-america-survive-parliamentary-norms-presidential-system
    Because the Constitution tells me so.
    To do so without my permission is to risk death.

59. PZ Myers deconstructs Jonathan Haidt here.
    Haidt strikes me as yet another disillusioned lefty of one sort or another, and whose work reflects that fact. Insofar as his recent work reflects his personal journey, it strikes me as not very good, or valuable scholarship. It’s just another example of the tired old refrain of the “I used to be a Democrat, but the party left me” genre (cf saint Ronnie). If that is the case, the guy is just engaging in turd polishing (he won a Templeton!).
    Red diaper baby David Horowitz exemplifies the quantum shift variety of turning one’s political beliefs inside out…..It’s been a long time, so I’ve forgotten if he was a Trot or a Mao/Stalinist, not that it matters.

60. wj,
    I think there’s even more fuzziness around the use of the word ‘racist’ and ‘racism’. I think most Americans of both parties have some tendency to judge people based on their race; in my person experience this is more prevalent on the conservative side of things, but only somewhat.
    Whereas people who openly disrespect different races, blame many or most of society’s problems on racial issues, etc- that seems to me to be much more of a one-party thing, but even then that’s a minority of a minority.
    And then there’s the great grey area in between…

61. I once tried to pay lip service to weekly comment quota for myself.
    Just today, I went over the weekly quota in a single day before 2:00 pm MST.
    Have at it, people.
    I need to take a breath.
    Insert a YOUTUBE video of all of youse guys heaving a sigh of relief — Finally
    I feel your pain.

62. “Conservative” means a lot of things. I read Andrew Bacevich occasionally and he is supposed to be a Catholic “conservative”, with a military background and a son who died in Iraq, and I tend to cheer every word. Clearly he’s not the sort of conservative that we have in Congress.
    “Racist” is also complicated. So many or most or maybe all the whites in those democracy corps focus groups linked upthread would probably deny that they are racists and might, for instance, point to black conservatives on Fox News who say the same things they believe, but many think that poor are bankrupting the country with the assistance of a liberal political elite that wants their votes and gives them welfare. And they tend to think that these poor people are nonwhite. So no, they don’t believe in some inherent genetic inferiority, necessarily, but what does one call that attitude? If it were really true that poor nonwhite people on welfare were somehow bankrupting the nation then, yeah, it would be reasonable to point that out, but since it isn’t true, the whole idea smacks of something unpleasant.

63. Liberals value all three of “ingroup loyalty, purity and respect for authority”, IME. We want a big cooperative in-group, an unpolluted environment, and experimental authority for material choices. Does Haidt not see this? I’ve never gotten very far in his writing.

64. The treatment afforded Senator McGovern and Senator Cleland, noted above by Countme-in, was indeed reprehensible. (As is the rank opportunism of Republican chickenhawks in general.) It is also not germane to the point I was attempting to make.
    My comparison was between Southern and non-Southern Democratic presidential nominees. The former have generally run better than the latter. I would posit that a keener understanding of Southern culture (both good and bad) may be part of the reason. (Bill Clinton, for example, kicked George H. W. Bush in the gonads at every opportunity in a manner that I dare say Michael Dukakis never even dreamed of.)

65. What is “experimental authority for material choices”? Does it have anything to do with cotton vs. wool vs. polyester?

66. There’s no fanatic quite like a convert.

    russell’s always a good source for stuff I can agree with, and have personally witnessed in action. In other contexts, as well.

    I just can’t stop harping on this!

    Now Laura’s saying things I can agree with. What’s next? Mass hysteria?

67. But one should not discount the possibility that Northerners simply care less about the geographical origin of a candidate than Southerners. In Germany we have something of an inversion there in that it is assumed to be an axiom that a Bavarian can’t ever become federal chancellor*. The conservatives tried twice and failed, in the first case with the active help of the non-Bavarian conservatives**. Merkel on the other hand defied the expectation that it would take decades for an East German to become chancellor. ‘Never vote for a Yankee’ seems to be strong enough in the US South that the risk-averse Dems tend to look for a Southerner as the preferred candidate when there is no obvious favorite.
    *’I’d never vote far a Bavarian’ is a quite common answer from people that usually vote conservative but change to social democratic (or by now even green) for that one election
    **it is strongly believed that Kohl deliberately let Strauß lose, so he himself would become the unquestioned leader (‘You had your chance and blew it’)

68. I’ve forgotten if he was a Trot or a Mao/Stalinist, not that it matters.
    if you go carrying pictures of chairman mao….
    What is “experimental authority for material choices”?
    yes, speaking from the left side of the fence, i don’t mind saying that this one left me in the dust also….
    What’s next? Mass hysteria?
    dogs and cats together, buddy. pandelerium!!

69. Hang on a sec.
    If the liberals on the board here are typically in the lefty echo chamber…
    And russell is a liberal on the board here…
    And Slarti is agreeing with russell…
    Welcome (welcome welcome welcome) aboard!
    Actually, that does bring me to a serious note- Im comfortable discounting Brett on whether Im living in an echo chamber, but I wouldn’t mind your take on it Slarti. Are there factual points that you think most of us libruls here would agree on but you think are demonstrably untrue?
    Not exactly fair since lumping everyone on one side into a pile is a recipe for trouble IMO, and if you do have any points it’s sort of an invite to a pigpile. 🙂

70. Meanwhile, some strange re-alignments going on in France involving the Front National:
    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100025783/time-to-take-bets-on-frexit-and-the-french-franc/
    …Her four sticking points on EU membership are withdrawal from the currency, the restoration of French border control, the primacy of French law, and what she calls “economic patriotism”, the power for France to pursue “intelligent protectionism” and safeguard its social model. “I cannot imagine running economic policy without full control over our own money,” she said.
    As I wrote in June, the Front has been scoring highest in core Socialist cantons, clear evidence that it is breaking out of its Right-wing enclaves to become the mass movement of the white working class.
    Hence the new term in the French press “Left-Le-Penism”. She is outflanking the Socialists with attacks on banks and cross-border capitalism. The party recently recruited Anna Rosso-Roig, a candidate for the Communists in the 2012 elections…

71. Now Laura’s saying things I can agree with. What’s next? Mass hysteria?
    Oh. My. God. Are there any residential bomb shelter contractors left?
    Agreeing on particular “facts” is one thing, but mostly it’s how they all hang together that produces the zest of political combat.

72. We have a good example of conservative fact free thinking right here in this comment chain. BB tells us about how good machinists have it compared to engineers such as himself. Then boobyp runs this:
    Mean annual wage for machinists: $40,860
    Mean annual salary for mechanical engineers: $84,770.
    US per capita income: $42,693
    Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
    This is typical of right wing thinking. Believe complete nonsense, and keep believing it in the face of blatant objective facts to the contrary.
    There is no parallel in the liberal community (although their are plenty of liberal loonies, but that is nut-picking in comparison). So much right wing thinking is fueled by pure factual fantasy. Whether that is due to a bubble chamber or not hardly matters. Right wingers stick to this crap in the face of all evidence and reason.
    Its really more about the mindset of conservatives than any bubble chamber, and in fact, the bubble chamber can exist only because of this immunity to fact and reason. It is the effect, rather than the cause. So many of them are immune to factual contradiction and reason. The more relevant question (answered elsewhere at length, I believe) is why they remain committed to fact free ideology, and are so impervious to reason.

73. Yes, if you live in a place where your point of view is markedly in the minority, you are relatively more likely to (a) not be that vocal about your point of view, and (b) have relatively greater understanding of the other point of view, because you’re immersed in it.
    Duh.

    Duh indeed, but as a leftist who grew up in the rural Midwest (and for that matter, just came off of 3.5y AD in the Army), let me throw my own anecdata on the side of russel’s and Donald Johnson’s.

    That last – that liberals were less accurate about their own beliefs than were conservatives or moderates about liberal beliefs is surprising to me.
    That is surprising to me insofar as it doesn’t make sense- ie I would’ve thought that for any group ‘their own beliefs’ was measured by what they say they believe, and therefore the same thing.

    The easiest way I could make sense of this result was not very charitable – by assuming bad faith on the part of the researcher. If the researcher assumes a conservative POV of liberal beliefs to be an accurate one, it would follow that moderates and conservatives would cleave more closely to accurate descriptions than the liberals would themselves. Like I said, not a charitable conclusion by any stretch.

74. I think I have agreed with Slarti before but I am pleased that we are in accordance again, even if sort of at my expense.

75. but what does the conservative audience get out of it? And why are similar efforts from the Left Wing Media less popular and more leaky?
    OK, so I’m thinking about this, and I’m not sure the overall thesis accounts for all of the phenomena. As it were.
    What about the Daily Show, or Colbert, or Maddow, or the afore-mentioned Garrison Keillor, or Terri Gross?
    These are all programs with very healthy audiences, all in the low millions. And, they all definitely skew left. And, they all make a lot of money.
    That’s sort of just off the top of my head, I’m sure there are others folks could name.
    Conservative media does well with certain kinds of programming – talk radio, talk television, basically – but the left wing definitely has niches that it owns as well.
    The left-wing stuff tends to be funnier and satirical, right wing tends to be more explicitly angry. So, there’s a style difference.
    But I’m not sure you can say all of the successful media programming is on the right.

76. I don’t know the ratings numbers, but on the subject of MSNBC, in my opinion much of it is pretty bad. Not as bad as Fox, but bad enough. Chris Hayes was by far the best, when he had his two hour morning show on the weekends, but he has to do the cutesy stuff in his hour weekday evening show. The New Yorker had a piece about this several weeks back. He’s still better than the others, but his ratings stink. (I have read that much.) Maybe there is no big audience for serious political TV. I’m apparently in the minority on this, but I don’t think much of Maddow’s show most of the time.
    Now otoh Colbert and Jon Stewart are great–they do everything satirically, yet somehow I think it works better than Maddow (who tries to be funny sometimes, as does Chris Hayes in his new slot, and the results are usually painful to watch.)
    Maybe lefties tend to be like me–more critical of the offerings we see from our side than Fox watchers tend to be of their fare. That said, I do hear a lot of liberals who seem to think highly of Maddow. She’s occasionally good–most of the time,though, I think she talks down to her audience. Maybe each member of the audience thinks she’s talking down to the other people watching the show.

77. Now otoh Colbert and Jon Stewart are great–they do everything satirically, yet somehow I think it works better than Maddow
    One aspect is that the Colbert/Stewart audience are high information viewers, I think. Their audiences are aware of what is going on and want something added to the news, where as Maddow seeks to be an information source for low information viewers, much like the evening news tended to inform most people However, I don’t think the audience for liberal low information viewers who need information and reinforcement is all that big. For Limbaugh, Beck and O’Reilly, their audiences are, it seems to me, low information viewers who want information. This sets up a dynamic where they are able to get more attention and then drive the news cycle in a way that Hayes and Maddow can’t.

78. If there is someone ‘talking down’ on MSNBC that would rather be Lawrence O’Donnell on The Last Word. A real equivalent in style to Fox would imo be The Ed Show.

79. btw turning the dial to KFBK was democracy in action. I voted NO! I loved the Prairy Home Companion. I also loved Hilzoy.

80. Fuzzy Face,
    A couple of quick responses.
    1) Liberals consistently have a better understanding of empirical reality than Conservatives, you know, actual provable facts. If liberals live in a hall of mirrors, it is not one that just reflects what they want to know, but reality.
    2)If you think Conservatives have a better understanding of what liberals believe, than vice versa, then you have clearly never been a liberal reading conservative blog comment describing what liberals think in the most bizarre and cartoonish terms. Apparently we want universal healthcare because we are tyrants who want to control everybody, and that is just the start.

81. weren’t there studies (study?) that show that people who are more fearful and angry are more likely to have conservative politics?
    seems to me that would explain why people who sell fear and anger (ex. Limbaugh and the Fox News gang) would do well with conservatives and why no liberal equivalents have been able to make it work. Colbert and Stewart, on the liberal side, are comedians, not red-meat vendors.
    do other countries have the same media splits that the US does?

82. http://www.alternet.org/fascinating-differences-between-conservative-and-liberal-personality
    Here’s a study. I don’t know how good it is as I haven’t read it yet. I just found it from a quick Google.
    I do think that the Tea party subset of the Republican party, which seem to over lap with the evangelical subset from the Democracy Corps study, has a proclivity for anger. I think that’s party of why they are so unpopular with the general public and with more moderate Republicans. All that yell, yell, yell gets tiresome after awhile. But they seem to thrive on it.
    Air America tried an angry liberal program but it didn’t take off. I listened to it once or twice but found it unpleasant to have someone shouting in my ear.

83. I think I have agreed with Slarti before but I am pleased that we are in accordance again, even if sort of at my expense.

    Awesome response, Laura. I am humbled, and a little bit penitent.

84. Two things I have mentioned a number of times in a number of places about the asymmetry between conservative and liberal views that seem germane here:
    1. It is very common to see conservatives bicker about whether some position is “conservative”; it is much less common to see liberals bickering over whether some position is “liberal.” Liberals favor a position or don’t, but they don’t worry about whether it is “liberal.”
    2. The right has a large constituency that is, at least nominally, in favor of small government as such, as an end in itself. While the left has constituencies that have material interests in public spending, and, therefore, tend to favor big government, there is no significant constituency in favor of big government as such, as an end to itself. It is fair comment that liberals may be too prone to think that a big government program is the best way to solve a problem, but the focus is on solving the problem, not expanding government as such, and most liberals I know or know about are open to the idea that some small government method would solve the problem better.

85. To me, the basic difference is this.
    Liberals consider government to be a completely appropriate instrument for addressing economic and social issues.
    Conservatives, much less so, and perhaps not at all.
    And what seems to me to underlie this is a difference in understanding about what things do, and do not, belong to the public sphere.
    I.e., what are the res publica.
    If your understanding of what things are public is narrow, government involvement in them is going to seem intrusive and perhaps illegitimate.
    If your understanding of what things are public is broad, government involvement seems appropriate and correct.
    The most concise expression of the conservative form of this that I’m aware of was Thatcher’s statement that there is no society, only individuals and government.
    It’s also evident in the sort of minimalist ‘government as night watchman’ concept that Brett articulates quite often.
    Not picking on Brett or seeking to disparage his point of view here, it’s just a handy example.
    I also think that were folks find themselves on that spectrum rarely has a purely rational basis. It’s a cultural stance as much as it is anything else.
    Folks don’t think about these things as much as they have feelings about them. Much thinking often follows, but the first principles are intuitive and affective, not rational.
    And, are therefore *much* harder to change. It usually takes very very large events indeed – wars, widespread economic events, really transforming social or material changes on the order of, frex, the industrial revolution – to move the needle more than an inch or so in any direction.
    What belongs to the public sphere? That’s the root question.
    That’s my take on it, anyway.

86. Here’s the trouble, FuzzyFace: right-wingers don’t think.
    This is empirically documented by many, many, many studies. Politically, “conservative” is a synonym for “ignorant, inconsistent, and thoughtless, but very certain”.
    This is why liberals come up with false interpretations for what the Republicans’ plans are, or false interpretations for what the Republicans’ beliefs are. Because liberals are giving Republicans *too much credit*. Liberals are assuming that Republicans *have a plan* (they don’t), and assuming that they *have consistent beliefs* (they don’t). Republicans are balls of pure Freudian id, like egomaniacal toddlers.
    Once you figure that out, it’s super-easy to predict their behavior, and liberals who have figured that out can figure out exactly what so-called “conservatives” are going to say in every situation — the thing is, what right-winger say depends on stupid, meaningless emotional cues, so it can’t be tested in a Haidt-style survey format, which is missing the cues.
    So you’re right: most liberals don’t understand “conservatives”, because “conservatives”. Because liberals treat “conservatives” as if they’re rational people — and *they are not*. Liberals who recognize that “conservatives” are mentally defective understand “conservatives” pretty damn well. But of course (duh) “conservatives” don’t like to hear this.
    Footnote: I put “conservative” in scare-quotes because political “conservatives” aren’t conservative by any dictionary meaning of the word. I like people who are actually conservative, who are often quite bright — they are usually called “conservationists” or “preservationists”, though.

87. Nathanael- take it down about 5 notches. FF has added to this discussion, you have not.

88. Liberals consider government to be a completely appropriate instrument for addressing economic and social issues.
    Conservatives, much less so, and perhaps not at all.
    That might be sort of true for some libertarians (and IMO actual libertarians are much more rare than those claiming the name), but doesn’t seem at all true for run-of-the-mill conservative Republicans. They want to use the government for addressing *all kinds* of social issues, they just have a very different agenda.
    And, Id argue, they want to address economic issues as well, but they’re more likely to portray their positions as “market-driven” even when they’re transparently not (eg subsidizing natural resource extraction).

89. both very good points, carleton.
    back to the drawing board, for me…

90. Far too broad a brush there, Nathanael.
    I see a general tendency for shortsightedness on the right but even that is imo feigned in case of some leaders. Yes, RW politicians rely on widespread ignorance to get elected* but that does not mean that they have to share that ignorance. And if their actions hurts their party, it does not necessarily mean that it hurts them. Failing and falling upwards is part of the game (just take the loonies that pretended to run for president and got publicity, book deals, entry to the public speaker circles and positions on FOX out of it).
    Take a look at College Republicans and you see the school of sociopaths in training. They eat actual conservatives for breakfast, the poor for lunch and their moronic followers for dinner.
    Similar though less extreme over here. Political student organisations on the left consist of salon bolsheviks and naive idealists, those on the right of professional cheaters looking for out for their career (unless they are among the dying breed that still hasn’t noticed that the 19th century is over and both Goethe and Bismerack dead).
    ‘Professional’ conservatives are predators following the premise of ‘after us the deluge’. Normal ones truly believe in ‘leave us alone’ (again with the exception of the puritans that cannot feel left alone ever when they know that there are people not subjected to their doctrine bt that’s not ‘mentally defective’ either by necessity).
    *to a degree most pols do, RWers just go farther out.

91. Carleton is right, with a twist, certainly when it comes to North Carolina politics. Since the GOP has taken over the state government (governor, both houses), not only have they advanced a rightwing agenda in general – including the most detailed voter “reform” (= suppression) legislation in the country – but the state legislature has repeatedly run roughshod over local governments (city, county) on issues such as zoning, resource allocation, taxation, billboard control, etc. Anyone who ever took seriously the “conservative” mantra that government should be, not just reduced in size, but shifted down to the lowest level possible – to the “people” – need only look at NC today to be disabused of that. When conservatives gain power, they wield it, with a vengeance, at whatever level they control.

92. otoh, I do agree that limited government is a meme conservatives often draw upon, but I would argue that they draw upon it selectively. Or, more generously, that they draw upon it *differently*. That is, it’d be easy to call this hypocrisy, but generously I suspect that it’s at least as much a case of my lumping ‘conservatives’ together and demanding consistency (something that strangely bothers me more when done to liberals, go figure).
    On the third hand, there are quite a few genuine hypocrites out there, I don’t want to slight anyone who is genuinely disingenuous. 🙂

93. combining Carleton and dr ngo…
    the GOP likes to sell itself as the party of small government, and uses the threat of “big government tyranny” as a motivator for its voting base. but, when elected, it mostly works to enact conservative Christian social norms and to make government smaller in areas that affect the immediate desires of the biggest businesses in its area. the little guy is told the latter is for his own good (BS about competition and the free market and freedom!), but in reality, it’s about making things easier for businesses. that can include removing regulations or repealing burdensome laws and taxes; and it can also mean maintaining or erecting barriers to competition, if that’s what helps local businesses (ask Tesla about selling cars in NC).
    it’s a sham.

94. Conservatives would not, and do not and will not support ACA or anything like it. As its flaws continue to reveal themselves, the reasons why conservatives don’t support programs like these will become even more evident.
    Conservatives do favor less regulation, lower marginal tax rates and a reasonable degree of certainty in terms of what the private sector can expect from the public in terms of new regs, things like ACA and whatnot that make future planning difficult.
    Conservatives generally don’t care that someone is filthy rich as long as that person earned the money honestly and, generally, we don’t believe that someone who is filthy rich should have to give all or most of it back when he or she dies.
    Here in Texas, compared to NY or CA, we have limited gov’t and nothing like what Doc Ngo is reporting from NC. So, I guess we like federalism. People on NY, CA, TX and NC can go their own way. I’d like more of that, not less. I draw the line at the constitution, the Bill of Rights and most importantly the 14th and 15th Amendments.
    Contrary to a constant theme on the left, federalism isn’t code for Jim Crow. Please, even if you can find an individual or small group that is racist, give it a rest with respect to the rest of us.
    Conservatives don’t believe that you have to oppose Medicare and SS in order to oppose ACA. Accepting some gov’t support doesn’t mean having to agree to any and all subsequent adventures.
    Conservatives tend to be pro-life. This gets conflated with being in favor of all kinds of control over individuals. No one other than outliers care about birth control. More and more conservatives are coming around on gay marriage. I agree there is a religous subset who seem to think that if Jesus were alive today, he would run for office. There is pushback on the right and among Christians on this topic.
    I can’t speak for Ted Cruz. I voted against him. Generally, I like to find common ground. I think that is true for the conservatives I know. Activists are not the same as ‘all conservatives’.
    On the left, there are those who would bend and those who think the left has already bent too much and who despise those on the left who continue to bend. Left, meet right.

95. Something funny, and without value judgement, is that I knew whose comment I was reading after the first 2 sentences.

96. Conservatives don’t believe that you have to oppose Medicare and SS in order to oppose ACA.

    conservatives stridently opposed Medicare when it was first passed:

    Ronald Reagan: “[I]f you don’t [stop Medicare] and I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” [1961]
    George H.W. Bush: Described Medicare in 1964 as “socialized medicine.” [1964]
    Barry Goldwater: “Having given our pensioners their medical care in kind, why not food baskets, why not public housing accommodations, why not vacation resorts, why not a ration of cigarettes for those who smoke and of beer for those who drink.” [1964]
    Bob Dole: In 1996, while running for the Presidency, Dole openly bragged that he was one of 12 House members who voted against creating Medicare in 1965. “I was there, fighting the fight, voting against Medicare . . . because we knew it wouldn’t work in 1965.” [1965]

    http://thinkprogress.org/health/2009/07/29/170887/medicare-44/
    Gingrich tried to get it to “wither on the vine”.
    but “conservatives” all love it now. and the GOP runs every time on a platform saying the Democrats are going to kill it.
    conservatives hated SS when ii was passed, and used the exact same language to describe SS that they use about everything else:
    http://articles.latimes.com/2009/aug/14/opinion/oe-altman14#target=%22_blank%22

    A Republican congressman from New York, for example, charged: “The lash of the dictator will be felt, and 25 million free American citizens will for the first time submit themselves to a fingerprint test.”
    Another New York congressman put it this way: “The bill opens the door and invites the entrance into the political field of a power so vast, so powerful as to threaten the integrity of our institutions and to pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants.” A Republican senator from Delaware claimed that Social Security would “end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European.”

    it’s always the same old screechy nonsense from conservatives. about every damned that a liberal wants, some “conservative” is going to scream that it’s the coming of tyranny, socialism, and the destruction of America.
    tiresome.

97. Conservatives would not, and do not and will not support ACA or anything like it.
    This despite its origins as a Heritage proposal and its implementation by GOP Presidential candidate Romney in Mass? I mean, you might not support it, but that’s quite a few conservatives there.
    As its flaws continue to reveal themselves, the reasons why conservatives don’t support programs like these will become even more evident.
    I think it’s important to distinguish practical objections from theoretical/principle objections. Are you opposed to an ACA that is designed well and functions properly?
    So, I guess we like federalism…. Contrary to a constant theme on the left, federalism isn’t code for Jim Crow.
    Unless it involves weed, assisted suicide, or electing Democrats to the White House (to mention three USSC cases that leap to mind). Or gay marriage (DOMA). etc.
    That is, I think federalism is like ‘small government’- a mild ideological preference, sure, but one that’s easily discarded when it comes down to brass tacks. Now, not all conservatives wanted DOMA, but it was certainly popular enough at the time that I have a hard time saying it was anti-conservative.
    I don’t recall the modern GOP ever restraining itself at the Federal level due to federalism concerns. Exception: some of Justice Thomas’s dissents.
    Conservatives don’t believe that you have to oppose Medicare and SS in order to oppose ACA. Accepting some gov’t support doesn’t mean having to agree to any and all subsequent adventures.
    I think it does mean that if you accept those programs in principle, you cannot reasonably argue in principle that the ACA is a transgression against what government should do. That still leaves arguments against it on a practical basis, but once you’ve accepted program A I dont think you can raise categorical objections to program B when they have the same philosophical underpinnings.
    Unless you think that the ACA is fundamentally different, but then Id want to hear exactly how that’s the case.
    Please, even if you can find an individual or small group that is racist, give it a rest with respect to the rest of us.
    I would be glad to do that, if eg the NC GOP hadn’t just gone whole hog on the black voter suppression thing, abandoning even the fig leaf of ID verification to branch out into limiting early voting on Sundays.
    There are really only a couple of options on that point:
    -argue that it’s a coincidence that the NC GOP limited early voting on a day when blacks are more likely to vote
    -argue that this is an unfortunate trend for the NC GOP and that it’s not representative of conservatives in general
    I don’t think either of those are easy hills to climb, and I dont see another option (although Im certainly open to hearing one). And that sort of thing makes me say that the GOP- at least in the South- still has a race problem. Not that all Republicans are racists, or that most Republicans are racists, or anything like that. But that the party has issues, and needs to work though those issues- and that it would facilitate things greatly if the non-racists in the GOP (who I suspect are in the majority) would stand up and oppose this sort of thing as vocally as possible.
    we don’t believe that someone who is filthy rich should have to give all or most of it back when he or she dies
    Tiny point there- dead people don’t own things. And 100% estate taxes is a relatively extreme position, I dont even know how much support that would have on the left in America.

98. Note the use of “give all of it back.” I think someone is admitting that people don’t accumulate wealth in a vacuum, all by themselves, and that the wealthiest have benefited most greatly from the underpinnings provided by government in a stable and prosperous society. 😉

99. Talk about conservatives favoring less government and liberals allegedly favoring more is something of a trope — a figurative expression that actually obscures the reality here. As noted above, conservatives love government power and regulation when it serves their ends.
    I am reminded of the words of a former Republican president on this subject:
    There once was a time in history when the limitation of governmental power meant increasing liberty for the people. In the present day the limitation of governmental power, of governmental action, means the enslavement of the people by the great corporations, who can only be held in check through the extension of governmental power.
    Theodore Roosevelt, 1912 campaign speech.
    The issue is not really about more or less government power, but about what purposes that power will serve. So much of the government regulation hated by the right dates from the Progressive era and was designed to curb the extraordinary power and evils of unregulated capitalism. 100 years later, we are at the same place in terms of this ideological conflict.
    We would be far better off talking about that, than the canard that what separates the right and left is more or less government power.

100. I can’t really fathom why I, as a liberal, would want more government for its own sake. What does that do for me, exactly?
     I think it’s a form of projection. Small-government types seem to fixate on this abstract notion about what government should or shouldn’t do, like it’s a natural law or something. So they think liberals have a view that works the same way, only in reverse. (All IMO, of course…)
     For me, and from what I gather from what I hear from most other liberals, there is no particular notion about what government should or shouldn’t do, aside from what works best overall. We’re just not all bunched up about it either way.

101. For me, and from what I gather from what I hear from most other liberals, there is no particular notion about what government should or shouldn’t do, aside from what works best overall.
     exactly.

102. This despite its origins as a Heritage proposal and its implementation by GOP Presidential candidate Romney in Mass? I mean, you might not support it, but that’s quite a few conservatives there.

     a) Conservatives do not, in general, treat absolutely everything that comes out of Heritage as Word of God. Remember how conservatives rushed out to support the implementation of that idea? Me neither.
     b) I personally never considered Romney to be all that conservative, nor does anyone I know personally or any blogger I am familiar with. I realize this isn’t exactly dispositive, but I am always amused when people talk about conservative Mitt Romney.
     c) I’m not sure why I have to keep pointing out a) time and time again, or why I bother.
     Definition of insanity, I suppose.

103. For me, and from what I gather from what I hear from most other liberals, there is no particular notion about what government should or shouldn’t do, aside from what works best overall.
     exactly.
     same here.
     politically i’m a fan of (a) self government and (b) the rule of law. the government should be as big as the people who live under it want it to be.
     if we decide we want the public sector to do our grocery shopping, pick up our dry cleaning, and wash and wax our cars every weekend, and there’s a practical way to make that happen, i have no problem with it.
     or, not. no problem with that either.
     i’d have no problem with tossing the ACA out the window and employing purely private means to make sure everybody could go to the doctor.
     unfortunately, that option doesn’t appear to be available. so, i’ll go for whatever gets the job done.
     the ACA seems to be the best option, because it’s the one that we were actually able to make happen. IMO it’s a hideous overly complicated hash, but apparently that’s the way we like our laws here in the USA.
     so, i’m fine with it. it’s better than nothing.
     in any case, the impact of the ACA or anything similar on my personal liberty appears to be approximately zero.

104. I realize this isn’t exactly dispositive, but I am always amused when people talk about conservative Mitt Romney.
     a similar thing happens to many people when others talk about how liberal Obama is. it’s not too hard to find people who honestly believe that Obama is a moderate Republican.

105. Conservatives do not, in general, treat absolutely everything that comes out of Heritage as Word of God.
     The question was about conservative beliefs in general. McTex says Conservatives would not, and do not and will not support ACA or anything like it.
     I think that pointing out that its roots are at least in part from a conservative think tank is relevant. Im not saying that all conservatives must worship at the altar of the Heritage Foundation.
     Either the Heritage plan is not ‘anything like’ the ACA, or the people at Heritage who came up with it are not (or were not acting like) conservatives. OR, McTex’s categorical statement was wrong. I choose #3.
     I personally never considered Romney to be all that conservative, nor does anyone I know personally or any blogger I am familiar with. I realize this isn’t exactly dispositive, but I am always amused when people talk about conservative Mitt Romney.
     That’s funny, Im pretty sure I said GOP Presidential candidate Romney. Wait, yeah, you actually quoted it, so that’s what I said.
     See, Im not trying to argue that all conservatives think X or that it’s even possible to come up with a list of beliefs shared by all conservatives. Thus, I point out Romney’s status as standard-bearer for the GOP in 2012 and leave readers to form their own conclusions about how much weight to give this point.
     I’m not sure why I have to keep pointing out a) time and time again, or why I bother.
     I don’t know about other times, but you may be a little trigger-happy on this point. If someone is using it to argue that no conservative can reasonably object to the ACA, that all conseratives are bound by the proposals of the Heritage Foundation, then sure. But objecting to the idea that ‘conservatives could not support anything remotely like the ACA’, I think the Heritage point is a pretty serious counterargument.

106. …who honestly believe that Obama is a moderate Republican = in policy matters, not party, obvs.

107. Slartibartfast is the living embodiment of the “no true Scotsman fallacy”. When it is pointed out that the ACA was an I dea developed in a Conservative thinktank, promoted by a conservative speaker, and implemented by a conservative Governor, and later conservative presidential candidate, he doesn’t change his view about whether any conservatives could ever support it, he simply declares all the aforementioned to not be “true conservatives”
     I will agree that all conservatives are not racists, and yet they still seem quite comfortable with racism if they think it will advance their political aims. Take Jim Crow, Reagan’s “welfare queens”, and the current push to pass laws specifically to disenfranchise black voters.

108. it’s not too hard to find people who honestly believe that Obama is a moderate Republican.
     Well he’d be quite unexceptionable in the UK’s Conservative party – though probably regarded as something of a deficit hawk.

109. a similar thing happens to many people when others talk about how liberal Obama is. it’s not too hard to find people who honestly believe that Obama is a moderate Republican.
     Those both strike me as pretty wrong. I mean, there’s some ‘more wrong’ stuff out there- how Obama is a gay Muslim Communist- but in general ‘Obama is a moderate Republican’ and ‘Obama is a far-left Democrat” strike me as roughly equally wrong. He is, in general, comfortably to the left of Kent Conrad or Susan Collins, and comfortably to the right of Chuck Schumer or Elizabeth Warren.
     Likewise, Bush II was neither a secret liberal nor a secret Bircher- he was a moderate Republican, more ‘conservative’ on some issues, more ‘liberal’ on others, but more or less in the middle of his party.
     [I look forward with amusement every Presidential election cycle to whatever conservative think tank it is that cherry-picks their way to confirming the Democratic nominee as ‘far-left’. The amusement is from the imagined conversations late into night- “Wait- here’s a vote Sanders missed! Let’s put a lot of weight on that one and see if we can get X to the left of *an actual Socialist*!”]

110. Slartibartfast is the living embodiment of the “no true Scotsman fallacy”
     Then I declare him No True Slartibartfast!
     Seriously though, make sure you’re not confusing him with McTex; Slarti made some specific points, but he didn’t endorse McKinney’s point about ‘true conservatives’. I rarely see him paint with that kind of broad brush.

111. Slart wrote:
     “but I am always amused when people talk about conservative Mitt Romney.”
     The man himself could hardly keep a straight face when he declared “I am a conservative.”
     I am always amused when people talk about liberal Barack Obama. So is he.
     Neither of them are the problem.
     Slart again, correctly:
     “Conservatives do not, in general, treat absolutely everything that comes out of Heritage as Word of God.”
     It’s all of the other things conservatives treat as the Word of God that weigh on us at the moment.
     All it takes is one terrorist in the Senate and roughly 50 or so in the House who believe Jim DeMint’s word is the Word of God to destroy the world.
     MckT wrote: . “No one other than outliers care about birth control.”
     Small point, but there is talk in the House about adding language to their ransom note that would prohibit Obamacare from offering free birth control in exchange for opening the government and not heading over the cliff into financial apocalypse.
     MckT added:
     “I can’t speak for Ted Cruz. I voted against him. Generally, I like to find common ground. I think that is true for the conservatives I know. Activists are not the same as ‘all conservatives’. ”
     There’s something oddly inside out backwards about that first sentence, but time is short.
     No one ever thought you did vote for him.
     But there he is.
     Have all of us hostages at OBWI — liberals, conservatives, moderates alike — now said our piece about our harmless political differences?
     Speak up now, because I don’t know if any of you have noticed, but we’re all chained together on al Qaeda Flight 93 and the self-defense drink trollies were jettisoned some time ago.
     The aircraft just went belly up and nose down at altitude. The engineering tolerances of the plane are under stress.
     We’ve even had the touching scene, if this was a movie, and I wish it was, of Slart and Laura joining each other toward the back of the plane to huddle and commiserate, perhaps to smooth over rough edges before it’s too late.
     I like it, but we just lost an engine and its time to fasten your seat belts and return your trays to the upright position and commence the screaming and the burning.
     Ted Cruz and the 50 in the House are planning on leaning on the stick and pushing it forward, which (I don’t know much about flying) seems to me to be the wrong way to pull the nose up.
     They are going to present their Bill to the Senate and the President five minutes before unscheduled landing and then parachute out of town.
     That’s the good news.
     The bad news is if a few of them get cold feet, they forgot to take landing lessons, on purpose.
     The Tea Party went to the same governance schools as al Qaeda.
     The sadists call it a little social experiment (hat tip John Judis). See you at the other end:
     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4GAQtGtd_0
     Back to lurking and trying to figure out how many dead Republican politicians, who no one voted for, and media whores it will take to return the country to a viable glide path.

112. Conservatives would not, and do not and will not support ACA or anything like it.
     This is all well and good, but I have a question about what ‘will not support’ means.
     The ACA, ugly as it is, warts and all, passed both houses of Congress. It was signed by the President.
     It subsequently survived some double-digit number of legislative challenges, including many brought while the (R)’s owned the House.
     It was a significant plank in two Presidential elections, and the candidate in favor of the ACA won both.
     It was challenged numerous times on legal and constitutional grounds, culminating in a SCOTUS case, where it by and large prevailed.
     It’s the law.
     There’s “will not support” in the sense of “I think it’s a bad idea”, and there’s “will not support” in the sense of “I’ll see you in hell before that thing is allowed to come to pass”.
     One of those positions allows for people with different points of view to share a functioning government. One does not.

113. McK,
     So, I guess we like federalism. People on NY, CA, TX and NC can go their own way. I’d like more of that, not less.
     Let’s not confuse decentralization with federalism. It makes sense to decentralize some aspects of government, but doing that does not require that we treat states as sovereign entities. States, after all, are subdivided into counties that fulfill certain functions, yet no one thinks they should be sovereign.
     One of the huge problems with US federalism is quite obvious and, IMO, inarguable – the structure of the Senate and EC. It is one thing to say Wyoming should be allowed to set its own speed limit. It’s quite another to say Wyoming should have 2% of the votes on matters on national concern that come up in the Senate. Or three votes in the Electoral College. That’s patent nonsense.
     So I’m no big fan of federalism.
     Contrary to a constant theme on the left, federalism isn’t code for Jim Crow
     It is true that not all, or most, federalists are racists, but I’d say the whole “states’ rights” enterprise is pretty badly tarnished by its history, and its recent use to disenfranchise voters hasn’t helped. Federalists may not be racists, but racists do tend to be federalists.

114. Conservatives do not, in general, treat absolutely everything that comes out of Heritage as Word of God. Remember how conservatives rushed out to support the implementation of that idea?
     Also relevant is that ‘conservative’ positions have changed over time with the prevailing political winds. Which IMO doesn’t change the underlying political philosophy- if you were for it today and against it tomorrow, it presumably fits within your philosophical approach to government.
     [eg both parties have endorsed strong Executive Privilege claims in the WH and opposed them from Congress, leading me to conclude that neither position is incompatible with either party’s philosophical approach to government].
     Unfortunately, the proposed deal will do nothing to stop Obamacare’s massive new entitlements from taking root — radically changing the nature of American health care…. Heritage Action opposes the House proposal and will include it as a key vote on our legislative scorecard.
     says Heritage today.
     If only we could put Heritage 2013 and Heritage 1994 in a bottle and shake it. Make them fight!

115. I personally never considered Romney to be all that conservative…
     Slarti,
     I am truly curious. What would it take to consider him more of “that conservative”? Is it because of his current espoused positions, the fact that he seems to change them often, and has apparently changed them extensively? In that case, would you not be commenting on his character, not his “conservativeness”?
     I ask this with all sincerity.

116. Let’s not confuse decentralization with federalism.
     This is IMO very well said.
     I often remark that I’m OK with federalism, and I think that is likely incorrect. I’m OK with decentralization, as Bernie has described it above.
     Speed limits, housing codes, etc etc etc. Fine, different things make sense in different places.
     Federalism in the sense of states as sovereign entities, no thank you. IMO that question has been put to rest.
     We already had the Articles of Confederation, and they were crap.

117. I should just pop in here and thank McT for being the object of a pile-on yet again. I do appreciate you coming in to state a conservative position here and doing it in a way that isn’t like throwing gasoline on a fire. The inevitable group dynamics means that you catch a few elbows in the pile, and I hope everyone can be aware of that and act accordingly.

118. it’s not too hard to find people who honestly believe that Obama is a moderate Republican.
     Not a moderate Republican. Say rather, a moderate conservative. (Using “conservative” in its traditional sense. Not as it has been hijacked by radical reactionaries in the US.)
     That is, Obama’s policies and actions run a lot closer to Brett’s than to Laura’s. At least from the impression I have of your views. Put another way, Brett is far closer to Obama than he is to the Tea Party caucus in Congress. And nobody here is under the illusion that Brett is a liberal — although he would probably be denounced as a RINO, at best, if he was posting on a Tea Party site. Being even vaguely engaged with reality (a necessity in an engineer) will do that to you.

119. “On the left, there are those who would bend and those who think the left has already bent too much and who despise those on the left who continue to bend. Left, meet right”
     False equivalence rears its head yet again. Point to the Democrats in Congress who’d hold the economy hostage the way the Republicans are doing. There aren’t any that I’m aware of, but I suspect there are quite a few who think Obama is much too eager to make a “grand bargain” with Republicans over entitlements.

120. Careful, wj, the speartip of creationism in the US are engineers 😉

121. I think I need to point out something anybody who would DARE to utter the words, “no true Scotsman” should keep forever in the forefront of their minds:
     Not. Everybody. Is. A. Scotsman.
     That is to say, were I to say, “No true Scotsman was every born in the Thailand and lived out his life there!”, it would be no fallacy. It really is true that some people aren’t true Scotsmen.
     Not everybody in the Republican party is a conservative. Given the political reality that you don’t stand the slightest chance of getting the Republican nomination without claiming to be a conservative, neither is every Republican who claims to be a conservative really one.
     The Romneys have a long history in the Republican party. It is a history of being liberal Republicans.
     Mitt Romney was elected Governor of Massachusetts, a position no conservative would have a prayer of being elected to.
     No matter how much you want to pin every last policy position of Mitt Romney on conservatives, the truth remains:
     Mitt Romney is not, nor has he ever been, a conservative. He was merely forced by political reality to lie about it.

122. When speaking of Romney, I preferred “liar” to “conservative” all along, so let the flag of consensus wave among persons of opposing political persuasions.
     Still, I prefer to go out speaking the King’s.

123. Mitt Romney is not, nor has he ever been, a conservative. He was merely forced by political reality to lie about it.
     Yes. Romney is a formidable liar, even by the standards of politicians.
     I can remember him claiming he wasn’t interested in running for governor of MA, about thirty seconds before he jumped into the race.

124. The elder Romney failed because he was too honest, the younger because he was too obviously dishonest. The next generation seems to follow in father’s not grandfather’s footsteps. They have still to learn that it is the petty lie that kills careers not the Big Lie, and even more effectivly than honesty.

125. Brett, McTx, and Slarti:
     I’m dying to know who the hell IS an actual conservative, in your view.
     Ted Cruz?
     John Boehner?
     Ann Coulter?
     anybody?
     –TP

126. Brett Bellmore,
     If you want to split hairs, I would argue that there isn’t currently a single member of the GOP who is a conservative. They all endorse the Ryan “path to Prosperity” which makes a mockery of the very idea of fiscal conservativism with its magic math and generally budget busting properties, and they are virtually all on board with the current effort to jettison 200+ years of legislative norms, in which you try and effect change through persuasion, compromise, horsetrading, and elections, in favor of a new system in which the party in the minority engineers a constant series of crises that imperil the health of the nation in order to issue extortion demands to keep them from pulling the trigger. Someone more eloquent than me described it as “elections simply deciding, who gets to write the ransom note, and who gets to read it.”
     Almost none of them are conservatives, they are revolutionaries.

127. I’m dying to know who the hell IS an actual conservative, in your view.
     Edmund Burke?
     Russell Kirk?
     Barry Goldwater?
     Bill Buckley?
     Pat Buchanan?
     Ayn Rand?

128. Oh, if there were only some sort of way to distinguish the validity of a ‘bias’ or ‘opinion’ or ‘belief’. Hey! how about we check with this little thing called Objective Reality?….
     ..how much progress there had been in racial equality since the 1960s.

     Assessment of racism is subjective, numbers that describe the growth of Gov. spending, the deficit in relation to the GNP, the predictions of the ACA effects on prices in the healthcare market, that’s reality. Disagreement of these numbers requires a thesis in why it is wrong, not just “you lie!”

129. I will join in the cry for a real conservative to stand up and be proclaimed.
     “Conservative” seems like a catch-all, no not a catch-All, but a catch-everything that-is-not-obviously-liberal term.
     I know lots of self-defined conservatives. Most are basically apolitical, but “conservative” has a nice, respectable ring to it, no association with hippies or war protesters, so they call themselves conservative. Some of these folks are actually liberals when it comes to issues.
     I know people who call themselves conservatives who are nearly one-issue voters, the issue being taxes. They don’t want to pay them.
     My tax guy calls himself a conservative and he is an Ayn Rand cultist.
     The guy who runs the used car lot calls himself a conservative and he has a poster on his wall of “scientific facts” which includes the “fact” that dinosaurs and people lived at the same time.
     Our manager calls himself ‘sort of conservative” but votes Democratic because he is offended by the Tea party.
     My father-in-law was a conservative. He worked for the WPA, was a beneficiary of Bonneville Power, retired on Social Security and Medicare and opposed big government programs like welfare.
     Congress is full of people who call themselves conservative and vote to cut Food Stamps and retain farm subsidies.
     So all I know is what people do. That’s what I judge by. Seems to me that what politicians who call themselves conservative do is subsidize profitable corporations, screw over disabled people, children and the elderly, meddle with private decisions like birth control, deny people rights to voting and marriage when it seems politically expedient to do so, cut taxes and then blame everyone but themselves when the budget goes out of balance, and justify it all with ideological statements or meaningless phrases like “fiscal conservatism” or “pro-family” or “anti-big government”.
     So, speaking of those politicians, I think their kind of conservatism is a lot of self-serving hypocritical bullshit.
     But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a valuable set of ideas being articulated by someone somewhere under the term “conservative” that’s worth consideration. I just don’t think it exists in Congress

130. […] numbers that describe the growth of Gov. spending, the deficit in relation to the GNP, the predictions of the ACA effects on prices in the healthcare market, that’s reality.
     One of these things is not like the other…

131. So Brett, there are no longer any shop classes, and you seemed to imply there weren’t many apprenticeships, so how do you create machinists without employer created training programs?
     Back in the day when I was in HS, the hypothesis was you wanted a white collar job because that was less impacted by job orders, when there’s no work, who get sent home, you or the machinists?
     Nationwide, employers avoid training people because “they’ll just leave”.
     Not if you pay them what their worth beyond what the training cost.

132. That is to say, were I to say, “No true Scotsman was every born in the Thailand and lived out his life there!”, it would be no fallacy. It really is true that some people aren’t true Scotsmen.
     Of course, ‘what is a conservative’ is a bad choice for the NTS fallacy, because the whole point is that Scotsman is well-defined initially and gets redefined with the adjective ‘true’ when that known definition conflicts with an assertion. ‘What is a conservative’ is not well-defined initially.
     Ergo, rather than relying on my own opinions about ‘what is a conservative’ to contest McTex’s assertion (since that looked to turn into a rousing game of “Is not!” “Is too!”), I use proxies. I would think that the last GOP nominee for President and a hard-right think tank would be evidence enough that conservatives would not, and do not and will not support ACA or anything like it could be falsified, but instead I learn that Heritage is not literally an object of worship on the right and that Mitt Romney is a liberal….
     No matter how much you want to pin every last policy position of Mitt Romney on conservatives, the truth remains:
     Mitt Romney is not, nor has he ever been, a conservative.
     The specifics of what defines a conservative is clearly an opinion. Ergo, whether Romney was a ‘real’ conservative is an opinion. And it’s usually a mistake to confuse opinions and facts like that.
     My opinion that Romney is a good proxy for conservatism is based on his nomination; I can’t think of a major party nominee since WWII that I wouldn’t comfortably consider a representative of their party (and I consider the parties representative of their ideological camps).
     Now, anyone can say anything like “He’s not a real liberal unless he supports unions” or “she’s not a true conservative if she’s pro-choice” and that’s fine with me.
     On the third hand, I do get tired of how Romney wasn’t a true conservative, McCain wasn’t a true conservative (also for mandates before he was against ’em), Bush II wasn’t a true conservative, Bush I wasn’t a true conservative, etc. Im curious if Democratic nominees get the same treatment- is Obama a liberal? was Kerry? was Clinton? Carter? Kennedy? iirc in the past you’ve been pretty comfortable in the past referring to most of the commenters here as liberal, the MSM as liberal, etc.
     Circling back to the original point- is there a reasonable definition of ‘conservative’ that fits McTex’s assertion that conservatives would not, and do not and will not support ACA or anything like it. Heritage is IMO clearly a conservative think tank (although I eagerly await Brett’s declaration of fact to the contrary). They created something very like the ACA.
     Now, they probably did this in bad faith, as a way of undermining the Clinton push for a healthcare plan. But even accepting that thesis, it was still ‘conservative’ enough at the time to be presented as a conservative proposal by Heritage with a straight face. If it were patently obvious that no conservative could ever support a plan like that, then it wouldn’t have been a very effective decoy…
     [Id kind of passed it by, but McTex also said that conservatives are lukewarm to gay marriage and are getting more progressive. So Im left with a remarkably idiosyncratic definition of ‘conservative’ that 1)Im certain would piss off a lot of people who would self-identify as conservatives and 2)disavows what I recall as the de facto conservative position on healthcare reform during the 90s. And so, it seems this is more of a state of the McTex than a state of the conservative union. (confederacy?)
     Now, Id be the first person to admit that Ive got some idiosyncratic political beliefs of my own. But I wouldnt dream of saying ‘real liberals think that the A-10 is awesome, that we should pass an amendment mandating algorithmically-drawn House districts, and that we should increase government funded scientific research by an order of magnitude.’ Or even ‘real liberals are ok with the ACA because they understand it was the best deal available’- cos a lot of them don’t, and I can’t pretend to speak for them.

133. Those both strike me as pretty wrong.
     indeed, indeed.
     but its wrongness hasn’t stopped people from thinking it.

134. The question was about conservative beliefs in general. McTex says Conservatives would not, and do not and will not support ACA or anything like it.

     If McTx had said that no conservative had ever supported anything like the ACA, I would concede your point. Did that Heritage proposal get a lot of support on the conservative side? No? Then you have to concede mine, I say.

     What would it take to consider him more of “that conservative”?

     I think that chanting along with the “lower-taxes” mantra doesn’t necessarily qualify, while getting enough votes to win the Massachusetts governorship tends to disqualify.
     Other than that, Romney is conservative only by virtue of ringing up on issues that appeal to the Republican base. Who knows who he truly is, other than a decent shapeshifter?

     Slartibartfast is the living embodiment of the “no true Scotsman fallacy”.

     it’s not too hard to find people who honestly believe that Obama is a moderate Republican

     You guys should hash this out between you.
     Look, I offered my point of view, which I freely admit comes from, well, my vantage point. Romney doesn’t speak for conservatives. He’s not considered to be conservative by any conservatives that I am aware of (including me). Whether he’s more conservative than you are is not in dispute.

135. You guys should hash this out between you.
     i decline.
     instead, i’ll note that there’s a world of difference between a) an assertion that Obama is not a True liberal and b) a simple statement of fact.
     i never asserted a). but there’s a link up there to a Google search with 150,000 hits for “Obama is a moderate Republican”.

136. “He’s not considered to be conservative by any conservatives that I am aware of (including me).”
     Yes, but you aren’t really a conservative. All kidding aside, name one conservative in congress today, and I will tell you why you are wrong.

137. So all I know is what people do.
     what laura said.
     “true conservatives” and “true liberals” are the macavity cats of political discourse. when soi-disant conservatives and / or liberals bugger public life to hell, the true varieties are miles away.
     i have no idea who is “really” conservative and who is not. since we live in an environment where the full spectrum of political and social opinion has to squeeze itself into either of two parties, it’s mostly a matter of branding anyway. substance has little to do with it.
     so, as a practical matter, who is “really” conservative or liberal is kind of beside the point. the words describe valences, affective tendencies and predispositions, more than they do particular philosophies or doctrines.
     McK tells us what conservatives would not, will not, and do not do, and when it is pointed out that “conservatives” in fact do, and have done, those things, it is explained that the folks who do those things are not, in fact, conservatives.
     Macavity’s not there!
     which, in fact, is very handy for Macavity, but I digress.
     In any case, whatever.
     I’m with Laura, I’m interested in what people do. What hat they wear or what flag they fly on any particular day, I couldn’t care less.
     The ACA was, broadly, based on proposals that were meant to be a market-based solution to the free rider problem created by the mandate that hospitals provide care regardless of ability to pay.
     The driving wheel, the essential mechanism, of those proposals was the individual mandate, which was seen as preferable to an employer mandate, because it placed the responsible for securing health care coverage on individuals and families, rather than on businesses.
     Plus, it dealt with the unemployed.
     So, not a bad idea overall.
     Those proposals were subsequently embraced by some as an alternative to the relatively more government-centric proposals offered by the Clintons.
     The whole issue came up (and comes up), at all, because of fairly glaring market failures and obvious inefficiencies in the health care industry in the US.
     Whether you’re for it, agin it, or just don’t care, those are the high points.
     Whether you’re for it, agin it, or just don’t care, the underlying issues – the growth in the cost of health care, the very large number of people who cannot afford either health care or insurance, the use of techniques like recission and refusal to cover pre-existing conditions by private insurers to limit risk, the extraordinary cost of caring for chronic illnesses like senile dementia and diabetes, etc etc etc – are not going away.
     They aren’t going away.
     The folks in the House don’t like the ACA, and they are determined to cause the rest of us pain until they get their way. They represent, maybe, on a good day, what, 10 or 12% of the membership of the House? But they can threaten the Speaker with the loss of his seat, which is all the leverage they need to screw the rest of us to the wall.
     What are they offering in lieu of the ACA? How will they address all of the issues I’ve enumerated, along with the other million and a half issues that are not in my list?
     They have nothing. All they have is (a) they don’t like it, and (b) they can take Boehner’s seat away if he doesn’t do what they want.
     I don’t care what letter is after their name. I just care about what they do.
     And what they do is extortion.

138. i never asserted a).

     Fine. Here’s what I said:

     I personally never considered Romney to be all that conservative, nor does anyone I know personally or any blogger I am familiar with. I realize this isn’t exactly dispositive, but I am always amused when people talk about conservative Mitt Romney.

     Again: I have no issue with most people (with a couple of exceptions) here thinking that Romney is more conservative than they are. I don’t regard him as the voice of conservatism. Few people do.

     name one conservative in congress today

     Hard to say. The religious right has pretty much subverted the Republican Party, which sort of ruins the whole idea of Republican/Conservative interchangeability. That said: I’d tend to pick Rand Paul, even though I don’t particularly care for the guy.

139. …which sort of ruins the whole idea of Republican/Conservative interchangeability.
     Are there any Democrats who fit the bill?

140. Hey, Slarti, we’re in agreement again! On your 9:45 post. Or pretty close. I’m not sure I’d call Rand Paul a conservative. I think he’s a say-one-thing-do-the-opposite grifter like his dad.

141. but there’s a link up there to a Google search with 150,000 hits for “Obama is a moderate Republican”.

     I didn’t realize we were letting Google vote. Say, did you know that Obama is a communist?

142. “I think he’s a say-one-thing-do-the-opposite grifter like his dad.”
     That God for that, if true. There’s nothing more dangerous than pure sincerity in the words of ideologues carried out fully in their deeds.
     One only thing Trotsky admired in Stalin was his sincerity.
     Compared to the Paul family, now, Anthony Wiener is my favorite exhibitionist, although he backed off from fully undressing, so we may just have to primary him with a truly sincere exhibitionist who is not afraid to walk the halls of Congress fully naked.
     Actually, if I had to name one prominent liberal (even in today’s sense of the word “liberal”) of the past, I would name two: Dwight D. Eisenhower and Abraham Lincoln.
     But then I still have the agility to hang precariously out of today’s Overton Window, (after defenestrating Glenn Beck) and crane my head in the opposite direction of today’s “conservatives” to the left where Eisenhower and Lincoln are buried.

143. I didn’t realize we were letting Google vote.
     huh?
     i wrote, and you quoted, “it’s not too hard to find people who honestly believe that Obama is a moderate Republican.”
     and that link backs it up.

144. Say, did you know that Obama is a communist?
     Do you deny that there are people who think so?

145. and that link backs it up

     It’s a point I never disputed.

     Do you deny that there are people who think so?

     I linked to people who think so.
     Am I speaking English? Is this thing even on?

146. The specifics of what defines a conservative is clearly an opinion. Ergo, whether Romney was a ‘real’ conservative is an opinion.
     Carleton,
     we can, however, look at the opinions of people who say that some others are not “real conservatives”, and compare them to actual actions of individuals.
     For example, take what the Tea Party members of Congress consider “real conservative” policies. Compare those to the actions of all Republican Presdients and Presidential candidates of the 20th century. You necessarily conclude that exactly none of them (definitely including Goldwater and Reagan) can be considered “real conservatives.” Which rather suggests that the definition of “conservative” is, at the very least, evolving over time.

147. the definition of “conservative” is, at the very least, evolving over time
     yup

148. Look, Slart, I’m sorry I never said that you didn’t agree that the dispute we didn’t have wasn’t entirely unclear in that we weren’t sure that weren’t sure about what we didn’t say was or was not in dispute when we disagreed about our disagreement on what we did or didn’t agree on.
     I hope that clears it up, and we can move forward.

149. Did that Heritage proposal get a lot of support on the conservative side? No? Then you have to concede mine, I say.
     I would- like I said, I think the Heritage proposal was a tactical manuver rather than a genuine attempt to get something accomplished, and accompanied almost zero effort once Clinton’s proposal died. And surely Heritage doesn’t speak for conservatives or conservatism, because nothing and no one can really do that.
     The religious right has pretty much subverted the Republican Party, which sort of ruins the whole idea of Republican/Conservative interchangeability. That said: I’d tend to pick Rand Paul, even though I don’t particularly care for the guy.
     That’s the second post from a conservative saying that the religious right and ‘conservative’ are basically barely overlapping on a Venn diagram. I admit, that’s not my viewpoint at all.
     According to this poll, about 43% of Americans self-identify as evangelical, and 58% of those self-identify as conservative. That’s about 25% of Americans overall self-identifying as both, the lion’s share of the 40% or so self-identifying conservatives in America.
     otoh, I view ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ as flexible, relative labels rather than fixed ideological descriptors, whereas eg “Socialist” or “Libertarian” I view as more attached to a specific ideology. (Well, my view on the latter has started to come loose from it’s moorings, at least Ive come to terms with the fact that many of the self-described Libertarians I meet on the net appear to have only a passing attachment to what I see as Libertarian principles…)
     So if someone views ‘conservative’ as fixed, then we’re going to talk past each other to some extent. Although I think they’ll also have a problem coping with historical changes…
     Which brings me round to thinking that Rand Paul is a funny choice, Id put him on the bubble between libertarianism and straight conservatism rather than at the center of the latter.
     [Although if I had to pick an institution to do that in America, it’d be the GOP. And we’re back at Romney wasn’t a true conservative nor McCain nor Bush II nor Bush I etc].

150. Which rather suggests that the definition of “conservative” is, at the very least, evolving over time.
     I entirely agree. Yet the statement by McTex was categorical, and even extended into the future indefinitely. Another reason I object to it, as in the same sentence he embraces (or doesnt push away) Medicare, the very program that Reagan called creeping socialism and warned would lead to the End Of Freedom. Perhaps McTex himself has an ancestor who declared that no conservative could ever support such a program…
     This is just one of those things that’s problematic definition-wise; the borders are fuzzy, but if we don’t at least in general agree on the location and shape of the thing then we can’t really talk about it. Which is why the most fruitful thing to come out of this conversation for me is that many of the conservatives here don’t think most of the people who call themselves conservatives in America are, in fact, conservatives. Which is more or less my operational definition.
     And, as with Brett, I wonder if they apply a similar limiting definition to liberals- are most Democratics true liberals but most Republicans not true conservatives?

151. I wonder if they apply a similar limiting definition to liberals- are most Democratics true liberals but most Republicans not true conservatives?
     I have memories from the late 60s and early 70s, of Democrats having exactly this same kind of discussion: is so-and-so a “real” liberal or not? Right around, as it happens, the McGovern debacle. Interesting parallel, there.
     It makes a fascinating discussion: does a lot of concern for ideological purity cause electoral disaster? Or is it a result of an ideology having shown itself to be an electoral failure? That’s an important question, because it speaks to how rapidly it is possible for a party to recover.

152. An excerpt from a yahoo article:

     But that emerging Senate pact was put on hold Tuesday, an extraordinary day that highlighted how unruly rank-and-file House Republicans can be, even when the stakes are high. Facing solid Democratic opposition, Boehner tried in vain to write legislation that would satisfy GOP lawmakers, especially conservatives.
     Boehner crafted two versions of the bill, but neither made it to a House vote because both faced certain defeat. Working against him was word during the day from the influential group Heritage Action for America that his legislation was not conservative enough — a worrisome threat for many GOP lawmakers whose biggest electoral fears are of primary challenges from the right.

     Consider how the bolded words are being used here, in an article from a major internet source intended for the general public. Attach to that whatever importance you deem appropriate.

153. does a lot of concern for ideological purity cause electoral disaster?
     ratcheting-up the purity has worked pretty well for the Tea Party folks, so far. but, while winning a bunch of seats Congress is a big deal, it’s not quite as high-profile as winning the nomination for President (let alone winning the office). if one of them were to win the nomination, i think the bulk of the US would run away screaming.
     or, i hope they would.

154. Should a vote take place in the House on this latest offer by the Senate, and pass, expect the next government shutdown to begin January 15, 2014 and the next attempt to keep the Republicans’ promise to default and destroy the United States will occur on February 7, 2014.
     Unless moderate conservatives, like Barack Obama, agree on a grand bargain …
     … in which case, the bargain will be rejected by a plurality of Republicans in the House. The plural of Republican is Tea Party.
     I can predict these outcomes confidently because 232 conservatives in the House and Ted Cruz were permitted to live, as in “not die” through the past three weeks.
     Where there is breath from their direction, there is the end of the country.

155. hsh,
     I suspect that often people change reference points for ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ just based on what their talking about. When talking about a GOP proposal Id say “liberals won’t accept X”, referring broadly to the Dems. Whereas if I were talking about negotiations within the Democratic party, “liberals won’t accept X” would be a smaller group.
     [Or, how Ted Cruz is “a far-right conservative” in America but would properly be considered “batsh1t insane” in Belgium; or if you prefer, how Elizabeth Warren would be a right-winger in Cuba].
     That also makes sense in how eg Brett is comfortable referring to painting ‘liberal’ with a broad brush but ‘conservative’ gets a much tighter definition- from his personal perspective both occlude the same amount of sky (like the sun and the moon) based on their size and distance. So it looks like an equitable sizing, until viewed from someplace else in the solar system.

156. If a House vote is permitted on the Senate bi-partisan compromise this evening, and passes, expect another government shutdown to commence on January 15 and another suicidal run at defaulting and destroying the world’s economy on February 7.
     If we don’t go over the edge then, rinse and repeat at least twice more leading up to the 2014 mid-term elections.
     I predict these events with the utmost confidence because Ted Cruz, Erick Erickson, Jim DeMint”s Heritage Foundation, the Heritage Action Committee, roughly 80 Tea Party House members, and their Strother Martin-Liberty Valance prairie scum cackling sadists in the media and the electorate were permitted to live (as in “not die physically”) over the past three weeks, through the goodness of America’s heart and a complete lack of common sense on the part of same.
     Where breath remains in those black lungs, so remains the mortal threat to the Republic.

157. The invocation of McGovern is interesting, because you had a sitting president engage in a campaign of illegal actions to make sure that McGovern was the one who was chosen. While it is true that in various races, the Democratic candidate has, by showing how close a moderate Republican candidate’s positions are to the Democratic position, I’m not sure there is any parallel to what steps Nixon took to undercut more centrist candidates. I’ve not really gotten a handle on it, but the use of McGovern as an example of how ideological purity is either a symptom or a cause undermines its use as an example.
     It amazes me that almost everyone fails to note Nixon’s actions. Perhaps they had little effect on the election and McGovern would have been nominated anyway.
     At any rate, this George Packer piece is on the same ground as wj’s comment, and it has this
     But what if Romney wins the nomination and loses the election? This scenario is still the odds-on favorite. To deduce the consequences among Republican activists, let’s imagine a counter-factual from 1972: pit Nixon against Humphrey or Muskie or Jackson, a candidate imposed on the liberal Democratic base much as conservative Republicans feel Romney is being imposed on them. A Nixon win would have convinced the liberal base that the party had not been true to its core. The theology would have hardened a little more. Next time, they’d nominate a real liberal, a candidate of the grassroots.
     It’s easy to picture hard-core Republicans coming to the same conclusion: Romney and the party élite betrayed the party’s principles (again, after McCain) and gave the country four more years of the hated Obama. Never again! Next time, a real conservative! (Go back another twenty years, to the G.O.P. convention of 1952, and Senator Everett Dirksen, of Illinois, a supporter of the conservative Robert Taft, pointing at Thomas E. Dewey, the party’s moderate two-time loser, and thundering, “Don’t take us down the path to defeat again!”)
     McGovern’s debacle forced the Democratic Party to find its way back from the ideological wilderness—from being the party of delegate quotas and “acid, amnesty, and abortion.” Every successful Democrat after 1972, from Carter to Clinton to Obama, has had at least one foot in the party’s center. A Gingrich rout in November might have the same effect on Republicans—it might drive their party back toward the center, and toward mental health, in 2016. But if Romney wins the nomination and loses the election, the party will continue down into the same dark hole where Palin, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Santorum, and now Gingrich all lurk. So a sane Republican has a terrible dilemma, today in Florida and beyond. That’s what happens when political parties are captured by a minority of fervent believers.

158. As should be expected, when I comment that fewer comments are going in the spam folder, that is an invitation to the blog gods to make the statement false. It seems that the last 7 comments went in there. I’ll check on the folder as often as possible, but if you don’t see your comment, don’t panic, it will be released.

159. I’m panicking because I see my two very similar comments.
     If this was the ACA website portal, I’d would be signed up for two very slightly health insurance policies.
     😉

160. “I would be…”
     and
     “…slightly different”

161. if [a Tea Party presidential candidate] were to win the nomination, i think the bulk of the US would run away screaming.
     or, i hope they would.
     Perhaps I’m overly cynical, but I’m inclined to believe that the milquetoast corporate media would betray their High Brodarian ideals in the pursuit of shallow Brodarian postering, and drown out any public screaming that might be occurring with an ear-shattering display of thoughtful nodding and pensive chin-rubbing.

162. (Which I know ultimately doesn’t mean the electorate would fall in line with the media’s delusional prattle, but the cacophony of nodding and chin rubbing is dreadful to contemplate.)

163. It amazes me that almost everyone fails to note Nixon’s actions.
     Not those of us who read Rick Perlstein’s stuff.

164. I have memories from the late 60s and early 70s, of Democrats having exactly this same kind of discussion: is so-and-so a “real” liberal or not?
     Where have you been? We had this very same conversation during the passage of the ACA as many in the base accused the administration of “selling out” single payer. The debate was heated, to say the least. This rift continues to this day as centrists Dems blame the outcome of the 2010 election on the failure of “the base” to get fully behind and “own” the ACA.
     it might drive their party back toward the center, and toward mental health…
     Haha….LJ, I don’t believe you were writing this with the Eagleton fiasco in mind, but I got a laugh out of it nonetheless……:)

165. OOPs….I meant Packer wrote that. Well, he supported the Iraq invasion.

166. “If this was the ACA website portal,”
     It would crash before 99.9% of the people trying to use it managed to leave a comment.

167. if [a Tea Party presidential candidate] were to win the nomination, i think the bulk of the US would run away screaming.
     Im with nv; rampant Broderism and a thirst for a horse race would keep it way closer than it should be based on policy preferences. Maybe the 2016 Dem would stretch Obama’s 4% margin of victory win to 6-8% or so. I don’t think we could get a 60-40 type landslide if the GOP ran Bachmann-Limbaugh.

168. Not those of us who read Rick Perlstein’s stuff.
     Yes, but I was trying to find an obituary of McGovern that might, in some small way, acknowledge that the fact that he got trounced might be related to the massive amount of illegality involved in that election. I know it is a hard thing to write, cause you can’t say that McGovern might have won had Nixon not been a criminal, (I guess you could, but I don’t think it wouldn’t be true) but arguing that McGovern’s defeat means that liberal ideals were rejected by the populace is like saying that because the minor league scrub team that was elevated to play the reigning NFL champs got blown out and they ran a no-huddle offense, this means that the no-huddle offense was worthless.

169. let the purge begin!

     In an interview with the National Journal, Charles Boustany (R-La.) said those colleagues [who don’t want to destroy the world economy] had “put the GOP majority at risk.”
     “There are members with a different agenda,” Boustany said Wednesday in an interview in his office. “And I’m not sure they’re Republicans and I’m not sure they’re conservative.”

170. I’m inclined to believe that the milquetoast corporate media would betray their High Brodarian ideals in the pursuit of shallow Brodarian postering
     I totally agree with this. It was apparent with the Ari Shapiro’s rejection of “ransom”.
     That said, the Glenn Greenwald phenomenon will be interesting to watch. He, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill are teaming up. I almost gagged myself with a spoon this morning listening to an uncritical interview of Jeremy Scahill on NPR.
     That said, I have really enjoyed lurking on this thread where I’ve basically agreed with most (nonconservative) commenters.

171. Slarti on Mitt Romney’s true conservatismness: “I think that chanting along with the ‘lower-taxes’ mantra doesn’t necessarily qualify (as that conservative, ed.), while getting enough votes to win the Massachusetts governorship tends to disqualify.” (? ed)
     Again, I would aver that your remark seems more a judgement on Romney’s character, not the essence of his ‘conservatiness’, unless you distrust the guy and you feel that trust is an essential part of being a ‘true’ conservative. I don’t know.
     If you were to sit both Romney and Randy Paul down side by side and ask them policy questions, they’d pretty much give you the same answers I would think. So how do you differentiate the two on the scale of conservatismness?
     Is it a character thing?

172. Sapient,
     I have the very same response when NPR does something on economics. They are pitiful in their framing that differs only slightly from “centerist” (read deficit scolds) pap. The recent 60 Minutes hatchet job on Social Security disability is quite similar in this respect.

173. This isn’t Slarti answering, of course. I’m barging in with an unsolicited opinion. I think it’s a character thing. I think Romney’s tract record shows that the answers he gave would depend on who was in the audience. After all he was both for and against the Chrysler bailout depending on where he was in Michigan when the question was asked.
     So I can see why he isn’t a conservative. Or a moderate. Or anything, really.

174. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303376904579135231053555194
     The above link is to the Wall Street Journal and has a pretty good description of the Tea Party.

175. The above link is to the Wall Street Journal and has a pretty good description of the Tea Party.
     Thanks for that Laura. IMO it’s a very good and very fair and even-handed discussion of tea party folks.
     I’d be curious to hear what folks here who identify, to whatever degree, with the tea party movement have to say about it.
     I actually have very little issue with the tea party per se. It seems like a lot of TP’ers don’t have, and have little interest in acquiring, good information, which is not such a good thing. But the basic stance of these are my values, I feel threatened by what is going on, and it pisses me off, is not something I have an issue with.
     Per se.
     What I find unacceptable is their apparent inability to recognize the legitimacy of other people’s interests. They, apparently, own the American Holy Grail, and if their point of view does not prevail they will shut down the country, or mount an insurrection, or start shooting people they don’t like.
     It’s a childish, selfish, self-serving, and destructive attitude.
     Things don’t work that way. Specifically, in this country, they do not work that way *intentionally, and by design*.
     They aren’t the only catfish in the sea. They need to get the hell over themselves.
     I’m glad Obama and the Senate held their ground, and I’m glad the tea party faction in the House got not one damned thing out this exercise. I hope the less fire-breathing (R)’s in the House take these guys out to the woodshed, and I hope they take Boehner along as well. And, I hope any future attempts at crap like this also net out to zero, or less than zero, for these folks.
     It’s a big country, lots of different kinds of people live in it, and we don’t all want the same things. If you can’t deal with that, you need to find another place to live, because the folks who don’t agree with you aren’t going anywhere.
     The tea partiers need to absorb that message. If they can’t, it needs to be pounded into their heads.
     Because that’s the reality. It’s not my weird, I-love-diversity, kumbaya opinion, it’s the reality. It’s a reality we all live with, it’s a reality that costs us all something, and it’s a reality we all accept as the price of living in a big and various country.
     They need to suck it up, grow up, and deal.

176. They need to suck it up, grow up, and deal.
     if the comments at RedState are any indicator, they’ve decided that the will do no such thing. purge, reload and try again seems to be what the base wants.
     it was an embarrassing self-defeat, but not a crushing one.

177. Well, I think you have made an essential point, a point left out of the article. There’s a reason why the Tea Party has been losing popularity: every time hey hold a public event, they come off like a bunch of stupid jerks. Morans. They do that to themselves with the Confederate flags, racist signs and way-beyond-the-line rhetoric.
     Those values listed as Tea party values? Those aren’t exclusively Tea Party values. The Tea Partiers are not the only Americans concerned with patriotism, the Constitution, the budget, or the future. But they come off as thinking they are the only ones who care, the only real true Americans.
     In my mind that’s what’s wrong with the Tea Party. They are snobs.
     But they are Republican snobs. They are Republicans for a reason: the Republican party decided–and Lee Atwood has a lot of the responsibility for this–years ago to make it a fundamental part of the party’s appeal to claim to be the party of pro-life, pro-family, patriotic fiscally conservative value voters, as opposed to the anti-life, anti-family values, Unchristian, unpatriotic, budget-busting Democrats. The Republican party leaders decided to use the tactics of polarization and marginalization deliberately with malice aforethought to get the crazy voters.
     So the Republican party is responsible for the damage done to our political discourse and decision-making. It isn’t enough for the Republican party leaders to now try to distance themselves from their own id. The only real change will be if those Republican politicians who don’t want to be perceived as Tea Partiers give up the irresponsible rhetoric that has been characteristic or Republican politicians since the nineties.

178. Like russell, I see a lot of the things that the Tea Party is described as believing in as quite like my own beliefs. But only the positive parts: patriotism, personal responsibility, the importance of family, that government regulations have gone overboard in many instances, etc.
     Where I differ with them is what I would call their “negative beliefs”: that minorities are moochers, immigrants are a burden, that all government regulation is unfair and unjust, that liberals want to destroy America — in short that those who disagree with them on almost any point are not just wrong but ill-intentioned and evil. Not least because I know both a lot of conservatives and a lot of liberals subscribe to the positive parts. And because I know a lot of minorities, and a lot of immigrants, who are nothing like the negative image that the Tea Party has. Quite the contrary, they tend on average to be bigger on those positive values than the average non-minority non-immigrant.
     The other point on which I differ with both the Tea Party, and those I know on the far left, is this. They both seem to reflexively assume that, if anything goes wrong in the world, it must be the result of a (usually secret) conspiracy to deliberately make it go wrong. For me, things frequently go wrong either by accident or by mistake. (In part because I have zero faith in the ability of a group of any size to either keep their actions a secret or to effectively execute a complex plan without major parts visibly failing.)

179. purge, reload and try again seems to be what the base wants.
     whatever floats their boat.
     it was an embarrassing self-defeat, but not a crushing one.
     well then, the rest of us will have to go for ‘crushing’ next time around.
     Like russell, I see a lot of the things that the Tea Party is described as believing in as quite like my own beliefs.
     to clarify my own position – i don’t find their beliefs to be much like my own. i just don’t have a big problem with them holding the beliefs that they hold.
     i’m just not interested in them breaking stuff when they don’t get their way.
     For me, things frequently go wrong either by accident or by mistake.
     agreed.

180. Dmbeastmaster: “We have a good example of conservative fact free thinking right here in this comment chain. BB tells us about how good machinists have it compared to engineers such as himself. Then boobyp runs this:
     Mean annual wage for machinists: $40,860
     Mean annual salary for mechanical engineers: $84,770.
     US per capita income: $42,693
     Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
     This is typical of right wing thinking. Believe complete nonsense, and keep believing it in the face of blatant objective facts to the contrary.”
     I would also ask people to think about fuzzyface’s original claim that machinist jobs were going infilled – has anybody seen wage data to back that claim up? If true, then machinist wages should be rising sharply.
     BTW, I have never seen right-wingers offer up facts. In every case it’s been liberals looking up the facts.
     Second, has anybody seen articles on alleged shortages which didn’t mention good reasons for the anecdotes in the story to be worthless? For example, the last one I saw about machinists had the employer offering $10.50/hr. But wait, it gets better! The jobs were in NYC.

181. Sorry: “BTW, I have never seen right-wingers offer up facts. In every case it’s been liberals looking up the facts.” Refers to the skills shortage argument; it ‘s not a general statement.

182. From Laura’s WSJ link:

     Many tea-party supporters are small businessmen who see taxes and regulations as direct threats to their livelihood. Unlike establishment Republicans who see potential gains from government programs such as infrastructure funding, these tea partiers regard most government spending as a deadweight loss. Because many of them run low-wage businesses on narrow margins, they believe that they have no choice but to fight measures, such as ObamaCare, that reduce their flexibility and raise their costs—measures to which large corporations with deeper pockets can adjust.

     This describes a number of TP supporters I know personally to a tee. They’re people I like a great deal, whose company I enjoy. I just don’t want to talk politics with them. They believe all sorts of silly things, and are often ignorant of many of the underlying facts that are pertintent to whatever political issue they are discussing. And they get mad when challenged with those facts. So it’s better to stick to sports or music or reminiscing about the stupid stuff we did in high school.
     This final paragraph is interesting:

     It’s no coincidence that the strengthening influence of the tea party is driving a wedge between corporate America and the Republican Party. It’s hard to see how the U.S. can govern itself unless corporate America pushes the Republican establishment to fight back against the tea party—or switches sides.

     I guess you gotta pick your poison. That goes for both sides, I suppose.

183. BB tells us about how good machinists have it compared to engineers such as himself.
     In fairness to Brett, “machinist” covers a lot of ground.
     In conversations I’ve had with him here on this topic, he’s offered very good evidence that folks at the higher end of the machinists’ trade – skilled CNC folks, frex – can make six figures.
     So, maybe not so fact-free in this case.
     Perhaps some greater precision about what is meant by ‘machinist’ is needed.

184. “things frequently go wrong either by accident or by mistake”
     Things more often go wrong due to willful ignorance.

185. “things frequently go wrong either by accident or by mistake”
     Things more often go wrong due to willful ignorance
     ”
     Hard to quantify, but all three things occur. But I agree that there’s a lot of willful ignorance. The worst things the US does are usually out in the open, but sometimes the mainstream mostly just ignores them. I’ll avoid examples,as it would look like an attempted threadjack.

186. when even Ann Coulter thinks the GOP is being overrun by “hucksters” and “shysters”, you know the wheels are coming off.

187. Two things I associate with the left that underpin, with reason, the right’s thinking–speaking broadly here, so finding an outlier doesn’t carry the day–are:
     1. ACA–The means, manner, method of its passage coupled with its now quite impressive inability to launch itself despite years in which to prepare. That chapter in legislative heavy handedness on such a crucial topic is not going away, nor should it. As the foolishness of its substance becomes more and more apparent, we will know why the instincts of so many who opposed it were correct.
     2. A continuing desire and intent to raise taxes and to regulate the private sector without cutting a single non-defense program anywhere and without taking any meaningful steps to look at the current regulatory load and taking steps to roll it back.
     The reality based community likes to tout its competence. Ok, time to pony up. How’s that unemployment number these days?

188. Coulter was just bragging

189. How’s that unemployment number these days?
     falling.
     and would be falling faster if the idiot caucus would:
     1. stop it with the delusional austerity measures
     2. stop lurching from one manufactured fiscal crisis to the next
     3. start investing in things like infrastructure improvements
     whaddaya think? is the GOP gonna stop strangling the economy while accusing Obama for being the reason the economy can’t catch its breath?
     no?
     probably no.

190. ACA–The means, manner, method of its passage
     McTex, if memory serves the ACA as passed includes hundreds of amendments proposed by Republicans. Yes, they all ended up voting against it anyway. But it isn’t really accurate to characterize is as something that was rammed down the country’s throat without input from both sides.
     No argument that the ACA’s website rollout has been a mess. (All big software projects are more likely than not to have initial problems. Which isn’t an excuse, just a reality comparison.) And if those don’t get fixed in another 6-8 weeks, it will be bad. But if they do get fixed, it will be no worse than a number of other big government programs over the years. We may not like big government programs, per se, but that’s a different discussion.

191. The reality based community likes to tout its competence.
     The reality based community generally touts the fact that it’s reality based. One would think that was sufficient.
     Ok, time to pony up. How’s that unemployment number these days?
     It sucks.
     You’ll say it’s the dead weight of taxation and intrusive regulation, I’ll say it’s the half-@ssedness of what should have been a vigorous Keynsian response to a failure of the financial system caused by systematic fraud, following on a general hollowing out of the productive economy by toxic finance capitalism run amok.
     Who’s to say who’s right? Both points of view have merit. It’s a complex phenomenon, accurately picking root causes out of the overall noise is a challenge.
     You vote for your guy, I’ll vote for mine, and they’ll argue about it and make a plan. It’ll be a half-@ssed mess of a plan because it will have to account for both your point of view, and mine.
     Kind of like the ACA, as it turns out.
     That’s how we do things here. That’s as good as it gets, and as good as it has ever gotten, beginning with the authoring of the Constitution itself, and continuing right up to now.
     As an aside, if you’ve ever been involved in rolling out a product with anything like the scale and complexity of the website(s) that are the consumer’s interface to the ACA, you will be not at all surprised that it’s awkward and buggy.
     If you think the private sector does a better job under similar circumstances, allow me to disabuse you of that notion.

192. If you think the private sector does a better job under similar circumstances, allow me to disabuse you of that notion.
     also, the ACA website was written by the private sector (two contractors, working on govt contracts). it’s not like the federal govt has a Programmer Corps to do these things. what we got for our taxpayer dollars is what the private sector delivered.
     which is impossible, because the private sector is always awesome and perfect. i know.

193. “Ok, time to pony up. How’s that unemployment number these days?”
     Europe has tried the austerity route. It hasn’t worked out well for them.

194. The means, manner, method of its passage coupled with its now quite impressive inability to launch itself despite years in which to prepare. That chapter in legislative heavy handedness on such a crucial topic is not going away, nor should it. As the foolishness of its substance becomes more and more apparent, we will know why the instincts of so many who opposed it were correct.
     I think you’d be better off trying to make one argument at a time; people who lump multiple arguments together are often doing it because they can’t stand up individually. Personally, Id much rather talk about the structure and function of the ACA than hear again how passing a bill through Congress was ‘heavy handed’ etc, don’t see much productive discussion there.
     Although when I say “structure and function of the ACA”, I don’t mean ‘lets pretend that an overloaded website means that the program is doomed to failure’.
     A continuing desire and intent to raise taxes and to regulate the private sector without cutting a single non-defense program anywhere and without taking any meaningful steps to look at the current regulatory load and taking steps to roll it back.
     Taxes are at low levels historically; anyone who claims to be concerned about deficits but cannot countenance the idea of raising those historically low taxes isn’t serious about the former IMO.
     And I can falsify ‘a single non-defense program’ by observing that many (most?) liberals want to cut ag sudsidies and subsidies for natural resource extraction. Many would gladly cut federal drug enforcement activity and spending. Im sure there are other programs that specific individuals would like to cut.
     Personally, I dont mind looking critically at regulation, but that’s not an excuse to undermine the principles behind the legislation- ie Im fine with streamlining or otherwise facilitating EPA reviews as long as it’s not being done with the intent of being more lax towards actual pollution.
     The reality based community likes to tout its competence. Ok, time to pony up. How’s that unemployment number these days?
     Im with cleek, not sure what you’ve accomplished by pointing out that unemployment is getting better. Deficit’s falling like gangbusters too, if you want to ask us about that.
     Both doing much better than the countries that tried to fix the slowdown via austerity. That’s the sort of thing the reality-based community love btw, looking at two different approaches and see which one works better, rather than trying to deduce it from first principles.

195. Three years head start and a half a billion dollars should get me more the absolutely blank webpage I get after logging in once I was finally able to create an account.

196. Three years head start and a half a billion dollars should get me more the absolutely blank webpage I get after logging in once I was finally able to create an account.
     Yeah, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?
     I haven’t been on the ACA site, so I don’t know how good or bad it is. If I really wanted to know just how badly the public sector had FUBAR’d this particular effort, things I’d want to know would be:
     How far into the three year head start did we get before anybody was actually allowed to start work?
     How many monkey wrenches were thrown into the development effort by folks who weren’t interested in having the program succeed?
     It’s relatively easy, although still quite far from simple, to roll out complicated systems when there’s a solid consensus about what you’re trying to achieve, and about whether it’s a good and worthwhile thing to do.
     It’s that much more complicated when half the folks who own your budget would love to see you go down in flames.
     And, as cleek aptly notes, there are some conflicting incentives involved, because the folks who are actually hands-on are likely private employees of a contractor, who generally want to do what they need to do to get paid and then move on.
     We want a small, just-in-time government, don’t we? So, we use private contractors for lots and lots and lots of things.
     Either way, as long as the plug doesn’t get pulled in January, or February, or whenever, I’m sure they’ll sort it out.

197. The means, manner, method of its passage…
     The Democrats cheated by winning elections and passing legislation.

198. also, not for nothing, but i just jumped on healthcare.gov and created an account in, like, 2 minutes.
     the site is more than reasonably responsive. in my limited experience.
     maybe you’re just having a bad day, charles.
     i was about to suggest a number of private sector sites you could check out if you wanted a truly frustrating, time-wasting experience, but i think that might be sort of bad form, so i won’t.
     no doubt, we can all think of some favorites of our own.

199. That chapter in legislative heavy handedness on such a crucial topic is not going away, nor should it
     This is an unfounded slanderous slur slung out there just about every time you show up, McKinney. The assertion is not true. The legislation, committee work, and extensive debate was initiated by Obama’s inaugural address in early 2009 and the bill was signed in March, 2010. That’s over a year of intense public scrutiny. To assert that the political majority was ‘heavy handed’ is simply a bald faced lie.
     Try another fainting couch, please.

200. so finding an outlier doesn’t carry the day…
     A continuing desire and intent to raise taxes and to regulate the private sector without cutting a single non-defense program anywhere
     How about millions of outliers? Almost nobody wants to raise taxes. It may be hard for you to fathom, but people on “the left” pay taxes too, and prefer paying less. If raising taxes is a necessary consequence of doing other things they want to do, they’re willing to chip in.
     As far as cutting programs, our “defense” spending is out of control, so there’s a lot of mileage to be had there. Personally, I’d be in favor of nearly completely defunding the DEA and virtually any program that’s part of the war on drugs, for example.

201. “How many monkey wrenches were thrown into the development effort by folks who weren’t interested in having the program succeed?”

     Well…software programmers, developers and engineers do tend toward being libertarian… 🙂
     Last week, when I tried to create an account, it would get almost to the end of the process, then nothing. Today, I created an account in a few minutes and got a confirming email. But logging in gives me a blank user profile page.
     Being in Texas, I dealing with the federal exchange, not being passed on to a state exchange.

202. this liberal would also like it if we could stop subsidizing tobacco farmers.

203. Hey, look! Another doomed and heavy handed government program is up and running that can only end in the destruction of freedom and the dystopia of one world UN government!
     Get a life.

204. Well…software programmers, developers and engineers do tend toward being libertarian… 🙂
     I was referring more to folks in Congress. But whatever.
     Sorry you’re having a bad experience, I had no problems whatsoever. I was on the federal site, not the MA site.
     In any case, there’s always something to b*tch about if you’re so inclined.
     this liberal would also like it if we could stop subsidizing tobacco farmers.
     this liberal would like to shut down the CIA directorate of ops. that would save us some serious $$$.
     if you’re gonna trim, trim big.

205. I wonder if these dire predictions about the ACA and the future awfulness it will produce will be timed in Friedman Units (at least until enough of them go by that no one cares anymore, thereby avoiding crow ingestion).

206. The next six months will be critical to answering your question…

207. if you’re gonna trim, trim big.
     Dean Baker estimates that we could save upwards of $200 billion/year by reforming drug patenting laws and restructuring research incentives. That’s some real money.

208. Good grief! I just went to the healthcare.gov site. First thing that hits your eye: neither of the individuals on the front page are white! Are they trying to reinforce the Tea Party folks’ conviction that this is all a plot against America as they imagine it? (At least Covered California has a mix.)

209. First thing that hits your eye: neither of the individuals on the front page are white!
     there’s a white woman on the “Learn” page (which is also the front page if you go to healthcare.gov)

210. First thing that hits your eye: neither of the individuals on the front page are white!
     The fact that this is the first thing that hits your eye boggles my mind.
     People need to get out more.
     And no, I’m not accusing you or anybody else of racism, it just seems like a truly weird thing to have that be the first thing you see.
     Not “how do I sign up”, or “is there a help page”, or “how do I log in”, but “holy crap, those people are colorful!”
     We have a whole lot of growing up to do here in the good old USA.

211. I thought wj was making sarcastic reference to the racial paranoia of some (or most) of the Tea Party movement.

212. Yes, it was intended as sarcasm; I should remember to use the /sarcasm flag.
     But I’m hardly going to object to the fact that the two women on I saw look a lot like my wife and in-laws. 😉

213. what’s really interesting is Liz Fowler of Wellpoint, Blue Cross’s parent co, wrote most of the Obamacare/Romneycare while a legislative aide for Sen Max Baucus of Montana. Previously worked for WellPoint before working for Sen. Baucus. Wikipedia says she was the leading opponent of Single Payer. after Romneycare/Obamacare was passed by the Congress, Ms. Fowler went back to work for Wellpoint.
     talk about socialism for Business. lol. when Government gets in bed with Business, we see the results. profits over people. mass corruption that make Government look better by comparison.
     Business gets their way by buying Govenrment/through lobbying. buying the Congresspeople.
     Romney/Obamacare is so effed up according to everything complaint i hear, yet do i hear private business getting any of the “blame” for the structural problems.
     from what i gather from some conservatives, only Government can eff up. lol. biased much. Government is bad when it’s bad, getting private Business to help make it worse is never alluded to.
     not that those who hate Government will ever admit Business’ part in the mess made, though.
     spending over 800 billion a year on defense is where a lot of the waste is. and i never hear any push to cut back on military expansion. did anyone read about the new bases in Italy opened recently. closer to the middle east, too.
     the military never, ever cuts back, just redistributes to another “honey” pot.
     so these people who never talk about military waste are part of the problem.
     my nephew, in the Army, tells me of a $2000 light swithplate. asking about the waste in the military is not a healthy idea. since nothing will ever stop the military congressional complex that keeps patronage as job #1.
     yet cutting SS, Mediare, food stamps, WIC, infrastructure, NIH, schools, other non military stuff is deemed non essential.
     right. non essential to the people larding up on Government pork. notice how it only civilian things that “Have” to be cut.
     ignorance is truly bliss for those who choose to stay ignorant

214. i also just read some story that says without pork barrel spending Congressmen have little incentive to pass budgets.
     irony?
     supposedly cleaning up the old ways of Congress, i.e, pork barrel spending, has led to the new “Hostage Taking” behavior of Congress. what a twist. Maybe next time the Democrats can hold America hostage for higher taxes on the Rich.
     we need to prepare for more come Jan, when the debt ceiling game comes up for renewal!!!
     the best Congress Government Business’ Money can buy.

215. Bernard, you can only hold the country hostage like that if the other side actually cares about the good of the nation. And understands that what you are threatening would be bad for it. The track record of the Tea Party gives no reason to suspect that might be the case.

216. Yes, it was intended as sarcasm
     My bad. Sorry wj!!

217. Posted by: CharlesWT:
     “Last week, when I tried to create an account, it would get almost to the end of the process, then nothing. Today, I created an account in a few minutes and got a confirming email. But logging in gives me a blank user profile page.
     Being in Texas, I dealing with the federal exchange, not being passed on to a state exchange.”
     When I hear thin
     1) I finally dropped Comcast, after their ‘upgrade’ reduced my service, and I had spent hours on chat/phone. And having their customer service guarantee recited every motherf-ing time, as they ‘serviced’ me but good.
     2) I’m going to buy a Microsoft Surface tablet, after my iPad has been ruined by a piece of malware called ‘iOS7’ (the hackers were sooooo good that they actually put it in the Apple Store, like it was legitimate software).

218. Sorry – ‘When I hear *things* like this’

219. “hackers”
     Just read an article speculating that automobiles will be the next area of ruination for hacker hyenas.
     Once self-driving, non-unionized 18-wheelers hit the roads, we’ll at least see a “Bus” type of movie from Hollywood featuring a few hundred of the big trucks converging on some Federal employee preschool in D.C. to make revenge mincemeat.
     I’d lay down even money real-life operatives think of it first.
     Regarding the ACA website, I’m thinking there are servers and/or unmarked warehouses/office spaces crammed with Republican/Tea Party ratf*cker operatives at computer terminals gumming up the works for the rest of us.
     Maybe they do it from home too, seeing as how the gummint closest to the people is usually the most corrupt.
     There has been speculation that some of the forest and grassland fires in recent years, especially in California, may have been set by al Qaeda.
     If so, they learned it from Republican operatives during the 1990’s who set forest fires leading up to big elections, which makes roughly as much sense (which means enough to be plausible) as conservative Wall Street Journal editorials at the time blaming Smokey The Bear tree huggers for the conflagrations.
     I hope CharlesWT finds affordable insurance through the ACA, but I’ve got to ask, given Charles’ internet persona here as a more or less libertarian Texan, what gives?
     😉

220. Still, entrepreneurial pinkos, socialists, small businesses, and investors are putting their money where conservatives refuse to put their mouths:
     http://finance.yahoo.com/news/venture-capitalists-play-obamacare-tech-110000303.html

221. Meanwhile, the other Somali pirates get theirs too:
     http://www.balloon-juice.com/2013/10/18/late-night-open-thread-more-small-businessmen-crushed-by-the-obama-administration/
     I love the libertarian/Randian “lighthouse” theory of small government.

222. I hope CharlesWT finds affordable insurance through the ACA, but I’ve got to ask, given Charles’ internet persona here as a more or less libertarian Texan, what gives?
     reminds me of the Jewish grandmother who, when asked about a particular restaurant, said ‘oh, that place, the food is just awful! And the portions are so small!!!’

223. http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/10/18/2786841/yes-south-different-race
     Some of you might be interested in this link. It’s an article based on analysis of tow other research-based articles about the Tea party phenomenon. One article attributes the Tea Party largely to race issues, the other doesn’t.
     Both articles refer to the Tea party as conservative, which is pretty standard. I’m thinking here of our discussion upthread. “Conservative” is frequently used, rightly or wrongly, to mean “reactionary” or racist or to refer to people who want to use the power of government to micromanage other people’s sex lives.
     But that’s an aside. I just thought the articles provided another take which could be compared to the Wall Street Journal article.

224. Hannity, rateffer:
     http://www.salon.com/2013/10/18/inside_the_fox_news_lie_machine_i_fact_checked_sean_hannity_on_obamacare/

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