The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

Members of
Tea Party claim their movement springs from and promotes basic American
conservative principles such as limited government and fiscal responsibility.

But research
by University of Washington political scientists Christopher Parker and Matt
Barreto argues that the tea party ideology owes more to the paranoid politics
associated with the John Birch Society of our past than to traditional American
conservatism. Parker and Barreto authored a book titled “Change They Can’t Believe
In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America,” (2013, Princeton
University Press).

At the
heart of their book is a nationwide telephone survey in early 2011 of 1,500
adults (equal numbers of men and women) across 13 states. The results illustrate where members of the tea party and
conservatives part ideological ways. Asked if they think
President Obama is “destroying the country,” 71% of self-identified tea party
supporters said that statement was true, compared to 36% among all
conservatives.

Other survey results:

• 75% of tea party conservatives
  said they think President Obama’s policies are socialist while 40% percent
  of non-tea party conservatives held that view
• 27% percent of tea party
  conservatives said they think President Obama is a practicing Muslim,
  while 18% of non-tea party conservatives took that view
• 75% of tea party respondents said
  they wish President Obama’s policies to fail, compared with 32% of conservatives

Parker calls the tea
party a continuation of what political scientist Richard Hofstadter in the
1960s described as “the paranoid style in American politics,” characterized by
exaggeration, suspicion and conspiratorial fantasy.

Here
is what Richard Hofstadter wrote
in 1964:

Hofstadter
quoted the original Ted Cruz, Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1951:

More about the role of delusions comes
from a New Economic
Perspectives blog post entitled “Now is the
Time to Cast off Delusions” written
by Michael Hoexter about how shared delusions prevent us from meeting in the
middle on our big problems. Here are a few of the Hoexter’s 11 Shared
Delusions:  

Shared Delusion #1: Society
is a Market

Conservatives assume that society is a
market or must act like a market to function optimally. Individual
policy proposals, like the school
reform movement that operates under the banner of “school choice” and
“parent choice”, show this belief system. 

Shared Delusion #3: Government
is Never Effective or is Second Best

A standard belief by the right wing is that
government is always incompetent. While exceptions are found in the praise
of police or military organizations, the view of civilian government is always
as a bumbling, incompetent institution. They speak of the mistakes and
inconveniences of the federal government while the triumphs of government are those
of the military or some other “exceptional” individual within government.

Shared Delusion #4: Authority is Always Illegitimate

The concept of authority itself is always treated
as illegitimate.
The idea of authority having legitimacy is seen as tantamount to incipient totalitarianism, or, of giving up on egalitarianism or
democracy. The questioning of climate scientists’ authority in the area
of climate is the most significant and damaging example of this seemingly
democratic impulse (“anybody can be a climate scientist”). 

Shared Delusion #7: There is no Non-Partisan Data

 

There is a belief
that data does not exist independent of an interpretive framework that
represents a particular interest. This idea has now become the reality
of the Right. The mentality on the Right has led them to dispute every
issue and policy as if there is no non-partisan reality basis to
the argument. Whenever they argue that incomplete data is automatically false
data and therefore it’s OK to invent and/or cherry-pick whatever facts,
pseudo-facts, or non-facts we want, the post-rational Right think they are on the
path to political dominance.

Go read all of Hoexter’s
post. But the real question is, how can we deal with them?

They will not
be discarded easily by the post-rational Right. The first step is for
people to want to discard them.
They must have some motivation in order to do that. Maybe the Shutdown or the
Debt Ceiling crisis can provide such a motivation, if we could agree on a plan
that might save our fragile economic recovery. 

Here is a
small step towards greater clarity of thought: Contrary to Republican claims, the deficit is not increasing—it peaked in 2009 and
has been dropping ever since, declining by $200 billion last year with
another $450 billion drop projected this year. These numbers do not have a
partisan bias:

Maybe they are thinking about the debt, but the
deficit is down
35% from this time last year. In Washington, the shrinking deficit has
altered the debt limit discussion, which Republicans now prefer to link to
concessions that are only loosely related to overall spending reduction. Like
Obamacare.

Moreover,
House members continue to say that there will not be a financial crisis if we default
on October 17th. Republicans believe that we don’t have to pay every
bill as it comes due. They believe that
Mr. Obama is lying to them about the downside outcome in this crisis.
In fact, Pew reports
that 54% of Republican voters think that American can breach the debt limit “without
major problems”. They think the real problem is America having a Greece-type
collapse.

The
risk of a collapse of the world’s largest economy feels more real to them than certainty
of our borrowing costs rising as a result of a default.

For the past 5 years, all conservatives talked about was how we needed
“certainty” for markets to create the jobs we need. Where are those
who were caterwauling about certainty today? They are busy creating a massive
level of uncertainty.

Instead, they
are hand-wringing about the evils of public insurance exchanges where people
can pick and choose from a menu of
private health care plans. Private Plans.

Oh, the socialism!

Delusions
abound in the land.