As most of you know, I don't write many diaries, and when I do, they usually concern issues that touch my life as an HIV+ gay man. But this one will be different. The circus in Washington over the (entirely manufactured) debt ceiling "crisis" seems to me to be further proof of something I've thought for a long time now.
My thought is simply this -- propaganda has disastrous consequences. I'll explain this a bit more below the curlicue.
Anyone who's been reading this site over the last couple of weeks knows that one of the reasons we can't get a debt ceiling deal is largely because of the intransigence of certain Republican members of Congress, mostly those affiliated with the so-called Tea Party. These people categorically refuse to consider any tax increase to fund essential goverment services. To them, taxes are simply a form of theft that destroys economic activity and entrepreneurship. In their world, the federal government can solve the deficit problem by cutting taxes. You see, to your average Tea Partier, it makes perfect sense to say that decreasing government revenues will result in increasing government revenues. Taking in less money means you take in more money. Tea Partiers will not be swayed by the talk of pointy-headed economists. Indeed, they will not even be swayed by mathematics. Thus, they will not agree to any deal that doesn't include massive cuts to federal spending (combined, perhaps, with tax cuts), because they consider the idea of authorizing additional borrowing by Uncle Sam to be anathema to their "principles."
And therein lies the problem. You see, this is what happens when a country spends over three decades pretending that idiotic right wing ideologies are as valuable as facts. This is the result of the collective decision of the Very Serious People to take seriously right-wing rhetoric about taxes and economics and to treat it as if it were a valid, rational basis for policy. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan apparently had it all wrong -- you can indeed have your own facts. Or perhaps more precisely, in Washington's bizarro world, an opinion is as good as a fact. Indeed, many of the Very Serious People no longer seem to know the difference between the two. Or if they do, they don't appear to think the distinction between fact and opinion makes any difference at all. In Washington, pointing out that something is simply false is viewed as very bad form.
The reason Speaker Boehner can't get through to the Tea Party members of his caucus is because they (like most Americans) have been fed a steady diet of utterly unrealistic right-wing propaganda for decades. And our "objective" news media has treated this insanity as if it were worthy of respect rather than derision. These people have been told for years that their ideology is as good as truth. They really believe tax cuts reduce the deficit. The claim is demonstrably false, but none dare call it bullshit.
And that's just one small drop of the snake oil these people have swallowed. Now, after years of ingesting a steady diet of ideological horse manure, lots of these imbeciles have actually been elected to Congress. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell now have the unenviable task of persuading them that they must vote to raise the debt ceiling, which means copping to the fact that the right's economic propaganda is just, well, propaganda. Of course, Boehner and McConnell have been spewing this propaganda for years, which is doubtless why their so many of their own members refuse to believe them when they suddenly admit that the emperor of right-wing economic ideology in fact has no clothes.
But these tea party mouth-breathers have been indoctrinated with the idea that facts are the result of some kind of liberal conspiracy, and they're not about to give up on their baseless opinions. After all, why should they? They've been told for years that right-wing economic ideas that are completely unmoored from reality count for as much as facts. Of course, in the interest of "objectivity," no one in the news media or in the political class would be so crass as to say, "That's wrong."
So what we are seeing is the inevitable consequence of decades of pretending that the ideas of people like Ronald Reagan, Arthur Laffer, Grover Norquist, Howard Jarvis, and others are somehow grounded in reality. Bush Père offered perhaps the last gasp of sanity when he decried Ronald Reagan's "voodoo economics." But he, too, was soon persuaded to toe the party line.
Our long years of determined denial of reality have taken their toll. The ideology of the so-called Tea Party is the apotheosis of disturbed, right-wing, Randian fantasy. Perhaps the worldwide economic collapse that will follow our default on the debt will lead people back to the world of reality. But me, I'm not holding my breath.
(This rant is now officially over.)