Losing Touch With Reality

David Frum asks, "When Did The GOP Lose Touch With Reality?" (h/t Ritholtz)  He puts it sometime around 2005.  I put it earlier than that.  I admit, I voted for George W. Bush in 2000, but by the time the Republicans pushed the tax cuts of 2001 through, I thought the party was off the rails.  By that time, the Bush Administration had pushed Jim Jeffords out of the Republican Party, when Karl Rove told him to toe the line or get out.  After that followed the tax cuts, 9/11, the fearmongering about terrorism, the Afghanistan war, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Iraq War, more tax cuts, the 2004 election campaign, and then Katrina.  By that time, I had decided to run for election in 2006, to take on an incumbent who represented the purest form of what would become known as the Tea Party.  Since the 2006 primary election, I have voted for no more than 2 Republicans for any office above the county level.  Anyway, here is Mr. "Axis of Evil" making his argument:

It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as balancing the budget on the backs of the poor. By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are lucky duckies because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked churches, synagogues, and mosques. By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by TheWall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the greatest central banker in the history of the world, according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an open invitation to death panels. A dozen years ago, a very similar reform was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is socialism. In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic-recovery program.

I really can't disagree with a single thing he says in this paragraph.  All of these items are things which Republicans seem to have forgotten in their rush to portray Barack Obama as worse than Mao and Stalin.  However, the grassroots base, which came together at our county convention in 2006, would have agreed with all of that back then.  Every speaker at that convention, except myself, gave the same speech about lower taxes, smaller government, banning abortion, getting rid of gun control, bringing back school prayer, etc.  They wouldn't mention income inequality, school funding, local government funding, insuring the uninsured, paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or anything else which might lead to prudent goevernance.  At the convention, many of the radical (soon to be Tea Party) challengers upset the establishment Republicans for endorsements in the upcoming primary.  After the event, I spoke with the Chairman of the county Republican party, who said that he and his deputy were fairly scared by the radicalism of the base.  So I take issue with the idea that this occurred only recently.

Here is another excerpt from Frum:

Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know canny investors, erudite authors sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him and yet that is done too. (emphasis mine) Conservatives have been driven to these fevered anxieties as much by their own trauma as by external events. In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump.  (emphasis mine)  Along the way, the GOP suffered two severe election defeats in 2006 and 2008. Imagine yourself a rank-and-file Republican in 2009: If you have not lost your job or your home, your savings have been sliced and your children cannot find work. Your retirement prospects have dimmed. Most of all, your neighbors blame you for all that has gone wrong in the country. There’s one thing you know for sure: None of this is your fault! And when the new president fails to deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone’s accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage, what relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief.

I think Frum makes extremely strong points here.  First off, with the exception of a couple of tax increases in the Health Care law, Obama hasn't raised taxes at all, and those increases were targeted at the extreme top, who have had their taxes cut by huge amounts in recent history, leading to record deficits.  Secondly, the Republicans controlled politics both in the '20s and in the '00s.  What happened after each?  A terrible Depression.  I see a direct link between the two.

Finally, Frum states:

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama, whatever his policy errors, is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.

The conservative bubble does amaze me.  I was talking with a pretty reasonable friend last week, and I asked him if he thought the President was intelligent.  He said no, and gave the teleprompter line.  I nearly blew up on him.  I just can't understand how people listen to the President speak and come away thinking he isn't intelligent, or that he can't speak without a teleprompter.  Frum doesn't even touch on a number of other issues, such as global warming or a belief that the housing collapse was caused by the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.  Anyway, he deftly makes the case that the Republican Party is unmoored from reality, and he seems to place that as occurring in about 2005.  I think it began at least as early as 1992, and has gotten progressively worse since then.  At this point, the Republican base isn't rooted on this planet.  It is rooted in fantasy land.  On that, Frum and I agree.