Fear and loathing

You see a lot of false equivalencies in the media. It's sort of their creed: if you report that Republicans have done something that makes them look bad, you must immediately find a way to say that Democrats do it also. That is how you seem "fair." If the Republicans are, for instance, lying through their teeth, and the Democrats aren't, you're obligated to say something like "Republicans are claiming that Ted Kennedy is a serial killer, but Democrats today used a very generous interpretation of their tax plan, so both sides lie."

For instance, on ABC's "this week," Paul Krugman (who is brilliant) and Cokie Roberts (who is a complete tool) had the following exchange:

Krugman: This is not just about McCain and what he did. The fact of the matter is, for a long time we have had a substantial fraction of the Republican base that just does not regard the idea of Democrats governing as legitimate. Remember the Clinton years. It was craziness, right? They were murderers, they were drug smugglers, and the imminent prospect of what looks like a big Democratic victory would drive a lot of these people crazy even if Sarah Palin wasn't saying these inflammatory things. It's going to be very ugly after the election.

Roberts: On both sides that's true. I think that you've also had a huge number of Democrats who think that the Republicans are illegitimate, and that was particularly true after the 2000 election, and to some degree after 2004. And so you really do have at the core of each party people who are not ready to accept the verdict of the election.

Krugman: I reject the equivalence.

Jeez.

I'm just going to quote Hilzoy's response in full, because it's better than I could put it:

I do too, on two counts. First, there is no analogy between 1992 and 2000. In 1992, there was no question that Bill Clinton won the election. He had 370 electoral votes to Bush's 168. He got 5.6% more of the popular vote than Bush. It was not close.

In 2000, by contrast, Gore won the popular vote, and the electoral vote turned on Florida, whose results in turn were decided by the Supreme Court. And the decision in Bush v. Gore was very hard to explain as a principled decision: justices in the majority not only abandoned long-held positions on federalism, but announced that their decision should not be cited as a precedent in future cases. I really do not want to re-argue the 2000 election. But I think that the idea that there's some sort of equivalence between doubting the fairness of the 2000 and 1992 elections is absurd.

Second, while a lot of Democrats had deep concerns about the outcome of Bush v. Gore, the overwhelming majority of us accepted that the courts had the right to adjudicate questions of law. As a result, most of us accepted the idea that whether or not George W. Bush had actually won the election in straightforward common-sense terms, he was entitled under the law to be our President.

Or, in short: we had a lot more reason to regard George W. Bush as illegitimate than the Republicans had to regard Clinton as illegitimate. Despite that fact, most of us accepted the fact that, like it or not, he was our President. We did not go around claiming that he had killed one of his closest associates, or was a drug smuggler, or hung crack pipes from his Christmas tree.

There is no equivalency here. None at all.

Maybe next week I'll take on the (cough) challenging task of explaining why there is no equivalence between saying that Clinton was a murderer and saying that George W. Bush is a war criminal. Hint: it's the same reason there would be no equivalence between saying that Bush held up a convenience store and saying that Clinton was unfaithful to his wife.

Amen.

I want to add, though, that this seems, to me, to point out a distinct difference between the Democratic base and the Republican base.

I think, for the most part, we see politics as the clash of competing ideas. Which is why a lot of alleged Democrats and liberals were willing to give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt for so long. Those of us on the "angry left" (the "dirty fucking hippies" to use Atrios's phrase) were left helplessly pointing out that Bush was lying us into war, that his administration was staffed with incompetent cronies, that his proposed social security policies were presented dishonestly and were actually a big gift to Wall Street at the expense of the least among us. Eventually, more and more people came around to our view, because it got really hard to avoid--Bush and his minions didn't just represent an alternate set of proposals we could battle honestly, they represented something much more insidious, dishonest, and destructive.

People who reached this conclusion did so almost entirely on policy grounds. Bush's policies, and their results, just got so hateful and disastrous that open-minded people could no longer ignore it, which is why Bush's approval ratings are now dipping to sub-Nixonian levels.

In short, it wasn't that we hate him and therefore we look for reasons to justify that hate. For the most part, we started out giving him the benefit of the doubt and found that his actions left hating him as the only honest option.

Contrast that to the way conservatives, even allegedly "mainstream" ones, treated Bill Clinton. From the very, very beginning, they accused him of having murdered Vince Foster, of being a drug smuggler, of operating death squads in Arkansas to whack his political enemies, of somehow having committed impeachable offenses in a 1974 Arkansas land deal on which he lost money. They hated him with a passion that bordered on psychosis.

And it clearly wasn't that they hated him because of his policies, or even because they'd heard that he was a murderer or a rapist or a drug smuggler. They hated him because he was THE ENEMY.

And this is my point. The conservative base doesn't see politics as a clash of competing legitimate ideas. It sees politics, and everything else, as a clash between good and evil. When George W. Bush said "you're either with us or you're against us," he wasn't just talking about that one moment in history. Conservatives think that about literally everything.

During the Cold War they were able to conveniently structure their worldview along capitalist vs. communist lines. When that ended, they had ten years to wait for al Qaeda to offer them a new group to hate. So they spent the 90s adrift. And, rather than adapt to newer, more complex realities and engage in an honest debate with Democrats and liberals about how to move forward, they just cast American politics in the same tribalist terms.

They hate Bill Clinton because, to them, the whole world is a Saturday morning cartoon, populated by Good Guys and Bad Guys. They see the world like I did when I was 5. And their identity as Good Guys requires them, at all times, to be fighting against some historic and unprecedented EVIL FORCE. After the cold war, they conveniently and suddenly had a Democratic president to hate. So, they believed all that shit about him not because they found it plausible, but because it conveniently fit into their need for the opposition not just to be the opposition, but to be THE BAD GUY.

In short, it had nothing whatsoever to do with policy (Clinton actually agreed with them on a number of issues, like welfare reform). They hated him because that's how they feel about the enemy, and all those ridiculous slurs fit neatly into their need to justify their hate.

So no, there is no equivalence. The difference is categorical. We feel that a lively and engaged and honest policy debate is essential to effective governance. They feel that He-Man needs to crush and defeat Skeletor.

Conservatism in the 1990s had a distinctly anti-authority slant. The fringe of that movement was utterly convinced that Clinton was a tyrant who was going to come take their guns away and make them bow down to the UN or something. Somewhat more "mainstream" conservatives, at the very least, felt that it was the epitome of patriotism not just to disagree with Clinton, but to absolutely loathe and detest him, to regard him as illegitimate despite his having twice been legitimately elected president.

And then, bizarrely, after a Republican got "elected" president, they did a 180, and became hardcore authoritarians, regarding any criticism of the new president, however mild, as not only unpatriotic, but treasonous. the "good guy/bad guy" lines were redrawn: Bush was the Good Guy. Al Qaeda was the Bad Guy--and so was anybody who said anything bad about Bush the noble hero and his quest to vanquish the Bad Guys.

As usual, there is no such thing as legitimate disagreement. It's always good vs. evil.

And the hateful, Munich-beer-hall style crowds at McCain/Palin rallies is a sign of how this is going to manifest in the Obama/Biden administration. It'll be the 90s all over again but with a "terrorist" flavor.

To these crowds of crazy-base-world conservatives, Barack Obama is the Bad Guy for the same reason Bill Clinton is--he's the opposition, and there is no such thing as legitimate opposition. He has a Muslim-sounding name, which feeds nicely into their preexisting framework of Muslim Bad Guys, but even if he didn't, they would still be calling him a "terrorist" because to them, "terrorist" is simply a synonym for "Bad Guy." And any Democrat about to be elected president would by definition play that role for them.

I don't know exactly why they always see things this way. Maybe tribalism is built into our genes by evolution (in ancient times it made us more likely to protect our own genetic line, and thus those genes survived). Maybe fundamentalist Christianity has something to do with it, casting the universe as it does in stark good vs. evil terms (witness the rumors that Obama might be the antichrist).

I suppose we can congratulate ourselves on having, to a much greater degree, transcended our tribalist evolutionary roots and come to see the world in more nuanced terms, as a clash of competing ideas rather than a war between GI Joe and Cobra. Because there is absolutely no equivalence. We are not like them. (And, to their credit, some conservative intellectuals, like David Brooks and Christopher Buckley, have begun to acknowledge that the intellectual conservatism of decades past has been replaced by lizard-brained reactionary ignorance--Buckley has even endorsed Obama).

They are the small-minded thugs. We strive to be ruled by the better angels of our natures. Keep fighting the good fight. This time at least, we're about to win.