Future head of the Party of No Nothings
Balloon Juice has been eviscerating Megan McArdle here.
We have a distressing and gathering trend of conservatives polishing their bona fides by running down "experts" in whatever field they happen to be talking about. And while scientists in particular bear the brunt of those attacks, any evidence based knowledge is suspect.
I am a well known hater of Andrew Jackson, and he clearly represents the first movement away from the Enlightenment in American politics. James Monroe was no Jefferson or Hamilton, but he was a product of that generation's thinking about American governance. Jackson - and to a surprising degree his enabler and sidekick Van Buren - were the products of a new American politics in which the civic good was no longer considered the fundamental guidestar of leaders. For Jackson, the guidestar was to be his own instincts. For Van Buren it was to be the politically advantageous.
The marriage of these two perspectives produced the 19th century Democratic Party. A party wedded to slavery and racial apartheid, state power over national needs and local prejudice over empirical fact.
With Woodrow Wilson and later Franklin Roosevelt's election, combined with the mossback conservatism of Harding and Coolidge, the broad group of people known as Progressives moved into the Democratic party and altered it forever. Progressives had existed in both parties. Teddy Roosevelt and Bob LaFollette were both Republicans. Jane Addams might have been one, too.
When Truman began advocating for civil rights for blacks, the old Southern base of the Democratic party began a long abandonment of the party of Jackson. It took about thirty years, but eventually the partisans of Jackson became the partisans of Reagan.
Jackson and Reagan both shared charisma, a clear view of their place in the world and a tenuous relationship with objective fact. Both followed an ideology that led to long term economic instability in America. Jackson killed the Bank of the US and ushered in a century of wildcat banking and routine bank failures and financial crisis. Reagan ushered in the economic snake oil of supply side economic, the Laffer Curve and "deficits don't matter" as long as Republicans were in power.
This consistent strand of American politics that favors preconceived ideas over objective knowledge - "I know what I know and facts be damned" - is the one thing that continues to haunt our political system. It is not the structure of the Senate or the nature of our electoral system.
As Krugman points out, and the evidence is accumulating to support him, the unrest in Egypt was caused primarily - overwhelmingly - by economic issues. Those economic issues revolve mostly around rising food prices, which is a real issue in the developing world. And rising food prices can be definitively tied to global climate change.
Meanwhile, the Party of The Gut Over The Brain continues to debate the established science. They deny climate change almost entirely for two reasons: coal and oil money helps keep them in office and because the experts say it's happening and screw the experts. Your average Teatard doesn't get any campaign contributions from the Kochs or ExxonMobil, but they HATE those pointy headed experts.
And just as they rallied around Jackson and his demagoguery, they are rallying around Palin and her ilk.
It can win elections, but it's bad for the country. In case anyone cares about that.
UPDATE: Get the full low down here.
No comments:
Post a Comment