Our New Alternative Universe
Patton Oswalt did a comedy bit a while ago about how the 2003 political landscape seemed like we were living in a bad alternate universe. For a few years it did actually feel that way to me - I found myself arguing with otherwise sane, rational people who said that torture should be legal, quagmire was success, that soldiers were safer than civilians, people who reveal covert CIA identities are heroic whistleblowers, creationism should be taught in science class, etc. Every day I woke up feeling a little insane. "Arnold Schwarzenneger runs California, torture is legal, and spinach is poison!" But then things changed. Sometime in 2006 I was on a mailing list where one person was making an argument about lower taxes encouraging independence and entrepreneurship and the other person was arguing that higher taxes provided a necessary social safety net to encourage risk and I realized that this was actually a reasonable disagreement. It was refreshing. I felt like we'd started turning a corner.
Then Democrats trounced Republicans in the 2006 midterms and 2008 election. And Republicans responded in the last couple of months - by appointing the first black guy Republican party chairman to bring avant garde republicanism to urban-suburban hip-hop settings, and letting Indian Bobby Jindal give a friendly upbeat response to Obama's State of the Union. Republicans wrestling with the dissonance between what they believe and where those beliefs led them from 2000 to 2008 seem to be taking a shortcut to cargo cult politics. "Obama won because he's an optimistic, hip, friendly minority. We can get the same thing with our own optimistic, hip, friendly minorities." Um, no. Obama won because he's a smart, educated, objective pragmatist with an impressive CV running on a platform of change against a party whose reality-detached, conveniently self-deluding policies toward science, economics, regulation, diplomacy, torture, terrorism, Islam, history, scapegoating, human nature, and the U.S. Constitution ran things pretty hard into the ground. Ironically, making believe that it's all about minorities, oversimplifications, and platitudes is the sort of conveniently self-deluding rationalization and wrongheaded response that caused Bush Republicans' policies to fail in the first place.
Or maybe I'm wrong and the Republicans are right. I'm happy to let Steele and Jindal - or Rush Limbaugh - run their idea up the flagpole and see how many people think it's worth saluting.
Then Democrats trounced Republicans in the 2006 midterms and 2008 election. And Republicans responded in the last couple of months - by appointing the first black guy Republican party chairman to bring avant garde republicanism to urban-suburban hip-hop settings, and letting Indian Bobby Jindal give a friendly upbeat response to Obama's State of the Union. Republicans wrestling with the dissonance between what they believe and where those beliefs led them from 2000 to 2008 seem to be taking a shortcut to cargo cult politics. "Obama won because he's an optimistic, hip, friendly minority. We can get the same thing with our own optimistic, hip, friendly minorities." Um, no. Obama won because he's a smart, educated, objective pragmatist with an impressive CV running on a platform of change against a party whose reality-detached, conveniently self-deluding policies toward science, economics, regulation, diplomacy, torture, terrorism, Islam, history, scapegoating, human nature, and the U.S. Constitution ran things pretty hard into the ground. Ironically, making believe that it's all about minorities, oversimplifications, and platitudes is the sort of conveniently self-deluding rationalization and wrongheaded response that caused Bush Republicans' policies to fail in the first place.
Or maybe I'm wrong and the Republicans are right. I'm happy to let Steele and Jindal - or Rush Limbaugh - run their idea up the flagpole and see how many people think it's worth saluting.