[Journalists] could have made the point that they were important because they were skilled at compiling and communicating what might interest people, or they could cling to their AUTHORITAH and claim they were important gatekeepers, deciding what the rabble should know. They chose the latter, and now they wonder why we don’t applaud.
Day: July 27, 2010
The Oncoming Storm
Jonathan Chait isn’t too worried about consequences of the failure of the Senate’s cap and trade bill to find support:
I don’t think the failure of a bill means the planet will burn. I think it means that the Environmental Protection Agency will take over the issue. This isn’t ideal from an economic point of view. But it is ideal from Congress’s point of view – or, at least, the conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans who hold the deciding votes in Congress.
I agree up to a point. But I think the biggest winners here will be the far right. This sort of quiet expansion of governmental powers plays right into their hands; likewise, they have a base that’s already sure the EPA is right up there with [Godwin’s law alert] the Gestapo, meddling as they do in our water and air and such when the little guy with a massive industrial waste stream is just trying to get by. Likewise, it will be taken as yet more “proof” of the creeping Socialization of everything.
This is usually the moment that sensate individuals take recourse to the facts: why, cap and trade is a Republican idea, and Republicans are the ones stopping it; this means it is they who will suffer the consequences.
To which I say: don’t worry your pretty little head about that; the facts do not matter. This is additionally one of those cases where it is genuinely Bad for the Democrat; this outcome dispirits the base and empowers the opposition.
Were I an optimist, I might say that the administration and its cronies will easily foresee this eventuality, and be ready to combat the inevitable “it’s not enough for the government to take our water and other precious bodily fluids and poison them with fluoride and God knows what other Communistic contaminants, now they want to control the air we breathe” style-nonsense that will inevitably emit from the maw of the far right. Yes, theoretically optimistic me opines that the various trans-limbic individuals inhabiting American polity will furthermore soon begin their own inoculations against such future tropes so that, when said tropes arise, the public will be well prepared to disregard the new, and incompatible information. After all, it is well known that fact-primacy is everything in the current environment.
But I am not an optimist.
I’d like to see labor unions spend more time negotiating pay and benefits and a lot less time negotiating the kind of stultifying work rules that drive managers crazy. I agree with conservatives that Sarbanes-Oxley went too far and probably ought to be scaled back. And I agree […] that local zoning regs often become little more than hammers for NIMBYism and soft corruption.
Kevin Drum.
To which I add: Harrumph. I think this sort of framing is the model for a new Democratic century (or, for that matter, a new and revitalized GOP; there’s absolutely nothing there that Reagan wouldn’t get behind) . That nobody (well, nobody other than Bloomberg) seems to be taking it up with any seriousness is, shall we say: dispiriting.
And yes, I know that such a platform could end up looking like more ultimately pointless Clintonian triangulation, but one would assume that with Better Democrats™, one could rely on the rather obvious popularity of such measures to drive the debate inexorably forward without recourse to a lot of pulling-the-football-away compromising; otherwise, you craft the bill as inviolable take-it-or-leave-its and let the chips fall where they may, fully intending to run on either consequence.
Either way, you can definitively say it’s never been tried.
To which I add: Harrumph. I think this sort of framing is the model for a new Democratic century (or, for that matter, a new and revitalized GOP; there’s absolutely nothing there that Reagan wouldn’t get behind) . That nobody (well, nobody other than Bloomberg) seems to be taking it up with any seriousness is, shall we say: dispiriting.
And yes, I know that such a platform could end up looking like more ultimately pointless Clintonian triangulation, but one would assume that with Better Democrats™, one could rely on the rather obvious popularity of such measures to drive the debate inexorably forward without recourse to a lot of pulling-the-football-away compromising; otherwise, you craft the bill as inviolable take-it-or-leave-its and let the chips fall where they may, fully intending to run on either consequence.
Either way, you can definitively say it’s never been tried.
Lemkin 