[Vision2020] Severe Conservative Syndrome

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


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February 12, 2012
Severe Conservative Syndrome By PAUL
KRUGMAN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

Mitt Romney has a gift for words — self-destructive words. On Friday he did
it again, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference that he was
a “severely conservative governor.”

As Molly Ball of The Atlantic pointed out, Mr. Romney “described
conservatism as if it were a disease.” Indeed. Mark Liberman, a linguistics
professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that
most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of
use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured.

That’s clearly not what Mr. Romney meant to convey. Yet if you look at the
race for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, you have to wonder whether it
was a Freudian slip. For something has clearly gone very wrong with modern
American conservatism.

Start with Rick Santorum, who, according to Public Policy Polling, is the
clear current favorite among usual Republican primary voters, running 15
points ahead of Mr. Romney. Anyone with an Internet connection is aware
that Mr. Santorum is best known for 2003 remarks about homosexuality,
incest and bestiality. But his strangeness runs deeper than that.

For example, last year Mr. Santorum made a point of defending the medieval
Crusades against the “American left who hates Christendom.” Historical
issues aside (hey, what are a few massacres of infidels and Jews among
friends?), what was this doing in a 21st-century campaign?

Nor is this only about sex and religion: he has also declared that climate
change is a hoax, part of a “beautifully concocted scheme” on the part of
“the left” to provide “an excuse for more government control of your life.”
You may say that such conspiracy-theorizing is hardly unique to Mr.
Santorum, but that’s the point: tinfoil hats have become a common, if not
mandatory, G.O.P. fashion accessory.

Then there’s Ron Paul, who came in a strong second in Maine’s caucuses
despite widespread publicity over such matters as the racist (and
conspiracy-minded) newsletters published under his name in the 1990s and
his declarations that both the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act were
mistakes. Clearly, a large segment of his party’s base is comfortable with
views one might have thought were on the extreme fringe.

Finally, there’s Mr. Romney, who will probably get the nomination despite
his evident failure to make an emotional connection with, well, anyone. The
truth, of course, is that he was not a “severely conservative” governor.
His signature achievement was a health reform identical in all important
respects to the national reform signed into law by President Obama four
years later. And in a rational political world, his campaign would be
centered on that achievement.

But Mr. Romney is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, and
whatever his personal beliefs may really be — if, indeed, he believes
anything other than that he should be president — he needs to win over
primary voters who really are severely conservative in both his intended
and unintended senses.

So he can’t run on his record in office. Nor was he trying very hard to run
on his business career even before people began asking hard (and
appropriate) questions about the nature of that career.

Instead, his stump speeches rely almost entirely on fantasies and
fabrications designed to appeal to the delusions of the conservative base.
No, President Obama isn’t someone who “began his presidency by apologizing
for America,” as Mr. Romney declared, yet again, a week ago. But this
“Four-Pinocchio Falsehood,” as the Washington Post Fact Checker puts it, is
at the heart of the Romney campaign.

How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with,
facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health
reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid
out at the Heritage Foundation!

My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives
and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the
G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only
to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a
process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by
posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced
that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.

Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in
all the hokum — and now the party elite has lost control.

The point is that today’s dismal G.O.P. field — is there anyone who doesn’t
consider it dismal? — is no accident. Economic conservatives played a
cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers
from “severe” conservatism in the worst way. And the malady may take many
years to cure.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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