Most of the Republican Party’s behavior on the national
stage (this includes the Trump phenomenon, though I’m going to try really hard not to make this piece about
him) defies a conventional wisdom that is rooted not in politics, but in
physics: Actions have reactions.
Once upon a time, politicians who did a thing—usually a bad
thing—were subject to the consequences of doing that thing. That thing could be
big—like perjury—or it could be small, like a verbal gaffe or a PR stunt gone
wrong. Shame was a controlling mechanism in American politics: many people
noticed the bad thing, and their unified reaction to it translated to
consequences personal, professional, or electoral for the offender (and
sometimes his or her allies, too).
But suddenly the shame mechanism appears to be all but
broken. An improbable claim, in the age of the internet outrage machine and an
unrelenting tide of (mostly
bullshit) thinkpieces insisting that the new PC culture is coming to
strangle us all. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that people don’t suffer consequence for actions—empirically, social
media has accelerated our destruction of those we judge (just ask Dr. Palmer).
But politicians—and particularly Republicans—appear to be paradoxically exempt
from this weaponized societal guilt, and things as fundamental as our standard
of governance are feeling the effects.
Three particular factors are driving this problem. The first
is that politicians have increasingly narrow constituencies and media channels
that amplify their version of events in a crisis. Alarmingly
few congressional districts are truly in play because of how party
affiliation is distributed across or concentrated between gerrymandered lines,
and people are of course more likely to
accept the commentary of an increasing number of ideological news sources and
echo chambers that they already agree with. I posit that this trend is worse on
the right than on the left, though what few friends I have on the other side of
the aisle might reasonably argue it is at least on par for both parties.
Victimhood culture, by contrast, is not. There has been many
a Trump
piece written on the fundamental role that anger and resentment now play in
the minds of so many Republican voters and elected officials. The majority sees
itself as persecuted at every turn for fear of what they have left to lose, and
these feelings express themselves in an outrageous range of activities to
include cheering on outsider
candidates, coming to the passionate defense of the faux-besieged,
and insisting that the War
on Christmas is a thing.
Lastly—and here’s where the liberals are surely guilty—is a
fundamental disconnect between the thoughts and feelings of beltway insiders and
the thoughts and feelings of people who vote. People within the system obsess
over the process rather than the end result, and often times, folks can’t even
be bothered to care much about the end result in the first place. I’m not
arguing in favor of the low information
voter theory here so much as suggesting that details as varied as ‘who’s to
blame for x problem’ or ‘how did we arrive at y crisis’ are perceived very
differently by folks inside and outside of DC.
Let’s take the last factor first, because an illustrative
example is an issue near and dear to my heart. Once upon a time, the junior
Senator from Arkansas decided that he and his party, rather than the president,
should take the reins of U.S. foreign policy. Sen. Tom Cotton proceeded
to pen the mullahs a letter explaining that “President” Obama’s negotiations
were not the end-all be-all of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Iran (they were), and that
any deal that he reached with them would surely be overturned by the next
commander-in-chief (it won’t be).
Beltway insiders (here I include myself, charitably, among
their numbers) clutched our pearls and gasped. The move was likened to treason
by way of obscure 18th
century laws and declared “unprecedented”
by no less than the Senate Historian. What we failed to consider in our
calculus was that no one in the much-mythologized Real America gives a good god
damn what the Senate Historian thinks. Cotton plugged along with his efforts to
derail the deal—an effort we successfully denied only by moving beyond our own
arcane concerns about the craft of diplomacy and trumpeting a different, and
more effective, message. (Another post for another day.)
None is a more instructive lesson in victimhood culture than
the case of Bill O’Reilly. As it came to pass, O’Reilly was, more or less, a
liar; his tenure of war reporting and the danger it posed to his self was
exaggerated. O’Reilly’s first response to the attack was machismo and vehement
denial, but the victimhood complex soon took over for him. If the liberal media
was attacking him and the liberal media was always wrong, the base reasoned,
then O’Reilly must be right! A distrust of media, expert consensus, and elected
officials only furthers a cause in the minds of the paranoid and angry when
that sinister infrastructure unites to call out (read: persecute) one of their
own.
You’ll notice, also, the conundrum that this leaves those on
the left to face. Brian Williams also
lied about being in danger during a war; his lie was objectively more
egregious than O’Reilly’s, but the principle was the same. Yet for the sake of
intellectual honesty, the media attacked him as well—to great (and I guess
righteous?) effect. The filthy cynics among us wonder why we should eat our own
if the other side won’t even touch theirs; someone, after all, must “get down in the mud with the
fucking elephants.” But the prevailing tone, for the time being, remains one of
accountability, while the party of personal responsibility rallies to the
defense of their tribesmen in all but the most ridiculous instances.
How do constituencies and echo chambers contribute to the
problem? The last government shutdown—and fears of another—show precisely what
happens when the ideologue and nihilist caucuses within the House hit a
critical mass. The congressmen and women who shut down the government made many
people angry; unfortunately, those people were not the ones who voted them
in—or could vote them out—of office. They (voters and elected alike, because
that’s the point) wanted the
government to fail because their entire intellectual foundation is built on the
insistence that that is all the government does.
Throw in the other two factors here and you have a perfect
storm where there were real consequences for real people, yet nothing happened
to the perpetrators. The Republicans grabbed
the narrative and gave it whiplash: Democrats, they insisted, were refusing
to “compromise” (in much the way that one rarely compromises with hostage-takers,
though hey, sequestration). Beltway commentators warned of lost revenue,
derailed programs, and crippled capabilities, predicting catastrophic
consequences at the poll for the “party of the shutdown.” But 13 months later,
the GOP swept the midterms.
Here’s an odd sentence: Todd Akin can, perhaps, provide us
some hope. Not even a conservative-leaning electorate and robust Fox News
defense, the ever-present victimization feelings of a white male uncomfortable
talking about the ladybits system in the first place, and the talking heads’
exaggerated reactions (do the talking heads know what or where Missouri is?)
could save a man who coined the term “legitimate
rape.” Some things, it seems, are
still too ludicrous to say or do without incurring the ire of your enemies and
the self-preserving intuition to shun of your friends. But the pool of such
behaviors seems to be shrinking rapidly.
The nice (?) thing about this theory is that it is more or
less provable. Watch to see if Dr. Ben Carson gets a bump in the polls for denouncing
a hypothetical Muslim president. Watch to see if GoFundMe donations in the name
of “religious liberty” pour into the next mom and pop joint called out for
discrimination. Most critically, watch to see if the government shuts down
again. My prediction is that the right will continue to isolate itself from the
consequences of its behavior, and the left will be unable to penetrate their
internal discourse in a meaningful way. At the risk of sounding overly ominous,
an entire half of the country left unable to feel shame may have worse
consequence for the rest of us yet.
