No less fanciful is Friedman’s notion that both parties are equally to blame for the paralysis in Washington. The Democrats can certainly play tough in Congress, and they suffer from beholdenness to various interest groups, but they seem models of moderation when compared to the Republicans. We live in a world where Fox News regularly mocks the phenomenon of global warming, Eric Cantor rejects the very idea of compromise, and Grover Norquist can get nearly 300 members of Congress to sign a pledge not to raise taxes. Jeb Bush recently said that both his father and Ronald Reagan would have a “hard time” fitting in in the current-day Republican Party, which, he observed, has exhibited “an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement.” Enforcing that orthodoxy is the Tea Party, which has pushed the party—and much of the country—in a radically anti-government, anti-tax direction.
Indeed, I wonder where outside of Washington Friedman has been traveling. To Wisconsin, where the Republican governor (backed by a majority of the state’s electorate) rolled back the collective bargaining rights of public unions? To Florida, where another Republican governor is trying to make it as hard as possible for people to register to vote? To Mississippi, where Republican lawmakers have sought to close down the state’s last abortion clinic? Not only abortion but now contraception has become a national issue thanks to the Catholic bishops and their amplifiers in the conservative press.
Thomas Friedman acknowledges none of this. To do so would shatter the above-it-all, pox-on-both-their-houses analysis of American politics that he offered in “Taking One for the Country” and that he has served up in many other columns over the years. (In “We Need a Second Party,” Friedman offered a rare recognition of Republican nuttiness.) Since at least 2006, he’s touted the creation of a “third party” representing the “radical center” in America, one that would, as he put it in 2010,
challenge our stagnating two-party duopoly that has been presiding over our nation’s steady incremental decline.
This two-parties-equally-share-the-blame frame was recently blasted by Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In a April 27 op-ed in The Washington Post, “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem,” they noted that they had been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years and had never seen either so dysfunctional. And, they wrote, they had no choice but to say that “the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.” The GOP “has become an outlier in American politics,” one that is ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, unmoved by scientific evidence, and dismissive of the legitimacy of the opposition.
Mann and Ornstein had harsh words for the press, too. Its routine assertions that “both sides do it” and “there is plenty of blame to go around” are “traditional refuges” for journalists seeking to prove their lack of bias, but such “balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality.” Their advice to the press:
Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?
In the book from which their article was adapted, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, Mann and Ornstein criticize journalists for doing a poor job of covering the most important political story of the last three decades: the transformation of the Republican Party.
Their article got enormous attention. It spent days atop the Post’s most-read list, generated more than 5,000 comments, and was tweeted more than 3,000 times, and Mann and Ornstein appeared on The Daily Show. Their observations, coming from two respected insiders, would, I felt sure, force journalists to reconsider their faux even-handedness.
Friedman’s column showed how naïve I was.
Thomas Friedman, Jeffrey Toobin, Thomas Mann, and Morman Ornstein worship the same god: the State.
But Friedman's hymns are insufficiently worshipful of the correct disciples of Statism.
#1 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Wed 11 Jul 2012 at 08:20 PM
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The Republican party has always been wicked, but not for the farcical reasons listed here.
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#2 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Wed 11 Jul 2012 at 08:29 PM
This was a topic Thomas Frank took on a while ago:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703906204575027484210248038.html
Centrism is the philosophy of the rich man's and a red state's democrat. They do not believe in the radical nature of the republican party, they do not share all the social and cultural values, but they do not really believe in the historical values of their party either.
The rich, business world democrats believe in 'small government' and 'fiscal responsibility' values because these are to their economic advantage. The red state liberals believe in 'social conservative lite' and 'fiscal responsibility' because these are to their cultural advantage (and a bit of 'little government' positioning helps with the resource extraction, service, manufacturing industry donations). Centrists of all stripes love the benefits of military power and security (mainly for economic reasons) and protecting 'national interests' abroad. They weren't really against the excesses of the Bush administration (and they've continued to support many of them through the Obama administration) but they thought how the Bush Administration did things was crude, incompetent, and counter productive. Wrong is too strong a word.
With the advent of tv, journalism developed a celebrity culture. Therefore journalists and pundits became more media personalities and stars, traveling in the same circles as the rich they report on. Just as there are 'Davos Liberals' you have Davos Journalism which is branded as 'centrist' but is sympathetic to the the right, in spite of its crudeness, because of the benefits the business friendly, small government ideology bring them and their portfolios.
Centrists don't care about policy, they care about picking winning sides and milking political advantages for themselves.
And, unfortunately, because of the wealth behind it, it pays really well:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/robert-kuttner/americans-elect-third-party_b_1288110.html
Pete Peterson and Robert Rubin aren't going to fight for candidates like Elizabeth Warren and it shows when the DLC backs away from them, prefering blue dog losers, when it comes to elections. Centrist journalists nit pick and equate their standing on principles as akin to the republicans standing on Kenyan birth certificates and against Nazi Communist healthcare. "See? Both sides do it. There's radical elements on both sides."
The people who say these things at this point are not intelligent and/or principled people. They are either too stupid to percieve that one party has made their radical mainstream, too cynical by half to admit their mainstreaming of radical is serious, or too cynical by whole to publically admit the other side has gone radical, if not insane.
If you are saying these things now; after eight years of the Bush Administration with the worst terrorist attacks, prosecuted wars, disaster recoveries, and financial collapses occurring on their watch; after eight years of republicans tearing the country apart under Clinton, eight years of "all praise the mighty leader" under Bush, and near four years of going back to tearing the country apart under Obama; if you are still on the centrist script, you may have public authority, but you don't merit it. You're a joke, an awful joke that your rich sponsors are playing on the rest of us.
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 12 Jul 2012 at 12:29 AM