"Head Like a Hole" - Nine Inch Nails
When the history of this strange political moment is written, I believe that what will stand out is 1) the fact that one of the two major political parties in the most powerful nation in the world was completely overrun by irrational people, lacking even a pretense to policy empiricism, and those willing to kowtow to them; and 2) that the mainstream media outlets in the country, including nearly all leading commentators with pretensions to being "moderate," made a concerted effort to ignore this fact, suggesting instead in establishment confabs like that going on at the Aspen Institute, that the problem is that we have two "extreme" parties and that the solution to our problems would be a third party of the center, which would be run by Very Serious People like Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, in the process, virtually ignoring the very real economic pain being suffered by an enormous swath of the American people.
The emblematic figures of this tendency will be people like Thomas Friedman and Mark Halperin, people with wide audiences and mainstream respectability who occupy themselves respectively with either airy pronouncements that ignore politics (and economic conditions) as they actually exist or smug, trivial, right-tinged horse-race type political commentary that makes a mockery of the idea that policy actually matters in people's lives.
The reality. of course, is that the Democratic Party is a broad-based moderate party often caught in its own internal battles between its liberal/labor wing and its conservative corporate types. Its ideology, such as it is, is tepidly center-left and pragmatic. The Republican Party, on the other hand, has become completely a party of the hard right at this point in time, centered on economic policies that cater to the wealthy and powerful and social policies that pander to the prejudices of its religious base -- and the "ressentiment" that is its defining characteristic -- that is to say a Party filled with a substantial number of people who define their policy preferences by either a selective and ill-informed interpretation of the Bible or that which they believe will most piss off liberals. Proclaiming rough equivalence between the two parties is an act of supreme intellectual bad faith.
If the Republican Party succeeds in either 1) creating a debt default crisis; or 2) pushing through a destructive politics of austerity by threatening to force a default, it is likely that we will be looking at an economic period that will be comparable in misery to the "Long Depression" of the 1873-96.
I suspect that future historians will find the babble and blather produced by the likes of Friedman, Halperin, and their fellow moderates in the midst of these extraordinary times and in the face of such destructive right wing politics to be baffling in the extreme.
