I feel sorry for Kim Stafford. For one thing, she has the exact same name as the Portland poet, who doesn’t even have the good taste to be female. But more than that, in 2012, a photo of her went viral — the photo there on the left. Ben Collins explains it all in an Esquire article, Remember Kim Stafford? …Of Course You Don’t. She was going to a college party and at the last minute she found out it was “Boston Tea Party themed.” Without easy access to a tricorn, she made the mistake of being creative.

She decided to go to the party as “one of those Tea Baggers.” So she went online and searched for some illiterate Tea Party signs. She settled upon, “A Village Somewhere in Kenia Is Missing There Idiot.” I have to admit, I have not been able to find such a sign. But there are plenty of similar ones like, “Get A Brain Morans!” (So true: Dylan Moran is just an idiot!) Anyway, Stafford scrawled the phrase on an empty pizza box and went to her party where all went well. That’s one of the things about actual physical contact: misunderstandings tend to get resolved quickly. Not so much here on the internet.

I don’t think I need to tell you what happened next. People are awful. And it is all the worse because they are at least nominally liberal. Now, I understand getting things wrong. It has happened to me. And even when I’ve not gotten things right, I’ve acted in ways that are not in keeping with my elevated potential. So I can’t be too harsh on people who said she was, for example, an idiot. But as with everything that ever involves a woman, it became sexualized. She was called a “whore” and compared to a horse. Oh well. As Stafford herself said after the whole thing, “[P]eople are evil.”

The problem is not satire itself. The problem is reality. The truth is that Stafford’s sign isn’t that extreme. The idea of it is nothing that we didn’t see (with far more cause) applied to Bush the Younger. The grammar errors are fairly minor — especially on the internet where editors are not allowed and writers (very much including me) post things as fast as possible with the most cursory of checks. And remember, we’ve seen Obama as a witch doctor or any of the collection of racist images at All Things Democratic including “Lawdy, I sho’ loves campainnin!”

The question is how can one in any individual instance be outrageous enough to come off as satirical rather than just another offensive and ignorant conservative? I’m serious about the question, because I like satire. I wish there were an answer. But the truth is that any Colbert Report segment in isolation would be hard to judge. And as I discussed in Conservatives Think Colbert Is a Double Agent, many people think he’s secretly serious anyway.

This is one way that the internet really makes our lives less free. But it is part of a larger social trend away from having a small number of substantial relationships and toward having a very large number of superficial ones. My close friends don’t often misunderstand my intent. But the problem does go beyond that. We all seem to be forever on the edge of offense. I think there are a lot of reasons for that, but mostly it is that the modern world provides very few opportunities for us to find meaning in our lives. And having a thousand friends is like having none. No wonder we lash out instead of chuckling, “Get it? She misspelled Kenya!”

Until further notice: satire is dead.

I have long thought that Watergate backfired on liberals. Pretty much any Republican malfeasance harms liberalism because it harms the idea that government can be a force for good. I’ve become really frustrated with what I see as casual cynicism: the idea that everyone is out for their own gain and no one is any damned good. This is implicit in the “both side do it” argumentation so loved by the mainstream media.

Yesterday, Matt Yglesias pointed out an excellent example from Ron Fournier where he complained that Obamacare was “a one-sided law.” So if Republicans explicitly boycott a law because it will provide political benefit to the president, both sides are equally at fault. Similarly, Dean Baker pointed out, “Robert Samuelson does the old ‘pox on both your houses’ routine, complaining about Republicans who want tax cuts for rich people and Democrats who defend Social Security and Medicare.” All of this pushes the idea that government is corrupt and there are no good politicians. And what that means is that the Republicans win, because that is the idea that they are pushing.

There is no doubt that this has been a major issue since Nixon. But there is another issue that was brought up in a Thomas Frank interview with Rick Perlstein, How ’70s and ’80s Cynicism Poisoned Democrats and America. In it, Perlstein brought up a major change in the kind of Democrats who got elected in 1974. It was kind of the start of the New Democrats. I’ve discussed this in the past to the extent that I refer to Jimmy Carter as the proto-New Democrat. He was, after all, the guy that really started the deregulation frenzy, rolled back Nixon’s policy of detente with the Soviet Union, and pushed forward debt fixation. But I always thought that he was something of a singularity. Not so:

And that means that liberal — Populist! — economic policy was largely dropped. Hart and company didn’t argue against the conservative economic policies of the Republicans. In fact, they largely agreed with them. Later in the interview, Perlstein noted, “And a lot of these post-New Deal Democrats, by the way, come out of the New Left and the New Left had this very problematic relationship with the labor movement, who were seen as sort of the Cold War consensus.” This has long been a problem with our new upper and upper middle class political establishment. They have no real experience with the working class. And this is why Republicans — even while being horrible for workers on a practical level — have managed to paint Democrats as a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.

The big problem with this is not just that Democrats elect nothing but conservative presidents like Carter, Clinton, and Obama. The problem is apparent in the fact that the Republicans claim these conservatives are leftist extremists. And that allows people like Ron Fournier and Robert Samuelson to define a new liberalism that is far to the right of Nixon. By abandoning liberal economic policy, the Democrats have not only directly harmed the American middle class, they have also made any real discussion of change impossible. Now even the most traditional of economic policies are met with cries of, “Socialism!”

This is why I see the primary problem in American politics as being centered around the Democratic Party. If we want a more reasonable conservative movement and Republican Party, the solution is for the Democratic Party to move to the left on economic policy. But the sort of people in the media who are always looking for compromise and occasionally fretting about the extremism of the Republican Party always call for exactly what caused our current problems. Fournier thinks that there is some magic trick whereby if Democrats just move the right amount to the right in the right way, the Republicans will move the left and we will all sing “Kumbaya”! But just the opposite has happened and will continue to happen. When the Democrats move one step toward the Republicans, the Republicans move two steps away. And it is only studied ignorance that allows pundits to not see this.