Following up on my afterword in the last article, Matt Yglesias has an interesting (very short) article about how the government shutdown will resolve itself. He is riffing on a tweet by the front man for everything House Republican, the National Review’s Robert Costa, “The theater of the standoff is integral to House GOP unity; unless you go to 11th chaotic hour, many on right will yell, ‘Ya caved!'” I’m sure that’s important in the thinking of the House Republicans, but I think it’s silly. The base is going to say “Ya caved!” regardless of when it happens. People like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh have primed the base to think that all the Republicans have to do is hold out long enough (Four months? Two years? Whatever it takes!) and they will win.

I think it is really strange. The Republicans have been absolutely fantastic at managing expectations outside the party. Everyone expects that they will do nothing or at least nothing good. So when they manage to approve pay for furloughed federal workers, there is dancing in the streets. But when it comes to managing expectations inside the party, the Republicans are hopeless. I don’t think there is any secret to why it is: Fox News and the radio ranters are what define the thinking of the base. But after all this time, I would think the party would have taken control.

Yglesias and Costa both seem to think that the Republicans will “cave.” I don’t see it like that. The Republicans will demand something to save face. The most obvious is the repeal of the medical device tax. I think it is a very good tax. The government is pushing lots of new business to these companies, the least they can do is pay a bit (2.5%) back. But the Democrats might go for it because they are also corrupt and they take money from these same companies.

I hope it doesn’t work out this way. The best situation would be that Boehner allows a vote in exchange for “negotiations.” That would probably work well with the base because the Republicans have been saying for week that they are the reasonable ones; all they want is to negotiate. The facts say quite the opposite, but that doesn’t much matter to the base who only get their news from the right wing echo chamber. The other possibility is that the Republicans could listen to Ramesh Ponnuru who has been trying to remind the Republicans if they get something they want, they must give the Democrats something in return. His idea is a one year delay of the individual mandate for a one year elimination of the Sequester. (That’s a typical conservative gambit itself: give us what we want and we’ll give you something we both want. But it’s a start.)

Overall, it is good news. The government will be back up and running in a week and a half. The Debt Ceiling will be out of the way for another year. Federal workers will get paid. And we can get back on to our usual dysfunction. The Republicans will probably come away from the whole experience with a bad taste in their mouths, but they won’t have lost anything. Maybe it will make other such hostage taking less likely. Maybe. But the main thing is that we have to beat the Republicans at the polls. That’s the only way they will start acting like a normal political party.

On this day in 1712, the great Venetian painter Francesco Guardi was born. The Venetian school emphasized the use of color over line, in contrast to Mannerism. But Guardi worked at the very end of the movement and so his link to the movement is somewhat tenuous. Still, in many ways you can see a clearer technical connection between Guardi and Leonardo da Vinci than you see with other members of the movement.

Opera composer Giuseppe Gazzaniga was born in 1743. His best known work is Don Giovanni Tenorio, a short opera based on the Don Juan legend. It tells the exact same story as Mozart’s Don Giaovanni. Gazzaniga’s version hit the theaters about six months earlier than Mozart’s. And it is quite a nice piece, although I am especially fond of the Mozart version. Here is the “Aria del Catalogo” from the opera:

There are two cartoonists’ birthdays today, although I’m not terribly fond of either. The first is Bil Keane, creator of The Family Circus, which I didn’t even find funny when I was a child. He was born in 1922 and only died a few years ago. The second is Bob Thaves, creator of Frank and Ernest, a better cartoon, but hardly great. He was born in 1924.

We also have two fun music birthdays today. First is Steve Miller who is 70 today. Here he is doing “The Joker”:

The second musician is Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats who is 62. Here he is doing “I Don’t Like Mondays”:

Other birthdays: the great physicist and rocket man Robert Goddard (1882); Israeli painter (who I really like) Nachum Gutman (1898); comedian Bernie Mac (1957); celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson (55); and actor Guy Pearce (46).

The day, however, belongs to the philosopher Denis Diderot, who would be 300 years old today if only he had eaten better and perhaps exercised a bit. He is best known today for being the main force behind the first real encyclopedia, the 28 volume Encyclopedie. And he is in the news as France debates whether they should dig the old man up and reinter him in Paris’ Pantheon. That would make him sort of an official hero of France. But there are some problems. Some people think France should do something about the fact that of the 72 people in the Pantheon all but two are men. Anne-Cecile Mailfert said, “Diderot is dead; he’s going to be dead in 50 years; so he can wait.” That may be true. But what cannot wait is celebrating this day.

Happy birthday Denis Diderot!

You know me. I’m not inclined to agree with the world view of many publication with “business” in the title. And I’m even less inclined to agree with anything that related to Michael Bloomberg. Still, I read Bloomberg Businessweek all the time and often find it informative. Yesterday, Joshua Green wrote an interesting article, Republicans Are No Longer the Party of Business. But as you may have guessed based upon the bullshit title, I don’t much agree with it.

The title is a gut buster, ain’t it? I could count the ways, but I won’t. The Republicans have never been the party of business. They’ve been the party of big business. But actual small businesses like the doughnut shop across the street from Grocery Outlet? No way! What’s always been sad is that the Republicans are really good at the kind of rhetoric that appeals to small business owners. I know! I’m one now and I’ve been one many times throughout my life. But what I’m not is naive enough to think that Republican rhetoric has anything to do with how they govern.

But it’s worse than that. Even for big business, the Republican Party has not been especially good for at least two decades. What the Republican Party has been good for—now and forever more—is the rich. Because the one thing you can count on is that the Republicans will cut the taxes of the rich. The last two Democratic presidents have been very pro-business and indeed, very pro-big business. All Obama and Clinton did was raise taxes a couple of percentage points on the rich. Oh my God!

Last year, the US Chamber of Commerce spent $35,657,029 on federal elections. And how much of that was spent on Democrats? A great big $305,044. That’s 0.86%. Bill Clinton was president during a huge economic boom. Obama has been president during a “recovery” that has seen 95% of it go to the top 1%. Yet the Chamber decided that that the Democrats deserved 0.86% of its largess. In fact, this was after the Republicans in 2011 created a Debt Ceiling crisis that everyone agrees greatly hurt economic growth. Yet the Chamber of Commerce decided that the Democrats deserved 0.86% of its federal political donations.

So sure: the Chamber is angry with the Republican for shutting down the government. And if the Republicans cause a government default, the Chamber will be apoplectic. But in 2014 and 2016, you can bet that the Chamber will spend the vast majority of their money on the Republicans. Because the Chamber—and big business in general—doesn’t care so much about a good economy so much as they do that their taxes stay as low as possible. The Democrats might raise taxes by a percent or two. The Republicans might crash the world economy. On balance, big business thinks the Democrats are the bigger risk to them.

Yesterday, Adam Liptak wrote an interesting article in the New York Times, Experts See Potential Ways Out for Obama in Debt Ceiling Maze. It discusses three ideas—two of which you have probably heard before. And the one new one is kind of dumb. Still, I think it is important to discuss them.

But before getting to the specifics, I should note: the White House could not be any clearer that none of these ideas is valid. And I think we should believe them. There are two sides to this. One the front side, they have to say that to put pressure on Congress to use normal order to raise the Debt Ceiling. But on the back side, I’m sure that Obama is concerned that if he does anything that is considered even slightly shady from a Constitutional perspective, the House would almost certainly vote to impeach him. Just the same, I think this is typical cowardly Obama, because the Senate would never have the votes to convict. What’s more, the Republicans would end up looking really bad, impeaching two consecutive Democratic presidents over trivial issues that they more or less created. But I think that Obama might change his tune if we are on the verge of default.

The first idea is that the president could claim that it was a state of emergency. In such cases, he has broad authority and could do pretty much as he liked regarding spending. That strikes me as an extremely bad precedent that could eventually lead to a kind of dictatorship where divided government always leads to a state of emergency and a government ruling based upon that. It is very much like Obama’s use of spying and drones: some liberals may think it is okay in his hands. (I don’t!) But what about in the hands of President Ted Cruz?

The second idea is that the president should use the 14th Amendment, which reads, “The validity of the public debt of the United States… shall not be questioned.” Obama could just say, “By the 14th Amendment I am paying the government’s bills.” This does sound like the best option, but this is the one that the White House has been most specific in dismissing.

The third idea is that the president is screwed regardless of what he does: one way or another, he is going to violate the Constitution. As a result, he should just admit that he will violate the Constitution whether he acts or not, so he should act. Most of the legal scholars think this is a loony idea. Perhaps more important, there is nothing that would set up the Republicans on an impeachment drive than Obama admitting that he was intentionally violating the Constitution. (Although, as I said, I don’t see this as necessarily a bad thing from a political standpoint.)

I was most struck by something that Harvard law professor Laurence H. Tribe said. He is supposedly a liberal legal scholar, but I guess like most liberals in America, that doesn’t mean much. The article quoted him as saying, “Congressional spending directives to the president contain an implicit condition that, if the money just isn’t there to be spent, the president must make tough choices—prioritizing repayment of bondholders who have lent money to our country over those who have been promised payment under various sorts of entitlements, politically painful though that would be.” He could be offering this up as an example. But I don’t think so. He seems to be saying that this is what Obama should do. The problem is that both bond holders and Social Security recipients have paid money to the government with an expectation of getting paid back. I don’t see why Tribe thinks it is clear that the bond holders are more deserving of payment than the retirees.

In the end, if the Republicans force a Debt Ceiling crisis, Obama is either going to have to find a way around it, or he is going to have to default on debt obligations by paying only part of what’s owed to everyone. I don’t see any reasonable way of distinguishing between one government obligation and another.

I was very disappointed to see that yesterday, Nate Cohn had written Quit Blaming Gerrymandering for the Shutdown. I was not disappointed because he was wrong; I was disappointed that he beat me. On Wednesday, as I waited around at the VA for my father’s surgery, I wrote in my notebook, “Gerrymandering by Republicans does not make for very conservative districts. It makes for very liberal districts.” That was in my list of “articles I will write when I get the hell out of here!” Unfortunately, Cohn published his article before I was even out of the hospital.

What’s going on is that a lot of pundits are claiming that the Republicans are so extreme because of gerrymandering which makes for really red districts. If that were true, then the House would now be controlled by the Democrats. The idea of gerrymandering is to create districts that are fairly safe for the Republicans (in this case) but really safe for the Democrats. So the Republican districts will be maybe 60% Republican but the Democratic districts will be 90% Democrat. (The opponent districts would probably not be able to be quite this extreme for practical reasons.) If you don’t understand this, you should watch C.G.P. Grey’s great “Gerrymandering Explained” video:

Cohn notes that many districts are in fact highly “red” but this isn’t due to gerrymandering; it is just because (especially in the south) whole regions are really conservative. And even in those areas, there will be natural gerrymandering because liberals tend to live in compact areas.

But Cohn (and everyone else, as far as I can tell) avoids an important point. If gerrymandering caused politicians to be extreme, it would be the democrats who are extreme. But they aren’t, are they? So this whole idea that gerrymandering has made Republicans extreme is nonsense. In fact, it is a kind of apologia for the Republicans. But the facts don’t provide any such comforting narratives to explain the radicalism of the Republican Party.

As I discussed yesterday, I think that the problem is that the Republican elites have simply become extreme based upon their acceptance of the work by truly minor league thinkers like Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek. But based upon a comment by JMF, I have begun to think that this is allowed by a great deal of implicit fascism in the base of the party. As the data show, neither the elites nor the base believe in “small government” except as a talking point. But the elites get support for policies the base largely doesn’t agree with by getting the base to vote on its typically fascist beliefs. As I wrote in the comments, “Are they jingoistic? Check. Do they vilify immigrants and minority groups? Check. Are they hierarchical and authoritarian? Check. Are they in favor of traditional Christian sexual mores? Check. Are they for corporate welfare? Check.”

That is all speculative. What is not speculative is that Democrats being forced into overwhelmingly liberal districts has not lead to a bunch of socialists or even very liberal people in the House Democratic caucus. I may be wrong about why the House Republican caucus is so extreme. (I actually believe there are a number of reasons.) But there is no doubt that gerrymandering is not any part of the cause. Let me just leave you with a good example: Nancy Pelosi is more conservative than her liberal district. That would never happen on the opposite side. (It would make a great term paper to look at Boehner compared to his district.)

The first artificial earth satellite Sputnik 1 was launched on this day in 1957. I just love it because it is a great example of American hubris. We have such a tendency to think that we are the only people who can do anything. Except when our government is trying to frighten us into war or at least more military expenditures, the rest of the world is a bunch of clowns. But when Sputnik was launched, Americans were shocked. Several years later, when we decided that we would beat the Soviets to the moon, our first launch was intended to simply crash a spacecraft on the moon. And we missed. Look, I’m not trying to put America down here. I think we are great people and a great nation. But there are lots of great people and nations. And hubris is a very unpleasant character trait for anyone to have.

There are four artist birthdays today in as many countries and centuries. First, there is Lucas Cranach the Younger, a German Renaissance painter, who was born in 1515. Second, is Francesco Solimena, an Italian Baroque painter, who was born in 1657. Third, is Jean-Francois Millet, a French Barbizon painter, who was born in 1814. And fourth, is Frederic Remington, an American artist of the old west, who was born in 1861.

Children’s writer Edward Stratemeyer was born in 1862. He is best remembered for having created The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew book series. But he created a number of other series: The Rover Boys, Tom Swift, and The Bobbsey Twins. In fact, that last series was his longest running one, ending in 72 books. The funny thing is that Stratemeyer wrote almost none of the books. In fact, he wrote none at all of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books. Almost all of these books were produced by a large number of writers. Often, teams of writers worked on a single book, although that does not appear to be the normal way the books were produced once they were established. One interesting thing I found out was that the publisher decided to rewrite the Nancy Drew books in the late 1950s to remove racist stereotypes. But in the process, they also changed the Nancy Drew character to make her less assertive and more “feminine.” So they took out racism (with questionable success) and they added sexism. What this shows is that a lot of feminine stereotypes that we live with today are really not all that old.

Other birthdays: actor Charlton Heston (1923); philosopher Richard Rorty (1931); humorist Roy Blount Jr (72); writer Anne Rice (72); actor Susan Sarandon (67); and the very great writer and activist Tim Wise (45).

The day, however, belongs to the great filmmaker Buster Keaton who was born on this day in 1895. I’ve always had this slight political problem with him. Like a lot of people in the film industry at that time, he seems to have sided with the south in the Civil War. The great example of this is in The General where the rebels are the good guys and the Union army men are the heavies. I don’t think that means that Keaton was a racist, however. The film is still great, but it rankles. Nonetheless, he was a fine filmmaker. But I remember Woody Allen comparing Keaton to Charlie Chaplin. He said that he appreciated that Keaton was a much better filmmaker. Chaplin’s films are really primitive, mostly shot with one long shot, like people sometimes shoot performances of plays. But Allen said he still greatly preferred the Chaplin films. I don’t know why Allen thinks that, but I know why I do. Chaplin is so much more compelling and his films are so very very sweet. Anyway, Keaton was great and I still really enjoy his films.

He is most remembered for his stunts, which are amazing. And in the following video, there are a bunch of stunts and other great moments from his films (with a soundtrack of a Queen song that strangely works pretty well followed by a Beatles song that does not). But it is important to remember that he was first and foremost a great filmmaker:

Happy birthday Buster Keaton!

The 40 second [Update: video changed; now 60 second.] video below is really great. What’s going on is Ron Paul and Mitch McConnell discussing how the government shutdown is going. They were mic’ed, but they didn’t know. They both agree that it is going well for them because they think it sounds bad when the Democrats say they refuse to negotiate. However, the whole thing comes off badly for them for a couple of reasons. To start, it makes the whole thing seem very much like a game. And it sounds like they are surprised that they are winning the “optics” war, which of course, only makes their position sound like their petty political battles matter more than all the lives that are adversely affected by the shutdown. Fundamentally, it makes the whole shutdown seem like it isn’t a serious business.

It gives me pause, however: was I wrong earlier today when I said, GOP Losing Government Shutdown Battle? Maybe, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on at all. At first, I kind of agreed that the Democratic position of “no negotiation” sounded bad. But I’ve been pretty impressed with how most people seem to understand that “no negotiation” frames the government shutdown as not a policy dispute but as a terrorist act.

So what seems to be happening in this conversation is more evidence that Republicans get very skewed views of what’s going on in the country because of their media echo chamber. They surround themselves with people who only tell them, “Things are really going great!” So when they lose this battle (as I’m pretty sure now that they will), they will be just as surprised as they were when Romney lost the election. How many times are they going to repeat this error?

H/T: Steve Benen

Josh Marshall asks, Just Where Is The Center of Gravity Here? It follows up on this idea that Byron York has floated (I discussed it on Monday) that there really aren’t that many crazy Republicans in the House and most of them want to vote for a clean continuing resolution. Marshall concludes, “The fabled GOP moderates never appear.”

Jonathan Bernstein calls these supposed moderates the Fraidy Cat Conference. He says that sure, they are more than willing to talk to Byron York privately and say, “This is crazy!” But in public, they are a bunch of wimps who will always follow the crazies. I see it differently. Yes, Bernstein is right: these people are afraid. But they might grow backbones if they really disagreed with Ted Cruz and his people. But they don’t. The supposed moderate Republicans believe in exactly the same policies as the most extreme “drown the government in a bath tub” types.

I just wrote about how the Republican elite have left their base behind. Part of what’s going on is that even a high percentage of the elites have been taken away by their rhetoric. Mario Cuomo (a great man, unlike his son) once said, “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” The House Republicans are so in love with their campaign poetry that they are trying to govern with it. Most of them know when it comes to any particular bill (“Should we crash the economy or eliminate the EPA?!”) that they need to do the old boring prose thing (not crash the economy and keep the EPA). But when a large part of their caucus really seems to believe that they can have all that they’ve campaigned on, it is hard to resist.

This is why Christians don’t tend to hang out with atheists. It is hard to believe that if you are nice and believe in Jesus that after you die you will go to a place where you will be unimaginably happy for the rest of eternity. But if everyone you know believes it, it is a lot easier. This is why all of those people in the Heaven’s Gate cult killed themselves. I’m sure most of them had real doubts. But no one admitted it. And how could they all be wrong?

The main thing here is that all the House Republicans believe all the radical talk. It is absolutely not true that all Democrats are secretly socialists. In fact, most Democrats aren’t even especially liberal. (We can thank the Republican Party’s extreme ideology for that!) But these Republicans really are Ayn Rand zealots at their core. Most of them care about their jobs enough to know better. But they figure maybe the public zealots know something that they don’t. Maybe if the Republicans keep the government closed for 4 months, Obama really will sign the Ryan Budget. Who are they to stop this historic moment that may end in them getting just what they themselves most desire?

Afterword

Am I saying that the House Republicans are like a cult. That’s not my main point. I think most people behave in this way; we are social animals, after all. But there are definitely cult aspects to how the House Republicans are acting.

Ed Kilgore brought my attention to an article by Ross Douthat, Why the Right Fights. I try to avoid Douthat, just like all the supposed moderate conservative pundits. But there is something especially annoying about him. Almost all of his writing is simply conservative apologetics. Whenever I read him, I feel like I’m being sat down by one of these conservatives who think that if I just have their ideology explained slowly and softly, I will join the team. Well, I won’t. And a big problem with these people is that they haven’t thought their ideology through nearly as carefully as I have. Douthat, like most conservative writers, benefits from heaping helpings of conservative affirmative action.

With this in mind, I do find him insightful about the way that conservatives think. But it is always important to cut through the whitewash. And that’s most of what we get in this column, that I dare say Ed Kilgore mistakes for wisdom. Douthat tries to explain why it is that from the standpoint of liberals, conservatives are never satisfied:

This is an amazing pile of bullshit! Most conservatives do not want Medicare and Social Security cut—at least they don’t want it cut for themselves. The roughly 20% of the nation who are hardcore conservatives only want smaller government in a theoretical way. They want government cut when it comes to programs that benefit those kinds of people. But the truth of the matter is that those programs don’t cost that much. Who is responsible for the biggest increase in Medicare in the last 30 years? Conservatives![1] Who is responsible for the huge military buildup over the last 30 years? Conservatives! The Republican Party is every bit as much for big government as the Democratic Party. The only difference is what kind of big government they want.

So really, all Douthat has provided here is an excuse for why conservatives are never happy with their many successes. All that is really going on is that the elites of the conservative movement have become radicalized. What they want is not even what their base wants. Yes, they want to get rid of Social Security. And if it came down to a vote, they might get as much as 5%. An opposite example would be the liberals who would like to make all guns illegal. That too would get very little support (but likely more than 5%). The difference is that the people who want to make all guns illegal on the left are not in charge. The people who want to end Social Security on the right are in charge.

This all means that the Republican Party is screwed up. It doesn’t reflect its own membership. It has fallen off the ideological edge. I’ll admit, that doesn’t make them nihilists in an absolute sense. But from a practical perspective, it does. They have become so extreme that they no longer see politics as the art of the possible. They want it all. And that is the same as wanting nothing.

[1] I know some conservatives would complain that Medicare Part D was the idea of that non-conservative George Bush Jr. But it was enacted in 2003, during the Bush honeymoon period. Conservatives only decided that Bush wasn’t one of them at the end of his term after it was clear what a clusterfuck his administration had become. Conservatives are always for big spending programs when the Republicans are in charge.

As I was waiting around at the San Francisco VA, I picked up a copy of the SF Examiner and I was very surprised to see the political cartoon above. It isn’t the cartoon itself—I know of lots of liberal political cartoonists. But what was the Examiner publishing it for? And then right next to it was an editorial, “GOP Needs to Stop Obamacare Fight for Good of Nation.”

It was two years ago when I last read the Examiner. (I don’t go out of my way; it’s a terrible paper.) And at that time, three of the four editorials were from the Weekly Standard. The Examiner has been a very conservative paper since it became free and changed to tabloid format. It could be that that the paper just changes with the winds and it is now liberal. I didn’t see anything else that indicated a partisan take on the news—one way or another. But it seems clear that if the Republicans have lost the Examiner, they are losing this battle. Bad.

At the beginning of the government shutdown, I was a little worried. As I reported after the first day, the press was framing the issue in the Republican way. They were pitching it as a negotiation. One would never call a blackmailer’s demands a negotiation. But it seems to have turned around. It isn’t just the Examiner.

As you may recall, Jennifer Bendery has been compiling a list of House Republicans who have publicly called for a clean continuing resolution (CR) vote. Once that number reached 17, it would mean there was a clear and very public majority in the House for the vote. As of right now, it stands at 21. So that has allowed Obama to say very simply that Boehner ought to allow the House to vote on a clean CR:

And Boehner’s response is pathetic. He said, “The president’s insistence on steamrolling ahead with this flawed program is irresponsible.” The “flawed program,” of course, is Obamacare. But what makes is especially pathetic is “irresponsible.” Really?! Obamacare is irresponsible but a government shutdown and threat of a government default is the height of responsibility! Regardless, it is hard to compete with: “Congress wants to pass this and Boehner won’t allow it.” I don’t see how he gets out of that.

What’s most amazing is that now Boehner is again saying that he won’t allow a government default. I’m not sure how that works. Is he supposed to say, “Enact our conservative wish list or I won’t raise the Debt Ceiling except I absolutely will raise the Debt Ceiling”? That just makes no sense at all, but that may be the point. Until today, I figured that Boehner might have some idea of what he was doing. But apparently not.

So its looking more and more like the modern Republican Party isn’t just bad at governing; they’re also bad a politics. I haven’t ever felt this good about the Democrats’ chances of retaking the House in 2014.