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'Centrism': The Cult That Is Destroying America
Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system.
And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.
No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.
Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.
So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.
The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook.
What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.
You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won’t do it, nothing will.
And yes, I think this is a moral issue. The “both sides are at fault” people have to know better; if they refuse to say it, it’s out of some combination of fear and ego, of being unwilling to sacrifice their treasured pose of being above the fray.
It’s a terrible thing to watch, and our nation will pay the price.
99 Comments so far
Show All"And yes, I think this is a moral issue. The “both sides are at fault” people have to know better; if they refuse to say it, it’s out of some combination of fear and ego, of being unwilling to sacrifice their treasured pose of being above the fray."
Yes indeed
Did you see "Meet the Press" on Sunday? I usually avoid the show, but not last Sunday. And I gotta say, "Dick Gregory is a dick." I believe he is as bad an example of the problem Mr. Krugman is identifying as there exists in the mainstream media.
Well, I'm not really into vegetarianism, but I'm still rooting for Dick Gregory, one of the Last Angry Men from the Sixties counterculture.
What the hell was he doing on "Meet the Press", anyway?
Do you mean David Gregory? Dick Gregory is a black leftist comedian and political activist.
Well, yes, I did mean David Gregory. Sorry. This name-calling stuff is very out of character for me.
The "balanced approach" seems to mean workers give more and billionaires get more. It balances on the scales of corporate logic. A fourth of the country's kids and a helluva lot of retirees need food stamps. The rich are trying to turn workers into bio-fuel to power their yachts. A real Class War would beat the hell out of the current class massacre. It's great that we have one socialist in the Senate. We need a hundred there and five hundred in the House and Bernie Sanders in the White House.
And we need 50,000 orgainzers
And five million in the streets!
Yes!
Thanks for calling it what it is: a class massacre.
since last night's address to the nation i've been wondering "hasn't obama learned YET?"
there's no point in expecting decent behavior from those mad dog republicans.
You actually think that Obama is dumb .... ???
Wow --
You realize there's a chance that he - as some say - is playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers? Is it not true that the Republicans look more unhinged and intransigent every day? Is it not becoming obvious that the Tea Party extremists have the Republican party by the short hairs and they don't want any deal, period? The more Obama moves toward them, the further they have to back up to maintain their distance. He could be working them right off the cliff. Anyway, that's my jolly fantasy for tonight, cuz I'm sick of bumming out on this insanity.
From a narrowly partisan POV, your comment has some validity. Obama may yet end up scoring some political points here.
From larger POV, the party politics are irrelevant. Obama is intent on imposing massive austerity and the Tea Party is a foil that allows Obama to appear forced to compromise, which for Obama means slashing away at the few hard earned social benefits left to the people.
Who cares if Obama is playing 3-D political chess if his ultimate goals are in line with the militarists and the banksters and against the interests of the People?
Well said, dreamjoehill.
Never attribute to a grand plan that which can be explained by incompetence.
Never attribute to a grand plan or incompetence that which can be explained by class interest. The political leadership of both parties are wealthy and represent a wealthy plutocratic agenda. The media magnifies their differences but they have a lot in common that goes unnoticed.
Spot on!
Obama plays his supporters, not the Republicans. And it seems to work - look at your post, for example.
So, what on earth can we the people do to make this right?
I'm tired of all this already!! How hard can it be to do the right thing?
If they keep saying, they know what Americans want, then why don't they do it?
Because, they DON'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT WE WANT!!
Why doesn't the president invoke the 14th amendment?
Why should the debt ceiling have anything to do with Social Security, Medicare, etc?
The president needs to say, this is what we're doing and if you don't like it then shut the fu6k up!!!
The President took the 14th Amendment off the table because if he hadn't then he'd no longer have the excuse that the Republicans are holding him hostage so he has to make a deal with hordes of spending cuts and no revenue increases. He had to do that so folk who say they are Liberal will still come to his defense when he acts like a Conservative.
Good point, LibWingofLibWing. It's all a sham, a stacked deck, Kabuki theater, big time wrestling to deceive the working people of this nation, so that Obomber can steal their money while pretending to be a 'reasonable' man battling extremists on the right. You gotta hand it to the oligarchs: they are masters of illusion. They know how to dupe millions of people. It's what they do for a living.
eggcream,
They know exactly what we want. What we want does not matter.
They do not work for us. Their job is to do what the masters of the universe want them to do.
eggcream, you are assuming "they" represent us, we the people. They don't. The debt ceiling shouldn't have anything to do with SS and Medicare, but the president is complicit in this framing.
WRONG!
The problem is mendacity. People were lied to continuously by the media and the politicians while the country was stolen by the elite plutocracy.
The country is destroyed (past tense) Mr. Krugman, thanks to you and your kind. We are a failed state miltary dictatorship like the Roman Empire was in its' death throws. They had a senate all the while too.
throes
Whoops!
Check.
agelbert: Absolutely correct. To label Obama as centrist without defining the context is (intentionally) deceiving. There are few elected officials that are not far right of the true center of the opinion of the US public. Unfortunately, the only way to get truly representative government is to select by lottery, and in such a way the process is completely transparent.
However, public opinion is also skewed significantly right of public interest, due to the lies propagated by the MSM. The MSM, of course, are owned by the same corporate interests that run Washington.
The republican party as it currently exists is the single greatest threat our country and society faces in the 21st century. Greater than global warming, greater than terrorism and greater than the recession. We've become so used to it that its easy to miss that the behavior of many of these people, especially so called tea party republicans is quite literally insane. I'm saying this in a literal sense and as a mental health professional. From a mental health point of view we consider insanity related to loosing touch with reality combined with exhibiting erratic and often destructive behavior while no longer being able to function in a healthy manner.
These people are literally and intentionally acting in way that is directly destroying our society, systematically and obsessively. They work to dismantle the very healthy fabric of society. They deny Americans the freedom to make reproductive choices for themselves. They attack religious beliefs they don't agree with and try to push their rigid oppressive spiritual views on others without their consent. They lie, cheat, steal and engage in sexual misconduct while professing morality and attacking others for doing the same. They aggressively work to make basic health care all but impossible to obtain for people in need with no care or compassion for the suffering this has caused many thousands of people including children. They subvert the rights of women while spouting their distorted family values, maintaining the destructive outdated patriarchy. They deny homosexual Americans the right to be equal under the law and promote hatred toward them and people of other races. They put the country and economy at risk to push their insane agenda risking defaulting on our debt even though the debt ceiling was raised more than a dozen times without issue under President Bush. They deny reason, facts and the obvious aspects of reality while pushing fantasy that supports their agenda and calling it reality. They relentlessly attack anyone who opposes them with the intention of destroying them. This is sociopathic behavior.
This is not political ideology, this is not conservatism, this is quite clearly and quite frankly insanity, it is mental illness. I think this is going to have to be seriously looked at if we are going to survive as a society and a nation. If you have mentally ill people running your society the only possible outcome is destruction. I intend to both write about this as well as research it in order to bring more attention to this issue. I hope you will seriously consider the implications this suggests because sociopaths cannot be reasoned with and they are capable of the most extreme behavior without remorse. The Democratic party is not much better but the extremity we see today in the Republican party has gone off the charts in my opinion.
Your third paragraph is remarkable; accurate and to the point. Imagine; sociopathy being contagious; clearly it is on that side of the aisle. My question is: what common agit-prop do these congressmen and senators watch and/or listen to, to manifest itself in such hysterical and irrational behavior. My partial answer is: evangelistic, fundamental religion has primed the pumps for most of these men at an early age making them rigid authoritarians who believe in a Mannichean world viewpoint. A viewpoint that has no compromise or flexibility. We are in grave danger as a society.
Television spreads the contagion. And the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal plays a prominent role in fomenting the irrational beliefs and the unreasonable behavior.
Yes, what they (evangelistic, fundamentalist) have in common is they all gave up the bible for the “Left Behind” series and are praying for Armageddon. Meantime, because they are the chosen ones, they deserve power and power money. Climate change jobs are of no concern to them.
Who/what rendered them so powerless that they have an appetite for power and money that cannot be satisfied?
cbondi: Excellent points - I agree with your assessment - insanity - literally.
The biologist Tim Flannery, in his "Here on Earth" (2010), likens us, civilized man, to a superorganism, like an ant colony, where power is resident with the colony, but the individuals are individually incompetent, i.e., incapable of life outside of the colony.
John Gofman, atomic scientist as well as medical doctor, wrote in "Irrevy" (1979), that in his professional opinion as a doctor, "power and privilege" were in fact THE disease.
What to do??
I have been studying the United Nations for over a year now.
Here is the attempt, at the UN, both ideologically and practically, to counter the insanity. To me it most resembles the Iroquois Confederacy, who after prolonged destructive wars came up with the 'Great Peace' - consensual democracy, if you will. All agree - or no deal.
Until I had studied Lysander Spooner, I had not fully realized the inherent anti-democratic tendencies of a representative democracy and of what we might call the 'constitutional' democracies. A majority is not consensual democracy, and a constitution which has never been studied in detail and signed by every member of the nation is not a contract in any meanigful sense.
These would just be debating points were the ecosphere not in a spiral dive, with a subset of passengers, us, trapped inside.
A friend asked recently - "Come up with solutions."
OK - we globally emit say nine billion giga-tonnes of Carbon per year.
Ballpark this needs to be cut by eighty percent.
Divide nine giga-tonnes by seven billion people, and cut this by eighty percent, and you arrive at ~ 0.26 tonne allowable per person on Earth per year - in every country.
Like wise food can be addressed this way, etc...
There is nothing new in these suggestions, the UN and Lester Brown and many many others have already done the work.
But it needs to be accepted by the widest possible audience - consensual democracy.
Instead we are constantly diverted from the discussion by red-herrings such as the deficit ceiling.
We need to get to work - to think and discuss. In so doing we will find out who we are, and never mind those who think they know who we are.
Manysummits
=====
"We need to get to work - to think and discuss."
Exactly.
And where might we conduct the discussion?
Don’t you people get it! This is their way of bringing about the “End of Times”. They have been working on this for the past twenty years or so. Why try and save the environment or anything else when you believe that the end is near.
http://www.beliefnet.com/News/2005/03/Environmental-Armageddon.aspx
Quote from above speech by Bill Moyers,
Forty-five Senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian Coalition was Senator Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land." He seemed to be relishing the thought."
Some of these people are still making policy in Congress and why should they care what happens to the rest of us when their heaven is so near.
cbondi,
Great post! But this behavior goes back to the very foundations of European settlement of North America. Read up on the real history of the Puritans who founded Massachusetts. In 1630, ten years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Charles Winthrop and 900 additional puritans established Boston and formally established what is now Massachusetts as a completely hierarchical and religiously intolerant colony. In fact the Puritan's intolerance directly led to the founding of Rhode Island in 1636 by Roger Williams and others as a place for people to escape the punitive nature of Massachusetts's religious zealots.
That's what the Republican hard conservative right reminds me of. The people who brought us the Salem Witch Trials. With the assaults on unions and worker protections, minimum wage laws, child labor laws, and the continual pushing of their interpretation of "Christianity" into law they're not trying to take us back to the Guilded Age of the ninteen twenties but all the way back to the 17th Century.
Excellent post. We should, in light of your diagnosis, insist upon invoking ammendment # 25, section #4, to immediately remove the O-man from office. Also impeach the Supremes. There should be a wave of impeachments, recalls, etc.... Perhaps lead by a battery of ACLU lawyers, to stop this "runaway train".
Some kind of legal action should also be pursued against mainstream media leaders who've contributed to this problem. Not-to-mention taking real aim upon the bankster syndicate; the cause, and the "fuel" for this insanity.
cbondi, I agree with your assessment, except that I think we have to think about this systematically. Parties don't exist in a vacuum. I would say capitalism itself is a sociopathic system in which gigantic, unaccountable entities (limited liability corporations) exploit workers, pollute ecosystems, kill people, and generally ride roughshod over civilized norms of humanity, and our bought-and-paid-for "representatives" do nothing about it except facilitate it, because said corporations dominate the electoral process.
Watch a film called The Corporation and it explains trenchantly why the corporation is a sociopathic entity which we have enthroned. The Republican Party represents Capital, but so, in a lesser way, does the Democratic Party. But we must look behind the drama of the party game to see the domination of both by corporate influence. These unelected entities are often richer than many nation states and have virtually limitless cash to influence elections, buy politicians, undermine environmental laws, to suit their psychotic agenda of more profit no matter what the cost.
I think Mr Krugman has hit the nail on the head. There is a cult of balance and a bending over backwards for "fairness" infecting the liberals and even the left. I have come up against it over and over. It is why no one says no to these thugs or calls them out for what they are. It is why the Repugs message gets through and nothing else does because everything said form the so balanced side is so overly careful it moves and reaches no one. It is a fear of really taking a stand I and it is killing us.
I say this and post it as often as I can. Perhaps someday, someone will notice.
Edward R. Murrow once said that to the media, the opinions of Judas have equal value to those of Jesus.
Yup, many times I wonder how our M$M would handle the NAZI's and the concentration camps. I could picture the talking heads putting some NAZI in his SS uniform saying the Jews were being treated just fine, then show some emaciated prisoner, then question on why he thinks he has it so bad when the SS says they are treated just fine.
FYI Im watching the news now and yup it is being presented in a perfectly bipartisan fashion.
"...no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on."
This is one of the most important lines in the article. An awful lot of people listen to the B/S that is fed to them by M$M and buy it because it is repeated over and over. Yea some people do know what is going on, but as long as they are in the minority this B/S can continue.
IMHO Krugman has been coming out with some pretty good articles lately.
"IMHO Krugman has been coming out with some pretty good articles lately."
Agreed. And I'm surprised the NY Times publishes them.
Seems the Times is returning to its pre-'70s editorial policy of taking on the oligarchy occasionally.
Brilliant! Sums up precisely what I have witnessed this president doing while his supporters put blinders on. Another president in the same situation would have applied 14th amendment emergency procedures and let the court slap his wrists after the fact. This is a centrist right leaning president who is acting more like a junior senator. Is the Dem side of the aisle getting threatening Emails from the Tea Party?
AMEN! The media's dismal coverage -- as usual -- of this BS game is pathetic. The normal tit for tat argument is continuosly trotted out and as pointed out Columbia prof Melissa Lace Blackwell on MSNBC last night Obama enables the both sides equally at fault/partisan wrangling BS with his echoing of the Rethug mantra of "government is broken" crap. Of course, it there was a true progressive response to all this extremism, government wouldn't be broken.
There is no "center" anymore--no where, no how. Many of the synomyms for "liberal" are tolerant, broad-minded, generaous, charitable, kindhearterd gracious. These are also Christian values yet now they are hated by...yes, some Christians...
According to Michael Hudson & others - the current debt ceiling crisis is a manufactured phony crisis that Obama could have easily ended in a number of ways. But it gives him cover to do what he wants to do anyway - to rollout the cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, etc recommended by his Deficit Commission [which he didn't have to institute in the first place]- even though SS & Medicaid have little if anything to do w the deficit.
From DN! Fri July 22nd Interview: [MICHAEL HUDSON: 'Sheila Bair finished her five-year term at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Now that she left, she was able to talk about the arguments that were going on while all of this money was being given away. She opposed it. She said none of this money, not a penny, had to be given away. She said they could have closed down Citibank, they could have closed down AIG and the others. Depositors insured by the FDIC wouldn’t have lost a penny.
She was overruled by Geithner and especially by Bernanke, who essentially said, "We have to save the rich first. We have to save the gamblers." There was plenty of money in all of the banks to cover all of the retail deposits for {small} businesses & families. What there was not money for was for all the cross-gambles that they {Wall St Banksters} had made on derivatives...
You could see it coming even before Mr. Obama took office, when he appointed the Deficit Reduction Commission. He appointed opponents of Social Security to the commission: GOP Ex-Senator Simpson -and Bowles- Clinton’s ex-chief of staff. Obama believes in trickle-down economics. He believes that Wall St are job creators, not downsizers and outsourcers and foreclosures... How can a Democratic president put forth a Republican program? There has to be a crisis {Rahm Emmanuel: 'Don't let a crisis go to waste'... ala Milton Friedman's Disaster Capitalism - Privitized so-called 'Free-market Reforms'}. Now, in reality, there is no crisis at all. In order for him to do it, the Republicans have to play good cop, bad cop. They have to have the Tea Party move so far to the right, take a so crazy a position, that Mr. Obama seems reasonable by comparison. Because he’s a Wall St Democrat, which we used to call Republicans. Mr. Obama’s Deficit Reduction Commission said, we have to get rid of Medicare, we have to get rid of Social Security, put the Social Security funds into the stock market {exactly what Bush Jr tried to do but the Dems wouldn't let him}, create a stock market boom, a new Wall St bubble.']
This is actually an interesting thought... we could have given every citizen in the USA over the age of 21 a million dollars in cash for the money we spent on the bailout... I would trust them to spend that money than the government did to stimulate the economy... it would have given a bailout to largely innocent victims of the predatory lenders and investors in the housing crisis.... instead of the idiots who created the problem... like Bob Dylan sang... steal a little and they put you in jail... steal a lot and they make you a King...
You need to check your numbers. There are roughly 350 million people in the United States. Let's assume half are over age 21 (it's probably more than that). 175 million people time 1 million dollars each = $175 Trillion dollars. That is one heck of a lot more than was spent on the bailout. Using your theory, everyone might have been able to be given about $5,000.00. would that have had the effect you were looking for?
The Fed pumped about 17 trillion into the financial system.
That's about 100 G's per adult.
Obama is so far to the right on this budget issue, he's left.
Boy, has he left...us