By Chris Satullo
How would you react if the manager of your favorite baseball team explained a late-game strategic blunder this way: “Well, frankly, I find baseball pretty boring and my mind was wandering at that point.”
Or if the coach of the NFL team that ignites your passion told a post-game media gaggle why he told his team to run out the clock in a game they trailed by four points: “To tell the truth, I’m much more focused these days on doing my new podcast, so I was in a hurry to get to the studio.”
You’d be enraged. You’d want them fired. You’d sign a petition to have them run out of town. And you’d be right.
So when oh when will the American people reach that same boiling point with the yahoos in the Republican caucus who have paralyzed this nation’s House of Representatives with their cascading waves of performative nonsense? This is what happens when you put people who hate government and have no clue how to govern in charge of governing.
When will voters learn not to give power to politicians who are addicted to posturing, people whose only agenda is to criticize government as incompetent and to starve it of funds? Ultimately what could happen is this: Your government stops doing the very things that you most count on it to do for you.
Because you do rely on government daily for so much – even if, bamboozled by years of right-wing “government is the problem” claptrap peddled on Fox News, some folks are unwilling to see or admit that.
You depend on government to ensure that your life savings, which are merely numbers on a bank or mutual fund website whose worth is safeguarded by government rules and regulators, will actually be there when you need them. You depend on government to make sure that the plane that went up in the air with you inside will actually land safely. To make sure that the steak you forked last night won’t kill you. To make sure that the bridge won’t collapse while you’re crossing it. And to fix a pothole before it ruins your car’s suspension.
For all of governments’ flaws, despite the rhetoric about how “government is the problem,” most of them from the local to the national do a decent job on many of their responsibilities. (Better than, say, Wells Fargo or Equifax does on theirs.)
The reliability of these quiet services is precisely why so many voters wallow in the pretense that they are not getting any value for their tax dollars.
Do you know what is one of the costliest benefits the federal government gives out to taxpayers? The mortgage interest deduction. It’s been around so long that most homeowners who benefit from it don’t even recognize it as the special-interest tax break – with dubious economic benefit – that it is.
Here’s the dirty little secret of the GOP-fueled “budget crisis” of this moment: The Freedom Caucus’ frantic arm-waving about cutting deficits and taming the federal budget is futile from the jump, because these phony fiscal hawks declare off-limits any breaks or benefits beloved by their middle- and upper-class supporters. Beginning with Social Security and Medicare, these benefits make up a far, far larger portion of the budget than the aid to Ukraine that GOP reps love to fulminate about.
These conservatives without a clue also reject a priori any talk of raising taxes or ending the tax code’s many forms of preferential treatment for the investment income their affluent donors enjoy raking in. Again, if you leave those breaks in place, you can’t even begin to fix what you claim to be on fire to fix.
Feeding red meat to their populist voters while actually catering to plutocrats’ wishes has long been a conservative political habit. But watching this current crop trip over their shoelaces trying to explain their lust for a shutdown, you begin to wonder whether many of them are just too new, or just plain dumb, to recognize these basic budget facts.
In short, a lot of them sound like they believe their own bullshit.
This stems from a long-brewing defect in GOP discourse. “Government is the problem” rhetoric has flooded the Fox News-bubble for so long that many of these holders of elective office have no other ideas. They don’t study how to shape and pass compromise bills that would do something useful for ordinary Americans, because they don’t see that as their job. Being good at government is a “Democrat” thing; it doesn’t get you prime-time hits on Fox News or the main stage at CPAC, which is how in their hearts they define success.
Who needs to design and call smart plays when there’s a podcast you could posture on instead?
Much of the GOP caucus in the House sees its job simply as spouting about the need to shrink government. To freshen up the riff occasionally, they cherry-pick anecdotes about government missteps (or simply make them up out of whole cloth). The goal: Always keep your voters in a state of disgusted rage at government, with you positioned as the person who must stay in office to “tame” it.
This long-cultivated populist rage, though, has become a prison that pens in those who might occasionally want to be reasonable and useful. Their voters now also fervently believe the bullshit party line. In its state of perpetual, furious ignorance about reality, the base will toss out of office, or even physically threaten, any office-holder who dares to question the official script.
Now, with this looming shutdown and the who’s-the-Speaker? stalemate, we’ve reached the risky reductio ad absurdum of this syndrome.
Deficits have grown laughably out of the reach of any cure that declares “hands off” to middle-class benefits and “no way” to tax increases. You clearly can’t bully your way to budget balance just by ripping “food stamps” out of the hands of immigrant moms; the numbers just don’t work. (Not that they ever did, really.)
When the situation demands a solid working grasp of how government actually works, and a willingness to work with the other team so you can achieve 50 percent plus 1 on a useful, compromise bill, these noisy rookies are at a loss.
They’ve never studied the playbook, never practiced the plays. They always thought the job was merely yammering into the microphones that get shoved into their faces by toadies who work for their team.
Who knew being good at governance might be so hard?
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia