James Fallows Doesn't Know What He Thinks He Knows

*sigh* 'People Don't Realize How Fragile Democracy Really Is'

Two days ago I mentioned the "Goodbye to All That" essay by Mike Lofgren, a respected (including by me) veteran Congressional staffer who had worked for Republican legislators on defense and budget issues for nearly 30 years....

Among the important aspects of his essay is that it goes beyond one now-conventional point of "the worse, the better" analysis: that the GOP's main legislative goal is to thwart Obama, and if that includes blocking proposals that might revive the economy, so much the better for the Republicans next year.

More fundamentally, Lofgren argues that today's Republicans believe they are better off if government as a whole is shown to fail, not just this Democratic Administration. Republican hard-liners might seem to have "lost" the debt-ceiling showdown, in that they wound up even less popular than the Democrats are. But in the long view, Lofgren says, unpopularity for anyone in Congress, including their party's leaders, helps the Republicans: "Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy," because it buildings a nihilistic suspicion of any public effort, from road-building to Medicare to schools. (Except defense.)

This is the kind of eau de garbage we readers get when writers become so partisan they cannot see or think straight. Oh, are there people out there who want all government to fail? Sure there are. On the Right various kinds of libertarians hover around the fringes, and you'll find anarchist types floating around the periphery of the Left as well. But the idea that any of these people represent the dominant political opinion of the Republican or Democratic party is nonsense. Actually, it is nonsense on stilts.

When it comes to mainstream political opinion there is no "nihilistic suspicion of any public effort" anywhere except the minds of folks like James Fallows. Sure there is plenty of suspicion about Washington, but Washington (thank God) does not have a monopoly on "public efforts." In fact, a large part of the complaint many people are making is that the Federal government has become far too overweening, and the result has been that our society has become less democratic. By definition most "public efforts" are local affairs, but increasingly we are not allowed to direct our own affairs unless we get the Feds to sign off on whatever it is we want to do, be it build a bridge or update the curriculum of our public schools.

To the degree that Fallows rejects the idea that power should be located in the people and instead embraces the idea that experts in Washington should govern all of our public affairs, Fallows can be said to be anti-democratic, if not by intent certainly by result.

The sad fact is the ruling classes, and the journalists that spend their cushy lives rubbing elbows with them, are not synonymous with "democracy" in any meaning of the word. And really this is what this all comes down to in the end. Fallows despises (and most likely hates) this tea party rabble which won't shut up and let the rulers rule already. That Fallows calls this impulse respect for democracy is the cruelest irony of all.