So vapid, it's fun

Joe Nocera, the NY Times' former business columnist and now word-slinging desperado in all manner of punditocratic enterprises, writes this morning perhaps the most vapid column it has ever been my pleasure to read. Yes, pleasure, not displeasure, for it's like one of those inexpressibly bad movies we've all seen that is so bad, it is downright good; so bad, it's irresistible; so bad, it almost instantly achieves a kind of cult status.

Nocera's cult-like thesis? That Democrats -- not Republicans -- are chiefly responsible for the primal nastiness in contemporary politics, said nastiness having been launched by said Democrats back, quite precisely, in 1987, the annus horribilis of the Robert Bork battle for the Supreme Court. I kid you not. Here's Nocera, in full delusional flower:

[O]ur poisoned politics is not just about Republicans behaving badly, as many Democrats and their liberal allies have convinced themselves. Democrats can be — and have been — every bit as obstructionist, mean-spirited and unfair.

I’ll take it one step further. The Bork fight, in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics.

In order to subscribe to that wretchedly bad history, one must first summarily execute a lot of one's knowledge about the political 20th century (or, for that matter, the 19th, or even the 18th). For today's political knife fights are but an extension of past partisan rumbling over the New Deal, as well as its sisterly progression, the Great Society.

Pseudoconservative Republicans -- virtually the only GOP species left -- still want to kill them both, and their immeasurable hatred of all things New Dealing today tends to overshadow their profound hatred of yesteryear. You want vitriol and vituperation? Forget the clownish likes of a Michele Bachmann or Rush Limbaugh; check out instead the 1930s' venom of a Westbrook Pegler or Father Charles Coughlin. In addition to these vermin, FDR's tenure was marked by miscellaneous right-wing charges of a "dictatorship" being dispensed by a "crippled" socialist in an unAmerican White House.

From there, one can draw a straight line to the right's indulgent, postwar hysteria over disloyal Democrats having "lost" China, having bungled Korea, having installed herds of pro-Stalinist subversives in assorted high places, having corrupted our sacred institutions and having sold our powerful secrets. For sure, we liked Ike, but it was Joe McCarthy who set the conversational tone -- right up to his admiring Barry Goldwater, in defense of heated extremism.

The rest is more familiar: the 1970s rise of the malignant, racially coded and theocratically inclined New Right; the 1980s erosions of New Deal-Great Society social protections; Gingrichism and the attempted political assassination of a democratically elected president; more charges of Democratic disloyalty -- this time, Iraq; and now, the right's entire Obama-derangement-syndrome thing.

The record positively screams the GOP's immense culpability for the "mean-spirited and unfair ... end of civil discourse in politics." Yet just about all the NY Times' Joe Nocera can see is ... poor Robert Bork. It's so vapid, it's fun.

Comments

[SueMe]

Excellent. I hope you made a similar comment to his NYT website.

[Robert Lipscomb]

I submit it goes back to Thomas Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions.

[Rich Horton]

You know... you've got two choices here; you can look at it simply like an ideologue, OR you can try to look at it like a political scientist. Nocera gave us a hypothesis we can actually find a measure for. We can look at the numbers of cloture votes in the Senate and use that as a measure of discord in the proceedings.

Has the Senate become more discordant in the years since the Bork fight? Well, yes. (You can find a graph for cloture voting on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_States_Senate )

So, is Nocera's hypothesis confirmed? Well, not exactly. WHen you look at the graph the two eras that seem to kick off marked increases in the amount of political discord are the Watergate era (for obvious reasons), and the era marked by the election of Clinton in 92 and the election of a Republican Congress in 94.

It also has to be said that your analysis isn't really borne out by the data either. By this cloture measure the Senate was a pretty harmonious place from 1948-1970, despite McCarthyism, "Who lost China-ism", and the rise of the Civil Rights movement. If politics of the era were really so discordant why doesn't it show up on this measure? Are there other objective measures that will show the discord you claim? (My use of cloture voting is a quick and dirty solution, though an entirely defensible one I'd argue. The rule for cloture hasn't been changed since 1949, so we know we are dealing with an apples to apples comparison.)

That's my two cents. Mileage will vary depending upon how ideologically fervent one is.

[CK MacLeod]

Rich Horton: The assertion that political science can or does transcend ideology is highly ideological.

[rikyrah]

bravo
bravo
bravo

[Rich Horton]

CK: Uh, no. The real question becomes is it possible to talk about politics without it becoming an excuse to stick ones tongue out at ones "enemy". You, seemingly, deny that is even possible. You'll forgive me if I do not view that fact as a sign of your enlightenment.