The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [124]
It was a nice little setup for bullshit artists like Romney, who could then go into sad little towns like this one and blast Hollywood values, saying, as he did today, “We have to clean up the water our kids are swimming in.” Not the actual water, of course, which might be polluted (or disappearing, as it is here in Orlando, where homeowning decent folk like those in Romney’s audience use 75 percent of their water irrigating high-maintenance St. Augustine lawn grass; experts expect a crisis by 2013), but the cultural water, the water where actors who don’t even believe in Jesus aren’t satisfied with the money they make, and then speak out of turn. And if not actors, gays or professors or someone else with too many ideas. For a long time, those monsters were villain enough to keep the conservative vote captive.
On the other side, voter manipulation turned into a similarly easy proposition. Vilified unfairly for the wrongs of the nation, wounded and defensive American liberals focused exclusively on unseating the horned Republican beast. They gave Democratic candidates their vote almost without a thought, supporting “winners” over candidates with something to say. A burgeoning third-party movement spearheaded by Ralph Nader disappeared into almost total irrelevance after Nader’s 2000 run ended up being perceived as the crucial factor in electing George Bush. Things got so bad that for a brief time former General Wesley Clark, a man who in the 1960s and 1970s traveled the world giving speeches in support of the Vietnam War effort, became the darling of American liberalism, a segment of society whose modern roots lay in the development of a movement to oppose that same Vietnam War.
The next little thing about this vote-for-the-lesser-evil trick, of course—and this is no secret to anyone anymore—is that it drives all the “serious” candidates toward what is commonly referred to as the “moderate center,” even if these serious candidates aren’t, in fact, moderate or centrist in any meaningful sense and the so-called center moves further to the right with each election cycle. For nearly two decades now this process has been steadily advancing on the Democratic side, as liberals are trained to accept the idea that the national majority will never accept a true labor party, or any candidate perceived as “soft” on defense.
In What’s the Matter with Kansas? Tom Frank wrote mostly about conservatives when he described a process by which Middle America was trained to vote on social issues while ignoring its own economic situation. But, in fact, the same exact thing happened to liberals.
At the tail end of the Reagan years the Democratic Party, with the aid of Clinton/Gore–led groups like the Democratic Leadership Council, presented us with a new kind of “business-friendly” Democrat, one who voted the right way on choice and minority rights but was “willing to work with business” on such matters as free trade, deregulation, privatization, government spending, and personal debt. Such a Democrat, we were told, could win: we’d be giving up a thing or two in terms of workers’ rights and other matters, but at least Roe v. Wade would be safe for now.
That led to the absurdity of the late 1990s and the early years of this century, a time when a massive empire that dominated the world economy chose its leaders almost exclusively according to their stances on such matters as abortion rights and gay marriage. On the substantive economic issues the main candidates were very nearly identical, resulting in the outrageous comedy of 2000, an election in a 250-million-plus population that ended in an exact statistical tie. This was a situation so absurd that it even made a comedian out of reviled lefty oracle/MIT professor Noam