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Tuesday, November 16, 2010

IOKIYAAR... Obviously. Now What?

It's rather sad the way folks in the left blogipelago seem to think they have accomplished something when they demonstrate Republicans have once again said one thing and then done another (McCain's endless re-drawing of the line in the sand which, when crossed, will magically make him stop being an old antigay bigot crank, for instance), or once again declared some principle sacrosanct and then immediately danced around it in practice (blowing epic spending holes in budgets despite their pious fiscal responsibility, re-branding earmarks something else while railing against earmarks and so on).

Republicans always lie, they always flip-flop, they are always hypocrites: this is expected of them and it is never news to demonstrate that they are doing what is expected of them. Exposing their hypocrisy and spin has exactly zero impact on their conduct. Only Democrats, who are known to care comparatively more about real policy outcomes and coherence between campaign promises and actual governance are held to such standards.

It doesn't matter how many times you expose a family values politician chewing some hooker's foot or taking a pastor's son's prick up his bum, it doesn't matter how many times you expose a swinging dick bombs and bullets bully as not giving two shits for veterans, it doesn't matter that anti-abortion zealots spirit their privileged daughters lickety-split to the clinic while denying everyday folks that privilege.

People (especially our hacktacular punditocraps) have come to grasp about Republicans that what they say is never much of anything but their signaling of their moment to moment tactical assessments of the present state of political affairs with an eye to consolidating the long-term position of the incumbent-elite interests who pay them for their services in this regard.

So, naturally enough, pundits read the Republican tea leaves, and then subject Democratic claims to substantial scrutiny. Republican and Democratic claims belong to two different genres, it is actually proper to assess them according to the criteria appropriate to the genre in question.

The relentlessly repeated exposure of the "hypocrisy" or "deception" or "double standard" captured by the phrase "it's okay if you're a Republican" has no force precisely because it really is "okay" to engage in such hypocrisy, deception, standards if one is a Republican. What the left blogipelago doesn't seem to grasp is that this is just endlessly to recognize what it IS to be a Republican, and that this isn't a recognition with much in the way of subversive, reformist, educational, agitational, organization force when all is said and done.

Republicans lie, then Democrats expose the lie and then roll their eyes at the awful preposterousness of it, and then the Republicans get what they wanted (which is why they lied) and then the Democrats sigh histrionically at the way of the world and prepare for the next round.

The reason that IOKIYAAR, is that it is, for now, okay to BE a Republican, it is okay to be committed to governance as a tool to consolidate short term parochial advantage to incumbent-elites from moment to moment. Only when it is no longer okay to be devoted to such destructive reactionary visions of governance will it not be okay for Republicans to do these things they always do over and over again however much they are exposed as doing what we expect them to do in this way.

Democrats need to make and then keep making a clear, coherent, positive case for why governance needs to be in the hands of those who are accountable to actual consequences in the service of justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, and general welfare: And the simple fact is that Democrats are generally scared to death or apparently altogether incapable of making such cases... Or, once the point has been made here or there, they get bored or nervous at the thought that it might be part of their proper work repeatedly to drive home the points that some indispensable public goods can only be accomplished by good government, that hostility to democratic government is hostility to everyday people, that taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilization, that warranted consensus science should facilitate the arrival at policy outcomes once majorities are reconciled to the value of desired outcomes.

Once Democrats make the case and attract majorities to affirm the case for their sense of good government it won't matter if occasionally their best efforts or experiments fail (as they will), precisely because failure is "okay if you're a Democrat" in part because everybody will already know that that's part of the price one pays once one has decided to BE a Democratic devoted to good, responsible, accountable, efficient, equitable, improvisatory democratic governance.

We must stop exposing all the ways in which hypocrisy, incompetence, deception, corruption, class warfare for the rich, and so on are "IOKIYAAR" and expecting anything to follow from this exposure but an endless ineffectual belaboring of the obvious.

We must make it not okay to BE a Republican, by educating and celebrating and selling what it is to BE a Democrat instead. When Republicans bemoan amidst the inevitable mistakes and set-backs in our push from the left toward an ever more secular ever more sustainable ever more equitable ever more diverse democracy that "IOKIYAAD" -- and it will be, because it will have become better than just "okay" to BE a Democrat -- then, and only then, will it no longer be the case that "IOKIYAAR."

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