Surprised by the Surprised

Doll-eyed dolt Paul Ryan dreams Randian dreams of neo-feudalism and drafted a budget that reflected his meanspritied and imbecilic view of the world, proposing to voucherize and hence end Medicare while larding the already rich as always with even more tax breaks among other things. And then almost all the House Republicans voted for Ryan's neo-feudalist day dream.

Many of the gossip columnists, er, Serious Voices in the major media Commentariat appear to be surprised by this turn of events.

Of course, Republicans are now in the majority in the House because most Americans seem to think thinking is hard and so either they don't vote at all even when their lives are at stake or treat voting as they do their twitter accounts, primarily as a means of testifying to the world that at this moment they happen to feel hungry or cold or bored or angry or happy without much contextualization or foresight involved at any point in the process. But then, most Senate Republicans voted for Ryan's neo-feudal budget, too. The Republicans don't yet control the Senate (though chances are good they will after the next election).

Again, the Commentariat declares itself surprised by much of these goings on.

Don't Republicans grasp how popular Medicare is? Don't they read the polls? Don't they understand that recent special election results and recall drives indicate overreach? Isn't Paul Ryan, after all, a Very Serious, nay, courageous and principled guy? Isn't all this rather surprising?

Even pundits with whom I sympathize seem perplexed. Wait, might the Republicans actually not raise the debt ceiling, despite the obvious and effortlessly avoidable catastrophic consequences? Might the Republicans think they can gain power through anti-abortion and union-busting politics they didn't campaign on while ignoring unemployment politics they did campaign on? Might the Republicans really try to get away with trying to end Medicare by naming their pet voucherized not-Medicare "Medicare"?

You will forgive me if I express my own surprise at the surprise of anybody who is surprised.

Are they really surprised? I must say, that's really surprising.

Randroid Ryan is more explicit about his neo-feudalism than most Republicans are, which is why, I suppose, he is described by the Commentariat as an "ideas guy" and as an intellectual, despite the fact that all of his ideas are palpably stupid, his numbers don't add up, his pieties have been endlessly tried and failed, and his slogans are all cribbed from the plutocratic apologists like Rand, Hayek, Mises, Friedman he parrots, all of which suggests the farthest imaginable thing from a mastery or concern with actual thinking or intellectual life.

It is true that he differs somewhat in his actually parrot-promulgated neo-feudalism from that of most of his Republican peers who seem simply to have stumbled opportunistically into line with neo-feudalism through common or garden variety parochialism, greed, corruption, laziness, brutality, with minds jellified by bad education, organized misinformation, and especially the total suffusion of public discourse in America with the profoundly deceptive, hyperbolic, dis-integrating norms and forms of advertizing and marketing.

It is worth noting again that precisely such neo-feudalist fantasies (both actively asserted and opportunistically ready-to-hand) have driven the Movement Republicanism within the Republican Party since the New Deal: Today's Teabag-Fascists are genealogically linked to the Republicans who wanted to depose FDR in a coup and then formed the Birchers and Randroids that Eisenhower and Buckley marginalized, but who seeped back in through the Nixonian "silent majority" minority's politics of resentment, then through the Reaganomic "moral majority" minority's politics of family values, then through Gingrich's counter-revolutionary contract with America which was a Contract Hit on America, then unleashed in the madness of post-9/11 America, a boiling witch's cauldron which John McCain shamefully irresponsibly definitively authorized and mainstreamed at last in choosing the palpably unqualified chthonic horror Sarah Palin as his running mate, leaving us to the unqualified dysfunction of a system in thrall, whoever is notionally "in charge" of it, to economic-illiterates, climate-science denialists, anti-abortion zealots wedded to market-fundamentalist and theocratic-fundamentalist conjoined twin ideologues bringing on and cheering on the end-times.

To know and remember these things is to stop being surprised by the unsurprising irrationalities of governance beholden to Movement Republicanism.

Everybody should remember well that Movement Republicanism wrongly thought Medicare and all of the Great Society programs amounted to authoritarian socialism --as they just as wrongly and vociferously thought the New Deal before it amounted to authoritarian socialism (rather than a sensibly equitable socially democratic embrace of market dynamisms providing an alternative to what looked likely to be an epochal post-colonial planetary embrace of actual authoritarian socialisms), and they fought tooth and nail to keep Medicare from implementation. Movement Republicanism went on to hate Medicare throughout the successful and popular program's whole life (even as Republican Party dependency on older Americans invested in the program demanded a stealthy and strategic approach to this hostility, often relying on white-racist and culture war issues that otherwise mobilized this indispensable demographic), and they now seek with robotic predictability and perfect consistency to destroy it.

What's to be surprised about now?

Those who express surprise at the Republican embrace of police state anti-abortion measures they did not campaign on and which few Americans are calling for -- citing, for example, their empty ritual talk of libertarianism, which was never anything but an apologia for racism and anti-democracy -- simply cannot have been paying any attention to what Republicans always actually do, whatever they happen to say before doing it or to justify doing it.

Those who express surprise at Republican union busting to ensure that nobody who isn't rich is in any kind of position to secure a livelihood independent of the whims of incumbent elites -- citing, for example, their empty ritual talk of hostility to "elites," which was never anything but an apologia for anti-intellectualism -- simply cannot have been paying any attention to what Republicans always actually do, whatever they happen to say before doing it or to justify doing it.

Those who express surprise at Republican efforts to slash taxes and regulations on the richest of the rich who are among the very few who are not suffering from the economic catastrophe brought on by many of these very actors -- citing their empty ritual talk of representing "Real Americans" which was never anything but a cynical mobilization of the mob in the service of the corporate personages who are their only real constituency -- simply cannot have been paying any attention to what Republicans always actually do, whatever they happen to say before doing it or to justify doing it.

Those who express surprise at Republican efforts to end Medicare -- citing the empty ritual campaign slogans with which they regained the House to "save Medicare from Obamacare," which were never anything but exactly the lie they are telling right now that by naming their neo-feudal voucherized non-Medicare successor to Medicare "Medicare" they are saving Medicare even as they end it, appended to the lies of the Summer of Tea that Obamacare (which, among other things, actually managed to save Medicare by creating some, but too few, structural constraints on rising healthcare costs) that it really amounted to authoritarian socialism, that it was going to institute Death Panels, and all the rest of that arrant nonsense -- simply cannot have been paying any attention to what Republicans always actually do, whatever they happen to say before doing it or to justify doing it.

This is all perfectly unsurprising, perfectly predictable, perfectly on script for Movement Republicanism.

It's bad enough that some people believe the evil, idiotic Movement Republican line or are at any rate well pleased to ape that line out of cynical opportunism in service to incumbent elites.

But for people who reject the neo-feudalist Movement Republican line to be caught unawares to the cost of their more righteous and sensible efforts by yet another repetition of the script really is beyond belief. There is nothing surprising in anything the Republicans are doing.

If you don't like what they are doing, pay attention for heaven's sake, and make the better case that beats them.

And beating them really has to be the first priority of anybody who wants to do anything the least bit sensible any time soon (and given the urgency of planetary problems like climate change, resource descent, weapons proliferation, neoliberal precarization time truly looks to be running out).