The Assertions of Ideologues; Common Enemies

• How the Republicans’ budget plan ignores the record of history;
• How conservatives don’t mind Muslims as long as they’re all against LGBTQ rights;
• Another review of the book about a conservative “regime change” for the “common good” — a Christian common good, that is.

Heather Cox Richardson explains how the Republican’s 2024 budget plan is built upon false premises, and an ignorance of history.

Heather Cox Richardson, June 15, 2023

Yesterday, the Republican Study Committee, a 175-member group of far-right House members, released their 2024 “Blueprint to Save America” budget plan. It calls for slashing the federal budget by raising the age at which retirees can start claiming Social Security benefits from 67 to 69, privatizing Medicare, and enacting dramatic tax cuts that will starve the federal government.

I’m actually not going to rehash the 122-page plan. Let’s take a look at the larger picture.

This budget dismisses the plans of “President Joe Biden and the left” as a “march toward socialism.” It says that “[t]he left’s calls to increase taxes to close the deficit would be…catastrophic for our nation.” Asserting that “the path to prosperity does not come from the Democrats’ approach of expanding government,” it claims that “[o]ver the past year and a half, the American people have seen that experiment fail firsthand.”

Instead, it says, “the key to growth, innovation, and flourishing communities” is “[i]ndividuals, free from the burdens of a burdensome government.”

It is?

Our history actually tells us how these two contrasting visions of the government play out.

The middle of the piece contrasts the tax-cutting obsessions of the Republicans with the results of FDR’s New Deal. Along the way: why is there a growing debt? Because Republicans under Bush and Trump keep cutting taxes, primarily to the wealthy and corporations. Concluding:

When the Republican Study Committee calls Biden’s policies—which have led to record employment, a booming economy, and a narrowing gap between rich and poor— “leftist,” they have lost the thread of our history. The system that restored the nation after 1933 and held the nation stable until 1981 is not socialism or radicalism; it is one of the strongest parts of our American tradition.

(The image at top is from one of Cox’s sources)

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Turns out Conservatives, who’ve demonized Muslims for decades (hissing that Obama was surely one, as if that would be the ultimate mark of evil), don’t mind them so much when they have a common enemy. Woke backlash makes for strange bedfellows.

NY Times, Michelle Goldberg, 16 Jun 2023: Creeping Shariah Has Nothing on the Woke Mob

…as the battle against wokeness has supplanted the war on terror in the right-wing imagination, conservative sympathies are reversing. “Republicans are wooing Muslim voters by promising to protect them from L.G.B.T.Q. rights advocates whose demands conflict with their faith,” David Weigel reported in Semafor this week. The Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who once called for banning Muslim immigration from the Middle East, recently ran a sympathetic segment about Muslim parents in Maryland who want their kids to be exempt from reading books with L.G.B.T.Q. characters or themes. “Us Catholics and other Christians, other people of faith, have been waiting for the Muslims to step up on this issue,” Ingraham told her guest, a Muslim father and activist named Kareem Monib.

With name checks of Grover Norquist and Dinesh D’Souza. Concluding, it’s all about fear:

History shows us, however, that nothing drives conservatives to reach out to groups they once feared as much as another group that they fear even more.

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Another item about this here:

Slate, Aymann Ismail, 16 Jun 2023: The New Republican Voters, subtitled “A Muslim man went to a school board meeting last fall. He left supporting Donald Trump.”

I’m not surprised.

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Another review of that book that advocates for the forceful conservative takeover of America for the “common good.” (Earlier discussed here.)

Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 15 Jun 2023: What a new conservative call for “regime change” in America reveals about the culture war, subtitled “‘Regime Change’ sounds like a radical book. It isn’t — and that’s telling.”

Attacks on philosophical liberalism are common on the intellectual right nowadays, but concrete attempts to sketch what might replace a regime founded on democracy and individual rights are conspicuously absent.

Regime Change fails to deliver on this promise. All of [the author’s previous book] Why Liberalism Failed’s flaws are on display in the follow-up, but in ways even more damaging to the argument. What is arguably the book’s most important claim — that liberalism is beset by an insuperable tension between a conservative mass public and an insular liberal elite — is never established with a single empirical study or even a simple piece of polling data.

As I’ve noted before about conservatives and other ideologues, their arguments tend to assertions without evidence, not conclusions drawn from evidence.

Still, the book’s author apparently feels things he perceives that a lot of others feel, and the reviewer concedes that the book is useful for documenting that.

The principal problem with liberalism, according to Deneen, is that it strips people of things that provide them with a sense of order and meaning.

By elevating individualism and progress into guiding social values, liberalism destroys the traditions and norms that allow human beings to make sense of life and find their place in the world. American Christianity is on the decline, small-town America is hollowed out, drug abuse rates are rising — all symptoms of a spiritual crisis brought on by liberalism’s philosophical assault on what Deneen sees as the sources of social stability.

The people most responsible for this state of affairs, according to Deneen, are America’s liberal “elite.”

Deneen’s definition of “elite” is somewhat broad, referring not necessarily to people with wealth or high political office, but rather “those who possess social status because they possess the requisite social and educational skills to navigate a world shorn of stabilizing norms.” He’s a bit vague on who specifically this definition applies to, but it roughly appears to mean people with college degrees working in knowledge-sector jobs: the “laptop class,” as his fellow conservatives would say.

And this dovetails nicely with David Brin’s repeated observation that conservatives are at war with the “fact-based professions” — see this review. Again, assertions without evidence, vs. conclusions based on evidence (facts).

There is something valuable in this critique. … I think Deneen is right that “traditional” social structures like houses of worship provide a sense of community and place sorely lacking in much of modern life — benefits that liberals can be too quick to dismiss.

But most of his anti-liberal broadside is at once underbaked and overheated.

The reviewer explains why, on both counts. Then he lists a selection of the author’s proposals, including this one —

• “Most importantly,” bring Christianity into public life through steps like public prayer and closure of businesses on Christian holidays

— which reveals the author to be a religious ideologue, advocating a theocracy, and presuming that his beliefs should trump all others.

I skimmed the rest of the review. The author declined, “not-so-politely,” to be interviewed for it.