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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/opinion/krugman-the-boehner-bunglers.html?ref=paulkrugman&_r=0
The federal government is shut down, we’re about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?
The main answer, which only the most pathologically “balanced” reporting
can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party. As Thomas Mann
and Norman Ornstein put it last year in their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,”
the G.O.P. has become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme;
contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime;
scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of
facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its
political opposition.”
But there’s one more important piece of the story. Conservative leaders
are indeed ideologically extreme, but they’re also deeply incompetent.
So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect — the truly incompetent can’t even recognize their own incompetence — reigns supreme.
To see what I’m talking about, consider the report
in Sunday’s Times about the origins of the current crisis. Early this
year, it turns out, some of the usual suspects — the Koch brothers, the
political arm of the Heritage Foundation and others — plotted strategy
in the wake of Republican electoral defeat. Did they talk about
rethinking ideas that voters had soundly rejected? No, they talked
extortion, insisting that the threat of a shutdown would induce
President Obama to abandon health reform.
This was crazy talk. After all, health reform is Mr. Obama’s signature
domestic achievement. You’d have to be completely clueless to believe
that he could be bullied into giving up his entire legacy by a defeated,
unpopular G.O.P. — as opposed to responding, as he has, by making
resistance to blackmail an issue of principle. But the possibility that
their strategy might backfire doesn’t seem to have occurred to the
would-be extortionists.
Even more remarkable, in its way, was the response of House Republican
leaders, who didn’t tell the activists they were being foolish. All they
did was urge that the extortion attempt be made over the debt ceiling
rather than a government shutdown. And as recently as last week Eric
Cantor, the majority leader, was in effect assuring his colleagues
that the president will, in fact, give in to blackmail. As far as
anyone can tell, Republican leaders are just beginning to suspect that
Mr. Obama really means what he has been saying all along.
Many people seem perplexed by the transformation of the G.O.P. into the
political equivalent of the Keystone Kops — the Boehner Bunglers?
Republican elders, many of whom have been in denial about their party’s
radicalization, seem especially startled. But all of this was
predictable.
It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no
longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is
climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to
believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies.
For a while the party was able to compartmentalize, to remain savvy and
realistic about politics even as it rejected objectivity everywhere
else. But this wasn’t sustainable. Sooner or later, the party’s attitude
toward policy — we listen only to people who tell us what we want to
hear, and attack the bearers of uncomfortable news — was bound to infect
political strategy, too.
Remember what happened in the 2012 election — not the fact that Mitt
Romney lost, but the fact that all the political experts around him
apparently had no inkling that he was likely to lose. Polls
overwhelmingly pointed to an Obama victory, but Republican analysts
denounced the polls as “skewed”
and attacked the media outlets reporting those polls for their alleged
liberal bias. These days Karl Rove is pleading with House Republicans to
be reasonable and accept the results of the 2012 election. But on election night
he tried to bully Fox News into retracting its correct call of Ohio —
and hence, in effect, the election — for Mr. Obama.
Unfortunately for all of us, even the shock of electoral defeat wasn’t
enough to burst the G.O.P. bubble; it’s still a party dominated by
wishful thinking, and all but impervious to inconvenient facts. And now
that party’s leaders have bungled themselves into a corner.
Everybody not inside the bubble realizes that Mr. Obama can’t and won’t
negotiate under the threat that the House will blow up the economy if he
doesn’t — any concession at all would legitimize extortion as a routine
part of politics. Yet Republican leaders are just beginning to get a
clue, and so far clearly have no idea how to back down. Meanwhile, the
government is shut, and a debt crisis looms. Incompetence can be a
terrible thing.
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