From Death Panel to Death Spiral
A positive feedback loop is defined as a system that responds to a disturbance in the same direction as the disturbance. With every small input the response gets amplified, growing ever larger until the system collapses. In the physical world, one of the most famous examples is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which collapsed in the face of a moderate wind. The destruction was a result of a "resonant frequency" that allowed the bridge to respond to the gentle nudge of the wind like a swing arcing higher and higher with each push until the oscillation was greater than the bridge could withstand.
In the political world the best example is the Republican Party responding to the resonant frequency of crazy. We may be witnessing the GOP self-destructing in a death spiral. With every lost election, the Republican ranks contract, giving greater voice to the remaining extremists -- leading to the next lost election, giving even greater influence to the wing nuts. Destruction just like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
Nowhere is this destructive resonance more clearly revealed than in the health care reform debate. Disrupting town hall meetings is a distraction to keep our attention away from the stench of a decaying GOP. Any disinterested third-party observer of what is happening in our town halls would have to conclude that opponents represent the flames of a Party burning out of control. Hysterical opponents seek to foster fear that will spiral toward blind panic.
Opponents of reform have shamelessly fanned the embers of fear that the government will prevent us from choosing our own doctor (nothing in the proposed health care plans suggests that), when in fact we already suffer that actual restriction with many insurance policies. Irrational skeptics spread unfounded fear that the government will choose for us what procedures will be allowed, as though this is not common practice in our current system. This is exactly what is happening now with private insurance companies. Opponents spread rumors that the reforms proposed by Obama will be too expensive when in fact the costs of inaction are much greater.
"Keep your government hands off my Medicare" is the voice of the poorly informed, a level of ignorance so deep as to make reasoned debate difficult. Comparing Obama to Hitler requires no further discussion. Fabricating the idea of death panels is an act of desperation. Claiming a government take-over of health care ignores every fact of the case. The opposition is focusing on fictitious extremes rather than addressing issues seriously.
A consequence of the positive loop of amplified lunacy might well be that Republicans cease to be a national political force. The voice of the GOP is now the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, which positions the Republican Party more as a fringe group like the LaRouche movement rather than as a major player on the national scene.
In the throes of death, Republicans may experience an intermediate stage of irrelevance on their slide to extinction as a consequence of inner-party splits as extremists pull ever harder to the right. The rise and fall of the short-lived Bull Moose Party might be informative as an historic comparison. During the presidential election of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt formed the new party (formally called the Progressive Party) after losing the nomination to William Howard Taft. The new party, named popularly from Roosevelt's assertion that he was "as strong as a bull moose," won 27% of the vote compared to Taft's 23% during the election. The resulting split allowed Wilson to win with 42% of the vote. The Bull Moose Party was on scene only briefly but had a significant impact on American politics.
We might also witness a trajectory in which the Republicans simply cease to exist at all. We of course have precedent for the demise of important political parties. The Federalist Party comes to mind. But the most telling historic parallel would be the rise and fall of the Whig Party, established in 1834 as a reaction to the growing executive clout of Andrew Jackson. States' rights were a major party platform.
While now nothing but a distant memory, Whigs at one time were a powerful force in national politics, boasting three presidents to its credit. William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor were elected president as Whig candidates. Millard Fillmore, also a Whig, became president after Taylor's death. During the height of Whig power nobody would have predicted that the party would cease to exist.
Ironically, the Whigs died in the face of the new Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln when the issue of slavery divided the nation, and Lincoln's Party attracted more Whigs than anti-slavery Democrats. The Republicans might soon experience the same fate as Lincoln inflicted on the Whigs. Major parties can die.
The death of the Republican Party would be no cause for celebration. Excess on the left is as dangerous as right-wing craziness. The only way to weave a path to the middle is through reasonable opposition that prevents the extremes of either group from gaining too much influence. Moderate Republicans have much to offer that would be sorely missed if the GOP declines to the point of irrelevancy. The ideals of smaller government and reduced taxation are laudable, if tempered by realism. But Republicans have truly lost their bearings as the moderate wind of change pushes conservatives to ever greater extremes, responding with growing amplitude to that resonant frequency of crazy. Let's look at some examples.
Republican Claim: We want government off the backs of the American people.
Reality: Republicans insert government into our schools, hospitals and homes. They want government to control the most personal aspects of our daily lives. Conservatives, for example, want the government to deny a woman's right to choose her own reproductive destiny, and to deny gay couples the right to wed. The right wants the government to tell us what to teach and what research can be done, opposing stem cell research in our universities and proposing that Intelligent Design be taught in our public schools. They want government to favor one religion over others, defending the display of Christian religious symbols on government property. But even more egregious examples can be found in Republican support for increasing the role of government intrusion into the most intimate and private decisions we make. Leaders of the Republican Party interfered directly with the family's end-of-life decisions in the Terry Schiavo case. Republicans supported the Bush policy of illegal wire tapping and the erosion of our civil liberties through illegal arrests and suspension of habeas corpus. These gross expansions of government power under conservative rule are the first death throes, the initial terminal spasms, as traditional Republicans leave a Party that has left them.
Republican Claim: We are fiscal conservatives who want a small government, while Democrats just want to tax and spend their way to ever bigger government.
Reality: Republicans expanded a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, with no means to pay the $400 billion price tag. Republicans created the swollen Transportation Security Administration and the resource hungry Department of Homeland Security. Republicans implemented the largest tax increase in U.S. history under the leadership of their beloved Ronald Reagan. He was forced to do so following his tax cuts because the philosophy of trickle-down economics proved disastrous. Reagan was responsible for the most bloated growth of the federal government. Reagan created, with his proposed budgets (not that of the Democratic Congress), the largest debts and deficits in history at that time. Then we have Bush, who epitomizes financial mismanagement. He ballooned our debt to $10 trillion and exploded our deficits in an orgy of profligate spending with no off-setting revenue. Only when a Democrat sits in the Oval Office do Republicans become concerned with the national debt. They suddenly become "worried" about spending. We see here the second spasm of death for the GOP as more moderates abandon the Party in the face of this hypocrisy, leaving behind an increasingly extreme core.
Republican Claim: We are the Party of family values.
Republican Reality: The GOP is the Party of sex scandals, gay love and divorce. Nevada Senator John Ensign had an affair with a campaign staffer. Mark Sanford cheated on his wife while pretending to uphold family values as the governor of conservative South Carolina. John McCain, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani had sordid affairs followed by ugly divorces, all the while touting family values on the national scene. U.S. Representative Mark Foley liked male pages, urging one to "get a ruler and measure it for me." Ted Haggard, then head of the National Association of Evangelicals, apparently paid male prostitutes for sex while using crystal meth. He held weekly meetings with George Bush, teaching the president that homosexuality is an abomination. U.S. Senator Larry Craig was charged with soliciting sex in an airport bathroom. He was a vocal, loud and prominent opponent of gay marriage. Bob Allen, a Republican Congressman in the Florida House of Representatives, was charged with paying an undercover cop $20.00 for the pleasure of offering the officer oral sex. He was an active sponsor of anti-gay legislation. Glen Murphy, Jr., while National Chairman of Young Republicans, allegedly got some young Republicans drunk, and then decided to practice oral sex on the inebriated. Republican State Representative Richard Curtis from Spokane, Washington was involved in a gay sex scandal. Donald Fleischman, Chairman of the Republican Party in Brown County in Green Bay, WI, was ensnared in his own scandal of homosexual yearnings. This list is not comprehensive, and excludes the more than 4000 priests who have faced sex abuse charges in the past 50 years, involving more than 10,000 kids, mostly boys. Another death spasm, another breeze from the gentle wind.
Republican Claim: The free market functions best with minimal regulation and interference from the government.
Republican Reality: When lax regulation bordering on criminal neglect and a policy of looking the other way as bankers and brokers raped the American people finally led to financial collapse, Republicans quickly set aside their rhetoric about the magic of the market. They turned immediately to the government that Reagan famously claimed was "the problem not the solution" to solve the problem of their own making. The GOP used government funding to bail out Wall Street through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), an effort inspired and implemented by a Republican administration and supported by a critical mass of conservative allies on the Hill. This may represent the final death throes of the Party as all pretenses at fiscal responsibility and rationality are abandoned. As the winds of crazy blow, these same folks wail in complaint when Obama uses government funds to clean up their mess.
The realities of governance have shredded the ideals of the Republican Party beyond recognition. The GOP is not the party of small government and lower taxes. They are the Party of borrow and spend, big government and sex scandals. They are the Party of governors who cut and run midterm and who skulk to Argentina for a tryst with a foreign lover. They are the Party of fabrication and lies. What remains are the inanities of O'Reilly and the absurdities of Glenn Beck. The latter claimed in 2008 that we have a broken health care system designed to do nothing but push patients out the door when he was treated for an unspecified condition. He claimed is surgery went "horribly awry" and that his hospital care was "phenomenally bad." Yet one year later we endure his shrill railing against Obama for tinkering with "the best health care system in the world." You could not make this stuff up. This shrill rhetoric is perhaps the final push on the swing before going over the top of the bar out of control.
The violent extremism of the Republican Party seen in the health care debate is likely the last gasp of a terminal patient. Sadly, "the best health care system in the world" will be unable to save the GOP from death. After all, our hospitals are "phenomenally bad."
Witness the destruction wrought by the resonant frequency of crazy.
Follow Jeff Schweitzer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Jeff Schweitzer
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I, too, see the Republican party spitting. With the religious, gun/suvivlist, anti-NWO conspiracists going off the radar (an "America First" or "American Family" party?). I love the mention of LaRouche. The true moderate will join up with the Blue Dogs / Boll Weevil dems. Moderate Dems are esentially the Moderate Repubs of old and bipartisanship today is to simply get the full democratic tent to agree. I see the loose alliance between these surviving moderates and Libertarians as probable, if the Moderate party chooses a libertarian stance on social issues. The remaining Dems could woo Libertarians with fiscal constraint, but not likely. While I logically see this happening, I cannot decide if it is good, how it will affect me personally, what the demographics will be or even how I will fit in.
George Soros and the progressive democrats, whose messenger will not oblige to his constitutional obligation to prove that he is an American citizen and will say anything the teleprompter tells him to say, has created legislations such as the Stimulus Bill, the Equal Pay Bill, the Global Poverty Bill, the Tobacco Bill, the Climate Change Bill, the upcoming Health Reform Bill and the UN sponsored Bill that will force Americans to pay a global tax, will bring America to a $2 trillion dollars deficit and cause this country to self distrust.
Cybercorrespondent
Where were you when Bush created the first trillion dollar deficit? Did you warn that the country was going to self-destruct when he obligated us to a $400 billion drug program with no means to pay for it? Do you worry about self-destructing when our government let Wall Street rape the American people? You would have bit more credibility if you expressed some concern when Bush was shredding our constitution, imploding our economy and going to war on false pretense. And your "birther" credentials completely undermine your comments as having any rational basis at all. Obama proved his citizenship -- get over it.
Beautifully put, Dr. Schweitzer. You have laid out, in extremely informative language, the essence of the Republican. THANK YOU!
I see the Republican party splitting, with the theocratic part going one way and the small-government part going the other - probably to the Libertarian Party. Much of the hypocrisy highlighted in this article is due to incompatibilities between these two ideologies.
Given the shameful infant mortality rate in this country largely due to the unavailability of health care, those who oppose the public option are clearly baby killers. Any time the government attempts to step up and discharge their responsibility for promoting the public interest, the right wing Republicans scream bloody murder about socialism or some other such drivel. They don't recognize that there is such a thing as the public interest. The only thing they want government to do is to enable them to feed their insatiable greed.
Why did Barack Obama attack pharmaceutical companies before and now he has teamed up with them to promote his health care plan? Why are all the tort lawyers big democratic supporters and multi-millionaires? Obama’s true intentions are so obvious that even the left is starting to express concerns. For example, on August 10, CBS Evening News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson filed a report stating that “the White House agreed not to seek price controls on drugs for seniors on Medicare and would not support importing cheaper drugs from Canada.” According to Attkisson, “The pharmaceutical industry is now so firmly in the President's camp it's developing plans to spend up to $150 billion promoting it with TV ads.”
According to the acting president of Public Citizen and founder and director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, “An all sort of off the record deal was reached that is very bad for the American public.” Other experts say that for their cooperation, Obama is allowing pharmaceutical companies to charge $50 for a $2 pill and is assuring them that there will be no changes to the laws that make it near impossible for less expensive generic drugs to reach the American market.
Unless tort lawyers, the pharmaceutical lobby and other special interest groups like the AMA, ADA and the AARP are dealt with to preserves the Constitution and the free market system, while also protecting the medical provider and consumer, no healthcare plan can work.
Cybercorrespondent
Let me make sure I understand. If we somehow deny people the right of redress for negligent care, we can all have negligent care? Where will you stand when one of your family is hurt by some negligent doctor? On the side of the doctor? Give me a break.
If the civil tort system is abolished, exactly how will victims of medical negligence get redress? Through a government program? Good luck getting that through Congress.
It's comical hearing people on the right expressing their fear of their healthcare being rationed. I changed companies recently, and was denied longterm disability coverage by my new employers insurer. Why? Because I take anti-depressants. My depression has never lead to me taking any kind of leave from work, didn't stop me from getting two university degrees, has never lead me to make an attempt on my own life, commit an act of violence or abuse drugs or alcohol. But there mere fact that I have taken anti-depressants for a few years means I can't get LTD. Even if I were, for example, to be injured in a car accident I would not be covered. THAT"S NOT RATIONING?! What the hell is?
But elderly baby-boomers were not affected by this, so they do not understand it. It is not a talking point of Faux, not a twitter by Paln. Just because it happens to millions, doesn't mean it will enter the right wing discussion.
It would be so nice to think that the Republican party would somehow self-destruct under the weight of it's own distortions and desperation.
Trouble is that the Democrats reaction to all the crazy from the right is to capitulate. Why push back against Republican lies about health care reform when you can back down instead. "See ya, Public Option!!"
The Democrats are a case study in Stockholm Syndrome.
Have the house progressives not drawn a line in the sand? The senate only has 5 senators standing in the way of reform. Primary them like we in PA are with Specter and you'll get your public option. He's been voting 97% (according to Nate Silver) with the Dems since we primaried him. Not so much before.
You're absolutely right. I should have said Democratic leaders. I posted this before I heard about the 100 progressives in the house. They give me a little bit of hope. I'm so used to Pelosi capitulating to the Republicans that I didn't expect her to take a stand on this.
I have long thought that the Republican party is morally bankrupt. Now they are crazy as well. I simply cannot believe what is coming from that party. Charles Grassley has clearly gone over the edge. If I could afford it they would make me sick!
You want to compare sex scandals? Ted Kennedy, #1 by a long shot killed his lover.
Bill Clinton, taking advantage of a young woman in the white house and lying about it.
John Edwards, cheating on his cancer stricken wife while using (probably) campaign $ to shuttle his sweetie around.
You're reaching all the way back to Ted Kennedy? Kind of proves my point.
I agree completely about John Edwards -- the guy proved to be a complete dog, a hypocrite of the worst kind.
You don't get a pass on Clinton; your friends tried to impeach the president for lying about sex, all the while they were having affairs themselves, and lying to staff, spouses and the public about it.
And how long ago was it that McCain had his affair that you mentioned?
Clinton does not get a pass, he was President of the United States at the time, Not only was he deceiving his family, he purposely lied to the american public and the court system. What a guy.
The BIG difference...the Dems never claimed to be the party of family values and the moral superior.
We all know the Dems have no family values, they don't need to claim otherwise.
Another awesome blog! Thanks Jeff!
I'm from the Puget Sound area, so I loved the comparison to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. For those who aren't familiar with this reference, see this clip from YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mclp9QmCGs.
(you start to see the action around 1 min)
To further the analogy, we now have not only one bridge but two Tacoma Narrows bridges to handle the increased traffic. Perhaps from the wreckage of the current Republican Party will come two stronger parties to serve more people. It truly is not the Republican ideas that I have a problem with, it is, as Jeff states, the "resonant frequency of crazy" that is so disheartening to those of us who simply want intellegent discussions about issues. If Republicans and perhaps a third independent party can come to the table in good faith to discuss solutions to our country's problems, I'm all for that.
I agree; I would love to see reasonable opposition to keep us on track toward the middle; we all know that Democrats can veer sharply left when unattended by adults.
I'm an Independent and I totally agree. We need discussion and opposition of ideas. Frequently that's where the good ideas are hammered out, or a belief in a good idea is verified. Liberal and conservative are actually stronger if there's a healthy tension and discussion.
But the moment the GOP took in the Dixiecrats and adopted the Southern Strategy (who on earth decided racism is a strategy and expects to be taken as a moral authority?) which speaking of moral leads to the moral majority and the climbing into the embrace of the evangelical far right. (Not to be confused with actual Christians, who know politics and church don't belong together.) On to the denegration of education and the dumbing down of their voters exacerbated by the propaganda from Rupert's Murdoch's crew....well the Republican party ceased to be a conservative party. They just became crazy people as summed up so well by Dr. Schweitzer.
From your keyboard to God's eyes & ears.
I would feel better, if it went from his keyboard to *The People's* eyes & ears!
Then Jeff's words might really have an effect!
Democratic governing strategy: solid majorities in both Houses lack the stones to pass legislation without Repubs to hide behind; then call ordinary Americans "stupid Nazis" for opposing the highly partisan Pelosi health bill.
We'll see how well this works out in 2010.
I guess those statistics would easily explain the results from the last presidential election. I'll see you in 2010.
Democrats are not calling opponents Nazis; you have that exactly backward; opponents are calling Obama a Nazi. Geez. At least get the basics right.
From todays news:
"Self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states of the union, according to the Gallup Poll".
I guess those conservatives are voting democratic now. .
In many ways, modern Democratic platforms resemble, if not outright reflect, Republican positions. The truth is the Left is like the old noble Right and the new Right doesn't even sit on the political scale anymore.
From what I understand, Cap & Trade was originally a Republican bill...even the infamous "Death Panels" were originally Republican notions that have been passed along until the "new" right could lambaste the very things they used to support while the "new" Left falls into taking up their old political positions.
The "new" right isn't Conservative or Republican but is, in fact, some bizarre chimera-like form of embryonic religio-fascism. The Goldwater "Right", or the real right before Reagan hijacked it, are, sadly, no where to be seen or heard (McCain being one of few exceptions in the last election).
I agree 100%. Todays Democrats want lower taxes and less government, just like the Repubs of old. We really are the enlightened ones.
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