Plan B Forum

Broken Windows, Broken States

Years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase 'defining deviancy down.' James Q. Wilson popularized the conceptually related "broken windows" theory of crime and crime prevention. Whether or not these theories and catch phrases work as sociology is separate question; subsequent research has not been kind. But they capture the toxic consequences of the normalization and expanded acceptance of destructive behavior - something that not only applies to individuals and communities but to states and their internal workings. Stepping back from the latest Washington debacle, you quickly see how far down this road we've gone without really even realizing it.

It has started to feel normal that two or three times a year we have a major state/fiscal crisis and maybe once every 18 months or two years, there is a true breakdown with fairly grave consequences. The last time was in the summer of 2011. We have a very good chance of another next week and something even more catastrophic next month.

Despite the fact that it hasn't occurred since 1996, at this point, given the possibilities on offer, a government shutdown seems almost prosaic. Countless citizens are inconvenienced in ways large and small. But you can start the thing back up again in a week and apart from a mini-shock to the economy probably everything goes back to working fine. The thing with truly catastrophic potential and permanent damage is defaulting on the national debt - the possibility of which is mind-boggling in the absence of actual state bankruptcy, war or civil disorder.

I'm not even sure what to say about it because it's the new normal. We know it. We live it. But this is really unprecedented stuff - deep attacks on the state itself inasmuch as the state requires for it to function a penumbra of norms surrounding the formal mechanisms of government.

Right now you might theorize that 'Obamacare' has somehow become such an idee fixe on the American right that some sort of cataclysmic confrontation is inevitable. But that theory doesn't really hold up because for the previous two years it was austerity and dramatic fiscal retrenchment that merited threatening to default on the federal debt to deal with.

For all the ubiquity of political polarizing and heightened partisanship, no honest observer can deny that the rise of crisis governance and various forms of legislative hostage taking comes entirely from the GOP. I hesitate to state it so baldly because inevitably it cuts off the discussion with at least a sizable minority of the political nation. But there's no way to grapple with the issue without being clear on this single underlying reality. Sufficient evidence of this comes from 2007 and 2008 when Democrats won resounding majorities in Congress and adopted exactly none of these tactics with an already quite unpopular President Bush. This is the reality that finally brought Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, two of DC's most arbiters of political standards and practices, fastidiously sober, even-handed and high-minded, to finally just throw up their hands mid-last-year and say "Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem."

Many people say that the danger is that the Democrats, reasonably enough, will adopt the same tactics once they are back in a comparable position. I worry about that too. But not that much. I think the reality is that they won't because the sociology and mores of the parties are just different.

It has become so pervasive that I believe it's lost on many of us just how far down the road of state breakdown and decay we've already gone. It is starting to seem normal what is not normal at all.

The Sociology of Ruin and Collapse

About your post this evening...it goes back just a couple of years, to the last government shutdown crisis in 2011, and I don't think that's far enough to understand what's happened to the Republican Party, or at least to the GOP in Congress.

Remember that up to the beginning of 2007 the Republicans had not only the White House but majorities in both houses of Congress. They'd held them for some time. They had the power to set the agenda for the country, for several years, and then they lost it.

The Republicans who lost it were mostly those the media speaks of as "responsible" Republicans now -- people who either worked in the Bush administration or were that administration's most faithful water carriers on Capitol Hill. In the last years of Bush's administration his approval ratings crashed to historic lows, taking those of his party with it. And then the economy collapsed.

It is all too easy to think of today's GOP in Congress as a party in which the animals have taken over the zoo. It has people who are unhinged by the idea of Obamacare, or are bought by monied interests, or are bitter about the idea of a black President, or are just slackwits and poseurs, according to this line of thought. And the GOP has all of those things.

But what it also has is a decapitation problem. The leaders of the GOP up until a few years ago lost all credibility with the public -- including some of the Republican public -- and no one has emerged to take their place. This is actually a product of the dominance of the Bush administration (and the Bush campaign infrastructure, not necessarily in that order) within the party beginning in 2001. No major Republican who came into public view before 2009 has any record of having clashed with America's least popular modern President on anything important (apart from how much to beat up on Hispanic immigrants). With that President and his record now thoroughly discredited, the door is open to some pretty weird stuff.

Recall that the Republican Party went through a crisis in the mid-1970s during the Watergate period. At that time, it was able to turn to a number of well-known Republicans who shared many of the substantive positions taken by the disgraced Nixon administration but were not identified with Nixon himself. Ronald Reagan, obviously, was the most prominent of those. The GOP itself was able to use the aftermath of the Watergate disaster as an opportunity for growth.

It's hard to see how that happens now. Reagan could campaign as the loyal, principled un-Nixon Republican in the late '70s, as could many others; even today's Tea Partiers don't acknowledge the depth and scope of the disasters visited on the country by Bush and his people. They denounce Washington, and spenders, and "the left," in passionate, even fevered tones, and have no one within the Party with standing to slap them down. They also have a very influential permanent campaign infrastructure with a vested interest in encouraging the idea that one good election cycle will put Republicans back in the driver's seat in Washington.

The Tea Party tree has roots planted in the century's first decade. The strife within the party is really a battle between people who prospered during the Bush period and people trying to drive the GOP toward something else -- toward less government today, maybe toward something else tomorrow.

dgs49 wrote: Well then...I guess it's a question of where you sit.