The party of bad faith
Republicans pretend to care about things they don’t
Over the past couple of months, Republicans have passed or proposed three big budget initiatives. First, they enacted a springtimefor-plutocrats tax cut that will shower huge benefits on the wealthy while offering crumbs for ordinary families. Then they signed on to a what-me-worry budget deal that will blow up the deficit to levels never seen except during wars or severe recessions. Finally, the Trump administration released a vicious budget proposal that would punish not just the vulnerable but also most working families.
All this should infuriate you. But your anger should be directed not only at Republicans but also at their enablers: the professional centrists, both-sides pundits and news organizations that have spent years refusing to acknowledge what the modern GOP actually is.
To be sure, American history is full of politicians and parties that pursued nefarious ends. The pre-Civil War Democratic Party was largely devoted to preserving slavery. But I can’t think of a party that so consistently acted in bad faith as today’s GOP — pretending to care about things it didn’t, pretending to serve goals that were the opposite of its actual intentions.
Recall, for example, the grim warnings from Republicans about the dangers of budget deficits. House Speaker Paul Ryan declared that our “crushing burden of debt” would create an economic crisis. Then came the opportunity to pass a $1.5 trillion tax cut targeted on the rich and suddenly all worries about the deficit temporarily disappeared.
Now that the tax cut is law, of course, deficit-hawk rhetoric is back — not as a reason to reconsider the tax breaks but to cut food stamps and Medicaid. We knew this was going to happen, but I expected the fake deficit hawks to wait a little longer before resuming their act.
You also may recall how Republican sposed as defenders of Medicare, accusing the Obama administration of planning to cut $500 billion from the program to pay for the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare did seek substantial savings in Medicare by, for instance, ending overpayments to insurance companies. But so did Republican proposals. And Donald Trump, who promised during the campaign not to cut Medicare or Medicaid, is now proposing draconian cutsin both programs.
Whyhave Republicans become so overwhelmingly the party of bad faith? (And not just about budgets; remember when Republicans cared deeply about a president’s sexual morality?) Probably because the party’s true agenda, dictated by superwealthy donors, would be very unpopular if the public understood it. So the party must consistently lie about its priorities and intentions.
The GOP’s bad faith has been apparent for a long time. Yet the gatekeepers of our public discourse have beenwillfully blind to this reality. Take, for example, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a think tank that can be a useful resource for budget analysis. Still, back in 2010, the committee gave Mr. Ryan — whose fraudulence was obvious to anyone who actually read hisproposals — an award for fiscal responsibility.
Even now the committee is busy pontificating about the need to reform the “budget process.” Let’s get real. The problem isn’t the process, it’s the Republicans.
Meanwhile, many news organizations treat recent GOP actions as if they are a departure from previous principles. They aren’t. Republicans never cared about deficits, and they always wanted to dismantle Medicare, not defend it. They just happen not to be who they pretended to be.
It’s clear why many people won’t face up to the reality of Republican bad faith. Washington is full of professional centrists, whose personas are built around a carefully cultivated image of standing above the partisan fray, which means they can’t admit that, while there are dishonest politicians everywhere, one party basically lies about everything. News outlets are intimidated by accusations of liberal bias, so they try desperately to show “balance” by blaming both parties equally for all problems.
But the job of policy analysts and journalists isn’t to be “balanced”; it’s to tell the truth. And while Democrats are hardly angels, at this point in American history, the truth has a well-known liberal bias.