A Blight Across the Land

Here is a key bit from an excellent article by Paul Krugman in the NY Times:

... surveying current politics, I find myself missing Richard Nixon.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Nixon was surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch.

But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system’s ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.

As many people have pointed out, Nixon’s proposal for health care reform looks a lot like Democratic proposals today. In fact, in some ways it was stronger. Right now, Republicans are balking at the idea of requiring that large employers offer health insurance to their workers; Nixon proposed requiring that all employers, not just large companies, offer insurance.

Nixon also embraced tighter regulation of insurers, calling on states to “approve specific plans, oversee rates, ensure adequate disclosure, require an annual audit and take other appropriate measures.” No illusions there about how the magic of the marketplace solves all problems.

So what happened to the days when a Republican president could sound so nonideological, and offer such a reasonable proposal?

Part of the answer is that the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence. Whom are Democrats supposed to reach out to, when Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was supposed to be the linchpin of any deal, helped feed the “death panel” lies?

But there’s another reason health care reform is much harder now than it would have been under Nixon: the vast expansion of corporate influence.

Go read the whole article. There are more details about lobbyists and the corruption of politics.

In American history the ground has shifted many times, but it is so slow that most don't see it. In the mid-19th century, the Democrats were the party of racism while the Republicans held a higher moral standard and gave a home to the abolitionists. But during the Goldwater/Nixon years the ground shifted and the solid Democratic South became the solid Republican South as the Republicans became the racist party and the Democrats moved from being big city machine and Southern racists to a more liberal inclusive party.

But as Krugman points out, it isn't just that the party positions change over time, you can have eras in which the big tent parties overlap and consensus is possible. But you can also have times when ideology is rampant and compromise is impossible. Prior to the Civil War fights in the Congress were not just pyrotechnics of words, Congressmen beat each other and called for duels to the death. It was ugly. Today is once again an ugly time. Fanatics have seized the Republican party. This has poisoned the political arena.

As Krugman points out:

There was a lot of talk last year about how Barack Obama would be a “transformational” president — but true transformation, it turns out, requires a lot more than electing one telegenic leader. Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system.