Big Top metaphors must be trendy. My friend Bill recently
paraphrased the argument of one libertarian writer
as “Paul Krugman is a bozo.” Not to be outdone, White House advisor
David Plouffe borrowed an image from the midway to denounce Donald
Trump for “sideshow behavior.” But even as fun-loving billionaire
Trump continues to mix policy with conspiracy theory, neither he
nor Krugman is likely to push Washington Post columnist
E.J. Dionne, Jr. out from under the center ring spotlight.
Dionne careened into his
most recent essay on a tirade against the “absurd, irrational,
and wholly unnecessary confrontation over whether to shut down the
federal government,” and what he saw looking out his back door were
Tea Party rally-goers cheering a speech from a “fire-eating”
Indiana Congressman. Of course, “fire-eating” in this context meant
“failing to agree with E.J. Dionne.” If, like me, you associate
fire eating with George C. Scott wearing an Army uniform in front
of an American flag, or Slim Pickens riding an atomic bomb like a
rodeo bull, or (on the few occasions when metaphors sleep soundly)
shows at Hawaii’s Polynesian Cultural Center, then you’re not from
the echo chamber where progressive pundits amuse each other by
sticking pins in wax figurines of conservative lawmakers or writing
variations on “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”
To hear E.J. Dionne and his amen chorus on the
heavily-barnacled flagships of American journalism tell it, the
near-shutdown of the federal government was clear evidence of “the
high cost of hating government.”
What Dionne and the Bon Mots make of those Democrats who
welcomed the prospect of a shutdown if it could be turned to their
advantage, they do not say. They are sure that the president was
determined to avoid a shutdown, but the evidence for that is
inconclusive at best. You could make an equally convincing case
that President Obama tried again to vote “present”
rather than “yea” or “nay.” One colleague of Dionne’s (columnist
Eugene Robinson) lent credence to that idea by
describing recent Democrat tactics as an ineffective mix of
caucusing, cogitating, and ruminating. “Leading” wasn’t on his list
but could not have been; the only Democrat tactic he seems to have
missed was “scaring women and children.”
The Tea Party movement, far from hating government, simply
wants to see federal power exercised exclusively within its
original Constitutional limits. The driving force behind this
resurgent conservatism is positive, not negative. Tea Partiers are
not united by a conviction that government as such is evil, but by
a conviction that accountability and subsidiarity are good, and
that — as Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan put it recently —
“You cannot lift an economy when it is crushed beneath the weight
of Big Government.”
Dionne will not accept any part of the Tea Party critique,
because it contradicts the “banana republic” narrative that he and
other left-leaning pundits are starting to prefer. For them, the
peasants are revolting, in every sense of that word. Dionne seems
to think that the odds of finding a reasonable Tea Party member are
on par with the odds of landing a job as an orchestra conductor in
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
You have to think that your political opponents are evil
to write things like “in no serious country do threats to shut down
the government become a routine way of doing business,” while
conveniently ignoring the fact that there would have been no budget
fight this year if the previous Congress had actually done its job.
And as long as we’re looking at Dionne’s implied definition of
“serious government,” do you think he’d mind if we ask whether
serious governments fund abortions, pretend that abortions are
routine “health
care” procedures, dabble in eugenics, and hold even national
parks hostage to funding for
Planned Parenthood?
Dionne changed horses late in his column by admitting that
the whole “hating government” thing was a sham, because “the vast
majority of Americans” oppose government shutdowns. The problem he
railed against then became “recklessness in pursuit of political
victory,” Predictably, the “recklessness” to which he alluded had
nothing to do with the presidential penchant for redistribution as
“stimulus,” or the strange hold that “family planning services”
have on Democrat imaginations.
Despite all the clown car-packing that Dionne did in
thirteen paragraphs and his tedious libel of Tea Partiers as
disrespectful fanatics, I do have to give him credit for one
sensible comment. “Threatening the functioning of the public sphere
is not an acceptable tactic in a democracy,” he wrote, and he’s
right, although he’d have done better to say that to the Wisconsin
legislators who skipped the state rather than vote, or the SEIU
functionaries who routinely slander the people who disagree with
them. Where Dionne and his fellow travelers are almost invincibly
wrong is in assuming that the federal government is solely
responsible for maintaining “the public sphere” in these United
States. Are there no civics lessons in circus school?
