It was the day after Rand Paul’s filibuster of John Brennan’s
nomination, and all was not well at MSNBC. Lawrence O’Donnell
took to the cameras to accuse Paul of being “empty-headed” and
pulling a “stunt.” The Kentucky senator was guilty of “spewing
infantile fantasies about a serious subject” that might turn off
mature critics of President Obama’s drone program.
O’Donnell then brought in guests E.J. Dionne and Ryan Grim.
Usually the interview segments on Lawrence’s show consist of
everyone sitting inside a warm intellectual bubble, exchanging
insufferable smirks and musings about how Republicans don’t believe
in the Theory of Relativity. Then someone inevitably exacerbates
his carpal tunnel from patting his own back too many times,
O’Donnell takes a commercial break, and returns five minutes later
for his “Rewrite” segment where he shouts at the camera in a fake
Boston accent. But this time was different. Dionne and Grim
(tepidly) defended Paul, leaving the flaxen-haired host sputtering.
“Rand Paul is stark-raving mad!!” O’Donnell projected.
Paul’s filibuster has produced some lane-swerving on both the
right and left. For conservatives, it came in the form of tension
between the small-government and hawkish wings of the movement. For
liberals, it was bumbling confusion, with a few standing with Rand,
others mumbling caution, and many more calling him a lunatic.
This debate on the right was always going to occur. Following
the difficulties of the Iraq war and the ascendancy of Barack
Obama, conservatism has been moving in a more libertarian
direction. But for the left – the same people who spent the Bush
Administration in high dudgeon about civil liberties abuses, and
often spoke in far harsher terms than Paul — there is no excuse.
Liberals across the board should have been hailing Paul’s
filibuster as a necessary check on executive power.
So why weren’t they?
Some of it can be explained by the fact that their guy is in the
White House. This is a problem not just for the left, but political
parties in general. If Rand Paul were filibustering President
Bush’s drone program, it’s difficult to imagine the GOP Senate
leadership paying him any heed, let alone joining him on the floor.
Likewise, Democrats are going to be reluctant to criticize Barack
Obama. Such is politics.
But I think there’s something deeper and more sinister at work
here: The American left has dedicated much of its energy over the
past three years to marginalizing its political opponents. Whether
the right is asking for spending cuts, entitlement reform, or an
investigation into the Benghazi attack, the response is always the
same: conservatives are deranged nuts and their argument is the new
Birtherism.
The urge to cry crazy has run deep into the roots of American
liberalism. Newspaper columnists have devoted gallons of ink to the
seemingly limited proposition that House Republicans are insane.
Some writers, like the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky, seem
incapable of writing about anything else. MSNBC commentators
chortle their way through segments, utterly impervious to the
notion that someone out there might take deficit reduction or the
strict constructionism seriously. Those ideas, you see, are
crazy.
It’s often asked whether conservatives have become too hateful
of the president. This is a fair question; hatred, though it wakes
you up in the morning and keeps the embers burning at night, can
only advance you so far before logical argument must take over. But
there’s a flip side to this question that rarely gets asked: Have
liberals become so contemptuous of Republicans, has calling
conservatives insane become so burrowed in the leftist critique,
that the left risks marginalizing itself?
Consider the recent health care arguments before the Supreme
Court. Conservatives started making a constitutional case against
Obamacare in 2009. A
New York Times/CBS News poll showed that 68% of
respondents supported overturning either some or all of the law.
Yet the left remained in smug hibernation, fully content that the
Supreme Court would see through conservatives’ craziness. “[J]ust a
few years ago,” wrote a drowsily
awakening Linda Greenhouse a few months before the ruling, “the
constitutional argument against the [Obamacare individual] mandate
struck most people who thought about the matter as frivolous.”
After the justices knocked around the Obama Administration’s
lawyers, the left sat bolt-upright in bed. “I’m telling you all of
the predictions – including mine – that the justices would not have
a problem with this law were wrong,” said
a panicked Jeffrey Toobin. Were it not for John Roberts’
waffling, the Supreme Court would have struck down Obamacare
entirely on the basis of a legal argument the left derided as nuts
and unworthy of serious debate.
The left didn’t mothball their “crazy!” accusations then. But
now there’s some evidence that things are starting to change. It
began with the sequester. Republicans decided early on to let the
automatic spending cuts take effect, and several liberals responded
by instinctively calling this crazy. But then the debate aligned in
an unfamiliar way: conservatives were rationally explaining why
sequestration cuts would have a minor impact, while the president
was embarrassing himself with apocalyptic fantasies of starving
first responders and poison in the food supply. Since it was Obama
who seemed outlandish, the cries of crazy didn’t stick.
Then came the Paul filibuster, which twisted liberals into
horrible contortions. If their conduct during the Bush
Administration is any indication, most progressives support Paul’s
concerns. But to say so would be an acknowledgement that Paul, a
man who they’ve spent the past three years fitting for a
straitjacket, is not only right, but did more to sound the alarm
about civil liberties abuses than they ever have.
For many, the solution was to seize on a few of the rough edges
from Paul’s 13-hour speech and use them to dismiss the filibuster
altogether. Paul had cited George Orwell’s 1984 and raised
an entirely hypothetical and hyperbolic example of a drone bombing
Jane Fonda. Thus James Carville could still comfortably compare
everything
to Birtherism. The smirks were back in place. Crying crazy
could go on.
But as with Obamacare, their dismissiveness is running against
the trend. Paul’s filibuster energized the GOP, brought
conservatives and libertarians together, aligned Republicans with
young people, and gave the right a much-needed dose of passion.
It’s a lot harder to smirk someone down when the popular culture
(even
Jon Stewart!) disagrees with you. Suddenly the left appears
vacuous and hypocritical.
George Will wrote in
2000 that “The Gore campaign is like an old jalopy with one
gear — fear overdrive.” Today the progressive’s functional gear
isn’t fear (although that still comes up), but dismissive
accusations of insanity. The left, which once fought for civil
rights and liberties, is becoming a clutch of mandarins, holding
the Overton Window in place and emitting grunts of superiority
towards any who try to move it.
As we’re now seeing, this can only work for so long. “Crazy,”
like “stupid” and “dumb,” is a fine adjective when you’re engaged
in interlocution with first-grade boys on the swing set. But as the
crux of a political argument, it gets a bit stale.
