So, in yesterday’s post on USDA school lunch guidelines, I got into a bit of a debate with commenter reflectionephemeral who counters my argument about making reasonable accommodation to anti-Washington sentiment. He writes:
You think that this kind of thing is reasonably perceived as overreach, so why not knock it off and maybe diminish the vague, inchoate sense that “the government is too big”. I’m of the view that as long as there’s a GOP & a right-wing paramedia that feels the need to foment suspicion and hatred of America whenever they’re out of power, it doesn’t much matter what happens around the edges. In a world where Bob Dole & Jesse Helms’ health insurance reform plan can suddenly be decried by everyone in the GOP as unconstitutional fascist tyranny– thereby driving down the plan’s support in public opinion polls– there’s no sense trying to meet in the middle. The point, for Republicans, is the tantrum itself, not the ostensible policy reason for it. And they are great at getting their message out. So now we have greater public concern over the deficit than we did when the Republican Party was busy creating the deficit.
When NPR fired that guy because James O’Keefe released a clip of him saying something that made it sound like he was being mean to the Tea Party, it didn’t result in the right ceasing its highly effective PR campaign against the “liberal media”. They’re gonna keep on saying it no matter what the media does, because it works for them, and it seeps into the public consciousness.
I think this confuses the issue a bit. I fully agree that no amount of accommodation is going to result in reasonable behavior from right-wing ideologues. There is, in the United States, a core of, for lack of a better phrase, “neo-Confederates” committed to nothing short of dismantling the federal government as we know it. This neo-Confederate core is somewhat diverse. Some are effectively white supremacists. Others are just greedy f__ks, looking to do whatever it takes to reduce their tax burden to something approaching zero. And yes, as a practical matter, this neo-Confederate core currently runs the Republican party. But, but, but. Just as there are indeed many “accidental guerillas” in places like Afghanistan, there are also “accidental wingnuts” in the United States.
Look, most people do not pay much attention to politics. Even people with extreme views are often (usually) woefully ill-informed. Most people are heavily influenced by anecdotes, by idiosyncratic experiences. These people are the tacit supporters of right-wing fanaticism. The don’t vote Republican because they consciously want to overturn the civil rights movement. They are just people who are concerned about “reverse racism” because their cousin’s friend’s uncle missed out on a job at the DMV because of a quota. Or something. They don’t know the guy. Don’t know the details. It is just something they heard.
They are the sorts of people who become receptive to anti-DC sentiment when their plumber tells them he can only install a low-flow toilet, that, you know, always clogs. The sort of people who get annoyed when their kids come home from school and announces that the school won’t serve chocolate milk in the cafeteria because of some new government rule. And so on.
I am not saying we can do anything about the radical neo-Confederate core. All we can do with them is fight them tooth and nail. Defeat them in elections. Shame them through exposure. Boycott their businesses. And so on.
But we can do things to reduce their appeal, their surface plausibility. We can isolate them from their tacit supporters, the accidental Confederates, by pushing for a more judicious use of federal power, particularly in cases where the rewards are, at best, small.
An example is school lunches. RE concludes his comments by writing:
As to “who cares”, this admittedly too-high-sounding number from last year is part of why I’m a little less receptive to this particular local-rights argument than I might be:
In a startling new study from Share Our Strength, a national non-profit dedicated to ending childhood hunger in American, 86% of teachers say that many of their kids are coming to school hungry and 65% say that most kids rely on school meals as their primary source of nutrition.
But, you see, the USDA guideline are designed to REDUCE caloric intake, not increase it. One of the guideline is about sodium intake, which doesn’t even do much about the “plague” of childhood obesity, which, btw, has little to do with school lunches anyway. We’re not talking about setting a minimum standard to alleviate hunger. We’re talking about a silly, one-size-fits-all approach to healthy eating for children. It is unnecessary as a matter of substance, and it is terrible as a matter of politics.
Thanks for taking the time to respond to my comment.
At the end of the day here, I think, we’re both making somewhat unverifiable empirical arguments. Your argument is that if we had fewer semi-annoying federal intrusions, e.g. on toilets and light bulbs, then there would be less receptivity to antigovernment rhetoric. Which is a plausible enough argument. My argument is that the Republican Party’s four decades of antigovernment talking points have seeped into our public consciousness. In a large, complex, modern society, there will always be some private or public bureaucracy to be outraged about, if the goal is outrage. If the antigovernment PR campaign stopped– as it did in the Bush Jr. era– then people wouldn’t really be that mad at the government about their toilet. Or at least, they wouldn’t take their toilet irritation as a reason to write letters, join protests, donate money to politicians, etc. Then, I maintain, people who don’t pay much attention to politics, who I think are inclined to take a “both sides have some points but go too far sometimes” view, wouldn’t be hearing about Big Bad Gubmint all the time, and wouldn’t draw any larger meaning from the demise of chocolate milk then they do from a frustrating interaction with a cable or electronics company.
If you can design an experiment to test which of the two of us is right, well, my hat’s off to you. But the light bulb issue you brought up seems to me to be a telling example.
Pres. Bush signed an uncontroversial, bipartisan bill into law in 2007 that provided for new energy standards, some to take effect in 2012. In the interim, the GOP lost control of the executive, causing them to remember that they hated the government. So we got the customary, massive effort from the GOP to make people mad about something by lying about it repeatedly at high volume:
The reason for the receptivity to antigovernment rhetoric, in my view, is the orchestrated Republican flipout, not the act itself. As David Jenkins points out in the above-linked article, a large part of the reason that Joe Barton decided to fearmonger about light bulbs was because he wanted to chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and his GOP rival, Fred Upton, had helped write the ’07 legislation. Faced with this populist, antigovernment appeal, Upton did just what Dick Lugar and every other Republican have done the last two plus years: he gave into the demagoguery and fought to repeal his own bill. At the very least at the federal level, a vote for a Republican is a vote for nihilism.
If there weren’t a flipout about a four-year-old, industry-favored, bipartisan bill about light bulbs, there would be a flipout about airline regulations, or tax forms, or shipping wine across state borders, or importation procedures, or the Third Amendment, or the absence of airline regulations, or whatever else could be mined for deceptive, inflammatory demagoguery.
The point of the resentment is the resentment. As Pat Buchanan wrote in his 1971 memo to Richard Nixon, working to heighten whites’ resentment about “the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party” would “cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.” In 1971, that was a tactical gambit. Today, it’s the alpha and the omega of Republican rhetoric, policy proposals, and legislative effort.
I agree with you that most people don’t pay much attention to politics. (I don’t begrudge anyone that, either.) I know that for a long while, I thought that “the science is uncertain” about climate change, because I just heard the rhetoric from “both sides”, and figured they both had a point. Then I looked into the data & the scientific consensus, and was shocked at how one-sided the facts were. I submit that the same is the case with the antigovernment rhetoric of the GOP. The confusion over climate change, like the resentment of light bulb laws, comes from the PR campaign, not from the act itself.
There didn’t appear to be all too much antigovernment resentment during the Bush Jr. presidency, as the GOP pushed for Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, the executive’s asserted power to wiretap and to detain & torture US citizens without charges or a warrant, surpluses turned into deficits, the right in Raich v Gonzales to imprison folks for activity legal under state law, and the invasion for bogus reasons & failed occupation of an arbitrarily selected Middle Eastern country.
The cause of the receptivity to the talking points is the right wing’s efforts to gear up the resentment machine, which then trickles into the public consciousness. It’s not the result of anything that the government has done.
As to the school lunch debate itself, I don’t want to get too far into the weeds, because it’s just not something I know much about. I’m inclined to think that nationwide standards are a good idea, for the reasons spelled in the Yglesias post I linked last thread, but I could be wrong.
As a father of three kids, the school lunch issue is important to me.
Standards do have benefits as well as costs. If all the feds did was set a standard, that would probably work out – localities could implement the standards in whatever way they think works best for them. But the problem is the feds don’t just set standards. They also spend a lot of money on school lunches and provide incentives and other things that have a lot of effects downstream. The result is that at the local level, pizza, and mushy peas constitute a balanced, healthy meal.
So in general I agree with Bernard’s argument in this area, though I’ll add a couple of reasons he doesn’t mention:
1. The Department of Agriculture has competing missions. On one hand, it’s supposed to develop nutritional standards – on the other hand it’s supposed to promote American agribusiness. These two goals are often in conflict. New standards don’t address that problem.
2. Centralizing authority promotes corporatism and regulatory capture. This is obviously also related to point #1. Last month the NYT ran a pretty good investigative report about the food industry and the national school lunch program. Concentrated federal authority and federal money created powerful incentives for big business to capture that money and those markets through manipulation of regulations and political influence.
So, the current standard seems good in principle, but fails in practice because of the way the feds try to enforce the standard and because of the money they spend on school lunches and because of their competing interests with regard to agribusiness and other interests. Again, changing the standard probably isn’t going to change the outcome and layer additional rules probably won’t overcome the inherent problems of the system. Details matter.
So, the new standard sounds good – but how is it going to work in practice? I don’t have a lot of faith that rejiggering the standard will result in the outcomes that proponents claim. I also don’t have faith that adding more complexity to the current regulatory process and incentive structure (ie. adding more regulations) will work either. IMO, the solution is to decentralize authority for those things that do not require a clear federal role (ie. the principal of subsidiarity) and school lunches is definitely one area that should be decentralized.
Of course, there are downsides to that. Undoubtedly some places will make bad choices or screw things up. If those localities are unable to correct such deficiencies then, perhaps, the federal government could play a role in helping them.
[...] profess great upset at the government’s supposedly overbearing efforts to help out groups. Bernard Finel ably captured the dynamic: Even people with extreme views are often (usually) woefully ill-informed. Most people are heavily [...]