The Great Debate

The office for the Internal Revenue Service near Times Square in New York May 16, 2011.  REUTERS/Chip East

We just had five congressional hearings about the Internal Revenue Service, full of sound and fury, but, we now know, signifying nothing.

Despite all the hoopla and headlines about IRS personnel targeting conservative tax-exempt organizations, there is no real scandal here. IRS staffers acted not only legally but, given their impossible task, quite rationally.

They forgot, however, that they not only work in a political fishbowl, they swim in a sea of politics. Faced with internally contradictory regulations laid out in vague terms, and with little guidance from higher-ups, they botched it. Republicans may now finally get the chance to pour unlimited amounts of secret money into elections.

The Internal Revenue Code provides a tax exemption under section 501(c)(4) for nonprofit groups “operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare” (emphasis added). In classic oxymoronic bureaucratic doublespeak, however, a 1959 regulation decided “exclusively” really meant “primarily.”

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in Asbury Park in New Jersey, May 28, 2013. REUTERS/Jason Reed

How often these days do we see a political figure liked by both Republicans and Democrats? Not so often that we should fail to notice.

But there was the evidence last week in two different polls. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie drew a 58 percent favorable rating from his fellow Republicans around the country and 52 percent from Democrats in a recent Gallup Poll. Forty percent of Republicans in the NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, and 43 percent of Democrats, said they like Christie. (The NBC-Journal numbers are a bit lower because the poll offered a “neutral” option.)

We are witnessing the slow death of public opinion in this country.  It’s being displaced by party opinion.

These days, more and more Americans are inclined to judge issues from a partisan viewpoint.  In March, according to a Pew Research Center survey, twice as many Republicans (53 percent) as Democrats (27 percent) said the economy was poor.  Yet, from everything we know, Republicans are not suffering more economic deprivation than Democrats.

Elections today are less and less about persuasion and more and more about mobilization: You rally your supporters in order to beat back your opponents.  Republicans did that in 2004, when President George W. Bush got re-elected with 51 percent of the vote. Democrats did that in 2012, when President Barack Obama got re-elected with 51 percent of the vote.

President Ronald Reagan (L), President George W. Bush (R, Top) and George H.W. Bush (R, Bottom) Reuters/Files

The hoopla over the new George W. Bush Library in Dallas, as well as some gauzy looks back penned by former aides, shows we are in the middle of “The Great Bush Revisionism.” The former president is being lauded and congratulated. But for what?

A new examination of Bushism may be helpful because the current scandals in Washington are the symptoms of too much power and too much arrogance.

President Barack Obama, making a statement at the White House, announced that the Internal Revenue Service acting commissioner had been ousted, May 15, 2013. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

The tempest about the Tea Parties and the Internal Revenue Service is a gift for the Republican Party — and one that obscures the real issues.

Why, for example, has the IRS been so indulgent of far bigger, flagrantly partisan tax-exempt groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and Charles and David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity?  Such groups spent hundreds of millions of tax-exempt dollars to influence the last two elections, in clear violation of IRS rules.

More than 25 years ago, Representative Jack Kemp told me, “In the past, the left had a thesis: spending, redistribution of wealth and deficits. Republicans were the antithesis: spending is bad.”

He went on to explain, “Ronald Reagan represented a breakthrough for our party. We could talk about lower taxes and more growth. We didn’t have to spend all our time preaching austerity and spending cuts. The question now is: Do we take our thesis and move it further, or do we revert to an anti-spending party?”

We now have the answer. Republicans have reverted to an anti-spending party. Their latest cause? Austerity. Their argument? A shrinking economy is better than big government.

February 1913 marked a turning point in U.S. history. One hundred years ago this month, the states ratified the 16th Amendment, clearing the way for adoption of a federal income tax. Two decades before, in 1892, the Populist Party had first put a progressive income tax on the national agenda.

The income tax faced steep conservative opposition. Since it was enacted, in fact, the political wars over income tax have never stopped. Conservatives battled against it when it was first proposed and have continued the struggle ever since. Now, Tea Party conservativism has given that fight new force.

The economist Joseph Schumpeter called tax systems the “thunder of world history.” Because if you dig beneath the rhetoric, tax systems reveal the underlying direction in which societies move. The saga of the income tax says a great deal about changes in America.

The conventional wisdom has arrived: 2012 was a status quo election.  President Barack Obama was reelected.  Democrats continue to have a majority in the Senate.  Republicans still control the House.  Only two states changed their presidential votes from 2008 to 2012 (North Carolina and Indiana).  Six billion dollars were spent and almost nothing changed!

The conventional wisdom is wrong.  Things have indeed changed.  Voters came out to defend the revolution of 2008.  They rejected a return to the old order.

The status quo candidate in this election was Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.  Romney represented the old order that’s been in power since 1980: the Reagan regime with its power base of older white men.  Bill Clinton, the only Democrat to win the White House during that regime, tried to make accommodations with it.  They impeached him.

If there’s one thing that united Occupy Wall Street with the Tea Party movement from the very beginning, it’s a virulent aversion to being compared to each other.

The Tea Partiers started sharpening their knives before the Occupation even began. Two weeks before last year’s launch Tea Partisan blogger Bob Ellis wrote a post entitled “Socialists Plan to Rage Against Freedom on Constitution Day” – all but daring the lamestream punditry to compare the “infantile” plans of “spoiled children” to “throw tantrums” and “thumb their nose at the American way of life” to the beloved movement that “sprang up from nothing a little more than two years ago in the face of a Marxist president and Marxist congress.”

In reality, of course, no political movement springs “from nothing.” Indeed, both of them have roots in the same man. Fifty-five years earlier that fall, the Tea Party movement’s direct ancestors met in Indianapolis to launch their first bid to rally citizens against the “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” occupying the White House, Dwight Eisenhower. But when their beloved anti-communist Barry Goldwater was buried in the 1964 presidential election, the Republican Party moved swiftly to officially renounce the “radical organizations” that had sullied its public image. Then the most radical of the right-wing radicals, Goldwater’s beloved speechwriter Karl Hess, moved into a houseboat, renounced politics altogether and dedicated the rest of his life to peacefully protesting the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of the new aristocracy he dubbed “the one percent.”

Barely three weeks before the Republican convention opens in Tampa, Florida, the party is deep in the throes of a barely disguised civil war. This is nothing new. The struggle for the soul of the GOP between conservative traditionalists and libertarian radicals has been going on now for more than 40 years, since Barry Goldwater briefly (and disastrously) wrested the presidential nomination from the corporatist Northeastern fat cats who ran the party for their own benefit. Ronald Reagan’s presidency was a breakthrough for the Goldwater stalwart, though now even Reaganites are finding it uncomfortable as they fend off the Tea Party’s nihilistic insurgency.

The shock defeat in Texas of Rick Perry sidekick David Dewhurst at the hands of Tea Party candidate Ted Cruz was chilling for the Republican establishment. And there in the background, celebrating Cruz’s Senate primary victory with hockey mom gusto, was Sarah Palin, queen by acclamation of the Tea Party. If even ultraconservative Perry’s pick is now considered too traditional, too establishment, too safe, too left-wing for the Tea Party acolytes purging old-guard and dead-wood incumbents, which old-school Republicans can consider themselves safe? Cruz’s surprise success has proved to the GOP establishment that its days are numbered. Denial is futile. The Tea Party mob is coming for them.

Despite a lackluster economy, 23 million unemployed, unpopular healthcare legislation and a president portrayed as an elitist Kenyan Muslim socialist, Romney is still only neck and neck with Obama. And in the battleground states, Obama has a clear lead. Romney’s campaign managers know they must somehow enthuse the GOP base, but between them and the Republican grass roots are two gatekeepers who have maintained a studied insouciance about their official champion: Palin and libertarian-in-chief Ron Paul. Neither can bring themselves to unreservedly endorse Romney, a man who in the eyes of their supporters is not only part of the Republican Party’s problem but the nation’s problem, too. He is a privileged, ultrarich, blue-blood dilettante without any burning convictions who has decided to forgo a life of moneyed leisure to dabble in a White House run. In brief, he is not one of them.