The politics of unreason

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

Sometimes a tempest-in-a-teapot brouhaha can reveal much about the tenor of a time, including the level of seriousness and rationality that characterize the political moment.
Consider, in the context of some of the grave challenges faced by the United States and the world – economic stagnation with the potential for descent into global depression, serious environmental degradation, unchecked global warming – that one of the issues that sent Republicans in Congress into a tizzy at the end of last year was the fate of the incandescent light bulb.   

Ironically, it was during the administration of George W. Bush, that notorious anti-business, pro-regulation zealot, that the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 became law. The Act required industry to produce more efficient light bulbs than the typical energy-guzzler it had been making for decades.

At the same time, the legislation afforded the lighting industry ample time to adjust to the new regulations. The first phase of the transition would not go into effect until 2012, and subsequent increases in efficiency would be phased in during the next two years.

Contrary to much of the paranoid rhetoric that built up as the 2012 deadline approached, the law is by no means a radical measure. In the words of one media outlet: “The law doesn’t ban incandescent light bulbs. Instead, manufacturers beginning in 2012 no longer will make the old 100-watt incandescent bulbs, replacing them with lower wattage bulbs that produce about the same amount of light. New 75-watt, 60-watt and 40-watt incandescent bulbs will be phased in later.” In sum, it is such a modest, business-friendly conservation measure that even George Bush and the industry could embrace it. Indeed, manufactures have been working for five years to meet the new requirements and are ready and willing to do so.

But neither the blessing of the quintessentially pro-business George W. Bush nor the lack of industry opposition – never mind the myriad substantive arguments in favor of energy efficiency – were good enough to dissuade Congressional Republicans from assuming their default position: obstructionism.

Apparently swayed (or scared) by Tea Party anti-government fundamentalists and alarmists – they are banning incandescent light bulbs, the end of all American freedoms cannot be far behind! – the Republicans fought against implementation of the law enacted by their former leader.

Although they failed to overturn the 2007 Act, they did manage to deny the executive money to enforce the new regulations. Industry representatives and environmentalists concur that the law will be observed regardless, if for no other reason than that industry is too far into the transition to more efficient lighting that it doesn’t make sense for it to go back and defy the law to boot.

The equation of the right to make, sell and use incandescent light bulbs with American freedom tout court is just one example of how pervasively and minutely the Tea Party has radicalized the GOP and supercharged the party’s penchant for irrationality, infusing it with an added measure of what the late political scientist Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics.”

Another manifestation of this phenomenon is playing out in Hampton Roads, Virginia, an area described by the Washington Post this way: “Outside of greater New Orleans, Hampton Roads is at the biggest risk from sea-level rise of any area its size in the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.”

In response to efforts by planners to prepare for the probable consequences of climate change, a Tea Party-inspired movement has emerged and mushroomed, featuring arguments that global warming is a hoax and that the planning process is a UN conspiracy to seize land and abolish private property.

Then there is the biggest Tea Party-influenced irrationality of all, which has become a ruling dogma for the Republican Party and, in a less radical way, also infected the Obama administration. That’s the fervor for drastically cutting government spending to reduce the deficit in spite of a crippled economy. That, as Keynes in the 1930s and currently Krugman have pointed out, is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Such medicine, meted out by Herbert Hoover from 1929 to 1932, then briefly by FDR in 1937, and now thrust upon most of Europe principally by Germany, has a cure rate of zero.

Neither is it working in the United States where, despite the mild apparent improvement in the labor market, the economic situation is dire as the number of poor people soars, the middle class becomes smaller and poorer by the day as their homes lose value, and the level of economic inequality has become so intolerable as to force a significant proportion of the population, previously dreaming the old American dream, to wake up to the new American nightmare and even to rebel against it.

There is, however, a silver lining to one of the irrational, monolithic positions that the Tea Party has compelled the Republican presidential contenders and the party in general to assume. The issue is immigration. Among other things, the insufferable Republican presidential debates became a contest about who is willing to swing the iron fist the hardest against “illegal immigrants” and who can show the least compassion.

Most Latinos are rightly convinced that there is in such talk a thinly-veiled animus, especially among the Republican base, toward the growing footprint of the Latino community in the United States. How else to explain the passion against “illegal immigrants” at a time when net immigration from Mexico is nearly zero and total immigration is at its lowest point in many years?

Top Republican strategists and social scientists alike have predicted that for Republicans to permanently alienate the fastest voting bloc in the country is political suicide. Polls show that despite disappointment with Obama, Latinos overwhelmingly will vote for him rather than pull the lever for a candidate of a hostile party. The question is whether Latino electoral power already has grown enough to save Obama. If it has, the Tea Party and the politics of irrationality it has maximized prove to be the undoing of the Republican Party.

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