As Paul Krugman pointed out yesterday, the more market fundamentalism fails, the more vigorously it seems to be embraced. Bipartisan compromise now consists of agreement between the center-right and off-the-deep-end psychocapitalists. I honestly don't see a way out of this self-defeating feedback loop given our current political environment.
Before I wrote this cartoon, I was actually thinking of doing one that showed Republicans praising FDR the way Obama has praised Reagan, just as Krugman mentioned (hey, great minds think alike!), to show how ridiculously improbable that would be. Also, is it just me, or shouldn't more people be freaking out about Ron "End the Fed" Paul overseeing the Fed? I dunno, maybe not enough Americans understand what the Fed is.
On another note, all I want for Christmas is for you to join the Slowpoke Facebook Krew, or follow me on Twitter. If you don't already do so, of course.
FDR was a great wartime leader who effectively led the fight against aggressive international socialism.
There, that wasn’t so hard.
Dang it, I meant to say “national”. Oh well.
This is something I worry about a lot. You saw this dynamic on health care — During the Clinton administration, Clinton proposed fairly comprehensive health care and the Republicans cried “no, that’s too horrible! We should do an individual mandate instead!” A Republican governor in Massachusetts even implemented an individual mandate system, which is working fairly well.
Flash forward a few years, and the Democrats put forward what is essentially the Republican individual mandate plan for health care. The few elements of the plan that are strongly liberal, like the public option, are stripped out of the legislation in order to bring the center-right Democrats on board, and in a futile attempt to get moderate Republicans support. Now we’re told that the public option is far too horrible to contemplate, and some of the same Republicans who once advocated for individual mandates now say they’re unconstitutional. (And maybe they are! But the one person whose opinion matters, Anthony Kennedy, has yet to weigh in on the question.)
This sort of slippage happens all the time — cap-and-trade, once a policy designed to make market principles and environmental protection go hand-in-hand, is now despised as government intrusion. It’s not possible for Democrats to compromise with people who don’t actually want anything other than for Democrats to fail.
FDR was a great wartime leader
Praise for FDR from a Republican. Amazing! And, alas, not true. At least, I have trouble calling someone who put citizens of his own country* in concentration camps a “great leader” of any sort, war or otherwise.
*Not that it’s ok to put people from other countries into concentration camps, but what FDR did hadn’t even the ghost of an “enemy alien” excuse. Especially in the US where Americans are supposed to be Americans, regardless of where their ancestors came from.
He had Nazi spies shot. You have to admire a man with clarity of purpose.
Robert,
Don’t you (when convenient) deny being a Republican?
Nope. Staunch, that’s me.