Teenage Nervous Breakdown

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 41 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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Most American political crises have a set pattern.

First comes excess. An obsolete political thesis (a set of myths and values underlying power) causes the crisis. In this case, it was George W. Bush following the Nixon Thesis into the ditch of Iraq, Katrina, and the Great Economic Meltdown of 2008.

When anyone questioned him, he just repeated the old mantras, louder. He knew no other way, any more than Lyndon Johnson, or Herbert Hoover, or James Buchanan before him. After all, he learned his politics at his daddy's knee, and his father adapted his to those of Ronald Reagan. Who validated Nixon. 

It's when Thesis hardens into ideology and ideology runs into history that America runs into a brick wall.

Next comes a crisis election. The 2008 election of Barack Obama was a turning point, just like the 1968 election of Richard Nixon, the 1896 election of William McKinley, or the elections of Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln were turning points. Note that I put the crisis Presidents considered “failures” first in that list. There's no certainty about a crisis leader's success, only the reality of a turn.

Then, of course, you have the crisis itself.

In the Nixon generation this was Vietnamization and what you might call the War against the War against the War, the Southern Strategy that rallied the Silent Majority to Nixon's side and could have made him a Great President after the 1972 landslide, only he decided to steal what he had already had and got caught.

In our case, the crisis was begun by the fight over the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. This was the ground the retreating side decided to fight on, just as the Democrats of a generation earlier chose to fight over Vietnam, and against the Cold War.

We have just come through a key battle in that crisis. That is the title of this Clue. It's a nervous breakdown by the retreating side. And this is a decisive point, for two reasons. First, because the retreating side can't help itself, and second because it's decisively rejected by the new majority.

Why can't Republicans resist Ted Cruz? Simple. Because he's a demagogue.

There has always been a little bit of demagoguery at the heart of the Nixon Thesis – remember the nattering nabobs of negativism? Cruz' political genius has been to distill all this to its essence, and to deliver it pure to the public stage. He thinks he's the Hispanic Obama, when he's really just a domestic version of Joe McCarthy, arguing against the tide at the height of the New Deal.

What Ted Cruz is selling is the logical extension of what Republicans have been taught to believe for most of their lives, the politics they were taught by their parents, who fought under Nixon-Agnew. That is, the other side consists of evil people, with evil intent, Communists and Socialists and Fifth Columnists. An enemies' list. They will destroy America unless we stand strong, stand now, and not give an inch.

It's obvious to everyone outside the Cruz bubble that his followers are a minority, and a relatively small one at that, in terms of a nation with over 300 million people in it. But go online some day, try to engage them in debate, and you'll see that they make up for their small numbers with incredible passion, with absolute certainty, and with utter contempt for those who disagree with them.

This is matched by Cruz' own demagogic skill at turning every criticism back on the critic. One heckler is ridiculed as being, well, one heckler. Throw a bunch at him and they're the “paid operatives” of the President, never mind any lack of evidence to that effect.

Attack, attack, attack. If you're in the bubble, it's glorious. If you're outside, it's outrageous, and dangerous.

This is the lesson Ted Cruz is teaching the majority of Americans right now. That he's dangerous, that his certainty is dangerous, that his supporters are crazy. He is energizing Obama's Silent Majority in a way that the President himself never could, by making most of us into his enemy, and by attacking us as though we were the malignancy and he were the cure.

All of which makes the 2013 Shutdown a watershed moment in this generation's politics. There's an assumption, among non-Cruz Republicans, that this is a fever that will soon pass, that they can use money, deliberate disenfranchisement, and time to heal the Cruz-inflicted wounds and maintain the power they have.

The polls indicate that's not the case, and I believe the polls. While Nate Silver still disagrees, that's because Nate Silver is young. He's 35. The first President he remembers is Ronald Reagan, who validated the Nixon Thesis of Conflict, gave it its gloss, and set the nation on the course it has followed for most of his life. He is steeped in the Myths of Reagan, the Values of Reagan, and the Politics of Reagan. He assumes that the future will be like the past because the future always has been.

But fundamental change does happen in America. It happens at a pace which, for mortals like Nate Silver (and myself) appears glacial. But it does happen, and specifically because we're mortal. Those who followed the Roosevelt Thesis of Unity have mostly died-off now. Those who followed the Nixon Thesis of Conflict are aging out. For those practicing what I have called the Obama Thesis of Consensus, all this is still brand-new, unproven, and tentative.

I was taught at Rice, a lifetime ago, by Dr. Gilbert Cuthbertson (right) that MV=P. Myths and Values create power. These myths and values that are the key to power, what I have dubbed a Thesis, are forged by a crisis. They're hardened, like concrete, when push comes to shove and the new majority suddenly discovers that it is, in fact, a majority,  a rather substantial one.

What those who followed Nixon did with his majority was unique in our history. They deliberately whittled it down, exiling whole groups of people from the Republican Tent, in order to maintain the fear of “otherness” on which his Thesis rested. Once upon a time there were pro-choice Republicans, there were moderate and even liberal Republicans. The majority had to be whittled away so its zeal could be maintained, and so that zeal could be energized periodically, the knees jerking each election, regardless of whether the jerking was in anyone's best interest, because otherwise “they” will overwhelm "us."

Well, “they” have.  And “they” is us. What will the new Administration do with this power? What will Barack Obama and (more important) his successor, do to validate, extend, and enhance this power, to make policy with it?

Gradually, over the next months and years, we are going to find that out. The fever is passing, the time for demagogues fading away.

My own guess is that, based on what I've called Obama's Thesis, that he will seek broad consensus, reasoned voices, and the kind of slow, steady progress that was the essence of progressivism 100 years ago.

But it's not my call to make.

Most likely, it's Hillary Clinton's. She'd be the same age in 2017 that Reagan was when he took office, and I suspect she'll have the same historical role, that of validating the Obama Thesis of Consensus for a generation.

Some may then call her the greater President, but it's the one who faces the crisis, faces it head-on, with courage and certainty, whom I'll credit.