The Republican Brain (37 page)

195
The Heritage Foundation
Curtis Dubay, “Obamacare and New Taxes: Destroying Jobs and the Economy,” January 20, 2011. Available online at
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/01/obamacare-and-new-taxes-destroying-jobs-and-the-economy
.

195
repeatedly displayed a chart
PoliticalCorrection.org, “Rep. Bachmann Blames Deficit on Obama,” January 7, 2011. Available online at
http://politicalcorrection.org/factcheck/201101070002
. Original transcript of Bachmann's remarks, on Fox News's
On the Record
with Greta van Susteren, is available at
http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/on-the-record/transcript/bachmann-president-2012
.

196
“the most monumental insanity”
Andrew Leonard, “It is the most monumental insanity” (interview with Bruce Bartlett),
Salon.com
, January 5, 2011. Available online at
http://www.salon.com/2011/01/05/bruce_bartlett_on_tea_party_monumental_insanity/
.

196
warning about precisely this disaster
Bruce Bartlett, “Debt Default: It Can Happen Here,”
The Fiscal Times
, June 11, 2010. Available online at
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2010/06/11/Debt-Default-It-Can-Happen-Here.aspx
.

196
“the starvation of this economy-retarding beast”
John Tamny, “Learn to Love a U.S. Default,”
Forbes
, May 24, 2010. Available online at
http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/22/default-united-states-economy-opinions-columnists-john-tamny.html
.

196
debt ceiling denial
Carrie Budoff Brown, “Default deniers: The new skeptics,”
Politico
, May 17, 2011. Available online at
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=11733D6E-25F4–410E-9092–45FD717A8B2F
.

197
“default will be painful, but it is all but inevitable”
Ron Paul, “Default Now, or Suffer a More Expensive Crisis Later,”
Bloomberg
, July 22, 2011. Available online at
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011–07–22/default-now-or-suffer-a-more-expensive-crisis-later-ron-paul.html
.

197
“starve the beast” approach
John Tamny, “Learn to Love a U.S. Default,”
Forbes
, May 24, 2010. Available online at
http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/22/default-united-states-economy-opinions-columnists-john-tamny.html
.

198
Reasonably foreseeable consequences
Secretary Timothy Geithner, Letter to the Honorable Senator Michael Bennet, May 13, 2011, available online at
http://www.treasury.gov/connect/blog/Documents/20110513%20Bennet%20Letter.pdf
.

198
Pat Toomey
Pat Toomey, “How to Freeze the Debt Ceiling Without Risking Default,”
The Wall Street Journal
, January 19, 2011.

198
“a complete mystery”
Bruce Bartlett, “Debt Ceiling May Come Crashing Down on Treasury,”
The Fiscal Times
, May 6, 2011. Available online at
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2011/05/06/Debt-Ceiling-May-Come-Crashing-Down-on-Treasury.aspx
.

198
just the month of August 2011
Bipartisan Policy Center, Debt Limit Analysis, July 2011. Available online at
http://www.bipartisanpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Debt%20Ceiling%20Analysis%20FINAL%20(updated).pdf
.

199
“default by another name”
Treasury Department Fact Sheet, “Debt Limit: Myth v. Fact,” available online at
http://www.treasury.gov/initiatives/Documents/Debt%20Limit%20Myth%20v%20Fact%20FINAL.pdf
.

199
“shouldn't be playing around with inflation”
Noam Scheiber, “Fighting the Fed,”
The New Republic
, November 17, 2010. Available online at
http://www.tnr.com/print/article/politics/79223/fed-sarah-palin-war-quantitative-easing
.

199
not raising any alarm bells
Paul Krugman, “A Quick Note on Inflation,” September 24, 2011, available online at
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/a-quick-note-on-inflation/
.

199
sent Bernanke a letter
Republicans' Letter to Bernanke Questioning More Fed Action, September 20, 2011. Available online at
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/09/20/full-text-republicans-letter-to-bernanke-questioning-more-fed-action/
.

200
“I'm not shocked by much anymore”
David Frum, “The GOP's Bernanke Letter,”
FrumForum.com
, September 21, 2011. Available online at
http://www.frumforum.com/the-gops-bernanke-letter
.

Chapter Eleven

The Republican War on History

“What we see in here isn't always the same as what we read in books, or see on TV. So what? We know the truth, and that's good enough for us.”

So speaks Addison, a young female character in former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee's cartoon
Learn our History
series. In the series—tagline: “Take Pride in America's Past”—a group of kids called the “TimeCycle Academy” ride their bikes back in time to learn about U.S. history. But not just any version: It's a mythologized and religiously infused account, provided to counter the alleged “hate America” narratives of the cultural left.

Thus in the sample World War II video, Adolf Hitler's evil is unleashed across Europe, but the U.S. rallies and even the “gals,” like Rosie the Riveter, pitch in. At least in the sample video, however, Franklin Delano Roosevelt appears absent.

Huckabee's series offers another sample video about the Reagan Revolution. At its beginning, America of the late 1970s faces a “financial, international, and moral crisis”—epitomized by scenes of Washington, D.C. drowning in squalor and street crime. But “one man with some very big ideas set out to make a huge impact.” He gave people “hope,” says Addison. Then, at a speech given in New Hampshire in September of 1980, we see a campaigning Ronald Reagan saying,

God had a plan for America. I see it as a shining city on a hill. If we ever forget that we are one nation under God, then we will be one nation gone under.

“One man transformed a nation . . . and the world,” Huckabee's video goes on to declare—and soon the Cold War has been won, with Reagan ordering Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

From a liberal perspective, this is hogwash. Words like reductionist, triumphalist, even jingoist come to mind. For Huckabee, it would appear that history is a simple, linear story that makes America look great—and why not? We are God's chosen, after all.

It gets worse. It looks like the Ronald Reagan quotation above isn't even something the former President said—or at least not in September of 1980, while campaigning in New Hampshire. Rather, the words seem to be an amalgam of many things Reagan said over the years: a composite speech, at best. Reagan often spoke of a “shining city on a hill.” That great line—“if we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under”—was said at an Ecumenical Prayer Breakfast in Dallas, Texas on August 23, 1984.

A liberal found this out, of course—tracked it back to the sources, proved it. As if the goal of this sort of conservative history is to keep good footnotes.

The Huckabee series is just one in a number of recurring cases in which conservative politicians, intellectuals, and activists have been caught committing historical fouls for ideological reasons. Consider a few recent episodes, several quite infamous:

• After touring Boston's Freedom Trail and the Paul Revere house in June 2011, Sarah Palin stated that Revere, on his famous midnight ride, “warned the British that they weren't going to be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells and making sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed.” The errors here are multiple. Palin is anachronistically interpreting Revere as an icon of a right to bear arms that didn't exist yet—this was before the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Revere's ride was not to “warn the British”—it was to warn prominent colonists like Samuel Adams and John Hancock that the British were coming—and it was highly secretive. There was no ringing of bells. Later, Revere was captured by the British (though he was trying to avoid them) and he did try to spook them with some puffed up talk about how many armed colonists there were. But obviously this was not the purpose of his ride.
  

  Palin nevertheless refused to admit correction and stood by her statement—seizing on this last detail in particular.
  

• In a January 2011 speech in Iowa, Michele Bachmann, celebrating the U.S.'s tradition of inclusivity and diversity, claimed that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” She then cited John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, as an example. There are, again, many problems here: Many of the founders owned slaves, and the Constitution treated slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportioning representatives to different states. And John Quincy Adams, who did oppose slavery, was not a founder.
  

  Nevertheless, when asked about her claim by George Stephanopoulos of ABC, Bachmann, like Palin, stood her ground. She explicitly called John Quincy Adams a “Founding Father”—even though he was born in 1767 and so would have been a mere child in 1776, and just 20 years old when the Constitution was signed (not by him).
  

• In 2010 in Texas, a Republican-dominated state Board of Education changed the social studies curriculum to require high school government classes to cast doubt on the idea that there's a constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. Specifically, the new standards state that students should “examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America and guaranteed it free exercise by saying that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' and compare and contrast this to the phrase ‘separation of church and state.'” Where's the contrast? The First Amendment's prohibition against Congress's creating an “establishment of religion” (the so-called Establishment Clause) has indeed been interpreted by the courts as creating such a “separation”—based in significant part on writings of Thomas Jefferson. In an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson described the purpose of the Establishment Clause in precisely this way, writing:
  

  Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.
  

• In 2011 David Barton, a Christian conservative and head of a Texas-based organization called WallBuilders—which describes itself as “presenting America's forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on our moral, religious, and constitutional heritage”—claimed that the Founding Fathers already had “the entire debate on creation-evolution,” and that Tom Paine had stated that “you've got to teach creation science in the public school classroom. The scientific method demands that.” Paine, a deist and a crusader against organized religion, died in 1809, the same year that Charles Darwin was born. “Creation science”—centered on the claim that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old—is an American fundamentalist invention of the 20th century.
  

Embedded in these examples, one finds historical errors of many types. There are simple factual mistakes that seem to emanate from confusion, but that also have an ideological tinge and then are rigidly defended. There are egregious, motivated misrepresentations (the Texas Board of Education trying to sow doubt among students about whether the First Amendment creates a separation of church and state). Finally, there's anachronism, “the unthinking assumption that people in the past behaved and thought as we do,” as the British historian John Tosh defines it—which is the only way Barton can possibly talk about a “creation-evolution” debate occurring before Darwin, and about Tom Paine advocating “creation science.”

But don't just focus on the specific errors and misrepresentations—we know by now that people will commit almost any sort of reasoning flub in service of an emotional goal. Rather, what's important here is to sense that goal, that deeper purpose. The misinformation here isn't of an idle, accidental sort. As with the Huckabee videos, these erroneous stories are told in service of a broader triumphal and providential narrative about America—Reagan's “shining city on a hill.”

In this story, America is a unique nation, blessed and chosen by God, founded in religious faith. It has righteousness and good on its side—and its enemies (Nazis, Soviet communists, and so on) are the purest incarnation of evil on Earth. America has been threatened, but great leaders (chosen by God) have emerged at critical times to win the fight against those forces—epitomized by Ronald Reagan.

The story is a Christian one, a Manichean one, a simplistic one, a comforting one, and a
certain
one. Psychologically, it is deeply conservative. It is about nothing if not maintaining and honoring tradition—in this case, the tradition of America as a great and heroic nation (whose citizens keep themselves armed and free!).

The problem—for fact-loving liberals—is that this isn't an accurate story. It doesn't obey the evidentiary canons of academic historians, and the details it ignores deeply complicate or confound the conservative narrative. There are ugly moments in America's past, too, ones that you can't paper over. Slavery. Segregation. Lynchings. The slaughter of native Americans. Japanese internment during World War II. This doesn't make America a
bad
country today: We've changed a lot, learned a lot, progressed a lot. But it doesn't help to whitewash and mythologize things—or, so reason liberals and academic historians.

But as we've already seen, when it comes to biased conservative reasoning on behalf of deeply held beliefs, rigorous scholarly accuracy has little to do with it. What matters is having an argument—any argument, so long as it meets the minimum threshold of making you feel reaffirmed and sure of what you think, and what your group thinks. What matters is whether you can cobble together, and defend, an assortment of facts that bolster your identity and satisfy your psychological needs.

On history—as on science, as on economics—conservatives have done just this. They've written a powerful and compelling (though inaccurate) script that reinforces their system of beliefs in both a logical and an emotional way—a narrative they can then pass on to children at their earliest ages, as in Huckabee's videos. In many ways quite brilliant and even beautiful in its simplicity, this script casts them as—yes—“The Tea Party,” sharing the same values as the original American revolutionaries, and carrying forward their tradition.

And what have liberals done in response to the right's historical narrative? As we'll see, they certainly haven't twisted history in the same systematic way (a few troubling cases notwithstanding). But they rarely know how to respond to conservatives' historical misinformation—which is not with rebuttals, but by telling moving and
accurate
historical stories of their own.

In the words of historian Rick Perlstein, the author of
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
, the intellectual traditions of liberalism on the one hand, and rigorous historical analysis on the other, are closely linked. As Perlstein puts it:

Liberalism is rooted in this notion of the Enlightenment, the idea that we can use our reason, and we can use empiricism, and we can sort out facts, and using something like the scientific method—although history is not like nuclear physics—to arrive at consensus views of the truth that have a much more solid standing, epistemologically, than what the right wing view of the truth is: which is much more mythic, which is much more based on tribal identification, which is much more based on intuition and tradition. And there's always been history writing in that mode too. But within the academy, and within the canons of expertise, and within the canons of professionalism, that kind of history has been superseded by a much more empirical, Enlightenment-based history.