What does a political regime do when its philosophy doesn’t work and is leading to ruin? It can’t scrap the philosophy, which is its raison d’être and the basis of its power. Were it to chuck the philosophy, its core constituencies would abandon it. So instead it blames those who have most cogently pointed out the defects of the philosophy. It calls them liars and haters. The strategy is evidently one of desperation, and a confession of the bankruptcy of the regime in question.
In the waning days of the East German state — the German Democratic Republic — East German Politburo apparatchik Hermann Axen persuaded Erich Honecker to embrace an “our-critics-are-liars-and-haters” strategy. Communism in the late summer of 1989 was a joke, but it was at the same time the raison d’être of the SED, the ruling Communist party. Without it, a lot of bureaucrats would be out of a job. Axen was one of these. “A dirty wave of hate and great lies is breaking over the GDR,” he declared on September 10, two months before ordinary Germans brought down the Berlin Wall in the name of political and economic freedom.
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Flash forward to 2011. The Democratic party in the third year of the Obama presidency is in trouble. The administration’s policies are rapidly becoming a joke. One can quibble about the best label for those policies — Keynesian big-statism, tax-and-spend liberalism, socialism lite. What is not in doubt is that the policies have failed to help the economy and are leading to ruin. But the Democratic party can’t abandon the policies because its foremost constituencies, the public-sector unions, are dependent on them.
And so the Democratic leadership has settled on the Hermann Axen strategy. “Our-critics-are-liars-and-haters.”
In January, Rep. Steve Cohen (D., Tenn.) compared Republican opponents of the health-care law to Joseph Goebbels. “They say it’s a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels,” Cohen said. “You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it. Like blood libel. That’s the same kind of thing. . . . The Germans said enough about the Jews and people believed it — believed it and you have the Holocaust.” (Cohen later issued a lame apology.)
As the case for the administration’s policies crumbles, the Democratic leadership is amplifying its Axen-style rhetoric. Vice President Biden has accused tea-party Republicans of “acting like terrorists” in the debt-ceiling negotiations. (He later said that he was misquoted.) On Monday, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.), chair of the Democratic National Committee, called the tea partiers “tyrants,” and last week Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.) accused the Tea Party of propagating a big lie. He urged the media not to give “equal time or equal balance” to tea partiers because their view “is not factual.”
This is good news. The “our-critics-are-liars-and-haters” trope has a limited rhetorical appeal. It is typically trotted out when a regime no longer has either a persuasive case for its policies or a language with which to make that case and win back the middle-of-the-roaders who have turned against it. The regime is forced to do what it can to reassure and reanimate its ever more apathetic base. When a regime finds itself in so unenviable a position, the odds are good that it will fall.
— Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author, most recently, ofPathology of the Elites.
I propose that the bankruptcy of ideas started long before Obama took the oath of office. The democrats had to crank up the politics of personal destruction to return to power in 2006, aided an abetted by a House Republican leadership oblivious to the voices calling for spending restraint. The mantra at the time was: Anything positive was the result of Pelosi's great leadership whereas anything bad was Bush or Cheney's fault. I actually had a conversation with a leftist zealot at the time arguing that 5% unemployment was just catastrophic, which now actually sounds like the golden years of time past. Buttressing a failed socialist agenda with Orwellian doublespeak has run it's course specially as the monopoly of news coverage by ABC, NBC, and CBS crumbles in the light of Internet, cable, and talk radio news. The Democrat party is circling the drain and it is pulling along with it the entrenched Republican leadership that has been inarticulate at best in selling it's message.
Whatever value lies in the author's premise is lessened by his flawed perspective. It is not the "Keynesian big-statism, tax-and-spend liberalism, socialism lite" who represent the East German's of the late 1980s but the crumbling remnants of the Conservative Ascendancy. For 30 years, conservatives of both parties have had their way with American public policy. The result is economic devastation and huge popular sentiment against the American way of government. The only comment on our situation the conservatives can offer is "we're really the good guys and those who say otherwise are communists." It's pathetically delusional or desperately wishful.
Joe Steel, you state:
The only comment on our situation the conservatives can offer is "we're really the good guys and those who say otherwise are communists."
Well said. The electoral issue comes down to two points:
* will the republican establishment rouse itself to do anything more than a tepid defense, while continuing to disdain the best potential friends it could hope for - the Tea Party?
* will the republicans offer anything more in economic policy than a promise to go into the abyss at a walking pace rather than full throttle?
This administration is such a monumental failure, and at so many levels as to be breathtaking. But first among their failures is the notion that the "best and the brightest" vettted their candidate regarding a resume so thin as to be non-existent. It is now clear that all those brilliant thinkers weren't thinking, or they are not quite as smart as they claim.
In closing, I've read recently that The Left is carping about the quality of Rick Perry's college transcripts...while there remains deathly silence about the whereabouts of our president's college transcripts that remain sealed 2 1/2 years after his election.
Middle America is hopefully waking to understand the economic philosophy of the Democratic party boils down to Us versus Them.
They have no solutions for creating a truly prosperous society. They believe America was made great by the entitlement program without pondering how it become possible to fund entitlements in the first place.
Their strategy is to demonize the opposition, plain and simple. Class warfare and race baiting is all they know.
Expect it leading up to the election and when some degree of civil unrest results somewhere in the nation, expect them to blame it on heartless, morally bankrupt conservatives for attempting to further divide the masses along economic lines.
This regime will not fall, although it could be made to fall if millions of Americans would come to the Mall in Washington and protest, just like the Egyptians did.
This regime will perhaps be voted out of office, leaving another 17 months for the president to continue to stack up piles of regulations, judges and bureaucrats who will harm us.
The "our-critics-are-liars-and-haters" strategy is similar to the "do-not-believe-what-you-see" strategy. The Tea Party gatherings look very much like peaceful, respectful and hard working people concerned about their country but liberal democrats insist they are really racist and hateful white people sponsored by evil corporations that want to hurt poor people and "minorities". In fact, conservatives almost always appear to be happy and tolerant folks while liberals tend to be angry, hateful and envious of others. We are told not to believe our own eyes.
WOW. Talk about projection! You think the right has contempt for people? lol.
I've worked for a really far left guy. Phrases I would hear frequently were "fly over states", "I don't want to talk to those people, thats why I hired you" (talking about car guys from the middle of the country).
He was as big an elitist as I've ever met. He thought he was better than everyone else because he used to work for the State Department and went to High School in Switzerland.
The Left has shown far more contempt for people even remotely right of center than the Right has ever dreamed of doing in reverse. It's not even close. The ones out there lieing, hurling around petty insults, and calling people names are the leaders of the Democratic party! Talk about contempt, they don't even acknowledge that there is a right to have a contrary opinion to theirs! If you don't agree with them, well then you must be insane. They are acting exactly like children who, when they can't get their way, can't help but throw a temper tantrum.
Oh. That would explain why the Right believes people of all flavors can and should be responsible for their own health care, education, and retirement investment needs. We believe people are capable of doing these things in a free society. The Left does not.
Your statement flies in the face of the tea partiers; who by and large are regular, tax paying, middle class folks.
Not that there isn't plenty of arrogance to go around; I've had the displeasure of meeting "establishment republicans" and they are everything the left makes them out to be. The difference is, these irksome few are the exception - not the rule.
The other major difference is on the right side of the political spectrum, we have very few "takers" as the whopping majority of us are "givers." We are employed, actively work and add value to our communities. We care. This is what happens when you believe in personal responsibility and the idea you make your own destiny.
Now flip that, and you have described the political left; a majority of "takers" of entitlements, who believe the role of everyone else (read: suckers) is to give them what they want for free - and they can always scream for more. Takers are oblivious and antipathetic to what their lifestyle costs everyone else. Who cares? Don't be a hater.
There's a combination of willful ignorance and hubris among these types that is painfully evident to any with active brain function.
We worker ants" can no longer - not do we care to - support you "grasshoppers" as you play while we toil, oblivious that winter is coming.
MikeB - be objective. Look at the rhetoric coming from the left. How many times do they need to compare conservatives to terrorists?
There is contempt on both sides, but imo it is much deeper on the left. Maybe you don't see it because most 'main stream' media outlets are on the left, so they don't get called out for it as often.
