Mitch McConnell: Antisocial Is The New Sensible

It was just yesterday, wasn’t it, that the rampant extremism and anti-Obama rancor of the GOP was embodied by one Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has served up so many chestnuts of loco over the years that even Dick Cheney could sound positively equanimous by comparison.

Let’s recall but a few of Mitch’s more unnerving haikus. Some are deeply comedic; one is irrefutable, and therefore unfathomable coming from the Owl’s mouth; some are just plain non compos mentis:

“If the administration wants cooperation, it will have to begin to move in our direction.”

“We all know that Social Security is one of this country’s greatest success stories in the 20th century.”

“Mitt Romney has spent his entire life finding ways to solve problems.”

“I mean, we’re going to have to pry his hands off the door and search him to get the key back to the White House.”

“I agree that Bill and Al are responsible for the prosperity we are currently enjoying across America. That’s Bill Gates and Alan Greenspan.”

“If they’d like to run against President Bush, I question whether they are smart enough to take over the job.”

And so on. Mitch McConnell has said more than enough over his long tenure to demonstrate a hard-line, often mean-spirited, and always supercilious approach to governance. Full stop.

So why is it, then, that recent days have seen such an outpouring of near-empathy for McConnell, spearheaded by progressive media? Why does Mitch McConnell lately appear, by virtue of his eleventh-hour deal with Harry Reid to save Earth from a spanking-new recession, to represent the (however resentful) step-brother of reason?

I suspect it’s a side-variant of Stockholm syndrome, whereby one becomes so inured to dissembling and enmity — delivered by an overbearing, oily messenger — that anything short of blatant sabotage to rationality feels warm and momentarily reassuring.

But more apparently, it’s that McConnell — like John McCain before him, and John Danforth before him, and George H.W. Bush before him, and Richard Nixon (yes) before him, and Dwight Eisenhower before him — precedes an emergent generation of ‘conservatives’ so relatively extreme that he seems a hale steward of humane sense by comparison. (The exception — and hardly the only one — to this mini-theorem is Ronald Reagan, who was Barry Goldwater in chaps; he was far more hard-over than his successors, but was more adept at misdirecting attention away from his sociopathy, and re-framing unadulterated cynicism as domestic realpolitik. Present-day centrist, my bare foot.)

So while McConnell was viewed, three short years ago, as an inordinately annoying stablemate of sanity — while lacking in any visibly thoughtful aspect — he emerges now as the peacemaker, the rationalist… the moderate. And consequently the pernicious cycle continues; McConnell now faces a legitimate challenge for his seat from the right.

But how long can this trend continue? What sort of ideological super-harpy could make us ‘miss’ Ted Cruz, or Paul Ryan, or even Dick Cheney? Is there a natural limit to madness in electoral politics?

Of course not; a momentary scan of history proves as much. And one suspects that the trend will veer laterally; rather than ladling on more virulent extremism from the right, the current vogue for fact-denying and other-hating will be stripped of its functional intelligence (after all, Ted Cruz is a relatively smart man, and so is Mitch McConnell) and replaced with rank fatuousness. That’s the vector we’re on.

It’s already happening — witness Raul Labrador, Steve King, Louis Gohmert; not a shred of bonafide cerebral tinder between them. Witness Jan Brewer, the candidacies of Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle, the bumpy ascendancy of Scott Walker. And, for Pete’s sake, witness the mental sandbox in which their conservative media cheerleaders oscillate at maximum infant-frequency.

It’s a pattern too evident, and too linear over time, to ignore. And it’s not a reflection of any self-administered macro-dumbing of the electorate; to the contrary, it’s driving the trend.

So the progressive media clings awkwardly to Mitch McConnell, in these weeks, because he is the fusty uncle who, once or twice per term, says something that bespeaks a considered core, a working awareness of politics as a negotiated endeavor. Something approaching maturity, of mind and of purpose. Something responsible — but in the serest terms.

In the end, Mitch McConnell is hardly emblematic of these somethings. But he is proof that, just for now, antisocial is the new sensible.

By: rhb

Rob is a NYC-based Internet entrepreneur. He's also a businessman and job creator (wait: doesn't demand create jobs?) who understands the sense, and the eventual predominance, of the progressive agenda.