Truth is Relative

There can really only be one topic here this week. Jeff Flake gave his retirement speech, and became a new Republican hero. Don’t get me wrong; it was a great speech, well worth reading in its entirety. But the reaction to it in the press misses some very important points. This is Jeff Flake, people. Flake was elected courtesy of the Tea Party movement, so it is horrifying that he has found someone too extreme for his liking. But he delivered this speech, and then voted later that night to outlaw class action suits against financial institutions. Flake has voted for each and every one of the horrible healthcare proposals his party has put out there. So his speech is not a clarion call for policy change in Washington, as so many in the media would have it. John McCain at least helped torpedo the healthcare atrocities with no votes, although he too was upset by process, not policy. Flake deplores the dangerous extremism of the president, but Flake himself was the dangerous extremist when he first came to Washington.

You read that right. We have now have a president whose extremism is shocking and deplorable to a Tea Party stalwart. It has gotten so bad that a Jeff Flake is on the verge of realizing that Mitch McConnell has brought the Republican Party to this point with his stratagems to exclude the Democrats from governance, even when they were the Party in power. But Flake focuses his criticisms on the president, and it is easy to miss his comments about how things are being done in the Senate. Flake calls for a return to “shared facts”, but he has relied throughout his career on only those facts that suited him. He can not see the essential fallacies of supply side economics, and he invokes faith and moral authority in his speech, not the Constitution and established law. On Social issues like abortion and gay rights, it appears to be Trump who has come around to Flake’s point of view.

Where Flake differs from Donald Trump is not in matters of policy, except regarding trade and immigration. Their economic agendas are largely simpatico, and I would expect Flake to be a reliable vote on tax cuts for the rich, for example. The big difference and point of contention is their goals. Trump has pushed his Party toward the Steve Bannon world view. Where Flake believes that the government should exist to help the wealthy produce more wealth, Bannon believes that the government has failed. It must be destroyed, so that something better can be built in its place. While it is not entirely clear what this new better world would look like, it appears to involve reasserting the supremacy of white Christian males, and putting everyone else in their place. Along the way, however, many of the same policies apply. Both Flake and Bannon seek to completely dismantle the safety net. Flake sees programs like Medicare and Social Security as unfair burdens on the wealthy, while the Bannon wing of the Party sees them as handouts to “them”. They are also simpatico on social issues, but Flake sees a moral imperative where Bannon sees government intrusion.

Flake, to his credit, does feel that the United States has an important role to play in world affairs, where Bannon does not. Flake refers to the United States as “the architects of this visionary rules-based world order,” which implies that we should be the ones making the rules, even though he praises our policy of reconstruction after World War II. But the meaning of Flake’s speech changes greatly when you consider the speaker. This is not a shaming of the Republican Party for the harm their policies will do to the people who elected them. This is not a sudden conversion to progressivism from one of the most conservative members of the Senate. No, this is simply a call for a return of responsible governance, from a man who believes his policy positions are correct. Flake feels that, if the Republicans were to return to normal governance, their ideas would prevail simply on their merits. He believes that “shared facts” will bear him out. I think the results would be otherwise, but I applaud Flake for being willing to risk that. In the context of politics as it is being practiced in 2017, it was a brave speech. It would have been braver if it had been made by a man who was willing to stand for reelection after giving it. But that is a lot to ask. It falls to the general public and the people of Alabama in particular to stand up to the wrongness of our country, and reject the Bannon- approved candidates running in 2018. Jeff Flake has signaled that he does not have it in him to take on that job. and I don’t blame him for that.

So the short answer is that Flake’s speech is something of an illusion. Hence, this week’s song: