Aura of Inevitablility

Paul Krugman writes:

Something I’ve been trying to put into words, as I watch a couple of issues close to my heart — health care reform, climate change — is this: the “aura of inevitability”, which used to be one of the right’s great weapons, seems to be working for the other side now.

If you followed the Bushies closely, especially in the pre-Social-Security, pre-Katrina days, you became all too aware of the strategy. Again and again — the recount, the tax cut, the march to war — the Bush team would set out, successfully, to convey the impression that everyone knew they were going to win, that resistance was futile. In the case of the war, in particular, a lot of people who should have known better went along out of sheer careerism: this was going to happen, and anyone who stood in the way was going to bemarked as a loser.
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One more thing: the loss of the aura of inevitability has, I suspect, been an important factor in the rise of the teabaggers and all that. My guess is that the attitudes among the Republican base identified in that scary Democracy Corps study aren’t new, although the sense of powerlessness is; the Monster Raving Loony wing has been an important part of the conservative coalition for some time. Under Bush, however, that wing was kept relatively quiet with dog whistles: people at the top in effect convinced the extreme right that they shared its views, and with a little patience they’d see the kind of America they wanted. Now that’s all gone, and the underlying radicalism of the base is out in the open. And that looks likely to cause a lot of trouble for Republican hopes of regaining power any time soon.