The absurdity of "responsibilty"

By Dave Anderson:

In a non-cooperative, multi-iteration game, the best strategy to ensure cooperation or at least non-douchebag behavior is tit for tat.  This means make a choice that punishes the opposition for being a douchebag when they previously made a choice to be douchebags, and make a choice that rewards them for non-douchebag decisions.  That behavioral pattern should produce non-douchebag behaviors.  In the American political context, that means "responsible" behavior should be rewarded. 

Not all liberals get that.

Kevin Drum wants a bi-partisan commission to propose a grand bargain on Social Security:

I�m entirely in favor of a Social Security commission, similar
to the 1983 commission, tasked with producing a conventional basket of
small revenue increases and small benefit cuts that would balance
Social Security�s book in the long term....

But aside from the virtue of even small acts of fiscal rectitude, it
would also have the huge virtue of taking Social Security off the table
as a political issue. If we could, at long last, get the Washington
Post and the Wall Street Journal and the Peterson folks to quit droning
on endlessly about this, we might actually clear the way for discussion
of some real issues.

Brian Tamahama believes that there is a liberal dilemna on appointing judges to counterbalance movement conservatives who are on the bench to act as ongoing veto points for the next thirty years.  He advocates unilateral disamanment by the appointment of uniformly moderate judges in the hopes that future Republican administrations will disregard a successful thirty year strategy to shift the discussion and the law right while also pleasing their door-knocker and phone-banker base:

they [liberals] should always oppose rigid ideological
screening of lower court nominees. (This does not mean a nominee�s
political views are irrelevant, but that conformity to liberal ideology
is not the overriding consideration.) But liberals know that
conservatives stand ready to exploit this na� idealism.

So what is a liberal to do?

Unilateral disarmament is the right choice (as I have argued here).
There is no other way. We must trust principled conservatives in the
next Republican presidency to stand up and oppose rigid ideological
screening on their end. Then, perhaps, this destructive pattern of
politicization can be broken.

This act of good faith, regrettably, will likely fail unless the Republican Party undergoes a radical internal change.

The underlying assumptions behind both Kevin and Brian is that there is a large pool of Republicans who are willing to work in good faith and govern responsibly.  That good faith expectation is not justified.  Matt Yglesias looks at the Social Security commisison  and projects out a plausible future:

Kevin�s plan is going to play out along the lines of a familiar script.
First, Barack Obama proposes something sensible and centrist like a
balanced package of benefit cuts and tax hikes. Then this becomes
defined as the extreme left pole of the debate. Then because Max Baucus
and Kent Conrad are moderates, it needs to be balanced further in the
direction of spending cuts. Then the administration embraces that
proposal and it becomes defined as the extreme left pole of
the debate. Then because Evan Bayh and Blanche Lincoln are moderates,
it needs to be balanced even further in the direction of spending cuts.
Then because the package is more than zero percent tax increases, it
passes with at most the support of Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, and
conservatives denounce the Democrats as tax-and-spend liberals who want
to punish workers and seniors alike in order to finance giveaways to
ACORN and death panels. Then Alan Greenspan applauds politely, and then
when the GOP gets back into office they propose large cuts in income
taxes on the wealthy and he applauds that loudly.

The same applies to judges.  Whomever a Democrat nominates will be the "most liberal' 'reverse racist' judge EVAH!  And we know that Republicans will be back in power at some point and the internal coalition pressures will force any imaginable Republican president to nominate hard line anti-choice, pro-corporate, anti-civil liberties, pro-authoritarian judges for Jesus.  The grand bargain that is hoped for is not an enforcable bargain. 

As I wrote in August, responsibility is a suckers' bet:

Right now the Republicans have engaged in a generation long strategy of
being irresponsible douchebags of running up massive debts, decrying
the possibility of actually paying down previous debts in order to get
some breathing room for either the foreseen (Baby Boomers retiring) or
the unforeseen (9/11) and passing large tax cuts that pay off their
contributor class.  They build facts on the ground that are favorable
to their ideology and core party members, and then they count on the
Democrats being responsible....

If we want a political discourse that is rational over the long run,
horrendously perverse incentives have to be counter-productive. 
Democrats should be strongly tempted to take the dare of being
irresponsible to break the Norquistian dream that we can have a
government of medium to high services and no taxes.  Moderate
inflation, which would be the first noticable impact of moving the US
debt to GDP ratio to levels that are also sustainable by modern industrial economies, benefit retrenching consumers much more than it does bondholders and GOP country-club funders. 

Cutting Social Security and raising regressive taxes in the hope that the GOP and its allied media outlets will shut up about an issue and take it off the table is counterproductive.  Guns have been removed from the political discourse, but we still see gun right groups scaremongering over health-care reform as a means of taking away peoples' guns.  We saw in health-care that single payer was never on the table, but that has not stopped the Republicans from crying socialism, communism and fascism on the bill. 

Instead we would see a Democratic base going WTF if Social Security was cut by Democrats in 2011 and Republicans rallying around as either populist defenders of Social Security or boogey-manning about threats to the rich or could be rich by the extra half a percent tax on wages. 

Responsibility is for either suckers or status quo seekers.